part0009

Every year as summer begins and amusement parks open, it becomes the season for the re-emergence of the annual legends about deadly dangers in funhouses, tunnels of love, and carnival rides. True, accidents do happen, and occasionally some pretty bizarre ones. But amusement-park mishaps couldn’t possibly occur at the rate that folklore suggests, or else no insurance companies would issue liability coverage, and very few parks would survive.

Another clue that we are dealing with legends is that so many alleged accidents at such a large number of parks all supposedly stem from the same few hazards—electrocution, razor blades, and, especially, snakes.

I’ll pass over the stories describing the fatal last step onto the electrified rail of a ride, as well as those stories about razor blades said to be stuck with chewing gum on the water slides by vandals, because these stories—as common as they are—seldom show much imagination or variation in their details.

The snake stories are much juicier. These tales are told about almost every amusement park in the country, old run-down places and classy new ones alike. I will not mention names, since I don’t care to give even the slightest credence to the stories nor to be sued. I regard the vast bulk of the stories as being merely traditional expressions of people’s fears concerning these popular, but always slightly suspect, places. Maybe we suffer some guilt for having fun, and that leads us to project stories about accidents onto the amusement parks.

The story usually goes that a small child on a popular ride complains about stings or bites. At first, the parents laugh, but eventually they investigate. The cause proves to be an infestation of poisonous snakes. First aid is provided too late to save the child.

Here’s a typical example from the Midwest: A man took his little girl to a carnival and put her on the merry-go-round. She soon began to complain that the horse was biting her, and she begged to be taken off. The father kept saying, “Don’t be silly. The horse can’t be biting you.” Soon the little girl slumped over and died, and it was discovered that the old wooden horses, which were full of cracks, were also full of snakes.

It seems that when the horses had been stored for the winter in Florida, they became a haven for the creatures. This is a nice touch to the story—legendary venomous serpents and other nasty things often originate somewhere in the South, possibly revealing northerners’ suspicions of that region. Sometimes, the infested horses are imported from India as replacements for old, worn-out ones. Frankly, I doubt that new merry-go-round horses are imported very often nowadays from anywhere.

I’ve also heard a story in which a car for a roller coaster is brought out of the warehouse in which it had been stored for a long time. A large crowd shows up on the first day of the park’s season. On the first trip with the extra car attached, a child suddenly stands up in the car and screams. It turns out that a den of rattlesnakes had taken up winter quarters there and were stirred up by the ride’s motion.

In another form of the story, told of many different parks, some kind of ride employing little boats—like a tunnel of love or a log flume ride—has poisonous water snakes living in the stream. They bite passengers who are unlucky enough to dangle their hands over the side of the boat. Or, in a more dramatic snake attack, the snakes drop from above, where they have been lurking. It begins to sound like an old Tarzan film at this point.

Further along the trail, some of the stories begin sounding like updated versions of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The Montreal Gazette reported in July 1983 that local brides were scared to pose for traditional wedding photos in the Montreal Botanical Garden. The reason? According to a completely unverified story going around at the time, a June bride was killed by a poisonous snake that had crept out of a flower bed.

The details of the alleged tragedy were vivid. She was but twenty-three years old, and the viper crept up under her gown and stung her. She complained of a sharp pain but was not heeded. By the time help was provided she was too far gone to be saved. The gory details of the effects of the bite went through many imaginative re-workings in Montreal that summer. At times the snake was said to be a python, a rattlesnake, or even a tarantula.

No hard facts were uncovered to substantiate the great Montreal snake scare of ’83. And, as a Botanical Garden spokesman sensibly asked, “In downtown Montreal where is this venomous snake supposed to come from?”