What could go wrong at an amusement park? Welp, these employees have a few stories of their own. They share the most messed up thing that’s ever happened to them while working at an amusement park. Content has been edited for clarity purposes.
“Are We In Danger?”
“I was the team leader for one of those raft water rides that sat 12 people on a giant inner tube. A child that was maybe 12 or 13 years old had a seizure while going down the final drop and because he wasn’t going to be able to get out of the vehicle we pressed the emergency stop button which drained all of the water. Then we removed everyone on the ride. As I was waiting for the EMTs to come and help with a child, I got a call on my radio to report to the top of the lift right away for another emergency.
I ran full speed through the ride and up the five stories worth of stairs to get to the top. The vehicle at the top had gone over the crest but for some reason did not drop into the water so the boat was literally teetering on the lift. If it had fallen, it would have been about a 10-foot drop on solid concrete. I had to lead my team in evacuating the entire section of the park while EMTs were treating the kid with the seizure. Then the fire department came to help get these people off the ride safely while rocking the strongest poker face I’ve had to keep ever.
Guest: ‘Is everything ok?’
Me: ‘We’re just having some technical difficulties. We, unfortunately, need to remove everyone from the ride. Just please remain seated and we’ll get you out in no time.’
Guest: ‘Why can’t we get off now?’
Me: ‘Your boat stopped in a weird spot so we just need to wait for someone to come tie the boat off.’
Guest: ‘Are we in danger?’
Me: ‘No not all, but for all that is holy don’t bounce around too much, and please ignore the news helicopter in the sky.'”
One Rule: Empty Your Pockets
“In 2011, I worked on the Dueling Dragons at Universal Orlando when in college. For those who don’t know, the Dueling Dragons were two separate coasters that ‘dueled’ and had several near misses with each other. They were pretty unique at the time and were super fun.
As you could imagine, Universal told people to empty their pockets before they rode so that their phones and other belongings wouldn’t fly out and smack somebody on the other coaster at 60 miles per hour. Of course, many times people would ignore this because they were either lazy or stupid.
I was working one day when the ride shut down completely. Pocket change had flown out of someone’s pocket and hit a guy in the eye, leaving him blind in that eye. The tragic part was that the guy was already blind in his other eye. So now the guy was 100 percent blind.
The ride didn’t duel anymore after that and was left permanently much lamer than ever. I still feel for the poor blind guy.”
“A Huge Rip Off”
“I was a caricature artist for Six Flags. One day, a dad and his son came up and wanted a drawing of the two of them. Now the way caricature pricing worked was we would charge per person in the drawing. The father and son wanted a simple black and white headshot of the two of them, and a black and white headshot was 10 bucks. So for the two of them, it would be 20 bucks, before tax.
I very clearly explained this to them, asking several times ‘Are you ok with the ending price?’And they excitedly accepted.
Fast forward to me ringing them up at the register, and telling them the total was 24 something. The father’s happy and friendly demeanor quickly dissipated, and he began arguing with me about pricing. I calmly explained the situation with pricing and apologized if I wasn’t clear enough. Then I gently reminded him that he understood and agreed otherwise I wouldn’t have done the drawing. Big mistake.
He got angrier and started yelling at me, cursing me out for lying and overcharging them ‘to put a few more coins in my pocket.’ He accused me of preying on parents and their children, thinking I could take advantage of them because ‘they’re stupid fools.’ He tried to take the drawing without paying, and when I held it back and told him he couldn’t, he threw a $10 bill at me and snarled that that was all he was going to pay. He continued to say I was worthless and my drawing wasn’t even good and didn’t deserve any more than that. I was really upset at this point, and handed him the drawing, wishing him a good day.
‘FORGET YOU!’ He yelled in response.
The whole time his son was standing there, looking embarrassed and terrified. The dad proceeded to pace back and forth in front of my stand, alternating between yelling at me at my counter and chasing customers away, screaming at them about how I was ‘stealing money’ and how the stand was ‘a huge rip off.’
Thankfully his charade lasted all of 20 minutes and the police finally got him out of there. Left me pretty shaken though, I had to take my break early and cried over my lunch.”
Six Flags Brought In The Swat Team
“Around 13 years ago, I worked security at a Six Flags. It was the fourth of July, so I went with a group of other security officers to help out at Hurricane Harbor since they had more guests than usual show up.
Come to find out the increased attendance was because a radio station, that was banned from Six Flags, announced that rapper Mike Jones and his crew were going to be at Hurricane Harbor that day. Then we found out the station was awarding tickets they didn’t have to listeners. So what ended up happening was that a bunch of groups decided to show up so they could hang out with Mike Jones. So the place to hang out was at the wave pool. Every 45 minutes, there was a 15-minute safety break where everyone had to leave the wave pool. When this happened, most people just got in the lazy river that flew around the wave pool.
Well during one of these safety breaks, all of a sudden I started hearing people simultaneously yelling, ‘Aye, Aye, Aye’ and then saw all kinds of people running.
The next thing I knew, there was a fight in the lazy river. Well, one of the first things we were taught was to never get in the middle of a group fight because they would stop fighting each other and start fighting you. Well, a Hurricane Harbor security officer decided to ignore all that and jump in and get his butt kicked. I think he actually got yelled at more for getting his radio wet than for getting beaten up.
There were a few more fights after that so then the park called the police to send more officers to help. We ended up having the local SWAT Team out there to help.
Every safety break after that had us on high alert for people fighting. I remember going home that night just being mad at people in general and wondering how they get off on acting a fool”
Every Man For Themselves At Kidzopolis
“So Six Flags has a lot of really dumb rules for their employees which causes there to be a crazy high turnover rate. That, on top of the fact that on this particular day it happened to be the hottest day of the summer in New England, which meant that after having only worked there for two and a half weeks, I was the most senior person in my department of Kidzopolis.
This meant I had to run the whole operations schedule for my department and tell everybody where to go and what to do all day. Keep in mind, I didn’t even know half of these people’s names. On top of that, nobody knew how to operate the freaking zoom jets. So my Supervisor grabbed me first thing in the morning and told me he was going to teach me how to operate this ride. Things were going alright when about halfway through this training, my supervisor passed out because it was like 110 degrees.
So now I was supposed to be leading this department full of people I didn’t know while operating a ride I didn’t know how to operate. If I had any questions, then I had no one to ask because my supervisor was unconscious somewhere.
Meanwhile, I was getting all sorts of calls.
Someone was like, ‘Hey! So Sally passed out in the Splish Splash Zone.’
I was just like, Who the heck is Sally?
Julie was calling me and telling me she was feeling dehydrated and needed to go on break.
I said, ‘Listen, I’ve got Julio trying to operate the Krazy Kups and the Wacky Wagons at the same time, what makes you think we have enough staff to let you go on break?’
Fast forward to the end of the day, I had three people faint because of the heat, still didn’t know most of my coworkers’ names, and got yelled at in Spanish over the phone a lot. Since I felt bad that nobody got enough time on break, I told everyone they could go home and I’d sweep up the department on my own.”
The Worst Possible Time For A Thunderstorm To Hit
“During one summer in high school, I got a job at an amusement park/ water park. I was trained on the kiddie rides and worked them for about two weeks before they moved me to the adult rides. The problem was, they didn’t train me on any of the rides. But most of the time all you needed to know was which button started the ride.
One day, I was working these swings, the ones that go around and up pretty high. I started the ride when a sudden thunderstorm hit. There was lighting all around, and I had like 20 or 30 people locked into a lightning rod screaming. I had no idea how to stop the ride. As luck would have it, my supervisor from the kiddie rides happened to be on the ride at the time.
As she would come around, she’d try to yell directions to me. Mind you, the ride was only like three or four minutes, but that felt like an eternity when you’re in a scary situation. So finally I figured out which button she was telling me to push. I pushed it and the ride stopped. I was relieved until I realized it stopped at its highest point, and it was not coming down.
I just started pushing buttons like crazy until finally, it started to move down. As people got off the ride, they were crying, hugging, and giving me horrible looks. As soon as they were all off, I got down from the big metal podium I was on just as my actual supervisor arrived and told me I was not allowed to get down from my post until someone else came around and told me I could.
My supervisor was ticked off at me for daring to get out of the thunderstorm without permission. I don’t remember what I said next, I just remember walking out through security and telling them I quit. I was shaking and beyond upset. I was responsible for those people on the ride and they could have been seriously hurt.”
“The Fireworks Were Set Off By Some Of The Employees”
“There was a resident idiot that helped with maintenance before the park opened for the day. One of his jobs was piling the roller coaster track. This involved riding the coaster with this oil can thing and squirting oil on the track as it went around. For one part you needed to be in the front car. For another, you had to be in the back seat. So the normal process was to ride it once in the front car, then switch to the back car and ride it again. Instead, this moron decided to jump from the front car to the back car while he was at the top level of the ride.
He missed, fell three stories, and landed flat on his back. Unfortunately, he landed on three concrete stakes that were used as part of the tie-down structure. They pierced him in three different locations, so he had to be pulled off of them, before they could take him to the hospital. Miraculously none of them went through any of his internal organs, and none hit a major vein or artery. He ended up fully recovering.
Our amusement park was the place that did the fireworks show every year for the Fourth of July. It was in a big public park with a lake, and the fireworks were set off by some of the employees from an island in the middle of the lake. During the show, one of the guys accidentally kicked over a rack of launch tubes right as one of the mortars was firing. It lobbed right into the crowd and exploded in the middle of the crowd. There were several injuries and one little girl lost her hearing permanently. I was in the crowd on the other side of the lake and saw it hit. Really messed with the guy’s head who kicked the rack over. He was the owner’s grandson.”
Too Many Slushies?
“I operated a few different roller coasters during my fun-filled summers at this amusement park, but most of my horror stories come from one ride in particular. The train was one of the ones that you had to step into, with a lap bar restraint.
On one particular day, it was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The ride had been running as usual for most of the morning. As we were loading the train, a guest came up to me to say that there was an awful smell coming from the front car, and my stomach immediately dropped. Usually, with these types of complaints, we’d find that the previous rider had one too many slushies before riding and had lost their lunch. Gross, but we were used to cleaning that kind of stuff.
I started approaching the front car and immediately called for my coworker to direct everyone out of the train and back into the line, and to call our supervisor to close the ride. Instead of a normal puke situation, I found a greenish-brown liquid spread all throughout the front car, from the seat down to the floor. Whoever was the last person to ride the ride had shat all over themselves and hadn’t bothered to tell anyone about it.
Cleaning human feces is one thing, but trying to clean up human diarrhea in 100+ degree weather, off of the floor of a car where you had to kneel down and stick your head into the car to reach the very front, is a situation that I never would have imagined even in my worst nightmares. The ride was down for the rest of the day, and it took over an hour to clean everything out of the car before we could start really sanitizing it.”
“The Kid Could’ve Been Killed”
“I used to be an Operations Lead on the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios Hollywood. One day, I was working the dispatch board (JP3), sitting in the operations booth when the phone rang. The Lead member manning the cameras answered, then suddenly slammed the emergency stop button, shutting the entire ride down. We’d stopped for a moment so we could off-load a disabled guest, but then some brain surgeon got annoyed at the delay, so he lifted his kid out of the boat and sent him to call the booth from the emergency phone right next to the Jeep drop effect, which back then was still functional.
If we hadn’t been shut down, the kid very well could have been killed. We evacuated the ride, and stayed down for five hours because we couldn’t get the water pumps back up and running. The dad and his family were directed out from the park, though they pitched a fit.
Another time, we had a couple of kids running around, assaulting the costumed characters and then taking off. We had rough descriptions, and I just happened to be at the front entrance while a character was walking around. I saw one of them making a running approach on the mascot, so I threw a nasty block into him as he tried to pass me. He went down hard and stayed down when another security guard dropped on top of him. He and his buddy were arrested, and I got a nice bonus for stopping them.”
“I Lost Track Of Whether It Was Balanced Or Not”
“I worked at a children’s amusement park and they had me operating the Ferris wheel which was a rough ride to operate. You had to balance it and put people with similar weights on opposite cars. So it was a lot of stopping and loading before letting it go around a few times. As you could imagine, it was difficult for a teenager to explain to an overweight couple why they couldn’t get on the ride when the only other person on the ride was a skinny kid.
I was supposed to only be on the ride for two hours, but they left me there for four hours in direct sunlight with no breaks. After four hours on a busy day with no water and no break, I was getting sick of having the bigger people yell at me for not being able to get on immediately. Eventually, I lost track of whether it was balanced or not.
I wound up making it go backward and people freaked out. That usually happened before but I was always able to stop it before it went all the way around. Not this time. I physically didn’t have the strength. Luckily, the owner was around and stopped it. People were beyond ticked off.
When my supervisor came to see what happened, I said, ‘That’s what happens when you leave someone on this ride for four hours.’
No idea how I didn’t get fired. No one was hurt, but they sure were terrified”
Who Was The Culprit?
“I worked in foods and sometimes had to cover stations that weren’t my home station. One time I got put into a Dippin’ Dots truck. Everything was fine for a while, but nobody was checking in on me. I had to pee so bad, but I was really busy and I couldn’t close down to go to the bathroom.
Well, it got so bad that I ended up peeing myself. Of course, thirty seconds later, someone from security came in and asked how I was doing. I pretty much said that I peed and bolted. Then I told my manager I was sick and clocked out. I was mortified.
Three years later, I was on my senior trip for high school and a bunch of us were sitting around talking about jobs we’d had. This one guy (that was pretty mean) started talking about how he had to clean up pee in a Dippin’ Dots truck because some prick peed himself. He said it was in the summer after ninth grade and he was pretty sure it was ‘by the little kid’s section’ which was where I was.
I had never felt like I had such a weighted secret in my life before.”
Angry Dad
“I was working in an amusement park as a 19-year-old. I was on the turnstile, talking with guests and checking everyone off. About three in the afternoon, a very young girl, about six or so, came up with her father, both in swimwear. Not unusual, since there was a water park attached to the regular park. However, there was a rule in the park that you had to be wearing a shirt to ride the ride, and the girl was in a two-piece suit.
I informed both of them that the girl needed a shirt and that we would be happy to save their spot in line if she had a shirt she could run and grab.
Her father raised his voice and loudly asked why I was ‘looking at his little girl’ and shouted about me being a sicko. I backed off and told him he misunderstood, but he kept shouting back to the line behind him about how I was a ‘sicko.’ He only stopped when park security arrived a few minutes later.
One of two times I felt like I was actually in danger; the dude was furious.”
Height Check
“I once had to height check a girl who was disabled. And this was just as they were about to get on the ride too. So apparently, someone else previously didn’t bother to check her height, to begin with. So I politely asked her and her carer to come and check her height. After lots of ‘No, no, no, no’, we eventually found out she wasn’t tall enough.
She didn’t take it well. She started screaming and saying she was going to ride no matter what. After leaving to let the carer tell her to get out, she finally left her seat after about 10 minutes, which is an eternity in rollercoaster time. I mean, yeah it sucks but I was just doing my job.
I was relieved that she was finally leaving, but then as she was walking through the exit, she turned around.
She screamed, ‘I HOPE YOU DIE’.
It was a bit soul-crushing. Also, it was my birthday. I quit not long after.”
Everyone Took Shelter Except A Baby
“A huge storm was coming. I was operating the railroad at the time. I had specifically warned that the ride can close at any time before people boarded. Unfortunately, we left the station right before they were able to call us to close the ride. So as we were on our way, suddenly there was a huge downpour. Upon arriving at the station, we were immediately directed to an employee shelter. We were told that we couldn’t suggest any shelter locations to guests because that would make the park responsible. So people were stranded at the station away from the entrance, wanting to ride back.
We also found a baby in a stroller that was abandoned in the storm near the kid area.”
Muppets Gone Rogue
“I used to work at an amusement park that had a section featuring actors dressed as characters from a certain family-friendly show. The actors for this area were almost exclusively teenagers and were notorious for goofing off in the dressing room, bathroom, and backstage areas.
This all culminated in two of the actors being fired for getting in a fight during a show. Apparently, a certain cookie-loving monster had an intimate relationship with a certain Spanish-speaking monster who was dating a certain television-loving monster.
Not really scary for me, but I think a few children were traumatized seeing a costume character’s head ripped off during a show.”