It wasn’t all bad. The staff were great, the pay was decent, and there were all kinds of perks including free day passes. There were lots of reasons to keep the staff coming back.

But there was a bigger reason why people left.

I spent two summers there as a lifeguard and shouldn’t have gone back after the first year. But I needed money for college and since the park itself was only in its third year of operation, I’d have seniority over whoever came back.

The place was called Thriller World, and to understand it, you need to know its history.

The park was a large plot of land at the base of The Tremblay mountains. In the early 1920’s, it was the location of a coal mine that dropped 1000 feet straight down into the Earth. It was a working and profitable mine for thirty years, but closed its shutters in the late 50’s.

The mine was owned by the Phelps family. Randall Phelps was one of the more industrious of the clan, and he stepped up to develop the land in the 60’s to create a ski hill and resort.

The mountain was long and treacherous, and attracted enough customers over the years to invest in some minor improvements, but still they were barely breaking even.

So Randall came up with an idea to use the land in the summer months.

And that idea was Thriller World.

It was an amusement park that would include all manner of rides as well as physical aquatic adventures. There was an insane wave pool. Tubing around an artificial river with rapids and heavy currents that circled the entire park in a quick-moving mote. There were slides that ran through tubes of varying lengths down the side of the mountain and opened up to a large pool at the centre of the park.

There was a Big Dipper. Bumper cars. One of those pendulum rides. A fast-moving Ferris wheel. A human trebuchet and giant safety net. A Tea Cup Spinner. A carousel. A grand, haunted mansion. There were shooting and throwing games and prizes and food vendors.

There was even a zip line overtop of the entire park that would continually get stuck in the middle.

And then there was the attraction that sparked Randall’s imagination to create the whole thing - It was called Thrill Racer and was a race from the top of the mountain to the very bottom.

You basically strapped yourself to an engineless light-weight bumper car, which had flimsy hand brakes you could use to try to slow down. Outside of that, the speed was entirely gravity driven by the steep slope down the mountain side.

The path of Thrill Racer wasn’t straight down, but zig-zagged around corners marked by large rocks with arrows painted on them. The ride down took just under 3 minutes on average, but some of the workers would stay after hours and try to set records.

This is where I first experienced death at Thriller World.

It was my first summer and my second full week working there as a lifeguard. I’d saved two kids from near-drownings in the wave pool and was feeling shellshocked.

Davis, one of the older lifeguard’s who’d coached me since I’d started, told me all kinds of stories about the previous summer and the injuries and deaths that he’d witnessed in the park’s first year operating. I think the stories were meant to be comforting.

What Davis said it came down to was - this place wasn’t a picnic. It was dangerous and people who weren’t ready for that, attracted problems to themselves. The accidents were almost always the customer ignoring the rules. There was the occasional freak accident. And then very rarely, a ride malfunction.

But he reiterated - Thriller World wasn’t the county fair. It was a place you had to keep your eyes and ears open.

And there was a reason why, amongst its staff, Thriller World had adopted a nickname drenched in blood -

“Killer World.”

Somehow it made me feel better knowing that others were aware of what was going on, but weren’t worried. And Davis had that young and invincible teenage edge to him that was infectious to anyone who didn’t. Like me.

I found myself drunk with some of the girls who worked the games tents. We watched as several of the operations and maintenance staff of the park were set to race four of the lifeguards down the mountain on the go-carts.

Davis was one of the lifeguards.

The maintenance guys brought a box of flares and each of the cart’s was fitted with one along the back bumper. One of the lifeguards, Cara, went up to the top of the hill with a scarf to be the countdown girl.

When Cara said “Ready,” everyone readied their flares. When she said “Set,” everyone lit their flares.

Cara yelled “Go” loud enough for it to echo down the mountain to us at the bottom.

We watched as the racers took off, their red flares spraying out and illuminating them as the go-carts took corners and ripped down the straightaways.

It was exhilarating being in the group as we all cheered for the different drivers and teams.

Several of the carts were pulling away, with one far ahead of the rest. The leader was hitting corners hard and didn’t seem to be using the brakes at all.

Then it lost control.

The go-cart hit a corner too sharp and it flipped, sending the driver colliding head first off a large boulder and into a violent tumble down the side of the mountain.

Screams pierced out as the go-cart, lit by the red flare, launched into the air before crashing down and spinning and tumbling all the way to the bottom of the mountain.

The body was still halfway up. Everyone who was watching ran up the side of the mountain. By the time we got there, the maintenance staff and the lifeguard’s who’d been racing were circled around the body.

It was Davis. Though it didn’t really look like a person. It looked like a plush toy with all the stuffing taken out.

Davis’ girlfriend Molly, another lifeguard who’d been cheering beside me, rushed over and dropped beside his body. She tried to pick him up and hold him, but found Davis’ body was like picking up wet laundry. The bones and muscles were pulverized.

Molly tried to touch Davis’ face, but even that was like a large ziplock bag over-filled with lasagna.

The investigation revealed that Davis had been going too fast and lost control. The go-cart he’d used was destroyed in its fall, so it was difficult to tell if the brakes had been working. But there were no marks on the pavement.

Either way, it was pushed aside and by Tuesday, everything at the park was back to normal. Except Molly never came back. I didn’t blame her.

I developed a drinking problem that summer but managed to get it under control by the time I left for school. I told myself I wouldn’t work at Thriller World the following summer, but when time came to look for a job, there was little else in town that was hiring.

I went back for my second summer, trying to convince myself it wasn’t as bad as I remembered.

The Thrill Racer was back in operation. As were all the other dangerous rides.

But this year… there was a new one.

At Thriller World, management always offered money to any of its employees who would test the new rides themselves, both for entertainment and safety.

But in their newest ride, no employee would test it.

It was called The Mine Drop.

Over the winter, Randall had brought in engineers to work on the mine, reinforce its structure and update and adapt its elevator to one that moves at an unnerving speed up and down.

The elevator would take ten people at a time and drop them, 1000 feet down into the pitch black. Since there’d been a cave-in at the bottom of the mine in the 1950’s which resulted in its closure, there wasn’t anywhere to go down there. So the elevator would slowly bring them back up.

There was talk of adding in stops along the way up, where riders could get off and explore certain, closed-in areas of the mine. Perhaps even adapt the haunted mansion into the tunnel systems.

But it never got to that point. In fact, it never even opened to the public.

Randall paid ten people from a local shelter to come test out The Mine Drop after we’d all refused. The elevator reached the bottom and was halfway back up when all three safety mechanisms malfunctioned and the elevator dropped to the bottom.

All ten people were killed on impact. Their bodies were found in a pile of pulverized bone and meat.

Randall did an exemplary job of keeping the details from the public, as he did with all the ‘accidents’ that occurred. But the events of the rest of the summer couldn’t be kept quiet.

It seemed like every week, the injuries got worse and another body was added to the pile.

In the wave pool, there were drownings from children being pulled into the suction generators.

When the bodies were found, it was discovered they hadn’t drowned. Their bodies had somehow been pulverized by the jets. Their bones and muscles liquified.

In the artificial river rapids that circled the park, there were a variety of strange deaths including drownings and electrocutions from the underwater fans and the ungrounded electricity that circulated through the park.

The lifeless bodies would be carried by the ongoing current around the park’s mote until they were pulled out by special lifeguards referred to as “Pickers.”

One afternoon, I arrived for a shift and as I passed the entrance, I saw the bodies of two boys, one after the other, face down, floating by like logs taken downstream in a heavy current.

Apparently, they were on their second lap around the park and none of the Pickers had seen them.

Their bodies, too, were pulverized. But those were explained away as the bodies being tossed and bounced off the walls and fake rocks in the artificial river.

I remember pulling one kid out of the water who’d just been on the edge of drowning. His body was covered in bruises. I heard him talk about hands.

Hands in the water.

Hands squeezing him. Hands pulling him down.

I never managed to find the kid after that to ask him more, but I heard he moved away.

The final nail in the coffin of Thriller World came at the end of August. And it involved Thriller House, the park’s haunted mansion.

The mansion was built specifically for the park and was filled with hidden rooms and stairwells and shifting walls. It was easy to get lost in it, and people did.

A lot.

In fact, it was the attraction that seemed to cause the most issues among the people who used it.

There were several kids who went missing inside. Because of the scale of the mansion and the shifting walls, some weren’t found for hours.

When they were finally discovered, it was always in the “House of Mirrors” room in the basement. And the children were always babbling incoherently.

Thriller House also had a secret way up to the attic that most customers didn’t find. Some of the other employees would go up there to drink sometimes after shifts. I joined them after one bad Wednesday.

I was uneasy the whole time. The room was huge and there were only six of us, but it felt like the area was filled with breathing bodies pressing in on you. No one else seemed to notice, but I couldn’t shake it.

Then the power cut out and we had a reason to call it a night.

The mansion creaked like an old home, even though it only looked like one. When we left, the walls leading to the doors out shifted on us and led us down to the basement, where we got lost for a half hour in the pitch black of the terrifying cellar.

There were all kinds of frightening statues and props dangling from the walls and ceiling. We thought we were going to spend all night down there, but I finally found the hidden door leading up to the first floor.

We got out and all went our separate ways. It wasn’t until the next day at work, when we found out a younger lifeguard named Jill hadn’t come home last night after her shift. She was one of the people who’d been drinking with us in the attic.

We all thought back and realized… she hadn’t come out of the basement with us. None of us saw her again after we left the attic.

We agreed to go and tell our supervisors what we knew. But we never got the chance.

While we were meeting to discuss what happened, a father had gone into Thriller House with his family and discovered the way up to the attic.

In the attic, several of the floorboards broke and the family of four fell through. They landed on a group of five people below them on the second floor. The second floor then collapsed onto eight people on the first floor, which then collapsed into the basement. And three more people.

Who’d just discovered Jill’s body.

In all, two were dead and seventeen were trapped in the basement under the rubble. The survivors were near-paralyzed, all with the same injuries involving pulverized bones and muscles.

As paramedics and firemen filled the mansion and lowered into the basement to start the rescue mission, an aggressive electrical fire started and caused the near-immediate collapse of all the weakened floors. Eight members of emergency services were crushed under the rubble and unable to escape the basement inferno as it burned out of control.

I left after that shift and the park never re-opened. If Thriller House wasn’t enough, dozens of other lawsuits had piled up over the summer and a federal investigation was underway.

The Phelps family sold the property to pay off the lawsuits and as far as I can tell, there were never any criminal charges or jail time for anyone. A few families of the victims got settlements, but that was about it.

Most people think what happened at Thriller World was negligence, cutting corners and saving costs.

But in the years that followed, I did my own research into the mountain and uncovered some history that disturbed me.

The ski resort in the winter had similar, strange and disturbing injuries and deaths as Thriller World.

There were electrocutions on the ski lifts, killing multiple riders as well as operators. There were other electrocutions, most of them in the hot tubs in the personal chalets.

Five skiers were decapitated by an overhead metal wire that had fallen across the route down the mountain. There were horrific downhill crashes resulting in disfigurement and in many cases, dismemberment.

Somehow, all the bodies had the same, specific trait in common - They were pulverized.

So I researched further back. And started finding difficult answers.

When the mine was shut down in the 1950’s, it was because of a miner’s strike. The strike was being led by twelve men who’d constantly been at odds with the Phelps family over pushing union affiliation.

Details were hazy, but a late night meeting was to be held in the mines among the miners and the Phelps’.

But there was a cave-in. All twelve of the miners’ representatives were killed. None of the Phelps family had gone down to meet them.

The miners’ bodies were eventually found but an investigation was stalled and then closed, due to the Phelps family’s ties to local and state governments.

The bodies of the miners were said to all be the same - Pulverized. The muscle and bones liquified by the collapsed tunnel they’d been told to go to.