There was one summer where I pretty much lived at the now-closed Joyland amusement park in Wichita, Kansas. I don’t remember the particulars anymore. I think my mom was doing some sort of training or something in town. All I know is that I had a season pass to the park – a plastic band that they snapped around your wrist every time you came in, like the arm bands at a hospital – that let me ride the rides as often as I wanted.

The whole thing probably only lasted a week or two, but when you’re a kid, a week or two can feel like forever. Every day, my mom dropped me off at Joyland first thing, and didn’t pick me back up until the end of the day.

Here’s the irony: Then as now, while I loved the atmosphere of amusement parks and midways, I didn’t actually enjoy most of the rides. I couldn’t tell you what all there was at Joyland back then, though I can name a few rides – an antique wooden rollercoaster that was falling apart, a log flume, a miniature train, bumper cars, and so on.

More vividly, I remember odd things like a vacuum-powered trash can shaped like the head of a pig, or a creepy animatronic clown named Louie who played the Wurlitzer organ. Louie apparently went missing in subsequent years and was gone for over a decade before eventually being found in the possession of a former park employee.

I probably rode every ride in Joyland at least once during that summer, even though most of them didn’t do much for me. However, I spent the majority of my time in one place: the Whacky Shack.

The Whacky Shack was a dark ride – maybe the first one I had ever experienced – that was, as it happens, very possibly the last dark ride designed by Bill Tracy, hailed as the “greatest designer and builder of dark attractions the amusement industry has ever seen.”

According to the Bill Tracy Project, Tracy created some 40+ dark rides, over a dozen walk-thrus, and nine water rides, among others, during his distinguished careet. The one I visited wasn’t even the only Whacky Shack – there’s allegedly still one in operation at Waldameer Water World in Erie, Pennsylvania!

My Whacky Shack opened in 1974, the same year that Bill Tracy died, but if it was haunted by his spirit, it would have had to jostle for a position amid all the grinning ghouls, shrieking specters, black light effects, and glowing spiders. (Online video of the Whacky Shack at Waldameer pretty closely matches my recollections of the one at Joyland, with a few notable exceptions.)

That summer, I must have ridden the Whacky Shack a thousand times. My bracelet got me into as many rides as I wanted, after all, and while I’m sure they expected me to use that more liberally, there was nothing in the rules that prevented me from riding the Whacky Shack… and then immediately riding it again.

By the time I arrived on the scene, Joyland was already suffering. Despite the fact that it was summer, I mostly had the park to myself during those days. I would spend the entire day seeing at most a handful of other kids accompanied by their parents, and most of the time when I rode the rides, I was riding them alone. I almost never had to share the Whacky Shack.

Joyland had been open since 1949, and it felt like it. Much of the park had fallen into disrepair when I was there, and the whole place closed down completely in 2004, after a 13-year-old girl was injured falling off the Ferris wheel. Despite several attempts to restore the park, much of it was subsequently lost to fire, including the by-then-disused Whacky Shack, which burned down in 2018.

I never went back to the Whacky Shack after that summer, though I dreamed of doing so. Urbexing into the ruins to see what remained – until it was too late even for that, and nothing remained at all. Or, rather, almost nothing. It seems that several artifacts from the Whacky Shack (and Joyland more broadly) are currently held at the Twisted Oz Motorcycle Museum in Augusta, Kansas.

I am far from alone in my fond memories of the Whacky Shack. Artist Jaime Evans built a Whacky Shack model out of a Weebles haunted house, while Vortex Souvenir commissioned artist John F. Malta to create this amazing Whacky Shack shirt a few years ago. Like too many things about the Whacky Shack, I was too late to get a shirt.

According to the Bill Tracy Project, there are a little over half-a-dozen surviving Bill Tracy dark rides still in operation, none of them very close to me. Perhaps one day, though, I’ll go and visit one or two, before they, too, vanish into the dark…