The amusement park midway is a wonderful place, especially at night. The smell of cotton candy, the sequencing colored lights on the spinning rides, all the energetic sounds, and all the human excitement. It's also the perfect surrealistic environment to stimulate your fears. The Dark Ride was invented for just this purpose.

According to historical accounts, the first electrically driven, rail-steered Dark Ride was created in 1928 as an economically feasible way to reproduce an experience from an earlier ride called the Old Mill. This attraction used small boats that floated through darkness and past eerie scenery. The construction cost to build something like this was very high, though, and a motorized "dry" version was a more affordable alternative for amusement parks to install. A rider on one of these new rides commented that it made him feel like he was bent into a pretzel, because of the twisting turns, and the company manufacturing them decided to name itself the Pretzel Amusement Ride Company. This company achieved quick success and in 1930 The Traver Engineering Company began to market its own version of this attraction with the name of "Laff In The Dark."

This is where my own experience comes in. When I was a little kid my aunt and uncle owned a summer cottage adjacent to the Crystal Beach Amusement Park in Canada - just on the other side of the park's vast grassy parking field. My sisters and I would stay there at least one week each summer. I still remember vividly, getting up in the morning and sitting in the front wooden screen porch to wait for the park to open and the sounds to float across the field. If the breeze blew just right you could hear the clicking elevator chain of the roller coaster... then the pause... then the screams of the descending riders! Now, if you listened a little more closely you could sometimes hear the mocking, maniacal laughter of a 6' 10" tall mechanical lady named "Laffing Sal." She was your first "welcome" to the Dark Ride called "Laff In The Dark." It was very primitive by today's standards - nothing like Disney's Haunted Mansion - but at six years old it was all I needed and wanted! I was hooked and would beg my aunt and uncle to let me go on Laff In The Dark every chance I got!

A man with a similar affection for these types of rides is George LaCross. He and Bill Luca created a website dedicated to the history and experience of Dark Rides at www.laffinthedark.com. Here are some questions concerning Dark Rides that he agreed to answer for us.

What is your historical connection with Dark Rides?
I grew up in East Providence, Rhode Island in close proximity to about a dozen old, traditional amusement parks, which in the 1960s and early 1970s, had classic dark rides built by the likes of the Pretzel Amusement Ride Company, R.E. Chambers, and Bill Tracy.

What fascinates you the most about them?
The fact that the combination of lighting, sounds, and stunts – all inanimate objects prompt a gambit of extreme reactions from riders – screams, laughter, chills. That’s creativity by the dark ride designers…thinking out of the box…at its best.

What electrical technology do you think enabled the design of the original classic Dark Rides?
The technology used in Old Mill rides and that used in Dodgem (bumper car) rides in the late 1920s. More info on this at: http://www.laffinthedark.com/articles/pretzelride/pretzelride2.htm

I remember riding “Laff in the Dark” and that initial jolt forward of the car when it started. Was this a deliberate design element to add a little scare, or just an inability to control the motor speed better?
That’s just the sudden activation of the hot rail to move the car ahead. It wasn’t deliberate design or a design flaw. That was typical of older dark rides. Some ride operators would push the cars with their leg or arm to ease that jolt.

It seems the current trend in amusement parks is to build larger, faster roller coasters with more extreme accelerations and turns as a way to deliver the ultimate fright. Can you see Dark Rides making a comeback in the future by utilizing better technology and effects?
Actually, I’ve seen coasters scaling back in terms of height and speed a bit over the years. There’s only so much of both that riders can physically tolerate. I know this first-hand from riding them. There are some companies building dark rides these days but we’d like to see more traditional style dark rides and not the interactive models where riders shoot the stunts as targets. Today, companies can use digital sound which is more cost-effective in the long run than the old sound repeater tapes that would wear and break over time. Plus they have switches that are activated by the motion of the cars or bounce-back light. This technology replaces the older micro switches and other floor-level devices that were pushed or run over by the car and were subject to wear and tear. So the technology is here to build them with lower-maintenance issues than in the past.

I think Disney had an excellent vision for the broader potential experiences that Dark Rides can provide. Do you believe the older rides are what partially inspired the Disney theme parks and attractions such as Pirates of the Caribbean?
I’m not so sure that dark rides inspired Disney theme parks, but I’m pretty sure that some of the old pirate-themed dark rides inspired Pirates of Caribbean while the Haunted Mansion is a combination of many elements found in older traditional dark rides.

What’s your all-time favorite Dark Ride, and your memories of riding it?
My very first ride on a dark ride was a circa 1935 Pretzel installation at Crescent Park in East Providence, Rhode Island, I first rode it when I was three years old in 1957. By that time, it had been renamed Laff In the Dark and six circus-type stunts such as clowns and performing animals had been added to supplement the original Pretzel stunts. The ride was long and the large building was wide open with no dividing walls so riders could see stunts lighting up a distance away. There were no sound effects, just riders screaming and/or laughing when the stunts lit up. None of the stunts were very terrifying, just startling. And I do recall wishing I could take home the alligator with snapping jaws stunt. I was bummed out when told it was a part of the ride and not for sale. The Pretzel ran until 1963 so I got to ride it quite a bit as I got older. In the summer of 1963, my grandfather bought me $1 worth of tickets (good for ten rides) so I rode it ten times in a row, while he played a game of chance next to the ride’s boarding area. By the time I completed my ten rides, he won a table lamp, so we were both quite happy.

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