My monster goes by many names. Funny Face, Steeplechase Face, Steeplechase Jack, Tillie—all at one time or another given to Coney Island’s de facto mascot. But to me he’s just “The Face.” He’s a cheeky man with leering eyes and a flat Edwardian haircut parted in the middle and curled at either end into two nubby horns. All of it cradled inside a mile-wide grin with an unnatural number of teeth. He’s a theoretically “fun” mascot from the 19th century that shows us what it’d look like if a barbershop quartet hired the Babadook.
The Face has haunted me since I was a child. I grew up north of the city, and Brooklyn was just far enough away to make Coney Island mythical and foreboding. The neighborhood felt as other-worldly to me as early-’90s New York did to the rest of the country. And as Coney Island’s ambassador, Tillie felt like a friend who would offer me a cigarette and suggest we break into an abandoned factory, then blame it all on me after we got caught.
I am back decades later to confront this demon, face to Funny Face. Specifically, I’m here to explore the park’s scary attractions—or what was left of them.
A hundred years ago the neighborhood was famous for haunted rides scattered across three competing amusement parks: Steeplechase Park, Luna Park, and Dreamland. There was a lot of money to be made frightening New Yorkers with ghosts and goblins in an era when the most suspenseful competition was black-and-white cinema. So the parks grew competitive, and an arms race kicked off as each tried to outdo the others with attractions made to raise Edwardian pulses higher than a shot of medically approved cocaine.
Today’s Coney Island amusements—including Deno’s Wonder Wheel Amusement Park, Luna Park, and various smaller vendors—still have plenty of scares, but most are of the thrill-ride variety: roller coasters like the Cyclone and other whirligigs exploiting our innate fear of heights, speed, and teenage ride operators on safety duty. But the other kind of fear—of the unknown, occult, and grotesque—has dwindled. Today, only one haunted ride remains at Coney Island: Spook-a-Rama.
It’s this ride’s gothic facade I’m admiring, taking mental notes about a plaster gargoyle, when two kids pass in front of me. “We should do this one,” one of them says, stopping to read Spook-a-Rama’s painted Rules sign, which reads “May cause seizures.” Then this kid, all of 12, raises her hand and does the “Hail Satan” sign.
The demonic duo turns back to make sure they’re not cutting me in line as I experience a vaguely familiar brand of childhood embarrassment: Do they think I’m too scared to go on the ride? I feel compelled to explain I’m simply studying the ride’s neo-gothic exterior and contemplating the history and legacy of Coney Island’s last remaining “spook ride.” That I aim to uncover why America has for so long connected carnivals and horror.
But I’m skeptical that would make me sound less square, so I say nothing.
***
Spook-a-Rama opened in 1955 on a scrap of land in the shadow of the Wonder Wheel. The ride’s owner, Fred Garms, was inspired by a boom in monster movies, and the ride’s name is a play on Cinerama. Its track was a quarter mile long, laid by the Pretzel Amusement Ride Co. of Bridgeton, New Jersey, and at 10-minutes, Spook-a-Rama once billed itself as the “longest ride in Coney Island.” (It’s since been shortened). The length alone places Spook-a-Rama in another era. If you find yourself on a modern ride for more than five minutes, a passenger ahead of you has probably died.
Spook-a-Rama’s creatures, artwork and effects were first created by Dan Casola, an Italian immigrant and the self-taught artisan behind many of Coney Island’s attractions, who worked mostly anonymously and created everything from the signage to the automations on the rides. I first learned about Casola from Charles Denson of the Coney Island History Project. For decades, Casola operated out of a “secret studio” behind Spook-a-Rama, where he worked unseen to keep his corner of Coney Island running like a literal well-oiled machine. Casola’s family would even bring meals to his shop as he tinkered for endless days on timeless nightmares. When his daughter once asked how he learned his trade, he answered, “By doing this.”
Casola is responsible for one of Spook-a-Rama’s (and Coney Island’s) most famous relics: a giant cyclops head nicknamed “Cy.” Cy loomed over the ride until it was damaged by Hurricane Sandy. The sculpture was so beloved it was rescued, displayed in the Coney Island Museum, and even sent on a gallery tour around the country. Despite the piece’s fame, it wasn’t until recently that Casola was identified as Cy’s artist. Was he too humble to take credit for his creations? Was he the victim of postwar anti–Italian sentiment? Perhaps he wanted to keep Spook-a-Rama mysterious?
“Probably because he was being paid off the books,” said Denson.
Casola’s under-the-table work capitalized on the era’s appetite for gothic entertainment, which had been growing since Marie Tussaud first exhibited wax figures of French guillotine victims in 1802. (A far cry from a modern Madame Tussaud’s exhibition featuring Jimmy Fallon and Taylor Swift.) For the East Coast elite, this appetite for the otherworldly was fed by seances hosted by exotic celebrities like the Russian-born Madame Helena Blatovsky, who toured the United States showcasing her psychic powers.
But for the masses, there was Coney Island.
Luna Park was first to introduce a haunted ride around 1905 with the Dragon’s Gorge. Steeplechase Park countered with Hellgate, a more sensational attraction that carried passengers through the flames of the underworld. That ride ironically caught fire in 1911, engulfing Hellgate in actual flames and destroying it. (At a time when safety regulations were a work in progress, sometimes the scariest thing about a ride was its structural integrity.) By the time Spook-a-Rama opened its chamber doors in the ’50s, Coney Island had become a mecca of haunted rides. According to Laff In The Dark, a website devoted to dark rides, these included The Devil’s Pit, Dragon’s Cave, Thirteen Ghosts, Crazy Ghosts, Dante’s Inferno, and a walk-through simply called “The Haunted House.”
Though the parks were rivals, to hear Denson describe it, there was also a spirit of mutual support across Coney Island. It was the frontier of the Five Boroughs, and to this day remains the last stop on the subway—the literal end of the line. Outsiders both geographically and socially, the rides’ operators relied on the community and the other owners to stay alive. And in many cases, parts of old rides would live on as components of new ones. “They weren’t bought from a factory and delivered there,” Denson said. “They were built by local artists.”
Coney Island’s outsider status also led to a level of permissiveness one couldn’t find many other places in the buttoned-up society of the Gilded Age. At a time when the tamest public displays of affection were frowned upon, these rides offered a socially acceptable excuse for couples to embrace one another under the guise of fear, giving new meaning to the phrase “theme park attraction.”
***
Finally entering Spook-a-Rama, I’m greeted with a macabre parade of decomposing corpses and other classic Halloween creatures. Most of them jolt to life with a pneumatic hiss, leaning toward me at that 20-degree angle all animatronics love. Other mechanical monsters pass: a man being electrocuted, the Grim Reaper. At the midpoint a Cujo barks at me as “Who Let the Dogs Out?” plays, which somehow feels like the oldest thing in an amusement park that predates the Civil War. But it’s the subtlest tricks that make me jump: a gust of cold air on the back of my neck, a curtain of strings grazing my face like cobwebs, a raving lunatic revving a chainsaw.
Okay, that last one is not very subtle.
***
One “creepy” character I didn’t see in Spook-a-Rama was a clown. This surprised me. Isn’t there always a creepy clown? Amusement parks may capitalize on horror, but the relationship is symbiotic. Horror exploits amusement parks for inspiration. The “creepy clown” archetype has become such a cliche that it’s easy to take the concept’s paradoxical nature for granted. It has roots dating back to bawdier nineteenth century circuses, and the fear of clowns even has a clinical title, coulrophobia, often attributed to perceived psychological threats like the uncanny valley of the clown’s makeup, the clown’s unpredictability, and the threat of humiliation.
Personally, however, I believe the origins of our clown fears are more cultural than primal. Bozo wasn’t born a monster. We made him one. After all, the most famous skull in Western literature, the one held by Hamlet, belonged to a jester. Creepy clowns in fact represent an entire invented subgenre that Andrew McConnell Scott, Professor of English at SUNY Buffalo, coined “dark carnival.” It’s a combination of circus and horror motifs that has inspired authors, artists, TV shows, 90 percent of Tim Burton’s career, and at least two albums plus one unbelievable film from KISS. Not to mention the Insane Clown Posse, who adopted “Dark Carnival” as a catchall term for their albums, fandom, and general ethos.
I assumed this subgenre was pioneered by the Victorian music videos of Smashing Pumpkins and Panic! At The Disco, but its background was inspired by forces even more powerful than Billy Corgan. “The roots of dark carnival can be found in the long and shabby decline of the vast tented circuses that toured the United States,” writes Scott. “The Great Depression wiped out many of those circuses.” Witnessing this slow decline, Scott suggests, Americans began to subconsciously view carnivals as something eerie and foreboding. After all, a crowd is one of the only things that separate a festive circus from an eerie one.
This could be why, even today, I feel that familiar sense of anxiety when I look at The Face.
***
Stepping off Spook-a-Rama in one piece, I make my way to the ride’s photo counter. A wall of old monitors display photographs of wide-eyed passengers captured mid-scare. I’m debating buying my photo when a family gathers next to me and searches the monitors. I hear the family explode with laughter. I jump (one more scare for the road) and look up. Their dad’s image has popped up: the grown man has climbed halfway out of his chair, there’s a look of panic in his eyes, and he’s screaming like he just opened the Ark of the Covenant.
I understand the explosive reaction. Had the kids ever seen their father look that scared? Does anyone? Not if you’re lucky (unless it’s on another ride). The children weren’t just laughing at dad’s silly expression, or rebelliously enjoying the momentary embarrassment of an authority figure. They were delighted to see their father in such a rare light, if only for a literal fraction of a second. It’s an underappreciated side effect of the fear amusement parks provide: it shows our loved ones a side of us we’ve never known. It’s like climbing Mount Everest with your dad, but way easier. His photo, and his kids’ love of his photo, reminds me that rides still bring people together.
***
In 1961, celebrity photographer Diane Arbus went inside Spook-a-Rama to photograph the ride’s interior. The Guggenheim fellow (later portrayed by Nicole Kidman) captured Spook-a-Rama’s S-shaped “pretzel track” winding between a skeleton, an owl, and what I think is a snarling gorilla’s head. The photo was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and years later inspired the Brooklyn-born novelist Francine Prose to write an essay for The New York Times, recalling her own memories of Spook-a-Rama. Prose calls it “the equivalent of Proust’s madeleine,” evoking a flood of fearful memories. “Looking back,” she writes, “I realize: That was the first time I understood—in a way that was at once inchoate and perfectly clear—that there were things from which the grown-ups couldn’t protect me.”
To discover two great artists had already chronicled Spook-a-Rama left me surprised. (Plus a little bummed; my tenure as literature’s preeminent Spook-a-Rama writer was over before it even began.) I never would’ve expected one homespun ride full of plastic skeletons to inspire so much passion. But expectations are often flipped in parks like Coney Island: A mascot designed to delight me scares me. A circus designed to evoke joy reminds the country of despair. A father screams like a child. Clowns become monsters. And rides designed for fear give partners freedom to express love. Nothing is what it seems. It can feel disorienting, but all the best rides are.
