Alright. Be nice to me with this one. I'm like a walking trainwreck of various assorted esoteric interests that damn near nobody cares about and this is one of the more "bitter" ones. It's a little easier to hide the flavor when it comes to things like retro games because video games are still a popular hobby otherwise but with stuff like this I feel like I'm wasting my time even talking about it.

I have a general interest in dark rides, specifically haunted houses, and more specifically haunted houses that were produced by Amusement Display Associates, a company managed by a guy named Bill Tracy out of Cape May, New Jersey. Bill Tracy was an Ohio-born artist who produced window displays and later Thanksgiving parade floats for Macy's before heading to NJ and starting up shop as a dark ride designer. He produced dozens of haunted houses during the 1960s at a time when locally owned amusement parks were still prosperous and profitable. This was long before the modern hellscape of "super park" dominance like Six Flags, Cedar Point, and of course Disney and Universal.

America used to be covered in amusement parks, dozens upon dozens of parks of varying sizes, dedicated entirely to having fun with your family and friends through thrills and relaxation and often times just the opportunity to experience the beauty of life through verdant tree-dotted playgrounds with lush gardens and various bodies of water. Sometimes this included live entertainment, sometimes swimming, often dancing. These were places dedicated to play and if they lasted long enough they would even see their penny arcades become video arcades by the late 1970s. Amusement parks are a beautiful concept that often fail to be financially and culturally viable long enough to last. Crowds dwindle, interest fades, parks shutter and live on in the memories of those who care while those who don't return to their anthill routine of work, TV, and shopping. So it goes.

I live in Pittsburgh and so I'm interested in local history. The Pittsburgh area has a couple amusement parks- Kennywood and Idlewild, really. Idlewild is more of a glorified Kiddyland but Kennywood has been a Pittsburgh staple for well over a century. Long ago a handful of others dotted this same landscape in all sorts of sizes but the park that interests me the most is West View. West View Park was an amusement park located in what is now an incredibly boring, stagnant shopping center featuring a Dollar Tree, Giant Eagle, a couple slapdash random tea and pharmaceutical stores and a storage unit building in what used to be Kmart. If none of this tickles your fancy just drive back past the senior citizen highrise apartments and peruse one of the fast food establishments like Taco Bell or Dunkin', or maybe check out one of the two tire stores. Fun stuff.

STEEL PHANTOMS WIP BELOW

A common bond tied together many of the dark rides that dotted Western Pennsylvania's amusement parks. For West View it began in 1963 with the aptly named Haunted House, followed by Boot Hill and Davey Jones' Locker in 1964. Kennywood's heart of darkness first received the touch back in 1961 with a renovation of Zoomerang titled "Safari", followed by the Ghost Ship in 1967 and another switchover from Safari to Le Cachot in 1972. Up north in Erie, Waldameer would see the construction of its legendary Whacky Shack in 1970 followed by its sister ride the Pirate's Cove in 1972. Each and every one of these rides shared a common thread- all were designed by William "Bill" Tracy and his masterful team at Outdoor Dimensional Displays (later Amusement Display Associates) based in Cape May, New Jersey. Born in Ohio in (year), William Tracy got his start (insert brief biography) before pivoting into what he would become best known for: designing and constructing dark rides for amusement parks. His haunts (and not-so-haunts) littered the landscape of America's playgrounds in a relatively short tenure with dozens of rides seeing construction from the early 1960s to the mid 1970s (in addition to some posthumous productions following his death in 1975). Haunted Houses, Kooky Castles, Whacky Shacks- these rides and more startled and spooked thousands of parkgoers for decades following their construction, offering up fluorescent blacklit scares in all flavors of horror from the traditionally "Halloweeny" to the unexpectedly violent and utterly grotesque. The animated ghouls within, often called "stunts" or "tricks", served many different purposes: some were built to shock and startle, some to incite a laugh or two, some to disturb and some to baffle us in ways we'll never understand. To the modern devoted he was something of a mad genius, an eclectic artisan that specialized in a sort of macabre psychedelia- but to most who've entered and experienced his creations, whether by foot on shaky funhouse floors or by rickety cart on a twisted track, there were no names associated with the work of his incredibly talented crew and the sands of time would come to erode old memories of the fiberglass freaks and neon nightmares that once haunted the halls of many dark rides across North America.