Lincoln Park P.5

Fast forward to 2000 and I got to ride in a former Mystery/Monster Ride car! Here’s how it happened: shortly after 1987, some of the cars and track from the Lincoln Park ride and Mountain Park’s Mystery Ride/Dinosaur Den ride were transported to Seaside Heights, New Jersey where they became the rolling stock for the Nightmare Manor dark ride at Casino Pier. The circa 1961 cars were painted and retrofitted with restraints for their service in Nightmare Manor, which like the former Lincoln Park ride, had a brief trek over the balcony.

Below: Here I am in the photo. And to be honest, I don’t recall much about the interior of Nightmare Manor; all I remember is feeling like I was a kid at Lincoln Park again!

Unfortunately, Nightmare Manor has since vanished from the Casino Pier midway, thus ending the long, exciting reign of Lincoln Park’s mysterious Monster Ride!

In the fall of 2020, my friend Sean McCarthy purchased one of the Lincoln Park Mystery/Monster Ride cars that stayed behind in North Dartmouth. The person he acquired the car from had been using it as a planter! Sean is currently restoring the car to its original 1961 condition from the paint scheme right down to the frame. As most of our readers know, Sean restored a ride car from Rocky Point Park’s Castle of Terror/House of Horrors several years earlier. You can read about that restoration here

A 1949 Lincoln Park brochure proudly touted the “new Fun House”. It’s not known what vendor was responsible for it back then, but it had elements from both the Philadelphia Toboggan Company (PTC) and National Amusement Devices.

Its Magic Carpet ending was a PTC staple in fun houses through the country. The fun house was situated in a relatively small building and by all accounts, it was always a corridor-guided walkthrough with no large open rooms with obstacles. Its façade was originally decorative but not overwhelming, graced with plywood clown cutouts.

But in 1961 both the façade and interior received a major makeover by Spadola. The plywood cutouts were replaced by life-size animated clowns and bug-eyed ogres that continuously turned 180 degrees to left and right. The balcony window, where patrons tried to traverse the shuttle boards (alternating planks) now featured back wall illustrations of clowns and other images similar to kids show icons like Yogi Bear, Popeye, and even Howdy Doody. Near the bottom floor entrance was a Laffin’ Sal or a remarkable replica of her, enclosed in a glass booth. Her distinctive laugh track was piped both inside and outside the building. The lettering, “It’s fun to get lost” was retained but in reality, getting lost inside was virtually impossible.

After groping their way through a standard mirror maze, patrons found themselves navigating dimly lit corridors; their direction guided by Spadola’s brightly illustrated images of clowns and the occasional multi-colored stripe. This was followed by a tilted room that also served as ascending ramp to the second floor. Here, patrons got to experience Spadola’s brilliance – looking down on them, hanging from the rafters, were dozens of his bizarre creatures. His creepy creations hung overhead just before the second floor window, on the ceiling over the shuttle boards, and for a good 40-feet beyond that. Whereas the façade text promised an appearance of a “pal” of one of the ogres, this commitment was fulfilled as several of the same bug-eyed beings appeared on a small, fenced in stage.

Following that was the Magic Carpet, and whoever was running it, was an attraction in himself. Seems every time I boarded the sofa, a grouchy older guy would bark out commands like “Sit down!” “Don’t crowd!” “Do you mind giving me some air?” “Quit screaming or I’ll give you something to really scream about!” Looking back on it, I guess if I was confined to a phone booth-sized room all day as he was, I’d be grumpy too. But the show couldn’t go on without him, and indeed, if he wasn’t manning his post, people were sometimes seen walking out his employee exit, directly onto to the go-cart track. They thought that was the Fun House exit.

And why was it spelled Fun Huose? Back in 1949, when the park staff was laying the two-foot tall letters on the ground, they accidently switched the o and u. Apparently, park management liked it as was, and never made the correction.