Ticket to Ride

The first time I saw a ghost, an actual ghost, I was terrified. I remember running down the alley behind the sideshow, knocking over a table of fairy floss as the partially decapitated incorporeal remnants of a little girl chased after me. Most of that day was a complete blur, but my strongest memory is of a coworker hastily dragging me into the lunch room by my collar, the little ghost girl howling a banshee’s lament as the door closed between us.

I found out later that the lunch room was pretty much the only safe place in the entire fairground, since it was built offsite and transported here about a year ago, long after everything had started going cuckoo bananas. The rest of the fairground, you ask? Well, that shit is haunted as hell.​

Urban legends say that this area used to be an Indian burial ground, and that sometime in the early forties the state built an insane asylum here. Rumour has it that when the asylum closed down due a series of unfortunate “mishaps”, the building was converted into an orphanage.

Apparently, a plane crashed into the orphanage one Christmas in the late fifties, killing all passengers and crew and decimating the main building of the orphanage, while the poor little orphans were busy performing a nativity play and not getting presents from loved ones. According to local myth, that’s when the eccentric Henri Flagstaff inherited the land, and used the sections of the destroyed orphanage and airliner to build the foundations for his amusement park.

Or so rumour would have you believe.

The real truth is that the amusement park was built on vacant land in the late eighties. The hauntings are due to the fact that the vacant land exists in an area where the boundaries between Earth and Hell are at their weakest.

Just don’t tell our customers.