Felt like absolute death and will never do it again. Holy shit it made me sicker and dizzier than I've ever been in my life, and I used to ride tf out of this thing.
Kids loved it and rode it another half dozen times.
They had to stop the Tilt-a-Whirl when I was about 6 yo bc I lost my mind, scared out of my mind. They initially wouldn’t stop it but my uncle ran into the staging area and screamed he was going to stop it himself.
Well they stopped it, he grabbed me and we left the Rehoboth Beach Fun Land and went to get ice cream.
My 6 and 9 year old tried it a few months ago and hated it 😂 Wasn't the actual Graviton through, it was an open air version that also went up and tilted and stuff so that may have been a factor. I declined to join haha
My Dad always tells this story about how he & his brother rode this ride as kids & his brother threw up & it came back all over them. They had to ride the bus home covered in vomit. He never got on one of these again haha
So it wasn't this ride but something similar happened to me. Me my brother and my cousin were riding the scrambler (pictured below). My brother had hot dogs right before we got on. Anyway he gets sick and blows hotdog chunks all over me. I end up being the only person that gets drenched. Not a drop on my brother or my cousin. As we are going around we are trying to yell at the operator to stop the ride but we only spin by him every few seconds so it was more like "Stop...........The...........Ride." Finally he stops the ride and we all get off. I come off looking like I was the one who got sick, and everyone else comes off clean as a whistle. My Dad obviously has to bring me home, but here's the kicker. My brother spent about 10 minutes trying to argue why he shouldn't go home considering he's fresh and clean and ready to ride other stuff. Even though he was the reason I had to go home early he was trying to weasel himself into staying. Dad shut that shit down quick.
This is the exact reason I never went on it as a kid. I'd heard stories. Plus people getting their hair caught. That one was a story that when around my school. That a girl died on one at Six Flags Great America. Not sure if it was true or not but it was enough to say nope.
I found out the hard way that around 32 my body stopped enjoying rollercoasters. Nothing spectacularly bad mind you, but instead of minor thrill and enjoyment, it was disorientation and anxiety for some reason.
It’s weird how our balance seems to degrade. I get woozy just from riding on playground swings (I have young kids). Haven’t been on a coaster in about 15 years but I imagine it’s different now.
It’s the core bracing squeeze, to stop the insides just going to jelly, and the eyes locking onto the horizon to maintain orientation. The enjoyment isn’t there, it is just enduring the ride till it’s finished.
Coasters hit different in your thirties and forties. But I have found that I could get back into them if I did so slowly. your body does get used to them the more you ride them and I was able to get back into coaster riding and now im all good.
48 and rode it this year with my 8 year old son at his request. It's been about 30 years since I rode it last, and boy did it suck this time. I legit thought I was going to die as I could feel my trachea collapsing upon itself. Of course there's nothing you can do in the middle of the ride - you can't reach your arm out to signal anyone (not like they're paying attention to you anyway), and the music is just blasting at a deafening level, so no one could hear you scream, if you could scream. So you just close your eyes and wait for the end, whichever version comes first.
I used to love amusement parks and I would go on all the rides. I was so excited to take my daughter and was looking forward to all the rides with her. I never want to go on a ride again, but at least now I understand my dad that much more.
When you think about fairs objectively it's pretty fuckin weird. At some point someone is just like, "Let's make a device that just shakes the absolute shit out of someone until they vomit, people will love it!"
Not by me. Mostly the public park by the library and weird little church parking lots.
But yeah, they still very much exist and they still look exactly like two guys with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and dirty trucker hats assembled them with nothing but a screwdriver and the wrong size wrench.
I asked a guy at my local agricultural fair and he looked at me like he was thinking should I? I thought for a minute he might let me and I would have been a legend in my kids eyes. It's just fairytale to them. Maybe in the future
As someone who spent a summer working for a traveling amusement company, it's definitely one of the safer rides, or at least one of the ones that would get pulled if something was even slightly wrong with it. Whereas the Ferris wheel ran on duct tape, WD-40, and hope.
Yeah there’s a reason I don’t ride fair rides or let my kid ride them. A Ferris wheel that is permanent and stays in one place is fine, one that is assembled out of the back of a truck is not. I’ve had too many negative experiences on fair rides.
A Ferris wheel that is permanent and stays in one place is fine, one that is assembled out of the back of a truck is not.
One that is assembled out of the back of a truck has at least had eyeballs on it on a regular basis. One that stays in one place has as much inspection as the minium wage employees feel like doing.
Until you take lsd and decide to ride it with a friend.
The carnie in the middle driving it turned into a frolicking mullet demon. He was doing cartwheels, while smoking. He stood sideways on the wall with his dark magics, while w.a.s.p. blasted our ears,it was a portal to hell.
op wouldnt know, cos they obviously never been on this thing. i refuse to believe the title could be a result of experience, what are they going to do with a seat belt? the wall is literally the floor, thats why youre allowed to climb and flip around on it.
only way to result in injury is a catastrophic failure of the whole apparatus, flinging everyone on the ride out to oblivion. in which case no belt is going to save you
We did this about a month ago. The ride was run by what looked like a 15 year old child with a 3 year old on her lap. Oh and a stereo bungee chorded to the railing to provide music.
They had an amusement park that would come to the local mall's parking lot every summer (with this ride); that amusement park stopped coming after 2010.
Rofl, our operator was the one walking the middle rails towards the end of the night when he let us ride for longer since there were fewer in the lines.
Same, he'd always be wearing a Motley Crue t shirt and be goofing off outside the control booth while its operating. Iirc they have some kind of internal timer safety so after so long it'd end cycle automatically. But he'd be running around the little handrail loop part or standing perpendicular on one of the rider slats or some shit. Safety was really something else back then 😆
I had that guy. We'd ride this so many times towards the end of the night he's say "Do what you want. You have two minutes." And we'd do crazy stuff then he'd warn us to straighten up because it was about to slow down.
They renamed it to Starship 2000 now around me. Still smells like barf, still plays 90s music, still has the teens that reach the railing by standing up on the seats.
That's a classic case study in survivorship bias. They studied cats who were taken to an animal hospital. Cats who fell from such a height that they died on impact weren't included because their owners didn't take them to the hospital, and cats who had no injuries also weren't included for the same reason.
Also did one as an adult and felt like I was suffocating. I’m not too out of shape either. I thought after, maybe I just need to man up but I don’t know. More body mass to press against the organs?
Hi. I was one of those kind 👋 I worked at a small amusement park that had one, some people absolutely couldn’t run it because even in the center, you get dizzy. We’d rotate off that ride every 40 minutes as a standard. Still, it was a fun time!
Yes! I’ll always remember it as a dude who looked like he’s attending a cannibal corpse concert, blasting metal, and being able to do all kinds of cool walks along the wall
one motherfucker did this at the fair in town. He leaned back too far and rippen through that canvas ceiling above him. I guess it fling him about a block away before he landed in somebody's yard. They still use the same machine, but there's a huge duct tapped patch over one of those triangles in the ceiling.
I've been on this ride at least 6 dozen times and never seen anyone throw up on it. Granted, that isn't a large amount but it was over many years; it seems to me like the force would keep the fluids in place until the ride ended - at least for "sympathy pukes." A real strong puke could perchance find its way onto one's neighbors.
Idk, my arm somehow got caught between two seats and pinned down so the seat beside me kept rolling up and down over my elbow and arm. I’m surprised it didn’t break. I was screaming at the guy to stop the ride 😭
I went on this exactly once when I was younger. Friend of mine convinced me to go on it with him... well I think with me being a fatass at the time (and still am) I guess it made the cage roll faster or at least more often. It literally never stopped flipping the ENTIRE time we were riding it. I always saw others stop and flip now and then but ours literally never stopped. I've never gotten motion sick/felt like I was going to vom after a ride in my life apart from that one zipper ride. Never rode it again and my BF and I went to the county fair this year just to check things out as its been a long time and I was a bit sad that they don't seem to even have the zipper anymore. I did see the gravitron though and that made me happy to see.
My first job was running one of these at a boardwalk. Did you know the operator in the middle spins with the ride? And if you move your head at all you get very sick very fast
Got stuck in one for 4 hours. Power went out for the entire fair and the hydraulic actuators for the door wouldn't operate. Fire department had to pry it open.
Can't believe there wasn't an emergency escape but I guess that wasn't a requirement back then haha
One of my favorite rides to this day. I’ve done it as an adult and felt fine, I’m surprised others said they felt terrible after, I usually get motion sick real easy but not on this ride for some reason.
Town festival, 2009. My cousin and I decided to ride this for the first time in our lives. No seatbelts, a safety cage with a chain, and gravity were all that was going to be holding us to that ride, and we were ready to take it on.
Except the ride overseer was rude to us for no good reason. We weren't rowdy, we weren't rude, chick was probably just tired of kids in general and took it out on us. My uncle bribed her to let us on and it worked.
Excited as we were, my cousin didn't factor in that that amount of force on a 13 year old who has a full stomach is a recipe for disaster. He vomited everywhere mid-ride. Covered two girls next to him in it from the spin force and even managed to somehow shoot the ride operator right in the face. Me? I was holding on for dear life hunkered in my corner, laughing my ass off. I was one of the few to not get covered in his stomach contents, and it was a delightful mix of chaos and horror to behold such a sight.
I once went to a fair with my cousin and our order of operations went blue sno-cones -> Gravitron -> fun house. She held it together admirably until we were almost through the fun house.
The only exit was a whirly slide. She barfed up blue sno-cone at the top of the slide, so that a trail of blue slime flowed alllll the way down...
At Geauga Lake in Ohio many years ago, there was a guy on the spectrum who would ride this thing literally over and over again. Known locally as Fred the Rotor Man. The ride would end, he would hide outside the exit door, and then as it was loading up again, he would immediately get right back on. Almost all day. Almost every day. For almost a decade. Guy was a bit of a local legend.
ours was called “the rotor” at geagua lake. some wildly creepy dude rode it all day every day. i hope he won his world record for whatever it was he was going for.
I went on this once as a kid and the crackhead running it passed out. My mother was frantically trying to find someone to stop the thing. Me and the other kids were in there about twenty minutes. I wasn’t right for a few days.
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