The 4 amusement park rides on which you absolutely don’t want to get stuck

On Wednesday, western Pennsylvania’s Kennywood Park experienced its second malfunction in as many days when its Pirate ship — an amusement park standby that swings patrons back and forth — lost power to its brake line. The mishap left riders lurching at the bottom of a incomplete loop for what probably seemed like hours but was roughly 10 minutes on solid ground. While no one was injured, enough patrons were shaken up to leave feedback like angry Theme Park Tycoon characters.

“I was terrified. My kids are crying. There was people behind us panicking. There was a guy in front of us, he was ready to get sick,” said one rider, who asked to have his name withheld, told Pittsburgh’s KDKA.

“It just kept on going, and I just got really scared, and I was feeling really sick, and I was crying. I was just terrified,” said rider Evan Paulick.

That’s awful...but it could have been much worse. Amusement parks are basically affronts to the specter of death. It’s what makes them great, but also why you can set a Final Destination movie there and the world will respond “yeah, makes sense, great film.” The Pirate is a simple back and forth experience that gets tamer the closer you are to the middle of the ship. Would I want to be stuck on it for 10 minutes? Adult me says no, but 13-year-old me just threw up a churro in excitement just thinking about it.

But even 13-year-old me knows there are some rides that are strict 90 second experIences before moving on to the Potato Patch for some hand-cut fries. Here’s our breakdown of all the amusement park attractions that would be absolute hell to be stuck on for 10+ minutes.

The conceit behind the Musik Express is simple. You spin around an inclined plane for two minutes, gradually getting faster and faster while a bored teenager in the booth plays either:

a) music (musik?) that hasn’t been relevant in two decades, or
b) music that is entirely inappropriate — for me this was Nirvana’s In Utero, in its entirety, at Warwick, RI’s now-defunct Rocky Point.

What you don’t realize about the Express when you walk up to the line, or even as you’re strapping yourself in, is that it’s essentially an astronaut experiment to see how much centrifugal force a 10-year-old can withstand. As the ride speeds up, you’re flung to the outer reaches of your car. A slick, flat, molded-plastic bench means anyone sitting to your right — sometimes two patrons — are now intimately aware of what you’ve got in your pockets. This is the exact moment Sartre was talking about when he said hell is other people.

But the discomfort trickles away as the ride slows to a stop and you dizzily walk yourself off the pressed metal crosswalk and back to the gum-pocked asphalt of the park. The dulcet tones of Korn’s “Got the Life” fade into the cacophony of bumper cars and carnival games in the background, and in several months, you forget the discomfort of the Musik Express. Until you buckle the world’s least effective seatbelt for a ride the following year.

Now imagine that feeling, on repeat, while gravity smooshes you through 30 to 40% of Iggy Azalea’s The New Classic. Hard pass. Same goes for other spinning rides like the Rotor or Scrambler or anything that counts on centrifugal force to rearrange your organs. — Christian D’Andrea

Pretty much every park has a whitewater simulator where you trudge wildly through brown-ish water the same consistency of a low-grade fever in a raft that looks like repurposed tools from an aborted effort to make the world’s largest deep dish pizza. Every ride is the same; you start out calm, bump into a few walls, hit a few manufactured “rapids” that leave itch-water drying on your shorts for the next several hours, and finally gasp in delight as that one strategically-placed waterfall soaks 30 percent of your boat right before the finish.

Typically, you then walk off, wring out your socks, and pray you remembered to bring your hand sanitizer. Instead, consider having to run the course four or five more times, ensuring total soakage. The chlorine in the water, exhausted from its losing battle with the park’s bacteria, decides to take its frustration out on your clothing and skin instead. Every bump increases your odds of accidentally swallowing something unfit for man or beast to ingest. Every trip past the waterfall feels more and more like God is taunting you. — Christian D’Andrea

Let’s be abundantly clear on what the “Zipper” is: A ride that was constructed by a group of carnies who checked out a book on medieval torture devices at the library and were like “seems like a good ride.”

You don’t get to sit on the Zipper, not really. It’s a half-standing human-shaped cage of misery. There’s a ever present realization that a few pieces of rusty rebar and fencing is all that holds you back from your annihilation.

Seriously, walk past the Zipper at any county or state fair. You’ll hear a group of people standing around trying to peer pressure each other into riding the Zipper, because the Zipper is an asshole that exists only because it knows people want to seem cool by riding it.

a. The Zipper sucks.
b. People only willingly ride The Zipper out of social fear.

Now imagine being stuck on this thing for a considerable period of time. The ride itself has three points of rotation, two controlled by the ride and a third free pivot on each individual capsule. It’s designed to completely destroy any sense of orientation you might have.

The Zipper (according to Wikipedia) has a MAXIMUM ride time of 2.5 minute. TWO POINT FIVE MINUTES. Even the Zipper’s creators know that this device should not be used for any extended period of time.

I love my life. I really do. If you stuck me on the Zipper for 30 minutes I’d tear a piece of the cage off using my bare hands and commit seppuku.

Disclosure: I rode the Zipper in 2009 at the North Carolina State Fair and threw up my turkey leg. — James Dator

The thing about amusement parks is that the rides are bad. They terrify me. I don’t like going through sharp turns. I don’t like being in the dark. And I definitely don’t like Space Mountain, the ride that goes through sharp turns in the dark.

The worst part about rollercoasters is that they make me nauseous and scared. That, but in the dark, is cause for an ambulance on its own and if I have to be stuck on that for TEN MINUTES lord help me.

I wouldn’t know where I was, what position I was in, where the end was, if I was hundreds of feet in the air. I wouldn’t know a single thing. So no thank you. Do not leave me stuck there. Unless you want a pile or tears mixed with vomit. — Matt Ellentuck