Water Park
Ray, NY, USA
March 2005
Back in the summer of 2002 I was working as a lifeguard at a water park in Vernon, NJ. The place used to be owned by a company named Action Park and has always had great business considering it was gigantic and it was also a winter ski resort.
At the top of the hill there is this ridiculously steep slide that stands about 100 ft to the sky and no joke when you go down it, you're not even touching the slide at first. It's sketchy. And right next to this slide are 2 smaller enclosed slides that you take tubes down.
One day I was sitting on the platform of the single person enclosed ride and it was around closing so it wasn't very busy, and I heard someone talking. Looking around all bewildered I came to the conclusion that it was no one I could make out. I started to clean up when all of a sudden I saw this little boy in the slide. He was saying he was stuck and I could hear him so well because everything was echoing. I told him to hang tight and we were going to shut the water off so he could walk down, and he said "ok, hurry" and smiled in a strange strange way.
Well I let the other guards know and we all went down to the bottom and turned the water off and were calling up to the kid. He yelled down that he couldn't get out because the tube was in the way. Well up we went. And all we found was a tube.
So a little confused and very weirded out, the bunch of us decided to head back to the meeting hut to let someone know. When we walked in we went to our lead and told him what had happened. He just looked at us and his face went pale and told us this:
Back when the park was still Action Park people were getting hurt on some of the rides because they weren't built the right way or the "safe way". There was this little boy who was going on the tube ride when all of a sudden his tube had gotten stuck inside the tunnel slide, he was quite young and they never shut the water off because the guards didn't know he was stuck. Well they didn't find the boy till after the park had closed, he had drowned.
Over the past years I was told that many guards who are stationed up there, will hear someone yelling at them for help, they will start to panic and shut the water off and no one will be there.