Intro

Today, I’m going to start with the story of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the person behind Anne. Then I’ll talk about Anne of Green Gables and her international fame, particularly in Japan. Finally, I’ll go over the theme park: Anne of Canadian World. 

Lucy Maud Montgomery

You know her name. I’ve said it at the end of every episode of The Abandoned Carousel. But who was Lucy Maud Montgomery?

I’m so glad you asked. Did you know that she’s an incredible person who did a lot of interesting things? It’s been so delightful to research such a strong and brilliant woman, making her own way (to paraphrase another woman, one of my favorite Tweets of all time from the exceptional Blair Braverman about her amazing sled dog Pepe). 

We all know Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote Anne of Green Gables. But how did she get there? Who was this ineffable being? “To write has always been my central purpose around which every effort and hope and ambition of my life has grouped itself,” Maud wrote in her 1917 autobiography.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was the writer who wrote Anne of Green Gables, and all associated books. She was born in a small village on Prince Edward Island (Canada) in November 1874. 

In her 1917 autobiography, Maud includes a section from a poem called To The Fringed Gentian, describing it as the keynote of her every aim and ambition from childhood onwards:

“Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep
  How I may upward climb
The Alpine path, so hard, so steep,
  That leads to heights sublime;
How I may reach that far-off goal
  Of true and honoured fame,
And write upon its shining scroll
  A woman’s humble name.”

How much do we want to get into it? Well, Maud’s life was filled with difficult situations from a young age. Her mother, Clara Woolner Macneill Montgomery, died of tuberculosis when Maud was almost aged 2. Her father, Hugh John Montgomery, was a bit of a flake by many accounts, and gave Maud into the primary care of her maternal grandparents. He slowly moved himself away bit by bit in search of “business” to Prince Albert (North-West Territories, now Saskatchewan) some 44h by car in the modern era. He fully awayed himself after Maud survived a bout of typhoid fever around age 5.

And before I go further, I hear you saying, but why are you calling her “Maud”? Though she was born as “Lucy Maud”, in nod to her maternal grandmother Lucy Macneill, Maud herself once wrote “my friends call me ‘Maud’ and nothing else”; later, she wrote ““I never liked Lucy as a name. I always liked Maud—spelled not ‘with an e’ if you please.””. Maud with no e, she was very firm, and so who am I to go against her stated desires?

Maud had a lonely childhood. As I said, she’d been given into the care of her grandparents, the Macneills, who had never approved of their daughter Clara’s marriage to Hugh John in the first place. Her childhood was a constant tightrope between the “passionate Montgomery blood” and the “Puritan Macneill conscience”. Tall, thin, severe old Grandma Lucy loved her daughter in her own way, and Maud back, but it was never well-expressed. Only later, in the fictional character of Marilla Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables, does Maud ever truly celebrate her grandmother. 

In the face of her father leaving, Maud let out her anger only towards her grandparents, never saying a word against the flaky absent parent Hugh John. Grandma Lucy had to play peacemaker in the house: between her husband, anti-social Grandpa Macneill who did not want to parent another child after already raising several to adulthood, and the angry semi-orphan Maud, desperate for socialization. Grandma Lucy pleased neither in the process. 

Maud’s Childhood Friends

Maud’s “ancient” aunt Emily, the Macneill’s daughter, got married off, leaving Grandma and Grandpa Macneill alone with Maud. As the Dictionary of Canadian Biography puts it, “their stern Scottish Presbytarianism became more rigid as they aged”. Think about living in a remote area, 11 miles from the railways and 24 miles from the nearest town, population about 1000, at the turn of the 1900s, and you might begin to see the scope of Maud’s isolation, especially as an outgoing tween and teen. It was a constant cycle between Maud’s flights of fancy causing town gossip, which her strict grandparents then agonized over.

However, Maud had it relatively good – a nice roof over her head, plenty to eat, clothes to wear. Her family was considered high status in Cavendish at the time. And despite the small population, there was a school and two churches and a meeting hall, there were cousins and friends throughout her early years.

Her grandparents boarded two orphan boys for four glorious years, when Maud was between 7 and 11 years old: Wellington and David Nelson, or Well and Dave, both around her age. These were incredible years for Maud, having siblings like she’d always dreamed, built-in playmates to roam and adventure with. They had free range of the world, to create and imagine and dream, telling stories, foraging for apples, and fishing. Summers were spent wandering the shorelines, collecting shells and talking with the mackerel fishers. 

Unfortunately, it wouldn’t last. One morning, with no explanation, Well and Dave vanished, their room cleaned up, possessions gone. Perhaps the Macneills realized Maud was getting too old to be spending so much time with boys, or perhaps they simply thought it was kinder this way. 

Maud had the occasional schoolfriends, but nothing and no one gave her the companionship she craved. She constantly perceived feelings of being an outsider, orphaned and alone, however. As she herself said to her journals, “Materially, I was well cared for … it was emotionally and socially that my nature was starved and restricted.” In her autobiography and other public-facing forums, Maud remained neutral, calling her childhood “very quiet and simple” and saying “Some might think it dull. But life never held for me a dull moment. I had, in my vivid imagination, a passport to the geography of Fairyland.”

Her journals are a subject I should mention, as they are often referenced when talking about Maud’s life and Anne of Green Gables. Maud wrote ten volumes of journals over the course of her life. As she gained fame in the 1910s, she began to edit and type up her journals. Maud was savvy, and she knew that the journals would eventually be published, so she began to shape them to reflect her life in the way she wanted to be perceived.

Here, then, is a biased source, an unreliable narrator. We do get insights into the private reality of Maud. However, Maud rewrote and retyped her journals, burning items that didn’t fit her desired image, so clearly Maud always had a public audience in mind. 

The other interesting thing is that unlike contemporaries Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott, Maud’s journals were kept private for several decades. It took until 1985 before abridged versions of the journals were published, and prior to that, only a handful of scholars even had access to the unedited versions.

From these journals, we get a deeper sense of the person. Maud was lonely. She felt like an outsider in the small town of Cavendish, though Maud herself was forever fervently passionate about the place, calling it “hallowed ground”. She invented imaginary friends, who lived in the glass doors of a cupboard in the Macneill’s parlor: Katie Maurice, a girl her own age; and Lucy Gray, an elderly widow who told “dismal stories of her troubles”. Maud had free range of the beautiful natural environment of Prince Edward Island, where she learned to make fun and merriment everywhere, out of the personalities of even the trees and the cats. Everything had a name, everything had feelings.

Writing and art were not seen as appropriate for well-bred ladies of the time in Cavendish, marking Maud, with her constant habit of writing and journaling as an oddity at best. And unfortunately, Maud’s extended family ridiculed and disparaged her early interest in writing, as mere “scribbling”, and later with harshed words. These were comments that she would perpetually remember and resent. 

Harsh comments were the ones Maud dwelled on forever. Her autobiography recalls a time when she was perpetually called by a boys’ name, much to her anger. “That experience taught me one lesson, at least. I never tease a child. If I had any tendency to do so, I should certainly be prevented by the still keen recollection of what I suffered at Mr. Forbes’ hands. To him, it was merely the “fun” of teasing a “touchy” child. To me, it was the poison of asps.”

At age 15, Maud received a summons from her father, Hugh John Montgomery, who’d gone and remarried and had children with his new wife. He invited her out to stay with him for a year, and she jumped at the chance to spend time with her father, whom she still idolized. Her paternal grandfather, John Montgomery, accompanied her on the six-day-long train trip out to Saskatchewan, for propriety’s sake.

Things weren’t great in Prince Albert, and Maud wasn’t welcome with the open arms she’d expected. Her stepmother Mary Ann MacRae wasn’t much older than Maud herself (she was 23 years younger than Hugh John Montgomery, her husband!). Maud spared no kind words for her, saying that she was “a woman whose evil temper and hateful disposition made [Hugh John’s] life miserable.” Maud was essentially treated as hired help. In fact, wicked stepmother Mary Ann pulled Maud out of school, setting her to tend the house and care for her stepsiblings, including the prodigal son and heir to the family name. 

There were few bright spots, all writing-related. Maud had her first works published: a poem “On Cape LeForce”, and an article discussing a visit to a First Nations camp on the Great Plains. Of the experience, she wrote: “ The moment we see our first darling brain-child arrayed in black type is never to be forgotten. It has in it some of the wonderful awe and delight that comes to a mother when she looks for the first time on the face of her first born.” Maud later claimed that the days she spendt sending out her poetry around this time were where she learned “the first, last, and middle lesson — Never give up!” 

What she had hoped would be a wonderful time in Prince Albert ended up being far from it, given all this, and Maud was grateful to return to Cavendish and her maternal grandparents, to her private bedroom where she could write in peace. With no accompaniment from Grandfather Montgomery on the journey home, Maud had to travel alone, finding her own accommodations in the evenings every time the train stopped. This was quite the feat as a young single female, not socially acceptable, but Maud handled it with aplomb.

Maud’s Higher Education

Maud was desperate to escape from the bleak path that lay ahead for unmarried women of that time, and knew she had to get out of town, despite her love for Cavendish. She applied to Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, in order to obtain her teacher’s license. With money having long run out, Grandma Lucy stepped in, loaning Maud her own money to help her attend school. With only enough money for a single year, Lucy Maud Montgomery was forced to complete the two-year program in a single year (1893-1894). She graduated with honors and described it as “the happiest year of my life”. I did tell you this was a story about a kickass woman, right?

She immediately began to teach. This was the days of one-room schoolhouses, where there was a teacher for an entire town, poorly-paid and exhausting work in (usually) rural communities. Maud taught at Bideford, Belmont, and Lower Bedeque: schools of 20-60 students between 6 and 13 years of age. The sense that I’ve gotten is that Maud Montgomery was a beloved teacher. She also spent part of each day writing fiction and poetry for submissions to the rapidly expanding newspaper and magazine market.

In 1895-1896, she took a break from teaching and studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This was quite the rarity for a woman, especially of her means, to seek higher education at this time; women were expected to teach until they married and then raise families and tend house. Grandmother Lucy Macneill came through for Maud yet again, scraping together her personal funds to set Maud through a year of school, but only a year. While Maud’s male cousin Murray Macneill received familial financial support to continue university, there was no such support for a female.

Starting in 1897, you really regularly see Maud publishing poetry in the Canadian papers [name them]. It was only in 1895 that her first payment for a published poem came: $5 Canadian, and with it, Maud bought a multivolume book set of poetry, people like Tennyson and Byron and Milton.

Maud’s Love Life

Here’s something I didn’t expect when I began researching this topic. I never would’ve guessed that Maud had the varied love life that she did. Apparently in a January 1917 journal entry, she sat down and ranked the men she’d had love affairs with, though she was careful to remind the reader that most of them held no sway over her affections.  

Childhood Loves

Nate Lockhart was one of the boys Maud knew in her tween years. On the cusp of womanhood or some other flowery phrase, Nate developed feelings for Maud, and proposed (at age 14!). Maud didn’t feel the same way, and “retreated”, trying to maintain his friendship. 

In Prince Albert, she had two suitors. John Mustard was actually her school teacher, and he spent much of the year delivering unwanted advances to Maud. He went so far as to regularly call at her stepmother’s house against Maud’s wishes, and stepmother Mary Ann let him in every time! Will Pritchard was Maud’s friend, or the brother of her close friend there, to whom she complained about John Mustard. Both men proposed to her, and she rejected both of them.

Edwin Simpson

In 1897, Maud was working in Bideford when she received a proposal from a distant cousin, Edwin Simpson, who was off studying to be a Baptist minister. She accepted, as she later wrote, out of a desire for “love and protection”. Maud felt her prospects were slim, she felt herself lonely and trapped in her rural teacher’s position, and thought she wanted the family life. Edwin was attractive and her intellectual equal.

However, though Maud was initially attracted to Edwin on a physical level, her opinions shifted, and she began to feel trapped and repelled by him, finding him self-centered and vain. It’s reported that she felt physically nauseated by his presence. 

(George) Herman Leard

The next school year, 1897-1898, Maud moved to Lower Bedeque to teach. Here, she boarded with the Leard family. And here, Maud had a passionate affair with the man she later said she loved the most out of all her suitors: Herman Leard. He was the opposite of Edwin – a salt of the earth farmboy type, a “himbo” in modern parlance. And 23-year-old Maud was smitten.

Her diaries are filled with Maud’s descriptions of their affair, which, like I said, was unexpected. “our lips met in one long passionate pressure – a kiss of fire and rapture such I had never experienced or imagined. Ed’s kisses at the best left me cold as ice – Hermann’s sent flame through every fiber of my being”. 

As the school year rolled into the springtime, Maud took herself to task, resolving in her diary that she must stay faithful to her fiance Edwin Simpson, but it was to no effect. Yes, both Maud and Herman behaved badly this summer. Maud was still secretly engaged to Edwin, and Herman was publicly courting a local girl named Hattie, squiring Hattie about during the day and sharing secret kisses with Maud at night. Maud’s journal entries that year were filled with her feelings for Hermann Leard: “wild, passionate, unreasoning love that dominated my entire being and possessed me like a flame – a love I could neither quell nor control – a love that in its intensity seemed little short of absolute madness.”  

And though it’s perhaps not the topic for this particular podcast, Maud definitely reached multiple bases with Herman Leard, as we might say. Despite the strict Presbytarian upbringing, Maud still did plenty of “preliminary lovemaking” with Hermann when they were alone in the house. Maud’s words, not mine.

It was not to last. 

In an unfortunate set of coincidences in spring of 1898, Maud broke it off with Hearmann. Soon after, he died from the flu. Maud wrote about it in her diary, saying Herman was “all mine in death, as he could never be in life, mine when no other women could ever lie on his heart or kiss his lips.” Around the same time, Maud broke her unhappy engagement with Edwin Simpson, too.

Not only that, but Grandpa Macneill died suddenly. All of this change and chaos happening at the same time! 

With her engagement and affair broken off, Maud chose to move back in with her widowed Grandma Lucy Macneill. Under the guise of taking care of her elderly grandmother (age 74, so certainly elderly for the time), Maud was able to avoid any more male entanglements or shenanigans. She was done with romance, she’d decided. Instead, she took care of Grandma Lucy, who in her own way had cared so much for Maud in her childhood, and ran the post office, still in the farmhouse kitchen. In doing so, Maud won respect from the Cavendish community. Professionally, Maud was able to write full time, getting the gossip from the townspeople coming and going from the post office, which she could then write into her books. And since she was postmistress, she could send items off to publishers without anyone being the wiser, avoiding the negative comments she so dreaded. 

Between 1898 and 1911 when Grandma Lucy Macneill finally passed away, Maud published like mad: stories, articles, poems, and her most famous book, Anne of Green Gables. She also worked for a brief period of time as the only woman at the Halifax-based Daily Echo, but gave this up in order to do battle when her uncle (John Macneill) attempted to evict Grandma Lucy, his mother, from her house where she and Maud lived. 

Ewan Macdonald and Oliver Macneill

During these halcyon days, a new minister moved to town, in 1903, the Reverend Ewan Macdonald (spelled both Ewen and Ewan). Ewan spoke Gaelic and was smitten by Maud conversation, sense of humor, and charm. In return, Maud too found him attractive, kind, and pleasant. There was never a language of passion for Ewan the way Maud had written of Herman Leard, but there was at least fondness.

For the first few years of their acquaintance, they were friendzoned. 

Around 1906, however, Ewan was heading off to study in Scotland, and proposed to Maud before he left. She accepted, one one condition: the engagement had to stay a secret until Grandma Lucy Macneill died. They lived far away from one another for the intervening years, due to Ewan’s remote posting after his studies concluded.

Maud wasn’t entirely faithful during the engagement, perhaps weighing a second possible future with a different man. Following the success of Anne of Green Gables, Maud had a brief and secret fling in fall of 1909 with second cousin Oliver Macneill, recently divorced farmer on the rebound. “I am again playing with fire,” she wrote in her journals. Whether the townsfolk were setting them up or not was unclear (her engagement to Ewan was secret, after all), but it’s clear the two held passion for one another. Oliver proposed multiple times during his short six-week stay on Prince Edward Island, but ultimately gave up. 

Oliver and Maud stayed in touch via letters, with Oliver even sending Maud a book of love poems. Summer of 1910 saw Oliver visiting again, with another set of “frantic scenes” that went nowhere, as Oliver quickly found and married another Cavendish local, one of Maud’s former students. 

Maud later ranked him second after Herman Leard in her journal a decade later, of people to whom she responded with “power of the senses”. (This passage in her journal was apparently directed towards her children and grandchildren, so that they would see her as a woman, that she had not always been “old and gray-haired and hug-me-tighted”.)

Not until her grandmother’s death in 1911 did she marry Ewan, some five years later at age 36.  This was an incredibly smart move on Maud’s part, in my opinion. She knew that Uncle John was going to get the house, at which point she’d need a new place to live. She also wouldn’t have the postmistress job, and would need a better financial situation in order to keep publishing. Thus, the good minister with his solid prospects: a pragmatic choice. 

They married in July of 1911, and moved to Leaskdale, Ontario, where Ewan had obtained a church position. Maud described what she felt upon marriage, sitting there at her wedding feast: “I wanted to be free! I felt like a prisoner—a hopeless prisoner. … But it was too late—and the realization that it was too late fell over me like a black cloud of wretchedness. I sat at that gay bridal feast, in my white veil and orange blossoms, beside the man that I had married—and I was as unhappy as I had ever been in my life.”. A son Chester quickly followed in 1912; son Hugh was stillborn in 1914; and son Stuart was born in 1915. 

Life for Lucy Maud Montgomery was Not Easy

I suppose my section title is a bit on the nose, as life is difficult for everyone, but married life wasn’t what Maud expected, it seems, and things got contentious as the years went on.

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Journals

The first few years of marriage likely went by in a flash, with babies and honeymooning and moving to a new town and starting a new church congregation. (“Those women whom God wanted to destroy He would make into the wives of ministers,” she once said.) 

Not only that, but Maud didn’t stop writing. The Story Girl and its sequel, The Golden Road, came out in 1911 and 1913, respectively. Anne of the Island came out in 1915. A short story collection, Chronicles of Avonlea, came out in 1912, as well as at least fourteen different short stories that had been published individually in newspapers and magazines during the early years of her marriage. 

As I mentioned earlier, Maud journaled throughout her life. Though abridged and edited versions of the journals were published between 1985 and 2004, it’s said that 50% of the material was edited out, including much of the darker side of her private life. These more negative parts were kept under wraps even until very recently, available only to a select few. Lucy Maud Montgomery historian Mary Rubio at the University of Guelph began publishing the unabridged journals starting in 2016, available under the title “The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery”. 7 out of 10 unabridged volumes have been published at the time of this recording. 

Basically, Maud was a minister’s wife, as well as a famous writer at this point. She couldn’t tell people what she actually thought – she could only tell her journals. And what she told her journals was that this was a dark time in her life. Her increased writing pace was at least in part a form of escapism. 

World War I and Lucy Maud Montgomery

With the onset of war in 1914, the relatively settled pace of small Leaskdale life was destroyed. Most of the young men in the community went away to fight, causing terrible social upheaval, both locally and globally.

Maud became outspoken politically, a passionate supporter of the Allied war effort. She published articles and essays appealing for volunteers to join the forces, and began campaigning for women’s suffrage, stating that women on the home front were also crucial to the war effort. (The federal government granted women suffrage between 1918 and 1922.)  

Mary Rubio, one of the pre-eminant Lucy Maud Montgomery scholars and biographers, observed: “Increasingly, the war was all that she thought of and wanted to talk about. Her journals show she was absolutely consumed by it, wracked by it, tortured by it, obsessed by it — even addicted to it.”

Depression and Disease

In topical history, 1918 and 1919 saw the Spanish Flu pandemic, killing 50-100 million people over two years. This was actually the first H1N1 pandemic, though we associate that term with the 2009 “swine flu” outbreak. 500 million people (27% of the world’s population at the time) were infected, and between 3-5% of the world’s population died of the disease – one of the deadliest epidemics in human history. It’s said that poor medical conditions and government misinformation contributed to the high mortality rates. 

Maud contracted Spanish flu, nearly dying of it. She later wrote “I was in bed for ten days. I never felt so sick or weak in my life,”” about the ordeal. Her friends helped care for her through the disease, but not, it’s said, her husband, who had been indifferent to her throughout her illness. 

Maud considered divorce after this, which was very difficult to obtain in Canada before 1967 – only 263 divorces out of 6 M people between 1873 and 1901. Ultimately, she decided that it was her duty to God to make the marriage work.

Maud eventually realized that she could not find intellectual stimulation from her husband. For much of her adult life, she carried on regular correspondence with other men, such as Scottish journalist George Boyd MacMillan and teacher Ephraim Weber. She also enjoyed the company of other men in person, though I’m sure it was proper, spending time with the “dashing” Reverend Edwin Smith, who taught at a different denomination in town.

1919 was the year Maud described as “a hellish year”. Her dearest kindred spirit, Frede McFarlane, who I haven’t had time to talk about, died of the Spanish flu. Frede lived with Maud for many months out of the year, and helped Maud raise her children. Her death was a huge blow to Maud. Other things weren’t great either. Locals were gossiping about Maud, who had the audacity to hire a maid. Maud’s troubles with her publisher, which I’ll get into, came to a head. And church politics in Canada at that time sharted shifting, which would eventually result in the creation of a new denomination from several old ones, known as the United Church of Canada. (Maud was indifferent to the church by this point, writing a very modern sentiment: “the Spirit of God no longer works through the church for humanity.… Today it is working through Science.… The [church] ‘leaders’ are trying to galvanize into a semblance of life something from which life has departed.”) 

And Maud’s husband Ewan didn’t make life easy, though not entirely his own fault. Throughout his life with Maud, Ewan had suffered from mental health problems. During his professional training in Scotland, Ewan had a nervous breakdown, and was forced to leave the program early without obtaining any further degrees. He was only able to find a preaching position in remote communities where they didn’t have much choice. And his mental health was never stable, which Maud didn’t understand the scope of until well after their marriage, due to the limited time they’d spent together. Ewan’s mental health symptoms increased at the beginning of the 1920s, with signs of schizophrenia and clinical depression. 

He lashed out at Maud, telling her that he wished she and the children had never been born, and that she was going to Hell. Ewan saw women as of no intellectual importance and not “worthy of a real tribute”. He refused to do housework or any form of childraising, and increasingly spent his time staring off into space for hours, shouting, or driving recklessly. Indeed, in 1925, he nearly ran over a Methodist minister who was promoting the United Church of Canada; had he not been a minister, this would certainly have been labeled attempted murder.

It was decided that in 1926, a change of pace was in order, possibly as a result of this incident, and the family moved to Norval, a Toronto suburb. Maud continued to be involved in the church events, as well as continuing her popularity as a public speaker and a presence at literary events. She was increasingly famous, her books as popular as ever, and spent time with the literary scene there. Ultimately, she won the nearly decade-long battle with her publisher, as well, which again, I’ll get to shortly. Maud saw Norval as a place with the charm of her beloved Cavendish, and hoped to stay there permanently.

They would not.

Maud’s dear son Chester was causing Maud headaches, with behavioural problems and poor grades, not to mention a secret marriage and the birth of his full-term child after only six months of marriage. Stuart was less of a handful, although he did court girls Maud didn’t approve of.

More than anything, it was Ewan’s mental health causing familial stress. More often than not, he was unable to fulfill his church duties, requiring heavy doses of barbiturates to even stumble across the lawn to give a sermon, according to Maud’s journals. In 1934, he was committed to the Homewood Sanitarium and spent two months there as a result. He became paranoid, catatonic, and physically abusive towards Maud in turns. After arguing with the church elders about his salary in 1935, Ewan resigned from his post and retired in a fit. 

Journey’s End

With both Chester and Stuart studying in Toronto, Maud and Ewan tried to find happiness by moving closer to their sons. Maud purchased a house she called “Journey’s End” there in Toronto in 1935, the only house she ever truly owned. And for a few years, things seemed good again, with slight child-related hiccups here and there. She was named to the Order of the British Empire by King George V, a great honor.

Maud continued to promote Canadian writers through the primarily-female Canadian Authors’ Association, and continued to publish and speak. However, critics, especially male critics, began to disparage Maud as being out of style by this time, examples of Victorian sentiment that wasn’t right for modern Canadian literature. Maud was ousted from the CAA board in 1938 as a result of this tide of sentiment.

It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Combined with the Great Depression, with extended family borrowing money and not returning it, with her sons’ personal and professional failings, and with her unhappy marriage and Ewan’s mental illness, Maud was diagnosed with a heavy clinical depression. She’d suffered from depressive periods throughout her life, but this was a big one.

Medication at the time for both Ewan and Maud was barbiturates and bromides, both strong medications whose damaging secondary effects were not understood at the time. (Read: addiction.) Barbiturates are mostly out of favor today, but you might be aware of names like phenobarbitol and sodium pentothal. Husband and wife relied on ever increasing doses of the drugs, resulting in a downward spiral of anxiety and depression from the late 1930s onward. 

As a result, heer writing, her one constant form of enjoyment, was something she could no longer concentrate on. Being cut off from that fundamental joy and emotional support also cut her off financially, and in her last years Maud would constantly worry about finances. Not only that, but the second World War had begun, causing Maud incredible anxiety. She wrote only one journal entry in 1941, including the line “Such suffering and wretchedness.” In a letter to a friend in late December of 1941, she wrote of her family struggles: son Chester’s wife left him, husband Ewan’s “attacks” which had “broken me at last”, and the fear that son Stuart would be conscribed to war, leaving Maud with “nothing to live for”.  A month before her death, Maud wrote in a letter to her friend that she “had doubts that she would still be there in a week”.

On her last afternoon in April of 1942, Maud packaged up her last manuscript and mailed it to her publisher, went to her bed, and died, a heartbreaking end to an often difficult life.

Today’s scholars are divided on the manner of Maud’s death (whether the presumed drug overdose was intentional or accidental), which has only come to public discussion since 2008. The family, as described by granddaughter Kate Macdonald Butler, Stuart’s daughter, came forward on the 100th anniversary of Anne of Green Gables’ publication with a new piece of information, previously kept secret within the family. The intent was to bring the information to light in order to help lift some of the stigma surrounding mental illness. A piece of paper was dated two days prior to her death, discovered on her nightstand by her son Stuart, and is considered by many to be a suicide note, kept private for almost a century. 

In this last note, Maud wrote: “I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare to think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best in spite of many mistakes.” 

Anne of Green Gables

Let us pause here, then, and return to consider the point of all of this, that book, Anne of Green Gables, which inspired so many. 

If you’re at all familiar with English-language literature, then you’ve at least heard of the Anne of Green Gables book series, about the life of a plucky red-head named Anne Shirley. You might also have a sense for how generally beloved this book and series is. It will not come as a surprise to you the reams of paper, real and digital, that have been covered with text analyzing these seminal novels.

I’m about to say something controversial, then. I’ve never read Anne of Green Gables. I’ve watched literally only five minutes of any show or film adaptation of Anne prior to the start of my research for this episode. (The five minutes of televised Anne content I watched prior to this were when Netflix suggested “Anne with an E”. I found it inoffensive – simply not to my taste in TV. If I recall correctly, at the time, I moved on to the next episode in my Star Trek first-time watch, TNG’s “Darmok”. It was a great night of TV.) As of the start of this episode’s research, I literally had no personal opinion about Anne of Green Gables.

I can sense the letters coming in already. Don’t stop listening, don’t stop reading! 

You might think that this background makes me ill-suited for this topic, but what my theory presupposes is … maybe it makes me the perfect person?

We shall see.

Writing Anne of Green Gables

As mentioned in passing earlier, Maud began an intense period of writing around 1901, after she moved back to Cavendish to care for widowed Grandma Lucy when none of Lucy’s children would care for their mother. Short stories, articles, poems, and books – all went out in secret through Maud’s position at the post office, thus avoiding the negative comments from the townsfolk, who disapproved of such an “old” unmarried woman, especially a (gasp) writer. “The dollars have silenced them,” she wrote in 1905 of her judgy neighbors, “but I have not forgotten their sneers. My own perseverance has won the fight for me in the face of all discouragements.”

It is naive to think that a single source could be pointed at, to say “ah, here it is, the source of inspiration for Anne of Green Gables”. Maud was an excellent writer, taking bits and pieces from her own tribulations, from family stories, from news reports, and so on. Still, we’re all human. Like many writers, Maud kept a notebook with story ideas – words and phrases, interesting articles or clippings, pictures, etc. In her own words: “In the spring of 1904 I was looking over this notebook in search of some idea for a short serial I wanted to write for a certain Sunday School paper. I found a faded entry, written many years before: ‘Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent to them.’ I thought this would do.”

Indeed, this probably sounds familiar to an Anne fan, as it is the basic premise of the story. The concept was said to be a fairly popular one at the time, called “formula Ann” stories, since one would know the formula of the story right off. (The same holds true with many stories today – if you’re into transformative fanworks and fanfiction, you will immediately know what happens in a story I describe as a “coffee shop AU”.) Maud distinguished her character from others by calling her “Anne with an e”. Ah, there it is! (I will say that I was only able to find references to “formula Ann” that were primarily about Maud and Anne of Green Gables, so take that as you will.)

The story idea was not from a newspaper clipping, as some have claimed, but from a family happening, a routine adoption notable for the “mistake” in requested gender. In 1892, one of Maud’s local extended family members, Pierce Macneill, requested an orphan boy to help on the farm. A three-year-old girl was sent by mistake, and was summarily adopted into the Macneill clan anyways. Maud knew her, this distant cousin: Ellen picked up the family’s mail at Maud’s post office, Maud often borrowed a buggy from the family’s house, and Maud may have even taught Ellen at the local school on occasion. However, Maud was frustrated by suggestions during her life that Ellen had played even the slightest role in sparking the character or story of Anne. Maud was later quite judgemental about her cousin, saying “there is no resemblance of any kind between Anne and Ellen Macneill who is one of the most hopelessly commonplace and uninteresting girls imaginable”.

Maud began as she always did (“Write a book. You have the central idea. All you need do is to spread it out over enough chapters to amount to a book.“). She wrote in the evenings after her day’s work was done, up at the window desk in her little gable room. She wrote and wrote, and began to know that the story she was telling was too big for a short story serial in a Sunday School paper. She wrote it up into a full-fledged book between spring 1904 and October of 1905.

I’ll let Maud herself tell the story of the publication, quoted from her public domain 1917 autobiography, The Alpine Path.

Well, my book was finally written. The next thing was to find a publisher. I typewrote it myself, on my old secondhand typewriter that never made the capitals plain and wouldn’t print “w” at all, and I sent it to a new American firm that had recently come to the front with several “best sellers.” I thought I might stand a better chance with a new firm than with an old established one that had already a preferred list of writers. But the new firm very promptly sent it back. Next I sent it to one of the “old, established firms,” and the old established firm sent it back. Then I sent it, in turn, to three “Betwixt-and-between firms”, and they all sent it back. Four of them returned it with a cold, printed note of rejection; one of them “damned with faint praise.” They wrote that “Our readers report that they find some merit in your story, but not enough to warrant its acceptance.”

That finished me. I put Anne away in an old hat-box in the clothes room, resolving that some day when I had time I would take her and reduce her to the original seven chapters of her first incarnation. In that case I was tolerably sure of getting thirty-five dollars for her at least, and perhaps even forty.

The manuscript lay in the hatbox until I came across it one winter day while rummaging. I began turning over the leaves, reading a bit here and there. It didn’t seem so very bad. “I’ll try once more,” I thought. The result was that a couple of months later an entry appeared in my journal to the effect that my book had been accepted. After some natural jubilation I wrote: “The book may or may not succeed. I wrote it for love, not money, but very often such books are the most successful, just as everything in the world that is born of true love has life in it, as nothing constructed for mercenary ends can ever have.”

Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career, 1917

On June 20th, 1908, Maud wrote the following in her journal: 

To-day has been, as Anne herself would say, ‘an epoch in my life.’ My book came to-day, ‘spleet-new’ from the publishers. I candidly confess that it was to me a proud and wonderful and thrilling moment. There, in my hand, lay the material realization of all the dreams and hopes and ambitions and struggles of my whole conscious existence – my first book. Not a great book, but mine, mine, mine, something which I had created.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career, 1917

Inside Anne of Green Gables

Anne was an orphan who was mistakenly sent to live with Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, in the fictional town of Avonlea, on Prince Edward Island. Beyond that, the novel is sort of plot-light, mostly a series of vignettes showing Anne settling in to her new home. Clearly we can see influence in the basic structure from Maud’s own life, straight away: Marilla and Matthew draw from the grandparents Macneill, Avonlea is heavily based off Cavendish, and so forth. 

Anne’s trials were drawn from Maud’s own. Imaginary friend Katie Maurice, who existed solely in the reflection “in the fairy room behind the bookcase”, was dropped full cloth into the book. Anne’s love of nature was heavily influenced by Maud’s own childhood wandering through Cavendish. The rough structure of Anne’s life is Maud’s own: getting a teaching license at age 16 in one year instead of two, pursuing a bachelor’s degree at a fictionalized version of Dalhousie University, the sudden death of paternal figure Matthew requiring Anne to return to Avonlea and stay with the aging Marilla…the bones are all Maud’s. 

Other influences came from magazines of the time, such as the popular Godey’s Lady’s Book. Anne’s image was drawn from a 1903 photograph Maud had clipped from New York’s Metropolitan Magazine, pasted on the wall of Maud’s bedroom to remind her not of Anne’s physical looks, but of Anne’s “youthful idealism and spirituality”. (The image is gorgeous, showing a radiant young woman with a floral headband, gazing upwards innocently into dramatic, gorgeous lighting. Evelyn Nesbit was a Gibson girl, a “glittering girl model of Gotham” in the first years of the 20th century. Before Anne of Green Gables was published, though, Evelyn became the star witness of the first “Trial of the Century”, a sensational case where her millionaire husband shot and killed her rapist and lover, architect and socialite Stanford White. Absolutely beyond the scope of this podcast, but I’ll include links to some relevant reading and listening on the topic in the shownotes for the interested.)

It would not be a discussion of Anne if I don’t mention her looks, because what I’ve learned is that the character of Anne is obsessed with them, and much of modern Anne culture too. She despises her appearance, her thin frame, her pale skin with freckles, and of course, the iconic red hair. Originally her hair was brighter shades of red, later dulling to descriptions of Titian red, like later fictional characters Nancy Drew and Dana Scully. (And as I’ll get to shortly, in Japan, the series is known as Red-haired Anne. Iconic!) This hit the zeitgeist of the time it was published – red hair was all the rage that year.

Reception of Anne of Green Gables

Having no personal experience with Anne (where was I the day that the Anne books were read?) I reached out to some friends to get a sense of their feelings towards the Anne books in general. To no one’s surprise, reactions were almost universally positive. My friends expounded with much praise in particular for the themes of female friendship found in the books, for the sense of optimism and positivity that Anne brought to her challenging situations. Indeed, gallons of real and digital ink have been spilled about the beauty of the relationships in Maud’s books, which I cannot distill here without cheapening them.

It’s hard to collapse what makes the book so beloved into any brief space. The book still retains its popularity and eternal nature, even now, 112 years after its original publication. Though the book is firmly ensconced in the time period in which it was published, it speaks to readers on an intimate, emotional level, with the trappings of a fairytale. The sense in Anne was that even if things are bad now, they will get better. 

I love too this comment that I found: Anne books are feminist texts, even if they’re outside of the standard “empowering” literary tropes, because “they insist that the lived experience of women matters, across class and georgraphy and age”.

Anne of Green Gables was an instant success in 1908. It sold over 19,000 copies in its first five months, and was reprinted ten times in its first year. Not only were Canadians interested in the book. It had a broad reach, and notable people like Mark Twain himself liked the book. Twain is quoted as saying that Anne Shirley was “the dearest, most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice.” A typical newspaper review at the time called Anne of Green Gables a “sweetly simple tale of childish joys and sorrows of a diminutive red-haired girl” and declared it “the literary hit of the season with the American public.” The Toronto Globe reviewed the book at the time with another typical review, saying “Anne of Green Gables is worth a thousand of the problem stories with which the bookshelves are crowded today.”

Maud Battles Her Dishonest Publisher

Earlier, I talked about how the mid to late 1910s were a tough time for Maud. Much of this was related to her battles with her publisher at the time, L. C. Page & Company. I read an excellent essay entitled “The Robber Baron of Canadian Literature”, and I think that’s an apt description for Lewis Page. 

Page was not a good guy, we’ll start there. He was ruthless, hacking apart author’s texts without shame, taking massive shares of the profits without distributing to authors their dues, and other dishonest publishing acts. Page took and took and took, with an attitude of “so sue me”, knowing that then as now, lawsuits were a long and costly business out of the reach of many poor writers.

Maud was somewhat desperate by the time she shopped her book to L. C. Page. Based on her journals, she had some indication when she met with Page that he was a shady guy. But she signed the contracts without any apparent negotiation within three weeks, in May of 1907. The contracts were wild, with their requirements for sequels and their low royalties (10% on the wholesale price “over and above the first thousand”) and the five-year binding clause. 

Maud did get a small concession, for the books to be published under the gender-neutral “L. M. Montgomery” as opposed to Page’s preferred “Lucy Maud Montgomery”. She did not get her way with the illustrations, which she apparently disliked for how they suggested an ending that the book had only hinted at. 

Maud went to work on the contracted Anne sequels, though she was already falling into a love-hate relationship with her most famous character. 

By July of 1915, things were coming to a head. Page had threatened to stop promoting her books unless she signed another five year contract, which she did, begrudgingly. He published an unsanctioned book of “castoffs” called Further Chronicles of Avonlea. He gambled away the profits her books had made, his personal life was full of sexual immorality, and the payment of royalties based on wholesale pricing rather than retail pricing made the process more opaque, and therefore made it nearly impossible to track how much Maud should’ve been making. It turned out she’d been getting 7 cents per dollar on each book, instead of 19 cents per dollar on each book. Beginning in 1917, she switched publishers and sued Page. He tried to get her back by selling the rights to one of the sequels, Anne’s House of Dreams, but Maud stood firm. Those rights didn’t belong to him to sell, and he’d withheld the royalties she was actually due. She was going to get her own. 

“There is something in me that will not remain inactive under injustice and trickery”. She went on to say that Page and his company had “traded for years on the average woman’s fear of litigation.” Finishing with a bang, she said “very few authors can afford to go to law with them, especially when they can’t expect to get money out of the result. They have done the most outrageous things to poor authors who can’t afford to seek redress.””

It took almost a decade to get that redress, and five different lawsuits. Page fought Maud at every turn, trying to take the case all the way to the US Supreme Court (they were not interested). Maud stopped writing about Anne in her journals, saying that although she’d made money, “it’s a pity it doesn’t buy happiness”. 

Page, meanwhile, had sold the film right to the Anne books back in 1908. Maud had no say in either the 1919 or 1934 film versions of Anne of Green Gables, and the money made from them went to Page and not to “Mr. Montgomery”, as one foolish American journalist reviewing at the time said. Maud was furious over the 191 film in paritcular, saying “I think if I hadn’t already known it was from my book, that I would never have recognized it.” She went on to slam the New England setting, saying “A skunk and an American flag were introduced – both equally unknown in PE Island. I could have shrieked with rage over the latter. Such crass, blatant Yankeeism!”

The Massachusetts courts ruled in Maud’s favor in 1925, finding that she had been cheated out of money she’d been owed. Page used every trick in the book to continue to try and avoid his fate, even saying that Maud’s lawsuit had caused his brother’s 1927 heart attack and harassing Maud via constant negative telegram. (Page and his brother were not close.) Finally, however, he had no choice, and in 1928, finally, Maud received the check for $15,000, the sum the courts decided was owed to her. This ended up being only about $4,000 after paying her lawyers, and Maud sensibly invested the money in the stock market. However, of course, the stock market crashed the next year, and Maud lost much of her recovered savings.

Ironically, of course, today the rights to Anne are incredibly profitable, held jointly by Maud’s heirs and Prince Edward Island through a licensing corporation. 

It’s very much beyond the scope of the podcast, but Anne of Green Gables has become a licensing and merchandising magnet. There were 1952 and 1972 BBC adaptations, a 1956 and 1958 CBC TV musical. The premiere in 1965 of “Anne of Green Gables: The Musical” in Charlottetown marked the beginning of the longest-running annual musical theater production, per Guinness book of world records. Kevin Sullivan’s 1985 CBC miniseries is perhaps the best-known adaptation, winning an Emmy amongst many other awards. Sullivan did three more sequels in 1986, 200, and 2008. There have been PBS versions and the most recent CBC adaption, distributed by Netflix, Anne with an E. Anne is big money, and a popular draw for audiences of all ages in all decades.

Anne in Japan

Nowhere is Anne’s popularity more striking than, of all places, Japan, and the story of how Anne of Green Gables became popular there is well worth hearing.

Loretta Leonard Shaw

We begin by considering Loretta Leonard Shaw, a contemporary of Maud’s, and a fellow Canadian, though the two never knew one another personally. Loretta was a decorated, highly-educated student from St. John, with a BA in English, French, and German, and a teaching certificate with the highest possible marks. However, it was missionary work and not local students that she was most passionate about. 

Loretta was accepted for missionary service in Japan, and in less than a year, Loretta learned Japanese and moved to Osaka. She taught young girls there for a number of years, and although education of girls was not considered important in society at that time, enrollment at her schools increased tenfold over the course of her teaching tenure, partially due to her skills and curriculum. Loretta sensibly commented that it was “unwise and unmoral” for women and girls to be given lower educational standards based on outdated cultural concepts of gender inferiority.

Throughout her life, Loretta was instrumental in representing the two cultures to one another as much as she could, bringing items and ideas from Japan to Canada and likewise from Canada to Japan. In 1932, Loretta became the head of the women’s and children’s literature department at the Christian Literature Society of Japan, where she brought translations of “wholesome” Western literature to Japan. 

Here is where a friendship made an incredible difference larger than they’d ever have guessed. In the late 1930s, just before Loretta’s health-related furlough back to Canada, she gave a copy of a favorite book to a friend of hers, in memory of their friendship. This was Anne of Green Gables: hardcover, with a cream cover, green-shaded portrait of a beautiful young girl on the front cover.

Hanako Muraoka

This friend, of course, was named Hanako Muraoka. She was born from a small, impoverished farming town, and with luck, attended the prestigious school in Japan founded by the Women’s Missionary Society of the Methodist Church of Canada, known as Toyo Eiwa. There, she studied Japanese subjects in the morning and English (Canadian) subjects in the afternoon. This foundation gave her the skills and interest to begin translation as a career and passion, publishing a collection of translated short stories soon after her formal education was completed. This was not only a difficult task, but it was a challenge for a time when women were not encouraged to have independence or careers.

Her life became difficult after World War I; her husband’s publishing company was destroyed in an earthquake, and her son died suddenly at a young age. Her translations were her solace and coping strategy, starting with Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper” in 1927.  

Loretta and Hanako met in the early 1930s, when they were both working as editors at the Christian Literature Society of Japan. There, they worked on a magazine “Children of Light”. Loretta Leonard Shaw published a 1936 article entitled “Utopia” in this magazine, in both English and Japanese, discussing how she and her fellow editors saw themselves as ambassadors for their respective cultures, and that the best and fastest way to do this was “by introducing the best books of each nation to the other”. 

In 1936 (some sources say 1939), Loretta left Japan. Before she did, she gave Hanako Muraoka a copy of Anne of Green Gables, with the hopes that she would translate it to Japanese. Hanako is said to have been “enchanted” by it, and began translating it shortly thereafter in her leisure time. The book resonated with Hanako’s early childhood – the pastoral natural setting, the love of poetry, words, and literature.

Hanako used her language skills in other ways, as well. Beginning in 1932, she presented a daily five minute news program plainly explaining the news to children over the radio. She was incredibly popular, and was known as “Aunty Radio”. She also participated in simultaneous translating, for instance translating speeches by FDR live on air. With the start of the war approaching as the decade came to a close, however, English-language content began to be seen seen ever more as the enemy. Hanako quit her job at the radio, not wanting to read the hostile war-centered news to children, as well as not wanting to speak badly of the Canadians, many of whom she considered friends.

And at the same time, Hanako had to hide her translation efforts of Anne of Green Gables. The world was at war, and Canada was now the enemy of Japan. English was the language of the enemy, and it could get you arrested. But Hanako carried on, secretly translating Anne of Green Gables from English to Japanese as the war went on. Her translations were so precious to her that she reportedly took them with her into the air raid shelters.

Post-war, people could once again hope for Utopia. It took until around 1950 for the publishing houses to recover from the physical damages of the war, and Hanako Muraoka published her Japanese translation of Anne of Green Gables in 1952 as “Akage-no-An” or “Red-Haired Anne”. The book, unsurprisingly, became a bestseller. Hanako published the subsequent Anne translations between 1954 and 1959. By the 1970s, her translations were added to the curriculum in Japanese schools.

Hanako intended to visit Prince Edward Island in 1968. Unfortunately, this never happened. She passed away after a sudden stroke in October of 1968, never having visited the place, embodying the spirit of Canada, that had occupied so much of her time throughout her life. In the end, said her granddaughter in an interview with a Japanese news source, “it may have been for the best that the island she knew was the perfect one she had created with her translation”

Hanako Muraoka is today closely twined with the story of Anne coming to Japan, and has become a figure of some legend and renown, it seems, based on the articles I read. Her granddaughter, Eri Muraoka, published a biography about Hanako entitled “Anne’s Cradle: The Life of Muraoka Hanako”. A dramatized version of the biography was made into a serialized TV drama in 2014, and was a ratings success, keeping the love alive for both Anne and those who had a hand in her development.

Akage-no-An

Red-Haired Anne, as can be evidenced then by this tale, was and still is an incredibly popular figure in Japan. Anne of Green Gables is sort of an expected childhood book here from the US where I write – a passing, common reference, a generic childhood book here that’s perhaps seen as a little out of date. Did you read Anne of Green Gables or Little House on the Prairie or Call of the Wild as a kid? Did you read Hatchet or Brighty of the Grand Canyon or Where the Red Fern Grows? Etc. But none hold the place in the US, in my opinion, that Anne appears to hold elsewhere, in both Canada and Japan. In Canada, Anne is sort of a national icon, up there with maple syrup in terms of souvenir popularity. But it’s more unexpected that Anne would be so incredibly popular in Japan. (If I type “why is anne of green gables” and let Google autocomplete that phrase, the top search terms are “why is anne of green gables an orphan”, “why is anne of green gables an orphan”, and “why is anne of green gables popular in japan”.)

The popularity started of course with Hanako Muraoka’s translations in the 1950s. It was sort of a backlash against the wartime strictures against Western language and literature. 

But why was Anne popular? From what I’ve read, it is as simple and complicated as this: it was a good book with a good message. The message of Anne resonates very strongly with the messages of Japanese culture: basic morality of life and examination of life’s questions in a simpler setting that is so attractive. Anne is about finding happiness, and presenting lessons applicable to all in a straightforward setting. Not only that, but Anne’s world is very kawaii – cute. 

From a 1998 essay by Judy Stoffman, too, we have this interpretation of why the Anne books took off in 1952: “The book’s success was due in part to there being almost no realistic Japanese children’s literature, particularly for girls. A female in traditional children’s stories usually turns out to be a ghost or a malevolent spirit.” Anne also fits with the Japanese cultural lessons of filial devotion, and parallels the tale of Momo-taro, about a boy raised by an elderly couple. And at the time, the first wave of Japanese readers were quite poor after the war, so they could feel at one with Anne when she described puffed sleeve dresses and layer cakes. 

In today’s Japan, Anne is used by some teachers as a way of discussing gender roles, long considered a taboo topic. Nowadays, Anne is seen as a “safe bet” by publishers, and has been translated by multiple translators in Japan. Early translations have been criticized for their omissions both large and small. Modern translations have been set as “complete” translations, including notes and explanations on the translated text, literary allusions, and so forth.

Not only is Anne popular in translated books, but in ancillary works, children’s books, and more. A musical version has been in operation since 1980. There have been travelling museum exhibits.

Perhaps the most famous and most innately Japanese are the anime. The first of the two is the most famous – 1979 series, 50 episodes, called Akage no An. The people involved are noteworthy in the right circles: directed by Isao Takahata, and scene setting/layout/animation from Hayao Miyazaki. These two names are notable across the globe for cofounding the incredibly popular Studio Ghibli, known for critically acclaimed works like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro. Like their other works, Akage no An is full of characteristic charm and whim. You can watch all 50 episodes for free, legally available on YouTube, right now. A prequel, Konnichiwa Anne, came out in 2009. The anime increased Anne fever to a new high, and helped continue the waves of Anne obsession in Japan for decades to come. 

Canadian World (カナディアンワールド)

Anne is so popular in Japan, then, we can finally hit the theme park for the day. Yes, there is an Anne of Green Gables theme park in Japan. 

Now, of course Green Gables is a huge tourist destination on Prince Edward Island in Canada, as it has been for most of the last century. Anne is spread throughout the bones of Prince Edward Island. You can visit Green Gables, the real Macneill home that inspired Anne’s Green Gables. You can see the foundations of the original Cavendish home, you can walk down Anne’s Lovers’ Lane, you can visit the birthplace of Maud, and so forth.

About a half hour away in the big city of Charlottetown, you can find the Anne of Green Gables musical, lauded for being Canada’s longest running musical, and the Guiness world record holder for “longest running annual musical theatre production in the world”. Queen Elizabeth herself has seen the show during the 1964 season. 

But just as the Canadians are not the only nation to have a deep fascination with Anne, so too it is that another country also devotes some tourism resources to Anne. This, of course, is Japan. Ashibetsu, Hokkaido, the sister city to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, since 1993. Home to Canadian World, the Anne of Green Gables replica park.

Canadian World (1990-1997)

In 1984, the city of Ashibetsu in Hokkaido, Japan was looking to revitalize. Ashibetsu, or “village where the stars fall”, had previously been a prosperous coal-mining town. However, the closure of most of the town’s coal mines throughout the 1960s led to a population decrease, as people moved elsewhere to find new jobs. 

With population moving out, Ashibetsu sought a new way to bring people to the town in either the short or long term. It was decided that tourism would be the way, with a theme of stars, celestial objects, and so on, and a “restful village concept”. By late 1987, a proposal had been floated to create an Akage no An themed park, including a massive indoor water park, to be located in the valley on the site of one former coal mine. Of course, costs being what they are, the next year saw the water park proposal withdrawn, and a new proposal for Canadian World as it stands today was put out in its place.

Why Anne? Reportedly once of the officers who was in charge of development had visited PEI and seen the climate similarities between it and Ashibetsu. “The fact that he was a fan of this led to this proposal,” goes the quote.

The project is reported in the Japanese-language Wikipedia entry to be on the order of between $37-48 M USD, including mining site preparation, an Anne of Green Gables themed park, and a giant lavender field.  

Lavender planting was begun in June of 1989, and Canadian World officially opened in July of 1990. The park was “Japan’s largest theme park with a Canadian theme”, logical considering I couldn’t find any other Canadian-themed parks out there. It was less of an amusement park and more of a leisure park or a historical recreation park. Prince Edward Island was faithfully reproduced there in Ashibetsu: Green Gables, Mrs. Lind’s House, the clock tower, and so forth. An artificial lake was dug, Anne’s Lake of Shining Waters, and spruce trees were planted to make the Ghost Forest and Lovers Lane. Next to the lake, a central plaza and curving walkway, lined with dozens of Canadian-style buildings in a row, looking out across the water and the beautiful landscape. A train station on either end of the park, a field of lavender, and of course, the Green Gable house, set back on its own among a beautiful garden. 

Words don’t do the scope of the park justice. The place is absolutely huge: 450,000 m2. The main central plaza is located in the bowl of the old mine pit, and then other buildings scattered throughout the grounds. Getting down to the central plaza is easy – walk down a long downhill path. Getting back up – harder. Each little house looks like anything you’d find in Canada: clapsboards painted white and cream and blue, brightly colored shutters, pointy roofs, porches suitable for rocking chairs. Inside most are little shops and activities – the quiltmaker’s shop, the woodcarver’s shop, the chapel, the kids’ playground area. Different zones are present: Kensington Zone, Colts Zone, Craft Village Zone, Avonlea, Terrace du franc zone, Bright River Zone. This is a link to Hokkaidofan.com where there are many photos. https://hokkaidofan.com/canadian-world/

A CD was released by EMI Music Japan as the official park soundtrack, and a picture book for children featuring photos of the park was also produced. Crosspromotions occurred with local transportation systems to encourage visitors. And of course, as noted earlier, Charlottetown PEI and Ashibetsu became sister cities to mutually encourage tourism.

However, Canadian World didn’t take off. Despite the continued success of Anne as a Japanese cultural icon, and the new 1990s translations of Anne of Green Gables and related works, Canadian World floundering, unable to be tied into the success of the brand.

The park carried on. 1991 saw the highest number of yearly visitors: about 270,000, well below the target estimate of 400,000. New features were added to the park: a large restaurant called “Heartland” in 1991, a miniature SL (steam locomotive – choo choo, it’s The Abandoned Train!) called “Canadian Rocky” in 1992, painted green and gold, with a 2-4-4 wheel configuration. There was also a museum for antique music boxes in 1995, and so forth. Guests could rent rowboats or ride horses from the Canadian Riding Club. 

Despite the beauty of the natural landscape and the faithfully reproduced Canadian-style buildings, it seems there was some dissatisfaction about how well Canadian World reproduced Prince Edward Island. The location of the park meant that when winter came, it was difficult to get to and not necessarily a pleasant experience to visit (snow!) so tourism numbers in the winter seasons were low. The park is set on an incredibly hilly patch of land, so it’s actually a little difficult to get around the park, and elderly people were discouraged from visiting. There was very little for small children to do, though a small playground with a slide was added at one point. Outside food was not allowed to be brought in, making repeat guests unlikely.

And internally, the Japanese Wikipedia says that there was poor management and various internal management conflicts. The translation on the Wiki page isn’t great, but it seems that the way the assets and souveniers and goods were managed was done so poorly, which contributed to high costs.

Plans were made to expand Canadian World to better position it as a year-round business. The most major of these was Canadian Sports World, a project planned for 1994, to feature a ski resort, hotel, and golf course on site. Unfortunately, the economy struck. As I talked about in my Takakonuma Greenland episode, the economic bubble collapse in Japan in the late 90s caused problems across the country, especially for the many theme parks which had popped up. Here in Ashibetsu, it meant that there would be no more plans for Canadian Sports World. 

At Canadian World, employees were laid off, but the financial problems snowballed, and it seems from the translation I was reading that the park went bankrupt, shuttering in fall of 1997. The location was poor, the economy was poor, and there were other (some might say “better”) theme parks out there, competing for visitor attention. 

Ashibetsu Municipal Canadian World Park (1999-2019)

With the park closed, the community met to figure out what to do. Through a series of public meetings and financing agreements, the park became a public, free, municipal park, and reopened in July 1999. 

While there had originally been 34 buildings or facilities, not all were reopened. Anne’s Green Gables reopened as a museum, with photos of Maud, vintage Anne books, and a complete setup from Anne’s Green Gables, just like back in PEI. and the post office and Mrs. Lind’s house also reopened, managed by the city. Ten other buildings were occupied by separate tenants. 

Unfortunately, this was not enough. Maintenance costs on the site were huge, amounting to almost $1M USD annually. And attendance was low – 50,000 people in 1999, 70,000 people in 2001, and then nothing but decreases – 30,000 in 2012. 

By 2007, the city had to renegotiate the bankruptcy agreement to reconfigure the debts owed on the Canadian World site. The mediation allowed the reduction of the operating costs for the park, but this “free” public park was still costing the city a ton of money. 

Canadian World served as a background for several productions, including several movies. 

2013 saw a number of closures and vacancies. The tenant at the Kensington Station building vacated. The SL miniature steam train was noted as “gone” as of 2011 (though I can still see train cars on the tracks in 2019 videos, the green and gold engie is long gone). Several of the buildings by the north entrance of the park were completely closed due to structural instability, being simply unsafe to occupy or use. Public transportation to the park was slowly reduced, requiring visitors to come by private car or taxi. And of course, Canadian World was located where a coal mine had originally been, and is located in the mountains, not near a city. Distance was a factor.

2014 saw the end of a 20-year “Candle Art” event, held annually each August. No more would there be displays of flashlights, candles, laser beams, and fireworks – there simply weren’t enough funds or enough workers. The 2014 release of the Hanako and Anne anime did start to boost tourism, slightly, and Universal Music rereleased the omnibus Anne CD. 

However, it still was not drawing in the crowds. Local committees began to meet to discuss the future for the park. Here, the translation from the Japanese Wiki again makes complete understanding a bit unclear, but it seems as though the city decided to stop having the park be a municipal park. The debts continued to pile up, and something on the order of $19 M USD was estimated to be needed in order to renovate the aging facilities, which had apparently weathered poorly. Most of the tenants had pulled out, leaving only the city-run buildings.

An October 2019 newspaper article quotes and official who blames the theming, saying “the content did not match the climate and temperament of Ashibetsu”. Take that as you will. 

Canadian World (2019 – ?)

A new organization was set up called the “Canadian World Promotion Association” to take over operation of Canadian World, beginning from its 2019 winter closure. This group is an organization of volunteers, comprised of the tenants occupying the park as well as private sector members. The group requested to rent the facilities for free, with 2020 operation only on weekends and holidays (and weekdays during the school summer vacation).

The group also immediately began crowdfunding opportunities online, on readyfor.jp, a crowdfunding platform similar to Kickstarter. A March 4th newspaper article highlights the project and their crowdfunding efforts to date, bringing additional attention to the cause. This announcement is particularly interesting, detailing some of the buildings and the repairs needed for each of them. Walls are falling down, some doors don’t close, and the general air is one of disarray.

Fundraising has been quite successful, and the group has raised enough money to operate the park in 2020 and to begin basic repairs on the buildings, starting with Anne’s Green Gables house. The hope, based on the text in the crowdfunding updates, is that the operation will be self-funding from this point on through membership dues and fundraising activities elsewhere. Canadian World Promotion Association is quite transparent on their crowdfunding page about the costs involved with the park – reportedly the electric bill is the largest part of the operation, about 1 M yen or just under $10,000 USD for the half year when the park is open.

“Abandoned” Canadian World

Based on this history, you can see that Canadian World has never really been “abandoned” in its history, although some might consider the non-operational year in 1998 to be so. Rather, I think why Canadian World is often considered abandoned is because of its limited operational time period. During its most recent operation as a municipal park, Canadian World operated from the ended of April to the end of October, with limited hours (10 am to 5 pm). Most of the shops and tenants only operated on weekends, leaving the appearance of an abandoned site. Too, maintenance has been an ongoing struggle, and many of the buildings and park features were poorly maintained, giving the appearance of being much older than their actual years. 

Today, Canadian World is unfortunately only popular in the Western world through abandoned and urbex tourism videos. People like “Exploring with Josh” create some incredibly cinematic videos of places like this, but then they use clickbaity titles like “Fake Town of Horrors – What Happened Here?” Obviously that title has no actual bearing on anything related to Anne of Green Gables or Canadian World. Josh’s video is respectful enough, but the title. I don’t like the title.

The park looks abandoned though, in every video I’ve ever seen of the place. The park is so spread out that even if there were many visitors, it would be hard to feel crowded. (A few videos exist online from the mid-90s, and even then, the park wasn’t crowded, though it was more populous than it is today.) The maintenance now is a huge issue – fences at an angle, getting close to falling in the lake. Lampposts tilting over, held up by ropes instead of being repaired properly. Illegible signs, faded and weatherworn. A long-abandoned chain swing, missing its swings, sits in the middle of the central plaza, rusting.

It’s exceedingly surreal to view the footage available of Canadian World. Operational, yet empty, it’s like being a part of a dream. One has the entire park to themselves, it seems like, this huge open-air vista of Western-style buildings right there in Japan. 

Only a character so powerful as Anne of Green Gables, I have to think, would be able to keep pulling this off, dragging along this failing theme park and stil enticing tens of thousands of people to visit each year. What a legendary character. 

Conclusions

Although I began researching this episode solely to talk about the theme park, I have to say that I’m grateful to have learned about Maud and Anne. 

The introduction of Anne of Green Gables to Japan, it’s safe to say, had an outstanding effect on Japanese culture for such a small children’s book. The female Canadian missionaries like Loretta Leonard Shaw, who taught students like Hanako Muraoka, the first Anne translator, helped educate a generation of Japanese girls with increasingly modern ideals. Maud’s writing changed and developed with the times she lived in, a time of rapid growth in technology, wars, the roles of women, and so on. Yet she always knew that Anne would be her ultimate, enduring legacy: hopeful but fierce, in the face of all strife and struggle. Maud built for Anne a found family, sculpted out of her own hopes from the ashes of the nuclear family she herself never had, and this is a theme many still relate to today. 

Beyond her characters and her prose, Maud’s mental health struggles and addiction problems are incredibly resonant today, the better part of a century later. The opioid crisis is a major societal issue today, though at least it’s more socially acceptable to discuss, and doesn’t have to be confined to private journal entries. 

None of this was what I expected to find when I sat down to learn about this strange, not-really-abandoned theme park in Ashibetsu, Hokkaido, Japan. I wasn’t expecting to become fascinated by this strong, brave, brilliant woman, a person who has a gift for words reaching across the decades to talk with me. What a refreshing research topic, focusing on the lived experience of women. Not only that, but it was also refreshing to hear so much about the women Maud knew and the women who have since written about Maud. While I may not yet have the personal affection for the character Anne that so many do, I most certainly now have a deep admiration and respect for her creator, Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Maud’s first piece of writing she ever sought feedback on was a poem, which she considered her masterpiece at the age of 12. I thought it was beautiful, and a fitting end to today’s story.

“”When the evening sun is setting
Quietly in the west,
In a halo of rainbow glory,
  I sit me down to rest.
I forget the present and future,
  I live over the past once more,
As I see before me crowding
  The beautiful days of yore.””

Outro

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of The Abandoned Carousel, where I talked about Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, and Canadian World, in Hokkaido, Japan. There are more Anne and Maud books out there than you could possibly imagine, but I’ll suggest the two that grabbed me: House of Dreams, by Liz Rosenberg, and Looking for Anne of Green Gables, by Irene Gammel. Both are engagingly written and fun to read, and contain far more detail than I could possibly present here. 

My theme music is Aerobatics in Slow Motion by TeknoAXE. As always, you can find a rough transcript, images, and complete list of references at my website. For this episode, visit theabandonedcarousel.com/30. Thank you to Florian from Abandoned Kansai for allowing the inclusion of a photo; check out their great site.

I do have a Patreon, and I’ll shortly be publishing a complete behind-the-scenes podcast episode there, detailing the creation of this episode. You can find that at patreon.com/theabandonedcarousel. If you haven’t done so already, please leave a rating and review in your podcast app, especially on Apple Podcasts – just click the show name, click ratings and reviews, and drop five sparkly stars. It really helps others find the show. Finally, I’m going to be releasing a Q&A episode in the next few months, so now is a great time to send in a question you might like answered on that. For all questions, comments, corrections, and concerns, please visit my Contact page on my website, or simply email [email protected].

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

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86. Jul 11 CP· CN· P, July 11 2017 6:00 AM ET | Last Updated:, 2017. “You’ll have an awfully good read:” Retired U of G prof publishing journals of L.M. Montgomery | CBC News. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/lucy-maud-montgomery-complete-journals-mary-rubio-1.4198049. Published July 11, 2017. Accessed March 2, 2020.
87. カナディアンワールド | カナディアン | 北海道. カナディアンワールド. https://www.canadian-world.com. Accessed March 9, 2020.
88. カナディアンワールド公園. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E3%82%AB%E3%83%8A%E3%83%87%E3%82%A3%E3%82%A2%E3%83%B3%E3%83%AF%E3%83%BC%E3%83%AB%E3%83%89%E5%85%AC%E5%9C%92&oldid=74925656. Accessed February 4, 2020.
89. カナディアンワールド公園 – Home. https://www.facebook.com/canadaane/. Accessed February 13, 2020.
90. カナディアンワールド公園｜芦別市観光総合ガイド「星の降る里あしべつ」. 芦別市観光総合ガイド「星の降る里あしべつ」. http://go-to-ashibetsu.com/. Accessed February 11, 2020.
91. さらばグリーンゲイブルズ。2019年で閉鎖が決まった北海道芦別市のカナディアンワールド公園→2020年以降も存続が決定！. プチノマドになりたい主婦の雑記ブログ. March 2019. https://petitnomado.com/canadianworld/. Accessed February 11, 2020.
92. ブライアン・ペック/カナディアンワールド～赤毛のアンのふるさと – TOWER RECORDS ONLINE. https://tower.jp/item/3603867/カナディアンワールド~赤毛のアンのふるさと. Accessed March 9, 2020.
93. 廃墟寸前！カナディアンワールドを散歩してみた @北海道芦別市 Canadian World at Ashibetsu, Hokkaido. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=159&v=Ia679jzy11Q&feature=emb_title. Accessed February 4, 2020.
94. 検索結果. In: Wikipedia. ; 2020. https://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=ashibetsu&title=%E7%89%B9%E5%88%A5%3A%E6%A4%9C%E7%B4%A2&go=display&ns0=1. Accessed March 8, 2020.
95. 炭鉱跡「赤毛のアンの町」30年の歴史に幕　地元「踊らされた」　北海道 – 毎日新聞. https://mainichi.jp/articles/20191019/k00/00m/040/036000c. Accessed January 31, 2020.
96. 珠 on Twitter: “芦別のカナディアンワールド、本当に好きで毎年行かせてもらってます。 建物も素敵だし、自然いっぱいだし、カナディアンワールドの皆さん優しくて大好きです。 #カナディアンワールド https://t.co/axJvHopXcb” / Twitter. Twitter. https://twitter.com/tama_wrbh/status/1223131564613066752. Accessed January 31, 2020.
97. lenslife. 秋のカナディアンワールド公園 今季最終日 Ⅰ. Lens Life Blog. https://lenslife.exblog.jp/27176784/. Accessed March 9, 2020.
98. 芋畑サリーランチボックス全②巻発売中︎ on Twitter: “@tonosama36 https://t.co/k2eeZZcYQn 市営だったのが今年から民営で運営されるそうです！ 民営では維持がかなり難しい規模の土地ですので、クラウドファンディングでお金を募るみたいですね。 今年も四月からオープンとのことですので、是非遊びに行ってみてほしいです！” / Twitter. Twitter. https://twitter.com/sarii_imo/status/1223170944803336192. Accessed January 31, 2020.
99. 芋畑サリーランチボックス全②巻発売中︎ on Twitter: “芦別のカナディアンワールド公園、去年初めて行きましたがとても楽しかったです。広すぎて見きれなかったので今年も行きたい！アンの家の中も雰囲気たっぷりでとても素敵でした https://t.co/cQIjZk1Y2H” / Twitter. Twitter. https://twitter.com/sarii_imo/status/1223076334156435456. Accessed January 31, 2020. 105. 芦別「カナディアンワールド公園」～日帰りドライブのまとめ～ – 札幌のスィーツ大好き おぢさん日記 毎日食べるのだ！. 芦別「カナディアンワールド公園」～日帰りドライブのまとめ～ – 札幌のスィーツ大好き　おぢさん日記  毎日食べるのだ！. https://blog.goo.ne.jp/bstime0213/e/1d2cee5050f3403f70416d162fb0bbc7. Accessed January 31, 2020.
100. 芦別市『カナディアンワールド公園』が閉園？その前に赤毛のアンの世界へ訪れよう. しょうラヂオ。. https://hokkaido-child.com/canadian-world. Published September 20, 2017. Accessed February 11, 2020.
101. 赤毛のアン. In: Wikipedia. ; 2020. https://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E8%B5%A4%E6%AF%9B%E3%81%AE%E3%82%A2%E3%83%B3&oldid=76481476. Accessed March 8, 2020.
102. 赤毛のアンの世界を模したカナディアンワールドを存続させたい！ – クラウドファンディング READYFOR (レディーフォー). https://readyfor.jp/projects/canadian-world. Accessed February 11, 2020.

The post Lucy Maud Montgomery / Canadian World / Anne of Green Gables appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

When I started my research for the last episode, Takakonuma Greenland, I got a lot of results for Okpo Land. Sites like to compound the two, putting images of Okpo Land in a Takakonuma Greenland piece or vice versa. Several times, I came across references to Okpo Land as the true “scary” park, which is why I scheduled it for the week of Halloween.

Of course, in my research, I realized that the truth is quite a lot murkier than the internet rumors suggest. So let’s dig into the story of Okpo Land.

History of Okpo Land

Much of the actual history of Okpo Land is shrouded in mystery and rumors. It’s not helped by the language barrier: again, I don’t speak Korean, and Google Translate apparently has a much harder time with Korean compared to Japanese (from Takakonuma Greenland). This includes things like the actual opening date of the park. While the closing date is consistent (1999), the internet disagrees on the opening date.

Nearly all of the articles about Okpo Land online are a form of internet telephone, simply copying the same story idea and embellishing it without any efforts at verification of fact. These rumors call the park once one of the most popular theme parks in Asia, which seems hard to swallow. Some claim the park had been operational for decades prior to its 199 closure.

The truth seems a bit different. A local Geoje article explicitly gives the opening date as 1996, as does a different local news source. Another local news source describes the park as having only been open for two years prior to its closure. This makes sense – the park decor is all very 90s. 

But I’m getting ahead of myself, a little.

(If you want to start off with a few lesser-seen galleries before reading on, check out this one from johnwjohnson on Flickr and this one from Jordan/streetbeat85 on Flickr.)

Okpo Land: Geoje, South Korea

Okpo Land was located in Geoje, South Korea. Geoje is the name of the city, and Okpo-dong is one of the many neighborhoods within the city. And of course, given the name, you can see that Okpo Land was located in Okpo-dong.

It sat on the top of a hill, overlooking the harbor. Geoje is home to some of the largest shipbuilding in the world, including Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering (DSME), one of the largest shipbuilders in the area. 

At the time, Okpo Land was the only amusement park on Geoje Island, so it did have a captive audience.

Okpo Land and South Korea’s Economic Crisis

However, the audience apparently wasn’t particularly interested in visiting Okpo Land. One of the news articles describes Okpo Land as having “sluggish business”. Another article describes the park as having an “operating deficit”. As lawinsider.com defines it: “insufficient cash flow from the Improvements to cover normal operating expenses and maintenance”. A third article blamed the “IMF cold wave”.

I’m not an economist, nor do I play one on TV. But from my understanding, this is how it went. See, in late 1997, there was a financial crisis in East and Southeast Asia, stemming from the financial collapse of the baht in Thailand, which spread and caused financial distress to a number of other countries. South Korea was one of the countries hardest hit by the crisis, and in December of 1997, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stepped in with a $58.4 billion dollar plan to help stabilize South Korea’s economy. In return, the country had to undergo financial restructuring. “IMF programmes normally seek to reduce current account deficits, keep inflation in check, and keep domestic demand constrained.” 

The economy continued to shrink throughout 1998, but seemed to rebound in 1999, with president Kim Dae Jung declaring the crisis over in December 1999.

It was too late, however, for Okpo Land. 

It’s clear that against this background of financial crisis, the people of Geoje probably didn’t have the means to be spending money, and if they did, they were going to go to a different, bigger park. Okpo Land, which seems to have been started in a time of financial prosperity in 1996 or earlier, most likely couldn’t draw the paying crowds it needed in the hard times of 1997 and 1998. Before the park could try again in the summer of 1999, it was too late. 

The Geoje Times gives May of 1999 as the closure date for Okpo Land, and nearly every other source agrees with this year of 1999.

The Legend of Deaths at Okpo Land

Of course, what I haven’t told you at all is the dark side of the Okpo Land legend. 

You know, all the deaths.

Many internet legends talk about the one or more deaths at the park in its early years. And almost all internet legends about Okpo Land talk about the final death, the death in 1999.

See, we haven’t really talked about the park itself – we’ll get there – but there was a duck ride. Not a rollercoaster, as many descriptions say, but a monorail sky cycle business, another of the fun two-person visitor-pedalled rides in the sky. This one had a duck theme, a horrifying, horrifying duck theme. 

How can a duck theme be horrifying, you might ask? 

The duck on the front of each pedal car had an overly large head, a wide gaping mouth, and two comically large cartoon anime eyes, each pupil staring vacantly in opposite direction. I’ve seen a lot of spine-tingling things in my fascination with abandoned theme parks, but the duck heads from Okpo Land still remain at the top of my “creepiest things” list.

The legend goes that the final car on one train of the duck ride derailed, dangling from the tracks and dropping its rider to the ground, killing her instantly. Furthermore, the legend goes, the owner disappeared overnight, leaving the girl’s family without compensation or apology. The park was then reportedly shuttered by the authorities and declared unsafe, with all the rides still left in place. 

This, then, is the urban legend that surrounds Okpo Land.

Truth to the Rumors of Okpo Land?

I spoke over email with urban explorer Jon Dunbar, who runs the site Daehanmindecline. He is a well-known urban explorer in South Korea. He has an Instagram full of cute cat pictures, too. Jon’s images, used with or without permission, are some of the most common images you’ll see of Okpo Land in its abandoned state. I’m including a few of Jon’s images in my shownotes page and in social media promos for the episode with permission, and I encourage you to follow the links back to his site for more images. 

Jon told me over email about his history exploring the park between late 2007 and mid 2011. According to him, there was a single blog by a German photographer prior to his first trip which contained a version of that urban legend – lighter on details, with a death at the park followed by a second death which ultimately shuttered the park.

Jon went on to tell me about his first visit in late 2007, finding one of the duck rides hanging from the track. He imagined the rumored second death happening there, with the owners hypothetically leaving the ride broken, in situ, in the hurry to close the park permanently.

As Jon goes on to say, the German blog is long gone (and believe me, I’ve tried to find it! Not even the Wayback Machine could help with this one). So if you’re wondering where this rumor came from, about the girl dying after a fall from the duck ride, here’s how it got started.

The truth is probably somewhere in between the prosaic – not enough visitors, not enough money – and the salacious – deaths and quick park closures to escape a bad situation. And of course, we’ll likely never really know.

Abandoned Okpo Land

After its sudden closure in 1999, Okpo Land sat completely in place, abandoned, a magnet for urban explorers.  

The Geoje Times article from 2006 calls the abandoned park the “city’s monster”. Whether this is a mistranslation or accurate turn of phrase, I’m delighted by the description. 

City’s monster, let’s talk about this city’s monster. 

Okpo Land was small. 

Perched up on a hillside, it had great views, but not a lot of land area. This meant that, like Takakonuma Greenland and many of the other parks I’ve talked about on TAC, there were only a handful of rides. There were sort of three main areas – the swimming pool area (down below) and two separate hilltop areas, each anchored by one of the elevated rides.

Rides at Okpo Land

I’ve found a few park signs, but as I alluded to earlier, Google Translate has a harder time with Korean than it did with Japanese. However, I’ve spent some time with multiple images of the single park directional signs (two pink signs pointing one direction, two blue signs pointing another) and with the one image I’ve found of a park guide map, and I think I’ve gotten it mostly correct. (Unsurprisingly, AFTER I went through the trouble of sketching off a broken park version, I found a nice version from a guidebook. Ah.) Of course you know I’ve sketched my own version of the park map to help you understand the layout of the park. As always, if you’ve got corrections, comments, clarifications, or opinions, you can find my contact info at my website.

Going from least well-known to most well-known, let’s talk about the rides at Okpo Land.

Small Attractions at Okpo Land

There were these two large high top shoes. Not actually shoes, of course. These were miniature basketball hoops inside shoe facades, branded as “hightops”. It was an arcade game, classic and very cool, apparently manufactured by Skee Ball. I’ll link to a sale listing for a brand new one as well as an image of the very destroyed, very abandoned version.

Of course there were basic arcade game staples like air hockey.

And then there was a motion simulator, a Doron Precision Systems SRV brand. You’ve probably seen it at a carnival or a theme park near you. Here’s a video of one in motion. Of course, the simulator at Okpo Land was not in such fine shape after its years of abandonment, covered with graffiti in the available images online. 

In the park’s abandonment, all of these arcade games were outside in what appears to be an entrance plaza. This likely wasn’t their original home – the arcade building (labeled as “carnival” on the signs and map) seems to have been targeted by arsonists in June of 2011, according to a newspaper article.  Here’s a view via teaching engrish https://teachingengrish.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/img_74461.jpg https://teachingengrish.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/img_48811.jpg https://teachingengrish.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/img_74651.jpg However, that being said, these items have always been outside in the plaza in every image I’ve seen of the park, including the earliest images from 2007 and 2008, prior to the fires.

There was also once something called “battery”. I’ve checked and double-checked the translation, and Google’s so proud of this one, they give it a check mark when I run it through the translation site. This was located within the fenced square right off the entrance plaza, concrete painted green (here’s an image). I’m not sure what this actually was. One theory I’ve got stems from an early picture showing the view from the top of the coaster. There can be seen two large foam-looking items sitting off in the vegetation under the coaster, adjacent to the green battery square. Perhaps this attraction was a gladiator type thing, where guests could put on giant foam fighting gloves of a sort and “batter” one another? I don’t really know. The other idea, based on the two sets of bumper cars and the stack of bumper cars adjacent to this area, is that originally this was also a battery-operated bumper car area. 

Things That Go: Train, Bumper Cars, Rocket Ship at Okpo Land

Of course there was a miniature train. It’s an episode of TAC, which of course is more likely to feature a train than a carousel. 

Not much is known about the train. It ran in a small circular track roughly directly behind the main entrance, beneath the squirrel coaster. Here’s a promo image from the brochure: https://www.uer.ca/locations/viewgal.asp?picid=254356. There are almost no pictures of it, but the train and the tracks were left to decay with the rest of the park. Jon Dunbar photographed a rusted shell of an engine on a rusted and overgrown train track during his last visit in 2011. The rest of the train cars and the majority of the engine parts were long gone, though possible remnants of the train in a better state in late 2007, early 2008 can be seen in Jon’s images from an article on Dark Roasted Blend http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/01/abandoned-amusement-parks.html.

There were plenty of other things that go, as well. 

There were bumper cars too. Actually, there were two sets of bumper cars. One was sort of your basic sleek bumper car. The other set had a more vintage, old-timey overlay. The sleek bumper cars originally ran on a circular area underneath the rocket ship ride, while the vintage looking cars were stored away under a tarp in a storage building. Based on the park map, there was only ever one bumper car area, so perhaps these sets of cars could be switched in and out as themeing dictated. 

And then, making good use of the small land area, the flying rocket ship ride. The bumper cars were on a circular area at ground level, and the rockets sat on a circular platform above them, higher up in the air. 

It’s your standard “spin and go up and down” ride, like Astro Orbiter or Dumbo at Disneyland. The park’s guide map has a pretty good name for this one – it translates as “space warplane”! I love it. Though this ride was visible from the city, there’ not terribly much to say about it – simple “spaceship” cars that originally had small canopies. Reportedly for some years of the park’s abandonment, the cars were able to move around still. (See a photo of that here.)

Carousel and Viking Ship at Okpo Land

The carousel at Okpo Land is actually right next to the entrance gate and ticket booth. It’s not particularly special, in my opinion. The carousel structure itself is nicely detailed, but the horses are rather horrifying. Most of them have red eyes and leering grins, and there’s not much in the way of other detailing. These are low-budget carousel horses, not made from a particularly nice mold. 

Of course, you can call it a merry-go-round, too, if you like. I may not have touched on this in my episode on the Floyd J Moreland carousel, but there’s no true difference between a carousel and a merry go round. Some say that one has only horses and the other has many animals. Others point to the spin direction (clockwise or counter clockwise) or whether the twinkle lights are clear or colored. No matter what the point of comparison, there are as many rides that break the “rules” as fit them. So choose whichever name you like.

In the park’s abandonment, the horses are one of the more persistent amusements to be repurposed. They appear to have rusted out from the base carousel structure fairly quickly. Therefore, they were not only used for a photo prop in the standard way, but were carried around the park, placed in bumper cars, and general had a fun time with. Some were painted black, as if a vat of black paint were dropped over the top of them, and honestly it’s an improvement.

The abandoned carousel at Okpo Land is incredibly eerie – a rusting-out base, often filled with pools of water; tilting, fallen-over horses; knocked-in decorative panels; and still-bright, fiberglass decorations, broken but gleaming under the rust and creeping vegetation.

There was also a viking ship, a classic two-headed dragon themed swinging boat, much like the ones we’ve already talked about that existed at the abandoned Yangon amusement park and at Takakonuma Greenland. The swinging boat ride is a staple of many carnivals, fairs, and theme parks, so I don’t really need to go into detail. (Though I will add the interesting sidebar that the predecessor of this type of ride was called “The Ocean Wave” and was invented all the way back in the 1890s!)

The ride at Okpo Land was simply called “Viking”, which it proclaimed in big, English letters right on the sides of the ride. 

Interestingly, the Viking ride itself was positioned at nearly the apex of the hilly park, visible from many parts of the city. I’ve read several reports from urban explorers who had authorities called on them after people spotted them climbing the Viking structure even from outside the park.

Swimming Pool and Other Buildings at Okpo Land

Before I get to the two “big” rides, let me talk about the swimming pool and the other buildings at Okpo Land.

Per the park map, there were a variety of other buildings in Okpo Land. In the park’s abandonment, this isn’t really clear – one completely graffiti’d and destroyed building without any remaining signage pretty much looks like another. But according to the map, there were multiple buildings labeled “store”, a place for karaoke, and several “restaurants” and “restrooms”. A fairly large building on the map that isn’t ever seen in the exploration photos is the roller skating rink, which would’ve been behind the Viking ship. Maybe it wasn’t a building but just a flat concrete area? #6 on this promo brochure from the park shows what could have been the skating rink.

And #7 on that same map shows just a beguiling field of green. It’s really hard to accurately capture in any photo. But there was something called a “four seasons sliding range”, otherwise known as a long concrete slide down the hill, from the roller coaster area down by the swimming pool, all painted brilliant green, and perhaps originally covered in astro turf. Were there inner tubes or slick mats to slide down on? It’s not clear, and those small artifacts are long gone, or simply uninteresting, to any of the urbex photos available. 

Of course there was also the swimming pool complex, located down the hill from the other areas of the park, geographically closest to the squirrel coaster. The promo brochure for the park shows a variety of activities, including bowling and handball – it isn’t clear that these were available based on the abandoned photography I’ve seen, but it’s possible. There was definitely a variety of swimming pools, hot tubs, and saunas, however. In the abandoned stages, of course, the main lap pool was filled with stagnant, horrifying water.

Squirrel Roller Coaster and Rok ‘n Roll at Okpo Land

Squirrel Coaster = Fantasy Express

The squirrel coaster is the park’s second-most famous ride. The RCDB doesn’t know the name of it, just calling it unknown coaster. It took me a long time to find a name for it – the map I found that once was displayed in the park has the coaster shown but not captioned! Can you believe that? It was a struggle, folks. But eventually I found another map with one additional line in the key, and the name: Fantasy Express. I love it. Squirrel coaster = Fantasy Express. 

Anyhow, this is a cute little basic coaster. The track itself isn’t particularly noteworthy – just a simple shape without any inversions.

What IS noteworthy is the location (up on a hill, overlooking the harbor, adding to the thrill, and the theme. This coaster has a squirrel theme, or perhaps a chipmunk theme. A fat, gleefully chubby animal decorates the front of the car. He clutches what is presumably a nut or acorn in between his clasped hands. However, the casual glance makes it look perhaps a bit more salacious. I’ll leave it at that. 

This coaster is also somewhat notable in that the coaster train (singular) is permanently stuck on the lift hill, unable to move either forward or back at the movement of explorers. This has led to some striking photos of Okpo Land taken from the top of the coaster’s lift hill, looking back down: a gleeful woodland animal smiling back up at you almost menacingly, halfway up the lift hill; the blue roofs of the pool and sauna complex glittering with reflected light from the nearby harbor on the left; and the green, tangled climbing vines on the right, taking back the coaster and the rest of Okpo Land.

Rock ‘ n Roll OR Squirrel Buckets

Nestled up above the squirrel coaster by the Space Fighters and the ducks was another often photographed ride. This one probably has the best name of them all, and I double-checked my translations multiple times. That’s probably what made research for this episode take so long. Anyhow, Google Translate tells me the name of this ride is…Squirrel Buckets. 

Yep, squirrel buckets. I don’t even know about the etymology of that one. This is a beautiful version of the classic Rock ‘n Roll / Looper ride that was popular a couple decades ago. You’ll remember it disassembled at Takakonuma Greenland and semi-operational at the abandoned Yangon park. And of course, you can find an operational version of the ride at Knoebel’s in the US. Still not ringing a bell? Tuna cans on a carousel frame, and they all go round and round. I think it’s such a picturesque ride, but I would never ever ride this one.

In the park’s abandonment, climbing vines took over this ride most of all, and in many pictures, you can only see the decorative finial at the center post of the ride, surrounded by subtle mountains of green.

Duck Sky Cycle at Okpo Land

Of course, the park’s most famous, or infamous, ride is one we’ve already touched on, so I’ve saved it for last. Referred to on the guide maps simply as “Sky Cycle”, this is the supposed killer ride, the eerie, duck-themed ride that still gives me the creeps every time I scroll past an image of that gaping duck mouth.

Why, why would someone ever make a ride with such an eerie, chilling duck-faced overlay? Why is something simple like a children’s themed duck ride so unsettling in a world of admittedly much worse horrors? I can’t explain it.

Whether or not the duck sky cycle actually killed someone, what IS clear is that one of the sky cycle trains is on the track … wrong. 

Let’s back up a little. This is different from the sky cycle at Takakonuma Greenland. There, you had spindly little individual cars. Here at Okpo Land, the sky cycles have a solid overlay of duck theme. At first glance they appear to be connected in trains, but closer inspection of the photos indicates that the cars are separate, with bumpers on the front and back of individual cars to keep them from coming too close to one another.

Anyhow, there are many duck sky cycle cars in repose at the station at Okpo Land. It appears that there’s a side spur, where cars can be switched on and off the main track when higher capacity is needed. 

All of the ducks face the same direction, going clockwise around the track. 

Except one.

Two cars, two ducks, face the opposite direction (counter-clockwise). The front car is on the station platform, and the back car is missing its’ duck head facade, dangling, chick butt facing the ground.

Let me stop and tell you right now. That story, about the car derailing and killing the girl, and being left to dangle in place in the spot where she died?

Impossible.

Let me tell you what I think, and fast forward if you’d rather I not squash your theories about the legend of Okpo Land. 

There’s no possible way that a sky cycle car would be placed on the track going the wrong direction (counter-clockwise) when all the other sky cycle cars are going clockwise.

My hypothesis is that a person visiting the park in its abandonment decided, for whatever reason, to turn a car or two around. Is this possible?

Looking closely at the pictures, I think it is. The lead car is off the track, on the station loading platform, with one “wheel” in between the track and one on the station platform; the back balanced on the station. The car clearly has two Miller patented underfriction wheels in front, the kind used on nearly every modern coaster to keep cars from flying off the track during fast turns. The wheels are meant to go on either side of the track, keeping the cars in place.

In the back, however, from looking at other cars, we can see underneath the “duck butt” where passengers would sit and pedal, there’s simply some flimsy-looking metal arms, guiding the car roughly on the track. Likely, the car’s weight and the passengers’ weight were presumed to keep the car in place.

Here’s a close up view of the dangling, supposed killer car. It’s held onto the track by one single wheel in front, and everything else dangles.

I think what happened is that some people were having a good time and tried to turn two of the cars around. Or, perhaps not that, but were trying to “get the cars off the tracks” presumably to have fun with them in various places around the park. So these imaginary people lifted the backs of the cars up and wriggled and wrenched them until they could swing the cars around off the track. 

Then what? You can’t carry them down the stairs – too heavy. So they pushed the cars backwards along the track and tried to push them over the edge of the station. But for whatever reason, they couldn’t, or didn’t, finish the task. So one car was left cockeyed at station level, and the other was left dangling over the edge by a single wheel. This one they tore the duck facade off. 

From there, rumors could easily spread, as it is easy to imagine a horrific fate from such a wrenching-looking situation. But truly, the ride in operation would not have derailed this way, with all of the other cars the way they are.

This is only a theory about what happened to the sky cycle, but I’d say it’s a guess close to the truth. 

A girl may have fallen off the duck ride and died, I don’t know about that – it is awfully high. But the car wasn’t left dangling in its place – that’s just not how the ride would be set up. The final, ominous positions of the broken duck cars were most certainly done after the fact. 

Demolition of Okpo Land

It wasn’t until late 2011 that the park was actually demolished, over a decade after its closure. 

In the meantime, plenty of urban explorers visited and photographed the park. You can find all kinds of photos and trip reports linked in my references section (below). Seemingly on each visit, the beheaded duck facade was in a different place – was it on a visitor this time, was it on a carousel horse, was it tucked away in the vines to try and spook someone? 

Ultimately, it appears the park became a target of vandalism and arson until the city and the ownership companies couldn’t ignore it any longer. It was called the “city’s monster”, collecting trash and garbage, becoming increasingly rusted and blighted up on top of the hill right over the harbor.

Though some reports claim a single company purchased the land and then did nothing with it for years, other reports differ. One local news source actually breaks the sale of Okpoland down. The article states that “Short-term mortagages were set up by three people”, and they note the park was sold again to a Mr. Park in November of 2000. Then there were two “seizure and claims for transfer of ownership”, but the article notes that these were “eliminated”. Ultimately, that large shipbuilding company DSME purchase the site in November of 2006. The article reports that the company had plans to redevelop the site and build something else (a hotel, residential complexes, etc). However, considering that as of the time of this recording, the land is still bare as far as I know, I’m guessing something went wrong. The main article I’m referring to right here talks about urban management plans, and I think a little something is lost in translation – perhaps there were issues with zoning or other city ordinances. 

So like I said, ultimately in 2011, the park was demolished and returned to bare earth. 

A video from 2017 is available on YouTube from user A Million Toms showing a hike up to the site of the former theme park. It appears easy to access the site, with broken down fencing blocking the road from cars but not stopping an adventurous pedestrian. You can see primarily bare land and vegetation in the video, although A Million Toms does come across a broken piece of fiberglass decoration – a former buffalo plaque from the Viking ship. 

Here’s a great image from one of the park brochures, showing an artist’s rendition of how the site was supposed to be https://www.uer.ca/locations/viewgal.asp?picid=254354. 

Conclusions

People love to come up with rumors, and sensational stories certainly build upon themselves when passed from person to person in urban legend format. Such is the case of Okpo Land. In the later years of its abandonment, a broken duck-themed sky cycle, placed just so on accident or purpose by a visitor to the park after its closure, spurred rumors of death, of an owner who left everything in place and ran, or perhaps he was killed in a car accident, but certainly he gave no recompense to the girl’s family.

It’s all rumor. 

The park closed due to lack of money in the background of the poor economy of the late 90s. A series of different owners and bueracratic issues delayed the demolition of the park and still have stalled any new redevelopment there. 

The truth, of course, is kind of boring.

Okpo Land seemed like a charming small park with some truly bizarre theming. The duck face from the sky cycle is honestly one of the spookiest things I’ve seen, with haunting eyes that stare in either direction and seem to follow you as you move. 

But ultimately it was just a simple amusement park. A fun place for kids and families while it lasted, with boring and expected reasons for closure. Too, it seems to have been a fun place to visit in its long abandonment, even if the deadly rumors stem from staged rides and word of mouth. 

It is Halloween season when this episode is released, so of course you can imagine whatever urban legend you like. The truth is boring and fictional stories are much, much more thrilling.

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

Okpo Land Guide Map

1. 회전목마 merry-go-round
2. Restaurant
3. 카니발 코너 carnival corner
4. 수영장 swimming pool
5. 사 우 나 sauna         (missing – fantasy express – the COASTER) either spelled like this 판타지 표현 or 환상특급
6. 미니기차 mini train
7. 밧 데 리 카 battery?
8. 노 래 방 karaoke
9. 매점 store
10. 바 이 킹 viking
11. 관리사무실 . 화장실 administrative office, restroom
12. 분식코너 food corner
13. 롤러 스케이트장 roller skating rink
14. 매점 store
15. 사계절썰매장 four season sledding range
16. 음식점 . 화장실 restaurant * restroom
17. 스카이 사이클 sky cycle (ducks)
18. 범퍼카 bumper cars
19. 우주전투기 “space fighter” (rockets)
20. 다람쥐 통 squirrel bucket
21. 휴게실 “Rest area” (bathroom?)

References

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The post Okpo Land appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

Listen or read this episode of The Abandoned Carousel. Both versions are below.

Podcast cover background photo is by 4045 on freepik.com. Theme music is from “Aerobatics in Slow Motion” by TeknoAXE. Incidental music is “Long Note Two” and “Cryptic Sorrow” by Kevin Macleod / incompetech.com.

The Creepypasta: “Takakanonuma Greenland”

In Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture, there is an abandoned amusement park known as Takakanonuma Greenland. It sits in the outskirts of Hobara, a section of the Japanese city of Date. Very little is known about this park, and its exact location is largely unknown. You can’t find it on any Japanese map, as it simply isn’t there. Supposedly, its coordinates are 37°49’02.16″N 140°33’05.78″E , but if they are put into Google Maps, the search will be directed to the center of Hobara. This is inaccurate, since the park is hidden in a mountainous, rural area.

The only major information known about Takakanonuma Greenland is that it opened in 1973, and closed two years later. Some claim that this was due to poor ticket sales and needed renovations, but locals say that it was because of a significant amount of deaths on the rides. Miraculously, the park reopened in 1986, but struggled to remain open due to increased competition from bigger parks such as Tokyo Disneyland, as well as financial trouble. Finally, in 1999, Takakanonuma Greenland closed for good.

Following its closure, the amusement park was left to rot. Photographs from urban explorers who have infiltrated the area show a massive amount of decay. The ferris wheel and the roller coaster are covered in rust, the entrance is covered in graffiti, and the premises are being reclaimed by plants. The most notable feature of the park is the dense fog that always looms over it, giving off a Silent Hill feel. Like the information about the area, there is very little photography and video of it.

Allegedly, Takakanonuma Greenland was demolished in 2006, and now sits as an empty lot. However, in 2007, a citizen of the United Kingdom named Bill Edwards claimed to have visited an untouched, completely intact park. Supposedly, he took numerous pictures that were identical to those taken before the park’s supposed demolition, showing the same rusty, forgotten rides. However, according to rumor, when uploading these photos, only one appeared on his computer. This picture shows the entrance to the park on a foggy night, illuminated by the flash from the camera. In the center of this picture, you can barely make out the figure of what looks like a six year old girl in a white dress. She appears to be staring at the photographer with a serious, indifferent face. The girl has never been identified, and the whereabouts of Bill Edwards are currently unknown…

Creepypasta.com, April 26, 2013

Many elements of the story I just told you contain truth, like some of the best stories, but parts are fiction. What I just told you was a creepypasta, posted on Creepypasta.com on April 26, 2013. 

What is a Creepypasta?

Before we can get to the truth behind Takakonuma Greenland, let’s talk about “creepypasta”. What is a creepypasta? 

I’ll be drawing heavily in this section from an excellent article by the phenomenal Aja Romano, now at Vox and formerly at the Daily Dot. I encourage you to read the whole article.  

Creepypasta is one of those internet-y portmanteau words. It’s a spin-off of “copypasta”, a portmanteau of “copy/paste”. Copypasta was first used as a term online around 2006 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copypasta). This was essentially blocks of text that were copied and pasted around the internet, often with a spam or troll intent. Wikipedia gives examples of the “Navy Seal” copypasta and the script from the Bee Movie https://www.inverse.com/article/25329-bee-movie-memes-explained-script-youtube-videos. 

Creepypasta, then, began as a similar idea – text that is easily copied and pasted – but with the intent of sharing realistic horror stories. These often have a basis in reality/fact, and are presented as a journal entry or a “hey I was there” type story. Yep, they’re modern urban legends, modern versions of the “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” series that was the height of popularity when I was a kid (and how’s that for dating me?). 

At their most basic form, creepypasta are only a few paragraphs long, just enough to send a little or big shiver up your spine. Others have expanded the bounds of the genre, with multiple updates, images, realistic social media account postings, etc. Think Blair Witch Project. 

Creepypasta.com was created in 2008, and the related subreddit r/NoSleep was established in 2010.

Originally, the stories were anonymous. That was kind of the point. Jessica Roy in Time points to early stories shared around the depths of Usenet and chain emails in the 1990s. Aja Romano points to the story of Ted the Caver as the earliest true creepypasta, appearing on Angelfire in 2001 and telling the story of an explorer and an increasingly frightening system of caves.

Today, authorship is more important. Ironically, copying and pasting of creepypasta is less common now, as a result, being seen as IP theft. Some creepypastas have been spun into original novels or other media properties. Truly, today, they are simply collections of horror-themed stories more than the anonymous, realistic paragraph they originated as. 

In Romano’s article and the Wikipedia article for creepypasta, both linked in the episode’s references section, you can find a few of the more popular creepypasta. These include Slender Man, a story that has not only been referenced in pop culture since its creation, but which also has influenced a real life murder.

The Real Story of Takakonuma Greenland

The story I read at the beginning of the show was posted to creepypasta.com in 2013. Much of the tale does ring true. Let’s dig in and separate the wheat from the chaff of the “real” story of this mysterious abandoned theme park, and debunk some of the taller tales. It’s both interesting and challenging that most of the information available about this park is in the form of fiction.

So, Takakonuma Greenland. One of the most popular abandoned or haunted theme parks is this one, and it regularly appears on lists around the internet.    

Before I even get into it, one of the interesting things is the differences between English-language posts about the park, and Japanese-language posts about the park. It’s really only in the English posts that the wild tales abound; the Japanese posts recount some of the wilder English tales but all seem to comment on how Americans (or “foreigners” sometimes) always place the park on the lists of “top most haunted places” and so on. 

The Name: Takakonuma Greenland vs Takakanonuma Greenland

First, the name. American sites including creepypasta frequently spell the name as Takakanonuma Greenland. Surprisingly, not actually the name. The site Bloggitos helped clarify this topic. Locally, the park appears to simply have been called “Greenland”. As the park picked up steam with Americans, the kanji were mistranslated. Now I don’t speak Japanese, but here’s what Bloggitos says. There’s a joining particle in Japanese, “no”. However, proper nouns wouldn’t use this (example: Indiana-no-University would be any university in Indiana, not Indiana University specifically). 

So instead of Takakanonuma, the correct name is Takakonuma (Takako, a place (marsh), and Numa or Numanishi, another place).

Occasionally you’ll also see references to the place as Kokonuma Greenland, but I’ve not been able to find any clear etymology on that one. 

Location of Takakonuma Greenland

You might’ve missed it from the creepypasta I read at the beginning, but the location of this abandoned park also features heavily in some later versions of the story. You will alternately see the city referred to as either Date or Hobara. Hobara is the old name; along with 20 other towns and villages, the area has been known as the modern city of Date since January 2006.

Date, though, is located in Fukushima Province. 

Many listeners of the podcast will immediately be familiar with that name. Fukushima of course is the site of the 2011 nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima I nuclear power station.

2011 Nuclear Meltdown at Fukushima Daiishi Nuclear Power Plant

In brief, in March 2011, the “2011 Tōhoku earthquake” occurred. It was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and the fourth-most powerful earthquake ever recorded in the world. The quake triggered tsunami waves which swept across the islands. The quake and subsequent tsunamis are said to have killed over 10,000 people. 

One result of this natural disaster was the failure of the cooling systems at Fukushima’s Daiishi Nuclear Power Plant. This failure is the most severe nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown. Chernobyl and Fukushima are the only two incidents to be labeled Level 7 on the Nuclear Event Scale (with a 7 being the worst level, “major event”. For a comparison, the 1979 Three Mile Island incident was labeled Level 5). 

With the failure of the cooling systems, three of the reactors at Fukushima Daiichi experienced nuclear meltdowns and hydrogen explosions. As with any nuclear incident, the concern is for the spread and release of radioactive materials. An initial 20km evacuation zone was set up, and has since come down. Contamination of the Pacific Ocean with radioactive cesium has been the primary concern from this incident.

As of 2018, radiation inside the reactor buildings is reportedly still too high to safely enter. However, despite controversy, various world organizations do not predict any significant ongoing health effects from the accident.

Fukushima Daiishi Meltdown and Takakonuma Greenland

While this nuclear accident was a huge one, it didn’t affect Takakonuma Greenland. 

The nuclear power plant and the theme park are located about 100km from one another, far apart. (That’s 62 miles, American friends.) 

The reason this is relevant is because many of the versions/rumors of the park’s history claim that the park is soaking in toxic radiation from the 2011 power plant meltdown. Based on geography alone, this is completely untrue.

The True History of Takakonuma Greenland

With some basic facts established, let’s run through a more complete, true history of Takakonuma Greenland.

Takakonuma Family Park

Takakonuma Greenland opened as Takakonuma Family Park in 1973, on the side of a small mountain or hill. At the time it opened, the town the park was located in was called Hobara. 

(https://goo.gl/maps/3ZsCpuFowVdcEvyT7)(“Numanishi Senouemachi”)

From what I can understand, Hobara is a place out in the countryside, rural, though considered densely populated for a rural area. The area is full of rice fields and fruit orchards. At the time, there were no other amusement parks in the area, so the park did reasonably well.

On Facebook, in fact, I found photos from the park’s operation during this time. The album is titled “Around 1975 at Takakonuma Greenland” and there are two pictures. One shows the chain tower (swings) and the other shows a petting zoo.

However, it didn’t last. Business deteriorated, and the park shut down after two years. 

Not only did it shut down, it stayed closed for almost a decade.

Takakonuma Greenland’s Operating Years

After its closure as Takakonuma Family Park, the property was sold. I’ve seen references to both Nankai Kogyo Co., Ltd. and Tokyo Real Estate. Either way, the property stayed closed until the early 80s, undergoing refurbishment and upgrades. I’ve seen two different sources for the reopening date: spaicy.jp gives April 1982, and the RCDB gives 1985 as the date. Either way, the park reopened under the new name, Takakonuma Greenland.

Reception of Takakonuma Greenland

The park quickly gained popularity and notoriety for being the only park with a roller coaster in the area. (Spoiler: it actually had two!) It’s not entirely clear whether the coasters were installed during the reopening and rebranding, but this would seem most likely. The 1975 photos I mentioned earlier do not show any coasters on the hill, lending support to this theory.

For the next few years, things went well. Admission was relatively cheap – 700 yen ($6.50) for adults, and 500 yen ($4.50) for kids – though each ride inside required tickets, purchased at additional cost. 

However, mega parks began being built – Tokyo DisneySea and Tokyo Disneyland, 3.5 hours away. Universal Studios Japan, 6 hours away. And plenty of other, newer small parks were even closer. Instead of visiting Takakonuma Greenland, guests started to go elsewhere. It wasn’t convenient to get to Takakonuma Greenland using public transportation.

Because at the same time, the amenities at Takakonuma Greenland were rapidly aging. Some sites describe the place as “severely outdated”.

The area is humid, moist, and sees regular rain and snow. Rides required constant maintenance out in the elements. With the problems introduced in the economic bubble collapse of the 90s in Japan, they weren’t getting the maintenance they needed. There were no upgrades, no new rides. In fact, rides began to be taken away before the park itself closed. 

And the location of the park on the hillside was difficult – there was constant maintenance needed to trim back the vegetation, and there are also reports about erosion and partial collapses of some areas.

By the end of the park’s operation, the park’s schedule was erratic. Some months only open on Wednesdays, others only open on weekends. 

It seems that the park also constantly changed management over the short period it was open. One source reports five different owners between 1982 and 1999.

Closure of Takakonuma Greenland

Ultimately, the reason given for Takakonuma Greenland’s closure in 1999 is the same reason we see for so many parks – “management difficulties”, aka “it was no longer profitable to operate the park”. Yes, the owners could keep running it, but investing additional money in the park in the form of maintenance or new rides was a losing strategy. (Click for an image of the closure notice.)

You see, zooming out more broadly, Japan’s economy had hit a rough patch. In the second half of the 20th century, Japan’s economy was strong, perhaps overly so. The economic bubble burst at the start of the 1990s with a stock market crash, leading to the “Lost Decade”. The GDP fell, real wages fell, and the country experienced a stagnant price level that took decades to recover from.

Against this economic background, it’s not surprising that the choice was made to shutter Takakonuma Greenland.

The descriptions in translation from the Japanese sites are beautiful – the park was “left in the wind to wave”, says one site. Reportedly, the park owners literally just left. They didn’t want to pay to dismantle the park. They simply walked away. Other sites describe the situation differently, saying that indecision on the future of the property was the reason for the park’s long abandonment.

It took almost another decade before the park was demolished, leaving plenty of time for urban explorers to visit, and for rumors to fester.

Abandoned Takakonuma Greenland

Incorrect Coordinates of Takakonuma Greenland

It’s not clear why all of the stories about Takakonuma Greenland include the incorrect longitudinal coordinates. I’ll include a direct link to the streetview of the site as it stands today (or at least, 2014, which is when a Google car last drove by): https://goo.gl/maps/mEf7xAg23mZ3XQBp6 and https://goo.gl/maps/6rNGVfiDF4oj1UUC6. Type in “Numanishi Senouemachi” into Google Maps, and you’ll be in the right place. 

I suppose including directly false information in the creepypasta makes the tale more mysterious, but I do hate to see it. 

Where Are the Photos of Takakonuma Greenland?

One of the other big parts of the Takakonuma Greenland legend is that there are no photos of it, or few photos of it. You might think of the few very popular images: a rusty coaster in the fog, orange red rust dripping down over peeling white paint. In another of the images, a strange, small Ferris wheel looms in the background of the rusty white coaster, ominous in the fog. And a third, from a different angle: a green, grassy hill with a sign in large white Japanese characters. At the top center, the Ferris wheel, faded behind fog clouds. And to the right, a white roller coaster, on incredibly high supports, looking like something out of a horror movie as it looms over the hill in the fog.

Or, as the creepypasta states, despite many photos taken by an urban explorer by the name of Bill Edwards, only one photo ever would upload, featuring a haunted girl in a white dress on a foggy night.

Of course, none of this is true. The history of the park is well-documented if you look in the right places.

The thing is, despite the modern legend about the park, the place was originally just a small local theme park that was open for a couple decades. Not many people visited the park, and many of the touristy, operational pictures and videos of the place are likely shoved in closets and dusty photo albums. 

That’s not to say that there aren’t photos and videos, though. Today’s modern Google Translate makes it (while not perfect) a lot easier to search for things in other languages. And boy howdy, it’s probably not surprising that on Japanese language sites, there are a lot more factual details, fond commenters reminiscing about their childhood at the park, and of course photos, and videos of Takakonuma Greenland. 

 In fact, I’m going to shape the majority of the rest of the episode around a photo tour from an urban explorer “Kuke” who visited in fall of 2004. In addition, those primary images I described that you always see floating around the internet? Most of those are by “Jens of Japan”, and you can find them on his Flickr page or his website. I’ll include links to each relevant image in the shownotes. We haven’t really talked about the park in any detail, only about it as an abstract concept. So let’s take a visit to Takakonuma Greenland as it was. 

A Visit to Takakonuma Greenland

Of course, there was a car park at the front of the park, though the park was reasonably accessible by train and bus. After you got out of your car, you could walk with your fellow visitors up to the park gate. This was shaped like a castle gate, with a ticket line on one side and a park office on the other side. At one time, the park’s name would’ve been proudly spelled out across the top of the gate archway. By the time of the park’s abandonment, this had long fallen down. Of course, the whole thing is done up in a rather ugly shade of teal green, with red roofs on top of each turret tower.

To the right of the gate as you face it, there was the park map, up on a very large billboard. This remained after the park closed, and I’ve drawn my own version of the map to include throughout this section. Scroll down to the very last section of this post for the map key.

The map is our first indication of the park’s decline even prior to its closure. Several of the rides were apparently closed prior to the park’s closure, as their names were scraped off the painted sign. 

Enterprise and Looper at Takakonuma Greenland

In fact, the most obvious closed ride is missing. It would’ve been immediately in front of you as you entered through the park’s gate. First, of course, was the general ticket booth, small and non-imposing, where guests could purchase more tickets for each ride. The rides were listed with the number of tickets each took.

Behind the booth, there once was an Enterprise ride. You might remember this ride from the abandoned Yangon Amusement Park episode (theabandonedcarousel.com/9) – it’s a flat ride that starts out like a merry go round, and then raises up at an angle more like a Ferris wheel once it’s up to speed. 

The Enterprise is clearly visible in the park map – it’s an incredibly distinctive ride. But there are no photos of this ride, not even a hint of its demolished state. Perhaps it was planned and never added? The space does appear quite tight. Or perhaps it was removed.

To the left of the main entrance plaza was another classic flat ride: this one is called the Looper or the Rok n Roll. The Takakonuma Greenland version might have been called “Twister”. You might remember me describing this one in the abandoned Yangon park episode as well – “tuna cans on a carousel frame”. I’ve learned a wee bit more about these rides since then. In the US, you can find a refurbished version of this ride at Knoebels in PA. The style of ride is also called the Rok ‘n Roll. 

You essentially spin your tuna can back and forth (or 360) while the whole carousel of tuna cans also goes around in a circle. Vomit comet might also be an appropriate name. An image from Jens in 2006 shows this ride well-demolished, one of the tuna cans sitting askew on top of a circular platform full of rubble. Kuke over at Biglobe.ne.jp saw some of the tuna cans sitting on the ground, disassembled. An even earlier visit shows a more clear picture of this area: image 1 / image 2.

As you stood there in the entrance plaza, one thing stood out: how steep and hilly this park was. The entrance was at the base of the hill, and the ferris wheel stood at the pinnacle. The rest of the park rose up the hillside in front of you, terraced paths and platforms making space for the rides in front of the trees. 

Merry-go-round, Swings, and Train at Takakonuma Greenland

Let’s now turn to the right and take a look at one of the most photogenic parts of Takakonuma Greenland: the young children’s area, with a train, swings, and a merry-go-round.

During the park’s operation, the merry-go-round stood out. I’ll include a link to a photo of the operational merry-go-round from a visitor at the time right here. Even in its abandonment, the merry-go-round stands out, with beautiful, elegant horses, all white with colorful saddles and bridles. (I have to say, despite all my carousel research last week, I can’t quite tell which style these horses would be categorized under. Guess I’d better keep studying.) There were ornate decorations on the central column of the carousel, as well – gold-colored leaf on fanciful carvings around several mirrors. 

By the time the park was abandoned and had begun to be visited by urban explorers, the brilliantly-colored canopy was long gone, faded and hanging down from the skeletal support structure in tatters. This link is to an incredible image of the sunset over the carousel. Some of the horses had been stolen, their supports beginning to rust and break. And that gold-leaf had long since flaked away, leaving behind sinister black carvings with, oddly enough, red roses remaining.

Next to the carousel stood the Chain Tower, a menacing name for a standard swing-type ride that had been at the park since the beginning in the 70s. Originally, photos show it was painted in a colorblock yellow and blue scheme. By the time of the park’s abandoned days, the ride had clearly been through a number of different paint schemes. During the ride’s operation, the children sat in chairs that were attached by two ropes to the triangle “handle” of each swing position. By the time the park was abandoned, the seats were long gone, leaving behind only the eerie dangling triangles.

Surrounding this area was the SL, or steam locomotive. Yes, of course there was a miniature train. It took two tickets to ride, according to a 2005 image of the sign. I’m starting to think that I should’ve given this podcast a train-themed name instead of a carousel-themed name. Our friend, explorer Kuke, has images of the train station, showing a nice shaded spot to wait for the small little train. Of course, by the time of the known urbex images we’ve got, in 2004 and 2006, the train itself was yes, long gone. This image from an overpass over the train tracks shows the structure of the children’s area, including its proximity to the gate.

Buildings at Takakonuma Greenland

Walking from the overpass up the hill, one sees a tan building, nicely built, but yes, painted tan all over, including windows and clocks. Perhaps more camoflauge than straight up tan. Anyhow, this was a multi-purpose building. During the park’s operation, it served as both a haunted house and as a natural history insect museum, though not at the same time. This is one of the items scraped off the guide map, so it clearly closed some time before the park itself.

Inside, not much is left by the time of the abandoned walkthrough in 2004, just oddly painted walls and a few broken game consoles. This building was used for the filming of the movie Kamen Rider 555, thus the camo paint job. 

In the center of the park, across from the former haunted house, sits the largest building in the park. This too got a camo paint job for the movie filming. I was unable to translate the actual name of this one, but explorer Kuke calls it “free rest area”. Inside, a mishmash of broken game consoles again, as well as a store. There’s some comment that it might have been a theatre or stage. Across from this, a small shop that was a snack house. This also included a storage shed, in which were stored a box of skates and a sad Zamboni. At one time, the park hosted ice-skating – it’s not clear if there was an artificial rink somewhere or if the skating was done on the marsh for which the park is named. 

Sky Cycle and Go Karts at Takakonuma Greenland

Going out of the buildings and you’re already at the left-hand side of the park. Yep, it’s a small park. There stood a Sky Cycle, the next ride you’d come across. Sky Cycle, how fancy is that? This is a two person monorail-type ride, where guests pedal themselves around an elevated track at their own pace, overlooking the park below. It’s a simple ride but sort of easily terrifying – there’s nothing but a basic seatbelt to keep you in place, so far above the ground, and only your own feet can move you along. The cars are spindly and fragile looking, like odd bird skeletons.

By 2004 and 2006 when our urban explorers visited, a section of the Sky Cycle track had fallen down, or perhaps had been removed. This led to some excellent photos, where Sky Cycles were guided to the end of the track over time and pushed off into large piles. Images: image one / image two / image three. I’ll link to a video of the Sky Cycle still in operation at a different park – this was apparently a viral thing a few years back.

The Sky Cycle track ran right above the small Go-Kart track, vastly overgrown by the abandoned days, go-karts long since stolen and stripped of parts. Not much remained to be documented, just a few empty shells of cars looking like forlorn and rusty lawnmowers.

Behind the go-karts, we walk up the hill to the stars of the park: the Bobster, the Adventure Coaster, and the Ferris wheel.

Bobster Roller Coaster at Takakonuma Greenland

The park gained popularity and notoriety for being the only park with a roller coaster in the area. In fact, it actually had two, though this isn’t clear from the basic abandoned photos. I’ll link to an image which sets the scene nicely, showing the entrance to the Bobster, with the Adventure Coaster just up the hill out of frame. Bobster was made by Togo, and some pictures can be found at the RCDB, as well as at our abandoned explorers blogs. Although there were only three Togo Bobsters ever made, one is still operational, at Shirakabo Resort Family Land, also in Japan. These coasters were all manufactured in the early 1980s, and feature a single car with three riders all in a row. If you’re listening and haven’t had a chance to click over to the pictures, think about the Jet Star and Jet Star 2, and that general genre of 1980s retro-futuristic design, and you’ve got the Bobster. The front of the car almost looks like a face with a big oval mouth and two lights for eyes.

The Bobster remained waiting for riders to the very end, with a spare car parked on a side track, and two cars left waiting at the station, exposed to the elements, cushions faded and peeling. In the abandoned state, the grasses and small pines grew up around and through the Bobster track, leading to some incredibly eerie photos. Images: image one / image two / image three.

Jet Coaster Adventure Coaster at Takakonuma Greenland

Up the hill was the bigger coaster, and this is the more iconic one in our abandoned knowledge. It was called by two names on official park signage, both Jet Coaster and Adventure Coaster. It featured a white track and red cars with three white stars painted on the fronts. The RCDB suggests that this was a “non-looping” version of a Meisho Amusement Company coaster.

Most indications are that this coaster was installed in 1982 when the park was renovated.

This coaster looks particularly thrilling in photos, especially in the often-foggy environments of the Date hillside. The track itself doesn’t seem to have been particularly exciting, but with the coaster up on a hillside, the track itself is particularly elevated, adding an extra thrill element, as well.

And in particular contrast to the claims about the lack of imagery of the park in operation, we have video of this ride in operation: a 1990 compilation video which primarily shows the roller coaster from a variety of different angles, including an on-ride view. Guests can be seen queueing for the ride along the entire length of the lift hill. The park was certainly built in a different time period, safety-wise, as there is nothing but a short stretch of 3’ chain-link fence separating curious guests from the first drop on the coaster. The ride itself seems fairly tame, without significant drops or airtime, and the coaster seems to go quite slowly. Take a look at a less-often seen image: sunset over the coaster.

In its abandoned state, this coaster is one of the primary stars of the park. The rails are incredibly rusted after only five years of abandonment, which must speak to how poorly the coaster was maintained to begin with. Reddish orange streaks drip over the entire structure, like an ominous icing.

Ferris Wheel at Takakonuma Greenland

Finally, up at the top of the hill, past the Bobster and the Adventure Coaster, sat the Ferris wheel. I love the look of this wheel, with round cars dangling like teardrops from the circular frame. All of the urbex photographers have oodles of photos of the wheel.

By the time of our photographers’ visits some five years after the ride last spun, vines and other climbing plants had overtaken the wheel, climbing up the support poles and wrapping around the lower gondolas. Kuke states that the manufacturer of the wheel is “ Toyonaga Sangyo”, apparently the same maker of the wheel at the abandoned “Koga Family Land” park in Japan, which we’ll get to someday. (Image of the manufacturer’s plate: http://www.uer.ca/locations/viewgal.asp?picid=89239)

The wheel is small, reportedly only 25 meters in diameter, but it’s incredibly charming looking. A nicely-kept version of the wheel still operates today at Kamine Park in Hitachi.

Missing Rides at Takakonuma Greenland

Of course, as I mentioned, certain rides were shuttered before the park itself closed. We’ve already mentioned a few of these – the Looper and the Enterprise both had their names scraped from the park map. Other things, like a picnic area and a places where kids could ride motorized cars like those you might find at a mall, were also scratched off the map.

Labeled but rarely seen is the “ducks”, number 5 on the park map, and across from it, the flying elephants, number 4 on the map. The map image for the ducks appears to be children riding in a dog. Kuke saw a pile of rubble in this spot, including a sign showing a goldfish and a turtle. I’ll include a link to the image – if you can read Japanese, take a look at the sign on the front of the booth and see what you can make of it. Kuke also comments that the other spot, for the flying elephants, was just grass and concrete at the time of his visit. It’s possible that the common translation of “ducks” is incorrect; a different site calls it “Dachs”, as in dachshund, which would make much more sense with the image of children riding on a dog. Image of an unknown set of parts: http://www.uer.ca/locations/viewgal.asp?picid=182731

Urban explorers report a concrete slide down the side of the hill, which has not been labeled on the map. Perhaps this was a part of the children’s outdoor picnic area?

If you watched the video of the park’s operation, you can also see an impressive Viking boat, this one themed to a dragon theme with two ferocious heads. This was marked on the map but not visible in any urbex images, so this ride was likely sold. 

And up beyond the haunted house, there was once an outdoor petting zoo, said to have featured reindeer and bunny rabbits. This too was scraped off the sign, indicating an early closure. Kuke photographs an unknown building which may be restrooms or related to the zoo operations. Again, with the castle theme. 

It seems that the resource-heavy rides requiring staff manpower were closed early, to save staff hours and to make some money back when the writing was already on the wall (the enterprise and the Viking boat). 

Of course, in its abandoned years, the park was memorialized not only by urban explorers, but in a few pieces of media, including a music video (the opening theme for the “Freedom” OVA which plays the the song “This Is Love” by singer Utada Hikaru), a videogame called Siren 2 which was not released in the US, and the already-mentioned Kamen Rider 555.

Demolition of Takakonuma Greenland

Rumors about the demolition of the park abound. The creepypasta describes a still-extant park looming out of the fog in 2007. Other sources even claim the park stuck around through 2010 or beyond prior to demolition. 

But this is all hearsay and rumor.

What we actually know is from another photographer, user historicist on Flickr. They photographed a partially demolished Ferris wheel on January 20, 2007. Not only that, but they also include an image of an excavator, beginning to demolish another ride, artistically in front of the partially disassembled wheel, taken on January 22, 2007. Their comment: “By the next day the whole park had been demolished.”

After it had all been scrapped, the park sat empty and lifeless for the better part of another decade. Users who download the desktop version of Google Maps can use the time feature to see the land back through 2010 – empty concrete circles, torn zig-zags in the earth. Urban explorers describe very little left but park benches, concrete curbs, and this eerie frog-shaped abandoned sign for the Jet Coaster.

In 2014, work began on the site anew. Soon after, and still to this day, the former site of the Takakonuma Greenland Amusement Park is now covered in solar panels, gleaming shiny and silver in the rare sun.

The source of some of the modern rumors is the single abandoned urbex video we’ve got, a shaky, snow-covered, pixelated video of the rusty Adventure Coaster. The more popular version of the video is actually a repost, claiming that the posting date of the video supports a still-extant park in 2014. However, it’s a repost. The original video clarifies that this is a video from an urbex in 2003. Here’s a link to the original video. I recommend you click through – it’s fantastic and eerie to see the rusty coaster and theme park environs in greater detail, especially in the strange snowy environment. 

Legend of Takakonuma Greenland

The legend of Takakonuma Greenland still persists today. 

People often write of deaths at the park, though there’s no clear available factual information to this point. There are stories of suicides, of people thrown off the roller coasters, of couples dying together. They all seem to stem from English-speaking top ten lists about abandoned and haunted places, with each site trying to top what other sites had written. Every Japanese site writing about the park almost seems politely mystified by the park’s popularity, greater in the absence of the park than it ever was in life.

There’s no evidence for any foul play or bloodshed at the park.

But still, the legends persist. Ghostly voices heard near the site of the former coaster, ghosts said to be seen by the former haunted house. Strange feelings in the head after visiting the park. 

Perhaps it’s that original creepypasta story which seeds the English-speaking perception of the park. Perhaps it’s the relative lack of photos and videos. I think a lot of it lies in the language barrier, where all the fond remembrances from visitors to the park are in Japanese. (Not only fond remembrances, of course – I’ve seen people complaining about the small size of the park, the amount of insects, and the way people got injured on the Chain Tower swings.) And until recently, not a lot of pictures of the park were easily available to find.

Those that are common show a desolate park, ravaged by the elements. They bring to mind thoughts of the world without people, that eternal imbalancing feeling that abandoned theme park images inspire. This was once a place of laughter and fun, a bustling spot of activity. But abandoned, it’s eerie, empty, rusting into pieces, overgrown with nature.

Whatever it is, this park continues to be one of the parks that is most popular when people are searching for abandoned theme parks, despite the relative lack of concrete information about the place. 

Everyone, after all, loves a good spooky story story, especially around Halloween. 

After all, when you’ve looked at these Takakonuma Greenland pictures, did you see a ghostly figure of a girl in a white dress, peeking out of the fog? 

Are you sure?

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

Thanks and References

This week, I’d like to recommend the original photographers to you. I’ll put the links in the reference section of the shownotes, but I’ll call them out here as well. Many of my references are in Japanese, so please use the auto-translate function of your browser (like Google Chrome).

The 2004 visit of Kuke: http://www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~punch-ht/haikyo/h042009.html 

Jens’ visit in 2006: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jensofjapan/albums/72157625053218600 and his blog post about the visit: http://jensofjapan.blogspot.com/2006/11/takakonuma-green-land.html; and his video containing even more still images: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M-PnUmhRiA

And the images of user historicist on Flickr, in late 2006 and early 2007: https://www.flickr.com/photos/historicist/albums/72157594493640319/with/182581308/

You might also check the multiple galleries at uer.ca: http://www.uer.ca/locations/show.asp?locid=22541

References

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14. Creepypasta, or Internet Scares, if You’re Bored at Work – The New York Times. http://web.archive.org/web/20190726194510/https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/fashion/14noticed.html. Accessed October 2, 2019.
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40. Sanriku Ruins Movie 6 [Takakonuma Greenland]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac4LQfP580M&t=2s. Accessed October 8, 2019.
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45. Anthony. Takakanonuma/Takakonuma Greenland Deleted Video.; 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-56eQrNG8Bs. Accessed August 23, 2019.
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58. どらやき on Twitter: “すごーく近所にあった、高子沼グリーンランドっていう遊園地の話を聞きました。 閉園してからの廃墟っぷりがすごくて、検索する手が止まるレベル･･･ https://t.co/mp8jvRsZ6A” / Twitter. Twitter. https://twitter.com/dorarararayaki/status/801794010213847040. Accessed August 24, 2019.
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60. 之 裕 之 on Twitter: “Takakonuma Greenland in Fukushima, famous as an abandoned amusement park. Even if a solar panel is installed, the ground will collapse due to rainwater and the new solar panel will be abandoned. Since it will become, please note → https://t.co/vrTcT29iyZ https://t.co/b9nuioanmp “/ Twitter. Twitter. https://twitter.com/electricdaddy/status/851555677344378881. Accessed August 24, 2019.
61. 日本で二番目に怖い場所 福島県「高子沼グリーンランド」. NAVER まとめ. https://matome.naver.jp/odai/2142742314381060701. Accessed October 2, 2019.
62. 昭和日記 (#吹き抜けマニア の人) on Twitter: “消えゆく日本の廃墟より… ・高子沼グリーンランド 福島県 #廃墟 https://t.co/Em6xS9P0lC” / Twitter. Twitter. https://twitter.com/showadiary_com/status/943482607718735872?ref_url=https%3a%2f%2fleisurego.jp%2farchives%2f169611. Accessed August 24, 2019.
63. 死亡事故の噂が残る福島の廃墟テーマパーク「高子沼グリーンランド」の現在. スパイシービュー. https://spaicy.jp/takakonuma-greenland. Published September 15, 2017. Accessed August 24, 2019.
64. 海外でも有名!? 廃墟・高子沼グリーンランドがめちゃめちゃ怖い・・・. NAVER まとめ. https://matome.naver.jp/odai/2139899947228872201. Accessed August 24, 2019.
65. 福島県北部-伊達市-高子沼-その1-2016年4月上旬. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r58zs4I2A1Y. Accessed October 8, 2019.
66. 福島県民にとって想い出の映像集. 気ままにブログ三昧. http://musoujin.cocolog-nifty.com/blog/2018/09/post-2a5d.html. Accessed August 24, 2019.
67. 芝公園公太郎（ポートレートと廃墟を撮る人・ドローンフォトグラファー） on Twitter: “フィルムカメラの時代に出会った「甲賀ファミリーランド」「高子沼グリーンランド」で見た景色は死ぬまで忘れないと思います。 https://t.co/TiGgp9oGAp” / Twitter. Twitter. https://twitter.com/ruinsds/status/940222725905268741. Accessed August 24, 2019.
68. 高子沼グリーンランド. In: Wikipedia. ; 2019. https://ja.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=%E9%AB%98%E5%AD%90%E6%B2%BC%E3%82%B0%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E3%83%B3%E3%83%A9%E3%83%B3%E3%83%89&oldid=73303678. Accessed August 23, 2019.
69. 高子沼グリーンランドは世界レベルの心霊スポット？恐怖の廃墟の現在までを解説 | Leisurego | Leisurego. https://leisurego.jp/archives/169611. Accessed August 24, 2019.

Map of Takakonuma Greenland with Key

1. Ferris wheel (観覧車)
2. Jet Coaster / Adventure Coaster (アドベンチャーコースター)
3. Bobster (ボブスター)
4. “Flink Elephant” (Flying Elephants) (フラインクエレフアント)
5. “Ducks” or “Dachs” (クックス)
6. Go Kart (ゴーカート)
7. Sky Cycle (スカイサイクル)
8. Game corner (ゲームコーナー)
9. Twin dragon (swing)
10. (house? Shops or snacks?)(caption unclear)
11. (enterprise)(no caption)
12. (looper)(no caption)
13. (information booth)(unclear)
14. (gate)
15. Merry-go-round (メリーゴーランド)
16. SL (train)
17. Chain Tower (チェーンタワー)
18. “Little child open space” (ちびっこ広場 (電動遊貝))
19. (Haunted house and later insect museum)(no caption)
20. Picnic Square (ピクニック広場)
21. (outdoor play area) (no caption)
22. (deer and rabbit garden) (no caption)

A video of still photos from the park’s operation: https://youtu.be/PRLrAvDPjiE

This episode might be called Americans are dumb or lazy, honestly.

The post Takakonuma Greenland (高子沼グリーンランド) appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

The Human C. P. Huntington

The roots for this episode began growing a long time ago. I was looking at pictures of miniature theme park trains on Google. I started seeing these trains that looked really similar, except for the numbers on the sides, and started casually making A List. I later learned they were called C. P. Huntingtons, but I still had that question: what was the deal with all these trains?

The story of the C. P. Huntington trains begins with a member of “The Big Four”, the four tycoons who built the Central Pacific Railroad. We start our story with a great man from the 1800s: robber baron Collis Potter Huntington.

Collis had a nose for buying and selling. If you’re at all a fan of Star Trek, he would’ve made a fine Ferengi – very concerned with profit. Born in 1821 on the East Coast, Collis came westward in his late twenties, making money by selling supplies during the California gold rush. He was an entrepreneurial man, making his way up in the world by moving on to hardware store ownership before setting his sights on the “railroad issue”.

Collis invested in the new Central Pacific Railroad Company, along with the other members of the Big Four: Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker. Ultimately, their railroad in California connected with railroads from the east to finally make transcontinental travel possible.

Starting in 1861 in Sacramento, CA, the Central Pacific railroad began building eastwards until it met the Union Pacific Railroad at Promontory, Utah, in 1869. This was accomplished with the driving of a ceremonial “golden spike” which is now on display at Stanford University.

This was a huge deal – coast to coast train travel was finally possible, allowing for people to reach the opposite coast in about eight days. This replaced months-long sea voyages around South America’s Cape Horn, or rickety and dangerous wagon rides across the United States.

Huntington continued on throughout the rest of his life as a railroad tycoon, getting involved in the Southern Pacific Railroad line, too. He became a lobbyist, bribing politicians and Congressmen. He was reportedly one of the most hated railwaymen in the country by the end of his life, due to his preference for profit over people. According to his contemporaries, he was “possessed of the morals of a shark.” 

The CP Huntington Locomotive

Now that we’ve talked about the man, let’s get into the story of the locomotive that bore his name: the C. P. Huntington. 

“In the early days of locomotive building, it was considered a great achievement when that pygmy engine with a flaring superfluity of a smokestack, the C. P. Huntington, was put on the road,” wrote a 1926 newspaper op-ed.

Stories from a century ago often seem to bring up the wild adventures of these “Monarchs of the West” as the early Iron Horse engines were called. Apparently, all of these vintage engines were known for having interesting stories or thrilling escapes. 

The CPH was one of these. 

Origin of the CPH

Collis Potter Huntington needed some engines for his transcontinental line, but nothing else was available due to the Civil War – only these two small identical engines. Both engines had originally been built for a different railway back East, but were never delivered as the original purchaser did not pay for them. Collis Porter Huntington went ahead and purchased the CPH and her sister.

The engines shipped from Cooke Locomotive Works (also known as Danforth-Cooke) in New Jersey, all the way to San Francisco in a journey of 131 days around Cape Horn. CPH was #277 out of the locomotive works, and given the #3. The identical sister engine was #325 out of the factory, less popular in cultural references, was named the #4 T. D. Judah, in honor of the CP railroad’s first chief engineer who surveyed a passable route over the Sierra Nevada mountains. The CPH engine was put to use to help build Huntington’s transcontinental railway. 

The CPH: 4-2-4T

In technical details, the CPH is a 4-2-4T. I’ll give a layman’s definition of what this means, but I’m not a true train junkie (yet?), just a research nerd, so please forgive any errors. (I already know I’ll get letters about calling it a “train” and not a “locomotive”. Be kind, my train-friends.) 4-2-4T is train shorthand for the configuration of the wheels on the locomotive. A 4-2-4T has four leading wheels on two axles, two powered driving wheels on one axle (on the CPH, the big wheels) and four trailing wheels on two axles that support the tank (here, a “side tank” is noted with the T-suffix). There were other trains beyond the CPH that also bore this configuration, but a 4-2-4T is apparently colloquially known as a Huntington.

Working History of the CPH

The CPH did good work on the Central Pacific Railway, used in construction as well as pulling some passenger cars. Notably, she pulled the first passenger cars over the newly completed Western Pacific Railway from Sacramento to Stockton in August of 1869. In 1871, Southern Pacific purchased the engine and re-numbered it the #1. 

Under Southern Pacific operation, things were not as rosy for the CPH. In 1872, the train suffered a massive collision with a larger train. The engineer in the CPH was killed. Quote: “The San Jose Mercury of June 7, 1872, noted: “the construction locomotive is small, and when the collision occurred the larger engine went completely through the smaller, taking in steam boxes, cylinders, smoke stack, driving wheels, boilers, etc., and leaving it a mass of ruins.”” 

It took several years before the engine was rebuilt. Quote from “May 1, 1875, the following account appeared in the Minor Scientific Press of Nevada – most likely taken from an article originally appearing in a San Francisco newspaper. “Certainly a peculiar looking craft it is [the CPH]. The engine is of a most unique pattern, there being but one or two others like it on the coast. ”” 

However, the CPH was only put to limited use once she was rebuilt.

Around the turn of the century, the engine spent some time in storage before being rebuilt as a weed burner (someone’s got to clear the tracks, after all). Reportedly this didn’t last long either. The engine was rebuilt again back to her original configuration, and bounced back and forth out of storage in Sacramento at Southern Pacific’s machine shops, where it was put on a platform to display at the shops. She was pushed into official service retirement around 1900.

Disuse of the CPH

Why all this bouncing around instead of actually using the engines? Well, apparently this 4-2-4 locomotive design had significant issues. The single driving axle was too light and did not carry the full weight of the engine’s trailing rear end. The engine couldn’t reliably pull trains, particularly not on gradients. And the Forney-style water tank was too small, so the trains would consume all their water (necessary to make the steam) if they went any moderate distance. 

Something that’s hard to convey from all of this discussion so far is how small the CPH is. Technical schematics indicate she is 7 ¾ ft wide, 12 ½ ft tall, and 29 ½ ft long. This is incredibly small compared to many other locomotives. Indeed, some of my favorite pictures of the CPH I’ve found during my research are those where she is posed next to a larger engine.

The CPH Out of Working Service

As the years went on, loads grew larger, and the small CPH just couldn’t handle the requirements for larger modern loads of the times. With a need for bigger locomotives, the small 4-2-4s were left in storage, on back spurs at the train yard, or up on high trestles in the paint shops, for longer and longer, until they were scrapped.

The T. D. Judah, C. P. Huntington’s sister engine, was rebuilt into a 4-2-2 configuration at some point in the late 1800s. Some reports indicate that the Judah worked at a sugar plantation in the Hawaiian islands (“Sandwich Islands”); others say she was sold to the Wellington Colliery Company in British Columbia, sometime around 1889. Ultimately, the Judah was scrapped in between 1912 and 1914. (Though several of the 1922 texts I found indicated she was still in active service, nothing else I could find to substantiate this. Another 1899 text indicated she had been scrapped several years earlier. Central Pacific #93 was also converted to a 4-2-2 configuration, so it’s likely that the confusing reports is a result of mixing up the two. Big mystery, our T. D. Judah.)

Why the Poor Railroad Records?

As an interesting sidebar, you might be wondering why the stories of the CPH and the Judah are relatively light with details and mixed in with a bit of confusion. Well, as so often happens, this is a tale of fire damage. The 1906 San Francisco fires, the result of a devastating earthquake, destroyed nearly 80% of the city. Among the losses were those of the railroad: records, drawings, and photographs. A decade later in 1917, another fire in the Sacramento train shops destroyed more railway documentation. What we have available to us now from the time of the Iron Horses is what was saved by families of employees and the occasional state library record – the tip of the iceberg compared to what had been.

Back to the end of the working service record, we’d been talking about the scrapping of the T. D. Judah.

The C. P. Huntington was nearly scrapped in 1914 as well, but was saved this fate by the decision to have her put on display for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. This was a World’s Fair, meant to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal and showcase San Francisco’s recovery after the 1906 earthquake. 

At the World’s Fair, the C. P. Huntington was displayed alongside a much larger loco, a 2-4-4-2 Mallet. This was meant to drive home to the visiting audience the massive changes in railway needs over the prior 50 years, and it did so very well. The 1840s CPH looked practically like a child’s toy next to the large and modern 1900s locos.

The Original CPH on Display

Thus began the history of the original C. P. Huntington engine as a display piece and a showcase from a different era. 

In January of 1920, national papers reported the CPH being put on display in a place of honor outside Sacramento’s train shops. They called her “California’s oldest locomotive”, and in a bit of revisionist history, the papers declared that she had been the first loco to ever operate in California, a claim which certainly cannot be true. Tall tale or not, the CPH was getting a rest, and getting the due come to her.

She next went on major display at the “Days of ‘49” celebrating the 1849 Gold Rush. Not just a poem by Joaquin Miller that was turned into a song by Bob Dylan…no, in this context, I’m talking about the May 1922 celebrations in California to commemorate the Gold Rush. Old #1 was cleaned up and hooked up to a flat car with seats. She pulled passengers around the city for a modest fare of 49 cents. 

After this, she was kept in better repair, and participated in other displays and showcases, such as being part of the filming for the 1924 movie “The Iron Horse”, the highest grossing movie of that year.

The Iron Horse movie (click for more information).

Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, a lavish movie palace in downtown Hollywood that opened in 1922, held the premiere of “The Iron Horse”. During the movie’s run there, the little CPH was parked in the forecourt of the theater, facing the street, in order to help promote the film. 

She went to state fairs, dedicated bridges and railroad depots, and so on. When she was not out on display, she sat in front of the railyard there in Sacramento, under a small pavilion.

On December 16, 1935, she was even driven on a flat car down to New Orleans, where she was the first train to cross the new Huey P. Long Bridge. 

1939 Opening Ceremonies

In 1939, the engine participated in the opening ceremonies for the Los Angeles Union Station. 

The occasion was observed by Ward Kimball. If this name sounds familiar to you, that’s because he was one of Walt Disney’s “Nine Old Men”. Kimball was an animator, responsible for the creation of Jiminy Cricket (Pinocchio), Jaq and Gus (Cinderella), and the Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland) among many many others. 

Kimball was also a railway fan. He had his own narrow-gauge railway collection which he ran in his 3 acre backyard. Reportedly, Kimball’s train enthusiasm bumped up against Walt Disney’s, and Kimball helped encourage Disney to install the iconic railroad at Disneyland when it opened in 1955. 

Well, don’t mind me, going down a Ward Kimball rabbithole. He was a very interesting man, particularly if you’re into Disney. 

Why did I bring him up? 

Oh yes. Kimball was on hand to observe the opening ceremonies for the Los Angeles Union Station in 1939 because he was a train buff. Not only did he see the ceremonies, he filmed them on 16mm color film video, incredibly expensive in 1939. 

Kimball captured the only known footage of the opening. Decked out in brilliant red and green paint, Southern Pacific’s engine #1 was a relic from a different time, even in 1939 – the little engine was 76 years old at that point! It can be seen puffing smoke, wheels churning, steaming down Alameda Street in downtown Los Angeles.

It’s an incredible sight.

This was likely one of, if not THE, last time the boiler of the venerable CPH was fired and moved under her own steam.

Later Years of the CPH

The CPH was towed out for a few more railway events in the late 50s and 60s, but primarily sat on static display in the Sacramento park in front of the trainyard.

The railway donated the CPH to the state of California in 1964. It was displayed at the Stockton fairgrounds for years. After refurbishment at the Southern Pacific’s Sacramento train shops, the CPH was moved to an exterior display at the Central Pacific Railroad Passenger Station.

C. P. Huntington on display. Click for more information.

In 1981, the CPH moved into the newly-opened California State Railroad Museum, where it is still on display in 2019. 

She was restored to her 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition appearance, covered in complicated and artistic gold leaf highlights. A 1930s newspaper article on California railroad history devoted several newspaper inches to descriptions of the paint schemes of the old wood-burning locomotives – what a luxurious, different time it was to see a newspaper devote column inches to such a thing.

The engine is reportedly the only surviving standard steam engine of its type. Danforth-Cooke’s factory produced well over 3000 engines in the Iron Horse era between 1852 and 1926. Of these, only 11 reportedly remain in existence now in 2019, one of which is the CPH; she is the only 4-2-4 remaining.

Reportedly, this locomotive will never operate under its own steam again. The California State Railroad Museum made investigations as to the state of the CPH in 1998. Reportedly “the boiler shell is too worn out to be safely steamed again without major repairs and replacements that would compromise the state of the otherwise intact artifact.”

The C. P. Huntington is the second oldest locomotive owned by the California State Railroad Museum, and one of the older surviving locomotives worldwide. (The oldest known locomotive is the 1813 “Puffing Billy” at London’s Science Museum, an engine some fifty years older than our heroine the CPH.) The CSRM currently owns eight of the 45 pre-1880s locomotives still extant in the US, inclduing the CPH. The CPH silhouette even serves as the logo for the museum.

The Chance CPH

Now, if you’ve sat through this episode in confusion so far about how all this locomotive talk ties into the theme of the podcast, get ready to have a galaxy brain moment. You might think back to the Joyland episodes, for a bit of a clue to the rest of the story. 

In the mid-twentieth century in Wichita, Kansas, a man by the name of Harold Chance was building miniature steam trains. First under the Ottaway Amusement Company name, Chance incorporated his own company as Chance Manufacturing in 1961. A year earlier, in 1960, Chance had begun production on the first version of a new miniature train.

It was the beginning of something magical.

According to the CSRM, the C. P. Huntington had been displayed at at least two occasions: the Southern Pacific Centennial Celebration in 1955, and the Salute to Steam Age in 1958. (The latter event was a good-bye ceremony marking the last run of the last steam engine of SP, #4294. The engines were placed side-by-side in the park in Sacramento to mark the beginning and end of the steam era in Southern Pacific’s history). 

Additionally, scale models of the train were reported nationally around this time in the papers, including a 1951 half-size model by a man named Jack Collier, and much smaller 1.5” scale rideable models by a man named Bob Harpur. Oh, and a very large model made entirely out of fruit by an enterprising Lions Club. 

Being a person interested in trains, it’s highly likely that Harold Chance saw news reports of these events, at the very least, particularly the reports on the end of the steam era for the Southern Pacific in 1958. And like a train at a switch, we can see the leap Harold Chance might have taken.

He began building a miniature C. P. Huntington train for use in amusement parks.

Chance’s CPH was a one-third scale model of the original. His miniature version was faithful to the original as far as looks – handmade, and incredibly detailed. The littler steam engine had the unique design of the original, with the iconic stack and wheel arrangement. 

From a mechanical perspective, his models made some changes. Apparently the big “drive” wheels are false (they can even be removed without affecting the locomotive’s operation, which many operations do to ease maintenance) and the engine powers drive shafts on the front and rear trucks of the locomotive. Gone too was steam power: Chance’s model used gasoline for fuel.

He delivered his first engine to Joyland Park, there in Wichita, Kansas, in 1961.

Joyland’s iconic train served that park from 1961 until 2006. “Joyland’s train really launched Chance Rides,” said Larry Breitenstein, National Sales Director at Chance Rides, some time later. The train was last seen publicly when the park closed in 2006. Reportedly, it is in the hands of a private collector local to Wichita.

Other Chance CPHs

Joyland’s CPH wasn’t Chance’s last miniature CPH, though.

The company has produced over 400 miniature CP Huntington rides as of the time of this recording – 400+ trains over about 60 years. 

Some basic stats: engines run about $200k, and coaches run around $60k (prices from Wikipedia, date unclear). The trains are a narrow gauge. Most CPHs are 24” gauge. However, some of the early CPH models were 20” gauge. Chance still provides individual parts for the CPH in their sales inventory. This is unsurprising, as the CPH is reportedly Chance’s most popular ride.

To some in the amusement park world, the train is frowned upon – considered a cookie cutter train, which is both sad and inaccurate. Each engine has its own modifications and personality, and each engine runs differently. But to a general audience, the CPH is an incredibly popular thing – because it’s a train! Who doesn’t love to go on a train ride?

CPH #1-400+

I’m not going to talk about every single engine on this podcast – that would be a wild, very long episode and I’ll tell you right now that this will already be a long one as it is. But I will hit a few highlights. 

Why should you care, and what is the reason for me even doing this episode in the first place? 

Rabbitholes and those giant numbers on the side of the locomotive.

The best and worst thing about these trains is that they often (but not always) have the engine number visible on the side. This number is usually (but not always) the loco number from Chance. This is the reason I got into the topic in the first place – I got sucked down into a Google image search, wondering why there were similar-looking trains all around parks and zoos, and why they had the numbers they did.

A minute ago, I said “usually” the numbers reflect the manufacturing number from the factory. It’s not always true. Some park remove the numbers, some parks never have the numbers installed, and some parks change the numbers to reflect internal numbering schemes, confusing us all. The only way to accurately know which number CPH a particular train is would be to look at the builder’s plate, attached to each loco, which contains the engine’s serial number. But sometimes these too have been removed, or have become illegible.

Additionally, they are usually robust little trains. (Engine #2 has been in operation for almost 60 years at the time of this recording!) Given their hardy nature, the trains are often sold from park to park. This often leads to confusion about the trains, as when they are in storage or in the hands of private owners, their locations are unknown or unclear. Some engines have also been scrapped, such as the #29, formerly of the St. Louis Zoo, where it was involved in an accident that more or less destroyed the entire engine. Others are nearly so, such as the #8, which currently sits without wheels on the dirt at New Orleans City Park.

Should this podcast ever make money (lol) it would be fantastic to do a history on each of the parks associated with a CPH. I cannot count the number of times during my research for this topic that I would get stuck down a rabbithole for a particular train.

I’m not even going to include a list of the CPHs in my shownotes, the List being the holy grail of CPH research. For that, I’m going to direct you to the incredible Facebook group “C. P. Huntington Train Project”, where you can find an incredible Excel spreadsheet and some very smart people and a lot of cool photos.

Anyhow, let’s talk about some of the engines. Every engine has a story, and here are a few.

#2 – “Robert D. Morrell” at Story Land (Glen, NH)

The #2 is the oldest train currently in public operation, as the #1 from Joyland is in storage or private ownership. It lives at Story Land in Glen, NH, a small family amusement park aimed at the under-teen set. They have five CPHs: #2 (red), #4 (blue), #14 (in storage), #18 (used as a backup), and #47 (green).

There are a lot of interesting things about the Story Land engines that we could get into at another time. For today, we’ll talk about the number on the front. Every CPH has the year 1863 on the front of the engine – that was the year the original CPH was manufactured. There’s only one exception: CPH #2, the red engine from Story Land named “Robert D. Morrell”. It says 1861 on the front. It’s a bit of a mystery why this is. One possibility is that this is a reference to the incorporation date for the Central Pacific Railroad, which of course was where the original CPH first operated as engine #3. It’s not clear why only one engine has this plate, however (and only #2, not #1!). 

#34 – Coney Island and Lake Como Railroad

The trains with the smallest numbers are the oldest, and some of these have been through multiple hands. Let’s take the case of #34, and I’ll illustrate how you might go down a rabbithole of fascination with just a single engine. 

This engine #34 was a 1964 model, part of the “Coney Island and Lake Como Railroad” in Cincinnati. It was painted light blue and red, the “standard” color scheme, and was called “Mad Anthony Wayne.” Coney Island in Cincinnati is a park with an incredibly long history, which we may get to one day. For now, we’ll just talk about the train,where engine #34 operated with engine #35 (“George Rogers Clark”). The train and amusement park delighted guests there at the site of a former apple orchard until 1971, when Coney Island moved to Kings Island. This was a larger site, further away from the river floods that had constantly plagued Coney Island throughout its history, and most of the rides from Coney Island were moved over to Kings Island. However, Kings Island already had trains – larger Crown models, so the small CPH engines were no longer needed. 

CPH #34 was sold to the World of Golf in 1971, reportedly along with the former station which had been cut into sections. Unfortunately, shortly after it was all installed, the nearby Florence KY sewer treatment plant overflowed in 1976 into the area, and the park, including railroad, was shut down. The train was reportedly stored in the deteriorating station for most of the next 20 years. 

In the early 1990s, it was sold to the Oil Ranch in Hockley TX. It has been repainted black and red and lost its number but still operates there as of this recording in 2019.

#235 – Michael Jackson’s Neverland

Other notable trains belonged to public figures. Take #235. Michael Jackson was a hugely influential public figure, of course, no matter what your stance on his personal life and the decades of abuse allegations against him. 

His private ranch, Neverland Ranch, was over five times the size of Disneyland. It had a zoo, a movie theater, an amusement park, and two different trains. One was a CPH – #235, a 1990 model. It was customized for Michael Jackson, and had extra twinkle lights around the coach canopies, extra decorations, and a high end sound system installed. When Jackson died, David Helm (of Helm and Sons Amusements based in CA) purchased the CPH as well as other amusement rides. The engine hasn’t been seen in public since then.

#195, 196, 178, and 89 – Heritage USA

Other problematic public figures had CPHs, too, like Jim Bakker over at his Heritage USA “Christian Disneyland”. (Don’t worry, Heritage USA is a whole, giant episode for the future. The story of Heritage USA is absolutely wild.) Although general public reporting only refers to one train at Heritage USA, it turns out that there were actually FOUR. 

Two trains were delivered new to Heritage USA in 1979, funded by the many private donors who believed in Jim Bakker’s televangelism – these were #195 and #196. One of these was featured on the Tammy Faye Bakker album cover for “Movin’ On To Victory”. The other two trains were purchased used (one was described as a “shell” and the other barely ran), one of which was #178. 

When the park went under in the late 80s as Bakker’s pyramid scheme collapsed, the amusement park assets were liquidated. #195 had been involved in a minor collision with a gate during Heritage USA’s operation, and suffered cosmetic damage. It also was reportedly cannibalized for parts to keep #196 running. As such, #195 was reportedly traded back to Chance Rides during the liquidation of the park in the late 80s (1987/1988). Chance rebuilt the loco, and sold it. This engine is currently in operation at Lakemont Park in Altoona, PA, home of Leap-the-Dips, the world’s oldest surviving, still operational rollercoaster. 

#196, the loco in better shape, was purchased by private collector Mokey Choate, who owned 13+ CPH locos under the business name Big Mokey Trains, Inc. While Mokey passed away in 2016, the business is still in operation. Big Mokey Trains leases out its fleet of trains to parks. Perhaps someone needs short-term extra capacity for an event, or perhaps a park finds it cost-effective to have the trains only during the season and outsource any maintenance costs. This of course adds an extra level of confusion for any CPH hunters, as trains are rotated in and out for maintenance and may not always be at the same park. #196, then, is one of the Mokey trains, and was last seen operating at the Jackson Zoo in Mississippi.  

The other two locomotives, #178 and the unknown loco, have not been seen since.

Electric #400 and it’s Electric Brother, #402

If you’re in Houston and you’re hearing this, I hope you’ve visited the Houston Downtown Aquarium. That’s the home of the groundbreaking landmark CPH #400, the first electric CPH train from Chance. It was named “Electric Eel”. CPH #402, also an electric CPH but this time with a blue color scheme, went to the aquarium just recently, in July of 2019. 

Both trains run through an incredible exhibit called the Shark Voyage, where the trains travel through a completely see-through tunnel with a unique view on a massive shark aquarium exhibit.

Chance Rides spent quite some time perfecting their electric train. One of the few train videos they’ve posted on YouTube is from fall of 2017, showing the electric prototype in a stripped down state, taking some test laps in the Chance lot there in Wichita. 

It is likely not surprising considered today’s environmentally conscious consumers, but it appears that Chance will be making a big push for electric trains as the main CPH going forward. Reportedly, many places looking to make a new train purchase have inquired about electric models. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the next trains be predominantly electric over gasoline models, particularly for more environmentally-minded zoos.

The St. Louis Zoo’s Many CPHs

Finally, the last in the case studies I’ll cover today…the St. Louis Zoo. If there were a record for the place that has had the most CPH engines pass through it, that place might be the St. Louis Zoo.

The zoo has a long history with the engines. They started with engines #27, 28, and 29 in 1963 and 1964. The Zoo caught the CPH bug, and began purchasing additional trains for what became known as “The Emerson Zooline Railroad”. They are reportedly the business that has purchased the most trains direct from Chance, and in the early years, replaced their trains after 10 years of service. 

So when it came time to purchase the next engine, we reach the slight snag in the story. Remember how I mentioned that sometimes, the big numbers on the side of the tender don’t always reflect the manufacturer’s number? This is one of those times. The St. Louis Zoo wanted the numbers of the new trains to be consecutive. So St. Louis Zoo #30 was not CPH #30, muddling the issue of The List significantly. And, as noted, they’ve moved through a number of different trains, with their old trains being sold across the country, continuing to muddle the history of the individual trains. 

All told, St. Louis Zoo has owned a total of 23 different CPH trains to date. The current trains in operation are St. Louis Zoo #45 “Daniel Boone” (CPH #247), #46 “Pierre LaClede” (CPH #263), #47 “Lewis and Clark” (CPH #289), #48 “Ulysses S Grant” (CPH #300), #49 “Charlton Tandy” (CPH #303), and #100 “Emerson” (CPH #362, purchased during the zoo’s centennial). 

Reportedly, the Zooline Railroad is in the preliminary steps of exploring an electric locomotive purchase. Apparently the Zooline Railroad is reputedly the steepest of any CPH railroad, and there is some question as to whether the electric version could handle fully loaded trains on that grade. 

And if you’ve got a child who’s a train lover, you’ll love the St. Louis Zoo – they’ve got a program where kids can shadow an engineer for part of the day.

Other Variations on the CPH

Of course, Chance isn’t the only game in town when it comes to the CP Huntington. 

Western Train Co CPH

Western Train Co, in California, builds its own variation of the 24” miniature engine, suitable for theme parks and zoos as well. There are subtle differences between the WTC versions and the Chance version, but both are beautiful miniature trains.

Little Engines and Bob Harpur

Or, if an even smaller version is your speed, Little Engines makes a 1.5” scale model. Yep, still to this day! These can hold 2-4 people, perched on top of the cars like giants. Remember the 1950s model written up in the newspaper by Bob Harpur that I mentioned, oh, thirty minutes ago? Yep, that was these. Bob’s miniature CPH can actually be seen onscreen in the 1956 film “The King and I” starring Yul Brenner and Deborah Kerr. http://www.trainweb.org/jeffhartmann/CPH_models.html 

The episode is running long, so we probably don’t have time to get too in-depth here. However, the short version is that Bob Harpur was a fascinating man. He was incredibly involved with the live steam engine scene through his work with the Little Engines company after his discharge from the Army. He met Walt Disney in 1949 when Walt and his daughter came to the shop to look at the trains. Bob ultimately joined the Walt Disney company as an Imagineer twenty years later, in 1969. He had his hands in a number of different projects, notably including the trains at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, Disney Paris, and WDW Animal Kingdom. 

So there you go, information on two different Disney Imagineers in an episode that has little at all to do with Disney. Isn’t life grand?

CPH in Pop Culture

Elsewhere in pop culture, the CPH (or T. D. Judah, depending on your perspective) are iconic, providing inspiration for books, film, etc. The most well-known of these is the design for the Little Engine That Could – think on that friendly blue engine in your mind, and you might immediately see the parallels. Of course, as I’ve already mentioned, the logo for the California Railway Museum is a silhouette of the CPH. And the engine was featured on the cover of the Nostalgia version of Monopoly.

#44, #55, the Pittsburgh Zoo, and Chris Churilla

It’s not just the classic Little Engine That Could, though. There’s a whole series out there in recent days, aimed at the elementary school and younger audience, starring zoo trains Zippy and Guido. 

The best part is that Zippy and Guido aren’t fictional. The series is based on author Chris Churilla’s experiences with the real trains, CPH #44 and CPH #55, both from from the Pittsburgh Zoo. I know I said I was done with case studies of individual trains, but let’s get into just one more.

Churilla actually spent several years as engineer for the #44 and #55, there at the Pittsburgh Zoo. At the age of 14, he began spending summers as “host” of the trains (since he wasn’t allowed to engineer/drive them until age 18). At that time, the Pittsburgh Zoo train ride was dilapidated, giving out a lot of problems for the zoo and receiving very little love in return. After all, the trains had been there since 1965. Chris was instrumental in restoring the trains. He gathered together a group of train lovers, and together they cleaned up the trains, performed regular maintenance, and began raising funding from donors to keep the trains running. 

Eventually, Chris became the primary engineer, in charge of the whole train operation. “Engineering them was a dream come true!” he told me. In 2010, he upgraded the train exhibit (along the train route) to tell the history of the Pittsburgh Zoo and breathe new life into the ride. 

Unfortunately, despite a new paint job for the trains in 2011, the entire train ride was shut down indefinitely in 2013. Although the trains themselves were in good shape, the tracks weren’t. The zoo didn’t see sufficient value in the train ride. They were unable to find funds to repair the tracks, and were looking instead for a place to locate a new dinosaur exhibit. 

To honor Zippy (#55) and Guido (#44), Chris honored them by writing and illustrating first one, and now four, books about them. “There were so many people who loved riding the zoo trains so I wanted them to be able to continue to bring smiles to families for years to come!” If you follow him on social media, he’s recently been showcasing delightful hidden details from each book, such as the real-life counterparts to the cats, coaches, and other engines in the book. 

He still loves trains today. The CPH Facebook group I referred you to is a project Chris moderates, along with several other train-minded folks. There, they collect information on each of the C. P. Huntington trains. Chris now travels the world to ride CPHs, especially those where he can participate in “engineer for a day” programs to get his engineering fix. He also consults with zoos and parks on all things train: finding used trains, operations, and historical information. 

As of the time of this recording, a private train collector has purchased the real #44, Guido, and the real #55, Zippy, and is in the process of slowly restoring them.

No End to the CPH Rabbithole

There’s something about the CPH, that quirky little engine and her 400+ quirky little Chance copies. The CPH gets in your head, gets her hooks in you, and you can’t stop falling down the rabbithole. Maybe it’s something in the steam?

I don’t quite understand it, myself. I’ve reiterated this a few times on the podcast so far, but I’m not really a train buff, not particularly interested in the technical specs and all that. But this episode on the C. P. Huntington train is the one I’ve been working on the longest. If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d spend fifteen single-spaced pages writing an essay about theme park train history, I’d have called you mad. But there’s just something about the diminutive overall size, the comically large smokestack, the proportions of the wheels…the CPH just such a classic-looking train, and she really gets in your head.

There’s so much interesting information out there, not only about the 400+ Chance trains but about the namesake engine herself. Someday I hope to visit many of the places I’ve covered on the podcast and visiting the original CPH on display in northern California is definitely high on my bucket list.

Chances are (see what I did there?) that there’s a CPH at a zoo or theme park near you. Maybe get out there and ride one soon. 

All aboard!

Acknowledgements

I’d like to particularly thank Chris Churilla for patiently answering my many questions on the C. P. Huntington trains. You should check out his Facebook group “C. P. Huntington Train Project”, an exhaustive resource and archive for the person interested in compiling a more complete history of each Chance C. P. Huntington. And check out his books about Zippy and Guido – ask your local bookstore, or find them at a major online retailer. 

I also recommend the 1943 article by D. L. Joslyn, “The Life Story of the Locomotive C.P. Huntington As Told By Itself”, available for free online. It’s a charming chatty first-person history of the original locomotive, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

Podcast cover background photo is by 4045 on freepik.com. C. P. Huntington photo is by Chris Churilla, used with permission. Theme music is from “Aerobatics in Slow Motion” by TeknoAXE. Incidental sounds and ambience: FreeSound.org (Dungeness miniature railway – jjbulley; old railway station – YleArkisto; Jacksonville Zoo Ambience – inspectorJ; Amusement Park – _alvaro_; Steam Train Interior – allh; Brighton carousel – onetwo-ber) and freesfx.co.uk (Blacksmith Working on Anvil With Hammer).

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show on your podcast app. You might also leave a review, or share an episode on social media. Your word of mouth brings new listeners to the Abandoned Carousel fold.

I’ll be back soon with another great episode, so I’ll see you then. As Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

References

I’ve included a complete list of references used while researching this topic. It’s hidden under the link for brevity.

The post C. P. Huntington appeared first on The Abandoned Carousel.

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History of the Yangon Amusement Park

Myanmar, also called Burma, is located in Southeast Asia. For much of its history, Myanmar has faced violent civil wars and military dictatorships and isolationist policies. Yangon was for many years the capital city. However, the brutal military junta officially established Naypyidaw (200 miles north of Yangon) as the new capital in 2006, and moved governmental functions there. Rationale behind the move is, like most things in today’s story, unclear; The Guardian called it a “vanity project”. Climate considerations may also have been a significant factor. Located close to the coast, Yangon suffered terrible damages several years later during 2008’s Cyclone Nagis: 100,000 people killed and over ¾ of the industrial infrastructure wiped out. Much of Yangon today lacks basic services like 24-hour electrical service and regular garbage collection.

It is against this background that we begin to talk about the Yangon Amusement Park. If you think it’s odd that I keep saying “Yangon Amusement Park”, that’s because the park doesn’t clearly have a readily available name. Most sources refer to the place as the “abandoned Yangon Amusement Park”. Some sources call it “Game City”, which may or may not be accurate given that there is another “Game City” nearby. Coconuts, a major Asian multimedia company, produced a short documentary calling the site “Best Zone”, but it is the only source to do so. For the purposes of our story today, I’ll keep it simple and call it the “Yangon Amusement Park”.

Yangon Amusement Park

The Yangon Amusement Park was opened in 1997. As we’ve briefly mentioned, the government at the time was a brutal dictatorship constantly engaged in violence and civil war. The Yangon Amusement Park was likely built to serve as a flashy distraction from the evil things the military rulers were doing elsewhere in the country. It does seem the distraction from life under tyranny worked to some extent, with some locals remembering the park fondly from their childhoods.

Several big names from the Burmese government attended the opening ceremony for the park, as well as the Japanese ambassador. The park was heralded as a “world-class” amusement park with modern attractions. Reportedly, many of the rides came via Japan. The Yangon Amusement Park was notable for opening the first roller coaster in Myanmar (yes, in 1997).

Click here to view a series of images from the park in 2009 during the park’s operation.

Though the park is located next to the Yangon Zoo and were both reportedly meant to be one attraction originally, a dispute over ticketing meant that the companies in charge of each ran them separately.

Yangoon Amusement Park covers ten acres next to the Yangon Zoo. The zoo still operates, although the majority of its animals were moved to the new capital of Myanmar, Naypyidaw, around 2006. Today, hundreds of visitors walk past the park each day while visiting the zoo, unaware of the delights that once echoed just yards away.

Closure of the Yangon Amusement Park

As with the name of the park, the date and reasons for the closure of the Yangon Amusement Park are also shrouded in mystery. The park operated for about 15 years, reportedly closing in 2012 or 2013. No one is willing to say much about why the park closed, either. One source says that the director of the company leasing the land failed to renew the contract, apparently because he couldn’t attend a meeting with the Ministry of Forest due to being “out of town”.

Other rumors says the area around the karaoke bars at the park got too noisy, with gossip about authorities stepping in to break up fights and rumors about a murder or death in the park. Some locals say the park is haunted.

Abandonment of the Yangon Amusement Park

Due to the tropical climate, the park has fallen into decay quite rapidly, after being closed only 5 to 6 years. Think Jurassic Park, but with roller coasters instead of dinosaurs. No demolition was done; the park was simply closed, so all of the rides are still in place despite the years of abandonment.

Online, you’ll find that Yangon amusement park is popular for being friendly to those new to the urbex world. Why? It’s easy to enter, with several broken down fences or back doors through restaurants. There is little to no security, as local residents still live in the buildings in or adjacent to the park. The materials are primarily steel, and most rides are on ground level, so there is little worry of falling through floors. The main hazards are packs of roaming dogs (common to the city as a whole) and mosquitoes.

Monkeys and birds call noisily from overhead at times as visitors enter the park.

Even though the park has been abandoned for several years, it’s notable that there is little to no graffiti or vandalism in the park. A few minor tags exist, mostly in the arcade hall, and other incidents are harmless, such as moving the pirate around in the Viking boat. Had this park been left abandoned in the US, the images and video would paint a very different story.

#Yangon #AmusementPark offers an exciting #urbanExploration in a creepy #abandonedPark with wild dogs: exciting urban exploration in a creepy abandoned park with wild dogs Personal highlights – Saturday, March 10, 2018 https://t.co/Z9pc8KSwHM pic.twitter.com/1AOacnowS1

— Adrian Sameli (@aSabbatical_com) July 16, 2018

Rides at the Yangon Amusement Park

Let’s talk about rides, babee.

Roller Coaster at the Yangon Amusement Park

Always a good first draw for an abandoned theme park, the decaying roller coaster is often the most visible symbol of a once-vibrant amusement park. In the Yangon Amusement Park as well, we have one. The rollercoaster now decays under a tangle of quickly-growing vines. The RCDB only gives the details that this was called “Roller Coaster” and is a steel coaster. Pictures from its operation show a track, already rusting, perched on support poles painted a brilliant yellow and blue. The cars were standard coaster cars, top half red, bottom half white.

Today, with the park abandoned, tattered advertising flags still hang from the fence surrounding the coaster, where the cars and track come alarmingly close (by modern safety standards) to fences and pedestrians.

Fast-growing vines and small trees are quickly engulfing the structure, but the view from the top does appear magnificent. Climbing to the top of the coaster is popular with explorers due to the excellent view of the park and city.

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The Rocket at the Yangon Amusement Park

From the top of the roller coaster, you can see a strange oblong object peering up above the canopy. What could it be?

This ride, called The Rocket, is a classic Roll-o-plane or Dive Bomber type ride, where two capsules sit at the end of a long metal shaft, attached to a seemingly flimsy tower. The capsules spin as the shaft rotates, for extra thrills. According to Sam Aung Moon, who visited the park as a child, “people with heart conditions weren’t allowed to get on” that one.

In its abandoned state, the Rocket is incredibly eerie. One capsule rises high up in the air, like a rusting lookout peeking over the top of the green canopy of trees. The other capsule sits at ground level, doors falling open, tilting to one side. Lichen covers the once brilliant blue paint.

Abandoned entertainment park in Yangon, Myanmar (Burma) [4032×3024] [OC] #Abandoned #AbandonedPorn #Cool pic.twitter.com/PVLS0AW8xm

— Explore the world! (@Traversed) January 16, 2018

Viking Ship + Pirate at the Yangon Amusement Park

Another popular and fascinating ride is the Viking pirate ship. The designer of this ride, or perhaps just the designer of the park, certainly had a fun time. One sign for this ride indicates that the crew is seafaring pirate bandits, and the other promotes the idea that the crew is 10th-century Scandinavians with battle-axes.

The ride itself is a small, standard swinging pendulum ship. A lifesize figure of a pirate stands guard on the ship. The pirate is eerie, with a pale face and haunted-looking eyes, one hand reaching up empty towards the sky. He is not permanently attached to the ride, and does move around at the whims of explorers.

Not often mentioned or photographed is another pirate figure, up in the structure of the ride’s supports, looking out from a circus-like crows’ nest at nothing but the green, ever-encroaching trees.

Of course, there is the boat: covered in mildew, grime, and faded, peeling paint. A rather fearsome dragon face is on the prow, and Viking helms decorate the sides of the structure.

Adventurous visitors can push the ride back and forth, frighteningly enough. Tree branches have grown between the support struts, slowing the motion down.

The locals are said to enjoy relaxing on the ship and gently rocking back and forth after a game of ball.

Abandoned Amusement Park in #Yangon #Myanmar pic.twitter.com/iA98pwBbZ5

— SIMONTIDE (@SiMONTiDE) November 21, 2018

UFO Cycle at the Yangon Amusement Park

The UFO Cycle is a unique ride from the perspective of an American audience. The attraction is still manufactured today by “Ali Brothers” ride company in China, and is primarily seen in small parks around India, China, and other countries in Asia.

The UFO Cycles ride is a large wheel sitting on end, with seats for two people inside. As the guests pedal, the wheel turns and pushes the “monorail” car along the elevated track. Multiple wheels move along on the same track, independently.

At Yangon Amusement Park, the pedal mechanisms have long been removed from the abandoned UFO Cycle cars. However, the cars themselves can still be pushed along the track by adventurous explorers without a fear of heights. Painted with faded stars in a classic primary color scheme, the UFO Cycle is my personal highlight from the images of the park. I would’ve enjoyed riding this ride in the park’s heyday, and find it particularly attractive in abandonment.

View this post on Instagram

Lifecycle of an abandoned amusement park.This somewhat spooky but fascinating amusement park is hidden in plain sight in the middle of Yangon, with all the rides still there. Look around for yourself: I made a video of my urban exploration of the park – see my blog (link in profile bio @matthewseow #xennialtraveller) #yangonoftheday

A post shared by Xennial Traveller Vlogger (@matthewseow) on Jan 14, 2019 at 6:08am PST

Bumper Cars at the Yangon Amusement Park

The Yangon park reportedly had not one but two classic bumper car halls. These are open air structures with half-height walls, and a classic Dodgem bumper car attraction is inside. In the current abandoned state of Yangon amusement park, the bumper cars lie piled in a corner of the open-air hall, as if a giant hand tossed them away in a fit of spite.

Today, the youth of Yangon use the bumper car halls as a free, shady area for playing football.

Snuck into this incredible abandoned amusement park in #Yangon #Myanmar. I was chased away twice before a friendly man let me in through a hole in the fence beside his shop. pic.twitter.com/ddtZneULfS

— Karen Sweeney (@karenlsweeney) July 16, 2018

The Twister at the Yangon Amusement Park

This one is quite popular in the social media images these days, perhaps just for the questions it inspires. The Twister is a ride consisting of a series of round capsules, like giant tuna cans. Each capsule holds two riders, and the capsules rock back and forth. I’ve been unable to find a name for this type of ride – if you know, please comment or reach out on social media!

Yes, it’s possible to do a complete 360 on the ride, even now in the park’s abandonment. Back when the ride was operating, an engine spun all the capsules around simultaneously.

In the abandoned state of the Yangon amusement park, a family of wild dogs has made itself at home in the mechanical parts that once operated the ride. Adventurous explorers can still rotate themselves 360 degrees in the capsules, if they wish.

Attempting (unsuccessfully) to find the entrance to Yangon`s new Elephant Museum this weekend, I instead stumbled into the abandoned theme park. Just me and the crows. Amazing place. Reminded me of Berlin`s Spreepark, sitting somewhere between the unearthly and the exuberant. pic.twitter.com/xpqjwPajtL

— Bertie Alexander (@Bertie_Alexandr) March 4, 2019

Carousel at the Yangon Amusement Park

You know I love a good abandoned carousel, right? The carousel in Yangon Amusement Park is delightful in its abandoned state. Paint is faded and chipping, and the classically carved horses look wistfully at the viewer, as if longing for better days. Faded banners flap nearby, and dried leaves collect underfoot.

A second, smaller carousel nearby features toddler-sized horses. They’re much more cutesy and cherubic and this mini-carousel stands next to several decaying photobooths.

Abandoned theme park in Yangon, Myanmar. via /r/urbanexploration https://t.co/Z0x3xBNkZz pic.twitter.com/fyabfwb3i0

— Emanon (@RadioMy) August 29, 2018

Other Rides at the Yangon Amusement Park

Enterprise

Though not often photographed on social media, the park does have an “Enterprise” type ride – yes, named after the ship from Star Trek. The ride is manufactured by a Hungarian company, and can still be seen operating in 30-40 places around the world.

The Enterprise ride starts with the riders seated in one of 20 gondolas (space themed) on the ground. There are no seatbelts. The ride begins to spin clockwise, and then a hydraulic arm shifts the entire circle from the horizontal plane into a nearly vertical plane.

Though this ride looks like a basic flat ride in its abandoned state, this would’ve been quite impressive in action.

The ride at Yangon’s abandoned park will never operate again, covered in rust, slick algae and mold, and creeping vines from the trees nearby. The logo for the Japanese “Justmeet Corporation” is barely visible on the control panels, flaking away with the rain and the rust.

Astro Swinger

Another ride not often seen in urbex shots is the “Astro Swinger”. This is a chair swing ride with a bright yellow frame. Most chair swing rides have a circular top support and a solid central cylinder. This ride, however, has a very open upside down funnel shape for its support framework.

The cars of the Astro Swinger could very generously be said to have a car theme: they are boxlike with two small faux headlights for theming. Disneyland this is not (though there is a photo Disney stand underneath another of the rides).

Balloon Cycle

On social media, one of the most photogenic and popular rides is the hot air balloon ride. It is named the “Balloon Cycle”, and is located just a few feet from the carousel.

This ride appears to be similar to the Zamperla “Balloon Race” ride, and would raise guests and their balloons up in the air before tilting and spinning them.

Several of the canopies for the balloons at Yangon Amusement Park have collapsed, and a small tree appears to be growing through the center of the frame now. The classic rainbow color scheme on the balloons is now faded, adding more sad, picturesque beauty to the scene. Occasionally, music and laughter echo over from the neighboring zoo, making the scene even more surreal.

Happy Child World Arcade Hall

Don’t get confused with another local theme park called “Happy World”. This is the name for a small arcade hall at the Yangon Amusement Park. Inside, boxy, clunky video game consoles are piled up, covered in dust and grime.

There are also plenty of large animals and other cute figures. Each holds its own defunct game console, like one might find in a mall. A simple ride features two cars that once soared over the hall at ceiling height.

This is also where the “baby garden” is located. The baby garden is a small maze of nets and plastic ball pit balls with a few basic climbing structures.

This area can be the most eerie, with the sudden appearance of a grimacing plastic face from under a tumble of leaves.

The park had a bustling variety of other buildings, as well – shops, massage parlors, restaurants, karaoke halls. Most were independently owned. Some of the owners still live on the property. Diners, bars, and other small businesses back onto the property. Some residents (the younger ones, as a whole) enjoy the park in their backyard. Others don’t. “No one has driven the staff out of the shops, so they can stay here for now,” says resident Ko Soe.

The children in the area treat the park as their own personal playground. Some even call the abandoned park a “living museum” in the heart of Yangon. Images and video from the park show a serene place, set back away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Future of the Yangon Amusement Park

The park appears calm on the surface. However, things are not all that they seem. The company that built the park in conjunction with the Ministry of Forest (Doh Pyi Thar Enterprises) was dissolved in 2016. Their office near the park’s former entrance has been closed since 2016.

The land currently belongs to the Yangon authorities.

Around June 2017, rumors went out that the government was calling for the land to be “put out to tender”, or opened up for bids for redevelopment. Reports from the site “Myanmar Builders Hub” officially describe the park as being up for redevelopment as of November 2018. A design proposal was revealed in April 2019.

It appears that the park will be razed and rebuilt as a new Yangon amusement park, designed by the Amenity Design Group. Time will tell, but it seems that the days for this picturesque abandoned park may be numbered.

At least we’ll always have photos.

Remember that what you’ve read is a podcast! A link is included at the top of the page. Listen to more episodes of The Abandoned Carousel on your favorite platform: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RadioPublic | TuneIn | Overcast | Pocket Casts | Castro. Support the podcast on Patreon for extra content! Comment below to share your thoughts – as Lucy Maud Montgomery once said, nothing is ever really lost to us, as long as we remember it.

References

I’ve included a complete list of references used while researching this topic. It’s hidden under the link for brevity.

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• Lucy Maud Montgomery / Canadian World / Anne of Green Gables
• Okpo Land
• Takakonuma Greenland (高子沼グリーンランド)
• C. P. Huntington
• Yangon Amusement Park

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