8 Terrifying Action Park Deaths and Injuries

Perhaps one of the ugliest and most upsetting of the incidents at Action Park, the death of George Larsson Jr. after riding the Alpine Slide is one of Class Action Park‘s main focuses. The Alpine Slide, a 2,700-foot-long track made of concrete, fiberglass, and asbestos, saw riders sit on small sleds that had a brake/accelerator stick and descend the slope. (It is acknowledged in the documentary that these sticks were often broken.) One afternoon, while visiting the park with a friend, 19-year-old Larsson boarded the Alpine Slide. The brake on his sled was broken, which evidently caused his sled to run off the track. He fell into an embankment and hit his head on a rock, an injury that sent him into a coma and killed him. Park founder Gene Mulvihill told reporters that Larsson was an employee, that he was riding at night, and that it had been raining, a story that his family disputes. (Mulvihill told this story because if Larsson was an employee, he wasn’t required to report this death to the state). State records show that between 1984 and 1985 alone, there were 14 fractures and 26 head injuries incurred from the Alpine Slide. (“Luckier” riders often escaped with severe scrapes and burns from the concrete track).

The Wave Pool at Action Park – referred to by employees as “The Grave Pool” – was responsible for multiple deaths. In Class Action Park, former lifeguards and other employees said it was too powerful and too deep, and people who didn’t know how to swim often jumped in anyway. When the water became shoulder height – “The Death Zone”, as lifeguards called it – people would grab whoever was around them and take each other down, or reach for the ladders, which led to many accidents.

Lifeguards were often hazed by being sent to “The Death Chair” that overlooked the wave pool. Twelve lifeguards were on duty at all times. They couldn’t take their eyes off the water for a second, and often had saved a handful of people in a matter of minutes. Due to runoff from the human mountain, human waste, sunscreen, and gore from open wounds, the water was murky enough that bodies often couldn’t be spotted beneath the surface, so they had stop the waves every few minutes to scan the bottom for any bodies they might have missed. In 1982, 15-year-old George Lopez drowned in the Wave Pool. Five years later, a man named Gregory Grandchamps drowned. The pool is still operational today, although it is reportedly much shallower. 

Only days after the drowning of 15-year-old George Lopez in the Wave Pool, 27-year-old Jeffrey Nathan was killed while on “The Kayak Experience”, an attraction that saw 20 kayaks travel along 1,000 feet of rapids. These rapids, as it turned out, were generated by underwater fans. Nathan reportedly flipped out of the kayak – a common occurrence for riders of this attraction – and while he was in the water trying to get back onto his kayak, one of these underwater fans short-circuited, electrocuting him. He went into cardiac arrest and died shortly after. This incident led to the permanent closure of The Kayak Experience, though the park would not take responsibility for the death, and claimed they only closed it because people would be too intimidated by it.

This infamous enclosed tube waterslide was the first thing visitors saw when they arrived at Action Park. It’s described in Class Action Park as looking like something out of a cartoon, and that’s pretty accurate. When the slide was first finished, they used dummies as test subjects, and found that they kept emerging mutilated in some way or another. Eventually, park founder Gene Mulvihill incentivized his teen employees to try the slide by waving $100 bills in their faces. As the former employees recount, that $100 bill looked preeetty good, so they crossed their arms and legs and plunged into the pitch black tube. Before padding was added, riders emerged with bloody mouths. The next round of riders came out with lacerations that initially seemed unexplainable – until they realized that the teeth of previous riders had gotten stuck in the loop and were cutting them up. Folks often exited the slide bruised, bloody-nosed, disoriented, and unable to stand, and didn’t have much room to recover in the short, shallow pond that was supposed to catch them as they landed.

Another attraction in the Water World part of Action Park, Cannonball Falls ended with riders enduring a 10-foot drop before they hit the water as they were shot out of the slide. Comedian Chris Gethard recalled getting injured when he took the plunge, and employees admitted that people were constantly pulled out of the ice cold, 17-foot deep mountain pool because they were in shock or hadn’t come out of the slide correctly. Even as recently as 2015, Cannonball Falls was still the park’s leading source of injuries – a rider that season was reportedly so badly injured he needed shoulder surgery. Eventually, Action Park (then owned by Mountain Creek) was ordered to shut it down, and they did.

While ‘Man in the Ball in the Ball’ – later called ‘The Bailey Ball’ when that became too tedious – never saw its day in the sun with actual guests, it did have a test go horribly, horribly wrong. The giant ball, covered in caster wheels, was set to go down a mountain track made of PVC pipe with a man inside. True to form, Mulvihill paid an employee named Frank $100 to test it – on one of the hottest days of the summer. Unaware that the heat had caused the PVC-pipe path to expand and the glue to melt, Mulvihill sent the ball down the hill… and it hurdled off the track and down the 600-ft mountain, crossed the freeway, and landed in a swamp. It was later rolled into the nearby woods, where it remained for many years. While Frank’s fate – aside from being very shaken up and ill – was not heavily discussed in the documentary, we can only imagine that he never strapped himself into any kind of experimental contraption again after that.

This water attraction consisted of what were essentially warehouse rollers (like the kind from an assembly line) built into the form of a ski jump. Riders would use a plastic sled and (hopefully) skid across the water as they came off the slide. Unfortunately, many guests leaned too far forward on their sleds, causing them to face-plant into the extremely shallow water, which frequently lead to head injuries. If getting concussed wasn’t enough, the ride was also home to a thriving bees nest. According to employees, guests who lingered in the water too long would often get stung. And those lingerers – they were also repeatedly crashed into by other riders coming down on their sleds. Not a great system.

Named in the documentary as another one of the park’s more dangerous rides, Roaring Rapids produced a plethora of injuries. In 1984 filing to the state of New Jersey, the park noted a slew of guest dramas; fractured femurs, collar bones, and noses, as well as broken elbows, and dislocated shoulders and knees. In Class Action Park, it is mentioned that one guest drowned “near” the Roaring Rapids area, though research appears to indicate that the 1984 death they seem to be referring to was attributed to a heart attack brought on by the shock of the cold water beneath The Tarzan Swing.