Lake Shawnee Abandoned Amusement Park

Archaeological work on the property, including teams from Marshall University and Concord College, recovered more than 25,000 artifacts and evidence of two Native villages. Owner Gaylord White has said the archaeologists stopped digging when they began finding children's graves, and the figure of some three thousand burials circulates in the site's retellings — a claim the archive notes as asserted rather than fully documented. Some historians caution that the burial-ground framing has grown in the telling, at times at the expense of the Native people it invokes.

What is well documented is the Clay massacre of 1783 — though even here the versions split, with some accounts holding that Clay sought not revenge but a proper burial and a settlement with the Shawnee.

Snidow opened the park in 1926 for the families of Mercer County's coal miners: a Ferris wheel, a swing ride, a race track, a dance hall, cabins, and a concrete pool with a hundred-foot slide added when the lake was divided in 1927. It ran four decades and collected its own casualty list — at least three children killed, including two boys who drowned and, in 1966, a young girl on the swing ride who was struck when a truck delivering drinks backed into the swings' path.

The park was ordered closed in July 1967 by the health department. White, a former employee, bought the land in 1985 and briefly reopened it in the summer of 1987 before insurance rates shut it down for good in 1988. The rides were never removed.

The haunting claims orbit the swing set. Visitors and investigators report the swings moving without wind and the figure of a girl in a ruffled dress — the story goes she is the child killed there in 1966. White himself declines to discuss his own experiences, but he has told the story of his father mowing the field on a tractor, feeling a weight settle on his shoulders, and turning to find the little girl sitting behind him. He was not frightened, White says. He only wondered what to do next.

The site now runs tours in the weeks before Halloween, marketed on the language of cursed ground. The archive notes both the marketing and the ledger underneath it: a massacre, a burial field asserted at three thousand, three children dead at play, and a swing set that still creaks when the wind, investigators are careful to note, is not blowing.