Lake Shawnee Amusement Park

The Lake Shawnee Amusement Park is a Ferris wheel rusting on top of a massacre. The land along the Bluestone River was Mitchell Clay's farm — Mercer County's first white settler — until August 1783, when a Shawnee raiding party killed two of his children in the field and carried a third to Ohio, where sixteen-year-old Ezekiel was burned at the stake. Clay's revenge posse killed several of the raiders. A hundred and forty-three years later, a businessman named Conley Snidow built an amusement park on the same ground for the coal miners' families of Mercer County.

The park ran for sixty-two years and collected its own deaths: two drownings in the swimming pond, and in 1966 a little girl on the swing ride was killed when a delivery truck backed into its path. The park closed the next year. A former employee bought it in 1985 and reopened it briefly, and during bulldozing in the early nineties the crews started pulling up Native American artifacts — arrowheads, pottery, and then graves. A Marshall University team excavated for years; the Whites say the archaeologists stopped when they started finding children's graves, with an estimated three thousand burials possibly wiped out by epidemic in the 1700s. The 'ancient burial ground' framing is disputed, but the digging and the bodies are documented.

The rides are still there — the Ferris wheel, the swings, abandoned since 1988, open for Halloween ghost tours on ground that has produced deaths in three separate centuries. The cursed-land story is the tourism; the two hundred years of documented dying is the file.