For sale: Ghost Town in the Sky
Wild West amusement park in Maggie Valley, N.C., goes on the block
If you’re a fan of Western-themed amusement parks, have $4.5 million to spend and don’t mind driving three hours from Chattanooga, opportunity awaits in Maggie Valley, N.C. Ghost Town in the Sky, a Wild West attraction between Cherokee and Asheville that featured stuntmen squaring off for shootouts in dusty streets and girls dancing the cancan in a saloon, is for sale.
Said to be Western North Carolina’s No. 1 tourist attraction after it opened in 1961, Ghost Town in the Sky advertised that it sat a “mile high” atop a mountain (actually 4,600 feet). Tourists took a chair lift, incline railway or tour bus to get to the park, which also featured such rides as a tilt-a-whirl, bumper cars and a steel-loop roller coaster called the Cliffhanger.
But the venue had problems over the years. The decline began in the 1990s, according to the Smoky Mountain News, a Waynesville, N.C.-based newspaper, and the park closed in 2002, reopened four years later and closed again in 2009 after the owners filed for bankruptcy.
The park was purchased at auction in 2012 for $2.5 million by the then 88-year-old Alaska Presley, a Maggie
Valley businesswoman who hoped to revive it — and boost Maggie Valley’s tourism.
The renamed Ghost Town Village reopened in 2014 and 2015, said Chris Soco, the real estate agent who’s selling the property. The chair lift took visitors to the mountaintop — though many of the park’s rides were too expensive to restore, he said. The plan was to rebrand the park as an Appalachian village with artisan and craft shops, and no shootouts, since that’s not as big a draw as it once was.
“There’re not any Western TV shows; you don’t see ‘Gunsmoke’ or ‘Bonanza,’” Soco said.
The shops were all leased, he said, but the 2016 season fell through because public water wasn’t hooked up in time. Water is now available, he said, but Presley wants to sell. She’ll part with the entire 260-acre property, which includes some houses, or sell just the 90-acre park, which includes the chair lift, the Old West town and all the rides.
“We’ve actually had a lot of offers on it,” Soco said.
One potential buyer, he said, “wants to do an alpine slide underneath the chairlift … like Ober Gatlinburg.”
Presley would like to sell to “somebody that’s going to take it to the next level” Soco said, and keep it going as an amusement park, though that’s not a requirement for sale.
“We’d like to get it sold,” he said. “I expect it will probably sell by the summer.”
Bill Chapin, chairman and CEO at See Rock City, Inc., who runs another closely held long-time tourist attraction on Lookout Mountain, sees pluses and minuses for Ghost Town in the Sky as an amusement park.
Anyone who buys it would have “to continue to make investments to improve the quality of the attraction and the general experience,” he said.
“I think the toughest thing for them is you gotta take the chair lift up to get there,” Chapin said. “Western North Carolina is just an incredibly beautiful part of the world to have a summer vacation.”