Tripping over legends in Geoje’s former amusement park
Abandoned amusement parks evoke a lot of interesting emotions in people, even though to me they’re one of the less mysterious types of abandonments I visit. But I get it, as there are anthropomorphic faces everywhere, and amusement parks have been used to creepy effect in countless movies and cartoons.
The first I ever visited was Okpo Land on Geoje Island, south of Busan in South Gyeongsang Province. A beautiful island, but I crossed the entire peninsula in December 2007 just to visit an amusement park reported to have closed in 1999.
The park was seated on a ridge overlooking Okpo-dong, a neighborhood of Geoje City located near a DSME shipyard. It had several rides, including a full roller coaster, a “Viking” swinging ship, bumper cars, carousel and a duck sky cycle offering a magnificent view of the city. There was even a building with a large swimming pool. I visited three times in total: December 2007, April 2008 and June 2011.
Prior to my first visit, the only information online was one page that I remembered being German. It made some extreme claims I accepted uncritically at the time, and years later seemed to have vanished.
However, I now believe it was a Dutch website, and a Google search result turns up the date Aug. 29, 2005, even though it now seems to be updated with the park’s 2011 demolition date. The article is a listicle of 10 abandoned amusement parks from around the world, none more recent than 2005, and Korea’s own Okpo Land topped the list.
Translated to English, the Okpo entry reads:
“The most bizarre theme park in this list is Okpo Land… It has never really been a fun park. With only a few attractions, it was certainly not a Disneyland. Yet it was well attended, it was one of the few forms of entertainment in the wide area. From the 1990s, however, strange things happened in the park, which eventually led to the closure.
“A little girl died of a mysterious accident in the duck-coaster… The owner offered the family of the child no explanation, compensation or even apologies. In 1999, however, the same happened: a girl died when the eight-wheeler, of the same rollercoaster, drove off the rails and smashed on the asphalt. Even now the owner did not want to apologize. In fact, in the middle of the night he picked up his things and disappeared … No one has ever heard anything from the man.”
No sources are cited, but rather than fact-checking, I repeated and amplified it online. On my first visit, I posed a model on many of the rides. We found the duck sky cycle ride, with one of the vehicles partially derailed; I posed the model underneath as if she had fallen.
She’d been hesitant to do this, but I assured her it wouldn’t be taken seriously. Her fears were vindicated years later when someone did post a death threat in reply to the photo. However, by then I started to doubt the story that the duck ride had derailed, dropping a young girl to her death, and everyone had just left the ride dangling, a narrative I myself had helped solidify.
Even today while putting together this article, I discovered that in a database I help maintain, the owner of Okpo Land is listed as “some a** businessman who won’t pay the families he tore apart” and I presented my own summary of the two consecutive deaths as fact.
Just last week, the Abandoned Carousel, a podcast on abandoned amusement parks, put out an episode on Okpo Land, presenting the theory based on an analysis of photographs that the duck ride was not derailed by any fatal accident. Ashley, the host, observed that the vehicle in question was on the tracks backward, and her theory is that vandals were the cause, after the park’s closure.
“A girl may have fallen off the duck ride and died, I don’t know about that — it is awfully high,” she said. “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.”