Lake Shawnee Amusement Park: The Cursed Park Built on a Burial Ground

A rusted Ferris wheel and a set of children's swings still stand in a field in Mercer County, West Virginia, slowly being swallowed by the forest. They are the bones of the Lake Shawnee Amusement Park, and the land they sit on has a history dark enough that people call it one of the most haunted places in America.

The unsettling part is how much of that history is documented fact rather than ghost story.

Lake Shawnee operated from 1926 until 1988. But the violence on this land started long before anyone built a swing set, and the ground itself holds the remains of people who were buried here centuries before the first ticket was ever sold.

The Bloody History Before the Park

The story begins in the 1700s. According to West Virginia's official tourism office, settler Mitchell Clay established a farm on this land, and in 1783, while he was away, members of the Shawnee tribe killed two of his children and captured a third, who was later killed. Clay retaliated, hunting down and killing several Shawnee in what became known as the Clover Bottom Massacre.

That was not the beginning of the land's history either. It was a Shawnee site long before the Clays arrived. When archaeologists from Marshall and Concord Colleges excavated part of the property in 1988, they uncovered 13 skeletons, most of them children, and estimated that as many as 3,000 Native American remains may lie across the grounds.

This was a burial place. Someone built a carnival on top of it.

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The Park and Its Deaths

In the 1920s, a businessman named Conley T. Snidow purchased the old Clay land and transformed it into an amusement park, complete with a Ferris wheel, a swing ride, a dance hall, and a swimming pool. For a time it was a beloved local gathering spot, full of families in wool bathing suits enjoying summers in the sun.

Then came the deaths. Around 1927, a young girl named Emiline Shrader was killed while riding the circle swing, struck as a truck moved through the park. A few years later, a boy drowned in the swimming pool when his arm became caught in a drain.

Park operators reportedly filled the pool with sand afterward to prevent another tragedy. These were the documented deaths. Local legend has multiplied them over the years, but even the verified record is grim enough: children died here, on rides meant for joy.

The park changed hands and eventually closed. The land sat quiet for two decades, the rides rusting where they stood.

The Discovery That Stopped Redevelopment

In 1985, a man named Gaylord White, who had worked at the park as a youth, bought the property. According to reporting from West Virginia news outlet WBOY, his plan was to subdivide the land and sell residential lots.

Then the digging started, and the bones came up. When crews broke ground and began uncovering Native American burial sites and artifacts, White abandoned the plan to build homes on the graves.

Instead he reopened the amusement park briefly in 1985. It lasted only three more years before closing for good in 1988. Building neighborhoods on a children's burial ground was a line the family would not cross.

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The Most Haunted Amusement Park in America

What remains today is a genuinely eerie place. The Ferris wheel and the circle swings still stand, vegetation growing through and around them until the metal and the forest have nearly become one. Visitors leave dolls and small toys as offerings near the burial sites of the Clay children.

The park leaned into its reputation. It has been featured on a long list of paranormal television programs, and the owners now run guided tours, especially around Halloween, along with an annual "Dark Carnival." People report the usual catalog of haunted-place experiences here: a girl in a white dress, said to be the ghost of Emiline Shrader, swings moving on their own, and the sound of children.

Whether or not any of that is real, the documented history is heavy enough on its own. This is land marked by a massacre, layered over a burial ground full of children, where more children later died at play.

That combination puts Lake Shawnee in rare company among American ruins. It carries the same dread as Poveglia Island, the plague island off Venice, and sits among the genuinely eerie abandoned spots that draw people precisely because something terrible happened there. Its early American tragedy echoes other dark chapters of colonial contact, like the vanished settlers of the Roanoke Colony.

A burial ground became a farm. A massacre site became a swimming hole. A children's graveyard became a children's playground. Lake Shawnee is what happens when we build joy directly on top of sorrow and act surprised when the two refuse to stay separate.

Lake Shawnee is one of many decayed thrill rides worth knowing. Explore more in our guide to the world's most haunting abandoned amusement parks, the Katrina-drowned Six Flags New Orleans, and the body chute beneath Waverly Hills Sanatorium.