Crazy things you hear while waiting in line...

My daughter is now 52", but she wasn't in July, just 51.5 or so.

One of the ride ops said she was tall enough for MaxAir. I let her go and was scared to death until the ride was over. I shouldn't have let her go, but got caught up in the moment. Never again, she will wait until she is 54" to enjoy those rides.

98 times

cman2322 said:
I always get next to the good ones in line for Demon Drop and Power Tower. One time a girl told me that the ride ops were terrible and I had to make sure my harness was secure because they don't check very well and went on to give me some insane number of people who flew out of their harness and died. Walking by Demon Drop I came across a conversation about how these girls refused to go on the ride because they knew someone died when their hair got stuck somewhere and the brakes didn't work one time and a train flew off the back.
One thing I want to know is where do these rumors start?

2004... Demon Drop...

So, one of the little things we liked to do on Demon Drop, when someone was, well, obviously dumb or being obnoxious, was, before the ops at load/unload had checked harnesses, but after the car had loaded we might have hit the "harness release" button when they were pushing up on them a few times so the harness lock would let go. Usually this would be done to car 3.

We did have one girl get her hair stuck in the harness mechanism once... took about 4 minutes to get it unstuck. No scalping involved, although she did get an unexpected trim in the end.

Then there was the time we went down for a reverse drive (aka brakes work TOO GOOD and the car doesn't make it to the kicker wheel that brings it back to the station) and the guys in the car that stopped up in the tower, who were both foreign and ridiculously thin immediately wiggled out of their harness and got out of the car and met the ride op running up the tower to check on them about 3/4 of the way up the tower... that was... interesting. You want to see every supervisor in the park show up, call into park ops and say "guests are on the tower stairs, what do we do?"

The story of a car falling down the shaft of Demon Drop has its roots in truth. Except that it happened at SFGA on "The Edge" and it didn't crash into a car at the bottom of the tower, although it could have if it was further up the tower when the cable let go as at the time the ride program was different, and the second car entered the shaft when the first neared the top. Now the second car enters the shaft when the first moves into place for the drop. This incident is responsible for the dramatic number of drop brakes in the tower as they doubled in number after this incident. In addition, there is now a way, at the base of the tower to disengage the lift from the car manually to test the drop brakes. Part of the opening routine is maintenance comes over and the ride is put into manual mode and each and every one of the brakes is drop tested to make sure it holds. This is also re-done whenever the ride has experienced downtime for rain. That ride became Mr. Hyde's Nasty Fall at Six Flags Ohio, which became spare parts for Demon Drop... so in a way...

To this day I can not get my aunt to go to the park because she claims she watched someone fly out of Blue Streak and have to be pulled back in the car by her friends in 1966. She swears up and down that this is true. I couldn't even get my cousins to go to the park until 5 years ago because of this story.

Then there is Physics Day... I HATED Physics Day. We had so many kids trying to take "measurements" that day. "I'm sorry, you can't hold an accelerometer and your ti-83 calculator when on the ride"... same goes for an accelerometer and a laptop. No, not even if you duct tape it to your hands... I really wish I was making this up.

Then there was the time wicked twister went down because someones prosthetic leg was ejected from the ride and broke the light curtain...

Ditto for the butterfly that did the same thing... my friend called that one in "Down, Loaded, Operational, "butterfly" "

... 2 guests having sex in the Disaster Transport queue...

Had a good laugh at the Dragster crew, they were bragging that they were being funny by telling people "we're down because the gyro was broken."(they pronounced this jie-row) And that was funny because it's a sandwich. To which I replied "Gyro pronounced jie-row is short for gyroscope, a actual mechanical device, what you are thinking of is gyro pronounced "yeerroh" like year-roh but with a rolling R"

Other interesting guest quotes

"What time is the 10PM laser light show" Worded EXACTLY LIKE THAT, so frequent it was in the manual
"When did they move Magnum and paint it blue" -working MF entrance
To crying child literally running away from the ride : "You get on that ****ing ride and stop being a p**** or I'll beat the s*** out of you" (Guess who called security)

Yeah so that last one... not funny, but definitely crazy.

This is a hilarious thread based on the fact that you'll ALWAYS hear something awesome/hysertical/weird or have inside jokes after a trip to Cedar Point. This year will be mine and my brother's seventh year in a row going to the park, and we always come back with stories to tell. I love it!

There was also the time I was working at millennium entrance and this guy was pissed because his friends were going on it and he couldn't fit in the test seat. He was throwing a tantrum about it and finally his girlfriend said to him, "Shut up! I love you, but we are going on this ride. Maybe you'd be able to come with us if you could learn to put down the fork every once in a while and use the gym membership I got you."

Writing that out really doesn't give her delivery of that line justice. It took everything I had not to burst out laughing.

Spont Combust said:
^ This

I like to explain it to my coworkers like this: when people go on vacation, sometimes their brains "check out". They want to focus on having fun, most people don't want to fret the details. I don't let it bug me when they come with the same silly questions.

Thats basically what they tell everybody who gets trained at Universal, " People pay a lot of money to come here and not use their brains"

When maverick opened their was a lady in line telling people their had been a accident with it. She went on to say that she was there opening day and that one of the trains ran into the other in the station and landed on top of the one in front. She was also telling them that they had to bring cranes in to separate the trains and Life Flight landed on the road.

While riding CP&LE Railroad past Maverick:

Lady #1: What ride is that?
Lady #2: That's the Magnum. I forget the name of it now, but they changed the name last year
Me: 0.o

Here's my theory on how these rumors spread.

People don't want to go on a roller-coaster, so they make up an excuse: "Well, someone died on it because (technical error, something happened, blah blah blah) so I'm not sure if we should go on.."

Then someone else hears them talking and is all "Oh my gosh, did you hear that??"

In the Mean Streak line, one person said "Too bad they took out the loop, turns out it killed a person because it was too violent."

^^^I know what you mean...That loop on Mean Streak was a real SOB.

Damn it, where is the thumbs up button when I need it. t2fastspin wins one internet.

Just this past weekend, a guy told me that he saw the Incredible Hulk coaster stuck upside down twice."suuuure it was."

Standing in line for Mantis, I saw/heard a guy, probably about 19 or 20, tell his girlfriend that one winter, they pulled apart the track sections to insert another loop.

I notice that the guests always say "they". Who is this mysterious "they"? Coaster Elves?

^^Were you at Universal this past weekend? I was.

One of the things that annoys me the most is when you're standing in line with a clear view of the coaster's layout and someone says, "How many times does it go upside down?" even if you can obviously tell that it has no inversions. I also remember hearing someone at CP say "I want to go on the flying coaster next." And I don't know why, but I always find it sort of funny but sort of annoying at the same time when people don't call the coasters by their names. For exmaple, "I like that green one that your feet dangle."

Here's another good experience. Has anyone ever heard people arguing about what color Magnum is? Once I heard someone wanting to go on "the big red one," and someone else said, "But Maverick isn't that big." Then the other persons says, "No, not Maverick, the other red one." "Maverick's the only red one." "No it's not" and then points to another coaster. "You mean Magnum?" "Yeah that one." "But it's orange, not red." "No, it's red." "Orange." And so on. Oh, the general public.

Working Mantis... "whatchu mean I gots to wear shoes? I lost them on that damn Iron Dragon ride."

When I was younger barely tall enough to ride much, I was with family and friends and I really wanted to go on Oron dragon but everybody insisted that it went upside down.

This isn't so much what i heard but more what I saw. I was waiting in line to ride Skyhawk and right when the ride stopped and they unlocked the harnesses, some girl got up out of her seat and ran up to the operators booth and opened the door and just went crazy on the ride operator blaming her for what I guess was an "uncomfortable" ride. They had to call security and everything. Looked like it was just stupid people trying to find an excuse to get free season passes.

I was waiting in line for Skyrush on it's opening day, when my sister, who was 15 at the time, saw a man who was wearing all green with red hair and a large red beard. He was also about 5'2". People in the line began to say that that man was a "leprechaun" and my sister proceeded to ask me, "Is that a REAL leprechaun?"

^ Wow, Hershey park must have opened on St. Patrick's day this year...:)