Have you ever known fear? The cold shiver up your spine. Icy fingers squeezing your heart and slowly tightening their grip until your vision goes black and you fall into a swirling abyss of horror. All you can hear are the screams of lost souls, and the loudest scream of all is your own.
I have know that fear. And it has a name.
Blackgang Chine.
Oh sure, they make out they’re all jolly and fun on their little leaflet, but don’t be taken in by their lies. Beyond their gates lies nothing but horror and death. Also gnomes. Awful gnomes with dead, staring eyes.
It all starts out innocently enough. There’s a maze you can’t get lost in, and a rollercoaster that travels at a heady 35mph, which the island children assured me was terrifying. They were wrong. The terror was yet to come.
It began in the Blackgang sawmill. There were engines and waterwheelies and the comforting smell of engine oil. We skipped and tripped through the exhibits.
They had awesome anvils.
Plenty of dead people, stuffed and arranged into interesting poses.
They even had wheelie deelies. We thought we were safe. We were wrong. Just around the corner was a world of lies, horror and atrocious spelling mistakes.
Fur? FUR? That’s not fur! THAT IS WOOD!
Where’s the sand? Where’s the sea? It’s not a bloody beach, it’s quite clearly a tree!
I was getting pretty riled by this point, as I’m sure you can imagine. But we had barely scratched the surface of the tip of the iceberg of doom.
This is a whale. I’m sure it looks innocent enough to you, but you don’t know the half of it. They expect you to walk in through the whale’s mouth LIKE A FOOL! And what happens when you’re in there? IT SQUIRTS YOU! And then you come out through its arse and you’re wet with whale juice. AS WET AS A WHALE’S BELLY! Is that any way to treat a paying customer?
This is Brian. He hides in the woods and touches people as they walk past. Parents! Do not let your children lick his mushroom.
Ne’er do wells lurk around every corner. This chap reckoned he was hard. Well he’s dead now and I have no regrets.
This is where we stumbled into the house of a well to do chap who wanted to eat us. A wittier monkey might call him a dinnersaur. Not me though. I like to refer to him as WTF?!??!
It was at this point that I stopped taking photos, so you’ll just have to take my word for the rest of it. It was the cowboy town that did for me. Or rather it was the smell of the cowboy town. We decided to leave as quickly as possible but we were very lost indeed. There was a giant snakes and ladders set that was steeper than the steepest thing, and we knew it was purest folly to play. So we went past that and found a freakass scary castle. We ran. And ended up back at the snakes and ladders. We ran again. And ended up back at the snakes and ladders.
There were more dinosaurs. Giant scary butterflies and then there was this weather wizard thing with music and goblins and I think that was when I passed out. When I woke up there was a man dancing on the floor and the floor made the music and there were mirrors that made me look funny and made my belly feel sick like Satan was playing with my kidneys and there was a crooked house and demons lived there and they wanted to eat my soul and I ran and I ran and I couldn’t get out and then all of a sudden there was the giant smuggler and I ran through his legs and back to the car but I couldn’t see the Professor and I didn’t know where he was and then there was screaming and everything went black.
I woke up back at the hotel and the Professor was there and he didn’t remember anything. If I mention smugglers or dinosaurs he starts to shake and rock back and forth and it was horrible and if you love your sanity you’ll stay away from that land of horror.