Phantasmagoria
Bell's Amusement Park, Tulsa, Oklahoma
Rick Davis
One look at Bell's Phantasmagoria and you instantly recognize it as being built by Bill Tracy using his Whacky Shack design. But was it? Sure, the fa�ade and cars look familiar, but looks can be deceiving. Yes, Tracy created the facade as well as the gags, but the cars, track, and building were done in-house. Before we go inside, let's take a look back at the origin of the park itself.
Three generations of Bell's have made the park their life's work. Bob Sr. first entered the business just after World War II by creating small kiddy rides, sometimes using surplus fighter aircraft belly tanks. Many of these early kiddy rides ended up in drive-in theater playgrounds. The baby boom was just getting underway so it was only logical that Bob thought about building his own kiddieland amusement park using the rides he was creating. March 1st 1952 marked the beginning of Bell's Amusement park, which remained a kid's park until the 1960's when Bob began adding adult rides. The parks owner, Bob Jr., took the reins of the park as president around 1976 and his son Robbie is the current president of the park.
Around 1970 or 1971, Bob Sr. and Bob Jr. set out to find a new attraction to liven up the park so they headed off to the east coast to do some research. What they had in mind was a dark attraction- a walkthrough or a darkride. They found that they really liked the gory attractions by Freddie Mahanon and Bill Tracy that were popular along the east coast. They also toured some great haunted houses that featured live actors but they thought it would be too much of a risk for them. A Tracy darkride seemed to fill their bill nicely so they went home armed with ideas. The Bell's decided to construct the steel building itself in-house measuring about 63' by 72' by 16' tall.
Not content to stop there, the Bell's also made and installed their own track that they created with bar stock and flat stock. (They had a local shop bend some of the stock into a standard curve radius for them.) The ride was constructed with 15 rooms and 750 feet of track operating with 15 cars timed to leave 12 seconds apart. Originally, Bell's constructed the ride with a dip in the track in the rear of the ride and one in the front. How did they create a smooth dip in an era before computer drafting? Simple. They used strips of wood lath and bent them into a graceful curve that looked right! They also created a tilted room in which water "flowed up hill".
The ride cars were produced locally by Bell's. Small parks are a creative bunch that draw on the originality and resources of other small parks, much as an extended family would do. The ride cars are a good example. When Bell's decided to build their own ride vehicles, they called upon Lake Winnepesaukah Amusement Park. (Roseville, GA). Lake Winnie had a two-story darkride that used Bradley & Kay cars. Since the ride had an incline up to the second floor, they soon found that the short backed cars were the source of some complaints since there was not enough back support.
The solution was to modify the cars by extending the backs. They created a prototype using one of the original car bodies then formed a mold from it to make new body shells. Bell's asked them to create additional shells for its darkride using that same mold. Bell's then designed and built a chassis and running gear which was designed to free wheel in the dips of the ride. Bob Jr. said that it cost about $3500 each to produce them and that they made between 45 and 60 cars, most of which were sold to other parks such as Joyland (Wichita, KS), Wonderland (Amarillo, TX), and possibly Indiana Beach (Monticello, IN). Modesty aside, Bob says the cars are foolproof, run forever, and after more than thirty years, are just now showing wear.
Another innovation in the ride is the "bang doors". How to close the doors once a car goes through them has been a problem plaguing parks for decades. Some parks use springs, bungee cords, electric solenoids, hydraulic cylinders, or other mechanical means, but all of them are a maintenance hassle to keep them working. Bell's uses a different approach that needs practically no regular maintenance at all: They use gravity. Instead of mounting the doors truly vertically, they choose to angle them so that the force of gravity would naturally close them once the car has gone by. A simple solution with the added benefit of costing absolutely nothing! As originally constructed, the doors were framed with steel tubing and used 3" foam to cushion to absorb the blow of them closing.
This personal involvement in the creation of the darkride led Bob Bell, Sr. to be a panel member during a darkride workshop at the IAAPA convention in 1975. Bob had this advice to offer: "If you don't have a dark ride, you ought to get one!" "Capacity is governed by the distance between cars. Make it long enough so people can't see the car ahead of them. On the straightway, it should not be longer than 35 feet." (Amusement Business, Dec. 6 1975).
As the ride was nearing completion, it still lacked a name. Bob Sr. thought about the theme of the ride gore phantasms Phantasmagoria! That was it! Bob Jr.'s personal definition is "the sensation of something moving rapidly towards you or away from you." Phantasmagoria loosely translates from ancient Greek as an assembly of images or apparitions. The dictionary defines it as-
- 1 - an exhibition or display of optical effects and illusions
- 2 - a scene that rapidly changes
- 3 - a bizarre or fantastic combination, collection, or assemblage
All of these seem to apply quite nicely to a darkride.
With the building complete and the name selected, it was time to call in Bill Tracy. Tracy of course based the facade on his popular Whacky Shack design. Despite being rebuilt several times due to damage by Oklahoma's high winds, the original facade still remains today. Tracy was a very talented and imaginative artist, but a poor engineer- a comment that many park owners have said time and again. Most of his stunts lasted about two to three months, and then had to be rebuilt. But despite this, most of Tracy's classic stunts still reside in this ride today.
Some changes have crept into the ride over the years of course. The most obvious being the removal of the two dips that the ride had originally. Despite a sign warning riders against taking stuffed animals and the like on the ride, they did, and they occasionally dropped them on the track. When this happened in the dip, it caused the car to slow and come to a halt at the bottom of the dip leading to a collision with the following car. 
The park tried making the dips shallower, but the ultimate solution was to remove the dip all together. Another change to the ride was the removal of the troublesome "water curtain" at the end of the ride. The device that made it appear that the waterfall that was approaching would drench the rider was always a source of problems. Since there is never enough time to maintain such a source of continual problems, it was disabled permanently. The tilted room was deemed to lack "pizzazz". It was removed to be replaced with the classic "on-coming truck" gag, in this case, however, it is a bus. The bus was acquired for Bell's by their friends at Wonderland Park in Amarillo who installed a similar gag in their darkride.
Tracy was known for his racy figures and scenes which were acceptable in the free and easy 60's and 70's, but today, they are no longer "politically correct" resulting in the more "offensive" figures being covered up or modified. (While not "politically correct", his figures were anatomically correct!)
Let's see how the Bell's hard work turned out. The operator is waiting for us so let's hop in the car and take a ride. He pushes the button and our car comes to life, crashing through the front doors of the ride. We are warned by a sign to sit down due to "low beams" as we approach a series of three bang doors, each having a hole in the center providing us a little view of what is ahead. We start upgrade and encounter another sign; this one warning- " DANGER Professionally Trained GUARD DOGS DO NOT ATTEMPT TO FIGHT BACK! Bell's is not liable for injuries". We make a right turn into the darkness of a long empty passageway, continuing uphill until we make a 180-degree turn to the right and through the next "bang door".
It appears that we are on a small wooden bridge of sorts with a short picket fence to our left. Peering over the fence and down below we see an eerie scene containing a small pond and a large skull. Returning our gaze to the path ahead, we encounter a graveyard. An unfortunate soul's skeleton lies in a casket surrounded by tomb stones: "RIH ROSE HOUSEREK HUNG FOR BEING A WITCH"; "1874 to 1743 BILL YEAGERT DIED MYSTERIOUSLY AT THE POOL ROOM BY THE LOBSTER POT"; "RIP LILIAN HOUSEREK DIED A REALLY LONG TIME AGO" (No, those are not misprints, that is the way they read.)
A quick 90 degree turn to the left, through the bang doors and we see from our left a flying ghost is headed straight for us while a vulture is patiently waiting ahead of us, hoping that we weren't lucky enough to escape the ghost.
But we do escape, plunging back into the darkness after making a 90-degree left turn. 
In the midst of the blackness we turn 180 degrees to the right coming upon a throw back to the psychedelic sixties: An orange and green striped room lit with flashing strobe lights. A spinning disk at the end of the room adds to our disorientation. 
While distracted by the lights and disk, we turn right 90 degrees and are startled by a skull-faced woman in see-through underwear with her favorite dead rat. As if to get a breath of fresh air, literally, the next bang doors take us outside for a brief instant allowing us a few seconds to view the midway before crashing into the next set of doors and another long dark corridor. (This is where the outside dip used to be.)
Turning left 90 degrees, we hit another set of doors and start descending down an incline through a series of cock-eyed timbers. Again we enter the darkness, this time in an area that probably contained the ride's second (inside) dip.
Emerging from the darkness and turning left, we find ourselves in the scene with the giant skull that was visible earlier in the ride from above.
Exiting to the right we next encounter the pink draped frame of a lady. Her skull head distracts us from the fact that she is a bit immodest and not wearing underwear!
Turning left we encounter a HUGE rat that lunges at us as we pass.
Ignoring the stop sign on the door in front of us, we enter the next room and come face to skull with the front of a bus, light flashing and horn blaring! (This was the former tilted room.)
Turning left, we enter a mirror lined corridor that has a few surprises in store for us at the end. As the track turns to the right, we see a skeleton dangling from a noose to our left and a beautiful naked woman straight ahead. We see her from behind and can only wonder if she will turn around as we approach. Of course she does, but it's sure not what we hoped to see! Instead of beauty we are presented with a gruesome sight: a skull face and a decomposing torso!
We quickly move on, turn right, and enter a multicolored, spinning tunnel with a spinning disk at the end.
A bit dizzy, we finally turn right and enter a bat cave.
The track then takes us left and to the end of the ride. The water curtain trick was disabled years ago so we safely make it to the exit doors and back onto the midway.
