“Bill Cassidy—the second owner of Pretzel—told us before he passed away that that was one of the gimmicks that he was most proud of. It was just a spool of thread. It would hang from a rafter in the ceiling, and it would rub up against people’s faces and creep them out. It’s supposed to be cobwebs, I guess, but it wasn’t an actual web. It was just a string, but you couldn’t see it. It seems to me that just about every dark ride I rode in the 1960s had that. If it didn’t come factory-installed, I’m sure the park owners themselves would tack it up.”
–Collectors Weekly on the history of amusement park “dark rides” and haunted houses. Read more from Collectors Weekly in the Longreads Archive.
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