Lake Shawnee Amusement Park

Origin Story

Mitchell Clay settled 800 acres on the Bluestone River in 1775, the first English family in what is now Mercer County. In 1783, a Shawnee raiding party attacked the homestead while Clay was away. The published accounts do not agree on who died. The widely repeated version names Bartley and Tabitha Clay as the children killed and Ezekiel as the boy taken to Chillicothe, Ohio and burned at the stake, while the park's own history page names Bartley and Ezekiel as the dead and leaves the captive unnamed. The graves are on the property. The Daughters of the American Revolution set a headstone over them on August 14, 1937.

Conley Trigg Snidow bought the land in 1926 and shaped the lake himself with a horse, a plow, and a board fixed to the front. He put up a swing ride, a ferris wheel, a swimming area, a dance hall, and cabins. For 40 years, coal mining families drove in from across southern West Virginia and stayed the weekend.

Evidence & Claims

Two people drowned while Snidow owned the park. In 1966, a delivery truck backed into the swing ride and killed a girl in her seat. The park failed a health inspection and closed the following year.

Gaylord White, who had worked at the park as a boy, bought the property in 1985. He reopened it for the summer of 1987, ran it through 1988, and shut it for good when the insurance became unaffordable.

Then the ground began producing artifacts. Archaeologists from Marshall University, working with Concord College, recovered more than 25,000 objects: pottery, beads, tools, and necklaces from villages of the Fort Ancient culture, which occupied this part of the Ohio Valley from roughly 1000 to 1690. What the digs turned up in human remains is where the record splits. Newsweek, Wikipedia, and the Beckley Register-Herald put the work in the early 1990s and the count at 13 burials, mostly elderly people and young children. Other published accounts date two rescue excavations to 1988 and 1989 and give a figure in the low twenties, all of them children. Chris White, who runs the site now, says Marshall staff told the family the ground may hold as many as 3,000 people. No source reconciles the three figures.

The ghost accounts came after the excavations. Visitors report a girl on the swings, chanting from the tree line, orbs in photographs, and rides turning with nobody on them. The park has been filmed for Scariest Places on Earth in 2002, Most Terrifying Places in America and Ghost Lab in 2010, The UnXplained in 2019, and Portals to Hell in 2021. The Mercer County Convention and Visitors Bureau calls it one of the world's most haunted places.

Skeptical Explanations

The deaths and the burials are documented, and nobody disputes them. Neither establishes that anything here moves on its own. The rides have stood outdoors since 1988, and the swing is a rusted assembly of chain and steel in the open air. Every visitor arrives having been told about the girl on the swing before reaching the gate, and the swing is the first thing the tour stops at. No phenomenon reported here has been produced under conditions that separate the ground's history from what people carry up the road with them.

Every visit is by appointment, booked directly with the owners on 304-921-1580 or at lakeshawnee@yahoo.com. Two options are offered: a daytime photo and history tour of about 30 minutes, which covers the Clay killings, the Snidow years, and the excavations, and an overnight booking for investigation groups. Prices are not published on the website and are quoted at the time of booking.

Dark Carnival, the site's own Halloween attraction, runs on Friday and Saturday nights through October and includes a walk among the standing rides. Tickets go on sale on the Lake Shawnee website once the season is announced, and dates tend to appear on the park's Facebook page first.

The park is about 10 minutes north of Princeton by road. The rides are rusted open-air structures, so boots are worth having, and guides keep groups to set paths.