Last summer, we rounded up the world's scariest roller coasters, but with another season wrapping up, it's time for another look at the most terrifying rides from around the globe.
While most coasters are impeccably safe--and the chances of stepping on a killer jellyfish at a theme park are infinitely slim--there's still an element of risk when you strap into a ride. So after the jump, allow us to present the scariest roller coasters of 2008.
On May 5, 2007 a roller coaster at the park, Fujin Raijin II, derailed due to a broken axle. One person died, and many others were injured . Now, a second Expoland park coaster is sporting a large crack, visible to the naked eye, in its axle.
How terrifying is this? One professional inspector said:
I've never heard of a crack big enough to be seen by the naked eye.
In all fairness, the other roller coasters on this list were scary in a thrill seeker type of way, while the coasters at Expoland are mentioned for reasons that should be self explanatory. Let's hope Expoland fixes their coasters. In the meantime, check out the terrifying, but safe, ride experienced on an Expoland coaster above.
No, we are not talking about the Disney ride. That's the Twilight Zone Tower Terror, and shut up right now if you think that's scarier than Dreamworld's Tower of Terror in Australia. Sure, both rides have some serious free-falling action - but Australia's Tower of Terror has you do it backwards. At 90 degrees.
Oh, and it's the fastest roller coaster in the Southern Hemisphere. So, let's just look at the big picture here: when you ride the Tower of Terror, you climb 38 stories high at 100 mph, then you free-fall backwards, hurtling rapidly towards the ground. Yeah, that certainly sounds terrifying to us.
We realized that we hadn't shown any love yet this week to wooden roller coasters, so we present yet another un-creatively named coaster: the Colossos at Heide Park in Germany. It's the tallest and fastest wooden roller coaster in Europe (second in the world behind the currently out-of-commission Son of Beast), and, well, it's made out of wood, the material that makes for notoriously rickety trips on roller coasters. Now, we should mention that Colossos is made out of pre-fabricated, treated wood, which means it's smoother than a traditional wooden roller coaster. But when you're going 74.6 mph (just under the recommended speed of the German autobahn), the experience is still pretty beastly.
Chock it up to lack of creativity that England's Thorpe Park decided to call this coaster Colossus when there had already been a Colossus coaster in the states since 1978. Thorpe Park's version is more befitting of the name, though: it was the first roller coaster in the world to have a full ten gravity-defying inversions, and it remains tied for the most inversions on any coaster (and possibly also remains tied for the most disorienting roller coaster ride).
The train on the coaster, meanwhile, has no sides. Back before 2003, this meant that riders could actually stick their legs out of the side of the coaster WHILE IT WAS MOVING. Obviously, this was a fantastic, safe idea. These days there are restraints keeping the legs in, but riders are still as exposed as possible to the elements, which means there are even more parts of your body exposed to possibly pull a Fabio. Because if getting hit by a bird while on a roller coaster isn't scary, we don't know what is.
There are two roller coasters in the world tall enough to be slapped with the term "gigacoaster." Only one of them has broken a man's hip. Thus we welcome Nagashima Spa Land's Steel Dragon 2000 in Japan to our list of the World's Scariest Roller Coasters. The hip-shattering happened during an accident in 2003 when one of the trains lost a wheel and derailed, and Nagashima Spa Land closed the gigacoaster for the following two seasons, much to the chagrin of coaster aficionados. In 2006 they re-opened it, assuring guests of its safety. Even now, though, the Steel Dragon 2000 remains formidable: reaching top speeds of 95 mph, it's the longest coaster in the world, which means if you don't like the ride, you just have to wait it out.
These are the things that make New Jersey scary: Camden, controlling suburban mothers in SUVs, and Kingda Ka. Nestled at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson Township, NJ, Kingda Ka is the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the world. And as if it isn't dangerous enough to go from 0 to 128 mph in 3.5 seconds, shooting 90 degrees straight into the air, there's always the chance that, oh yeah, the car will FAIL TO REACH THE TOP OF THE TOWER AND START GOING BACKWARDS. It's little wonder that the thing is closed just about as often as it's open, which is the equivalent of saying "Oh yeah, Kingda Ka is doing something that could kill you right now. Check back in a week and hopefully it won't."
Take a look at the video. We got a little scared just watching it. Kingda Ka is, after all, king.
