Ghost in the Machine
With crowds moving on to glitzier attractions, ghost train rides are on the verge of extinction. But one man is on a mission to preserve their memory – and he’s turning to virtual reality to do it.
When Hurricane Sandy hit the U.S. in 2012, footage of the disaster was broadcast around the world.
For many viewers, the defining moment came when Atlantic City’s boardwalk washed away under the roiling ocean waters – a city’s emblem tossed around like nature’s plaything. But when Joel Zika awoke to the news in Melbourne, it wasn’t the boardwalk, or Times Square, or any of the usual fixtures of the American Northeast on his mind. It was Keansburg Amusement Park in New Jersey, and the small ghost train it counted as one of its attractions.
Five years earlier, Zika had visited the park specifically to ride that ghost train. And now, like a chunk of the boardwalk, it was gone. “It occurred to me then that I should have taken footage of the ride when I was there,” Zika says. “To create a record.” Back then, Zika wasn’t in the habit of recording the rides he went on. “I thought that was crass,” he admits – the theme park equivalent of taking a selfie with the Mona Lisa. But after Sandy, the fragile nature of amusement parks began to dawn on him. “And I thought, I should do something about that.”
For Zika, an artist and lecturer at Deakin University, ghost trains aren’t merely a pastime: they’re cultural artefacts worthy of study. “Ghost trains are hyperbolic reinterpretations of history. They evolved out of the Great Depression, when abandoned houses and boarded-up factories were common sights around the U.S. They reflected the changing socioeconomic landscape of the era.”
Ironically, the ghost train has itself become a victim of changing socioeconomic landscapes. “One by one, they’re all closing down,” Zika says, and most don’t need a natural disaster to help them along. “These days, people have all sorts of ways to be entertained. We’ll go to the movies, or put on a virtual reality headset. Ghost trains just aren’t relevant any more.”
Entertainments come and go. But what upset Zika was that historians seemed uninterested in documenting the rides before they vanished, meaning when they went, “they’d be gone for good”. One reason for this is the nature of the medium: you can’t just take a photo of a ride, or catalogue its schematics; you have to experience it in motion. So Zika decided he’d work out a way to do just that.
Armed with three video cameras, he went to Melbourne’s Luna Park, home to one of the oldest ghost trains in the world, and suctioncapped his proof-of-concept to the front of a cart. The trial was a success, though only barely: the cameras only captured what was in front of the cart, which made for boring viewing. “Unlike cinema, things catch your attention from right out of your peripheral vision. That also helps to distract you from boring stuff, walls or cables. It’s an early form of editing.”
He went back to the drawing board and returned with a 360-degree camera system he could replay using a virtual reality headset. He tried the ride again, and looked back at the footage using Oculus Rift. What he saw was the world’s first archived ghost train: something future generations would be able to experience long after the ride itself had closed down.
After uploading the video to the internet, Zika was inundated with requests from ghost train enthusiasts around the world, eager to have him preserve the rides in their communities. So far he’s captured four of the 12 rides identified as historically significant in the U.S., and has plans to capture eight more next year. After that, it’s unclear how much farther he’ll be able to take the project with limited funds. But, as VR equipment becomes more affordable, people other than Zika might be able to do his work for him, and upload the recordings into a ghost train library he plans to build with Deakin University. Meaning dozens of rickety old rides get the spooky afterlife they deserve.
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From Smith Journal vol. 21. Illustration by Raúl Soria.