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Creepiest Abandoned Theme Parks You DON’T Want To Visit

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Some amusement parks close for good, and nature never lets you forget it.

The YouTube channel BE AMAZED built its “Creepiest Abandoned Theme Parks You DON’T Want To Visit” video around four sites that shut down for four very different reasons — a nuclear meltdown, a business war with Disney, a string of fatal accidents, and a hurricane. Each one still stands in some form, rusting, flooded, or half-demolished, and each has become a magnet for the kind of urban explorer who ignores “No Trespassing” signs. Two locations anchor the whole story: Pripyat Amusement Park inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and Nara Dreamland, Japan’s abandoned knockoff of Disneyland.

• Pripyat Amusement Park in Ukraine was scheduled to open May 1, 1986, but the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant meltdown on April 26, 1986, forced its permanent closure days before opening.
• Nara Dreamland opened July 1, 1961, modeled closely on Disneyland, and shut down on August 31, 2006, after losing visitors to Tokyo Disneyland and Universal Studios Japan.
• Okpo Land in South Korea closed in the early ’90s following several accidents, including fatal ones, while Six Flags Jazzland in New Orleans shut down in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina wrecked the property.

Pripyat’s Ferris Wheel That Never Spun

Pripyat Amusement Park sat inside the Soviet city built to house Chernobyl plant workers, and it was set to open on May 1, 1986, timed to the Soviet Union’s May Day celebrations. That plan collapsed on April 26, 1986, when Reactor No. 4 at the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, forcing the evacuation of the entire city within days. Some rides were briefly switched on beforehand in an attempt to calm residents who already sensed something was wrong, but the park never held an official opening and never sold a single ticket.

What’s left is a 26-meter Ferris wheel standing motionless over a forest that has swallowed the surrounding pavement, along with rusted bumper cars and a swing carousel frozen mid-decay. The radiation levels around the site remain part of why the location draws comparisons to other extreme, hazard-driven landscapes covered in pieces like 15 Most Dangerous Natural Phenomena In The World, even though Chernobyl’s danger is man-made rather than natural.

A 26-meter Ferris wheel that never carried a single paying rider has become the single most photographed symbol of the Chernobyl disaster.

Nara Dreamland’s Disneyland Blueprint

Nara Dreamland opened on July 1, 1961, the creation of Japanese businessman Kunizo Matsuo, president of the Matsuo Entertainment Company, who built the park as a near-carbon copy of Disneyland after consultations with Walt Disney’s own WED Enterprises broke down before a formal licensing deal could be signed. The similarities weren’t subtle — a Sleeping Beauty-style Dreamland Castle, Main Street USA-style storefronts, teacup rides, and a monorail circling the grounds. Over the decades the park added its own identity too, including the wooden roller coaster Aska, modeled after Coney Island’s Cyclone, and the Arrow Development-designed Screw Coaster.

None of it was enough once Tokyo Disneyland and Universal Studios Japan opened and pulled attendance away. Nara Dreamland closed permanently on August 31, 2006, and sat completely untouched for a decade, turning into one of the world’s most-photographed “haikyo,” or abandoned-site exploration spots — despite security patrols and trespassing fines reaching 100,000 yen. Full demolition of the site didn’t begin until late 2016. Anyone tracking how modern parks approach theme-driven construction on the other end of the spectrum can see the contrast in ongoing builds like the one detailed in STAR WARS HOTEL Construction Status at Walt Disney World, where Disney is investing rather than watching a park rot.

Okpo Land and Six Flags Jazzland

Okpo Land in South Korea was once a well-loved local amusement park before it shut down in the early 1990s after several accidents on its rides, some of them fatal. The park was never fully torn down, and its rusting remains have since become a target for graffiti artists and urban explorers willing to risk a visit even at night. Six Flags Jazzland in New Orleans closed in 2005 shortly after Hurricane Katrina tore through the region, leaving the park badly damaged and abandoned. Nearly two decades on, the grounds remain overgrown and untouched, a draw for vandals and abandonment photographers alike.

Between a nuclear meltdown, a hurricane, fatal ride accidents, and a Disney copycat that simply ran out of customers, none of these four parks closed for the same reason — but every one of them left rides standing exactly where the last operator turned them off, which is what keeps drawing photographers back through fences marked with 100,000-yen fines.