Cotton candy & human sacrifice

When I was a wee lad, knee-high to a grasshopper, I went to a Sunday-school summer camp. Each night they would get the whole camp together & do church stuff...you know, singing & praying, & there were these youth pastors who tried to make scripture fun & exciting for us, with varying degrees of success. Some of them tried to scare us away from the path of temptation, too. One fellow explained to us, with the assistance of a slideshow, that while AC/DC & Led Zeppelin were about as Satanic as ham on rye, British rockers Venom were devout devil-worshippers hellbent on recruiting followers through their music. Imagine my disappointment years later, when I went out & bought Venom's "Cast in Stone" anthology, only to discover that they were in fact very close to a carbon copy of Spinal Tap. I guess anthologies don't realy do an album justice, as a concept. But I digress. One guy at these little meetings stood out above the others. He was determined to put the fear of God into us brats...or should I say the fear of Satan.

He told us a story about how once he was preaching a sermon to a similar group of tykes, about how reprehensible this Lucifer fellow really was, & was about to really break through & get the message across, when the door to the church suddenly slammed shut, breaking everyone's concentration & pretty much disrupting the momentum of his lecture. It was only later, he told us, that a friend came up to him & said that he'd been near the flagpole out front, & could see that there was NO WIND blowing at the time. Boogedy!!! So the Prince of Darkness, on top of everything else, is remarkably inconsiderate.

Well that was just the chips & salsa before the fajita plate; his next story was something that I still think about, twenty years later. Years ago, there was an amusement park in Long Beach called The Pike. It's been shut down, bulldozed, & built on now, but back in the day it was considered "the Coney Island of the West". Apparently, this guy & some buddies decided to spend an evening at The Pike, not realizing the horror that awaited them.

First of all, as soon as they walked through the front gates, this guy immediately got a terrible, terrible headache. He wrote it off as a coincidence, but after spending some time taking in the sights, he came to an eerie realization. "Hey," he whispered to one of his friends. "Have you noticed that all the employees here.....don't blink?" It was true. The guy who sold tickets for the ferris wheel, the Hot-Dog-On-A-Stick girl, the carnies working the shooting galleries & ring-toss, even the animal handlers at the petting-zoo...none of them were blinking, at all, ever. It really gave this guy & his friends the creeps. The rides were kinda spooky, too...he remembered one roller coaster in particular that had a horror-movie sort of theme. At certain parts of the ride, mannequins dressed as monsters would spring out of the walls on the side of the track, & for some reason it scared him more than a goofy haunted-house ride should.

Well, it was no surprise that this dude's headache went away the second he left The Pike. And it was only years later, after the park was closed, that he was made aware of a sinister truth: the entire operation, he discovered, was run by a Satanic cult. The employees were all members, branwashed by the the Devil's unholy power. And...ready for this?...the mannequins on the haunted-house ride were REAL CORPSES that had been murdered by the cult, then callously recycled as stage props.

Now, I don;t know about you, but that sounds like an amazing place to spend a Saturday night! Sure beats Disneyland. Of course, I haven't been to "the happiest place on Earth" since before I went to that freakin' summer-camp. Maybe things have changed. But as evil as Walt Disney was, I don't know if he could compete with something that cool. Some things you just can't fake.