Thirteen Graves Beneath Lake Shawnee Amusement Park, WV

Reviewed by Josh N · Updated September 16, 2026 · How we verify

Rust, a collapsed ferris wheel and a swing set that still moves in the wind: the abandoned Lake Shawnee Amusement Park sits on a hillside outside Princeton, West Virginia, and it has spent more time closed than it ever spent open. What draws people now is not nostalgia for the swimming pool and the dance hall. It is the claim, repeated on cable television for two decades, that the ground itself is cursed, and that the children who died here never left.

Quick Facts on Lake Shawnee

• Where: Princeton, Mercer County, West Virginia, on the shore of Lake Shawnee
• Opened: 1926, developed by entrepreneur Conley Trigg Snidow, Sr.
• Original attractions: ferris wheel, swing ride, swimming pool, race track, concession stands, dance hall and overnight cabins
• Recorded deaths on site: two drownings during Snidow’s ownership, plus a young girl killed on the swing ride in 1966
• Closures: shut in 1967 after a failed health inspection; briefly reopened in summer 1987; closed again in 1988
• Status now: derelict, opened to the public for guided paranormal tours

The Clay Family and the Killings of 1783

Long before there was a ferris wheel, the land belonged to a settler named Mitchell Clay, and in 1783 three members of his family were killed there by Native Americans. A daughter and a son, aged sixteen and eighteen, were killed and scalped. Another son, also sixteen, was taken captive, carried to Chillicothe and burned at the stake.

What happened next depends on which account you read, and the difference matters. One version has Clay gathering other landowners and riding out for revenge, killing several members of the raiding party. Another holds that Clay did not pursue the Shawnee at all, that his concern was giving his children a proper burial, and that he struck a deal with the Shawnee chief that ended the dispute. Both versions circulate. The ghost tours generally prefer the bloodier one, because a cycle of vengeance makes a better foundation for a curse than a negotiated peace does.

Conley Snidow’s Park for the Coal Camps

In 1926, Conley Trigg Snidow, Sr. bought the land and set about building an amusement park for the people of Mercer County. It worked. The park was genuinely popular with locals, and particularly with the families of the coal miners who lived in the surrounding area, the sort of people who did not get many days out. Alongside the ferris wheel and the swing ride there was a swimming pool, a race track, concession stands, a dance hall and cabins for anyone who wanted to stay the night.

The deaths came over decades rather than in a single catastrophe. Two drownings were reported during Snidow’s years running the park. In 1966, a young girl was killed on the swing ride. The park closed the following year, in 1967, not because of the deaths but because it failed a health inspection.

Gaylord White, the Brief 1987 Season, and Thirteen Graves

The site did not stay quiet forever. In 1985 a former employee named Gaylord White bought the land, and in the summer of 1987 he reopened the park. It lasted one season. Rising insurance rates forced it closed again in 1988, and White turned instead to other uses for the property, including fishing tournaments and off-road motorsports.

It was that work that produced the park’s strangest chapter. In the early 1990s, White’s crews uncovered numerous Native American artifacts on the property, material predating the arrival of Anglo-European settlers. Archeologists from Marshall University spent several years on the site. They recovered artifacts and graves, and in total thirteen Native American skeletons were uncovered, mostly those of elderly people and young children. This is the documented core of the legend: not a rumor of a burial ground, but an excavated one. Shortly afterward, White began hosting Halloween week guided paranormal tours.

The Girl on the Swing and the Spinning Pinwheel

None of what follows is verified. It is what visitors and tour guests report, and it has hardened into a fixed local repertoire over the years.

The best known story is of a little girl seen on the derelict swing set, swinging without a sound, her presence sometimes said to be marked by a red ribbon that moves on its own. The second involves a white plastic pinwheel near the lakeside ticket booth, reported to spin when there is no wind, which local lore connects to a boy said to have drowned in the lake. Visitors also describe an oppressive stillness around the water and the sense of being watched among the standing ride frames. Treat all of it as folklore attached to real deaths rather than evidence of them.

Lake Shawnee on Television

Few abandoned parks have been filmed as often. Lake Shawnee appeared on Scariest Places on Earth on ABC Family in 2002, and on part five of the Travel Channel’s Most Terrifying Places in America in 2010. That same year, Everyday Paranormal featured it in season two of the Discovery Channel’s Ghost Lab. It turned up on The Dead Files in 2018 in an episode titled “Terrorland,” then in 2019 on both the Travel Channel’s Most Terrifying Places and the History Channel’s The UnXplained. Jack Osbourne brought Portals to Hell there in 2021, and in 2023 the park featured on Alone Paranormal Edition, created by OmarGoshTV on YouTube. The repetition is worth noting for its own sake: much of what visitors now expect to experience at Lake Shawnee, they first saw on a screen.

Visiting Lake Shawnee Amusement Park

The park is not a park anymore and it is not casually open. Access is through the guided paranormal tours the owners have run around Halloween week since the excavations ended, with details and booking handled through the official site at wvlakeshawnee.com. Expect uneven ground, standing water, and decaying steel structures that have been outdoors since the 1980s. Bring a flashlight, wear boots, and stay on the route the guides give you. Do not attempt to visit outside of scheduled tours: this is private land, and the hazards are real whether or not you believe anything else about the place.

See Lake Shawnee Amusement Park for Yourself

Sources

• Abandoned West Virginia amusement park has a bloody history
• The Haunted History of Lake Shawnee
• Shadow Factory
• Mapwv (official)
• Lake Shawnee Abandoned Amusement Park
• Wikipedia: Lake Shawnee Amusement Park

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