Indiana Beach apparently purchased, according to newspaper who quoted a Facebook post

Chicago businessman Gene Staples has purchased the 94-year-old attraction from its former owner, Apex Holdings, which announced plans to close the park in February and has since declared bankruptcy.

The deal was confirmed Thursday by White County Commissioner John Heimlich.

https://www.theindychannel.com/news/local-news/indiana-beach-purcha...usinessman

One hell of a year to buy an aging amusement park.

With any luck, maybe the Pepsi Refresh project will come back.

The good news is that Indiana Beach is a going concern which, under Apex, seemed to be more or less competently managed compared to the previous owners, Morgan RV Resorts. That means that at least in theory, Staples has at his disposal a team that knows how to operate the park.

Excuse me if I seem a little concerned or skeptical. I know nothing about Gene Staples, and I hope he has great success with Indiana Beach. Operating as an independent wholly-owned concern also means that the only financial requirements are for the long-term survival of the business, which is also a good thing. But here's what worries me...

Back in 2002, if I remember right, a businessman bought an amusement park that had been closed for two years but was in decent condition. He sunk a lot of money into the infrastructure and hired an "expert" to run it for him. The park had a great season, but it became obvious by the end of the season that the "expert" was being less than honest. The park closed suddenly, and the best wooden coaster in the State of Ohio was demolished.

I do think Indiana Beach has a lot going for it that Americana did not (current conditions notwithstanding). I really do hope that Staples gets this one right.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Basically, as soon as Indiana Beach reopens, go visit the park. Don't put it off.

I was fortunate to experience LeSourdesville Lake/Americana in '02. I'm kicking myself for completely missing out on Hard Rock Park. There's another poster here that swears up and down that 'Nights in White Satin' was the greatest dark ride ever.

I'll never know for myself...

Best dark ride ever? I really don't think so. Because as impressive as Nights In White Satin was, there really wasn't anything there. The only physical animation in the thing as I recall were some spinning whirligigs that you can find at any craft fair...oh, and the smoke ring. Other than that it was entirely lighting and projection effects. I'm not talking about projected video like in the Toy Story Mania or Iron Reef dark rides; I mean what looks like old school watch-glass on an overhead projector kind of projection effects. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it was that while the visuals didn't really tell a story or have any kind of cohesion to them, they were in fact perfectly synchronized with the audio. And that was especially interesting because each ride vehicle had onboard audio, and each room of the ride had its own sound system...and the ride played through the entire recording with the vehicles and the ambient audio perfectly in sync. It's especially interesting that when you enter the boarding area, music is playing, obviously a loop, and when you board the ride, the loop seamlessly blends into the song...and at the end of the ride it seamlessly blended back into the station loop. And the loop itself was also seamless, or at least long enough that I never heard a break. Presumably this was part of the reason they had to have a new recording done for the ride. That, and the version we all know has some sections in it that just sound horrible because the Moody Blues' recording engineer apparently didn't know what a VU meter is for (Seriously, most of their old recordings just sound terrible because they were recorded too damn loud).
Anyway, getting great sounding audio when adjacent rooms necessarily had to be playing different sections of the song at the same time had to be an interesting challenge to solve, and I'd love to learn some of the details of how they did it. As I recall, I think the ride vehicles were dispatched in pairs for capacity reasons (as if Hard Rock Park needed to worry about capacity...). So the ride was quite the technical achievement, was exceptionally well done, was an extremely interesting concept. I wouldn't go so far as to call it the best ever. It may well have been the best ride in the park, though!

(The B&M coaster would have been a lot better without that shpxvat pre-show)

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

HeyIsntThatRob? said:

There's another poster here that swears up and down that 'Nights in White Satin' was the greatest dark ride ever.

I'll never know for myself...

I won't either, because I had the misfortune of riding its replacement in year 2, which was undeniably the worst dark ride ever.