1,034 Comments for Rocky Point Amusement Park

Emery Picotte is a member of the American Coaster Enthusiasts. A group primarily focused on Roller Coaster rides, preservation and history. He is reachable through aceonline.com. He resides in CT. He was the organizer of the Halloween fests at RP subsequent to the parks closing. It is unlikely that he was the purchaser of the park.

The Halloween fests did not go well and he may very well be unwilling to talk to anyone about park related projects. He most likely suffered quite a bit of financial stress if not ruin in relation to these fests. I do not believe he had any connection to the park's heydey operations. Please do not that this particular paragraph falls into the category of speculation and opinion on my part.

I have a few more:
1. Not looking for a specific date-but decade the house was put in....
2. Does the name Emery Picotte mean anything to you? Rumor was he was the one who purchased the house....
I truly appreciate your help. I know the house itself was more cheesy than scary, and I want to try to keep my drawings the same way.
My style is sort of Mad magazine/R. Crumb with horror elements and I'm planning on using a tales from the crypt style for my story.
I would actually like to get a critique from someone who knows / remembers so much ...
Again, I want this to be a tribute to the park itself, and simply want it as factual as possible...

Having now read the articles end to end myself I can now understand where the RISDE (Rhode Island School of Design for those non-familiar) connection may have come in. Vincent Crudelle's father repaired amusement park haunted house props. Vincent himself was a talented artist who did not work on Rocky Points house of horrors but did attend RI School of Design. The articles read like a gothic novel.

And this should certainly give you plenty of food for thought regarding graphic novel content...

http://www.sacreddarkness.com/interview.html

This article may be of interest to you. Knowing that you are graphic artist gives me an idea of where you may be coming from.

The gentleman discussed used to build and repair some of the props in the house.

http://www.slowart.com/articles/janello.htm

I also believe the ride evolved over time. The ride as it was in the 90s and the ride as it was in say the 50s/60s are two different things - as props broke/got replaced. I don't know anything about Bill Tracey - however because of your post I took a look at a few websites dealing with his work - conceptually I could see a visual relationship (i.e style) that is compatible with the Viking and the Dragon that were on the outside of the ride.

The owners of this park cared very little for its history. They owned this and a slew of night clubs (Narcissus/Lipstick in Boston for example) and saw it as a business only.

The shift from an exclusively family oreinted park to one featuring bands and cover bands such as Steppanwolf, Max Creek, Gloria Estefan, Level42, The Machine, Dread Zeppelin, Snap, Kenny Loggins, and others reflects the influence of owners with nightclub backgrounds.

In short, history preservation was not of paramount importance to them - they would not have broken up the carousel if it had been.

I've done some searcing on the web-these are the only (other) images from within the house.
http://ctacke.tripod.com/index2.html

Park employees painted some of the stuff inside. Primarily the cars and the tombstones in the cemetary scene. The castle on the back wall of this room was there for as long as I could remember. When you passed through this room there was a little bit of strobe lighting effect (in another picture you can see one of the lights still remaining).

There was also blacklighting in variuos room in the house of horrors so that any white clothing you might be wearing would glow.

Someone else once said to me that some of the props were done by RISDE students - but that info is suspect. I had the impression they were speculating rather than approaching it with true knowledge.

Visual aspects - other props included a saw that cut 'through' a mannequin strapped to a table. Some sound effects created by a compressor and a scene with a 'doctor' working in a laboratory.

There was also a dragon like, or lizard like, monster located in an alcove with glowing red eyes.

You can't see it in this picture but there are two conveyors in this room. The one you can see takes the cars down. Further to the right out of sight is an identical one that took the cars up.

I'll give some thought to other visual aspect that may come back to me.

Thank you very much!
An earlier haunted house?
That's great to know!
I'm still curious on the inside of the house....
I remember the fat lady, the saw through the lady trick, the jaws door near the end and a few others....anything else come to mind?
So park employees painted all the stuff inside?
I've read that the house was designed by dark ride genuis Bill Tracy? Any truth to this?
I was there for Halloweenland and the cars were still running through the house...but most of the stuff was taken out of the house, so I am still curious about that one.
Which monsters were on the cars?
I'm curious how you know all this-did you work there?
Was there any park merchandise with the house of horrors on it?
(I found a Rocky Point coloring book, thats all I've found.)
Again, thanks again for the info, like I said I've got a million questions.....

Clarification - behind where Motts is standing there is another small room where the sound system was kept.

Also, the small room on the left hand side at the far end of the picture is where the main power for the ride was kept. Behind where Motts was standing when this picture was taken is where the sound system was located for the 'scary' sounds that were piped to speakers inside the house.

1. I don't know when it got built. It was the 2nd Haunted House at the park though. Somewhere near where the Musik Express (yes Musik not Music) there was an earlier one.

2. I can remember the Viking - I think he got removed in the late eighties. As I dont think it got taken down during the open season my guess is that he got damaged in winter or perhaps Hurricane Gloria??

3. I was actually there the day of the auction (a rather dreary rainy day) but can't tell you who bought it. I can suggest that they may have bought it and then discovered that its not movable. It was a cinderblock building underneath its facade and as the ride went it was largely a conveyor system and electrical track consisting of a single guide track throughout the ride.

4. The rides were all sold integral (except the carousel which had had its original horses/animals sold separately a number of years before. Thats not to say that the purchasers may have paid their 1000 took what they wanted and left the rest.

5. If the ride was shut down for Halloween land then perhaps the purchaers took away the track and it was no longer able to run. Perhaps Motts would comment on whether there was steel track throughout the building. From the perspective of this picture the Reptile was completely off/away from any tracking and the car in the background is stopped where the electrical track would have begun (the conveyor was mechanical only).

6. When I said the cars were painted over I meant that the old pictures had become faded and needed to be redone. Fresh coats of paint of a single color were applied and the characters redrawn. However, the characters may not have ended up on their original cars! The artists probably painted a car over and then used the car behind it as the model for one they were working on. This might explain how Darth Vader got on the cars. When they got to the last car all the other cars would have been painted over already and they would not have had a model to look at - whereas locating a Darth Vader model would have been easy.

Other trivia that might be of interest to you - the cemetary scene used to have tombstones that had printed on them the names of various park employees. Mostly management and ride maintenance people

If he is still living a great source of historical information about the park could be obtained from a man named Jerry Combs. He was a park employee who started there as a ride op in I think the 1950s. He had gone away and come back to the park many times. When he was away from the park he was with traveling carnivals. He knows an awful lot about amusement park rides and his employment at the park probably predated the existence of the House Of Horrors. He tends towards having a suspicous (of other people) nature so he would probably be on his guard when you first talked to him. However, I don't know if he is still around. By now he would be at least 70.

Why would they put a painting of satanism in an amusement park? That's strange, cool ,and a bit disturbing at the same time.

Now isn't that the sexiest woman you've ever seen?