The roads which lead to Alton Towers are alarmingly narrow. They wind up and down through the Staffordshire countryside, hemmed in by dry stone walls and bushes which scrape the windows of the jumbo-size tour buses which wheeze back and forth from the park throughout the summer. There are steep gradients, blind bends, and roads through tiny villages which become all but impassable in even the lightest snow.

Even now, more than a decade since I last worked there, I remember every twist and turn of the route – better, even, than I do the inversions of any of the rollercoasters within Alton Towers itself. I was employed there, in total, for less than a year, but during that time I must have driven along those roads at least a hundred times: in the early morning, in the middle of the night, alone, with colleagues, in rain, wind, sleet and (very rarely) blinding sunshine.

One feature of this drive that I always felt a strange frisson on passing was the Dangerous Road. Taken at speed, this shortcut could shave fifteen minutes off the journey between Stoke-on-Trent and the park. It was, however, steep, narrow, and composed almost entirely of one blind bend after another. Accidents on it were so common that at both entrances the verge was festooned with signs warning drivers not to enter, to ignore their satnavs.

Not many months after I started at Alton Towers I read an item in The Pulse (the photocopied staff newsletter which circulated intermittently in cafeterias and Green Rooms across the resort) about the death of a 19-year-old staff member in a car crash on the Dangerous Road. It was something I read with a sense of unreal horror. The park, it seemed, could take everything from its workers – their lives included. I had driven past the mouth of that road. Every day and every night I had made the decision not to take it. And when I left the park that night, exhausted after another twelve-hour day at minimum wage, wanting only to be home, to sleep… I made that decision once again.

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At 13:41 on June 2^nd 2015 an empty test train stalled in high winds on the Cobra Roll section of the Smiler rollercoaster – the newest addition to the line-up of thrill rides available at Alton Towers. Staff on duty failed to notice that the train had not completed its circuit and despatched a second car loaded with guests. Automated systems brought this car to a halt at the top of a loop, and held it there for eight long minutes, until operators overrode the controls and sent the loaded car plunging down directly into the unloaded one.

The accident left five-people with life-changing injuries. Two of the victims eventually had limbs amputated, while others required months of physical therapy and repeated rounds of surgery to resume anything akin to a normal life. Press coverage of the accident was extensive and rabid.

I was several years moved on from the park by this time, and the intensity of the reporting surprised me. The story remained front page news for weeks, and video footage of the victims screaming for help in the immediate aftermath of the accident was broadcast on mainstream television. It seemed excessive. Morbid. Especially as worse accidents (assuming, that is, that accidents can be graded by their severity) on the roads surrounding the park had passed for years with barely any media attention.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, however. Even before the accident I was aware that deaths and disfigurements which took place within the boundaries of theme parks were objects of awful fascination.

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Every ride death and every accident is the result of a chain of miscommunications, mistakes, and lapses in policy. So too are car crashes, but a car crash often lacks the other ingredients which lend theme park accidents such a penetrative psychic profile.

One of these ingredients, certainly, is the sharp contrast between joy and terror. Between the safe, controlled, mock terror that we feel in response to drops, climbs and inversions, and the real terror that we feel when our lives are genuinely endangered. When one is laid against the other it can create a juxtaposition that emphasises the bitterness of the latter.

The drama of accidents when they do occur is also undoubtedly a factor. In Final Destination 3, a rollercoaster accident is rendered in extensive detail, with a particular focus on the twists and turns of the track, the power of the machine to dismember or kill, and the heights and drops involved in even a routine run.

These are, however, surface phenomena. On a deeper level there is the fact that we believe theme parks should be safe. They are, like schools, prisons and airports, mediated environments. The rules of the outside world are suspended, and new ones established for the duration of our visit. We are not free to wander. Instead we are channelled through spaces specifically designed to control our behaviour. To make us queue, wait, anticipate, feel pleasure, feel surprise, move along, linger.

An accident which takes place in such a mediated environment can feel less like an unavoidable lapse and more like something intentional, corporate, malicious. When cars collide on narrow roads in the middle of the night out in the real, chaotic, confusing, nuanced world, it is permissible for it to be just a tragic accident. When the same happens on the track of a rollercoaster, something fundamental about our relationship to that world has fallen away. The play has left the stage and run riot through the audience, and the shock of this makes the rare occasions when it happens almost impossible to forget.

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There’s a somewhat-sinister rumour that nobody has ever been allowed to die at Disneyland. This oft-repeated urban legend holds that accident victims are always rushed beyond the bounds of the park before death can be declared by a doctor. For a company as image-obsessed as Disney this doesn’t seem too improbable. Very little could cast a shadow across the happiest place on earth more effectively than our own mortality.

But the rumour is just that: a rumour. There’s no truth to it. Deaths on Disney property have been numerous down the years. When you invite the population of a small city onto your premises most days of the year it is inevitable that some will pass away during their visit. Heart attacks happen. Age-related conditions take their toll. Pre-existing illnesses, exacerbated by heat, adrenaline, and exhaustion announce themselves in abrupt and tragic fashion.

There have, however, been a number of rather more high-profile fatalities. Violent ones. Deaths caused by operator error and mechanical malfunction.

In 1998, a man was killed while waiting to board the Columbia – a functional full-size replica of the first American ship to sail around the world – which routinely transports guests around the park. The cause of death was head injury. A cast member had attached a line before the ship was stationary, causing it to come under tension. A metal cleat was ripped from the hull and flung with considerable force into the crowd, instantly killing the thirty-three year old man and permanently disfiguring his wife.

On 5^th September 2003, a twenty-two year old man was killed when a train on the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad rollercoaster derailed. Marcelo Torres was the only guest to lose his life in the incident, but ten others were injured, some severely. The cause of the crash was improper maintenance – indeed, the car had been tagged for removal after cast members had heard unusual sounds emanating from its bearings.

Space Mountain, in almost forty years of operation, has seen only one death. On 14^th August 1979 a thirty-one year old woman was taken ill while riding, and was unable to exit the car. Ride operators advised her to remain in place until they could remove the car, but a miscommunication with other operators on duty meant that she was mistakenly sent through the ride a second time. When she did return to the station she was semi-conscious, and fell into a coma from which she never recovered.

I include these accounts here not because they are necessarily relevant to the point I am making, if indeed I’m making any point at all. I include them because they are harrowingly, weirdly, upsettingly fascinating.

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How parks respond to accidents is vital to their recovery, or lack thereof. In the immediate aftermath of the Smiler accident all of the corresponding ride-based merchandise was removed from shops, and the exterior branding was swiftly stripped from the ride. The bright colours, the jack-in-the-box music, the grinning logo… it all seemed suddenly inappropriate given what had happened. So the park changed itself. Became, for a time, a slightly more sombre place.

It was widely speculated at the time that, if the ride ever did reopen, it would do so with different branding, and under a different name – a kind of mental cleansing of the aura surrounding it. Demolition of the ride was also discussed. Rides which have been involved in accidents often are removed outright, even if they can be made safe. It’s not the objective level of risk attached to the attraction that matters, but the perceptions in the minds of the guests (and associations that the sight of the ride conjures up) which hold the most sway.

Even removing the tainted ride is often not enough. In 1972 Battersea Fun Fair was the site of one of the worst accidents in theme park history. A train on the Big Dipper – a popular wooden rollercoaster – detached from the lift cable and rolled back into the station, killing five children and injuring many more. The coaster was swiftly removed and replaced with a more modern steel attraction. The damage, however, was done. Within just a few years the park closed its gates, never to open them again.

Death – in particular the gruesome and unnecessary death of revellers on a ride – colours the atmosphere of a park. It changes it. A fatality is a difficult thing to recover from. Deaths on rides merit an immediate response. They create echoes. They turn a place of joy into one of horror, and frequently leave an indelible mark.

Employees can die by the dozen on their way to and from their place of work and nobody bats an eyelid. Death on a ride can be enough to salt the earth, to drive a park out of business – as though a sacrifice must be made in honour of the deceased. Joy and happiness cannot exist alongside the darker stories that thicken the air of a park – not when they are so visible and so tragic.

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Loudon Castle theme park was, at one time, the largest theme park in Scotland. Situated only a short distance from Glasgow, it entertained almost a quarter of a million visitors each year at its peak in 1997. It was home to several rollercoasters, a log flume, a drop tower and one of the largest chair-o-plane flat rides in the world. Not only that, but the grounds were home to Loudon Castle – an imposing, white stone structure from which the park derived its name.

The accident which would eventually curtail the park’s decade-and-a-half long run happened in 2007. Mark Blackwood, an 18-year-old seasonal worker, fell to his death from The Rat – one of the park’s largest rollercoasters. He was, at the time, pushing an occupied car which had become stuck on the rails.

Although the park owners were found not guilty of failing to provide proper training and management, the park never recovered. In 2010 it shut its gates for the last time. The rollercoasters and log flume were disassembled and stacked into storage. The drop tower was sold. The chair-o-planes ride was stripped of its seats, but remains standing like a misplaced planet in the middle of an overgrown field.

Little now remains except a few incongruous pieces of theming, and the footprints where the rides once stood. The castle is cracked and crumbling, in dire need of maintenance. Deer wander along pathways that were once thronged with excited visitors. It is eerily, constantly quiet. Year on year the forest takes back more of what used to be its own.

There is, however, one part of the grounds that is still cared for. A wide, flat lawn in front of the crumbling castle has been meticulously groomed. At its head sits a small wooden bench, dedicated to the memory of Mark Blackwood. The place which surrounds it is different from what it once was, and it is changing still. For the time being, however, it is calm, and silent, and peaceful.

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Krishan Coupland is a graduate from the University of East Anglia MA Creative Writing programme. His debut chapbook When You Lived Inside The Walls is available from Stonewood Press, and his short fiction appears in Ambit, Aesthetica and Litro. He has won the Manchester Fiction Prize, and the Bare Fiction Prize. He runs and edits Neon Literary Magazine. He is unduly pre-occupied with theme parks. His website is www.krishancoupland.co.uk.