Background: Ever since I got hired at the Asbury Park Press, I wanted to take a look at the Haunted Castle fire at Six Flags Great Adventure. To me, it just seemed like too good of a story to simply revisit for anniversaries: It was known to have safety issues — which went ignored — and people died after it caught fire. The park got off on manslaughter charges, but the safety changes that came from the fire were the first time the country took amusement park safety seriously.
This is just one story — but not, by far, the whole story.
JACKSON - Think about your last time inside a "haunted house."
Spooky music probably echoed throughout darkened or pitch-black hallways. Actors were on hand to scare patrons.
Lighted exit signs and sprinkler heads were attached to the ceiling. And if something went wrong? The lights would have gone up, with an employee addressing patrons through a loudspeaker.
And those actors — the zombies, the vampires and the ghouls — would have quickly become guides, breaking character to usher patrons to the nearest exits.
None of those safety standards was in place in May 1984, when a 14-year-old boy with a lighter walked into the Haunted Castle at Six Flags Great Adventure, touching off a catastrophe that still reverberates through the amusement park industry 35 years later.
Within an hour, the attraction would be left in smoldering ruins and eight teenagers — Joseph Beyroutey Jr., Nicholas Caiazza, Jose Carrion Jr., Tina Genovese, Christopher Harrison, Eric Rodriguez, Lenin Ruiz and Samuel Valentin Jr. — were killed, making it one of the nation's deadliest amusement park tragedies.
Their deaths led to one of Ocean County's highest-profile trials in the late 20th century, as Six Flags was charged with aggravated manslaughter for their negligence in not installing safety equipment.
That overlooked safety equipment, much of which had been dismissed as too costly or left in disrepair, soon became the recommended standard across the country.
“The problem was, this occurred in a time period where the regulations over amusement parks weren’t being taken seriously,” said Ken Martin, a Virginia-based amusement ride safety consultant. “It’s really sad when people come out to a park, because most people don’t think anything about it. They assume that, when they walk in the gates, someone is regulating it.”
‘MOST DANGEROUS PLACE’
In May 1984, 13-year-old Peter James Smith was inside the Haunted Castle when he saw smoke billow out of the hallways.
"Fire! Fire!" someone shouted. "Get out!"
This wasn't the day the Haunted Castle burned to the ground. It was less than a week earlier, when a prankster set off a smoke bomb within the hallways. But the incident left Smith shaken. He believed the Haunted Castle was a death trap in the making.
He swore it off for good.
"Even I noticed something was wrong with it, as a little kid,” said Smith, now a Seaside Heights school board member who spent the better part of 20 years researching the Haunted Castle fire for an e-book and documentary, published in 2004.
As it turns out, Smith's uneasiness about the Haunted Castle was shared by safety experts as well.
The Haunted Castle wasn’t a castle at all. In fact, it was essentially a series of shipping containers decorated to look like a haunted house – with flashing lights, spooky organ music and hanging spiders.
Actors were staged at different points of the Haunted Castle, so familiar to parkgoers and employees that they were often referred to simply as "butcher," "phantom" or "lady on the wheel."
The actors were largely separated from the guests by windows and wire fences.
After the fire, investigators determined that the site had been in violation of a dozen state fire codes, which went unenforced after Jackson Township officials ruled that the Haunted Castle was a temporary structure.
Temporary structures weren't held to the same standard as fixed structures; for example, they weren't subject to inspections or permitting processes.
Six Flags officials did commission fire safety assessments during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many came back with recommendations on the Haunted Castle, including recommending smoke and fire detection systems, fire extinguishers and sprinklers.
Park officials cherry-picked which recommendations to heed.
They installed battery-operated smoke detectors, which were quickly vandalized and never replaced. The fire extinguishers on site were often left nearly empty after parkgoers sprayed their friends in jest, according to the testimony of former employees.
“These things were recommended by their own safety experts,” Smith said. “They recognized that place as the most dangerous place in the whole park.”
The sprinklers were deemed by Six Flags officials as simply too expensive to install — even after a previous fire, in December 1981, did more than $1 million in damage to a games pavilion.
''I questioned them verbally, in my daily reports and in meetings,'' said Kathryn DiFusco during the trial. DiFusco, a former supervisor, testified that she'd reported unsafe conditions at the Haunted Castle as early as 1979.
"They said it would be too expensive to put sprinklers in a temporary structure that was to be replaced with a permanent structure," DiFusco said.
And then there was the polyurethane foam.
In one hallway, a strobe light was designed to frighten people as they walked through the attraction. But the light was so disorienting that many walked headfirst into a wall at the end of the hallway. In order to prevent injury, the park lined the wall with polyurethane foam as a makeshift crash pad.
By May 1984, large chunks of the covering had been ripped off and never replaced — exposing the foam. The Haunted Castle itself was "run-down," then-manager Michael Korzenok testified. Employees had begun referring to it as the "Haunted Heap," a joke referring to its shabby appearance, he said.
On May 11, 1984, a Friday night, Six Flags Great Adventure was populated by a large number of class trips. Genovese was there with the Victory Christian Academy, of Williamstown. Carrion, Rodriuez, Ruiz and Valentin were on a class trip from Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn, from which Harrison had recently graduated.
Beyroutey and Caiazza, friends from Paterson, came to the park to celebrate their last Friday before their summer jobs started.
At 6:30 p.m., the eight teens were among the 30 to 40 people inside the Haunted Castle when a 14-year-old boy from Pennsylvania flicked open a lighter.
According to the testimony of Joseph Iraca, a Trenton boy who had met him on line for the ride, the unidentified boy simply tried to find his way through the "dark, but not too dark" strobe room. Iraca demonstrated how the boy held the lighter eye-level, waving it slowly left and right to illuminate the room.
Prosecutors argued that youth bumped into the crash pad. Attorneys for Six Flags argued that he deliberately held the lighter to the foam.
The rest is agreed upon: The polyurethane foam caught fire almost immediately. The plywood walls were next.
″I told him to get out of there," Iraca testified. "He said he had to put it out."
The two boys were soon rushed away from the fire. Within a few minutes, the entire "castle" was ablaze.
There were no sprinklers. The exit lights were broken. The lights never turned on. The music kept playing.
‘PEOPLE ARE STILL GETTING KILLED’
Thirty-five years after the Haunted Castle fire, sprinklers and emergency exit signs are commonplace in haunted houses.
But those safety standards haven't come without a fight from amusement park operators, said Martin, the ride safety consultant.
Even today, he said, many owners complain of the added costs, especially given haunted houses' declining popularity, which they attribute to a ruined suspension of disbelief.
It's a give-and-take, Martin said. "Most fire departments don’t know anything about amusement rides but most amusement parks don't know anything about fire safety."
While there are national standards on amusement park safety, they haven't been universally adopted. Instead, they're passed on by amusement park trade groups and safety organizations, such as the National Fire Protection Association.
After the Haunted Castle fire, the NFPA recommended that "special amusement buildings," such as a haunted house, install sprinklers, lighted exit signs and walkways and institute emergency protocols — such as raising the lights and training employees to evacuate — that are commonplace today.
But in the absence of a national law, a state-by-state patchwork of safety regulations prevails, Martin said. A year after the fire, New Jersey fire codes were updated, requiring walk-through attractions such as haunted houses to have automatic sprinklers and alarms, exit lights and fire-resistant materials..
And in the years since, New Jersey has established itself as one of the most strict states when it comes to amusement park safety: All rides are inspected before materials are shipped to the state, during construction, and there are regular random inspections occur during operation.
In an email, Six Flags Great Adventure spokeswoman Kristin Fitzgerald said the park invests "the greatest amount of resources in our safety program, which is one of the most comprehensive in our industry."
"Safety is the foundation of everything we do," she said. "We work with internal and external experts to ensure the highest safety standards for our guests and team members. Nothing is more important than their safety."
Martin said that strict ride safety standards help in New Jersey, but that "it should be that way in all states.
"They should all be on the same page at the same time," he said.
In 2016, a boy was thrown from a Kansas waterslide and killed when he hit the protective netting designed to prevent patrons from falling. That same year, four people were thrown from a ride at the Ohio State Fair. One died.
According to the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, an estimated 1,035 to 1,171 injuries occurred on rides in the United States and Canada in 2017, 10 percent of which were considered "serious."
The number of ride injuries has fluctuated year-to-year but decreased about 42 percent to 47 percent since 2003.
"Rides are not any safer than from before these regulations were in existence," Martin said. "Things are still happening. People are still getting killed."
‘YOU’LL NEVER FORGET THAT HAUNTED HOUSE’
Smith's documentary on the Haunted Castle fire is uploaded to YouTube, where he still gets new comments from former employees, parkgoers and even a few who claim they survived the fire.
Most commenters are angry about the trial: Six Flags was found not guilty on charges of aggravated manslaughter and two park executives, charged separately, performed community service as part of pretrial intervention. Their charges were expunged before the trial even began.
"Anybody big and powerful can avoid the law," said Elaine Beyroutey, mother of victim Joseph Beyroutey Jr., after the executives' admission into pretrial intervention was announced. "But if it was you or me, we would have to have stood trial."
The families of all eight victims filed suit against Six Flags, seven of whom reached $2.5 million settlements. The other family was awarded $750,000 after a trial.
In Smith's opinion, justice was served on an economic level. The park's attendance and revenue declined as the Haunted Castle fire — and other incidents, like a death on the Lightnin' Loops roller coaster and a string of assaults on patrons — garnered national attention.
“I don’t think they got away with anything,” he said. “The revenue of the park went down millions of dollars. Their reputation went south big time. Nobody trusted Great Adventure anymore. It took them a long time to get trust back.”
After the fire, what was left of the Haunted Castle was demolished. For a long time, the site hosted the park's catering facility for group trips — like the school trips that went to Six Flags Great Adventure on that night in May 1984.
Now, it's home to Cyborg Cyber Spin, one of many superhero-themed rides in the immediate vicinity of the Haunted Castle site. Not that any parkgoer would know the difference — there's no memorial to the site or the teenagers who died there.
Every so often, Smith will talk to someone who isn't familiar with the fire. Or someone who had simply forgotten about it.
“Has it slipped out of the public consciousness? Yes. But the people who were there, who went to that place, who lived to that time? You’ll never forget that haunted house.”
He hasn't been to Six Flags Great Adventure in years.