The alligator watches us.
The eyes of more alligators slowly break the surface of the small lake.
The air buzzes with bees and crickets, the croaks of bullfrogs, the grunts of wild hogs. It is deafening.
The water is silent. So are the rattlesnakes, the water moccasins, the blankets of mosquitoes.
Also silent: the broken rides, dilapidated hot dog stands, graffitied bathrooms, collapsing ticket booths, scattered bumper cars.
The last time I was here was at a lively senior prom in 2005, a few months before Hurricane Katrina, and the ensuing levee and flood-wall failure, destroyed my hometown. This Six Flags was one of the storm’s many casualties. But while the rest of New Orleans set about rebuilding, the park was neither restored nor demolished. The wetlands once cleared to build it have reclaimed the land.
For people interested in abandoned places, this Six Flags is “the holy grail,” says Jake Williams, who explores deserted properties on his YouTube channel and directed a 2021 documentary about the park titled “Closed for Storm.”
From afar, and for nearly two decades, I’ve thought it must be one of the creepiest places imaginable.
Now that I’m inside the park, I no longer have to use my imagination.
When you imagine New Orleans, you probably don’t think about New Orleans East. Though it is 65 percent of the city’s landmass, it only contains 20 percent of the population. It’s an isthmus, laced with canals and bayous, roughly 10 miles northeast of Jackson Square. Once an up-and-coming neighborhood, it was hit hard by the 1980s oil bust that impoverished much of the city. It now houses subdivisions, factories, wetlands and a couple of 19th-century forts. Drive far enough, and you’ll fully surrender to nature in the Bayou Sauvage Urban National Wildlife Refuge.
It was in this section of the city that Jazzland opened in 2000, atop a concrete and steel foundation resting on 18,000 giant wooden pilings, to keep the whole thing from sinking into the wetlands.
Its roller coasters soared above the dense foliage surrounding it, announcing a new party destination for a city that thrives on tourism.
Every aspect was meant to invoke New Orleans, from the loose reproduction of the French Quarter to the Mega Zeph, a 110-foot-tall wooden roller coaster built on a steel frame and based on the Zephyr, a smaller coaster at Pontchartrain Beach, the city’s previous amusement park, which closed in 1983.
The fanfare was great, but it was too far from the city’s tourist center. If you’re looking for a roller-coaster night, you don’t truly have to leave the French Quarter. Jazzland’s parent company declared bankruptcy in 2002. Six Flags purchased the park, upgraded it with more roller coasters, and rebranded it as Six Flags New Orleans, though locals still referred to it as Jazzland.
As Hurricane Katrina brewed in the Gulf of Mexico in August 2005, someone put up plastic marquee lettering: “Closed for storm.”
My memories of that prom have faded.
I remember palling around with my friends Michael and Danny and our dates, poking fun at the fact that we drove to hang out in a fake French Quarter instead of the real one in our backyard. We were about to enter the real world, and we were excited. Everything felt easy. Nothing could hurt us.
The rides were not operational, so we wandered with our dates around the bright-colored buildings, popping into the main ballroom to hear that familiar mixture of classic New Orleans R&B, bounce music and Top 40.
Prom at Jazzland — at the time, it felt sort of stupid. A supposedly cinematic but utterly forgettable moment of our young lives, set in a weird amusement park in New Orleans East? We were young, and we felt above it all. We wanted to be in the city.
Then Hurricane Katrina. Then the levees and flood walls failed. And then a recession swept the nation. And then BP spewed oil into the Gulf of Mexico after Deepwater Horizon exploded. Companies fled New Orleans. The Times-Picayune, the storied newspaper where I’d dreamed of working, was gutted.
You build a life, even as it erodes around you. That’s how 19 years passed. That’s how I now live 1,100 miles away, in Washington, D.C. That’s how I wound up with a job that took me back to Jazzland.
Troy Henry wants to knock it down.
He’s a local businessman, two-time mayoral candidate and a lifelong resident of New Orleans East. And he’s sick of seeing the abandoned park every damn day.
In 2009, the city of New Orleans ordered Six Flags to vacate its lease and then took over the property. The city has granted permission to Henry’s company, Bayou Phoenix, to renovate. He hopes to turn the property into a complex with a movie studio, hotels, a water park, a man-made lagoon and a sports complex for children.
“It’s just blight, and it’s a waste,” says Henry. “It’s time to move on.”
The main entrances to the park are blocked by concrete barriers. After taking a dirt service road in, for a while, photographer Emily Kask and I just sit in the gargantuan parking lot. It’s cluttered with fallen light poles. In front of the turnstiles is an old statue of a small car, bleached white by the sun. A small tree grows through its undercarriage.
By entering the park, we somehow travel both forward in time and back.
A few months after prom, and a week after Katrina made landfall, a friend and I drove the 84 miles on Interstate 10 from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Sept. 5, 2005, was the first day the city allowed residents to assess the damage.
We drove to our own houses, finding a gaping hole in my roof and stagnating floodwater in his home, then to those of friends and family. Some were unscathed. Most were not.
I never thought I’d see that kind of destruction in person again.
But as I wander through the abandoned Six Flags in 2024, I am back in 2005. Because this place looks exactly like the city did then.
“Six Flags is a kind of lasting monument of Katrina,” says Williams, the documentarian. “It’s a shocking reminder of how devastating everything was for New Orleans.”
Williams was struck by a calendar left in the front office, turned to August 2005. A water line marking the top of the floodwater was still clearly visible on the paper.
Water lines are visible everywhere here, about six feet off the ground.
It’s a haunting vision of what the city might still look like if we hadn’t rebuilt. It’s a haunting vision of what the city could look like if this happens again.
We move through the park slowly. “Oh my God,” we say under our breath, at every little spooky scene. The park is covered in graffiti: “Roach City.” “The bones of baby dolls.” “I love you Curt.”
The ballroom that hosted the prom still stands, gutted, its steel foundation exposed. The floor is littered with dead rafters and live snakes.
Papers and folders are molded and rotting in the administrative buildings. Warehouses overflow with grimy novelty cups and stuffed animals.
A statue of a Mardi Gras jester that once felt joyful now looks demonic.
What freezes me, though, are the bumper cars. They’re still on the track, facing different directions, as if kids just hopped off. But the cars are covered in dust and dirt and pollen. It feels like too-fresh archaeology. It goose bumps the skin. It tingles the spine.
Why are abandoned places so creepy?
“Creepiness thrives on ambiguity, and things not being quite as they should be,” says Frank McAndrew, a psychology professor at Knox College who studies creepiness.
And your subconscious brain knows “abandoned places are abandoned for bad reasons,” says Coltan Scrivner, a behavioral scientist at the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University and the department of psychology at Arizona State University. Even if you consciously know why the place is deserted — or that it’s simply a set in a horror movie — the human brain uses shortcuts to heighten our awareness of potential danger, to create the feeling of fear.
New Orleans has traded on this spookiness several time over the years, making a few bucks by allowing movie and TV studios to film at the abandoned park. “Jurassic World” merely wanted the parking lot to build its own sets. “Killer Joe,” an ultraviolent black comedy starring Matthew McConaughey, made the park itself a part of the set. “The Park,” a 2023 dystopian thriller set in world where a virus kills all adults, was actually set in an abandoned theme park.
Unauthorized visitors also show up to the park. Once the sun sets, urban explorers, graffiti artists and daring teenagers sneak in. Henry says his security detail catches about 10 people a week. He whips out his phone and flicks through photos of trespassers caught by night-vision cameras. They often climb the towering structures, including the Skycoaster, a 180-foot-tall ride in which visitors would strap in and free fall. No one has been seriously injured yet, but the potential is high.
Photographer Johnny Joo, who specializes in shooting abandoned places, got caught a decade ago when he sneaked in at 4 a.m. to shoot the park. A security guard warned him that the city’s court backlog was backed up, with people waiting up to two weeks in jail for a hearing.
The message was clear: Get out of here, and don’t come back.
The rent-a-cops don’t concern John Gualtieri. The wildlife — boar, yellowjackets, poison caterpillars — worry him a bit more, since he hikes about a mile through the surrounding forest and swampland to avoid security.
“It’s like a mini-Australia, dude — a thousand ways to die,” says Gualtieri, a self-proclaimed ghost hunter who chronicles his exploits on Instagram.
A wild boar would kill you by goring you with its razor-sharp tusks, most likely in the groin. An alligator would latch onto you and probably flip on its back, pulling you underwater until you drown — unless it ripped off your limb first.
As for ghosts? Gualtieri hasn’t seen any but says the park feels cursed. “It felt like something was watching me,” he says. “‘I Am Legend’ vibes.”
Shal Ngo, director of “The Park,” scoured the United States for an abandoned place that felt whole, that felt like an actual ghost town, not a smattering of broken buildings.
The only one he could find was Jazzland. The buildings are rotting, but they’re standing.
“The magical thing about Jazzland,” Ngo says, “is it’s all still there.”
After about an hour, Henry leaves me and Emily. The longer we look around, the less it looks like the set of a horror movie, and the more it looks like parts of post-Katrina New Orleans itself.
Hurricane Katrina struck the city on Aug. 29, 2005. It killed more than 1,800 people and upended the life of every New Orleans resident — and many more along the Gulf Coast. It flooded 80 percent of the city and caused an estimated $150 billion in damage. The city is still not fully rebuilt, just as Jazzland is not fully unbuilt.
Henry says his company plans to begin demolishing the remains of Jazzland later this year, with an eye toward building something new by 2027.
But first: This year could bring the worst hurricane season since 2005, or so says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which predicts four to seven “major” hurricanes for the summer and fall. And the state is losing its wetlands — which help protect it from hurricanes — at the rate of a football field every 100 minutes.
This is all beyond the arena of spine-tingling. For the city, the feeling is constant existential dread.
The day after my trip the park, my friends and family gather at my younger brother’s house for boudin and burgers.
My prom mates are there. Danny recently moved back after several years in other cities. Michael never left. Now, they’re raising their children in New Orleans.
None of us remember much about the prom. Katrina overshadows everything. A visit to Jazzland, or what remains of it, turns out to be more of a personal excavation — of buried memories and bygone expectations.
I’d once planned to spend my life in my hometown, and still hope to someday move back. But life can blow you this way and that — into a good job, and an adopted city. There are, however, small but sure ways to reclaim what’s lost. To reach back while moving forward. Last year I got married in a different kind of park — the lush, mossy, wildly alive Audubon Park — under the 300-year-old oak trees that survived countless hurricanes, including Katrina.
Many of the trees have been here before America was America, before New Orleans was New Orleans. We ended the wedding with a second line to the limo behind a jazzy brass band, the oaks towering behind us.
They’ll probably be here long after Jazzland is gone.
Long after New Orleans is gone.
