Which is the scariest ride that you have experienced?

Do you mean “ride” in the sense of an amusement park attraction? or, say, careening through actual traffic in a car driven by a drunk driver?

^^ Amusement park.

@Jeruba – if you have experienced the other ride you can describe that as well.

The “Bullet” was scary when I was a kid. It’s a big ride that consisted of two capsules each on the end of their own fulcrum, spinning on an axis above the park in opposite directions (like two sledge hammers with people in their hammerheads) while the capsules themsleves spun at the end of their own fulcrums. I loved it.

But the scariest ride ever was flying at about 35,000 ft, above Norway and having the outside port engine explode and drop off, causing the plane to slide sideways toward the earth while violently shuddering. The other engines were screaming, it’s passengers were screaming and the O2 apparatus popped out of the ceiling above every seat. Drinks, food, magazines and books were flying everywhere inside the cabin. Utter and immediate chaos. I had a port side window seat and watched the engine smoke, explode, hang by wiring and debris for a moment, then drop away.

As we broke through the cloud cover, I could see the beautiful, green, rolling hills and blue lakes coming at me. I remember thnking how much it looked like Minnesota. And then, the flight crew up front were able to stabilize the plane, pull up, level off and we landed at a NATO airbase where they flew in another commercial 747 which we boarded and resume our flight from NYC to Stockholm. THAT was a scary ride. I actually had vynil upholstery under my fingernails when we landed.

Not an amusement-park ride— but a horseback riding venue in a state park (Shelby Forest) when I was ten years old. Camp Fire Girls started accepting boys that year and I joined maybe the only boy who ever did in the 1970s and because there weren’t enough horses for me to ride with the girls, I was the odd ‘man’ out and, determined not to be deprived— was to ride the trail alone after everyone else came back.

But it was time for the horses to eat dinner, and the horses didn’t WANT to be ridden on the trail after five P.M, and any horse out there would resent his rider and want to get back as soon as possible and depose of the rider by any means necessary

When I got on, people kept telling me to pull the reins to slow the horse down. But damn the commands, so thought the horse. The horse charged ahead bouncing me violently—I pretended to be tough and like I enjoyed it.

For several miles of a wooded, hilly area, this horse ran as quickly and violently as possible, and took every opportunity to scrape me off with tree branches. It even attempted to throw me off in ravines. Any relatively straight stretch of the trail, this horse ran/galloped as fast as it was physically able—probably not touching the ground more than touching. It wanted to get home and eat. I was ten years old, frail, and gentle, This horse wanted to complete the ride as quickly as possible to get home and eat, with the other horses.

I finally did get thrown in the home stretch and had to walk about twenty minutes uphill-downhill before meeting the entourage from the end of the trail who had come searching for me. There were no cell phones in those days, so those who began from the beginning of the trail had to walk the entire trail—almost two hours, before discovering that I had been found. I was battered and bruised and scratched up quite a bit from branches and bark. I had a back injury but nothing serious. I do not believe horses really intend to hurt people, but in a state park, horses obviously get quite a bit of abuse and probably see their riders as a burden rather than real people they relate to and can actually harm.

I wasn’t angry or resentful as I might be nowadays. But realized even then that I would always have a story to tell about.

The Big Shot at the top of the Stratosphere Tower in Las Vegas. Here’s a video of the rider’s view. Not my video, not me in the videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_pj4ptt7is

It’s really a horrifying feeling like a nightmare. I’m afraid of heights, and this thing made me feel like I was going to fly up into space. In the video, you see the rider’s view. You’re hundreds of feet above the city and it is really, really scary.

Cannonball. From west edmonton mall water park . Scary. You feel like drowning.

When I was 9, me and my family went on a royal carribean cruise and San Juan was our first port. My parents are extremely gullible people, so we were persuaded into going to a timeshare event. However, the person in our cab taking us to the time share event drove 60 miles an hour in a small two lane road in an impoverished part of town. Being only 9 years old, I was scared out of my mind that we were getting kidnapped.

I should have been glad about that excitement because the following 2 hours was the most boring experience of all time.

My dad was a mechanical engineer. So when I was around six years old we went on the scrambler at the Lane Country Fair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X29tYJfhhQM

That is a fancy one. Ours was a bit more like scaffolding. So my dickhead dad thought it would be funny to talk about the bolts and their strength that held the rides together. He included stuff like if this 3/8ths bolt snapped the physics would snap my neck before I knew there was a problem.

And then things went to shit. Our little spinning thing of death hit a guardrail and it was pretty violent. I screamed until they were forced to stop the ride.

The scariest ride I haven’t experienced was at Blackpool. The ride was nowhere to be seen but lying on the ground at t h e start was a broken set of false teeth. I thought if that’s what the acceleration is like you can keep it.

I was on a wild ride where the t bar broke and I wasn’t locked in. Last ride I ever went on. I was screaming for the operator to stop the ride. I considered throwing my shoes at him.

I can think of a couple of non-amusement park experiences that scared me to death.

First, was the experience of my daughter driving me home in her little Suzuki Sierra and taking corners so fast I swear it felt like two of the wheels left the road, and then driving down a hill so fast I thought we were going to smash into the back of the BMW at the bottom. I actually screamed! I tried not to because I didn’t want to appear critical of her driving but that hill was the last straw! I thought I was going to die!

Then there was the Roman taxi driver! He was weaving through traffic at very high speed while taking calls to his many lady friends. During the first call, he was singing a romantic song to some lady (we could hear her voice too). Next, he had a passionate argument with a different woman. Then he argued with a man about a debt from what we could understand. And finally, it sounded like he was talking to his wife. We were clinging to the seat in the back as he flew from one lane to the next, overtaking people like a mad thing! We were torn between screaming hysterically at his driving or laughing hysterically at the drama in his life!

I was in the Army Reserve. As part of some sort of cock-eyed training exercise, our unit took a trip down the Snake River while it was in flood, running 150% above normal. We were in these flimsy canoes. Like everyone else, my canoe tipped over. Just before I was swept downstream, I managed to grab hold of the top of a tree that had fallen into the river. It was flailing up and down and I could see I wasn’t going to be able to hang on very long. Someone pulled me out just as my strength gave out. Had they failed, the authorities would have found my body under the log jam just downstream.

Nobody was killed, which is truly a miracle.

Riding in the back seat while my future FIL drove last night. First time in 28 years I’d ever been car sick!

Riding in the car with my father, he’s a horrible driver

WIcked Twister
Dragster
Mean Streak
Cedar Point has some pretty scary rides.

A ferris wheel, a quick glance at the pin holding the basket to the wheel revealed that the cotter pin holding it in place was missing and the pin was not all the way in. I told the operator and he looked annoyed that they would have to shut the ride down and fix it. Carnival rides are just not safe.
@jca the one time I was at the stratosphere was for my wedding and they were not running any of the rides that day. I’m afraid of heights so it’s not like I would have done any of them anyway.

@ARE_you_kidding_me: Yes, they shut down the rides at the top of the Stratosphere when it’s very windy or stormy.

@imrainmaker Space Mountain at Disneyland.

@imrainmaker Second scariest ride on horseback. There were two horses going downhill. The horse I was on always had to be in the lead. She was leading uphill, until we turned around and started down. I wasn’t sure I’d get down safely with her efforts to get in the lead again.

Being in a three-seater airplane. I couldn’t breathe.

Like @RedDeerGuy1 above me, the scariest ride I was ever on was when the safety belt did not fasten before the ride started, and I was scared I would fall out. It was a space ship ride in Disneyland, and I told the operator about it afterwards, and he thought I was hysterical. I really was.

A snowy mountain road in nortthern England on which our small car began to slide backward. No railing, hundreds of feet drop. Thought we were gonners.

Fortunately, car skid into a patch of grass.

^ Where was the road @Pachy? I’ve been on roads like that myself. Very scary.

Just south of Wales. I think.

At Carnivale in LaPaz, Mexico. All the rides were castoff, not safe for Kmart parking lot fairs. The Fun House moving ramp flung me violently into a throng of merrymakers. They laughed and threw confetti into my eyes. So I was confused, bruised and blinded in a world I couldn’t understand.
That was the most horrifying moment of my life… All in the name of “fun”.