![]() ![]() It reopened in 1998 after millions of dollars were spent adding tons of new features, but when an employee was paralyzed after going down one of the slides and sued for millions, the waterpark closed for good-to everyone except skateboarders and graffiti artists who have no problem ignoring the “No Trespassing” signs, and artists like Ke$ha and BTS who both filmed music videos there in the past couple of years. That wasn’t the end of the water park where there’s very little water, though. It opened to the public in the ’60s, but dwindling crowds forced its closure in 1990. ![]() (Or, you know, just stick around wherever you live for another couple of years.) Flickr/el-toroĬalifornians love to ignore the fact that a desert is, by definition, a place that lacks water, which is why no one should be surprised that in the 1950s, a businessman named Bob Byers built a private waterpark in the middle of the Mojave Desert for his family to enjoy. There is an effort to improve conditions, but basically, if you want to know what it will look like after the apocalypse, this is the only place you need to visit. Now, the beaches surrounding it are home to those aforementioned fish carcasses, boarded-up motels, and abandoned buildings. Dead fish carcasses replaced the throngs of tourists on the beach, and by the ‘90s, when the water started to recede (resulting in clouds of toxic dust from the lake bed), pretty much everyone fled the scene. ![]() Only problem? This accidental lake didn’t have an outflow, which meant no natural stabilization system, which meant it eventually (in the 1970s) became saltier than seawater and contaminated from runoff, which meant almost all of the fish died (as well as the birds who depended on them for food). It should have eventually dried up, but the farmers kept letting excess water from the river flow into the lake, and in the 1950s, the “Salton Riviera” became an incredibly popular getaway (more popular than Yosemite) where people went to swim and fish. In the spring of 1905, an irrigation canal caused the Colorado River to flood and fill an ancient dry lakebed with water, effectively creating a brand new lake named the Salton Sea. However, considering its heartbreaking past (and the fact that it’s private property- a developer bought it with plans to convert it into housing, though he’s faced opposition), it’s best approached with reverence (or legally, probably not at all). The building has been totally abandoned for over 15 years and is overgrown, rapidly decaying, covered in graffiti, and, frankly, looks like something straight out of a horror movie. Thorpe was found not guilty by reason of insanity and, in 2002, California created “ Laura’s Law,” a state law that allows for court-ordered assisted outpatient treatment. In 2001, Scott Thorpe, a client of the outpatient mental health clinic who suffered from paranoia and agoraphobia and had resisted hospitalization attempts by his family, fatally shot 19-year-old Laura Wilcox, a college student who was working there over her winter break, and Pearlier Mae Feldman, a mental health caregiver. Later, the building was the site of the town’s Behavioral Health Department, and this is where the story turns very grim. It was in continuous use until the mid-1970s and in the early ‘80s became a prison for low-risk inmates due to overcrowding in the county jail. There’s a tragic story behind this abandoned hospital on the outskirts of Nevada City that was built in 1860 as a private hospital and grew in size over the years with more wings added as the county’s population surged-the oldest part predates almost everything in Nevada City.
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