Yesterday, Jim Grey compared finding work to riding a roller coaster: all you can do is hang on and trust that it will eventually end. Jim’s post hit pretty close to home for two reasons: on one hand, I’m deep into a frustrating and fruitless job search. On the other, I just unearthed a treasure trove of photos I took of the roller coasters at Indiana Beach. Somehow, it all felt fitting.
I’ve always loved amusement parks. Long before I was old enough to drive to one myself, I was building them obsessively, managing budgets, and designing increasingly convoluted rides and slides in the first three editions of RollerCoaster Tycoon. These days, I still lose track of time tinkering with parks in Planet Coaster. That obsession has occasionally carried over into real life: I’ve been to my fair share of amusement parks here in the Midwest, and although some are bigger, some are cleaner, and some have taller coasters or brighter lights, none of them hit me quite like Indiana Beach. It’s my favorite park by far.
You may not have known it until you read the headline -heck, you may not have heard of Indiana Beach in general- but the place is celebrating its centennial this year. What began as Earl Spackman’s quiet family retreat along the west side of Lake Shafer was officially established as Ideal Beach in 19261. In those early days, the attraction was little more than a sandy shoreline, some rowboats, and a refreshment stand2.
Ideal Beach didn’t stay small for long. Just a year after opening, the park added a pair of thirty-foot toboggan slides that turned the lakeside getaway into a genuine attraction. Then came the legendary Ideal Beach Ballroom in 1930, a massive dance hall that quickly became one of Indiana’s hottest entertainment destinations3. Artists as diverse as Glen Miller, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, and The Who transformed the shoreline into a bustling hotspot.
After Earl Spackman died in 1946, his son Tom pushed the park into a new era. Permanent amusement rides like a Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, and the spinning Roll-O-Plane soon appeared along the boardwalk. In 1960, the growing attraction shed the Ideal Beach name and became Indiana Beach4. Its first roller coaster, an S.D.C. Galaxi, appeared in 1971. The park’s famous slogan, “there’s more than corn in Indiana,” came in 19855.
Tom Spackman continued running Indiana Beach well into his nineties, becoming almost as much a part of the park’s identity as the rides themselves. By the time the park and campgrounds were sold to Morgan RV in 20086, generations of families had grown up associating the Spackman name with summers on Lake Shafer! Unfortunately, the years that followed were rocky. Under Morgan’s tenure, the park found itself mired in controversy7. Its beloved reputation took a major hit.
In 2013, the property changed hands again when it was sold to Apex Parks Group8. That arrangement ended in shock when Apex abruptly announced in 2020 that Indiana Beach would close after ninety-four years. For a moment, it looked like one of Indiana’s most iconic attractions might disappear forever! Fortunately, though, Chicago businessman Gene Staples stepped in, purchased the park, and reopened it almost at the last second9. Today, Indiana Beach is thriving more or less as it has for most of the past century.
I first visited Indiana Beach in 2003 when I was twelve and immediately fell in love with the place. Unlike sprawling modern theme parks built on endless acreage, Indiana Beach is crammed onto a narrow peninsula where every square foot matters. The result is chaotic: rides twist between restaurants, midway games wedge themselves beneath roller coasters, and entire attractions hang directly over the waters of Lake Shafer. Nearly everywhere you go, the park feels less designed than organically assembled over decades in the most convoluted way possible.
That’s exactly why I love it. Indiana Beach doesn’t have the polished, hyper-sanitized perfection of a Disney park or the corporate-licensed sameness of somewhere like Six Flags. It’s louder, stranger, grittier, and infinitely more personal. The park has an eccentric personality all its own, the kind that can only come from a century of squeezing new ideas into whatever space happened to be available. You might find a random Tiki head next to the park’s legendary Taco Shoppe. Antique Autos swerve around a random mid-century fountain. An old Scrambler car serves as a planter. I hope that kind of stuff comes across in the photos I took.
One of the best examples of Indiana Beach’s wonderfully improvised personality was the Galaxi, the park’s first roller coaster. In 1971, it stood alone on a pier above Lake Shafer. When Tom Spackman decided to add waterslides, though, he faced a familiar problem: there was no room. In classic Indiana Beach fashion, the slides were simply wrapped around the coaster. The Galaxi was always a fun little low-stakes twister, but screaming through that tangled mess of waterslides made it feel uniquely Indiana Beach. Another coaster, a Schwarzkopf Jet Star called the Tig’rr, is similarly shoehorned atop the Tig’rr’s Den restaurant.
Indiana Beach entered the big leagues in 1994 with the debut of the Hoosier Hurricane. Built by Custom Coasters International, the hybrid wooden out-and-back stretches nearly 2,900 feet and blasts riders across the peninsula at speeds that exceed fifty miles per hour. The Hurricane features steel running rails mounted on laminated wooden track like a traditional woody, but broke new ground with a steel support structure.
Like the rest of the park, the Hoosier Hurricane was stuffed into available space. Paralleling the boardwalk, it rides along the shores of Lake Shafer, dives under the park’s suspension bridge, and spins back near the Giant Gondola Wheel and Flying Bobs. The Hurricane even shares some of its structure with the Cornball Express, an award-winning wooden twister that wrapped around the Tig’rr in 2001. Of the two, the Cornball offers a far better ride: not as rough, with more ejector airtime and laterals.
Indiana Beach was home to a couple of other memorable roller coasters during my 2013 visit, none stranger than the Lost Coaster of Superstition Mountain. Built in 2002 atop the old Superstition Mountain dark ride from the seventies, the ride is another hybrid woodie. Due to a lack of space, LoCoSuMo’s cars are hauled straight upward in an elevator before plunging into a tangled maze of tunnels, twists, and turns around Antique Autos and the park’s boat ride.
Indiana Beach is one of the dwindling number of amusement parks that still runs a sky ride, and it’s one of the best ways to experience the park. Floating above the boardwalk gives you a perfect view of the midway’s tangled layout! More importantly, the sky ride also serves as the gateway to one of Indiana Beach’s signature attractions, Steel Hawg. By 2008, things were so cramped that the park expanded into its northern parking lot to make room for it. An S&S El Loco model, the ninety-six-foot Hawg features two inversions and a beyond-vertical, 111-degree first drop. The ride isn’t fast, but it’s still insane! I’m still annoyed that I only managed to take a single photo of it.
It’s been years since my last visit, but under its current ownership, Indiana Beach has somehow managed to become even more gloriously unhinged. First off, Gene Staples replaced the Galaxi- missing since 2013- with a similar ride called Cyclone. The park’s newest headline attraction is the All American Triple Loop, a 111-foot traveling Schwarzkopf coaster that once roamed Europe under the name Dreier Looping. That sentence alone feels perfectly on-brand for Indiana Beach: of course the little park wedged along Lake Shafer would buy a legendary portable German roller coaster and squeeze it in.
The ride opened in 2023 after a massive restoration effort and instantly became one of the most impressive additions in the park’s history. Schwarzkopf coasters already have a cult following among enthusiasts, but Triple Loop carries an almost mythical reputation: it was the world’s first coaster with three vertical inversions when it debuted in 1984, then spent decades bouncing between fairs and storage yards across two continents before finally landing in northern Indiana. There may not be another place in America where that story could realistically end except Indiana Beach.
A hundred years in, Indiana Beach feels comforting right now. Roller coasters are engineered chaos: sudden drops, rattling turns, and moments where it feels like the whole structure shouldn’t hold together. The past six months have felt a little like that: I lost my job, I lost my stepdad and a wonderful aunt, and I was hospitalized twice. Just like on a roller coaster, you have little to do but climb slowly, unexpectedly plunge, and spend most of the ride not knowing what’s around the next bend. In the meantime, you hang on and trust the track is still there. I’m trying.
Sources Cited
1 Grady, D. (2016, July 4). A New Beginning. The Indianapolis Star. pp. A1-A8.
2 Potempa, P. (2015, September 24). Phil Potempa: Indiana Beach amusement park sold to new owners. NWI Times. Web. Retrieved May 7, 2026.
3 History (n.d.). Indiana Beach Amusement Resort [Monticello]. Web. Retrieved May 7, 2026.
4 (See footnote 3).
5 (See footnote 3).
6 Livingston, M. (2013, December 29). Worries grow about Indiana Beach future. The Indianapolis Star. p. A4.
7 (See footnote 5).
8 Indiana Beach’s new owner is overhauling amusement park (2016, March 7). The Lafayette Journal and Courier. p. A2.
9 Shannon, N. (2020, June 26). Indiana Beach reopens to the public on June 27. ABC57 [South Bend]. Web. Retrieved May 7, 2026.
