Bungee Jump to Bounce Shack at Knott’s

Helping to reshape Knott’s Berry Farm as a modern thrill park, owner Cedar Fair LP said Tuesday it will replace the park’s 46-year-old Haunted Shack attraction with a bungee jump-like ride that carries an extra cost for patrons.

The ride, one of 80 worldwide known generically as Skycoasters, will lift riders 180 feet high, drop them in a free fall, then swing them from a towering arch. It is scheduled to open for the summer season next year.

Jack Falfas, Knott’s general manager, said he hasn’t decided on ticket prices but plans to undercut what Six Flags Magic Mountain charges for a similar ride: $28 for one person, $44 for two people or $48 for three.

Reservations typically are required for Skycoasters, which are operated by the manufacturer, handle only a few riders an hour and are too scary for most people. “This is not Supreme Scream--a ride everyone will do,” Falfas said. “But there isn’t a thrill like it.”

Displaced by the expensive addition is the Haunted Shack, a tongue-in-cheek take on the cheesy roadside tourist attractions once common along highways like Route 66. Tours conducted since 1954 by employees playing the part of “Slanty Sam” featured optical illusions like water running uphill.

Even when founder Walter Knott, a former boysenberry farmer, added the Shack to his Ghost Town collection of Wild West buildings, the attractions it parodied were disappearing. Interstate highways were spreading across America, and Disneyland was to open just off the Santa Ana Freeway a year later.

By this year, the dusty old Shack was deemed too expensive to repair and upgrade for wheelchair access. Knott’s closed it early this month with no public announcement--a decision Falfas acknowledged was unpopular among many of the park’s longtime fans.

“Its significance was that it had history,” he said. “But no one was visiting it. It was some hokey stuff, and it just wasn’t a good fit anymore. Even on the busiest summer days there were never long lines for it.”

Like most Skycoasters, Knott’s new ride will get its own name. The one at Cedar Fair’s flagship park, Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, is called Ripcord; a small version at Pharaoh’s Lost Kingdom in Redlands goes by Hysteria.

The Skycoaster accounts for about $2 million of $4 million in capital improvements that Cedar Fair announced Tuesday for Knott’s in the coming year, with the rest going to picnic shelters, restrooms, shops and the like.

The modest budget contrasts with such major recent additions as the $24-million GhostRider roller coaster that Cedar Fair added at Knott’s and $26-million Soak City water park it built just outside. Falfas said more major additions will be made.