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Foreverland

Rocky Point Park lives on in artist Jason Mayoh’s comic book series.

If you still miss it all—the rides! the chowder! the theme song!—you’ll feel Jason Mayoh’s pain. More than a de-cade after Rocky Point Park closed its gates for good, the twenty-nine-year-old artist was shocked to discover photos of the amusement park’s now-abandoned and vandalized ruins. “Picture the image you have of a place as a kid and going back in twenty years to find it turned into a wasteland,” says Mayoh. “When I saw what the park had become, I wanted to bring it back to life in my own way.” As he set to work researching the park’s history, digging up news stories, old photographs and urban legends, it didn’t escape his attention that one attraction remained almost  intact. “The House of Horrors still had cars on the track,” Mayoh says. “Out of everything, it seemed to have a life after death.” Inspired, he created a three-book, horror comic series filled with tales of cursed rides, mysterious accidents and eerie mythology, weaving true stories with his own Tales-from-the-Crypt imaginings. “Once I started researching old articles, I was surprised there were so many strange, weird incidents that happened there,” Mayoh says. (Creepy fact: Broken-down rides were buried like corpses in the park woods.) Featured alongside Mayoh’s own artwork, reproductions of newspaper clippings and vintage Rocky Point Park advertisements stoke nostalgia even in the uninitiated. “Little kids who are Rhode Islanders are totally fascinated, even though they never got a chance to go there,” says Mayoh. “That’s been the most rewarding thing.” For more information, visit talesofrockypointpark.com.

http://www.talesofrockypointpark.com

By Nicole Maranhas
Photography by Chris Vaccaro