“It’s been a good long while, not being able to get Ghost Town started and to find somebody that would run it and take care of it. It needs to be put back to where it was,” said Alaska Presley, the park’s longtime owner.
Presley and her husband Hubert were part of the original ownership team, along with R.B. Coburn, that opened the Wild West-themed amusement park high atop Maggie Valley’s Buck Mountain in the early 1960s. She bought the park back out of bankruptcy in 2012 , but it never quite returned to the glory of its early years before closing permanently in 2016.
Since then, a number of rehabilitation schemes had been attempted by developers hoping to purchase the property from Presley, who’d listed it for almost $6 million. Now, a new LLC with Presley and developer Frankie Wood has been formed, as have expansive plans for the park’s revitalization.
It’s no surprise that the park’s loyal fan base is still adamant about its eventual reopening, but many of the well-known local personalities who attended the mountaintop reunion – and two reenactments of the park’s iconic gunfights – shed light on why.
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Russ Parker
“It was kind of a weird place to grow up,” said photographer Russ Parker. “People got shot and killed every hour, on the hour.”
Parker’s dad, legendary NASCAR photographer Pal Parker, did some work in Florida during the 1960s at Ghost Town’s sister park, Six Gun Territory, which led to Coburn coming to Maggie Valley to operate the photo concession at Ghost Town. Russ, named for the park’s designer Russ Pearson, was born a year later.
“Dad was in-and-out between here and the racing circuit, which meant that he employed all of his six kids and his wife,” Parker said. “And so the entire family, six kids and my mother, came up and were really raised here on the park and worked every day, all summer long.”
Parker said he estimates he’d shot more than 100,000 photos of tourists riding the chairlift, and has visited Ghost Town several times since it closed. Every time he does, he said, the experience brings a lifetime of memories flooding back.
“I was here a while back by myself, up here on the mountain, waiting for Robert [Bradley, a gunfighter] for something. It was eerie because you could almost hear the voices of all the things that happened as you were growing up,” Parker said. “You could picture coming in late and being yelled at. We never left here before 9:30 or 10 o’clock at night in the summer.”
When Parker and his siblings weren’t working, they’d explore the mountaintop and ride dirt bikes.
“We had all kinds of fun. All my friends were at home in the swimming pool and I was jealous of them at the time,” Parker said. “But now you look back and it’s like, what a unique place to grow up.”
Robert Bradley
Robert Bradley has been rolling off Ghost Town rooftops since 1962, but he started off at the bottom of the mountain, parking cars.
“I kept aggravating all the gunfighters, wanting to gunfight,” he said. “They finally called me up here up on top of the Silver Dollar, and all I’d do is come out and they’d see me and shoot, and I’d go back inside and that was it. Later that evening I was working in a show called ‘Jailbreak.’ I was running down the street and when I got to the end, they opened up with shotguns and I turned to flip and gravel flew and from then on they said, ‘Well, you just stay up here. You don’t have to go back to the bottom.’”
Eventually, Bradley clawed his way to the very top of the mountain as a performer, writer and manager of the park’s live action entertainment. During that time, like other Ghost Town performers, Bradley became fast buddies with Hollywood legend Burt Reynolds.
“Burt was a good stuntman to start with,” Bradley said. “He came just for a weekend gig or something like that, and he ended up staying the whole summer.”
That summer consisted of performances in which Reynolds played a bank robber. He’d come running out of the bank, and Bradley’s job was to jump up on a box, hurdle a railing and tackle Reynolds, a former Florida State halfback, mid-stride.
“All that had to be timed out just right, and then from there it was just ass-over-elbows out through the street,” Bradley said.
Robert Bradley, shown here as the “Apache Kid,” has a history with Ghost Town that goes all the way back to its beginnings. Jeffrey Delannoy photo
Off the job, that summer also consisted of a growing series of folkloric anecdotes about Reynolds’ time in Maggie Valley.
“Back then you had to go all the way to Asheville to get liquor, unless you bought it bootleg. That was cheap liquor at expensive prices,” Bradley said. “Instead of going to Asheville to get our liquor, me and Burt stopped and got some of that old bootleg liquor in this bottle club. It was a restaurant and all that. We would always get us a table by the window, so we could set that bottle behind the curtain and people wouldn’t see that cheap shit we was drinking.”
Frankie Wood
Wood, one of the park’s developers, had visited the park during his childhood and held fond memories, which is what led him to become involved in the effort to revive it.
“We were very excited about this reunion, giving everybody the opportunity to really enjoy it again as much as I did,” Wood said.
Wood’s brought in Matt Ferguson, co-owner of Route 19 Inn and chief innovation officer for Storyland Studios, a fabrication and design company that specializes in visual storytelling for some of the world’s biggest names in amusement park entertainment.
“Our goal for Ghost Town is to be everything that people love about it and more,” Ferguson said. “We want to have rides and attractions that compete with the best in the world, but we also want to preserve all of the things that people remembered and love about Ghost Town.”
Ferguson and Wood have been steadfast in their desire to retain as much of the park’s existing character as possible.
“These facades here are something that would be hard to do any better. We’d love to preserve what we can and recreate what we can’t preserve because it just brings back memories when people walk down these streets,” he said. “We want to preserve those memories.”
That all sounds like good news to Parker.
“What’s sitting here is the worst-case scenario at this point, but what Coburn and Pearson did here was unique, because they actually went out west and did scale drawings of buildings, they bought furniture, they brought props, they just created this entire town based not out of their imagination, but out of real Western sets in rural Western towns,” he said. “What happens here now and what moves forward can only be positive.”
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