(Via )įor decades, the imagery from Fire in the Hole has stuck with me. In reality, arson was not a Bald Knobber calling card. (Courtesy of The State Historical Society of Missouri) Above: Bald Knobbers set a cabin on fire in “The Shepherd of the Hills” outdoor drama, a play that’s run 57 years in Branson, Missouri. ![]() Top: A man wears the only known remaining Bald Knobber mask, belonging to William James of St. There was something primal about its frights-runaway trains, walls of fire, and the strange shadowy men with the bizarre devil horns-especially for kids brought up Christian. We rode Fire in the Hole six times in a row. Six years later, when I was 13, I came back to Silver Dollar City with my best friend’s church group. A steam engine’s horn blared, the train’s headlight appeared close enough to run us down, and finally we hurtled toward a wall of fire before plunging down to splash in a pool of water. Then it looked as though we were going to run off a broken track on a cliff’s edge. ![]() At first, we rode past a town on fire as villagers cried for help. In the waiting area, the walls were covered with paintings of men in creepy hoods, twisted devil’s horns protruding from the sides. ![]() My most vivid memory of the park is of a frightening dark ride called Fire in the Hole. Our destination was Silver Dollar City, a Christian-owned theme park that is like Disneyland reimagined as a 19th-century mining village, all built around a cave that was a bat guano mine in the 1880s. When I was 7 years old, in 1983, my family took a road trip from Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Branson, Missouri, a family-oriented resort town deep in the Ozark Mountains.
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