I love this place and you probably couldn’t guess why.

I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that I love this building. Every once in a while if I am heading out East, I pass it again and I always smile.

I love it for a couple of reasons. For one, if you are unaware based on this shitty photo, this is the abandoned shell of what used to be the Fort Rapids Water Park and Resort. I love it, for starters, because a failed water park hotel can never be anything else. That building will stand there until the day someone knocks it down or someone else with a coke problem and way too much capital decides they want to open a water park hotel that is extremely difficult to get to off the side of 70 Eastbound in Columbus, OH. The other, more prominent, reason is that this place was the location of one of the most insane nights of my entire life.

In 2010, I was twenty-two years old. I had just broken up with my now ex-wife(don’t get married young, please, I beg you). I moved back to Columbus from Canada, where she lived, and I didn’t have many- if any- friends. I was bored and alone a lot in my apartment scrolling Facebook and I constantly noticed that someone I went to high school with was posting very regularly about parties that he DJ’ed. I hit him up and he told me where he was going to be that weekend. This was my introduction into Columbus’ electronic dance music community.

I started going out a lot. Like, A LOT. I didn’t even fit in with the crowd, but everybody was always extremely nice and I really liked to drink and make myself look like an idiot. Some things haven’t changed. Over the course of the year, I had made some acquaintances, even some friends, and I had a thing that I did. Then Halloween rolled around. A group of people in the EDM community had a great idea. Throw a Halloween rave at that shitty water park off of 70. And the Headless Horseman’s (G)rave was born.

So, why would the water park agree to do this? I can only assume it is because a failing water park was going to take any business that it could get and they probably didn’t think that this would be that big of an event at all. In fact, I absolutely know that they didn’t think that it would be a big thing, because they continued to book families in the hotel during the same weekend as the rave. And boy, was that a mistake!

The day of the party, my group; myself, two DJ friends and another high school buddy who just had his first daughter; all checked in to our room as early as possible. We unloaded all the alcohol we bought from our cars and into our rooms and made ourselves drinks before putting on our Halloween costumes. I found myself the largest possible slutty women’s costume that would fit. We looked glorious.

As it started getting closer to time for the music to start, we all headed down to the hotel bar. This was the exact moment that I realized just how many families of regular ass people were going to be in the hotel this night. We took the elevator down with a very nice looking Midwestern family. The mother pulled her daughter close to her. I have never been less offended. Good call, mom. The moment we step off the elevator, it is a sea of ravers surrounding families trying to eat dinner and sneak glimpses of Sportscenter on the TV’s. Barely dressed girls covered in body paint and those fucking furry boots that look like you cut off a section of Big Bird’s legs. LED hula hoops, flame jugglers and concerned parents as far as the eye could see.

The party got underway about 8pm and at this point I was already hammered drunk. I walked through the big double-doors and the music hit me like a stiff breeze. The kind of bass that you feel in your chest every single second. I took a look around and the immediacy which which drugs were being passed person to person was awe-inspiring. These kids were not fucking around. Not tonight. I was on one of the many dance floors no less than five seconds before a girl who introduced herself to me as “Mowgli” handed me a nondescript dime bag and told me to enjoy my night. She had what had to be hundreds of them and was passing them out like she was the MDMA fairy.

I decided that I needed a break and that I was going to head back up to our hotel room. This was probably close to 10pm. On the elevator up, I was once again joined by a family. They were all wet from the pool(which thank God was closed off for ravers this night) and clenching their towels. They seemed, how do you say, very concerned. There was no way not to hear the music in every part of the hotel and when I got off the elevator and talked to my friend Kevin in the room I found out that people had been taking the couches out of all the rooms, walking them up the emergency exit to the rooftop and setting them on fire. The family on that elevator had to feel like they were in the middle of that Owen Wilson movie “No Escape.” They spent a bunch of money for a nice weekend getaway and now they are trapped in a hotel that is literally on fire and filled with hundreds of people who are out of their minds.

I went back downstairs, ignoring the billowing smoke coming from the sixth floor, which had now been completely taken over and turned into a gas-chamber for weed smokers. I drank some more, I danced some more and finally I was ready to crash. I got back on that elevator once more. This time, however, I was joined by a girl who was dressed like a zombie and covered head to toe in latex fake blood. Obviously taken back by my figure in the dress I was wearing, she told me that I looked beautiful and started to make out with me. She asked what room I was in and took me by the hand to take me there. We started hooking up, much to the chagrin of Kevin who was laying in the bed next to us in a form fitting Spider Man costume trying to watch TV when we burst in.

My zombie queen had passed out in the bed and I was still buzzing from alcohol and party drugs so I decided to go find my friends. There was a dad with his kid in the hallway and the little girl screamed when she saw me. It was at that point that I realized all of the costume blood had transferred over to me during the aforementioned act. My face looked like I had just eaten someone’s heart out of their chest with my hands tied behind my back, county fair pie eating contest style. By the time, I found my DJ buddies, I was shocked to find out that it was in fact the morning. We went and ate our complimentary continental breakfast together. We sat at our table talking about the night as people’s bodies were passed out all around us. It looked like a very colorful scene from the Vietnam War.

The group of us split off in a hurry, because morning time meant that it was time for the next day’s activity. The brunch bash in the pool. The hotel opened up access to the pool for the rave crowd in the morning. And I can tell you with certainty this. There is nothing better than floating in a tube on a lazy river and watching families flee as the music they thought was finally over starts all over again.

Shockingly, Fort Rapids actually did decide to hold a second rave. This time in the winter. They learned from their mistakes and blocked the hotel out so that no families were in the resort at the same time. It was at this party that someone actually died after running onto the highway while on drugs and being hit by a car. Shortly thereafter, Fort Rapids closed for good and became the vacant hotel haunted by water slides that won’t let it be anything else.