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E-Ticket Axis Coaster
Our sanity is but a flimsy levee before a sea of madness. It would take only the slightest snap to send us all over the brink of lunacy.
Our sanity is but a flimsy levee before a sea of madness. It would take only the slightest snap to send us all over the brink of lunacy.
At least, that is the theory of the esteemed Professor Howard S’raimi, world renowned neurosurgeon and psychiatrist. Professor S’raimi announces a new experiment into insanity. Today, we shall be his test subjects. Today, we shall enter the mind of a madman. Today, we shall experience the trippiest, wildest roller coaster Disney has ever conceived!
Welcome, friends, to the former grounds Stonecraft Grove Sanitarium. Over a generation ago, this was the nation's most notorious mental asylum. Generations earlier still, it was originally the Gracey’s ancestral family home. Bad mojo permeates every inch of this decayed, dilapidated American Gothic estate. The grounds and buildings are long abandoned now, merely a foreboding edifice on a parched hilltop overlooking the land. But with Professor S’raimi’s new psychological experiments, we are about to experience the madness which once thrived in this very spot.
“Stonecraft Grove: In the Minds of Madness” is a first-of-its-kind E-ticket roller coaster. Disney Imagineering partners with Sansei Technologies to bring the world the first ever Axis Coaster. This experience is to be a spiritual successor to the beloved Twilight Zone Tower of Terror (a ride which no longer calls Disneyland Resort home). Stonecraft Grove will boast a similarly striking fusion of storytelling and thrills, from the asylum’s first distant appearance all the way to our final gasp of sanity.
Queue
Queue
We arrive upon the threshold of Stonecraft Grove. A wrought iron gateway leads to the institution’s untended grounds. Stonecraft’s main, massive wing rests like a gargoyle atop a hill, its facades carefully situated to blot out the outside world. Stonecraft's ominous red brick gables draw inspiration from infamous historic sanitariums like Bedlam and Danvers State Hospital.
A spooky ambient soundtrack to set the unsettling setting.
We proceed down a cracked cobblestone pathway, winding around dead trees and dried fountains. The queue leads, eventually, to the asylum interiors. The space feels like a haunted hospital. Vacant for decades, yellowed wallpaper curls outwards, revealing rotted drywall. Lights spark overhead. Water pipes leak into stagnant puddles on the floor. Metal gurneys sit discarded in disrepair.
We get glimpses past unhinged doorways into unhinged minds. Patients’ empty rooms still bear telltale signs of their distress. Chicken scratch prophecies cover the walls. There are drawings of imperceptible horrors. Mildewed straightjackets drape over desks. A children’s dolly sits atop a cot. We can almost hear the institute’s onetime residents quietly giggling in the shadows…
At the hallway’s terminus, cast member attendants appear clad in clinical lab coats. With an eerily detached demeanor, they cull together the next group of test subjects.
We gather together now in an old-fashioned surgical operating theater. This room is recently repurposed as the start of S’raimi’s experiment. To that end, a projection screen is mounted in the corner. A creaking film projector starts up.
Professor S’raimi addresses us on screen. He outlines the institution’s long, troubled history. Off-putting black-and-white home movies unspool depicting the asylum’s onetime residents, depicting archaic medical terrors such as electroshock treatment and padded cells. S’raimi holds out an assortment of wax cylinders: the recordings of madmen. We are to listen to these recordings, all while strapped into Professor S’raimi’s new sensory deprivation chairs. This combination of stimuli, in this setting, S’raimi hypothesizes, will make us insane. Temporarily, he hopes. All the better for his research into the wildernesses of the human mind!
Lab attendants usher us further into the asylum’s bowels. S’raimi’s film seems to have awakened an angry force within the structure. Eerie wailing echoes through the halls, faintly enough that it could simply be our own psychic projection.
We wander now through the final stretch of queue before the experiment begins. Bare doctors’ offices are newly dressed in generators and monitoring devices. There is artwork on the walls from former test subjects. Crude hand drawn creations in crayon and charcoal, depicting a world of madness which we are about to enter. There are common motifs in these artworks, most prominently a blood red synapse. Professor S’raimi has labeled this a “stream of consciousness.” In truth, it resembles roller coaster track!
Ride System
Ride System
Walt Disney Imagineering is proud to be the world’s first adopter of Sansei Technologies' hugely intriguing Axis Coaster model. Sansei, better known as S&S, is a subsidiary of Vekoma, Disney’s longtime coaster manufacturer of choice. Their prototype S&S Axis Coaster proves to give riders a wholly unique thrill perspective.
While the Axis Coaster tracks are standard, the ride vehicles are anything but. Seats rest on an axle mounted above train cars. Seats rotate side-to-side, parallel to the track. Think of it as an evolution S&S’s earlier back-and-forth swinging 4D Free Spin coasters.
In practice, this horizontal spin allows for an extremely unpredictable, disorienting ride experience. While the track might perform a barrel roll rotation, the seats’ centrifugal force keeps riders upright. At other times, the seats will fully invert even while the track does not. Magnets oversee the seats’ movement. Combined with a careful layout design, these rotations are never out-of-control, though they may seem that way. This sort of controlled insanity is a perfect fit for our tale of terror.
Ride Stats
Ride Stats
Each train consists of fourteen cars, each seating two riders side-by-side. With regular dispatches every minute, this makes for a strong hourly capacity of 1,680 souls. Multiple LSM launches maintain the ride’s breakneck insanity, while creating several block sections. The ride is located entirely indoors, allowing for a fully controlled visual experience.
Manufacturer: Sansei Technologies
Model: S&S Axis Coaster
Launch system: Linear synchronous motor (x2)
Height: 95’
Speed: 60 mph
Inversions: 4
Height restriction: 48”
Duration: 2:40
Hourly capacity: 1,680
Ride Experience
Ride Experience
Test subjects enter Professor S’raimi’s experimental chamber. Past a series of metal rails, in the chamber’s center, is a row of deprivation chairs…ride vehicles. Fourteen chairs in a row, each realized in bare rusted steel, reminiscent of electrical chairs.
Careful lighting obscures the ride mechanism. While the load platform remains forever under flickering lights, a total shroud of darkness occasionally covers the chairs. This is to hide the moment when one coaster train departs and another train returns. From guests’ perspective beforehand, there is simply the surreal sight of test subjects being replaced in between experiment cycles.
Eventually, it is our group’s turn to undergo the procedure. We strap into the chairs. Even now, the seats sway slightly. The experiment’s overseer, the ride operator, flips a series of Frankenstein-like switches. Through onboard speakers, we hear wax cylinder recordings of past inmates. Their gibbering ramblings, coupled with the chairs’ imperceptible electrical currents, place us in an impressionable mental state. In short, we start to experience insanity!
The chamber lights dim; secretly, the train pulls forward into another room. Lights return, revealing what appears to be the same load chamber…only something is slightly off. The walls twist and turn at bizarre angles. The overseer remains at his station, only now he resembles a reptilian humanoid – an animatronic inspired by the aliens from They Live. Oddly, everyone else is long gone.
The rantings of madmen grow more desperate in our ears. The chamber lights flicker. The air grows deathly still. Walls bend and sway, transforming via projection tech before our very eyes. Our sanity vanishes, and the world melts into madness.
Trains launch forward at 60 miles per hour! The track immediately bends upwards and to the right. We experience our first disequilibrium between tracks and seats. We sway outwards as the track bends inwards.
Coaster track remains partly visible throughout, realized as a glowing red synapse. This visibility is crucial to maintain the bizarre disconnect between track layout and rider experience. The surrounding sights are equally berserk. Whereas Space Mountain uses its indoors setting to simulate outer space, we use it to simulate the subconscious! The once-stable, institutional asylum halls now spin 360 degrees like a kaleidoscope. Windows appear to self-replicate in radial patterns.
As we succumb to insanity, even these physical set pieces swiftly morph, replaced by darkness and by a swirling, psychedelic vortex of colors. The world becomes decidedly non-Euclidean. Projected visuals recall the wild multiversal realms of Doctor Strange. Onboard audio continues, with the lunatic ravings replaced by a frenzied instrumental score. This is a lot to take in!
The coaster layout does everything in its power to sell this disquieting illusion. The track spins around in a DNA helix corkscrew, and yet we remain upright. As the track levels out ahead into a straightaway, we inexplicably flip head-over-heels. This new element is what S&S calls the “holy flip,” the first of four inversions. Our next spin comes in the form of an “inverted serpentine,” leading into a turnaround side swipe.
The train plows into a trough, where a second LSM launch magnifies the forward momentum. Trains pull out into a “flared-up” inversion, then round a corner into an S-turn. A few helixes race through the whirlpools of the mind. A final “driller” inversion serves as a climax.
As the onboard recordings cease, we descend into darkness. The train slows along an unseen brake run, while seats continue to sway. When that darkness does vanish, we find ourselves once again within S’raimi’s lab chamber, the experiment concluded. The truth is, we never left. What we experienced was simply a hallucination. Those pulsating dimensions of unreality? All simply in our minds.
Or were they?
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