In Brief
At Lake Compounce in Bristol, Connecticut, the Starlite Ballroom is locked and dark after closing. Staff say the dance music never stops — a honky-tonk piano, the murmur of a crowd, shadows still turning under the arched ceiling.
The Full Story
There's a dance hall at Lake Compounce, the amusement park in Bristol, Connecticut, that the staff don't like to be alone in. Lock the Starlite Ballroom for the night, they say, and the music keeps going — big-band tunes, the murmur of a crowd, dancing shadows moving through the dark hall when no one's inside it.
One group of employees, walking out one night, said they heard a roomful of people talking and a honky-tonk piano playing "Oh Susanna" coming from the empty building. The chatter, they said, sounded like it was about travel in the 1800s.
The ballroom earned that crowd honestly. In its big-band years it packed the floor — its all-time record, 5,000 dancers, was set in the spring of 1941, the night Tommy Dorsey's reorganized band came through with a young Frank Sinatra out front. The walls were opened up so people could dance under the stars. The reports of the music, staff say, go back to the early 1900s.
But the park is older than the ballroom, and the lake is older than the park. The water takes its name from a Tunxis chief the settlers called John Compounce, who in December 1684 put his mark on a deed handing the lake to newcomers from Massachusetts — for a little money and, famously, a large brass tea kettle. Legend has it that shortly after, he drowned in the lake. The versions don't agree: that he tried to row across it in that brass kettle and tipped, that he drowned himself in shame, that his own tribe bound his hands and feet and took him out to the middle.
The park opened on that water in 1846, the oldest one still running in the country. The deaths didn't stop with the chief. A 16-year-old girl fell from the wooden Wildcat coaster in 1981 — the park called it the third death on that ride. An employee was crushed by the Tornado in 1999. A six-year-old slid off the Lake Plunge into the water in 2000. In 2001, a groundskeeper named Wilfredo Martinez was cutting grass beneath the Boulder Dash coaster when an empty train, running a test, struck and killed him.
Six deaths, all on rides with names. And the music in the locked hall hasn't stopped.
