Chippewa Lake Park in Ohio is an abandoned amusement park with such love behind it that the former owner is allegedly buried on site.
Built in 1878 as Andrew's Pleasure Grounds, the park's first roller coaster required it to be manually pushed up the track following each ride. The Beach family acquired the park in 1898 and ran it successfully through the 1960s. A conglomerate bought the park in 1968 with plans to turn it into a luxury resort, but a lack of funding and public interest means that no progress was ever made. In 1978, 100 years after first opening, the park was unceremoniously shut down, leaving it untended and abandoned for over 30 years.
When Parker Beach, the last of the Beach family to run Chippewa Lake Park and the one who sold it to Continental Business Enterprises, heard that the park was closing, he requested that his family bury him in the park when he died. The family agreed. Though Beach's 1992 obituary says he was buried at Mound Hill Cemetery in Medina, Ohio, rumors persist that Beach is buried somewhere near the park's roller coaster.
There have been nearly a dozen various plans for the Chippewa Lake Park, from renovations to a complete tear-down, but none of these have come to fruition. Though some parts were demolished, and others lost in fires, Chippewa Lake Park has largely stood, completely abandoned and choked with trees and overgrown brush, as it was the day the gates closed in 1978.
For more abandoned amusement parks, check out Miracle Strip in Florida; Disney World's Abandoned Parks; Prehistoric Forest in Michigan; Okpo Land in Korea; and Joyland in Kansas.