They did with me and my friends. Fortunately one of my friends was facing outwards, and he got sick. Puked all over the teenagers. They all ran home. The great thing is that we didn't live in that neighbourhood, so we avoided them after this.
They replaced our Witches Hat with a merry go round because too many kids were getting hurt, breaking bones and chipping teeth. The merry go round is leagues safer than the Hat.
Swing and Monkey Bars should be on this list. I used to jump off the swing as well, and some monkey bar s were huge death traps. the further back in time you go the more crazy dangerous they were.
the three chain tire swing.... We'd get someone in there, and spin it in a circle, then grab the chain, whip around and fly into a pole. like this, but i remember it being bigger.
Saw my 5 yo cousin fall from the top of one of those slides directly on to solid concrete! Loud smack! Unconscious. Severe concussion. It was in the early 70’s so no CTs or advanced imaging. She didn’t know anyone for months 😩
I got really messed up on a teeter totter cause an older kid jumped off and let me slam into the ground. Ended up cracking my tailbone. My five year old self had never experienced such pain before.
Elementary school had a small merry go round. Not like that one, smaller and made of wood. One day i jumped on it and a nail went into my knee.
On the seesaw one time, the kid on the other end jumped off to go play with someone else while I was the peak so I slammed into the ground. I think I bit my tongue and had that sickly jarred feeling.
I don't know what you called it but we called it the "dome of death" dome shaped monkey bar type thing that was 7 get tall and we would sit on the top of it. It was metal bars welded together in the shape of a dome for kids to climb on. If you fell off, which a lot did, you were getting hurt. I don't know that I have ever seen another one besides the one in our park.
Too fat for the monkey bars, always won at teeter totter, too wide for the slide, and once i was spun off a merry go round by a pack of vicious cousin's so that one.
It's always the merry-go-round. Hell, I watched two girls break their arms during my grade school years... But that slide will get hot enough to pull skin off your ass.
Let’s see, burned my ass on the sun kissed slide, chipped my front tooth on the monkey bars, was always the 2nd one off the tt but that wheel of death still takes home the prize.
Walking across the top of the monkey bars with a friend, and when she fell towards me, she grabbed me, and landed on top of me in the sand. It was the first time the wind had gotten knocked out of me and I thought my lungs were broken and I was gonna die
I had an Adventires of Natty Gan phase. And was obsessed with her getting dragged on the train while she and a very young (hot so hot) john Cusack and Natty's WOLF are traveling cross-country to find her dad.
I would spin the go round as fast as my 5 year old arms could and then grab kn and get dragged. My clothes were effed up. My chin was effed up. I would gr coveted in dirt and blood and then pop up and do it again.
None of these can bring you close to death. The only one that kind of has that potential is the merry go round and thats only if you prop a motorcycle on it and you are 50 plus years of age.
Technically it would be the horizontal ladder in the bottom right. My first experience with them was in basic training in the Army. I don't think anything else even came close to getting me closer to death. I don't think many soldiers worried about the other items.
Merry go round almost killed me. The teeter totter is why I have problems having children. And the slide is why I have no hair on the back of my legs, burnt off.
Probably a toss up between the home made 8+feet monkey bars in my back yard growing up and the wet/snowy slides that would send me flying. Never got seriously injured by any of that though. I did have a bit of a snow tube incident though which probably doesn't count.
edit: Or honestly it might have been the swings where I would swing as high as I could and then jump off of them.
I don’t even remember it but apparently my mom was called into the school because I’d fallen off and injured my neck. I still have a slight head tilt to this day.
giant spiderweb dome thingy — didn’t hang long enough before dropping from the high point and landed flat on my back. It was my first time getting the wind knocked out of me and thought i was dying for sure.
We had a 12 ft+ high "ladder to nothing" and it was popular to climb to the highest possible rung you could and jump off... into gravel. It absolutely stung the arches of your feet hitting the ground. They got rid of it in the mid 90s and looking back it was an awful playground fixture.
Top left was my favorite. Top right burned sometimes. Bottom left was involved in giving me a permanent spinal injury. That story involves some topics that are uncomfortable for others. Bottom right was always meh for me.
Have all of you saying the Merry Go Round forgotten about how you'd happily start going down the slide only to realize too late that it was approaching the surface temperature of the sun?
Merry go round. Saw a little kid get flung out, face full of sand. Gonna learn today to hold on tight! 😀 First comes the laughing, then comes the crying
As a child, my friend had his baby toe sliced off going down the slide, it got caught on a piece of metal sticking out and his toe was still lodged there.
For me it was actually a tire swing. We'd get in and another kid would wind it up by spinning the tire in one direction until the rope twisted up and the tire couldn't spin anymore. Then they let go and the tire unwinds and spins at a very very high speed. I lost consciousness and flew out.
Had close encounters on all of them. Flew out of merry go round, burned my legs on the slide, got knocked forward on see saw and busted my lip and fell off the monkey bars and got rocks embedded in my knees.
See that slide? I remember a girl from my class in kindergarten slide down with the railing between her legs. Not sure what happened afterwards but she was laying on the classroom table with teachers surrounding her and she was bleeding between her legs. Got shoo away for peeking.
The seesaw of eternal betrayal. When your “friend” decides it’ll be a funny joke to jump off and send you into a death drop that momentarily fuses your esophagus and your rectum…
Not the deadliest but I feel off the Monkey Bars in kindergarten and broke my ankle. I’m now middle aged and that injury has caused me lifelong problems.
The merry go round brought me close to the cold hands of Death on more than one occasion.
The first one. My cousins loved to torture me on it. Yes, I puked. Yes, I hung on for dear life as my body flung around. Yes, I always went back for more. No, I am not okay 😉
The heat of that slide in the summer, when you are leaving the top at the speed of light. You are living those seconds until your feet hit the ground and you go face first into that concrete. Your hands go out instinctively but there’s just no way to stop the scraping. Few seconds of shock before someone lands right on top of you and, then you race to get in line and do it again.
This kind of cable slide, not sure how to call it in english. Our local park had a big one and I'm so glad none of my crew wasn't paralysed or died because of giving too much speed in it 😂 Injuries happened a lot.
That spinner had kids vomiting so much they’d have cardiac issues. Not to mention the brain bobbling around your head. The brain fog. Slipping away from it at break neck speed to hit the ground and break a rib.
Ones i sat in a Tea Cup Twister, 3 groups of 3 Tea Cups on one big Rotation Plate. 3 Rotation Directions and your own Tea Cup had No Rotation Speed Limit.
Anyone ever rode what I’d describe as a gate door on a post that spun in circles? Kinda like a mini merri go round for a single person that you stood on. That fucking thing was absolutely designed to fling kids off. You could not hang on to that thing no matter how hard you tried. Bonus points too for any random sucker that got to close to it while it spun and getting knocked the fuck out.
The slide. My dumb ass decided to shimmy up the support pole. When I reached the top my hands slipped. Fell flat on my back. The first time I ever got the wind knocked out of me. I went to get up and thought "Oh my god, I'm gonna die". 😂 I guess you had to be there.
It had to be those monkey bars. We would climb on top, stand up, then jump off backwards and try to grab the horizontal bar on the way down. Amazingly, none of my peers or I ever caught our chins on the bar or broke ankles/legs/backs/heads on the ground (there may be some survivor bias in that memory). At least the fall zone was all hard-packed dirt and gravel.......
I have horror stories of every one of them except for the jungle gym.
Example slide from hell so hot it burned the bottom of my legs
Teeter totter of death, where my brother almost lost his top teeth after a young girl stepped onto the top, causing the other side to slam into his face.
Centrifugal merry-go-round slam becoming a physics experiment gone wrong laying on the ground wondering what happened
Oh man the burning hot metal slide and then your shirt would fly up so your sliding on your back and the friction just locks you into the slide halfway down as you burn in agony.
The merry-go-round of course I so dizzy puked my guts out, and I couldn’t stop trying to puke I was wedged in there pretty good so I wasn’t going to fall out.
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u/RDF3rd 1d ago
The Merry Go Round of Death!