Whether you’re slowly ascending that three-hundred-foot chain lift hill or blasting out of the station faster than a sports car on the Autobahn, roller coasters are quite potent in drawing out thrill-seekers and daredevils to get that quick hit of adrenaline. Usually, the hallmark of any amusement park would be the tallest and fastest roller coaster in the area. Or perhaps theme parks market the number of times their coaster goes upside down or the amount of time a ride subjects its riders to high levels of G-forces.

Sometimes, though, the key to marketing a roller coaster is to engineer something truly weird, to the point where you question if what you’re looking at is a genuine ride or a click-bait poster’s Photoshop passion project. So here is a list of ten roller coasters from around the world that have no problem making a statement. Albeit a strange, questionable, very unintelligible statement.

Related: 10 Abandoned Amusement Parks With Horrific Histories [Disturbing]

10 Cobra

The Shuttle-Loop roller coaster model is a classic choice for any new park to get in a looping coaster on a budget. Usually built by manufacturers such as Schwarzkopf or Arrow, these coasters either launch guests through a loop and a slope, or often, the ride will pull the train on a backward lift hill to gain the coaster’s momentum. They’re the very definition of “short but sweet.”

Cobra, in Switzerland’s Conny-Land, is a far stranger Shuttle-Loop, though. Instead of burning off that extra momentum on a 60-degree angle slope, this ride takes its riders upside-down at a diagonal before going through the loop again. This one-of-a-kind element is known as the Scorpion Tail (which, arguably, isn’t very snake-like). Built by Russian manufacturer Pax Company, Cobra was opened to the public in 2010. In 2020, the coaster introduced a new car where other than the front and back row, the four riders face each other, two sitting in forward-facing seats and two in rear-facing seats.^[1]

9 Der Schwur des Kärnan

At first glance, Der Schwur des Kärnan looks like an impressive and almost normal-looking ride. Reaching a height of 239-feet tall with a top speed of 78 mph, Kärnan, as it is often referred to, is located in Germany’s Hansa Park and was built in 2015 by German manufacturer Gerstlauer.

Kärnan’s weirdness, however, is secretly tucked into the structure surrounding its lift hill. The ride takes its riders up that 200-foot-plus chain lift at a 90-degree angle… before dropping its riders backward once it reaches the top, only to start climbing up the hill a second time. For real this time. To top that off, the ride has a secret, hidden barrel roll, right after the last (or, I suppose second-to-last) break run, right as soon as the ride re-enters the fortress structure—a sure surprise for anyone caught off guard by thinking the ride’s over!^[2]

8 Time Traveler

We head over to the U.S. for this ride, specifically Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri. Time Traveler is a particularly special roller coaster, in as much as it has spinning cars. And a Linear Synchronous Motor launch. And a 90-degree drop out of the station. And it goes upside-down three times. You see, Time Traveler is aptly named because when you get off of the ride, you’ll be so dizzy, you might not know what decade you’re in.

Time Traveler was built in 2018 by Mack Rides and was the only Extreme Spinning Coaster model in the world until September 2021, when another roller coaster model of this type was built in Belgium, known as the Ride to Happiness. All being said, though, Time Traveler has been given rave reviews by its American fans for the bizarre spinning sensation and the dizzying forces that it enacts.^[3]

7 Lost Coaster of Superstition Mountain

We’re staying in the U.S. for this next coaster, located in the Indiana Beach amusement park. It’s easy to see why this wooden roller coaster, built by Custom Coasters International, fits this list. Instead of normal roller coaster trains, this wooden coaster features full-on enclosed mine carts. Guests are trapped in trains, facing each other, as they chaotically weave in and out of an artificial mountain built on top of a pier over Lake Schafer.

Another fun bit of Lost Coaster’s history, however, is that it replaced a normal dark ride known as Superstition Mountain. The park manager, in 2002, decided to gut the mountain and try and squeeze in a roller coaster, and while more sane individuals may opt for a kiddie coaster, the visionary, Tom Spackman Jr., was wild enough to envision a compact, enclosed wooden ride. And so, the Lost Coaster of Superstition Mountain careens its captives to this day as the only wooden roller coaster of its type.^[4]

6 Orphan Rocker

This roller coaster will be the first on this list to no longer be in operation. In fact, Orphan Rocker was never officially opened to the public at all! Many things make this roller coaster from 1988 weird, one of which is the scenic view on the edge of a 700-foot cliff in the mountains of southeastern Australia, near Sidney. Another odd element of Orphan Rocker is the seats that swing back-and-forth, despite being on top of the ride. A third weird thing about Orphan Rocker is its name—Orphan Rocker (to be fair, though, it was built near the mountain named Orphan Rock).

The last weird detail in Orphan Rock’s short-lived history is that it was entirely built and designed by Scenic World staff itself; the park wherein Orphan Rocker is located, when most roller coasters are built by established manufacturers. In fact, the reason it was never opened to the public is probably because of this, when tests proved that the ride was too rough or inconsistent for the public. Though it was never really opened, work was done on this roller coaster until 2004, though the park finally gave up the ghost and started demolition in 2017.^[5]

5 Tower of Terror

Built at Gold Reef City in South Africa in 2001, this roller coaster looks like your standard Dive Coaster model, a roller coaster type that holds you in place for a few seconds before plummeting you down a 90-degree drop. However, what’s unique about Tower of Terror is that the drop takes place in an actual, authentic gold mine shaft. The structure was actually removed and relocated from an old gold mine around five kilometers away before being used as the support for this daunting ride.

Not only that, but instead of using a normal chain lift hill, the mine shaft also houses a single piece of track that goes up on an elevator. To finish off the weirdness, this ride doesn’t even drop straight down; it twists a little during its 90-degree drop to level out at a slight angle, putting its riders through at least 6 G-Forces—so claimed by the park! As a point of reference, Millennium Force at Cedar Point pulls in around 4.5 Gs^[6]

4 Unknown Coaster at Kathmandu Funpark

We head over to Nepal for the next roller coaster on this list and also revisit the concept of the Shuttle-Loop! Built in Kathmandu Funpark, sometime around 2004, little is known about this roller coaster, for the park it was located in doesn’t have an official website or as much as a Facebook page. But, it is known that this ride was one of three rides built by Parkash Amusements.

This blue roller coaster is more than your average Shuttle-Loop, however. While it does take riders up a lift hill, drops them, makes them go through a loop, then burns off the extra speed on another slope, this ride doesn’t have an electric, automatic lift hill. The ride operator has to pull the car up themselves, it is claimed, by a lever next to the ride. Sadly, this mystery coaster was closed in the 2010s, though it does have a twin in India, known as Loop Roller Coaster. However, it seems that this ride has its own automatic lift hill.^[7]

3 Gravity Max / 搶救地心

Here it is; probably the most used click-bait roller coaster of all time, or at least as much as I could find combing through the annals of YouTube. Also known as 搶救地心, Gravity Max is located in Taiwan’s Discovery World, and it was built by Dutch manufacturer Vekoma in 2002. If you take out the lift hill, Gravity Max is almost your standard corkscrew model, taking riders through one inversion at 56 mph.

The strangeness factor of Gravity Max, however, lies in its 114-foot lift hill. The ride takes its passengers on a piece of track that goes up an elevator, similar to Tower of Terror. And then it flips said track downward at a 90-degree angle, holding its horrified riders there before eventually dropping them through the rest of the track. Gravity Max is definitely the most likely roller coaster to trick its riders into thinking that they’re about to fly off the track, and Vekoma has only ever made one roller coaster with this type of lift hill.^[8]

2 Roller Ball

Wiener Prater, in Austria, is an interesting amusement park because it isn’t owned by one combined manager and is instead run by different showmen bringing their own rides to the location. Roller Ball, run by operators Kern and Waldmann, is one such roller coaster and is definitely Austria’s weirdest one.

The Roller Ball model hangs its guests on the side of the ride, flipping them back and forth as it winds down a serpentine track, neatly fitting in a small, vertical piece of land. Roller Ball is actually one of three different rides of the same exact ride type, built by Ride Engineers Switzerland; the other two being Wilde Hilde in Schwaben Park and Nid de Marsupilamis in Parc Spirou Provence. Roller Ball itself, however, is the newest model, having been built in 2020. ^[9]

1 Sequoia Magic Loop

Jazz lovers rejoice because the number one roller coaster on this list features the one-of-a-kind inversion known as the Saxophone. What is the Saxophone, you might ask? Well, imagine a roller coaster flipping upside down…and just traveling further upside down by a good distance before flipping right-side-up again.

And this happens three times on Sequoia Magic Loop. This ride, built at Italy’s Gardaland in 2005 by U.S. manufacturer S&S Sansei, is certainly the most eye-catching ride on this list, if not the most nauseating. While it is a hard category to get hard numbers for, there is definitely an argument for the claim that Magic Loop hangs its riders completely upside down more than any other roller coaster on Earth.^[10]

Roller coasters are still heralded as one of the easiest and safest ways for adrenaline junkies to get their fix. Whether they’re hitting 100+ mph speeds or ascending lift hills higher than 300 ft., it’s very easy to find excitement in these wonders of engineering. However, sometimes it’s too expensive to break the height or speed record, and so, some roller coaster manufacturers rely on being bizarre to sell their models.

In a previous list, ten roller coasters were listed that showcased manufacturers pushing the envelope and creating something truly weird to give its riders a one-of-a-kind experience. But ten is far too small a number. This is a list of ten more roller coasters that boggle the mind and feel too weird to be true.

Related: 10 Abandoned Amusement Parks With Horrific Histories [Disturbing]

10 Eejanaika

Roller coaster enthusiasts in California would immediately consider the menacing red coaster X2, out of Six Flags Magic Mountain, to be a bizarre and one-of-a-kind experience. This roller coaster, known as a 4th Dimension Roller Coaster, positions its guests in seats that stick out of the roller coaster’s side, spinning independently from the track for an intense, mind-boggling experience. However, one would be remiss to refer to X2 as the only roller coaster of its type.

Eejanaika, built four years later in 2006, is a 76-meter (249-foot) monstrosity of a 4th Dimension Roller Coaster and can be found in Fuji-Q Highland in Japan. (For reference, X2 has a maximum drop of 66 meters or 215 feet.) This coaster, which hits speeds of 125 km/h (78 mph) as it flips its passengers around madly, isn’t actually even made by the same manufacturer as its Californian relative—technically. X2 was a project started by Arrow Dynamics, a roller coaster manufacturer that went bankrupt as the ride was finished, and the roller coaster, then known as X, wasn’t as up to snuff as the company had hoped.

The manufacturer, S&S Sansei, would inherit the 4th Dimension Coaster patent and would construct Eejanaika in 2006 before going on to give X a refurbishment in 2008. They would also construct a third roller coaster of this type in 2012; Dinoconda, in China Dinosaurs Park, but that ride would only reach heights of 69 meters (226 feet)—which, arguably, is still impressive.^[1]

9 Rag-Time Reverser

In stark contrast to the bizarre, futuristic look of Eejanaika, this next roller coaster is a complete blast from the past. Built in 1915, the Rag-Time Reverser, also known simply as the Reverser, only lasted ten years at the Saltair amusement park in Utah before it tragically burned down. This wooden roller coaster featured side friction cars, which only had their wheels interact with the sides of the track, as opposed to modern roller coasters with up-stop wheels. This, however, isn’t the Reverser’s most unique feature.

The Rag-Time Reverser’s designer, Frank F. Hoover, would implement an element completely unique to this ride. Sections of split-track segments on the track would pull the front of the train to the back, essentially flipping the cars so that they’d face backward. This functioned similarly to railroad cars when it performed this maneuver and could happen multiple times during the ride. This was the only roller coaster known to history that featured this ride element.^[2]

8 Daidarasaurus

The third coaster on this link is also, sadly, a defunct one, having closed in 2007 after a career spanning thirty-seven years. Daidarasaurus was a unique coaster that operated in Expoland in Japan, in as much as it was only one of four coasters built by the roller coaster manufacturer Sansei Yusoki Co., Ltd. However, that’s not what makes this coaster extraordinarily unique.

When it first opened in 1970, Daidarasaurus ran with five separate tracks, which all raced each other, similar to a two-track roller coaster. Though not all sections ran together 100% of the time, each of the five tracks would interact with each other throughout the ride, like a classical music fugue. Soon after its opening, however, three of the five tracks would be removed, turning this steel coaster into a standard dual-track ride. Then, in 1999, the last two tracks were combined into one track, and for some time, Daidarasaurus was the second-longest roller coaster in the world.

Sadly, Expoland would close in 2008 due to a fatal accident on another coaster at the park, Fujin Raijin II. Daidarasaurus would remain standing but not operating for one year before it was removed completely. ^[3]

7 Round About/Paradise Fall

This next roller coaster is yet another defunct ride. Round About operated out of Freestyle Music Park in South Carolina for only one year. Then it was put into storage and moved to Vietnam’s Sun World Danang Wonders Park as Paradise Fall. Sadly, this ride would also have a short life span, only sticking around for two years before being removed, never actually ending up being opened to the public. Its interesting location history is just the beginning—it has a more unique feature.

While the main portion of the ride is fairly standard—six-seater cars traversing a non-inverting, steel track—the lift hill is what truly stands out about Round About. Instead of using a lift hill, the roller coaster uses a Ferris Wheel-esque contraption to get its riders to the top. This is the only roller coaster to ever feature an element like this, as its manufacturer, Premier Rides, has yet to repeat it.

Round About’s short lifespan didn’t stem from technical difficulties, however. The Freestyle Music Park, also known as the Hard Rock Park (named after the restaurant), would go bankrupt within the year, and all of its rides would remain standing but not operating before finally being sold off down the line. In fact, The Hard Rock Café brand was ditched early on in order to help keep the park afloat. Round About used to have yet another entirely new name; Maximum RPM!^[4]

6 Butterfly

The Butterfly is really, really difficult to actually call a roller coaster. Though if one follows a basic definition of a tracked ride built for amusement that uses gravity to move along, the Butterfly barely passes. Only twenty feet tall, the Butterfly is a shuttle roller coaster that takes two passengers up a small lift hill and rocks them back and forth until the ride finally loses momentum. There are no tricks, no inversions, no speeds that would trip a radar in a school zone; simply twenty feet of momentum.

In fact, the Butterfly isn’t simply one roller coaster, but in fact, a model created by Sunkid GmbH, a ride manufacturer from Germany. There are eighty-eight different Butterflies throughout the world, though most of them are located in Europe. Some versions of the model exceed twenty feet, but a majority of them are clones.

Sunkid GmbH actually only makes one other type of roller coaster; a standard steel alpine roller coaster, which takes one or two passengers on a trip down a mountain. However, the majority of the company’s work is the Butterfly model.^[5]

5 Axis Coaster Test Model

This next coaster is unique in that it doesn’t actually exist yet—at least in an amusement park. The aforementioned roller coaster manufacturer, S&S Sansei, recently released a new type of roller coaster named the Axis Coaster, which it hopes to soon sell to parks. This company, however, didn’t just release a promotional video to showcase this new model; they also built a small test model at their testing facility in Utah.

Built in 2019, this model borrows elements from two of their other coasters. It features the independent seat-spinning of the 4th Dimension Coaster and the ability for the seats to swing almost gyroscopically, even if the track itself flips upside down, which can be found on the company’s Free Fly coaster model. Unlike the family-friendly Free Fly coaster, however, the Axis Coaster will have the ability to flip its passengers upside down within the seat itself. But, unlike the 4D Model, the trains won’t just be affixed to the side of the ride.

The Axis Coaster Test Model is only a single loop, featuring off-axis banked turns and inversions that intentionally flip the ride to showcase its main feature. The test track, however, also features a launch, showcasing another element that this new model will be capable of should an amusement park decide to invest in this boundary-pushing model.^[6]

4 Pipeline Express

We head over to Canada for this next roller coaster, though it, unfortunately, met its demise in 2008. Pipeline Express, built at Sauble Beach Fun World in Ontario, is a unique model because of what it’s made out of. While pretty much all roller coasters are constructed out of wood, steel, or a combination of the two, Pipeline Express is one of the only roller coasters to have its track sled made out of plastic—with a steel support system.

The roller coaster manufacturer Bailey Rides only ever focused on one roller coaster model, that being the Pipeline Express, which takes single riders down a track constructed out of PVC pipe. They built six of these models for small, family parks in Canada and the U.S. and, more often than not, just name the ride “Pipeline Express.” Much like the Butterfly model, it is pushing the limits of the “roller coaster” definition to refer to this ride as such. Still, it definitely fits the criteria of a ride moving due to the forces of gravity.

The installation at Sauble Beach Fun World is specifically brought up because it’s the only version of the model where its length was recorded online. The Canadian coaster was only 700 ft. long, and no records indicate how tall or fast it was. The manufacturer claimed its run could be as long as 1,000 feet from a 50-foot tower. The last of these six plastic and steel coasters closed in 2019.^[7]

3 Twist Coaster Robin

Built by Sansei Yusoki Co., Ltd., of Daidarasaurus renown, this next roller coaster also comes out of Japan. Twist Coaster Robin was built in Yomiuriland in 2014 and was a compact, almost Wild-Mouse-looking ride that featured two inversions. That’s not what makes this ride weird, however.

This is another instance of a defunct roller coaster, but it is in the ride’s closing where Twist Coaster Robin gets its reputation. This ride was only open for literally one day before it was closed indefinitely. Though there are no official statements on the details as to what happened, it is speculated that the ride had an accident wherein a car’s anti-rollback lift hill system malfunctioned. So the car on the lift hill fell back into the station. No one perished from the accident, though the park didn’t take any chances with the ride, closing it right away.

Twist Coaster Robin would remain standing but not operating for two years before it was completely removed from the park. It remains one of the shortest-lived roller coasters that ever saw guests waiting in its queue.^[8]

2 Migfer

Another extreme-looking Wild Mouse coaster, Migfer is a bizarre-looking compact ride that hails from Turkey at Wonderland Eurasia, though it first operated in the Netherlands at DippieDoe Attractiepark.

Migfer features two extremely eye-catching elements that feel way more extreme than a ride that looks like a traveling fair ride should handle. First, it features a tight, compact loop right after its first drop that looks forceful enough to cause headaches that Advil couldn’t come close to curing. Second, it features a beyond-vertical drop that immediately turns into a vertical drop after traversing an inward dip. It is speculated that this is the steepest drop on any coaster in the entire world, though it is difficult to gauge, as no official angle has ever been published.

Migfer has yet to be officially open to the public, resting at its current location since 2019, though that is no fault of the coaster itself. Its home park, then known as Ankapark (named after the capital of Turkey), was actually a half-cocked dream park, thought up by the then-mayor of Ankara, Melih Gökçek. Legal authorities, however, deemed the park to be a massively ill-advised investment and use of public funds and went bankrupt almost immediately, though little information is known about the details of this story. The video above also a tower coaster, this one is in the Netherlands.^[1]

1 Swiss Toboggan

The last entry on this list also looks like a carnival ride that moonlights as a torture machine. The Swiss Toboggan is a model built by Chance Rides that takes its passengers up an enclosed, vertical lift hill 14 meters (45 feet) before violently twisting them into an eternal helix that surrounds the hill, turning six times, before forcing them through a violent bunny hill, before returning to the station—all while keeping its guests inside of a caged, single-passenger car.

While thirty-one of the Swiss Toboggans were built, only one of these rides operates today. Swiss Toboggan, named after the model itself, can be found in Wisconsin’s Little Amerricka and has operated there since 1993. The ride, however, is a relocation, having first opened in Arkansas’s Dogpatch Park in 1969, then being moved to Indiana’s Seven Peaks Water Park Duneland for a few years from 1988 to 1990.

However, this bizarre model isn’t Chance Ride’s only specialty. In fact, the manufacturer has developed a highly praised Hyper GTX model, which looks and rides like a normal roller coaster. A new rendition of this ride is being constructed at Mattel Adventure Park in Arizona.^[10]