Ghost slide: locals offer memories of now abandoned water park and slide

The now-dilapidated Zoom Floom water slide at Lake Monroe was once a busy summer attraction for the Bloomington area.

Imagine flying down a 480-foot slide and through a 40-foot tunnel in the hot Indiana summer months, cooling off and killing time with friends.

That was the scene at the Midwest’s longest water slide for several summers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to a 1978 tourist guide to Lake Monroe.

“Fast, safe fun for the entire family,” the brochure said.

It was considered the newest slide of its kind in 1978.

The Zoom Floom was by Lake Monroe Campground at the Cutright Recreation Area off State Road 446.

“Everyone went,” Bloomington native Eric Black said. “You always had to wait in line, and there was always a climb up the stairs to get back in line.”

Black went to the slide about twice a summer, he said.

If there is anything he remembers best of the experience, it’s the near-certain dangers involved.

"If you got off the mat (while on the slide), expect to lose some skin,” he recalled. “The slide was all concrete and it would remove skin on your knees and arms.”

One famous Zoom Floom visitor used it as a place to escape.

In an interview Herald-Times reporter Mike Leonard conducted with John Mellencamp in 1982, Leonard asked the rock star if he goes out in public often.

“Not much,” Mellencamp said. “If I do, it’s to places like the Zoom Floom where other people are, but no one knows me.”

Leonard has his own recollections of the slide.

“The Zoom Floom did attract its share of college kids and stoners in addition to families and kids,” he said. “I have a friend who tells a story about everyone dropping acid and going to the Zoom Floom and having the best time of their lives. I wouldn’t recommend that, but he enjoyed it.”

There isn’t sufficient information to determine exactly when the slide closed, but both Black and Leonard think it closed in the mid ’80s.

"In my memory, it was an attempt at a water park that just wasn’t big enough or well-funded enough to succeed,” Leonard said. “At the time, there was a bit of an entrepreneur’s market down by Lake Monroe because the lake was just created  in the early ’70s, and people saw opportunity.”

Leonard said businesses haven’t really succeeded by Lake Monroe because it’s not close to anything and can’t sustain year-round business.

“I’ve heard that it closed when the AIDS scare happened,” Black said. “Back then, people didn’t know how people got AIDS, and there were always people bleeding from the slide. There was also a slide called the Hydro-Slide on the other side of the lake that closed down about the same time.”