Decades of curiosity surround Mount Shasta’s rusting figures, which are now fading into the overgrowth
An aerial view of the city of Mount Shasta, Calif., with Mount Shasta and its forests in the background.Dee Liu/Getty Images
By Matt LaFever, North Coast Contributing Editor
Near the end of summer 2019, David Henderson went out to celebrate his 21st birthday with friends. They spent the night in Mount Shasta, California, beneath the quiet mass of the roughly 14,000-foot volcano that looms over the town.
At one point, Henderson said, they “decided to take a walk in the park.”
Mount Shasta City Park is no pocket park. Its trails wind through meadows and pine forests. Two public lodges — and a building called the Dance Hall — look like Western film set pieces. The 26-acre park carries a kind of gravity.
It was here, in the middle of the night, that Henderson stumbled onto something unforgettable.
Henderson had “wandered off a bit from my friends,” he recounted to SFGATE, eventually finding himself off the park’s main path. He paused, noticing how quiet it had become. Then, out of the dark, two strange figures emerged. Tall. Gaunt. Arms outstretched. When they finally came into focus, things only got weirder.
Henderson had discovered long-abandoned play structures: one with a clown head, its eyes x-ed out; the other, a confused scarecrow. “Things felt pretty ominous when I spotted them,” he told SFGATE. After he realized he was safe — just unsettled — he returned to his friends, but not before collecting some evidence.
On the left, the scarecrow swing glows in the sun; on the right, the clown swing with x-ed out eyes sits shrouded in foliage, its atmosphere far gloomier.Courtesy of Nichole Solga Smith/Reddit User
“I had to take a picture because I wasn’t sure my friends would believe me if I said there were clowns lurking in the bushes,” he said. He fired off a quick Snapchat with an appropriate caption: “good god why are these here.”
The towering terrors are parts of old swing sets tucked in the park’s far corner. They are often referred to as the “clown swings” by locals, and older residents remember them as a full-fledged T-frame swing set: two cartoonish heads mounted and centered on the structure, with arms outstretched with strange, white and mittened approximations of hands. Chains once hung from those arms, holding seats for children to swing in beneath the fixed, frozen faces.
Today, however, the chains are long gone. The frames linger in an overgrown corner of the park — visited less, weathered more and standing as silent sentinels of a forgotten era.
‘A Stephen King novel’
Nichole Solga Smith, 45, sparked a recent online outpouring of memories about the clown swings. In a Facebook post on the “Mount Shasta History: If the mountain could talk” page, she wrote, “How old are the scary clown swings at Mt Shasta City Park and were they always meant to be kinda spooky? What’s the backstory there? I remember them feeling old when I was young.”
She told SFGATE that she was inspired to ask online about the clowns after revisiting the park with her daughter during a school field trip. “I was feeling very [nostalgic],” she wrote to SFGATE, describing how she “grew up playing in that park” and remembered how the “clowns were always around” with their swings.
Seeing them again with her daughter, she wrote, “The clowns must have a backstory; they’re just too unique.”
Bill Craig, 58, a Mount Shasta native, responded to Smith’s post by sharing two black-and-white photos of the clown swings with the community. He went down memory lane with SFGATE, describing how he and his fellow Gen X kids got the full brunt of playground designs prior to safety regulations. He recalled a “merry-go-round that was like scalding hot metal” and that “burned off 12 layers of your skin,” as well as “these little horses on a spring where, you know, you just beat yourself up on them.” Off to the side, always watching, “there were two different clown swing sets.”
In black and white, the clown’s x-ed out eyes stare from the shadows, dark foliage closing in to deepen the gloomy atmosphere. Courtesy of Bill Craig
As a kid, he “didn’t even give it a second thought.” Beneath those cartoonish heads, he said, “You just go and you play on the swing set.” But he’s since come to realize their presence is rather alarming.
Craig returned to the park years later and saw how the clown swings had become “really dilapidated,” he said. Through the lens of his camera, the scene shifted: “All of a sudden, it is a Stephen King novel, right?” In his haunting photos, the clown with x-ed out eyes looms lifeless, while the scarecrow’s arms reach into the dark.
“I don’t know the history of it,” Craig said. “I wish I did. I wish I knew how they got there.”
Fortunately, Smith’s Facebook post created a trail of digital breadcrumbs — vague references, obscure catalogs and half-remembered stories — that together sketch out an origin story for the erstwhile swings.
Piecing together the timeline
Shannon Shaw, a district administrator with Mount Shasta’s Recreation and Parks District, said the best information she could offer to SFGATE about the structures’ origin was that “they were manufactured by GameTime in Litchfield, Michigan, and seem to have been part of a clown-themed playground equipment and amenities production.”
GameTime began making playground equipment in 1929 in rural Michigan, according to the company’s website. In 1979, GameTime moved to Alabama, later becoming part of Playcore. SFGATE reached out to the company but did not receive a response before the time of publication.
The Mount Shasta Sisson Museum offered up a stronger lead when SFGATE called: Mike Rodriguez, Mount Shasta’s first full-time Recreation and Parks director. Rodriguez started that job in 1973 and lived in a cabin at Mount Shasta City Park. If anyone knew how the swings got there, perhaps it would be him.
In black and white, the scarecrow swing’s outstretched arms cut across the frame, stark against the dark vertical trees rising behind it.Courtesy of Bill Craig
But Rodriguez quickly shut that door. “I don’t know who put them in,” he told SFGATE. “When I arrived in ’73, they were there.”
Still, he remembered how unusual they were. “Very unique back in the early ’70s,” he said.
Later in the interview, Rodriguez noted that the swings “drew a lot of attention over the years, where people would want to go swing down there.”
Eventually, the swings were removed because of safety concerns, he said, as the area became “highly overgrown by the creek, and it wasn’t a real safe area for a playground.” The frames — cartoonish heads and all — were left behind.
Redding resident Noah Everett joined the community’s discussion on the “Mount Shasta History: If the mountain could talk” Facebook page, offering a lead that could help solve the mystery. About 70 miles downstream, in the town of Anderson, three similar GameTime swing sets stand in a riverside park, Everett wrote, but instead of clowns, they feature characters from “The Wizard of Oz”: the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion. In photos provided to SFGATE by Everett, they look to be in far better condition than the swings at Mount Shasta City Park. SFGATE reached out to Anderson’s Parks and Recreation Department to ask about when its GameTime swings were installed but did not receive a response before the time of publication.
About 70 miles south of Mount Shasta, in the town of Anderson, the Tin Man swing — inspired by “The Wizard of Oz” — showcases GameTime’s whimsical design style.Courtesy of Noah Everett
Separately, an SFGATE scouring of the internet turned up a 2017 auction catalog with a listing for “Amusement Park Garbage Can Toppers” — two of them bearing the same clown and scarecrow faces as Mount Shasta’s swings, alongside the Tin Man and Cowardly Lion. The items were dated to around 1950. A blogger who documents vintage playgrounds found a version of the X-eyed clown behind a kitschy roadside stop in Hamer, South Carolina, and dated it to 1971.
If the blogger is right, then the swings likely arrived between 1971 and Rodriguez’s hiring in 1973. Newspaper searches from the era turned up no ribbon cuttings or announcements, but quiet clues appeared. A November 1971 article mentioned a new nature trail and noted that the park “offers a variety of playground equipment.” A map included in that piece marked the playground’s exact location — the same spot where the figures still stand. By May 1972, another article described plans to install “two playgrounds with swings and slides.” A May 1973 tourism ad invited families to spend “a day at Mt. Shasta’s city park with its busy playground.”
The clowns become myth
It seems the clown and scarecrow arrived without fanfare — slipping into the park and into memory before becoming legends. By now, these quiet landmarks have taken on a mythic quality. There’s little documentation, few photos of them and no easily discoverable formal recognition of their existence, yet nearly every local knows them.
In 2016, author Rob Murphy published “Miller’s Park,” a novella loosely based on the Mount Shasta City Park. The clown swings loom large in the text, described at one point as “intrusive and out of place.” The narrator notes that “every kid stayed away from them” and that “the clowns were even positioned like they didn’t belong.”
Photos of the swings have also made it to the r/weird subreddit, where images of the rusting structures racked up hundreds of upvotes. The top comment reads: “That would be horrifying at night.”
From above, the scarecrow swing stands tall and gaunt amid dark foliage in Mount Shasta City Park — a rusting relic of a playground long gone.Courtesy of Reddit User/Courtesy of Reddit user
Shaw, the district administrator with Mount Shasta’s Recreation and Parks District, acknowledged the clown swings’ eerie pull. “It’s interesting how their current out-of-commission state and the overgrowth around them contribute to their mysterious and even unsettling aura,” she wrote in an email to SFGATE. “They certainly do spark a lot of conversation!”
Even those who played beneath them can’t quite shake the feeling. “I can’t quite wrap my head around them ever being not spooky,” said Smith, whose Facebook post sparked a nostalgic reunion for Mount Shastans of a certain age. “The one with the ‘x’s for eyes is especially so.”
Over his roughly five decades running Mount Shasta’s parks, Rodriguez saw the swing sets become more than rusting relics. They endured through seasons, through changes in the town around them, until they were woven into its fibers. To him, the haunting clown and the melancholy scarecrow hold “a little bit of a nostalgia and a little bit of history.”
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Aug 9, 2025
NORTH COAST CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Matt LaFever has reported on California’s North Coast in print and radio for nearly a decade. A Humboldt State grad and 20-year Emerald Triangle resident, he strives to document the wilderness, wildlife, and wild people who call this place their home. Reach him at matt.lafever@sfgate.com.