The park

1977 — Enchanted Village

The park opened as Enchanted Village: a family amusement park off what is now Enchanted Parkway South, built for young children and the adults bringing them. Its scale was deliberate. It was never trying to be a destination resort, and that is largely why it lasted.

1984 — Wild Waves

Owner Byron Betts built the adjacent Wild Waves water park, and the pairing became the thing people actually mean when they name it: a single site where a family with a wide range of ages could spend an entire day without anyone being too old or too small for it.

The middle years

The park changed hands repeatedly over the following four decades, passing between a founder, local investors, a national chain, two real estate trusts and a management company.

• 1977–1991 — Byron Betts. The founder opens Enchanted Village on 28 May 1977 and runs it for fourteen years, adding Wild Waves in 1984.
• 1991 — Michael Moodenbaugh and Jeff Stock buy Enchanted Parks for $8 million.
• 1993 — Jeff Stock continues alone after Moodenbaugh trades his shares for an interest in Boblo Island Amusement Park, and brings several Boblo rides west.
• 2000 — Six Flags buys Stock’s shares in Enchanted Parks for $19.3 million.
• 2007 — CNL Income Properties buys the park from Six Flags and leases it to PARC Management.
• 2010 — Norpoint Entertainment, owned by Jeff Stock, takes over management after PARC defaults on its lease.
• 2016 — EPR Properties acquires the park as part of a $456 million purchase of CNL’s portfolio. Premier Parks LLC has managed it since 2017.

Who owns what now

Three parties, and the distinction matters:

• The land is owned by Jeff Stock, through EPI Realty Holdings Inc.
• The park was sold to EPR Properties in 2016.
• Operations have been run by Premier Parks LLC since 2017, and it was Premier Parks that announced the closure.

Note the name that keeps reappearing. Jeff Stock bought the park in 1991, ran it for nine years, sold it to Six Flags in 2000, returned to manage it in 2010, and owns the ground beneath it today. The redevelopment now proposed for the site is being pursued by someone who has been involved with this park, on and off, for thirty-five years.

He is also on record as having considered other uses first — hotels and an office park among them — before choosing a warehouse, citing faster construction and concern about the property deteriorating if left empty.

Today

The park is operated by Premier Parks LLC of Oklahoma. The land beneath it is owned by EPI Realty Holdings Inc. That separation between who runs the park and who owns the ground under it is the reason the closure and the redevelopment are two different decisions by two different parties.

1 November 2026

Premier Parks announced on 10 December 2025 that the 2026 season would be the park’s last. Its president and owner, Kieran Burke, cited operating losses since the park reopened following the COVID-19 shutdown. The gates close to the public on 1 November 2026, after the park’s annual Fright Fest.

The water park has already gone. Labor Day, 7 September 2026, was the last day it opened to the public. The rides run on until 1 November.

Season passes, group events, and ticket packages already purchased are being honored through the final season.

Help us record it properly

This page is thin, and it should not be. Almost everything worth knowing about this park lives in the memories of the people who went there — and almost every photograph of it belongs to a family, not an archive.

If you have photographs, ticket stubs, uniforms, or stories from any era of the park, the campaign wants them. Shared with permission, they become the history of this place and the evidence of what the region is losing.

Send your photos and memories