Hex - The Legend of the Towers

Hex: The Legend of The Towers, shortened to Hex is a Vekoma Mad House at Alton Towers, which situates itself somewhere in the Towers complex where not many people can find it and thus makes it one of the most underrated and ignored rides on park. It is known for blurring the lines between excellent and terrible effects both aurally and visually, as well as spooking, confusing, amazing and annoying visitors.

Planning and Construction

Tussauds needed a new interesting dark ride after going for 6 years without building one, and so asked the holy John Wardley to create (or steal) a new ride concept. After much brainstorming, he found that the rich ponce Talbot family who used to own the Towers estate had been cursed at some point in the 1800s after the 18th Earl of Shrewsbury didn't pay his tax and some local tree was cursed by the government to kill off his family for revenge. So John Wardley took the idea and visited the tree, proclaiming it was alright and went off to soup up the story.

Because Tussauds could not get permission to actually build the ride in the Towers complex, they had to rent a tarpaulin from the local garden centre and camouflaged it in with the ruins themselves (See: Ninja), completely succeeding with baffling visitors. The ride itself, a Vekoma Mad House was chosen at random out of a tombola by John Wardley and was then dipped in the ink of squeezed Gothic books to make it look 'spooky', then installed in the tarpaulin to look like it had been there the entire time. The famed Octagon room just happened to look like that at the time of finding. Including the blatantly obvious dummy under the white sheet.

Story

At some point in the 1800s, the 18th Earl of Shrewsbury was returning home to Alton Towers after a banquet at Weatherspoons one stormy evening and a government man disguised as a old crone was standing in the middle of the road.

• Earl: WTF you doin' on the road, crazy bint?
• Crone: Gimme your money plskthnx.
• Earl: Ahahahahah. No.
• Crone: I'm government, ya git, tax. Oh and I curse a local tree.
• Earl: Oh shiz.

Pathetic fallacy arrived and a Pikachu accidentally electrocuted the tree, making a branch fall off. At the same time at Alton Towers, a member of the Earl's family suddenly and mysteriously... DIED. This made the Earl mad about not paying tax and so wrapped the tree in Duct Tape because it was the only thing he could be bothered to use.

But then the Earl got bored of no-one dying and so put the branch on eBay to see if any bidder would buy to pay for his tax to vanquish the curse. Somebody probably did bid on it and that's the last of the story.

Originally, the story was about some professor person who was giving a boring lecture about the Towers ruins and that the visitors got trapped inside the vault from the storm of Pikachus outside. Unfortunately nobody understood this and so the current story was instead used because it actually made some sense, thus calling for a rushed voiceover by some guy.

The Ride

You enter the queueline through the Towers ruins, where you walk in a zigzag past old history artefacts and broken televisions. A certain number of people go onto the ride, the first part being the pre-pre-show where a portrait of the 18th Earl is shown for dramatic effect. You then enter another room, the pre-show where a Crimewatch re-enactment is shown on a broken projector of the Earl meeting the Government Crone.

You then enter the Octagon room where the music is played either really loud or really low, the special effects do or don't work and a broken television flickers. There is also a broken air con which doubles as a really bad wind machine. You then go down some very long corridors for dramatic effect where you wait for 15 minutes because the ride usually fails before you get to ride it.

You then enter the vault where the thing you're sitting on swings up and down whilst the set thing behind you revolves somewhat, and towards the end you see some random tree demon thing at the top of the ceiling. Nobody still knows what this is all about. You then leave the ride feeling either satisfied or confused by the experience, exiting through the Gardens to confuse the mind even more.