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Ten water slides push riders past the edge of what gravity and nerve can handle, and Nexus counted them down.
The countdown from Nexus, titled “Top 10 Most Insane Waterslides,” runs through the tallest, fastest, and strangest attractions built anywhere on the planet, and it doesn’t shy away from the darker chapters behind some of these rides. Leading the pack is a slide that no longer exists — torn down after a tragedy that changed how amusement parks build extreme rides. The rest of the list mixes record-setting drops with pure spectacle, including a slide that dumps riders straight into a giant snake’s mouth.
- The Verrückt at Schlitterbahn Waterpark in Kansas City, Kansas, opened July 10, 2014, and was Guinness World Records-certified as the world’s tallest water slide at 168 feet 7 inches — taller than Niagara Falls.
- The ride sent rafts down a 17-story drop at speeds up to 65-70 mph before launching them up a second 50-foot hill, and it was permanently closed after 10-year-old Caleb Schwab died on the slide on August 7, 2016.
- Summit Plummet at Disney’s Blizzard Beach drops riders 120 feet at 50 to 60 mph through an open flume, while King Cobra at Six Flags Hurricane Harbor in Jackson, New Jersey, ends with a 25-foot, 50-degree plunge into a 50-foot cobra head with misting venom fangs.
The Verrückt’s Rise and Fall
“Verrückt” is German for “insane,” and Schlitterbahn built the name into the ride itself. Riders climbed 17 stories before dropping down a slide steep enough to push three-person rafts to 65-70 mph, then launched over a second 50-foot hill before splashing into the landing pool. Guinness certified it as the tallest water slide on Earth, a title Schlitterbahn’s co-owner Jeff Henry and designer Johnathan Schooley had chased specifically to beat out rival parks.
That record came apart on August 7, 2016, when Caleb Schwab, the 10-year-old son of a Kansas state representative, was killed while riding the slide. The death led to a grand jury indictment of both Henry and Schooley, and the Verrückt never reopened. Nexus places it at the top of the countdown not just for its numbers, but because those numbers are inseparable from what happened afterward.
168 feet 7 inches — a water slide certified taller than Niagara Falls, built to send riders down at up to 70 mph.
Florida’s Free-Fall Icon
Summit Plummet at Disney’s Blizzard Beach in Florida takes the opposite approach to the Verrückt — no raft, no tube, just an open flume and a nearly vertical 120-foot drop. Riders hit speeds of 50 to 60 mph in a matter of seconds, which is why Disney built a speed-check radar sign at the bottom so riders can see exactly how fast they were going. It’s consistently ranked among the steepest and fastest body slides on the planet, and unlike the Verrückt, it’s still running.
The slide’s design theme — a ski jump gone wrong, themed around Blizzard Beach’s melting-snow storyline — makes it stand out from the countdown’s other entries, most of which lean on darkness, twists, or animal theming rather than pure vertical drop.
New Jersey’s Serpent Spectacle
King Cobra at Six Flags Hurricane Harbor in Jackson, New Jersey, earns its spot for showmanship as much as speed. Riders race side-by-side in double tubes through an enclosed, twisting flume painted in a red-and-white snake pattern before dropping 25 feet at a 50-degree angle directly into the open mouth of a 50-foot cobra facade, complete with misting fangs meant to look like venom. It’s less about raw velocity than about the theatrics of getting swallowed by a giant snake at the end of the ride.
The rest of Nexus’s countdown fills out with slides built around similar gimmicks — total-darkness drops, spinning vortex bowls, and shark-tank landing pools — all designed to sell a different kind of thrill than a stopwatch number, even if height and speed still headline the list.
Current Status of the List
What separates the Verrückt from every other entry on this countdown is that it’s a cautionary tale now, not an active attraction. Anyone hoping to check off the world’s tallest water slide is out of luck — the title, and the ride itself, is gone, while Henry and Schooley’s case worked its way through Kansas courts. Summit Plummet and King Cobra, by contrast, are still open, still drawing lines, and still doing exactly what they were built to do: scare people on purpose.
If you’re chasing the rest of this list in person, Summit Plummet and King Cobra remain the two you can actually ride — everything else on the countdown, the Verrückt included, exists now only in videos like this one. For anyone building out a backyard version of the thrill on a smaller budget, the mansions with backyard waterparks and insane pools and the breakdown of what it costs to build a recreation pond for swimming are a lot more attainable than a 168-foot drop.
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