>> There was a time when this quiet patch of woods tucked into a bend of Sugar Creek rumbled with engines drowning out the roar of thousands of cheering race fans.

Only bits and pieces of the once bustling Jungle Park Speedway remain, but the signs, once you see them, are unmistakable.

>> There's this grandstand, big old wooden grandstand in the woods, and you think, what is this doing here?

What could people have been looking at?

And you realize, there's some banking here and it looks manmade.

This is -- this is an oval.

This is a racetrack.

>> The races at this half mile oval were fast, wild and extremely dangerous, for drivers and spectators alike.

>> Even for a racetrack in the '30s, it was dangerous.

There were trees around it!

The fans were standing about 15 feet away from where the race cars -- where their groove was.

Spectators were injured and killed not that infrequently.

But back then, the value of life was very different than it is now.

Spectator gets killed, but who won the race?

>> That very thing happened in the summer of 1928.

The headlines announced the winner of the race, and a paragraph later, got around to mentioning the death of one Mrs. Charles Kiger.

She wouldn't be last person to meet their end at Jungle Park.

>> The track was the brain child of a young entrepreneur from rural Boone County, named Earl Padgett.

>> He bought some land down in Parke County, and by 1926, he had a dirt track, and people started pouring into it, thousands of people at a time.

They sat and paid $1 to watch these cars go 100 miles an hour on dirt!

It must have been just breathtaking!

>> On a good day, around 5,000 people would crowd around the fences to watch the races at Jungle Park.

Firsthand accounts note the wild atmosphere at the track.

>> It was rowdy and crowded.

I was, like, four, five years old.

I remember the drinking was heavy!

People drank beer, long necks.

One car went off the track on the backstretch, flipped and caught on fire.

Back then, they didn't have much safety equipment.

People ran and put the fire out with their beer.

>> And it wasn't just the crowd that was unruly.

Even the organizers weren't really living up to their titles.

Jack Shanklin raced there back in the '50s.

>> I turned over between turns three and four during qualifying.

There was no guardrail or nothing.

I went over the bank.

It wasn't at all organized.

They didn't even have a stopwatch.

They were supposed to be using a stopwatch for qualification, and the guy had a silver dollar in his hands, acting like he had a stopwatch.

>> Jungle Park wasn't the premier racing venue of its day.

That one was some 60 miles to the east, but it was a steppingstone for a number of world-class drivers.

>> Jungle Park was the very minor leagues of racing.

Like baseball, it was you started in the, you know, farm teams, the Triple-A, Double-A, Single-A, that kind of thing, and worked your way up.

A handful of very top drivers did come through Jungle Park.

Indy 500 winners Wilbur Shaw, for instance, raced at Jungle Park.

But once he won the 500, he wasn't going to race again at Jungle Park, because everybody knew it was exceptionally dangerous.

>> While the danger was certainly part of the draw, it was also likely part of what brought it to an end.

>> Other tracks had come along, and so it was copied in many little towns.

And so the crowds were getting smaller and smaller.

>> In 1955, it basically went away.

But five years later, they decided let's try it one more time.

>> This last hooray proved Jungle Park was too dangerous for mid-century Americans.

>> Fans came like they used to come.

There was a crash.

A woman who was on a blanket watching the race and moved to get out of the way of it, but did not get out of the way of it, and was crushed, and she died.

And that was pretty much it for Jungle Park.

By 1960, our whole concept of life and death had changed from 1926, and we weren't as comfortable with it as we had been earlier.

So that pretty much was the end of it.

>> Now, the old grandstands and a state historical marker are all that remains of this once bustling racetrack.

>> There was a time thousands of people walked around here, and there was all this action going on here, and then people just walked away from it and left it as it is, and there it is, just rotting away.

It's haunting, and it's beautiful to me in a way.