The night of Sept. 30, 1994, was like any other for a group of friends in Gurnee. It was a Friday. “Family Matters” was on ABC. Just a few months before, O.J. Simpson’s infamous Bronco ride had gripped the nation.
But when the sun rose on the following day, the Midwest was gripped by another major news story they had a hand in: The abduction of Tiny the Spider, Six Flags’ giant inflatable Halloween mascot.
“It was on every single radio station; every single newspaper,” Bill Walther said.
As Saturday’s opening of Six Flags Great America’s 50th season approached, Walther recalled the night more than 30 years ago that made him and his friends local legends, as well as permanent exiles from the popular theme park.
The night began like many others for a group of friends in a small town in the 1990s. They were at someone’s house, bored and hungry.
“You can’t really pilfer through their mom’s cupboards too much; all the food is gone,” Walther recalled.
It was decided they would cruise to White Castle for a bite. The weather was fine, he recalled, as he and Lawrence “Jeff” Evitts rode in Mikey Bartels’ pickup truck on a route that took them past the backside of Six Flags.
Starting in 1991, Tiny the Spider — measured at 40 feet across, and weighing 200 pounds — was installed on the west side of the American Eagle rollercoaster every October for the annual Fright Fest.
Walther couldn’t remember who said it first, but as he and his buddies were driving by looking at Tiny, they got an idea.
“We would do scavenger hunts,” Walther said. “And all through high school, people had looked at that big spider on the side and been like, ‘Man, that would be cool. That’d be the ultimate scavenger hunt prize.’”
Walther, describing his childhood, didn’t consider himself an excessive rabble-rouser. He wasn’t stealing stop signs and playing “mailbox baseball or any of that kind of stuff.” But he and his friends would make their own fun doing what he called “painless things.”
He recalled sometimes blocking cars in at the high school parking lot by moving around parking stops, and another time they all picked up a friend’s car and turned it sideways.
The spider caper, however, would be a bit more serious.
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The American Eagle ride is a massive wooden rollercoaster. The track is held up 127 feet in the air by a lattice of wooden beams painted white. As Walther recalls it, the spider’s top legs were near the top of the coaster, and the bottom was still visible above the trees along the freeway, meaning it could’ve been a hundred feet up.
But Walther, six feet tall and a football player, was good with heights and recalled scaling the scaffolding easily. Years later, he would move to Arizona, where he would go mountain climbing, bouldering, ziplining, skydiving and parasailing.
“I’m not an adrenaline junkie,” Walther said. “Heights just don’t really spook me.”
Walther and Evitts climbed — Bartel was content to remain with the truck — and unplugged the air compressor keeping the spider inflated. Then, they simply climbed back down and drove to White Castle.
It was only on the drive back on the freeway, when they saw the spider completely flat, that Walther got the idea to take the prank a bit further by taking Tiny. With their successful sabotage, there would likely be more security in the future, meaning a future attempt would be far more difficult.
“I was like, ‘Hey man, if there was any time to take it, it’d be now, right?’” Walther said. “This is, you know, brilliant logic.”
Actually getting the spider down was a different matter. Climbing up again, they found each leg tied down with eight straps.
“We had to go to each and every leg and untie those straps while we’re holding on to the side of a rollercoaster with no safety equipment or gears or nothing,” Walther said.
Finally, hours later, the spider was finally down. Next came a chain link fence, likely “meant to keep yahoos like us from attempting something stupid.”
They ended up pushing Tiny underneath. By this point, the spider was already waterlogged after a dip in the water when it dropped, and the morning dew wasn’t helping as they dragged it up a hill. By the time they finally lugged it into the back of the pickup truck, the three friends were exhausted, he said.
Despite the lengthy operation, they had remained “invisible,” even with semis rolling by on the highway.
What to do next was trickier. Should they cruise to Antioch’s football field and dump it there, or take it to one of their dorms? They ended up driving around, uncertain, before deciding they would figure it out later, leaving their treasure at Evitt’s house.
What followed was a media maelstrom.
“It was the talk of the town,” Walther recalled. “My mom was a hairstylist. Every single person who sat in her chair was talking about this caper.”
On the radio, people would call in, alternating between calling for the Tiny-takers’ heads and waving it off as a harmless youthful prank. A Crime Stoppers award for any information went out. For days, Tiny remained in Evitt’s garage, with the trio deciding they would move it the following weekend.
But that was not soon enough.
“I got a feeling somebody called and gave a tip,” Walther said.
As the official story goes, the garage door had been left open, and someone driving by spotted Tiny and reported it. Walther still doesn’t buy it.
“It doesn’t make any sense to me, because if I looked into somebody’s garage and saw some black stuff, it just looks like garbage bags,” he said. “I’m not going to call and say, ‘Hey, there’s the inflatable spider in so-and-so’s garage.”
After the alleged tip, Evitts called Walther and Bartels, and the three decided to turn themselves in.
While the police were understanding, Walther ended up spending the night in jail.
“My mom was always like, ‘If you get in trouble, don’t you call me,'” Walther recalled with a smile. “That was her way of, I don’t know, trying to keep me from doing stupid things.”
What stood out to him about that night was the sandwiches: pimento olive bologna, which dampened his spirits.
“This is the worst meal I’ve ever had, and these 24 hours sitting in the cell are the longest time of my whole life,” he recalled.
Local radio had the same split of callers, alternating between advocating for throwing the book at the group and sentiments like “They’re just kids.”
The issue was, according to baiduhai reporting at the time, the vinyl-and-nylon spider was valued at more than $15,000, making it a felony theft. And when they pushed Tiny under the fence, it got torn, making it felony criminal damage, beyond additional trespassing charges.
The felonies were ultimately dropped, and Walther said they were hit with fines and 200 hours of community service per person. Six Flags Great America, for its part, banned them from the park for life.
“I joke with my son, ‘I could take you back home to the amusement park, but I’ve just got to sit in the parking lot while you go in.’” Walther said. “I’m sure they have an old photograph of me, aged, that all the security guards are keeping a lookout.”
The theft made the trio local legends, and to this day, Walther said he runs into people who remember the story. He’s shared it numerous times over the years.
“They don’t even have to be from Illinois,” Walther said. “They’ll be like, ‘Yeah, I remember that.’ And then when they find out that I’m the guy, sitting there with them, they have to go through the story.”
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Thirty years later, Walther has had a successful career, untainted by the tale of his youthful misadventure. His son has heard and requested the story plenty of times. But it’s one he doesn’t think would be possible in the modern era of technology and surveillance.
“I feel like he’s missing out on some youth,” Walther said. “This generation is missing out on some youth and getting into some misadventures.”
But also with age comes reflection. Today, he’s “longer in the tooth,” and understands how dangerous the stunt was, and how awful he would have felt if he had influenced others into doing “something stupid.”
While he clearly enjoys telling the tale, he said sharing it with his son requires some warning labels.
“There’s the practicality and the maturity behind it,” Walther said. “It’s important to be aware of, and to communicate when you are telling the story, to try and instill in our kids that, yeah, you are going to do some stupid things, but you need to slow down and think about what the repercussions could be.”
Tiny is no longer perched on the American Eagle ride, although that’s unrelated to the heist. In 2012, it faced “health troubles,” as a previous report described it, and was later found “deflated and unresponsive.” The park even held a funeral.
But she turned out to be made of sterner stuff — what is death to a giant inflatable spider? — and returned the following season. Today, Tiny is typically displayed on ground level elsewhere in the park during Fright Fest, presumably under the watchful eyes of security cameras.