What is that thing which the woman in white is looking/laughing at? I refer to what appears to be an elephant trunk -- not attached to an elephant -- suspended between the two benches. BTW I am stone cold sober.

[Is it a trunk? More likely a limb! It looks to me like part of a tree. - Dave]

... a ride on the little train just the other side of the messy log patch. Looks like a nice steamer, willing to tote a dozen or so happy kids around the park. And the name "Hereafter" reminds me of the old plug about what guys say to their date right after parking in the woods.

The merry-go-round swing thing in the center of photo.

Apparently, the merry-go-round swing thing in the center of photo is stuck because someone is scaling up the side to locate the problem with a 1906 version of WD-40 aka lubricating oil.

I have to wonder if that expensive $10,000 investment was profitable as time went on.

Pine Beach was located at Sewell’s Point in Norfolk.

Pine Beach Hotel - The Hampton Roads Naval Museum Blog

It's nice to see Oliver Hardy and Mary Martin making use of someone's time machine. But as for the Hereafter, it is easy for us to snicker at such a kitschy exhibit for the rubes, but our contemporary comic book movies and "reality" tv are just as stylized and phony. In fifty years this will be really obvious.

THE DAILY PRESS, Newport News, Va., June 21, 1906

"HEREAFTER" AT PINE BEACH

Local Amusement Company Offers
Weird St. Louis Attraction

"Hereafter," a spectacular show which created a sensation on the Pike at the St. Louis exposition, has been put in at Pine Beach by the Newport News Amusement Corporation at a cost of $10,000 and will be ready for public exhibition tomorrow afternoon and night.

The contract for constructing this expensive amusement enterprise was awarded to Austin, Bradwell and McClennan of New York, the firm which put in the St. Louis show. Mr. McClennan was manager of Luna Park at Coney Island for two seasons, and has created such shows as "The Johnstown Flood" and "Over and Under the Sea."

"Hereafter" is under the general management of Messrs. Clinedinst and Ballard, of this city.

The show is a very weird one but it has never failed to attract immense crowds wherever exhibited. Entering the first chamber of the great building erected for this show, the spectators are ushered into the chamber of horrors, the walls of which are lined with coffins and decorated with grinning skulls and other grewsome objects. This is an exact reproduction of the famous Cabaret de la Mort, or the Cabinet [sic] of Death, in Paris. The lecturer invites some person in the crowd to enter one of the upright coffins and he is immediately transformed into a skeleton. His spirit invites the spectators to accompany him to the under world and together they descend a bottomless pit, finally crossing the river Styx and finishing in Hades. The electrical effects used are most vivid and greatly add to the impressiveness of the scene.