MYRTLE BEACH — Ripley’s Entertainment bolstered its nearly 50-year footprint in Myrtle Beach with an expansion of its Ocean Boulevard attractions and a new exhibit at its Broadway at the Beach aquarium.
The Florida-based company, which originated in 1918 after namesake Robert Ripley drew a cartoon in the New York Globe, first set up shop along the Grand Strand in 1976 with a museum located a block away from the Atlantic Ocean in a spot that formerly housed the legendary business Sloppy Joe's.
Slated to be finished in time for the spring are new attractions and updates including Ripley’s new Illusion Lab, which will feature optical, photographic and interactive illusions; Ripley’s Crazy Golf, a new mini-golf course; Ripley’s Mirror Maze Expansion, with expanded mirrored hallways and infinity rooms; and Ripley’s existing Haunted Adventure, which will be transformed into a 1908 macabre manor featuring a murder mystery.
Ripley’s plans to expand its Ocean Boulevard attractions come at a time when Myrtle Beach government officials have purchased real estate in an effort to revitalize the area surrounding the former Myrtle Beach Pavilion amusement park, which shuttered in 2006 and left a void for not only tourists but Horry County citizens.
The Ripley’s Myrtle Beach-area aquarium, which opened in 1997 a few miles away at the nearby entertainment and shopping complex Broadway at the Beach, is also expanding its 72,000-square-foot space with a new exhibit featuring sloths.
In the planned Sloth Valley, visitors to the aquarium this year will experience two-toed sloths face-to-face and visit a new ocean-themed exhibit in the aquarium’s Discovery Center, where they can walk a plank highlighted by hands-on animal encounters.
In 2020, the aquarium finished the most significant expansion in its history to date with a 5,500-square-foot expansion featuring African penguins with a floor-to-ceiling viewing glass and a 360-degree crawl tunnel.
The Ripley’s Myrtle Beach expansion announcement comes after a Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum franchise located on the Atlantic City Boardwalk in New Jersey closed in December after 26 years in business.
