Alpengeist

Coming off Busch Gardens Tampa's success with Montu in 1996, Bolliger & Mabillard's design relationship with the chain's parks expanded to Williamsburg the following year with an even taller inverted coaster. Alpengeist — German for "ghost of the Alps" — was built into the wooded terrain of the park's Rhinefeld area on a $20 million budget, its queue built out as an elaborate Bavarian ski-lodge complex complete with a runaway-gondola storyline: riders are cast as passengers whose ski lift has been hijacked by the legendary Alpine snow beast.

The ride's 195-foot lift and 170-foot first drop send trains through six inversions — a 106-foot-tall vertical loop, a cobra roll, a zero-gravity roll, and a corkscrew among them — winding through natural terrain rather than a graded, open layout, reaching 67 mph across 3,828 feet of track. Alpengeist opened March 22, 1997 as the tallest inverted coaster in the world, a record it held outright until Cedar Point's Wicked Twister surpassed it in 2002, and one it continued to hold among complete-circuit inverted coasters for more than two decades afterward. It briefly held the fastest-inverted-coaster title too, before nearby sister park Kings Dominion's Volcano: The Blast Coaster overtook it in 1998.

The queue's ski-lodge theming — chairlift benches, alpine signage, and gondola cars integrated into the line itself — set a benchmark for built narrative at the park that few of its later coasters have matched as fully.

Alpengeist remains Busch Gardens Williamsburg's tallest coaster and one of its most consistently ranked attractions in national enthusiast polls, prized as much for its immersive queue as for the inversions themselves.