Holiday World & Splashin's Safari built The Raven as a traditional wooden roller coaster for its Halloween section at a time when corporate theme parks were pursuing larger and faster rides. Holiday World president Will Kock commissioned Custom Coaster Incorporated of Cincinnati, Ohio, to design and build the coaster, with engineers Larry Bill and Dennis McNulty leading the design and using the park's natural terrain to shape its 2,800-foot course. Tim O'Brien suggested the name The Raven after Edgar Allen Poe's famous poem, and the station was designed to resemble a Victorian-era haunted house. The coaster rises to an 80-foot lift hill, includes an 85-foot drop made possible by the topography, reaches 48 mph, and features a midcourse swoop turn over Lake Rudolph. When it opened to the public on May 6, 1995, it quickly became the park's signature ride, ranked highly among coaster enthusiasts, and helped inspire other independent and family-owned parks across the country to install traditional wooden coasters of their own.
