WHEN FALLS HAVE A FATAL ATTRACTION.
NIAGARA FALLS HAS LONG HELD A SAD, HYPNOTIC SWAY
It was gruesome, exhausting work to recover a body from Niagara Falls. Moving handover-hand along a steel cable attached to the trees, down 90 metres in early morning darkness to the edge of the churning whirlpool downstream from the falls.
“It was an awful way to die,” recalls Michael Clarkson, who took part in rescues in the 1980s.
But as he writes in a new ebook, The River of Lost Souls: What We Can Learn From Niagara Falls Suicides, it’s not just “love sickness and family heart ache” that drives about two dozen people to jump here every year — there’s also a hypnotic pull to the rushing water.
The first white man to bear witness to the falls more than three centuries ago felt it. “The temptation to throw one’s self down this incredible precipice is almost too great for resistance,” missionary priest and explorer Father L ouis Hennepin wrote in 1678 after visiting the waters of Niagara, which “do foam and boyl.”
By the 20th century, Dr. A. L. Benedict warned those of “high nervous temperament” to avoid the falls altogether. He believed one of his patients jumped to her death after listening to the rushing of the waters “till she fancied they had a message for her. She had watched the circling swirl of the eddies, and whirlpools and the mighty downpour of the falls till her weak nerves were wrought with an unconquerable desire to rush along with the waves.”
A 1924 editorial in the Times Herald of Olean, N.Y., also suggested that some of those who jumped into the waters “had no more intention of hurling themselves into Niagara than they had of attempting a trip to Mars.”
According to a University of Florida study published in 2011, more than a third of 431 college students reported an urge to leap from a high place at least once in their lifetime, including those with no history of suicidal thinking. But researchers have a more grounded explanation for the “high place phenomenon.”
When we stand in a high place — a bridge, a building, the edge of a thundering waterfall — our fear circuitry may send a life- preserving signal like “Back up, you might fall.” But the signal fires so rapidly, they write, that we are not fully aware of why we’ve backed up and we misinterpret it as the “urge to jump.”
Perhaps, but as Clarkson reports, Marilyn Monroe twice had to step away from the railing while filming Niagara in 1952. And while filming Superman II in the 1980s, Margot Kidder told Clarkson, an extra in the film, “I can see why people jump. There’s a draw to the water. I feel like it’s pulling me.” Even Capt. Bruce Wright of the Niagara ( N.Y.) County Sheriff ’s Marine Unit has said of Niagara’s haunting draw: “They look at the water, and the next thing you know they’re wading out and over they go.”
“The attraction to the rushing water, I find that fascinating,” says Clarkson, a former journalist who grew up in Niagara. “And also very dangerous.”
Clarkson is careful not to romanticize suicide in his book; his goal was to try to understand its sometimes heart- rending allure to prevent more deaths. He lives with chronic depression himself, an illness that drove him twice on pilgrimages in the late 1970s to the New Hampshire mountain home of reclusive author J. D. Salinger. (“He told me if I was lonely and depressed to write about it.”)
Depression, addiction, “loneliness and simple unhappiness” are recurrent themes in many of the thousands of suicides Clarkson reviewed, dating back to the 1830s. Many people who have died at Niagara had never sought counsell i ng or help. Some went into the water upstream and perished before they hit the falls; others fell into the water below the falls. In 1934, 30-year-old Ruth Hyde climbed onto her seat on the Spanish Aero cable car that runs over the whirlpool, tossed away her cigarette and plunged 76 metres to her death. “She dived as gracefully as a good diver in the water,” one passenger said.
The stone abutment and steel railing at Table Rock, the shelf of rock that juts out from the Canadian shore at the brink of Horseshoe Falls, is one of the most vulnerable spots at Niagara but there are hazards along the river, on both sides. “People don’t realize how fast that water is moving,” said Mark McMullen, chief of the Niagara Parks Police Service.” If you get up past your knees it’ ll take you off your feet, and you’ll quickly find yourself in trouble.”
There are surveillance cameras and warning signs about every third pillar to stay off the wall, as well highvisibility police patrols. Many of McMullen’s officers are trained in crisis intervention. “We discuss all the time the potential of reducing risk, not only at the brink of the falls itself but all the way along the corridor.” But he doesn’t believe making the railings — already 1.2 metres — half a metre higher would deter anyone committed to getting into the water.
Clarkson says not everyone agrees with police. The authors of one 1991 paper on suicides recommended “making the water of the falls less accessible to potential suicides without reducing the tourist potential of the area.”
Only three people have survived falls over Horseshoe Falls without any protective gear. One of them is Kirk Jones, a 40- year- old unemployed auto parts salesman from Canton, Mich., when he went over the 57- metre vertical drop to the Niagara River below in 2003. He first claimed he had been driven by depression, but later admitted his infamous plunge was a daredevil stunt.
He was fined and banished from Ontario parks. But Jones died last year after going over the brink again. His body was pulled from Lake Ontario after a threemetre inflatable ball was discovered at the bottom of the falls, spinning around and around, empty.
Do you need help? Call the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention at 204874- 4073 or reach out online at https://suicideprevention. ca/need-help/
THOUSANDS OF SUICIDES (DATE) BACK TO THE 1830s.