Brooklyn Bridge

The Brooklyn Bridge killed its own designer before construction started, gave dozens of workers a fatal pressure sickness called the bends, and saw twelve people trampled to death in a stampede six days after opening in 1883. Visitors regularly report screaming and splashing sounds from below, a headless figure walking the span, and dark shapes floating mid-air before vanishing.

People keep calling the police about jumpers on the Brooklyn Bridge. They hear screaming, then a splash in the East River below. When officers investigate, they find nobody in the water and nobody on the ledge. It happens often enough that it barely surprises anyone anymore.

The bridge opened on May 24, 1883, celebrated with fourteen tons of fireworks. Six days later, twelve people were dead. On Memorial Day, a woman tripped descending the Manhattan-side stairs. Another woman screamed. The crowd, already packed onto the new bridge in holiday numbers, believed the structure was collapsing. The stampede killed twelve and seriously injured thirty-six. The New York Times described "dead and dying men, women and children piled upon another in a writhing, struggling mass."

But the death count started long before opening day. Construction took fourteen years (1869 to 1883), and the bridge killed people the entire time. The designer, John Augustus Roebling, never saw a single stone laid. On June 28, 1869, his foot got caught in a rope and was crushed by a docking boat. Doctors amputated two toes. He contracted tetanus from the wound and died within weeks.

His son Washington Roebling took over at age 32. The bridge's foundations required massive underwater chambers called caissons, pressurized to keep the East River out while workers called "sandhogs" dug with shovels and dynamite under more than double normal atmospheric pressure. When workers resurfaced too quickly, nitrogen bubbled in their bloodstream. They called it "caisson disease." We call it the bends.

German laborer John Myers became the first to die from it on April 22, 1872. Irish worker Patrick McKay followed eight days later. Daniel Reardon, also Irish, died within the month. Washington Roebling himself spent so much time in the caissons that the bends left him bedridden. He supervised the rest of construction from his Brooklyn Heights bedroom using a telescope, relaying instructions through his wife Emily, who essentially ran the project for years.

Workers died above the water too. Irish mason Neil Mullen fell from the 275-foot towers in December 1877 when temporary wooden supports gave way. A heavy cable snapped and killed two riggers, slicing one man's head clean off. Author David McCullough documented 21 deaths. Other accounts put the number at 27. Some estimates go as high as 40. The real number will probably never be known, since many of the workers were immigrants whose deaths weren't always recorded.

The ghost stories track the history. The headless figure is the most reported, a man without a head walking the bridge's span. Multiple witnesses over the years have described seeing him, usually at night, usually alone. Dark figures are seen floating mid-air along the walkway, then vanishing around corners or simply disappearing. The screaming and splashing sounds are the most common report, and they happen during low-traffic times when the bridge is quiet enough to notice.

Some of the sounds get attributed to the 1883 stampede. Others to the many suicides the bridge has seen over 140 years. The construction workers are the most persistent explanation. The bridge was built by men whose names we mostly don't know, funded by their injuries, and finished despite killing its own creator before a single stone was placed.

Emily Roebling was the first person to cross the completed bridge, carrying a rooster as a symbol of victory. Fourteen tons of fireworks went off behind her. Twelve people would be dead in a week. The Brooklyn Bridge has always been a place where celebration and tragedy sit right next to each other, and the people who cross it at night say the bridge hasn't forgotten any of it.