In Brief
The Brooklyn Bridge keeps generating police calls that lead nowhere: a scream, a splash in the East River, then no one in the water and no one on the ledge. The lore blames the dead a 14-year build left behind, starting with the designer who never saw a stone laid.
The Full Story
The calls come in during the quiet hours on the Brooklyn Bridge, when traffic thins out. Someone hears frantic screaming, then a splash in the East River below. Officers go down to check the water and the ledge and find nobody in either place. It happens often enough that the story has hardened around one explanation. The bridge was built on a body count.
It started before the first stone. The designer, John A. Roebling, was surveying near the Brooklyn tower site in June 1869 when a docking boat crushed his foot against a piling. Two toes were amputated, tetanus set in, and he was dead within the month, never having seen construction begin. His son Washington, 32, took over and was crippled by the bends from time in the pressurized underwater caissons. He ran the rest of the build bedridden in his Brooklyn Heights home, watching through a telescope, passing instructions through his wife Emily, who effectively became chief engineer for years.
The men who dug those caissons were called sandhogs, and they died of the bends in quick succession. John Myers went first in April 1872, Patrick McKay eight days later, Daniel Reardon within the month. Between January and May that year, the project physician treated 110 cases of decompression sickness. After the first three deaths, Washington Roebling halted digging on the Manhattan tower rather than push for bedrock. Estimates of the total dead across the 14-year build run from about 20 to 40, many of them immigrants whose deaths went unrecorded.
The bridge opened May 24, 1883, with fireworks, a band, and ships firing salutes. Roughly 150,300 people crossed that day, and Emily Roebling was the first across the finished span. Six days later, on Memorial Day, the dead caught up to it again. A woman tripped on the narrow wooden staircase on the Manhattan side and another woman screamed, and a rumor tore through the crowd that the span was collapsing. The crush killed 12 people and seriously injured 36. A bridge employee tore away a section of iron fence to open an escape route. The New York Times described the stairway as "packed with dead and dying men, women and children piled upon another in a writhing, struggling mass."
So when the screaming and the splash come in over the police line during the quiet hours, the lore has a deep well to draw on. The ghost guides report most is a headless figure, said to be a worker decapitated when a cable snapped free. People describe a man whose face is in shadow, then realize the figure has no head at all. Others tell of a blonde woman who crosses the span and vanishes, and shadow people who walk ahead of pedestrians at night before they disappear. Who the headless man was, and the year he died, nobody can say.
