Colorado Street Bridge (Suicide Bridge)

The first suicide off the Colorado Street Bridge happened on November 16, 1919, and more than 100 people have jumped from it since, including a Depression-era mother named Myrtle Ward who threw her three-year-old Jeanette off before following her in 1937 (the little girl survived when her fall was broken by a tree). The bridge is still taking people today while Pasadena tries to install a preservation-friendly suicide barrier.

One of the workers who died building the Colorado Street Bridge fell into a vat of wet concrete. The story goes that his coworkers decided they couldn't get him out in time, let the concrete harden, and left him sealed inside one of the support columns. That's the founding legend of the bridge, and while nobody has ever verified the body is actually in there, the story has survived for over a century because it feels like the right origin for a place this loaded with death.

The bridge opened on December 13, 1913. At 150 feet above the Arroyo Seco and nearly 1,500 feet long, it was the tallest concrete bridge in the world at the time, a showpiece of the Beaux Arts movement designed by John Alexander Low Waddell and Harrington of Kansas City. Pasadena built it to connect the city to the west side of the arroyo and open up the area to development. It's a really beautiful piece of engineering. Wide arches, decorative light standards, the kind of bridge people take wedding photos on.

It's also killed a lot of people. The first suicide was documented on November 16, 1919, six years after the bridge opened. By the late 1920s, the nickname "Suicide Bridge" was already in use, and the Great Depression pushed the numbers up hard. Over the past century, the best estimates put the total deaths over 100 jumpers, though the real number is almost certainly higher because early records are incomplete.

The darkest specific story is from 1937. A Depression-era mother named Myrtle Ward reportedly threw her three-year-old daughter Jeanette off the bridge and then jumped after her. The mother died on impact. The little girl survived (her fall was broken by a tree) and was raised by relatives. She died of natural causes as an elderly woman decades later. The bridge is full of moments like that, brief news items that buried themselves in the Pasadena Star-News archives and resurfaced when someone went looking.

Pasadena has been trying to reduce the death count for years. The city added safety railings in the 1990s and is currently working on a more serious suicide-prevention barrier system that's been in planning since 2017. The problem is aesthetic, because the bridge is on the National Register of Historic Places, and any barrier has to preserve the visual. The compromise has been controversial, expensive, and slow.

The ghost stories are as consistent as you'd expect. The most-reported is a woman in a long flowing robe who stands on the bridge's parapet and then leaps off, vanishing before she hits the ground. A man with wire-rimmed glasses has been reported pacing the walkway, though accounts don't agree on what he's wearing. People who live in the houses below the bridge in the Arroyo report cries at night that don't come from any living person they can identify, and a few claim to have seen figures standing on the bridge from below at 3 a.m., silhouetted against the arroyo sky, gone when they looked again.

What makes the Colorado Street Bridge a different kind of haunted place is that the thing that makes it so painful is still happening. Most haunted sites are dealing with history that ended a hundred years ago. This bridge is still taking people, which is why the barrier project matters so much even if the ghosts don't.

If you go, go for the architecture. Walk it during the day. Look at the arches from below in the arroyo. Then be honest with yourself about what you're actually looking at: a piece of public infrastructure that's been beautiful and lethal for more than a century, trying to become just beautiful again.