A Deadly Beauty: Busy Season Begins at Niagara Falls

I felt as if I could have gone over with the waters; it would have been so beautiful a death; there would have been no fear in it.

--Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1834, after visiting the falls

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The body was spotted by a tourist at 6:46 p.m. May 15, spinning in the Whirlpool.

That Monday evening, two things were clear to the rescuers and anyone else who knows Niagara Falls well: Getting to the scene would be difficult, and the victim probably would turn out to be a suicide.

For most of the 10 million people swarming around Niagara Falls this summer, it will be enough to simply gaze, feel the mist, smile for a photograph with the water rushing behind.

But a handful of others see the deluge and must become part of it, either to seek out death or to defy it.

It is the busy season here--for tourism, suicide and heading off the daredevils.

Converging on the churning waters were boats of the Coast Guard, the Niagara County Sheriff’s Marine Patrol, the Lewiston No. 1 Fire Rescue Boat, and helicopters from Erie and Niagara counties.

The body in the Whirlpool would be the second recovered from the lower river in three days.

The boats hung back, ill equipped to navigate the vacuum-like quality created by hundreds of thousands of gallons of water coiling and pooling before passing through the Great Gorge.

“It’s kind of like a drain effect, when you fill your sink and pull the plug,” explained Capt. Bruce Wright of the Niagara County Sheriff’s Marine Unit, who responds to these calls about a dozen times a year.

“It just continuously swirls, and usually anything that’s caught up in there, for the most part, stays there until it’s retrieved.”

Niagara Falls vies with San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge for the dubious title of most popular place to end it all. The number of Niagara suicides rises steadily through the summer and peaks in September. An accurate count is difficult because some bodies are never recovered, but the experts estimate the number at 20 a year.

According to Wright, the feelings recorded by Harriet Beecher Stowe are not unusual.

“It seems that Niagara Falls somewhat hypnotizes people,” he said. “They look at the water, and the next thing you know they’re wading out and over they go.”

Finally a jet boat roared into the Whirlpool, and a metal basket was lowered over its side. But engine problems arose, and a helicopter had to pick up the body. It was brought ashore and turned over to Canadian authorities.

The next step would be determining who the man was. Niagara Parks Police confirmed that he and the one found two days earlier were suicides, but would add only that both men were in their 40s and from Ontario.

Jet boats run by private tour operators have brought a touch of high-tech to the retrieval of bodies, but until about six years ago, the task often fell to the Hills, a prominent Niagara Falls family with thrill seekers of its own.

Red Hill Sr., a consummate riverman, three times rode a barrel through the Whirlpool Rapids below the Falls.

His son, Red Jr., died in 1951 going over the Canadian Horseshoe Falls in a contraption of inner tubes and fishnet he called “The Thing.”

The Hills estimate they pulled more than 500 corpses from the lower Niagara River over some 90 years.

“The body would be in the center of the Whirlpool, and it would go round and round,” Wes Hill, brother of the unfortunate Red Hill Jr., recalls. “We had to wait until it came close enough to shore, maybe 100 to 150 feet, then swim out and put a rope on it.”

Paul Gromosiak, a Niagara Falls historian, has written “Niagara Falls Q & A: Answers to the 100 Most Common Questions About Niagara Falls” after logging questions from 40,000 tourists.

He has spent years counting the suicides from 1856 to 1995. His statistics show that the favorite time is Monday at 4 p.m., mostly from the upper rapids but also off bridges over the Niagara River.

Then there are the daredevils.

Jean Francois Gravelot, the Frenchman better known as “The Great Blondin,” made the first tightrope crossing in 1859, only to be caught up in a celebrated rivalry with New York-born William Hunt, a.k.a. Signor Guillermo Antonio Farini. Whatever one did--cycle across, carry his agent across piggyback, stop midway to fry an omelet--the other matched and more.

In 1901 Michigan schoolteacher Annie Taylor went over and survived, but declared upon emerging from her wooden barrel: “No one ought ever do that again.”

English circus stuntman Bobby Leach survived the plunge in a steel barrel in 1911, only to slip on an orange peel 14 years later. His fractured leg became gangrenous, and he died.

George Stathakis, a chef from Buffalo, died trapped in the water, but his pet turtle survived the fall.

A 7-year-old boy wearing a life preserver is the only person to have survived a plunge over the Canadian Horseshoe Falls without a barrel or other contraption. He had been thrown into the water in a 1960 boating accident. No one has ever survived a trip over the narrower and rockier American falls.

Early stunts were often witnessed by thousands of spectators lining the shores, and only in the 1960s did authorities start cracking down on the thrill seekers. The first penalty meted out for falls-jumping was a $100 fine. But still they came. Of the 15 trips over Niagara Falls this century, five have been fatal, including the most recent, in 1995, when Robert Overacker, a 39-year-old stuntman from Camarillo, Calif., braved the Canadian falls on a jet ski.

Overacker had a rocket-propelled parachute on his back, but it failed. The 180-foot plunge was “like hitting cement,” as police described it at the time.

Hill, who lives in Niagara Falls, Ontario, says his brother in his “Thing” never stood a chance.

“He just wanted to try to conquer the falls like everyone else. He thought he could make a little money,” Hill said.

“I told him he was going to get killed,” he said. “I told him the contraption was so light that it would hit the water and stop and he’d shoot right out of it. And that’s just what happened.”

Hill has little tolerance left for stunts.

“It’s been conquered time and time again,” he said. “If someone else conquers it, he’s not a hero. He’s a fool.”

That’s not how Tyler Canning sees it. Last September, the 18-year-old strapped on three lifejackets and jumped from a rock to take the ride of his life through the churning rapids of the lower Niagara River.

“All I could see was just walls of water,” he recounts. “When I was on top of a wave I could see the shore a little bit and see people standing there. Then, when I’d go down between a few waves, they just looked like they were a thousand feet high and that’s all I could really see. Water from all angles.”

The ride lasted about 10 minutes until he reached calmer waters and swam to the U.S. shore. When it was over, one of his life jackets had been torn off, but he was unhurt. He was fined $1,500 by Canadian officials.

But Canning is undeterred. He says he dreams of going over Niagara Falls in a homemade barrel.

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On the Net:

https://www.infoniagara.com

https://www.iaw.on.ca/~falls