The LAist has a story about the Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena, Calif., which once carried Route 66 on the way to Los Angeles. Here’s a startling fact about the 1913 bridge that gives it its nickname:
Six years after the construction the first suicide took place, and it is now estimated that more than one-hundred people have plummeted to their deaths from the heights, although it has been argued that the figure is closer to two-hundred. Many of these suicides are blamed on the Great Depression of the 1930s which left many local folk so distraught that the only way they could exit the gray times was to end their life.
Researchers who’ve investigated the bridge claim that many people have been lured to their deaths by a strange specter, a ghost of a construction worker who allegedly fell to his death six months before the structure was finished. At the time no one was sure about the incident because the worker was said to have plummeted into a concrete pit used to support one of the pillars of the bridge. His body was never found.
The story about the construction worker is doubtful. But that doesn’t make the sheer number of suicides any less disturbing. That’s too bad. The bridge is striking enough architecturally on its own to be famous.