Review
"This is a great book. I got into work one of the mornings last week and I got this envelope and I looked inside and there was this book, Journeys to the Brink of Doom: True Stories of Disaster, Mystery, and Heroism at Niagara Falls. I picked it up during one of the news breaks and I didn't put it down. And then the next news break I picked it up and didn't put it down. And then the next newsbreak . . . you get the idea. Then I went to my office right after the show and I just read it from cover to cover." --
Tom Bauerle, WGR Radio[T. W.] Kriner takes a look at the dark side of Niagara Falls in this oddly disturbing little book, a compendium of tales of lives lost and saved amid the fury of the cataract. Actually, more are lost than saved in this book. Nearly 90 tragedies, some involving multiple loss of life, but many involving suicides, are collected here. So are about a dozen heroic rescues and a couple of mysteries. Kriner, a Niagara Falls native now living in Williamsville, is a polished writer. His reporting is to the point and his story telling is entertaining, but there's no mistaking the dark side here--a side this member of the Horror Writers Association can't resist attributing to Tawiskaro, a demon of Native American lore who demands at least four lives a year. --
Buffalo News, June 22, 1997
From the Author
In 1836 Harriet Beecher Stowe visited Niagara Falls and contemplated suicide. "I felt as if I could have gone over with the waters," she wrote in a letter to a friend. "It would be so beautiful a death; there would be no fear in it."
Harriet was a few chapters short of a finished book. To die at Niagara Falls is anything but beautiful. The cataracts are magnificent to behold, but incredibly brutal. Fail to respect them, get in their way, and they will hurl you into eternity--in pieces. The Falls have done just that to nearly five thousand people since Louis Hennepin became the first European to view them in 1678. Hennepin was afraid of the Falls.
So am I.
Twenty-two miles downstream from Buffalo and Fort Erie, the upper Niagara River splits into two channels at the head of Goat Island. It is here that the Deadline begins. That's what the old newspaper men called the beginning of the rapids above the Falls: The Deadline. The river drops fifty-five feet in less than half a mile and accelerates to twenty-five miles per hour. This broad, calm river suddenly narrows into a seething torrent of rapids and cascades then plummets 176 feet into the Niagara Gorge.
This is Niagara Falls: three cataracts over which 3,000 tons of water plunge each second. The American Fall, which is about 800 feet across, and Luna Fall, measuring less than 100 feet, together account for about 300 tons of water per second. The remaining 2,700 tons go over the Horseshoe, a titanic cataract with a crestline of about 2,500 feet.
The flow of water can be described in many ways, using various units of mass, volume, and duration. I prefer to measure the Niagara in terms of automobiles per second. It makes the power and danger of the Falls somewhat easier to comprehend for those who are not geologists or physicists.
I drive a 1992 Pontiac Firebird that weighs, shall we say, 2,000 pounds--one ton. Imagine a cliff broad enough to line three thousand Firebirds hubcap to hubcap at the very brink. Now imagine these three thousand automobiles rolling over that precipice simultaneously. Now picture an identical line of vehicles rolling into the abyss immediately after the first. And so on. Three thousand Pontiac Firebirds every second. Second after second, minute after minute, hour after hour, day upon day, week upon week. Imagine it! Can you? Do you see it? I can see it. It's an awesome force.
Dying at Niagara is no more beautiful than plunging over a cliff in a car. Decapitation, dismemberment, and disembowelment are the common results of a trip over the Falls. And if this weren't bad enough, there's a demon waiting in the depths below.
Like I said: the place scares me.
