The Dark Reality of Rivers No One Talks About (A Mortician's Warning) - YouTube
Transcripts:
Oh, for some reason I have a toilet paper roll here. I have oily skin. Anyways, okay. I feel like we've been through a lot. So, let's be truly honest with one another. Have you ever looked over a ledge and had that weird morbid little thought, what would happen if I just fell right now? Not because you want to fall.
I mean, I don't physically want to fall off that ledge, but because your brain is so chaotic and intrusive. Because saint, anytime I'm somewhere tall, a cliff, a bridge, I don't know, the Grand Canyon, a crazy hotel balcony with questionable railings, my brain is like, could I survive this? Could I tuck and roll like Tom Cruz and just make it? No. No, I could not.
And your brain, it lies to us. It sees water and goes, "Oh, well, that looks soft. That looks sparkly. That looks like a giant bubble bath." Absolutely not. Spoiler alert, water becomes concrete when you hit it fast enough. And let me just insert this as a mortician who has actual river trauma. Calling it river trauma. I refuse to swim in rivers.
Absolutely not. Never again. Don't worry. I'll tell you why later. And my children also know. Hard. No. I don't care if you think you know the river. You don't. The river is unpredictable, unsteady, and has the same temperament as a toddler with a chainsaw. It just does what it wants to. Every time someone tells me, "Oh, we swim here every summer.
" I'm like, "Congratulations." So did the last five people the current just swept away. Trauma is a great teacher. And mine says, "Stay on land, sweetie." And here's the thing. Once you really understand what water does at high speed, you start to realize Niagara Falls isn't a peaceful nature wonderland.
It's a vertical death blender. A nature-made blend jet permanently set to puree. Gravity plus bad decisions equals smoothie. There's somebody watching this right now like, "What did she just say?" Okay, so why am I suddenly thinking about all of this water, death, Niagara Falls? Because as usual, I was doom scrolling at 2:00 a.m.
when I stumbled across a video of a woman on a Niagara Falls tour asking the guide how many people go over it in a year. Annie on over, but they don't go all the way over. You get what I'm saying? I don't. Roll the clip. Roll the clip right now. You have to see this. Okay, insert clip. >> So, I just finished the Niagara Falls boat tour.
So before you actually get on the boat, the tour guide narrates the histories of Niagara Falls. As he's talking, I could only think, man, this is a perfect place to jump. So I interrupted his speech and I said, "Hey, just out of curiosity, how many people lose their lives willingly, voluntarily, a year?" He said, "A year?" I said, "A month." He said, "A day.
" I SAID, "TELL ME MORE." So we're talking. He said, "Look, I hate to say it, but this happens daily." I said, "Does it ever make the news?" He said, "No, obviously because it'll deterior tourists." And I'm like, I have questions. I have so many questions. What actually happens when someone goes over the falls? What does hitting water at 70 m hour do to the human body? Where do the bodies go? And how is it possible that anyone has ever survived this? And that's when my brain did what it always does.
It spiraled hard. So, buckle up, coffin crew. Today we're diving into the science, the chaos, the danger, the miracle survivor, the ghost stories, and my own personal river trauma origin story. Cuz it's just another morbid Monday. The ADHD is soing bad. Car, it's morbid Monday. It's morbid Monday. Da da da da da.
It's morbid Monday. The greatest day of the flipping week. Da da da da da da. Cue the intro. All right, so let's get into the part that fascinates me the most. Obviously, the science. Because before we talk about people going over Niagara Falls, before we talk about the cases, survivors, daredevils, or literally anything else, you have to understand what the water itself does.
Forget the rocks for a second. I feel like that's pretty self-explanatory, right? Everyone always thinks the rocks are the big danger. But no, the water alone is enough to unsubscribe you from life. When you fall from the height of Niagara Falls, about 160 ft, your body accelerates fast. It's gravity plus velocity plus a whole lot of Why are humans like this? By the time you hit the water, you're going somewhere around 70 mph.
And here's what people get very, very wrong. Water is soft only when you gently enter it. If you belly flop into a pool from like 3 ft, that hurts. Right now, imagine hitting that same water from a height of 16 stories. The water does not have time to move out of your way. It compresses. It hardens. And it becomes essentially concrete.
Slippery, splashy, hard concrete. You don't sink in. You crash into it. Your organs slam forward. Your ribs can break. Your lungs can collapse. Bones snap. Joints dislocate. And if you hit the surface wrong at the wrong angle, limb first, head first, back first. That impactalone can be fatal before you ever go under.
And honestly, I would kind of hope for that cuz then you don't feel very much. Morbid, but true. And then the water pulls you down. People think you just go over the falls and just glide into the river below like it's a Disney ride, but no. You disappear underneath into what's called the churn zone, which is basically nature's angry washing machine.
You don't want to go there. Trust me. This is where the water isn't just falling, it's smashing into itself, colliding, spiraling, pounding into rock formations. There are hydraulic pockets under those falls that can hold the body down for minutes, sometimes hours. Sometimes literally forever you get dragged down, popped back up, pulled to the side, slammed into rocks, logs, debris, anything the river has collected.
You are being ragdalled by physics and water pressure that doesn't care who you are. Which is why the first time I saw what moving water can do to a literal human being, it rewired my brain. It didn't happen at Niagara Falls, but it taught me exactly what water does to a human body. Are you ready? Personal story time. Trauma.
So, there was a river that ran along the state line. Literally, the border was like right down the middle of the water, but sometimes it'd go this way and sometimes it'd go that way. And one day, I got a call from the medical examiner. A man had gone missing in the river. And then he surfaced a week later on my side of the state line.
So, that meant it became our jurisdiction, our case. I drove out there and I ended up assisting with the boat recovery. And if you've never been on a river recovery, let me tell you, there is no clean, tidy, cinematic moment, no slow motion scene. You just get creative because you have to. So, we pulled the boat as close as we could to his body floating there.
We literally grabbed him by the hand and pulled him toward the shore with the boat because that was the safest option. And when I say I will never forget what that man looked like, I mean it. His face didn't even look human at all. It was so swollen and huge it almost looked planet like it looked like someone had inflated his whole noggin.
The skin wasn't even skin colored anymore. He looked like the river had claimed him like it had painted his whole body in its own color palette. And that happened because you don't float peacefully down a river like a leaf in a movie. You get dragged. You hit things at high speeds. Rocks, branches, the riverbed.
Your body goes up and then down and then up again. You get tossed and battered and pulled by these currents that just don't let you go. And the reason he went into the river in the first place still haunts me. A child had fallen in and he jumped in after him trying to save him and he just didn't make it out.
And I know you're wondering, another bystander pulled the child. So, the child was saved, but the man got swept away. We were about to load him into my minivan when his entire family arrived. They knew we were there. They knew why we were there. And they wanted to see him. They needed to see him. It was a part of their religious practice and you cannot say no.
So we unzipped the body bag and the guttural screams that came out of his mother. I will never forget those either. It was grief in its rast form. It was pain that hit the air and it just took your breath away. That moment taught me that water doesn't give peaceful deaths. Water is violent and unforgiving and it changes everything. that recovery changed me and it made me realize that we need to respect water and rivers and waterfalls on a completely different level.
And Niagara Falls, it's like all of that multiplied by a thousand. That was just I hear that woman scream in my dream sometimes. I'm not even lying to you. If a medical examiner or a funeral home professional tells you that they don't think you should view a body, they're not telling you that because they want to take away your last time to see your loved one.
are telling you that because we wouldn't want to see our loved one in that way. And we tried so hard to get them to at least let us get his body back to the funeral home. You know, go about it that way. But they didn't want to do that. So, now that I've described a little bit of the trauma of what water can do to a body, let's talk about where these bodies actually go after someone goes over them in Niagara Falls.
Because this might be one of the strangest, least talked about parts of the whole thing. Niagara Falls itself sits directly, and I mean directly, on the border, between Canada and the United States. They share the water flow, and unfortunately, they share the bodies. Here's the part people don't realize.
The Niagara Falls River flows north to south, which means anything or any body that goes over on the Canadian side usually gets carried straight towards the United States. It doesn't matter which side someone falls from. The river does not care aboutimmigration, passports, or jurisdiction. It's just like, well, off we go. And so what happens is this bizarre, tragic logistical nightmare.
Essentially, someone might go over the railing on the Canadian side and then days later their body surfaces on US soil. Suddenly, the American medical examiner is involved, the American sheriffs, the whole American recovery teams. And this is where things get complicated and really sad because sometimes the family lives in Canada but the recovery becomes a US case or the family lives in the US but the person went over in Canada.
I mean it just becomes a crossber multi- agency multi-jurisdiction situation all because the river decided to relocate them and it's not even predictable not even close. I had to throw in the jurisdiction. I don't see anybody talk about that. And somehow people still looked at Niagara Falls and thought they could beat it.
What? Niagara Falls has attracted daredevils for over a century. People who believed they could conquer the water with barrels, balls, floating contraptions, literal homemade submarines, anything they thought might cushion the chaos on the way down. And in almost every case, Niagara Falls responded the same way. Absolutely not. That's what the fall said. They said no.
One man decades ago created a giant rubber ball the size of a small apartment, filled it with padding, snacks, oxygen, the works, and went over the falls inside of it. People thought he'd survive because the thing was practically indestructible. They found pieces of the rubber ball. They never found him.
There was another man who tried to ride over the falls on a jet ski. He planned to parachute out midfall. The parachute did not open in time. And yes, the water took him instantly. There one minute, gone the next. And then there are countless unnamed thrillsekers, the barrel imitators, the homemade raft builders, the people who thought they could stunt their way through the falls.
Most of them are not listed online or in history books because the river doesn't return anyone. It keeps them. And this is where things get interesting because all of these daredevils, all of these attempts, all these tragic endings, there is one story that stands out. One person who somehow miraculously survived this entire watery nightmare.
And she didn't just survive. She brought her cat. The why? She wasn't some adrenaline junkie. She wasn't a stunt performer. She wasn't even some influencer trying to get views. She was a 63-year-old school teacher. Her name was Annie Edson Taylor. And one day in 1901, Annie, who honestly must have had more courage than the entire Avengers cast combined, decided that she wanted fame.
She wanted money. She wanted a moment in history. So, she did what any financially stressed, chaosfueled Victorian woman might do. She climbed into a padded barrel. Not any high-tech capsule, not a reinforced safety pod, a barrel. But you know, it's Victorian because they didn't have cameras like we do today. And she didn't go alone.
She brought her cat, her actual cat. She tucked that cat into a little padded nook inside the barrel for good luck. It's giving Mulan with a cricket. I have so many questions for the cat, honestly. Annie sealed herself inside. Some willing witness helped roll the barrel in the water and she floated toward the edge of Horseshoe Falls like this was some kind of whimsical river adventure instead of a death drop.
And then she went over the full height of Niagara Falls through the churn zone, through the hydraulic pockets, through water that has literally unsubscribed thousands of people from life itself. And she lived. She emerged with a small scalp wound and a bruised ego. And the cat.
I know you're wondering about the cat. I was too. Cat survived. Cat lived. Probably traumatized beyond words. Down a couple lives, but definitely alive. And here's the kicker. After she survived, Annie told everyone the same thing. Don't do it. Don't attempt it. It's not worth it. She says. Okay then. And she was right. Because even though we love this story, even though it's whimsical and somehow crazy and remotely magical and has a cat doing the most extreme emotional support mission of all time, Annie is the exception.
The rare almost freakish exception because believe it or not, after she did that, a century's worth of people tried to copy her and almost none survived. I didn't get a number. But the truth is that you cannot outsmart the law of physics. You cannot cheat gravity. You cannot cheat death.
And you cannot negotiate with 600,000 gallons of water per second. When people talk about Niagara Falls being dangerous, they always picture the big dramatic drop. I mean, that looks scary. The moment someone goes over, but what most people don't understand is that the real danger is what waits below the undercurrents, those hydraulics that I mentioned, the invisible forces that decide whether someone ever resurfaces again.
Don't worry, I have more traumafor you because I talked about my own recovery story, but my family has lived this in a different way, too. My grandpa grew up on a reservation in Minnesota. He and his brothers used to swim in the river near their home, a river they knew like the back of their hand. They jump off the same bridge every summer. And then one day, my grandpa's oldest brother jumped in just like he always did.
Same spot, same water, same bridge, same current. They'd swam in a hundred times. and he never came back up. No warning, no sign. The current took him and kept him under. And my grandpa never forgot that. He has carried that with him his entire life. So when I tell you currents are no joke, I mean it with every fiber of my being.
It breaks my heart picturing my grandpa just standing there with his other brothers waiting and waiting and waiting for his brother who he looked up to the most to pop back up and he never did. And that's why when I talk about these recoveries, funeral professionals going on death calls, we see things.
Most people will literally never understand. And standing there pulling someone from a river or a lake or a shoreline and seeing what the water has done, you will carry that with you forever. It just stays in your bones. Okay. You'd know it wouldn't be a podcast episode. Am I calling this a podcast? No, it's like a I don't know, morbid Monday podcast.
And you know, it wouldn't be one if I didn't research some ghost stories for you or lore. Because a place that sees this much death, according to the tour guide, and he's not lying, this much tragedy, this much unresolved grief, it's bound to have echoes and ghosts. Niagara Falls is one of those places where you can't not think about ghosts.
Does anyone else do that where you go to some really big historical place and you just think of all the ghosts that could be here? Cuz you can just feel it in the air. Almost like the air is carrying memories like the history is just bouncing off the rocks or off the water. I think about that all the time.
How many people have stood exactly where I'm standing? How many eyes have seen the same view that I'm looking at? And Niagara Falls radiates that. It feels heavy, charged, like the place remembers. And when you work around death long enough, you start to notice places that hold on to things. Not in a cheesy like horror movie way, but in a human way.
I'd say a grief way, a history way. And with everything that has happened there, it'd be strange if the falls didn't feel that way. So, I understand how there's ghost stories from there is what I'm telling you. So, without further ado, let's get into it. One of the oldest ghost stories of Niagara Falls, and one of the saddest is about a young woman from the early 1900s.
The versions vary, but the heart of the story always stays the same. They say she came alone before reinforced railings existed. She wore a long white dress that moved in the wind like it belonged to another world. It was dusk, that sherbet orange sky glowing through the mist. A couple passing by saw her standing there perfectly still at the ledge, staring into the water, not crying, not panicking, just utterly still.
And then she stepped forward and disappeared into the mist, into the roar of the water. Ever since, people have reported seeing her, the woman in white, standing near the railing at dusk. She looks so real you'd swear she was just a tourist. So human you'd swear you could tap her on the shoulder. But the moment anyone walks towards her, she dissolves into the mist.
And recovery workers say they've even seen her down near the rocks during shoreline patrols only for her to vanish the second they blink. So you're down there doing recovery. You're looking for people that have washed up on shore and they're seeing her ghost on the shoreline. There are also smaller, quieter stories that people just can't quite explain.
Tourists and staff tour guides have seen a dark shadow drifting through the mist where no person could stand, moving against the current like it has its own agenda. And others swear they've heard a faint help or a soft weight riding on the wind. These falls are huge and they're loud and you have to yell to even talk around them if you want your partner that came with you to even hear you.
You shouldn't be able to hear any other sounds like that at all. They're not full-on ghost stories, just little cracks in reality and little moments that make your stomach just kind of flip. I thought that was interesting. I can't imagine standing there and hearing help. You're like, what the who said that? How did I hear it in a whisper? And what's wild is how these modern ghost stories echo something much older.
Because long before Niagara Falls had tour buses and souvenir shops, the indigenous nations who lived here believed the falls were spiritually alive. One of the most famous legends is that of Leilaw Walla, the original maid of the mist, the woman the boat ride isnamed after. In the story, she was a young woman who, after heartbreak, paddled her canoe onto the river, seeking answers.
As she approached the edge, the thunder god Heo, a protective spirit, caught her in the mist and carried her into a hidden cavern behind the waterfall. In some versions of the story, she becomes a guardian spirit of the falls. In others, she remains protected by one, but every version agrees on the same thing. Her story is one of protection, not fear.
So, you're not supposed to fear her. And here we go again with the recovery teams. They have seen her. And I refuse to cut this out. I don't care if it sounds redundant because I just it gives me chills. Recovery teams, some of them who have seen the river on its worst day, say that during particularly dangerous days, they've looked into the mist and seen a woman in traditional indigenous dress standing calmly at the edge.
Not frantic, not confused, just watching them. And when they look again, she's gone. She isn't described like the woman in white. She doesn't feel like a ghost. They say she feels steady, present, and almost protective. I like that one. A protective spirit, just watching out for the people and the falls and the rescuers and the recovery teams.
They're more like recovery. They're not really rescuing. And here's where my mortician brain ties it all together because I've always noticed that places with water deaths feel spiritually heavier. And it's not like mystical. It's emotional. It's like a human feeling. That's how I describe it.
When someone dies in water, there's often no closure, no final moment. Often times, the family doesn't get a goodbye. Water takes people suddenly and violently, and families wait for answers that sometimes just never come. And that kind of unresolved grief, it clings to a place and it settles into the rocks and it just hangs around in the air or in the mist.
Water is powerful, but it's indifferent. It keeps secrets and it definitely keeps people. In places that keep secrets, they feel haunted. Even if you don't believe in ghosts, somebody confirm if you don't believe in ghosts and you're listening to this or maybe your husband doesn't or whoever. Do they ever talk about or comment how heavy a place might feel? Maybe they're more intuitive than they think that they are.
Cuz when people say Niagara Falls feels heavy or full of presence, I believe them. Because if anywhere in the world has echoes, it's definitely there. So, after everything we've walked through today, the physics, river dangers, trauma, that one lady and her cat who somehow made it, the legends, the ghosts, Niagara Falls hits a little different now, doesn't it? It's beautiful and brutal, spiritual, haunted, dangerous, and you should definitely add it to your bucket list because it's definitely on mine.
It's like one of those rare places where nature shows you how absolutely wonderful it can be and how big of a consequence it can be at the exact same time. And as a mortician, I have to respect a place that powerful. All right, coffin crew. Thank you for wandering through the mist with me today.
If you like this deep dive into danger and ghosts and history and all things morbid and death, make sure to like, comment, subscribe, and share it with your mom who would absolutely never let you near the railing at the falls. Or maybe your mom just doesn't like morbid stuff. And your dad, no, don't share with your dad. Maybe your best friend.
You have to have a morbid best friend, right? And if you don't, I will be your morbid BFF for life. Officially right now. Yay. Complete my heart. Anyways, I'm Lauren the mortician. And trust me, everyday is a morbid Monday in my world. Mango. Mango. Mango. Where are you? Mango, you need a mango kiss. Where are you? Mango, where's Mango? Honey, did you Where are you? Mango, she's missing. Wait a minute.
You were buried in the blankets. Oh my gosh. I was calling for you and everything and you ignored me. Got to give them kisses or they can't have a good week. This is Mango, my other morbid best friend since you're my first best friend and she always gives you kisses. So, you have a good morbid week. Oh, and some snores. Okay. Love you.
Bye. Say bye-bye.
