Death by Selfie

Ascending the steep stairs along the Kaaterskill waterfall with an infant in a carrier on my back and a two-year-old toddling felt like a tremendous achievement at the time. Especially when later our family learned that were a few visitors that year who had fallen off the falls to their deaths—a few most years actually. They blamed fools in flip flops, inappropriate footwear, but I think there’s always more to this nowadays. We live in the age of the selfie after all, at all costs.

Had we known this, we might not have felt so comfortable doing this climb with our little ones nor had such a great slow descent, luxuriating swim hole by hole the way Cheever’s short story character eventually got home through his wealthy suburbs via a meandering drunken journey pool by neighbor’s pool. I would have been anxiously distracted trying to picture where and how a body might land. Here or there? Splayed out for all the tourists to see with awful bent limbs or kindly hidden in the trees? Being rudely outed like this in death—splayed, displayed, out of control—is my worst nightmare.

But, a better to fear to have, and a big one for me, is stirred at the edge of things on high, or just from the thought of that. A fear of heights is not something anyone needs to conquer. Surely it’s a survival instinct and a correct one when not a mountain goat. Yes I have ziplined and did jump out of a plane once—key word being once—but the whole adrenaline rush comes from the extreme fear of heights at play here. Not having the fear would make these events irrelevant. In no way do I ever need to be so close to death again to feel alive, and every time I approach the border of cliff, or even many feet away from such a drop-off, my stomach lurches from the concept. If my kids even get a toe on the yellow bumpy strip alongside the subway platform edge, forget it. I wrench them back.

So how in the world does holding a phone give people the bravery stupidity to defy boundaries and lean too close to losing their balance? How many people die this way these days? It’s embarrassing to count.

In 2016, Bryn Lovitt in Rolling Stone wrote,

This month, a grown man fell to his death while posing for a picture on a ledge at Machu Picchu, the ancient Incan citadel in Peru. But death by selfie at a temple built for human sacrifice begs the question: How far would you go to get that killer shot?

The facts speak for themselves. In 2015, more people died from taking selfies than from shark attacks. Tourist destinations such as Mumbai have gone so far as to designate selfie-free zones. Even the notoriously unsympathetic Russian government issued a manual for how to safely take a selfie. Our need to capture the present moment via social media has completely changed the way we experience life, and a tragic irony presents itself when that results in death.

The author goes on to list the 11 most disturbing selfies gone wrong from being struck by lightning whilst extending one’s selfie stick, to getting close enough to the Chinese zoo walrus that the half-ton beast dragged the man into its pool, posing with a live grenade, gored by a bull in Pamplona, shot in the head posing with a gun, losing control of a plane, drowning in major waves, falling down the steps of the Taj Mahal or from a bridge while posing, taking an accidental cliff dive in Portugal, and what has to the be the worst confluence dumb luck ever experienced:

A teenage Romanian girl had attempted to take the special selfie on top of a train in the northern town of Iasi, Romania. According to a friend, 18-year-old Anna Urso was planning to post this “ultimate selfie” on Facebook. Urso decided to lie down on the roof of the stationary train car, but when she reached up with one of her legs to pose, but she hit an overhead live wire that shocked her with 27,000 volts. The young girl immediately burst into flames and was pronounced dead at the hospital after suffering burns on over half her of her body.

All while posing for selfies. Can there be a class action lawsuit against phones, or operating systems, or social media, or apps, or cameras, are all of the above conspiring to hijack our brains, especially the youngest, most pliable minds? Who can we blame?

These are all awful items on this dumbest death list but the height-induced ones get to me most as they already express the most obvious danger. I assume in the hypnosis of screen addiction people aren’t really noticing their surroundings in the same way they would if they were just simply present. Under this cloud of delirium, the rectangle of the phone is the only thing that is real and clear, this intoxicating portal to the virtual. The surroundings and any threats therein become obscured. Maybe they are only viewing the world from a little thumb-smudged lens, or the small screen. Everything else is abstract. Just angles and light. It’s important to get the best shot…until…what might be their frantic thoughts as they lose their footing and realize they’re falling too fast to stop, that this is it. Maybe the only thing that will survive will be the images on their phone because their body certainly can’t handle this impact without a silicone case.

Some stats since this article: an estimated 379 people world-wide died in selfie-related accidents between 2008-2021, with hundreds more injured. And they think the numbers must be much bigger as the real culprit might more often go unreported or undetected.

Reports the Telegraph, since 2021, “other sources suggest the toll had risen to as many as 480 fatalities by the end of 2024. By way of comparison, far more people die from taking selfies than from shark attacks, which on average account for 5-6 deaths per year globally.”

Survivalist Ray Mears told The Times recently that he is now forced to instruct his clients not to step backwards off a cliff while taking a selfie, “which was never the case in the past.” He’s not alone. In 2023 Oldham Mountain Rescue instructed hikers not to take selfies on the striking but precarious Trinnacle, a highly dramatic and extremely photogenic exposed rock formation, near Saddleworth in the Peak District, while the Environment Agency has advised against taking so-called “storm selfies” during extreme weather events.

Pair the recklessness of the underdeveloped frontal cortex of youth with the desire for social acceptance multiplied to the nth with the power of likes, and you have a toxic cocktail that has city kids riding atop subways and country kids teetering from cliffs.

“Risk-taking often translates into higher numbers of likes, especially if you’re doing something extreme that no one else has done. You want to provoke a reaction. It’s constant one-upmanship.”

Such as this sickening handstand on a mountaintop:

A fairytale visit turned into a horror story for Czech gymnast Natalie Stichova in 2024. While taking a selfie at Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, the impressive edifice that reportedly inspired Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Stichova slipped from the cliff edge and plunged 260 feet. The gymnast had previously posted pictures of herself doing handstands on mountaintops.

Aspirational and alarming.

THE FALLS OF KAATERS…KILL

In response to a number of these selfie-related deaths at the Catskills famous falls and the crowds that come spurned by this social media infected travel bug, New York State made significant safety improvements to this site in 2018: new fences, stone staircase, new safer trail, warning signage. There’s also a new route to bypass the crowds and enter straight into the back side of the falls on a flatter trail, which perhaps makes access greater. Despite their efforts, the deaths keep happening, as recently as this June.

A New York Times article from 2018, cites “The Deadly Waterfall in the Instagram Age” in the turning point year where maybe the park staff and emergency responders just couldn’t take it anymore. “The last four people who died at Kaaterskill Falls in the Catskills were taking or posing for pictures, according to a New York forest ranger.”

There have been at least eight fatal accidents here since 1992. Six of them have occurred in the past decade. The soaring popularity of this oasis in the Catskill Mountains, lifted by internet fame, has accelerated the problem.

Forest rangers have struggled to keep the growing crowds safe. They estimate the falls see 100,000 visitors a year, a tenfold increase from a quarter century ago.

Mr. Dawson said he believed social media was responsible. “Just talking to people who come up here, they say, ‘Yeah, we saw this on the internet—we’re trying to find it,’” Mr. Dawson said. “The unfortunate thing is, with those pictures, there’s nothing informing people that you could get seriously hurt here, too.”

Kaaterskill is among the more dramatic in a region full of dramatic falls. “At 230 feet, the combined drop of its upper and lower tiers is higher than Niagara Falls.”

With waterfall moisture comes slippery rocks. It’s easy to lose your footing. Add to that the bad footwear and/or not paying full attention for the sake of the best shot. even after these $1.25M upgrades, people of course can still find a way to be stupid and climb fences or ignore signs. In June it was a 70-year-old who “fell from a rock ledge onto the stone steps of the trailway below,” according to State Police from the Catskill barracks in an article on Hudson Valley One. This doesn’t mention anything about any selfie, as I’m going to give a 70-year-old the benefit of the older-generational doubt and hope he’d know better.