6. The Empire State Building
The Empire State Building has sadly been the site of over thirty suicides and even more suicide attempts since it opened in 1931. One of the most famous was that of Evelyn McHale, a 23-year-old who leaped to her death from the 86th-floor observation deck in May 1947. McHale landed on top of and crushed the roof of a limousine parked at the curb.
A photo of the aftermath taken by student Robert Wales led Time Magazine to dub the event the “most beautiful suicide.” In her book Ghosts and Murders of Manhattan, Elise Gainer recounts stories of people who have “seen a woman appear on the observation deck attired in 1940s-period clothing, her lips painted red…muttering about the death of her fiance in Germany and then throwing herself over the barrier.”
