“Welcome to Death Stairs, where ascension is perilous and descending is deadly,” reads the bio of the Facebook group that has 382K followers. Despite the ominous tone, the members often lighten the mood with their humorous captions.
“Literally all it would take is one drunk uncle attempting to scale this like Mount Kilimanjaro to turn the wedding reception into a funeral,” said one of the users about a tiny set of wooden steps used by restaurant staff to reach their office.
To learn more about ‘Death Stairs’, Bored Panda got in touch with Jeroen Puijn and Greg Wilson, two regular contributors. The fascination behind the group remains a bit of a mystery, they admit. But one thing’s for sure: the trickier the stairs, the more people seem to love them.
Jeroen, being Dutch, isn’t easily impressed. In the Netherlands, a small country that historically had to use every inch of space, narrow and steep staircases are a common feature.
For context, Dutch home steps are typically 15 cm deep, which is about 6 inches—half the recommended safety standard. You can’t even put your entire foot down. Yet, as Jeroen notes, everyone there is simply used to them.
Sharing a glimpse of his own home, Jeroen posts a picture of a small ladder leading to the attic. His cat is laying by the very edge of the opening, looking relaxed. One of the commenters calls the pet a “personal resident death defier”. The owner jokes that the cat might just smack you on the head as you come down.
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Jeroen says the scariest stairs he encountered weren’t in the Netherlands, but in Greece. Located on one of Crete Island’s famous gorges, they were very wet. Jeroen found himself seriously struggling with keeping his balance on the way down.
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On the other side of the world, Greg, who plays in a jazz band in Pittsburgh, has faced many vertical obstacles since moving to the city with his partner four years ago.
“We’ve encountered crumbling concrete city stairs, residences with all number of stair-related code violations, and piles of bricks or rotting wood being passed off as ‘stairs’,” he says.
“I see our laughable state of regulatory oversight as a microcosm of the downfall of the American empire, and [the group] manages to make a big heavy topic like that feel like something we can laugh about”.
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Greg had a near-death stair experience once when his dog rushed past him, causing him to trip down to his garage. The wooden beams supporting the stairs gave way, and he landed on his side, breaking two ribs. It took nearly half a year for them to heal completely.
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Under a Facebook photo shared by Greg, one user commented that Pittsburgh is the death stair capital of the USA. The staircase in the post has scruff marks and screw holes on the floor, where the railing used to run all the way through. Now, there’s a small gap that could be easily missed.
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“I guess we probably get a small smug sense of satisfaction being able to identify when something is wrong and unsafe, even if it’s blatantly obvious,” reflects Greg.
When we post on ‘Death Stairs’, it can feel like “we’ve accomplished something just by pointing out an obvious problem and saying, ‘this is bad and wrong! See? I’m helping!’”
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