Kevin Reid knew the bright green staircase in his childhood home was a bit bizarre: It was made of pipe fittings and looked more like a ladder.
The quirky staircase was just a part of his upbringing until it found a global audience in April after it was featured on the Facebook group Death Stairs, a page that has nearly 800,000 members and describes itself as a place “where ascension is perilous and descending is deadly.”
What qualifies for inclusion on the page takes many forms. Among the highlights: narrow, triangle-shaped steps, a glass spiral staircase with mirrored walls and steep wooden stairs carved into a New Zealand cliff face.
Mr. Reid had never thought of the steps at his childhood home as death stairs. His father had built the staircase as part of a two-story addition to the back of the house.
“I wouldn’t do it in sock soles, but you can fairly rush down them and they make a nice ringing sound when you go down them,” Mr. Reid said. “They’re solid.”
Mr. Reid’s steps were especially popular on Death Stairs, where photos are celebrated for perplexing design features.
No guardrails? Check. Carpeting that makes you lose your footing? Check. Steps of inconsistent depth and width? Check.
The more peril in the surrounding space, the better.
Do the stairs end in a dark basement? Excellent. Is the steep cement staircase guarded by rusting barbed wire on one side and open to a rushing dam on the other? Ideal.
Lane Sutterby, who lives in Kansas, had modest ambitions when he created the Death Stairs group in November 2020.
“I figured I’d have 10, 15 people join, maybe some of my close friends and a couple of random strangers,” he said.
He looks after the page with four other people, who monitor posts for violations of the group’s rules, one of which states: “Be polite. This is just a page about stairs.”
There are some clear regulars, such as outdoor steps in Pittsburgh, which, according to the city, has the most public staircases of any city in the United States. Tourist destinations like the pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico and Mount Taishan in China also frequently appear. So do stairs in homes built more than 100 years ago and the nosebleed sections of new arenas.
Ana Carla Díaz, a graphic designer in Cuautla, México, shared a photo of rickety, metal stairs that she took to get to a market.
“I honestly didn’t mind,” she wrote in an email, adding, “until I found the Death Stairs group and remembered all the death stairs I met in the past, and they are more than I want to accept.”
Stairs have been around since prehistoric times, according to the architect John Templer, who wrote the two-volume series “The Staircase,” which its publisher describes as the first theoretical, historical and scientific analysis of the staircase.
“The staircase can be a treacherous as well as a beautiful siren, with many facets to its complex overt nature,” Mr. Templer wrote.
Just how treacherous was revealed by researchers at the Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access at the University at Buffalo, who reviewed stairway designs in Architectural Record, a leading professional journal.
From 2000 through 2012, 61 percent of the 578 featured stairways had at least one visible design hazard, according to a 2016 study that the researchers published in the International Journal of Architectural Research.
“Falls are more common than we give credit to,” said Sara Harper, an assistant professor of exercise science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who studies fall prevention and the ergonomics of stairways. “And one unfortunate, unusual accident, whether it be on the stairs or level ground, can have a serious impact on our health, our well-being, the financial cost, all of the above.”
From 1990 through 2012, an average of 1.1 million people per year were treated in emergency departments for stair-related injuries, according to a 2018 study published in The American Journal of Emergency Medicine.
Professor Harper, who is a member of the Slips, Trips and Falls technical committee at the International Ergonomics Association, said that making stairs safer for people who might be more at risk, such as older adults or people with vision impairments, can benefit others too.
“It’s something that most of us interact with in our daily lives at home, at work, as we travel around our community,” Professor Harper said. “But sometimes it’s something simple that we take for granted or we overlook the importance of: How do we functionally utilize it?”
Mr. Templer took it a step further in “The Staircase,” writing that the suffering stairs can cause “reflects the ignorance, carelessness, or indifference of the building industry and, ultimately, our society.”
Some contributions to the Death Stairs Facebook page show how steep, rickety stairs are not the only risk. Distracting visual cues, inadequate hand rails and hard-to-see step edges are common.
Cicley Tu’i posted a photo of the dizzying hallway steps in a hotel in Augusta, Maine, where she stayed with her family.
“When you’re standing in the hallway, it feels like a tunnel at a circus,” Ms. Tu’i said. “It’s just absolutely trippy to walk down that hallway.”
She injured her hips while serving in the military and uses a crutch. One morning, when she was half awake, she took her 90-pound Great Dane lab mix outside and tripped.
She took a step, thinking the stair was shorter than it was, causing her leg to slam down and throw her off balance. She caught herself with her bad leg and rolled her ankle.
“I was totally fine,” she said, “but I thought: ‘I’m awake now. I don’t need coffee.’”
Many people on the Facebook page recognized the stairs, with one person writing, “Been there, tripped on them.”
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