History: Construction Of The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, California, United States

The Golden Gate Bridge is the second most common suicide site in the world, after the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge. The deck is about 245 feet (75 m) above the water. After a fall of four seconds, jumpers hit the water at around 75 mph or about 120 km/h. Most of the jumpers die from impact trauma. About 5% of the jumpers survive the initial impact but generally drown or die of hypothermia in the cold water.
Most suicidal jumps occur on the side facing the bay. The side facing the Pacific is closed to pedestrians.
An official suicide count was kept until year 1995, sorted according to which of the bridge's 128 lamp posts the jumper was nearest when he or she jumped. Official count ended on June 5th 1995 on 997th jump; jumper N:o 1000, Eric Atkinson (25) did his leap on July 3rd, 1995. By 2012 unofficial count exceeded 1,600 (whereas the body was recovered or someone saw the jump) and new suicides were occurring about once every two weeks, with the "record" of 40 in 1977, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis. Most suicides in one month was August 2013, when 10 jumped, one every three days. The youngest jumper has been 5-year-old Marilyn DeMont, who jumped followed by her father in June 1945
For comparison, the reported third-most-popular place to commit suicide in the world, Aokigahara Forest in Japan, has a record of 78 bodies, found within the forest in 2002, with an average of 30 a year. There were 34 bridge-jump suicides in 2006 whose bodies were recovered, in addition to four jumps that were witnessed but whose bodies were never recovered, and several bodies recovered suspected to be from bridge jumps. The California Highway Patrol removed 70 apparently suicidal people from the bridge that year.