You can find them in a Facebook group called ‘Death Stairs’ which, as its name suggests, is dedicated to sharing terrifying staircases. Picture this: flimsy ladders reaching for the sky and slippery rocks clinging to cliff edges. If you’re curious, we’ve gathered the most spine-tingling posts below. Fair warning though, you might want to hold onto something first. “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. 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. “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”. 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!’” Danish Design Review explains that stairs are hard “to modify if other parts of the scheme are changed as the plan develops. It becomes a difficult game of consequences—change one part and another no longer works”. Follow Bored Panda on Google News! Follow us on Flipboard.com/@boredpanda! Please use high-res photos without watermarks Ooops! Your image is too large, maximum file size is 8 MB.
