The Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge across the Golden Gate strait, linking San Francisco to Marin County. Construction began on January 5, 1933, under chief engineer Joseph B. Strauss. The main span is 4,200 feet. The towers rise 746 feet above the water. The color is International Orange. It opened to pedestrians on May 27, 1937, and to vehicles the next day. The total cost was about $35 million, under budget and ahead of schedule. At the time it was the longest and tallest suspension bridge in the world. A safety net under the work saved 19 men, who called themselves the Halfway to Hell Club. Eleven workers died overall. Ten of them died on February 17, 1937, when a scaffold fell through the net. That is the documented engineering history. The ghost stories are the ones that gathered afterward.
The bridge has a long and public record of suicides. The first documented one was Harold B. Wobber, a World War I veteran, in August 1937, about three months after the opening. Official counts over the decades have run into the hundreds and then past a thousand. A suicide-deterrent net was later installed under the span. Ghost-tour and folklore accounts say the weight of those deaths left something behind. The most common report is a Woman in White, a pale figure standing on the walkway or near the railing who disappears when approached. Pedestrians and workers have described solid-looking figures who are gone when the walker turns, voices on the wind that include short phrases of distress, and, in a few tellings, a person who appears to stop someone from climbing the railing and then cannot be found when the person looks for them to say thank you. None of these figures has a name. They are not tied to a specific death certificate the way a documented haunting sometimes is. Fort Point, the Civil War brick fort at the south end of the bridge, has its own soldier stories. Those are separate. The SS Tennessee, a Gold Rush steamer that ran aground in fog just north of the future bridge site in 1853, is also separate. All 550 passengers were rescued. The ship is not a bridge ghost.
What is documented is a 1933–1937 construction, a safety net that saved 19 and failed once, eleven construction deaths, and a decades-long public record of suicides that has made the bridge a focus of prevention work. The Woman in White and the vanishing figures are the stories told about the fog and the walkway. There is no named individual whose presence is confirmed by a contemporary account of a death on the span and a later sighting of that same person.
The Golden Gate Bridge from the south and at night.
Relevant links
SF Ghosts: haunting history — the Woman in White version
Golden Gate Bridge District: construction history — the 1933 start, the net, the 1937 opening
Britannica: Golden Gate Bridge — the span, the towers, the February 1937 scaffold accident
Ghost City Tours: the ghosts of the Golden Gate Bridge — the figures-in-the-fog accounts
Find out more about the Golden Gate Bridge at its official site.