Kirk Jones did not look the part of a daredevil, bearing a closer resemblance to porn star Ron Jeremy than he did to Evel Knievel.
But Jones, a pudgy shlub who lived in Canton for most of his life, was indeed a daredevil—a great and terrible one. In 2003, at the age of 40, he became the first person ever to intentionally go over Niagara Falls with only the clothes on his back and survive.
No barrel, no ball, no nothing. He just jumped into the water, went over the falls, and came out unscathed and alive at the bottom.
He tried it again in 2017, though, and this time, it killed him. He was in a huge inflatable ball with a boa constrictor inside it. His body washed up a month and a half later.
Jones was born in 1962 and grew up in Canton, graduating from Plymouth Canton High School. Friends described him as good-hearted and likeable. “You couldn’t ask for a better person,” childhood friend Dan Whitacre told the Detroit News in 2017. “He’s the person you want to be around all the time. It was always happiness with him.”
He worked in the family business, off and on, and lived with his parents well into his 40s. He didn’t do much of anything that was noteworthy, but in October 2003, he became world-famous.
On Oct. 20, 2003, Jones went to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls with some friends. He loaded up on vodka and Coke and jumped in the river at about 12:45 p.m., heading for the Canadian Horseshoe Falls. One of his friends tried videotaping it, but he was too drunk to work the camera.
Jones was floating on his back as he floated down the river, and by this time, all the tourists who realized what was happening were aghast. He hit the falls and plunged down 170 feet, his body corkscrewing all the way down.
Somehow, some way, he came out mostly unscathed at the bottom. He climbed out of the water at the bottom and raised his arms in a triumphant gesture to the thousands of people who were now watching.
The Canadian police showed up in a hurry and arrested him, and by the time he was released a short time later, he was already famous.
Fellow Michigander Alice Cooper was giving a concert in the city of Niagara Falls that night, and when he heard what Jones had done, he offered to put the daredevil and his friends up at a local hotel. They ran up a huge room-service bill on Cooper’s tab.
Most of the initial reports said that Jones’ jump was a suicide, but that was a lie. He only said that in an attempt to get off the hook with the Canadian authorities. They ended up fining him $2,300 and banning him for life from ever entering the country again.
The truth came out a few days later, when his brother told the Detroit Free Press that Jones had been planning the jump for a while.
“He did it because he wanted to be in the Guinness Book of Records,” his brother Keith said. “He talked about it for a month. He just had it in his head to do it, and I guess he did it.”
He did indeed do it, and it made him famous. And Jones tried to milk the fame for all it was worth.
He went on a media tour, telling Inside Edition: “It was a glassy, surreal experience and so loud and thunderous. A lot of pressure upon my head. I don’t know how fast, but it seemed like a hundred miles an hour.”
He also told the media he was going to write a book called “You’re Kidding Me: A Knucklehead’s Guide to Surviving Niagara Falls.” The knucklehead never ended up writing the book.
What did happen, though, is that he got an offer to join the Toby Tyler Circus as a sort of celebrity ringmaster. He would feed the animals when they were on the road and tell the crowd about going over the falls.
Alas, the circus life didn’t last long—and neither did the cash. The circus folded entirely after just three months, and Jones moved back in with his parents, who had moved to Oregon.
Jones fell on truly hard times after that, according to The Detroit News. His dad died in 2007, and the following year, Kirk and Keith Jones were both convicted of selling cocaine in Oregon. Kirk just got probation, but when he failed to perform community service, he ended up serving five months in jail.
The Jones brothers moved to Florida with their mom after that, but Kirk got caught shoplifting from a Walmart in 2014 and had to pay a fine. His brother died of a heart attack that year, and his mom died a year later. Jones was left without a family, a job, or much of anything else.
In April 2017, he found himself back in Niagara Falls, ready to try for fame and fortune once again. He was going to try going over the falls again, only this time, he would do it in a huge inflatable ball he had purchased for $800.
To make the stunt even more outlandish, he was going to be joined inside the ball by his albino boa constrictor named Misty. Jones was planning to record the entire stunt with a drone that he would control from inside the ball. He set up a website to sell merchandise from the stunt.
On April 19, he and Misty got inside the ball and headed toward the falls. Police found the ball a short time later at the bottom of the falls, but Jones and the snake were not inside. A boater discovered Jones’ body 12 miles downstream 44 days later. Misty was never found.
His body was taken to the Erie County Morgue in New York, and, with no family members still alive, there was no one left to claim his ashes. They just sat there for several years, until the Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, New York, offered to give Jones a final resting place.
The cemetery marker added one last injustice (his birth year was incorrectly listed as 1963 instead of 1962), but at least he had a home.
Jones’ grave lies in a special daredevil section of Oakwood Cemetery (it’s something of a tourist attraction), alongside four other people who either died going over Niagara Falls or survived the experience.
In a cruel bit of irony, Kirk Jones lies just a few feet away in the cemetery from a fellow Michigander named Annie Edson Taylor, a dance teacher from Bay City who was the first person ever to survive going over Niagara Falls. She did it on her 63rd birthday in 1901, inside an oak barrel.
Like Kirk Jones, Taylor thought that going over Niagara Falls would bring her fame and fortune, and that’s why she did it. Like Jones, though, Annie also died penniless and broken.
Being a Niagara Falls daredevil, it turns out, is most certainly not a good retirement plan.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
