Let’s face it, using the toilet is usually a pretty mundane, private affair. You go in, do your business, and leave. Maybe the worst thing that happens is running out of toilet paper or someone knocking on the door. But what if your moment of vulnerability turned into something truly bizarre, dangerous, or downright disastrous? Sometimes, the simple act of visiting the loo can go horribly, unexpectedly wrong.
Get ready to cringe, because here are ten times when a trip to the toilet turned into a catastrophe you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.
10 Python in the Pan
Most people’s fear in a public restroom involves awkward eye contact through a gap in the door. But sometimes, the unexpected visitor isn’t human. While rats or frogs occasionally make an appearance, one man in Thailand faced a far more terrifying guest in 2016.
Atthaporn Boonmakchuay was using his toilet when he felt a sudden, sharp bite on his penis. Looking down, he discovered an 11-foot-long python latched onto him! Thinking quickly, he managed to tie the snake’s head to the door with a rope before calling for help and collapsing from blood loss. Thankfully, he recovered fully. Emergency services had to smash the toilet to free the snake, which was later released back into the wild – perhaps looking for its next restroom victim.
9 Murdered Monarchs
Being a medieval king meant guards and protection, making assassinations tricky. Attackers needed to find their target alone and vulnerable. Unfortunately for some rulers, the toilet provided just such an opportunity.
Jaromir, Duke of Bohemia, had a turbulent life involving betrayal, castration, and blinding. His end came while he was seated on the latrine. An assassin thrust a spear up from below, fatally wounding him. Other rulers like Godfrey the Hunchback and England’s King Edmund Ironside are also rumored to have met their end mid-business. One account claims Edmund was shot from below with an arrow so forcefully that none of its feathers were visible.
8 Pop-up Toilet Trouble
You don’t always have to be *on* the toilet for it to cause trouble. In Amsterdam, retractable public toilets rise from the ground at night to combat public urination. In 2014, one such toilet emerged with explosive force right under an unsuspecting man on a moped.
A witness described it like an explosion, launching the man and his vehicle into the air. Miraculously, he only suffered minor injuries, though his moped wasn’t so lucky. It’s unknown if the shock caused an unintended need for the very facility that attacked him.
7 The Erfurt Latrine Disaster
Unexpected descents into toilets can be truly catastrophic. In 1184, King Henry VI of Germany gathered nobles for a meeting in a fortress church in Erfurt. As the assembly convened, the unthinkable happened.
The wooden floor beneath the nobles suddenly gave way, plunging them into the massive latrine pit below. Dozens of lords and their attendants drowned or suffocated in the accumulated human waste. Around 60 people perished in what became known as the Erfurter Latrinensturz (Erfurt Latrine Fall). King Henry survived only because his seat was on a stable stone section of the floor.
6 Eglon’s Embarrassing End
Ancient toilets weren’t always private stalls. Roman facilities often featured communal benches. This lack of privacy played a role in a biblical tale from the Book of Judges. The Israelites were oppressed by the Moabite King Eglon, described as very fat.
A left-handed Israelite named Ehud visited Eglon, claiming to have a secret message. Once alone, Ehud stabbed the king in the belly with a hidden sword. The blade disappeared entirely into Eglon’s flesh. As Eglon died, he discharged his bowels. His servants didn’t investigate immediately, assuming the king was simply taking a long time on the toilet, which apparently wasn’t unusual for him.
5 Collapsing Commodes
While the Nobel Prizes honor serious achievements, the Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate the quirkier side of science. In 2000, the Public Health prize went to researchers behind a paper titled ‘The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow’.
Despite the funny title, the paper addressed a real danger. It studied three cases where people were hospitalized after the toilets they were using shattered beneath them. The study concluded that older porcelain toilets posed the greatest risk of unexpected collapse. The winners humorously noted they were glad their research wasn’t just a ‘flash in the pan’.
4 An Electrifying End
Michael Anderson Godwin was initially sentenced to death by electric chair in 1978. However, his sentence was later reduced. He escaped the electric chair, but irony had a different, shocking fate in store for him.
Years later, while sitting on the metal toilet in his prison cell, Godwin was watching TV with headphones. Apparently experiencing issues with the headphones, he decided to bite down on the wire. As his teeth made contact with the internal wiring while he sat on the grounded metal toilet, he was fatally electrocuted. A truly bizarre and unfortunate accident.
3 Explosive Evacuations
Usually, an ‘explosion in the bathroom’ is just a figure of speech. But toilets can, quite literally, explode. Victorian newspapers reported on sewer gases igniting and blowing up lavatories. In one instance, a lightning strike reportedly ignited methane below a toilet, causing it to detonate.
Modern technology isn’t immune either. Flushmate, a company making high-pressure flushing systems, had to recall millions of units (1.5 million in 2018 after 3 million in 2012) because the pressure could build up and cause toilets to violently explode, sending porcelain shrapnel flying.
2 Trapped in the Tank
Most people intuitively understand you shouldn’t climb *into* a toilet. In 2016, a man in Norway dropped his phone into a public toilet. His friend, Cato Berntsen Larsen, bravely decided to retrieve it by jumping in feet first.
Unfortunately, this particular toilet wasn’t connected to a sewer but led to a large holding tank emptied only annually. Larsen found himself stuck, submerged up to his thighs in raw sewage. Panicked and claustrophobic, he began vomiting. Firefighters had to be called to cut the toilet open and rescue the extremely unfortunate (and smelly) would-be hero. The phone, sadly, was never recovered.
1 U-boat Sunk by a Flush
Toilet mishaps are usually personal embarrassments, but one incident arguably impacted world history. Near the end of World War II in 1945, the German submarine U-1206 was patrolling off Scotland.
This advanced U-boat featured a complex high-pressure toilet system designed to eject waste even while submerged, though it was very complicated and meant to be used carefully. Captain Karl-Adolf Schlitt, unfamiliar with the procedure, asked an engineer for help. The wrong valve was turned, unleashing a torrent of seawater and sewage into the submarine. When the water reached the sub’s batteries, it created poisonous chlorine gas, forcing the U-boat to surface immediately. Spotted by the RAF and attacked, the crew had to abandon ship. Four crewmen drowned. A faulty flush effectively took a submarine out of the war.
So, the next time you seek a moment of peace on the porcelain throne, maybe spare a thought for these unfortunate souls. You just never know what might happen when nature calls!
Have you heard any other bizarre toilet tales? Share them in the comments below!
