Culture

The Terror in the Toilet: What’s Up With Bathroom Ghosts, and Why Are They Watching OUR Unfinished Business?

Here’s why you might avoid using the toilet after dark

Cat Baklarz

Published in

Writers’ Blokke

11 min readAug 3, 2021

A hush fell over the damp tiles.

The youngsters moved closer, as if to shield themselves from something they couldn’t see. A few sent hurried glances toward the farthest bathroom stall, the one with the scratch marks and the sticky lock.

“There’s a ghost in that stall, I’ve heard it. She takes anyone who uses that toilet down through the pipes, and they’re never seen again.”

Bathroom ghosts are weird and unsettling. We use the toilet when we are most vulnerable — showering, crying, or otherwise relieving ourselves — and what goes down the drain really shouldn’t ever come back up. So why are there so many bathroom creatures in horror films and childrens’ folklore? And why are some of us afraid to use the washroom alone after dark?

I’m not the only one who learned to fear public toilets in elementary school. More than a film trope or a curious phobia, bathroom creatures come from Eastern and Western folklore, our fascination with taboos, and rather messy history. Here’s what we know about bathroom ghosts, and why they interrupt OUR unfinished business.

The first bathroom ghosts

Japanese bathroom ghosts

Japanese folklore offers us FIVE different toilet specters that appear in old, vacant bathrooms.

Tales about the first and most mysterious of these washroom waifs, Akai-Kami, date back as early as 1930. The masked Akai-Kami asks his victims if they would like red or blue toilet paper — choosing red means Akai-Kami will stab or flay his victims while choosing blue means that he will strangle them or drain their blood. Choose yellow toilet paper, and Akai-Kami may urinate on you or drown you in the toilet (fun!). Don’t choose any color toilet paper, and you might have enough time to run away.

In some versions of this story, the color of paper chosen means that a red tongue or white hand will rise up from the toilet and terrorize the victim. In other versions, a hairy yōkai called a kainade reaches from inside the toilet to harass the poor visitor who just wanted a few minutes’ privacy.

Three other Japanese toilet ghosts might visit students if they find themselves alone in an abandoned water closet.

Hanako, a schoolgirl who died during World War II bombing raids, wears an old-fashioned uniform and doesn’t usually attack visitors.

The vindictive Reiko, on the other hand, crawls about the bathroom searching for victims to replace her missing legs.

Akaname is a red ghost that scrubs dirty toilets with his long forked tongue. We don’t know anything about his motives, but at least now you have a reason to keep your toilet bowl spotless!¹

President Calvin Coolidge was ‘kicked by the can!’ *

Hold onto your toilet seats! While Japanese folklore shares a wealth of toilet terrors, writer Ruth Bleiman shares her experience living at the Beeches in Northampton, Massachusett, the final home of former President Calvin Coolidge. Most accounts say that in 1933, Coolidge suffered a heart attack and crashed into the bathroom sink. Some even suspect suicide.

“Previous owners had remodeled the room, we were told, because they were uncomfortable with the killer sink,” writes Bleiman. “ I looked for apparitions whenever I made my nocturnal trips to the bathroom. I imagined an anemic hand plunging up from the sink, grabbing me by the throat and crashing my head into the porcelain base.” ²

Bleiman never encountered Coolidge’s ghost, but this anecdote suggests that our fear of bathroom specters can be found almost anywhere — from a former President’s residence to the Antebellum Farnsworth Inn bathroom to the creepy gas station bathrooms we find in the middle of nowhere. Haunted bathrooms are everywhere, and there are some good reasons for that.

Haunted toilet tour

Interested in visiting the most haunted toilets around the world, or the most haunted bathrooms in the United States? I won’t cover them in detail here, but feel free to learn more about bathroom hauntings above, and debunk some of those fantom flushing legends here.

What’s up with bathroom ghosts?

Bathrooms and Hollywood horror

The 1960 Alfred Hitchcock hit Psycho became the first film to show a flushing toilet… and popularized a brutal bathroom murder. There’s no shortage of macabre movies featuring unsuspected bathroom attacks. Bathroom attacks or bathroom creature tropes appear in:

Shivers (1975)
The Shining (1980)
Poltergeist (1982)
Nightmare On Elm Street (1984)
Goulies (1985)
Jurasic Park (1993)
The X Files (1993)
IT (1990 and 2017)
Monsters, Inc. (2001)
Harry Potter (2002–2011)
Paranorman (2012)

… The list goes on.

Consider that these are only a handful of the most popular Western films and that there is a huge difference between bathroom terrors and bathroom attacks. When we see bathroom creatures or bathroom spirits, the focus is often on the creature or the setting itself. A haunted bathroom is the perfect remote setting for overhearing a private conversation… or an unexplained murder.

Bathroom attacks, on the other hand, evoke a sense of unease that either leads to laughter or suspense. Hey, I was in the middle of something! The ‘monsters’ in bathroom attacks could be Velociraptors or kooky Disney Villans, but often, they are more familiar fiends: a school bully, a predator.

Of all the tropes characters might experience in the bathroom, none look too good for protagonists caught in a sticky situation.

They might encounter a spider or hand climbing out of the toilet, or they might be sucked down through the pipes as I was warned would happen to me during my time in elementary school. Protagonists might encounter a bathroom mirror jump scare or watch in horror as the faucet streams blood or spiders instead of water. They might crawl through sewers to avoid detection or to track down a dangerous monster that hides in their city’s underworld. Characters might witness a stabbing or attack when their guard is low or when they are forced to use communal bathrooms**, or they might learn secrets while their adversaries plotting in the abandoned restrooms. Bullies might search the stalls or subjugate their victims to the Swirlie, which is seldom deadly but always mortifying.

In other situations, the bathrooms offer a safe — albeit uncomfortable — space for the ghosts in Harry Potter and Paranorman to share secret information with protagonists. Ghosts like Moaning Myrtle are otherworldly outcasts, the type of creature who might learn confidential information that aids the hero in their quest. For them, bathrooms are a haven, not a disaster waiting to happen.

Whenever a bathroom is shown in movies, best be certain that nobody poops, and that the dingy tiles serve an aesthetic or thematic purpose. A bathroom is a place we are vulnerable. Both in public and at home, the bathroom is one of the few places equipped with a lock. This remains a place where we can escape and keep others out — or become trapped with the horrors that might lie within.

Bathrooms as a place of ritual, becoming— and danger

Young girls are the main victims and audience for sharing bathroom lore — and as you might have guessed from the warning at the beginning of this section, that’s no coincidence.

Bloody Mary ³

Folklorist Alan Dundes notes that as early as 1976, young girls told peers the story of the vanishing highwayman and gathered in their school bathrooms to summon ‘Bloody Marry’ †. In one version of this vanishing highwayman story, a young woman asks strangers for a ride home and disappears mid-journey, only to leave a dark puddle in the back car seat.

Bloody Mary rituals, on the other hand, come in all shapes and sizes. Girls (and occasionally friends of other genders) might gather in a darkened bathroom at school or a sleepover and call ‘Bloody Mary.’ They might force a member of the group to complete this chant alone, or they might describe different rituals that help Bloody Mary appear.

These girls might flush toilets, turn around, or repeat a rhyme for consecutive nights before they see a bloody woman or their reflection covered with blood. They also might not see a figure at all. In some versions of the story, the girls are told that they will cut their finger later that week, or that they must flush the toilet before it fills up with blood.

All of this, Dundes argues, is experimentation for and hesitancy about menstruation.

“Folklore as a socially sanctioned outlet to permit individuals to do what is normally not permitted by society, superego, conscience, normative morality, and the like often needs the guise or disguise of fantasy,” Dundes explains. “This is why it is so often taboo topics which inspire the creation and perpetuation of folklore,” and why ‘Bloody Mary’ rituals are still something children whisper about today.

Fear of sexual assault in the bathroom

At this point, I’ll be discussing sexual violence, and sharing some soggy spoilers from the films ‘IT’ (Chapter One) and ‘Carrie.’ Here is your chance to skip ahead to the next section, if you would like. :)

Young people are warned never to be caught alone — after all, we do not know why the Ghostly hitchhiker disappears in a pool of (menstrual?) blood, but we DO know keeping company with strangers after dark is a recipe for disaster. We are warned to check for suspicious behavior, to carry pepper spray and check bathroom stalls before we enter. We learn what to avoid and what to do if we are followed. Yet rape and creepy dressing room photos still make local headlines.††

Bathrooms are places of tension, but they are not the only place young people fear.

Bloody bathrooms in ‘IT’ and ‘Carrie’ ⁴

Communal bathrooms are not the main place where rape or exposure occurs (most sexual abuse happens at home or with family friends.) But bathrooms remain a location where we are vulnerable, a juxtaposition of the public and the private.

Strip away that privacy and — surprise, welcome to high school locker rooms!

Steven King’s protagonist Carrie doesn’t discover an uncanny predator in this public-private space, but rather encounters ridicule and blood in front of her monstrous peers. There’s no escape — not even when she returns home. Compounded by her abusive mother’s criticism that Carrie is wicked and sinful for entering puberty, she becomes Bloody Mary, and the danger is inside her and around her.⁴

Beverly Marsh in ‘IT: Chapter One’ similarly experiences predation EVERYWHERE — at the drug store when she flirts with the male Pharmacist to help her new friends, at home, with her period signaling that she is “no longer daddy’s little girl but a woman he can terrorize sexually,” and when her bathroom sink erupts in a torrent of blood that her abusive father cannot or will not see.

“Beverly and her male friends are the only ones able to see the blood that coats her bathroom. Rather than shy away from it, the boys all jump in and help her clean, no questions asked... They’re in this horror together, and they need each other to survive Pennywise and puberty,” suggests Jill Grunenwald writing for Bitch Media.

It’s worth exploring why the heroes of ‘IT’ Chapters one and Two must travel to the sewers to banish the monster once and for all. Bathrooms and the sewers they empty into are places where we forget our less savory creations. We fear sewer rats (which, contrary to popular belief, are normal-sized) and spin tales about sewer alligators.

The abandoned sewers are the perfect place for Pennywise and IT’s minions to reside. Forgotten things are rarely forgotten, and that applies to modern sanitation as well. We don’t want the items we flush to come back and haunt us later, but that’s rarely the case.

Sewage water is treated and reused according to its quality. Sewer rats crawl about city streets, sewage is sometimes released into the ocean, and sanitation workers investigate wherever the pipes fail.

The parts of our lives we wish to forget — in this case, waste disposal — is only taken up by someone else less fortunate than we are (see: How Much Sewer Workers are paid in the US and India’s sewer cleaners keep working despite ban on job.)

Bathrooms as places of isolation and tension

Bathrooms are places of tension and separation. For every bathroom stalking scene, there is a lonely youth eating their school lunch alone or using the stalls as a place to calm an impending panic attack. Bathrooms are one of the few places we can be rest alone.

But no one wants to die on the toilet. It’s the ultimate slap in the face. And yet many famous figures (like President Calvin Coolidge) have keeled over due to unexplained bathroom mishaps or drug overdose. Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca and the emperor Nero are said to be the first to kill themselves by slitting their wrists and letting their blood drain in “Roman Bath” suicides.

Interestingly enough, it’s quite difficult to kill yourself by slitting your wrists or by throwing a toaster in the bathtub. The first requires severe cuts that pass through the arteries and the latter demands that individuals bypass safety measures meant to prevent accidental electrification. But death by toilet is a very real threat in developing countries like South Africa, where pit toilets sometimes cause young children to drown.

Before modern plumbing, bathrooms were completely cut off from the house, and individuals would avoid using these facilities at night lest an accident occurs. Patrons might fear getting bit by a hidden outhouse spider, or Halloween pranksters might move an outhouse so that the unsuspecting individual would fall in.

If you would like to learn more about bathroom disasters, there’s much more information available:

Final resting place

I would not choose to haunt the bathroom, but perhaps it is not a choice ghosts get to make. From before modern plumbing into the present, bathrooms have been places of danger and unease. Seemingly mundane bathrooms are places of embarrassment, intrigue, and even death.

We can only hope that we don’t meet our demise on the porcelain throne or meet an unfriendly guest in the mirror when think we are alone.

Happy flushing!

Notes

*When a character dies on the toilet, this is referred to as ‘The Can Kicked Him.’ (Slow clap. Super clever, Hollywood.) Also, some poor souls have died after cleaning their toilets with bleach, which creates toxic fumes when combined with ammonia in urine. Don’t do that.

**Prisoners avoid lingering in communal toilets because these often provide a stage for an attack.

† Oddly enough, no one knows who Bloody Mary actually is. Is she Elizabeth Bathory, a female serial killer who is said to have bathed in the blood of her victims? Is she Mary Queen of Scots, or perhaps Mary I of England? No one knows for sure.

†† It should be noted that right-wing groups cite predation as a reason to limit trans individuals’ access to bathrooms. There is little evidence that a trans individual has ever posed a threat to the safety of bathroom patrons. On the contrary, trans individuals who are denied access to gender reaffirming bathrooms are 45% more likely to commit suicide.

Sources

[1] “The Toilet Ghosts of Japan.” Portable Press, Portable Press, 26 Nov. 2015, www.portablepress.com/blog/2015/11/toilet-ghosts-japan/.

[2] Ruth Bleiman. “Ghost Story: An ooooOOOOOOooo Wafted Up the Stair The Idea of an Ex-President Dying in One’s Bathroom, Particularly If He Took His Own Life, Can Give a Paranoid Person Pause.” The Washington Post, WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post, 1993, p. 7–.

[3] Dundes, A. “Bloody Mary in the Mirror: A Ritual Reflection of Pre-Pubescent Anxiety.” Western Folklore, vol. 57, no. 2/3, California Folklore Society, 1998, pp. 119–35, doi:10.2307/1500216.

[4] Grunenwald, Jill. “Horror Films Are Still Using Menstruation as a Source of Scares. Good.” Bitch Media, Bitch Media, 9 Nov. 2017, www.bitchmedia.org/article/it-chapter-two-menstruation.