It starts with a nobleman in 1076. Duke Godfrey “the Hunchback” sat down to do what all men do. Then someone speared him through the wood. From below.
Medieval chroniclers were polite, calling it an attack after he had “withdrawn.” The reality was gore and bad planning. You’re unlikely to face a dagger in your bidet, but bathrooms remain strangely lethal places.
The Slippery Slope
We assume the kitchen is the danger zone. Sharp knives, boiling pots, gas flames. Easy to fear. But look at the tiles. Look at the tub. The CDC says eighty percent of home falls happen in the bathroom.
Hard surfaces. Water. Gravity. A lethal trio.
In the U.S., forty thousand injuries link specifically to toilets each year. The seat pinches your thigh as you rise. Rarely, the porcelain cracks under your weight. It snaps. You fall.
Statistics don’t always track the dead, but we know how they die. Babies drown in the bowl. Seniors stand up, blood drains from the brain, and they hit their heads.
There’s a biological trap too. The Valsalva maneuver. You hold your breath, push against constipation, and your blood pressure spikes. Oxygen to the brain dips. If your heart is already struggling, this strain can stop it. Doctors hate it. They say treat the constipation. Better yet, use a squat toilet. Your rectum opens wider. Gravity does the work. No pushing needed.
“To minimize risk, doctors recommend… squat toilets as the healthier option.”
Pits of Doom
Before flush valves and ceramic bowls, there were pits. Just holes dug into the earth. Sometimes they touched underground water. Dark. Deep. Deadly if you slipped in.
Rural areas still use them. Children die there every year, tumbling into the waste below.
But history offers a worse example. The Erfurt Cathedral in 1184. King Henry VI called nobles to settle a dispute. The wooden floor groaned. It collapsed.
Sixty people fell. Through the floor. Into the cesspit below. They drowned in feces. The survivors? The king and archbishop. They were in a raised stone alcove. Safe from the drop, safe from the muck.
Is there justice in plumbing? Not really.
The Submarine Error
Plumbing on a submarine isn’t like plumbing at home. There is no drain. Just valves to eject waste into the sea.
- German U-1206. Fresh paint, new crew, complex valve system. The captain was young. He flushed. Or rather, he failed to flush correctly. The valve backfired. Sewage poured into the submarine instead of out.
It soaked the batteries. Chlorine gas filled the hull. Toxic. Lethal.
The crew scrambled to surface. Three drowned trying to escape. The rest were captured. A whole submarine, lost because one man misjudged the plumbing sequence.
Currents in the Cell
Prisons use metal toilets. Heavy, unbreakable, cold. But metal conducts electricity.
Michael Godwin was serving a murder sentence in South Carolina. He was fixing his TV in 1989. Sitting on the toilet. He put a wire in his mouth. The current from the TV traveled through him. He died instantly.
The irony bites. Godwin had previously avoided the electric chair by having his sentence commuted. He survived the state’s execution device only to die from his own makeshift electronics on the throne.
Laurence Baker died in 1997. Pittsburgh. Earphones plugged into the TV. Same metal toilet. Same fatal shock.
If the toilet is steel, unplug everything. Or better, leave it plugged out.
Creatures from the Deep
You might expect snakes. You shouldn’t, really, but water rises, animals seek higher ground. In 2016, python bit a man in Thailand right through the bowl. Shocking? Yes. Fatal? Probably not. The venom is rarely deadly to humans, but the trauma lasts.
Outdoors, though. Watch the web.
Widow spiders. Black widows. Redbacks in Australia. They like the flies that buzz around outdoor latrines. They weave silk under the seat. Dark, quiet, waiting.
The phenomenon was so common it inspired medical literature. A 1927 study noted fifteen bites in “recent years” at Los Angeles General Hospital alone. Australian musician Slim Newton made it a joke in 1971: “I didn’t see him in the dark, but oh boy, I felt the sting.”
Female spiders do the biting. Male widows are harmless. Modern antivenom works. The last black widow death in the U.S. was in 1983 in a dentist’s chair. In Australia, a redback death made headlines in 2018—the first in decades—but the victim wasn’t on the toilet that day.
Still, the pattern holds. In 2000, an Australian man was bitten by a redback on his outdoor toilet seat. In 1961, a child was killed by one.
Check Your Seat
We treat bathrooms as neutral spaces. Private, clean, safe. But history shows us otherwise.
Slip on the tile. Scream on the floor. Drown in the pit. Choke on gas. Get zapped by a loose wire. Bitten by something that crawled up the pipe.
You are vulnerable when you sit. Your guard is down. The world waits outside. Inside, only the bowl remains.
Maybe check under the lid before you sit. Just once. No guarantee, of course. The dark doesn’t always announce itself.
