The Can Kicked Him

This page needs some cleaning up to be presentable.

A bunch of examples here are to be moved to Camping a Crapper, as the current trope has been changed from "died in the bathroom" to the more specific "killed with the toilet".

When Hulk want lunch money, HULK GET LUNCH MONEY!!
"In a fight, you have to be careful not to break the little bones in your hand on someone's face. That's why I like bathrooms -- lots of hard surfaces."
—Michael Westen, Burn Notice

The fictional bathroom can be a truly dangerous place. It is fraught, among others, with assassins, demons, and killer mutant creatures. This is very possibly why Nobody Poops. A death or injury in the bathroom is a one-way ticket to a legacy of ignominy, and the prevalence of scary water-closet events seems to speak of a deeper human fear of vulnerability in this most private of places.

This is not how you die in Soviet Russia, and generally has nothing to do with Ass Kicks You. See Swirlie for less injurious (hopefully) examples.

The location lends itself to being an Undignified Death.

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

Examples of The Can Kicked Him include:

Anime & Manga

  • The first episode of Ghost in the Shell:Stand Alone Complex revolves around solving the mystery of what happened in the men's room of a restaurant that led to all the geisha robots to take a group of politicians hostage and almost kill one of the politicians assistant. The last thing the security records show is the assistant trying to flee from the men's room right before she suffered a severe head trauma.
    • In one episode Batou breaks into a building through a bathroom window, but not before pulling them man inside out through the very same window.
  • The "Hanako" ghost from various manga and anime series is a girl who died in the toilet area. In Haunted Junction the fact that every single Japanese high school seems to have this legend is explained by the "fact" that every single high school in Japan has had this happen. One of the main characters is obsessed with collecting this particular kind of ghost.
    • Possibly because the Haunted Junction version is a sexy, naughty schoolgirl.
      • The principal one: the other Hanakos we see in the manga are either little girls, single arms, or have odd heads.
    • The Hanakos aren't the only highschool bathroom ghosts. There's also the handsome "Akamanto Kamen" (red mantle), the sexy "Aoi Hanten" (Akamanto Kamen's sister), the Yamikos (one of them being The Rival to Hanako)...
  • In Mezzo Forte, the 'danger service agents' attempt to abduct a mob boss as he visits a toilet stall, and end up killing him.
  • Some Red Ribbon Army mooks try to do this with Goku in Dragon Ball - riddling a bathroom door with gunfire. Fortunately, even young Goku was Made of Iron and the bullets only stunned him.
  • In addition to the previously mentioned Hanako, Ghost Stories has Akagami-Aogami, who asks people using the toilet if they want red paper or blue paper. Saying red will result in a bloody death, while blue will result in death by suffocation (turning the victim blue). Don't even think about asking for a third color.
    • Again, they show up in Haunted Junction as Akamanto Kamen and Aoi Hanten. Akamanto is one of the good guys, Aoi is a villainess ( willingly in the anime, but Brainwashed and Crazy in the manga.)
  • There are two Hanako ghosts in Hell Teacher Nube—one who died during a school fire and had tried to hide in the toilets, and another, more gruesome one that provided a hilarious ending after the former was sent to heaven. Then there was also a water-borne demon who kept trying to drown Noriko... and magically sealed the toilet stall and filled it with water.
  • In the Kyoto arc of Mahou Sensei Negima, Konoka is kidnapped trying to use the toilet.
  • The horrible toilet scene in Majin Devil where a teenage girl gives birth to a giant spider in the toilets at school, and it jumps at her yelling "Mommy!"


Comic Books

  • One issue of Planetary has Elijah subdue the guard of a facility run by The Four when he goes to the bathroom. Elijah has the power to freeze things on a molecular level. Guess what he does to make sure the guard can't move
  • In Watchmen Rorschach kills two inmates who were trying to kill him using toilets, then makes a crappy pun about disposing of waste in the toilet.
  • In Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem corners the President of the United States in a public restroom and shoots him with a bowel disruptor.
  • In Sin City: The Big Fat Kill, Dwight ambushes Jackie Boy in the bathroom to get him to leave Shellie alone. ("Yeah, well you already made a big mistake yourself. You didn't flush.")
  • In The Punisher MAX # 42, Rawlins is cornered by a pissed-off Frank Castle in a Kabul International Airport restroom... with a machete.
    • In Welcome Back, Frank the Russian beats the Punisher with a toilet.
  • Jackie Estacado takes out a mob boss with his Darklings this way.


Film

  • M. Night Shyamalan seems to have a thing about this.
  • In GoldenEye, James Bond punches a guard who was using the toilet ("Beg your pardon. Forgot to knock").
    • In Casino Royale, it was revealed that 007 has a history of bathroom murders - his first kills occurred in the bathroom of a cricket club.
  • Don Price, the romantic rival of the protagonist Edward Bloom in Big Fish, dies of a heart attack while on a toilet.
  • True Lies features a bathroom-destroying brawl.
  • Parodied in Austin Powers, where the battle between Austin and a henchman in the toilet sounds like constipation: "Who does Number Two work for?!? Who... does Number Two... work for?!?"
  • The worst toilets of Scotland in Trainspotting. Not a fight or death scene in a public washroom, but pretty horrible too.
    • However, Begbie mugs an American tourist in a pub toilet, and only just stops short of killing him.
  • Vincent Vega meets his end on the can in Pulp Fiction (See Max Payne, below)
    • Expanding on the Pulp Fiction example, every time someone went into a bathroom, by the time he came out, the situation was much worse than when they went in : Vincent Vega gets shot by Butch, then finds Jules held at gunpoint by Honeybunny ; the guy with the Hand Cannon finds Brett and Flock-Of-Seagulls dead, then tries to shoot Jules and Vincent but fails. Also, when Vincent gets out of the bathroom for the first time in the movie, he finds Mia unconscious.
    • Notably, this may be why the preppies are such easy pickings, and why leader Brett is so hapless when Jules interrogates him. They have a guy with a gun to take care of home invaders, but he's indisposed in the loo until it's too late. And there is no plan B.
  • Due to a rampant T-Rex, lawyer Donald Gennaro abandons the two Hammond children in a vehicle to take shelter in a washroom in Jurassic Park. However, the bathroom is eventually destroyed around him, leaving a toilet-straddling Gennaro to become the first person eaten by CGI.
  • The toilet bomb in Lethal Weapon 2
  • In Fight Club, Tyler Durden and his mob corner a guy in a toilet cubicle and blackmail him by threatening to cut his testicles off.
  • Psycho showed a toilet on film for the first time... followed shortly by the infamous shower scene.
  • El Mariachi had a bathroom murder scene
  • The first fatality of Mimic occurs on a toilet
  • The movie Ghoulies promised this in its marketing, allegedly scaring lots of little kids. However this didn't actually happen until the second film.
  • A demon composed solely out of excrement emerged from a toilet in a strip club to pursue the protagonists in Dogma.
  • In the second X-Men film, one of Magneto's guards is seduced, drugged, and injected with iron in a toilet stall. This leads to his death when Magneto extracts the metal from his veins. Ouch.
  • Snakes on a Plane had several people dying in the airplane's toilets
  • Exploding toilets in the country club during one scene in The Goonies
  • The bathroom sequence in The Lost Boys
  • In the first Matrix film, Morpheus makes his suicidal sacrifice to save Neo by fighting Agent Smith in a bathroom, and he gets his head slammed through a toilet bowl as well. He doesn't die, however, but only because the Agents want him alive for some very valuable intel.
    • Parodied in Gorsky and Butch comic where the heroes escape through the pipes but Gorsky has to stay behind to flush them.
  • Angela's Ashes features the death of an Ill Girl on a toilet.
  • 'Terminator 3: the TX and Ah-nold basically destroyed a row of toilet cubicles in the midst of one of their fights.
  • In Problem Child 2, Junior throws dynamite down a toilet, causing all the toilets to explode, including one his teacher is using. The teacher wears a diaper for the rest of the film.
  • In Meet The Fockers, the cat (who knows how to use a toilet) flushes the dog.
  • Several of Jim Carrey's movies have bathroom moments like these:
    • In Ace Ventura: "Do not go in there!" (though it's not in the actual bathroom, but Ace has to fake it is)
    • In Dumb and Dumber, Lloyd gets assaulted in the bathroom stall by the truck driver met earlier in the film. Lloyd happens to be in the stall in the exact time and day the "manly love" request written there.
    • In The Cable Guy, Jim Carrey's character disguised as the bathroom attendant attacks Owen Wilson's character while entering the stall.
    • A funny moment in Liar Liar when Fletcher beats himself up in the restroom.

Fletcher: I'm kicking my ass! Do you mind?!

  • 'Dreamcatcher. Perhaps the most ignoble death in film history - the character is trying to keep a sentient alien intestinal parasite from bursting out of a toilet by sitting on the lid, but has a habit of chewing toothpicks when he's nervous - and the first time he went for his package of toothpicks, the critter banged the lid and made him drop them out of his reach. That's right. The poor, neurotic schmuck died because he tried to pick up a toothpick.
    • Stephen King acknowledged in interviews that he did this on purpose. He's said that for a lot of people, the first sign of their body turning on them is seeing blood in the toilet bowl, and he wanted to capture that moment of terror.
  • The Boondock Saints, wherein Connor McManus is handcuffed to a toilet as two Russian mobsters take his brother Murphy out to the alley to shoot him in the head. Connor, in a fit of Unstoppable Rage, tears the toilet right out of the floor, carries up to the apartment building roof and proceeds to send the toilet crashing down upon the head of the guy about to kill his brother as he jumps down himself onto the back of the second goon.
  • In Our Man Flint, Derek Flint goes into the bathroom for some reason, and a Galaxy agent comes in to kill him. A fight ensues, which eventually goes into a stall, where the real dirty work happens just off-camera. Galaxy agent dies on the toilet, with his own knife in his chest.
  • The Pink Panther Strikes Again: Two assassins try to kill Inspector Clouseau inside a bathroom and end up shooting each other.
  • Pink Floyd the Wall - Judge Arse creates a potty for himself before he yells, "TEAR DOWN THE WALL!"
  • In Young Guns a bounty hunter out to kill our heroes retreats to a toilet. From where he shoots Charlie Sheen dead, though he's ... ventilated ... shortly thereafter.
  • In the Andy Warhol film Lupe, it is suggested that Mexican actress Lupe Velez was found dead with her head in a toilet bowl. May or may not be Truth in Television.
  • In Ghost Dog Way Of The Samurai, one of the assassinations pulled off by the titular Ghost Dog is, in reference to a famous Japanese historical assassination, pulled off by hiding in the cellar directly beneath his target's toilet, drilling a hole in the ceiling, and shooting the target when he sits down to use said toilet.
  • For some reason, when people look into a mirror and say Candyman five times, it's almost always a bathroom mirror. The results ain't pretty.
    • Bathrooms are the only place that most homes are almost guaranteed to have a mirror.
  • Jason Bourne once killed an enemy agent with a bathroom. Not just in, with.
  • The first victim of Cthulhu a monstrous gigantic octopus that had taken over a cruise liner in Deep Rising is a woman who is hiding in a toilet. It is implied that she was forcefully sucked into the toilet, complete with blood-spatters.
  • In the Doom movie, the Jerkass member of the team gets eaten by an Imp while hiding inside a toilet stall. In the actual game, you can often find corpses who were apparently killed while in or even on the loo.
  • Don Price, Edward Bloom's rival in Big Fish, has a heart attack in the bathroom and dies. It's worse because he saw it happen ahead of time. Pretty pathetic...
  • In the Slasher Flick Gutterballs, one character is killed in the ladies' room, then when another goes to check on her, she's dragged under the stall door and killed too.
  • The Assignment. When a terrorist accidentally encounters the fake Carlos at London airport, he leads him at gunpoint into a toilet to be interrogated. Fortunately the Mossad chief sees this and follows him in, leading to a fatal shootout between the two men.
  • Bad Boys. One of the two protagonists gets into a fight in a nightclub toilet while his partner enjoys the floor show outside.
  • Wise Hollywood Nerd Columbus reminds us in Zombieland to Beware of Bathrooms. It's one of his rules (Rule Number 3, in fact), and it's a good one.
  • Shoot Em Up. Mr Smith is pursued into a public restroom and accidentally drops his pistol into a toilet. He has to field-strip and dry the weapon using the hand dryer before it will fire again.
  • Justified in Brannigan (1975). John Wayne is targeted by a hit-man who rigs up a Sawn Off Shotgun behind his hotel room door. In case he dodges the first Booby Trap, the hit-man plants a bomb in the toilet, knowing that a near-death experience would lead to a Bring My Brown Pants moment. Fortunately the Duke is smart enough to dodge both traps.
  • Blown Away. Scott Glenn Tommy Lee Jones uses the toilet bowel in his cell to create a shaped charge, which blows a hole through the prison wall.
  • Hostel. In a Crowning Moment of Awesome, Paxton corners in a toilet stall the guy who tortured and killed his friend, cuts his fingers off, dunks his head in the toilet, brings him up so he can see he who his attacker is, and then slashes his throat.
  • Frank in Maniac follows one of his victims into a subway bathroom and kills her there.
  • People being killed in outhouses or bathrooms seems to happen a lot in Clint Eastwood movies. A few examples below:
    • In Unforgiven, one of the cowboys sought by the bounty hunters is shot to death while in an outhouse.

The Schofield Kid: "I shot that fucker three times. He was takin' a shit. He went for his pistol an' I blazed away..."

    • Firefox. Clint Eastwood's character starts having Vietnam flashbacks due to stress and takes refuge in a public toilet; unfortunately a KGB agent hears him and starts banging on the door, insisting on seeing his papers. Clint panics when the KGB man (falsely, as it turns out) claims there's something wrong with his papers, and kills him.
    • Also happens in The Outlaw Josey Wales, as he's shooting up the Union Army camp, catching one soldier in the latrine.
  • In Critters one of the Vorpal Bunny aliens is chased into a bathroom and tries to flee down the toilet. The pursuing bounty hunter blows both Crite and toilet to smithereens.
  • A prostitute has her head bashed against a toilet until it breaks (not her head, the toilet) in Dream Home.
  • The Alpha Bitch in Bad Reputation is beat against, then drowned in, a toilet. She had previously vomited in it.
  • A girl is knifed in the back, then dunked in a filthy, leech-infested outhouse until she dies in Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers.


Literature

  • Moaning Myrtle in Harry Potter died in a girls' bathroom and now lives in the toilets.
    • While she primarily lives in the bathroom where she died, she can move throughout the plumbing at Hogwarts and sometimes spies on good-looking students when they bathe.
    • In the first book, Hermione went to a bathroom to cry after Ron teased her. The same night that someone let a troll into the castle. Luckily, Ron and Harry went looking for her to warn her about the troll; by time they found her, any warning was rendered moot, but they were able to keep the troll from killing her.
    • Pretty much any time we see a bathroom in the series, something weird is going down. Check out this helpful chart.
  • Encyclopedia Brown had "The Case of the Exploding Plumbing", though no death resulted.
  • In A Song of Ice and Fire Tyrion murders Tywin while he is on the privy, giving us the immortal line: "Tywin Lannister did not, in the end, shit gold".
  • The story Heroic Proportions [dead link] has a dictator assassinated while sitting on the toilet. He actually died in his sleep, but a janitor placed his corpse on the toilet and shot it so that, even if he was a Karma Houdini in life, he'd be a mockery in death.
  • Mentioned in one of the Myth books. (Skeeve mentions that his bodyguards even accompany him to the toilet.)
    • "Jeez, boss! You know how many guys got whacked while they were on the can? Just pretend like we're not here."
  • In the book of Judges, a tyrant is assassinated while on the loo, and the guards don't check on him right away when he fails to emerge because they assume he's taking a dump.
    • Averted later, when King Saul, while chasing David, goes into a cave to take a dump, and while "his vision is darkened" David sneaks up on him... and merely takes a piece of his coat.
  • One of the Discworld books describes death via red hot pokers coming up through the privy hole. Kings live dangerous lives, sadly.
    • Magrat also defeats an elf by kicking him down the privy. He survives though, due to landing in "something soft".
    • And then the Lancre garderobes (advanced privies) are used in Carpe Jugulum.
  • The act of assassinating someone by waiting inside his privy hole is discussed at the beginning of Ed Greenwood's novel Making of a Mage. Later, one villain is assassinated exactly in such way.
  • Dean Koontz's novel The Face describes the death of the protagonist's ex-friend, gangster Duncan "Dunny" Whistler. He owed some guys money, so they sent a couple of thugs around, who submerged his head in a toilet for long enough to put him into a coma and eventually kill him.
  • A rather drawn-out assassination scene happens in an airport bathroom in William Goldman's Marathon Man.
  • In Proven Guilty, the first victim of the phages dies was attacked in a bathroom, probably in explicit recognition of this trope. Subverted in that he managed to physically and mentally survive.
  • Corran Horn in The Bacta War mentions that the refresher would be an... inglorious place to die. However, it's the best way to get upstairs (after some light-saber-induced ceiling modifications) so he can ambush a group of stormtroopers.
  • Quiller's Run by Adam Hall. Quiller is being stalked by an assassin who always uses the garrote. He tries to lure him into attacking by hanging out on a darkened lawn, but the assassin sees the trap and instead waits in the nearest toilet, knowing Quiller will eventually become thirsty in the warm night air and head for the nearest tap. Quiller just misses getting his head taken off by piano wire, and after a tense struggle kills the assassin with broken glass from the toilet mirror.
  • IT lives under the town of Derry, and makes its way up primarily through the sewer systems. Guess where it tends to come out when it strikes in one's home?
  • In Ender's Game, Ender Wiggin is cornered in the bathroom by Bonzo Madrid and a gang of bullies. Ender is in the shower, naked and dripping, without any help or escape route. He uses this to make himself seem pathetic, and imply that Bonzo is scared to take on some naked little kid alone. Bonzo is goaded into making it a one-on-one battle, which doesn't end well for him.
  • In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's Footfall, a character is killed by holding his face in a toilet until he drowns.
  • The President of the United States in The Buck Passes Flynn
  • Within the first 10 pages of Tom Clancy's "The Teeth of the Tiger", a Mossad courier is killed while at the urinal.
  • In Michael Slade's Ripper, the toilet is one of many, many fixtures in the mansion which the serial killers Skull and Bones have turned into a Death Trap.


Live-Action TV

  • One episode of CSI featured a toilet which exploded (though without fatality) due to dry ice flushed away.
  • In the very first episode of Pushing Daisies, the owner of the funeral home dies while using the bathroom.
  • There was an episode of MASH where someone rigged a toilet to explode. (An attempt to kill Henry Blake by Cowboy)
    • Also, during a shelling, Father Mulcahy and Henry Blake were in the double latrine when it was hit.
  • The first season of 24 had someone garroted while using the urinal.
  • In Scrubs. JD has a medical condition where when he uses the toilet he collapses unconscious.
  • In an episode of the The X-Files, it looks like killer cockroaches swarm a man using the bathroom and he dies on the bathroom floor. It turns out that the man died of an aneurysm from pushing too hard. Literally Death by Toilet.
    • The Flukeman ("The Host" 2x02) hides in a portajohn.
    • The sea monster from "Agua Mala" is attacks a couple of people from the toilet.
    • In fact, any self-respecting "Things I Have Learned From The X-Files" list contains "Don't go into the bathroom" as one list item.
  • In the pilot of Burn Notice, Michael explains that he likes fighting in bathrooms because there are so many hard surfaces.
  • In The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a liquid metal T-1001 eavesdrops on a conversation while disguised as a urinal, then kills one of the participants.
  • In an episode of The Job, Mike McNeil gets held hostage in the bathroom.
  • In Episode 2 of FlashForward we discover one of the Blackout victims was on the toilet and afterward had to resuscitate a coworker whose blackout had left him drowning in the urinal. Ewwww. Clean Pretty Reliable CPR disgustingly AVERTED!
  • George is killed by a space station's toilet seat in the series premiere of Dead Like Me. She's referred to in the Grim Reaper community as "Toilet Seat Girl," and try as she might, she can't escape the connection.
  • Supernatural does this at least once- one girl holds another's head in a toilet until she drowns.
  • The classic satirical Israeli sketch show The Chamber Quintet had a sketch in which a man described the Yom Kippur War as a ‘shitey war’, and mentioned he’d been shot to death in a very non-glamorous way: shot between the eyes while he was sitting on the toilet.
  • Red Dwarf: when the Cat feels the need to go behind the bushes and do some private cat business. On Backwards Earth. Where things happen backwards. Everything happens backwards.
  • In Frasier, Roz tells the following story:

Lupe Velez, the movie star in the '30s. Well, her career hit the skids, so she decided she'd make one final stab at immortality. She figured if she couldn't be remembered for her movies, she'd be remembered for the way she died. And all Lupe wanted was to be remembered. So, she plans this lavish suicide - flowers, candles, silk sheets, white satin gown, full hair and makeup, the works. She takes the overdose of pills, lays on the bed, and imagines how beautiful she's going to look on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper. Unfortunately, the pills don't sit well with the enchilada combo plate she sadly chose as her last meal. She stumbles to the bathroom, trips and goes head-first into the toilet, and that's how they found her. ... Will you ever forget that story?

Professional Wrestling

  • WWE: The Big Show was "pwnd" by Eddie Guerrero after Show stole Eddy's bag full of burritos. The burrito's? Spiked with Ex-Lax.
    • Chris Masters tried to jump Triple H in a stall, but failed.
  • I seem to remember a match between Raven and Taz where Taz was given a yellow swirlie.


Video Games

  • In the Hitman series, if there's an available bathroom, it is almost always the best place to hide a body, and within the bathroom, toilet stalls are the best place to put them. Oddly, random people tend to look into large body-sized containers with regularity, but will not consistently open an unlocked toilet stall door blocked by a corpse.
    • This is enhanced even further because pretty much everybody has to go sooner or later and a person standing in a room by themselves with their face against the wall just screams "Easy kill!" Even if your primary target doesn't take bathroom breaks, odds are his personal bodyguards will so you can easily get their clothes and go anywhere you like.
  • Half-Life 2: Deathmatch. You have a gravity gun that can launch heavy objects at lethal velocity. Most of the maps have toilets that can be picked up with this gravity gun. Needless to say, this is an iconic combat technique, so much so that not only is the kill icon for thrown objects a flying toilet, it's also in the title screen for the game. There's also an achievement in the standard game for killing an enemy with a toilet. It's aptly named "Flushed".
  • At one point early on in Max Payne, you can do someone like Vincent, blowing him away with his own MAC-10 as he comes out of the bathroom.
  • The developers of Splinter Cell want you to do this, as it feels like every game has some poor sap calling on nature near you.
  • "One C4 disposed of. The ceiling of the women's bathroom was set to blow!"
    • And like in Hitman the toilets can be used to store dead bodies, etc. Probably the nastiest thing the series has ever done in a toilet is presenting a soldier, busily using a urinal with his back to you. If you have no soul, you can sneak up behind him and snap his neck as he relieves himself.
  • Like with the MGS example above, in Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, the last mission of the first area has you sneaking into a warehouse... through the sewer systems. When you come up to ground level, you're directly across from a bathroom where one of the guards is taking a leak. If you're stealthy enough, you can sneak up on him and kill him silently.
  • Travis gets attacked by some guy named Jupiter (at least, that's what the belt buckle says) while sitting on the toilet in the ending to No More Heroes. If you got the good ending, Henry will show up and cut him in half for you.
  • In MadWorld, you can give your enemies lethal swirlies, though they're not so much swirlies as just dunking their heads into the toilet and waiting for them to explode into tiny chunks.
  • The start of the Facility stage from Golden Eye 1997 has you taking out a guard with your silenced PPK as he's using the bathroom in a Shout-Out to the scene from the movie.
    • The Wii remake has a similar scene, kept true to the original movie with a quick-time event to knock the guard's lights out.
  • Doom 3 has some particularly dangerous bathrooms, complete with spooky mirrors and impatient zombies.
  • Every Silent Hill game has a bathroom, and three out of four start in one. While nobody can be specifically said to die in one unless you're killed by one of the resident enemies, there are certain hints:
    • In Silent Hill 1, you can hear a girl sobbing in one of the bathrooms of the Darkside school.
    • In Silent Hill 2, one of the stall doors in the Toluca Jail has something blocking it, and as you leave there's a sudden weird noise from that stall.
    • In Silent Hill 3, you can knock on one of the stalls in the bathroom you start out in, and someone will knock back. You're unable to open the stall in Lightside Silent Hill, but in Darkside, the door swings open to reveal an empty stall with the walls splattered with blood.
    • In Silent Hill 4, the tunnel to other worlds opens itself slowly in the bathroom in Henry's apartment, and also opens out onto a bathroom in one of the subway paths. Specifically, Cynthia runs into the bathroom to vomit, monsters eventually come out instead of her. When Henry goes in, he doesn't find Cynthia, but does find a fresh hole. After going through it to his apartment, Cynthia calls begging him to come back, and is abruptly cut off. When he returns, he finds a white statue of her with bloody hands in one of the stalls, and shortly after that, she is found at the brink of death in another bathroom.
  • The murder in Fahrenheit (2005 video game) occurs in the bathroom of a diner.
  • Troopers in Duke Nukem 3D can sometimes be encountered in bathroom stalls. They're even considerate enough to flush before attacking.
  • You can't kill anyone in Bully, but a swirlie is still a knockout if you can drag your enemy to the toilets and flush 'em.
  • Inverted in Dead Rising. The bathrooms double as Save Rooms so zombies will almost never spawn inside, making them some of the safest parts of the mall.
  • The Hanako ghost also exists in Persona. It consists of a mobile toilet from which a gruesome demon peeks out and lashes out at the party... and it knows Mudoon.
  • Subverted in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, where there IS a giant, freaky hand that pops out of the toilet in the Stock Pot Inn... but all it wants is "p-p-paper, please!"
  • In Leisure Suit Larry, one of the many, many, many, ways to die involves flushing a backed-up toilet. Of course, you're required to use the toilet for One Hundred Percent Completion, and one would instictively flush it for more points.
  • The TV studio mission in Champions Online at one point has you cornering several of Foxbat's mooks in the studio bathroom.
  • Similar to the Fearsome Flush example below, Ghostbusters the Video Game has a Cursed Artifact in the form of an absolutely disgraceful-looking toilet. When you collect it, your HUD reads: "This toilet is making frightening noises...is someone drowning?" Turns out the thing has a bloodthirsty demon bound to it, and was involved in an assassination many years ago.


Webcomics

  • In Order of the Stick, Crystal mentions she assassinated someone while they were on the toilet, and got to keep their newspaper as a bonus. She later ends up getting ambushed and killed by Haley after coming out of the shower.
  • Reversed in Kevin and Kell. Kevin resorts to a loan shark who shows up via his toilet. The next strip shows little Coney in potty training on the same toilet, and the results: One dead loan shark, one full bunny. When asked about the effects of the shark would be on the young girl, she shows in a later panel what results: she visits the bathroom with a fishing rod.
  • This strip of Perry Bible Fellowship where "Mario" apparently drowned himself in a toilet.


Western Animation

  • And the toxicity of the toilet in Townsville Jail made it a substitute for Chemical X so Mojo Jojo could create The Rowdyruff Boys.
  • On her first appearance on The Simpsons, Skinner's mother is the victim of one of Bart's pranks when he drops a lit cherry bomb down a toilet, causing all the other toilets in the school to blow.
  • Yes, Western Animation. Animaniacs featured a Slappy Squirrel short with her facing an old foe. He tries the plungers-to-climb-a-wall routine. She grabs a plunger and..uses it for its initial purpose. Once the toilet blockage is clear, it flushes apparently everything. 'Can I sniff ya now?'
    • And then Wakko's issues trying to relieve himself in 'Potty Emergency'. He finally has to settle for breaking a fourth wall.
      • "Ewww... he didn't even wash his hands!"
  • Clyde's mother in the South Park episode 'Reverse Cowgirl' constantly harps on him for leaving the toilet seat up, insisting that she might fall in. Guess how she dies later in the episode?


Truth In Television

  • Famously, Elvis Presley was found dead on the can. The stock response to conspiracy theories about how he's really alive and living in ______ is, "If you were going to fake your own death, would you have picked that?"
  • Catherine The Great had a stroke on the toilet and later died in her bed. A poem by Aleksandr Pushkin popularized the notion that died on the toilet with an ambiguous final line.
  • In the 1980s the IRA planned to cause carnage at the busy London Bridge Station by planting a bomb in a men's toilet on the platform. Luckily there was nobody inside when the bomb detonated, and the thick walls absorbed most of the blast.
  • Several Japanese generals were assassinated on the toilet during the feudal era. Traditional sword arts prescribe fully removing one's pants and keeping one's sword on hand when on the pot.
  • George II of Great Britain died of a stroke on the toilet.
  • King Edmund II died when an assassin hiding in his toilet stabbed him when he was sitting on it.
    • Or perhaps not: Edmund Ironside's death as mentioned above was merely a rumor; the timing of his death was rather suspicious, and he was only 27 when he died, but he was severely wounded in battle six weeks earlier and could have easily died of those wounds. In fact, as I'm writing this, it's the 992nd anniversary of his death.
  • Sadly Truth in Television: some people didn't get the memo that you shouldn't pee on bleach because it creates poisonous fumes. This has led to deaths due to some people using bleach to clean their toilet bowls.
    • Also, prior to public sanitation, many toilets were literally just a hole in the ground, and thus a careless step could cause someone to fall in and drown. In Japan, toilets weren't modernized until pretty much after WWII (and even then a lot of them kept the old fashioned squatting style toilets), so many an Urban Legend sprung up around public restrooms.
  • Prison inmates know to keep one leg out of their pants when going to the bathroom because they are otherwise vulnerable to assaults there.
  • Finally, one might note that the heart rate slows when taking a big crap. Give it a second, and it might occur to you where this story is going.
  • Apparently the two most common places to die are in bed, and on the toilet. This is because the initial feeling when you're about to have a heart attack feels like you need to go to the bathroom. Depressing.
  • Black Widow bites have become less frequently fatal in the past century or so. The main reason for this is modern plumbing: people used to encounter them in the privy and get bitten in areas that are very tender and full of blood vessels; nowadays bites are more likely to be on the hands or feet, which are less blood-saturated and further from the heart.
  • While killer mutant ooze ghoulies may not enter real-life homes via the toilet, rats can and do use this route.
  • Dutch Schultz was shot while in the restroom. He still managed to pull his pants up and walk out, just so he wouldn't be embarrassed by dying in the shitter.
  • Vladimir Putin's phrase about "killing those terrorists in the outhouse" became famous in Russia.
    • Bonus point for using a word (Мочить) that literally means "to soak" in normal language... but in criminal slang means "kill".
  • Not exactly a bathroom, but Roman emperor Caracalla was assassinated while urinating at a roadside.
  • Edward II of England was allegedly killed by an assassin hiding in his toilet pit with a red hot poker (ouch).


Other

  • Numerous urban legends feature a veritable rogue's gallery of horrible critters (spiders, snakes, crocodiles, other insects) crawling up from the bowels of the sewage system to enter our homes through.... the toilet!
    • There's a practically classic Australian song, "Redback on the Toilet Seat" that goes along these lines. There was a redback on the toilet seat, when I was there last night. I didn't see it in the dark, but boy, I felt its bite!.
      • Possible Truth in Television. Redbacks like to hide under toilet seats, what with them being dark and enclosed. Someone sitting on it understandably startles them, and they bite. Luckily, the bites are rarely fatal, though they can be extremely painful.
  • In the official scenarios of Warhammer Fantasy Battle Fantasy Role Play, old toilets were a 'traditional' place to encounter a giant amoeba.
  • Grimtooth's Traps Too has the "Cranequin Goose" trap (a pressure-triggered crossbow hidden down the privy) and calls it "A fine way for a high and mighty hero to die."
  • The short-lived Cosmic Horror Collectible Card Game "Hecatomb" had at least one monster that was based around a killer toilet. Well, specifically, it was a carnivorous ooze-monster made from animated sewerage, which was depicted as having risen out of a toilet and eaten the unlucky cleaner.
  • Dilbert once featured a device called the Can-O-Matic, which masqueraded as a restroom stall and would randomly fire people by slapping a pink slip on their backs and then hurling them out of the building.
  • The Real Ghostbusters toyline had Fearsome Flush, a "haunted" toilet that, when pushed forward, would sprout menacing eyes, teeth, and tongue.
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