Exploding Toilet
There is some kind of volatile substance like a hair spray or insecticide that is put in the toilet by a man’s wife. Her husband uses the toilet while smoking a cigarette. He flips the butt in the toilet and blows himself off the toilet. Paramedics who are carrying him to the ambulance laughed so hard that they dropped him off the stretcher, causing him further harm.
There are many variations to this urban legend. One is that the man was already in the hospital and the wife painted the bathroom and had disposed of the paint thinner into the toilet. Another would be the husband accidentally driving his motorcycle through a plate-glass window or through the front door of the house and the wife poured the mopped-up gasoline in the toilet. This urban legend was reported as a news item from Tel Aviv in 1988. It derives from a gag about a volatile substance being poured into the pit under an outhouse. Canadian poet Robert Service tells of this story in his poem “The Three Bares”.
(Source: Brunvand, Jan H. Encyclopedia of Urban Legends. 2001.)
