Urban Legends

The Legend

Found on the Internet in May 1999

According to an article by Dr. Beverly "Crusher" Clark in the Journal of the American Medical Institute National (JAMIN), the mystery behind a recent spate of horrible, painful, rectally based deaths has been solved.

If you haven't already heard about this, then it's lucky you aren't dead already.

Three Chicago women were admitted to the hospital within a week of each other and all with the same symptoms. They had high fevers, extreme chills, painful hot flashes, rapid, repeated, high-intensity vomiting, and sort of a tickly feeling in their throats. This was followed by complete muscular collapse, paralysis, incontinence, incoherence, chemical dependence, unpredictable massive sleep expectoration, more paralysis, and death, not necessarily in that order. Autopsy results showed that their blood had become toxic, and that their buttocks had swollen to quadruple their normal size.

These women didn't know each other (or if they did they didn't mention it at the time of the autopsy) and seemed to have nothing in common aside from the vomiting, etc. It was, however, discovered that they had all visited the same restaurant (Big Chappies Tromatorium in the Blare Airport main terminal -- no pun intended).

The health department immediately shut down the restaurant so that an investigation could be made. Its power and water were cut off and the entire building was hermetically sealed. Intense inspections of the restaurant's food, water, and crabby staff produced no results. A big break came when one of the restaurant's waitresses came down with the same disease. She said that she hadn't been working at the restaurant in the last few days and had just stopped by to pick up her paycheck and use the restroom. That led to an increased inspection of the restroom (necessitating special hazardous material equipment, as all airport restaurant restrooms do), during which it was found that one of the commodes was wobbling as if it had a life of its own. Before a containment wall could be set up, the toilet exploded, spewing little spiders everywhere.

The spiders were taken back to the lab in an armored truck and analyzed by a special team of spider scientists. It was found that they were South American Rectal Blush Inducement Spiders (arachnius gluteus munchius), so named because they like to bite people on the bum, causing great embarrassment. The spider has extremely toxic venom that can lay dormant for days before springing into action and causing horrible death.

Because these spiders like a cold, dark, damp, smelly, atmosphere with lots of methane in it, they are very at home beneath the rims of public toilets and on some moons of Jupiter.

A few days later, a Los Angeles lawyer entered a hospital emergency room with the above-described symptoms. As a lawyer, he was allowed to die without being admitted, but before his death he said that he had been on a business trip from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles. He didn't stop in Big Chappies, but he did have a gigantically swollen hinder. Investigators found out that his plane had been in South America before arriving in New York and that the cargo bay had been accidentally crammed with bales and bales of deadly spiders instead of the expected luggage. The spiders made a break for it in Chicago, many of them hitching rides uninvited on other airplanes. It is now believed that they could be anywhere in the country ... even in your town ... maybe even right behind you!!!

So please, before you use a public toilet, lift the seat to check for spiders. And please, after lifting the lid of a public toilet, wash your hands. A lot.