TRUE STORY

The Phantom Pooper Strikes Again

A domestic terrorist harassed our dorm bathrooms

During university, I lived on the second floor of the dormitory. I have many fond memories from those days, not the least of which was the Grade-F toilet paper.

Made from a mix of hickory bark, sandpaper, and broken shards of glass, the TP was a marvel to behold to your bottom. Earlier that year, a scientific breakthrough at CERN allowed the Large Hadron Collider to separate our illustrious single-ply papyrus into bathroom tissue the width of a Hydrogen atom. ¹

I can imagine the marketing campaign for the anus-destroying microscopic film our school pretended was fit for human use.

100,000 sheets per roll. Now with 50% more rectal bleeding.

Using the dorm restroom was an unpleasant experience, but we did not have the money or options to improve the situation. Perhaps we should have eliminated fiber from our diets and waited to visit family — and their glorious Angel Soft— on the weekends.

Curse the fates. Were we forever doomed to be powerless pre-hemorrhoidal teenagers? After enduring sore bottoms for weeks, the situation escalated. An anonymous student terrorized our communal bathroom.

My roommate Matty was the first to discover the carnage when he opened the door to the toilet stall, ironically nicknamed the luxury suite.

The floor, walls, toilet seat, tank, and every imaginable surface — and some unimaginable — were covered in human feces. The pungent stench of daffodil-yellow urine pooled over half the floor.

It was like a bare-cheeked Olympic figure skater had explosively sh*t out a gas station burrito while simultaneously performing a Triple Toe Loop.

Taped to the only untainted portion of the wall was a ransom note. Hastily scribbled in brown crayons on white tablet paper were the following demands:

I will continue to defecate and urinate in the second-floor restroom until my demands for better toilet paper, preferably Charmin, are met.

Do not test my resolve.

— The Phantom Pooper

“Holy Sh*t,” Matty mumbled as he stood there in shock.

“There’s nothing holy about it. Someone in this dorm is one sick b*stard,” I responded mechanically.

We ran to retrieve our trusted Resident Advisor. Before entering ground zero, he never could have imagined how much he would regret trading free room and board for supervising asinine freshman guys. The story had spread as quickly as the smell, and dozens of young men cried out for retribution.

A few days later, the school launched a formal investigation. The culprit was determined to be a student living on the third floor of our building. We were not surprised. Terrorists know better than to crap in their own backyard.

Eventually, the Phantom Pooper was expelled, and we never learned his real name.

University administrators did not want to encourage deviant behavior by giving in to the Phantom Pooper’s demands. Our happy place remained stocked with the original electron-thick-ply sandpaper-like product.

Traumatized, I never returned to the luxury suite again.

Footnotes

¹ The description of the toilet paper is intended to be humorous hyperbole. Everything else in this story is factual to the best of my memory. A student in my dorm claiming to be The Phantom Pooper attempted to obtain quality TP by terrorizing our communal restroom.

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