Alligator In the Toilet

My favorite is the one about how there are giant mutant alligators in the sewers of New York, because people get them as babies and then get tired of them and flush them down the toilet. Then the alligators live on rats and garbage, and get exposed to radiation and dangerous chemicals from factory waste, and grow to immense sizes, and they are blind like cave fish, but have highly-developed olfactory glands and jaws that could crunch a car in half.

This one strikes home with me because when I was a very little girl, still in the church nursery, I asked to go to the bathroom while I was waiting for my mom to finish talking with another mom. I went into the big girl bathroom all by myself, feeling so proud and confident. I approached the toilet, and lo and behold, when I peered over the rim, two round yellow eyes looked out at me from under the water.

I turned right around and told my mom there was an alligator in the toilet. She didn't believe me, and sent a man in there to look at it, and the man came back and said there was a 'big ol lizard type thing' sitting in the water, and that it actually did look like a baby alligator. The church building was right near a lake, and the nursery bathroom was in a basement, so it very well could have been a tiny alligator that someone abandoned in the scummy water of the church pond.

The most terrible thing was that when the man went back with a rope and net to catch it, it was GONE. I was traumatized. For that whole year, I would hold my pee till it nearly killed me, so I wouldn't have to go to the bathroom. I had a paralyzing fear of sitting on the toilet. I just knew a big horrible green scaly thing was going to come up from the water and chomp on my most tender parts.