The Boy In The Bathroom Stall

“How many myths do you come across on a daily basis?” The professor’s question lingered in the air, under the tiled ceiling, but still above the hesitant pencil strokes in lined notebooks and tentative keyboard taps. You’d have to be blind to not see the hesitation, deaf to not hear it, and dead to not feel it.

Some of you may have heard this story already. On a 3 a.m. YouTube channel, or in a video where some skeptic tries to debunk everything they can’t understand. Or maybe you’ve never heard it before. But everyone at Melrose Elementary School has heard about Toby the Bathroom Ghost. He haunts the bathroom on the first floor. Why does he haunt the bathroom? Why just the first floor? Who, exactly, is Toby? No one really knows. He’s a rumor, a myth. I heard about Toby from Roger’s older sister who enjoyed pranking us, from bullies who said they’d sacrifice us to him, from classmates who said that Toby was harmless. Everyone knew Toby the Bathroom Ghost. Every boy who’d been in that bathroom alone had an experience with Toby. Never anything, like, weird. He just turned on the sink or slammed the door of the stall next to you. He wasn’t a perv, he was just...there.

To help us along, she continued, “They’re called rumors. They’re maybe called lies.” Her not-quite-Boston voice came from right behind my seat as she squeezed through the narrow walkways. Her preclass rant about egress and fire safety still rung in my ears loud enough for me to kick my backpack farther under the table. College, according to her, is not an excuse to be lax on fire-safety laws.

Roger and I, we were obviously short on chances to see Toby since our classroom was on the second floor, but we wanted to meet him so badly. So we stole his sister’s video camera one day. We had this YouTube channel. We’d just started it. Lame trick shots, failed Rube Goldberg machines, those were the kinds of things we posted. I wanted to post more. Ghost hunting was just starting to get big online at the time. Found footage, Ghost Adventures knockoffs, the works. I wanted to capture Toby on video. I wanted to find out everything there was to know about the ghost. There were so many stories about him, but none of them provided any information about his history, and every time I asked a question, I was met with two more.

“Myths. The word comes from Greek, mythos. It means story. Mythology is the study of stories,” my professor said. So, what stories did I have to tell? Rumors and lies. I told no stories, told no lies, except for the stories I told Roger when we were camping. Would those work for this assignment? “Try to draw inspiration from real life,” the professor said, as if she could read my mind. So ixnay on the campfire stories. I side-eyed Roger’s paper, where he’d written a full page of rumors he’d heard on the baseball team. Once he noticed me looking, he wrote a single word in the heavy, straight lines of his typewriter handwriting. TOBY, in all caps across the top of his page. Our first case together. The first ghost video on our channel. We were, what, nine? Ten?

So we stole his sister’s video camera, took it to school with us, and waited until this big school wide assembly, where the students and teachers were all packed into the gym on metal bleachers and fold-out chairs, organized by class and such. The moment attendance was taken, Roger asked to go to the bathroom. The teacher told him to take a buddy, and naturally he picked me. I just so happened to have brought a hoodie to school on an eighty-degree day in mid June, and it was balled up around the camera, an innocent kid with an innocent hoodie.

“On the other side of myth, we have science. We have research.” The professor was pointing us in a direction. She wanted these to be mundane myths, everyday lies, passing rumors. Too late, I was already deep down the rabbit hole of my memories. Others

were too. The pencil scratching and keyboard tapping filled the room, a chirping chorus of stories and rumors and lies. Put a bunch of creative writing nerds in a room together and mention the word story, and that’s exactly what you’ll get. I wrote, not for real people, but for readers: imaginary, fake people, ones that I could imagine doing book tours for, ones I could imagine reading my scripts, asking me if they read the line right. It helped my honesty, not writing for real people, not writing for myself, but writing to fake people who would never see the light of day.

We raced through the halls, into the first floor bathroom. We waited there, in the hall. And we waited. There was no noise, no sign of anyone still in there. We were giggly, we knew that what we were doing was weird, but we didn’t have a sense for the wrongness of bringing a camera into the bathroom until later on. But we didn’t have any ill intent or anything. It was just a

ghost-hunting thing.

The professor leaned over our table, her piercing dark eyes locked on me like heat seeking missiles. “I want you to go first,” she said.

My stomach dropped, hand stilling, releasing the pencil that hadn’t yet finished the story. “Go? What do you mean, go? Are we presenting these?”

She nodded. I clenched my jaw. All of the horror I’d captured on my channel, all of the scares I’d created, none of it could compare to the fear of public speaking. I could talk, sure. Talk to Roger, talk to a camera, talk to a crowd that wasn’t there. Second, third, and fourth person. To someone else who is there, to someone who isn’t there. But this story was written in first person. Me, myself, and I statements that probably didn’t even answer the prompt. But I had no choice. I had to talk to the very real crowd in front of me. The prospect of live, public speaking scared me more than any ghost. I choked down my fear and said, “Okay.”

We brought the camera into the bathroom, and we stood in the big stall at the end. And we waited. And we listened. And we recorded our silence, our breaths, our impatient shuffling. And eventually, we heard it. Or, rather, it was what we didn’t hear that excited us more than what we did hear: no footsteps, no clothes rustling, no movement, not even the squeak of rusty metal turning. Out of nowhere, the sink just turned on.

As I presented, my classmates pretended to pay attention. Some snuck quick glances at me between sentences, hastily finishing their own stories. Some actually watched, rapt with attention, and I could see the recognition in their eyes. This one had seen the interview at some point and nearly forgotten about it. That one was a horror-story junkie with a laptop decked out with stickers of Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger who was probably a longtime subscriber to the channel. I enjoyed guessing the ways in which some people knew us. Some zoned out on the wall behind me. I told the story of Toby, the start of our channel. The whole time, I avoided their eyes, except for Roger’s, because he was there with me. Could I do our stories justice? Normally I just answered questions with “check out our channel,”, or a deflection of a similar nature. That way, the version they were getting was carefully scripted and edited, and the person they saw was confident and rehearsed, not the awkward boy speaking off the dome before them. Roger nodded encouragingly, his thin-framed glasses catching the light. I looked right at him as I finished the story, and in the tilt of his head, the curve of his grin, I saw it. He knew exactly where this was going. He nodded slightly, silent assent to tell all. It gave me confidence, and I shifted my voice, my stance, eased into the person I was on camera. Imagined speaking into one, turned the eyes of the students into two dozen little cameras, recording me for that invisible audience that I wouldn’t have to see.

The moment we heard the water running, we jumped out of the stall, Roger pointing the camera with shaky hands at the sink. He’s become a much better camera man since those days, thank God, because when we watched the film back, the sink wasn’t even in frame. But I swear, the sink turned on, all on its own. That was it, that was all that happened. We yelled and laughed so loud that we thought we would get caught, and then we ran out before anyone could find us. I didn’t even notice that we didn’t find any real information until later. All we had was the sound of the sink and our excited cheering. And we posted it online. That was our first viral video, and the start of our ghost hunting career. It was such a lame video too. I’m surprised it got any views at all.

A chorus of groans rounded the classroom as I walked back towards my seat. People said out loud that it was lame, that there had to be more. Even the ones who had started out not paying attention, drawn in by my storytelling. “Is that it?” Roger asked loudly, a knowing grin on his face. “Will, the people demand more. Tell them what else we saw! How does it end?”

“Weren’t you there, too?” a classmate asked. “Why don’t you tell us?”

“I was.” He nodded. “But I’m not the one telling the story.”

“It’s not finished yet,” I said, “I wasn’t given time to write the rest.” Was the subtle dig at the professor absolutely necessary? No, but my confidence was in the clouds and I was feeling untouchable.

“Well, just tell us!” The classmate’s voice rose. The professor shushed him, but they were hooked. Everyone was. They all wanted to know how the story ended now that Roger had insulated that there was more. Hovering over the corner of my table, I managed to pull the last part of the story together, working more of my on-camera personality into it. I just had to pretend that it was all for a video. 

We didn’t see it until much later. Years had passed, our channel was finally a success: over a hundred ghost-hunting videos, millions of views and millions of likes, fan accounts, and brand deals. People had tried debunking us. We’d landed interviews on the morning news. No one could figure it out, and we were great. Both of us were seen as charming and funny. Roger became the practical one, giving benefit of the doubt to the debunkers. Sure, that noise could have been the house settling. Yeah, that shadow might have been caused by our own lights playing off the walls. He was dubbed a skeptic by viewers. He leaned into that role, even though he believed as much as me, the wide-eyed and reckless believer. At one interview, we would have been about fifteen or sixteen years old, they asked us about that first video, the one with Toby, the one that kicked off our viral ghost-hunting careers. They asked a question we didn’t quite understand. We asked them to repeat themselves, to show us the footage. “It wasn’t possible,” I said.

“Well, it had to be someone,” they said.

“We were the only ones in the bathroom,” Roger said.

They showed us the video and asked us again, “Who’s the third person in the bathroom with you?”

“The third person?” that same classmate interrupted, “but you said you didn’t hear anyone come in.” He was shushed by several others, including the professor, who looked as though she were in need of a bowl of popcorn. My confidence soared. Easiest A of my life.

“We were the only two in there,” I said, locking eyes with the classmate, “or so we thought.”

Right at the beginning of the video, before the sink turned on, before we got into the stall. The camera was pointed at the ground, catching the bottom half of one of the open stall doors. Poking out from under the door was a mop of black hair, a grinning face, and two wide eyes. But the thing was, the face was upside-down. In order to be like that, he would have had to hang upside down on the door without it swinging one way or the other, and without falling off. It was impossible. We would have seen him, would have heard him.

Roger and I looked at each other, then at the single blurry frame they’d picked out, then at our parents off-screen. They didn’t know what to say either, so I cleared my throat, looked the anchor in the eyes, and said, “It’s Toby.”

Rileigh Gouveai

Jamestown RI, USA

Rileigh Gouveia is a psych major in her junior year from Jamestown, Rhode Island. She has been writing for eight years and usually writes about fantasy, with most of her stories falling into either D&D-esque, high fantasy stories, superhero stories, or supernatural horror. “The Boy In The Bathroom Stall” is part of a bigger project she has been working on since freshman year.