Informant: There’s a haunted bathroom stall…

Collector: Oh! Tell me about that!

Informant: So we have the toilets that automatically flush when you walk out of the stall, except this one stall flushes nonstop.

Collector: What?!

 Informant: They always bring in maintenance people to try and find something to fix it, and they can’t find a problem with it. They’ve replaced the monitor, they’ve replaced everything on it and it keeps doing it.

Collector: That’s so weird.

Informant: So, they’ve come up with, like, a legend that—because it’s a Catholic school— that it’s a nun who sits on the stall the whole night and just poops all night.

Collector: Oh my.

Informant: And that was one of the first things I heard about it. I got up to go to the bathroom one night and it just kept flushing and I asked someone about it and that’s what he told me.

Collector’s Notes: I’ve noticed that legends and ghost stories over the years, have been used as a way to explain things that we don’t understand.  In this case, no one could figure out what was going wrong with the toilet repeatedly flushing.  So, they created a ghost culprit.  Of course they couldn’t fix it; an unwordly being was messing with it.  What’s intersting about this particular ghost story, is that I think it’s supposed to be comforting.  For those who would be bothered or afraid of the seemingly “phantom” toilet, there was comedic relief.  The story was about a nun ghost pooping endlessly.  It’s one of the few funny ghost stories that I’ve ever heard.  These guys are in a new place, and out on their own for the first time.  They may be nervous and apprehensive about sharing living quarters with a bunch of guys they don’t know.  This story probably eased a lot of the tension, and gave neighbors something to talk about and bond over.