The Day the Lights Went Out When I Flushed the Toilet

Written By:  Andrew Eide

When my father and brother built the second floor on our home they put a small bathroom off the Master Bedroom. This small bathroom only had a sink and a toilet and it was located above the stairway you used to walk to the 2^nd floor of the house.

I would often play upstairs as my bed was located in the hallway upstairs behind a curtain. This day I had to pee so I went into the bedroom in my parent’s master bedroom rather than run all the way downstairs to the main bathroom.

As I finished I hit the lever on the toilet to flush the toilet. The instant I pressed the flush level the lights in the bathroom went out. Since that bathroom had no window it was so dark in there I couldn’t see anything. It took me a long time to find the latch to open the door of the bathroom to get out.

I was so frightened that I ran downstairs and outside where the light was.

When my father got home I told him that flushing the toilet caused the lights to short out and go dark. He laughed and I told him I didn’t think it was something to joke about. He took me outside and showed me that there was a construction crew working on the street. He said they told him that they accidentally broke the electrical cable that provides electricity to our home.

So my father told me that it was an extreme coincidence that they broke the electrical cable and the exact same time I flushed the toilet in that bathroom.

Well I will tell you this. From that day until we move to Saint Andrews Road every time I used that bathroom in the master bedroom I would leave the door open. Also I would have one food outside of the bathroom door and then reach over and flush the toilet. The instant the toilet started to flush I would run as fast as I could out of there, down the stairs, and outside to the backyard.

The initial experience was so traumatizing that I was never able to flush that toilet with the door closed again.