The outhouse at my best friend’s grandparents house. It had long been abandoned in favor of indoor plumbing but the kids, including me sometimes used it in favor of going into the house. It was kind of rotten and tilted and stank like hell. Light shown through some of the boards. In the spirit of authenty, it was always stocked with a sack of dried corncobs by his grandmother. It was a valuable experience but I wouldn’t opt for one at my house now.
The WalMart in Fresno on Shaw Avenue. Muddy floors, no supplies, water in sinks. One of the toilets was boarded over with a piece of cardboard and someone had used it anyway. The feces was dribbling down the sides onto the floor. I beat a hasty retreat and informed an employee who gave me a blank stare.
I don’t shop at that WalMart anymore.
My wild-ass guess as a woman having experience at these no-toilet toilets (but with toilet paper provided) in Italy - tuck pants and underwear down to around the knees, grab the clothing items into a bunch with one hand so that they’re kept together and in a neat bunch, hand encompassing from top bands and around the crotch area. Pants should be pretty much under control at this point. Squat down, feet planted about shoulder width apart, and do your business in the hole, then use your free hand to hose off your rear.
Looks like Poe to me.
Worst bathroom for me: portapotty at a construction site in Santa Clarita, CA. Just…yuck. And I don’t have a hair-trigger yuck meter.
I always thought the men’s room at our old gas station was pretty dire. I tried to clean it once, but I just couldn’t. It was uncleanable, I swear. On more than one occasion, I caught male customers sneaking into the women’s restroom, but I didn’t blame them. The women’s room wasn’t very pleasant, either, but it was a palace compared to the men’s room.
I’m an insurance adjuster. I once investigated a claim where vagrants had moved into a rental house owned by our insured. There were, of course, no utilities, so they were using the toilet…and tub…as their loo. It smelled so bad that when the police were called, they thought that a rolled up carpet laying in the corner had a decomposing body in it. It didn’t, thank Og, but ewwwwwwwwwww.
In the U.S.: I still remember with horror a gas station bathroom we stopped at once when I was a kid, back before there was a McDonald’s with a clean bathroom at every freeway exit (heck, it was before most freeways). i won’t go into a description, but I have never in my life seen a women’s restroom in a more disgusting state. But we were all so desperate, we used it anyway. <shudder>
Outside the U.S.: My folks lived in India for a few years in the 1950s, and my mom tells me that the women in India don’t squat to pee. She said the women’s bathrooms on the trains were a hole in the floor that the women would just stand over the hole, spread their legs, and let it fly. Obviously, much of it didn’t make it down the hole. For some reason she wouldn’t use the train bathrooms. Gee, I wonder why.
The toilet in “Trainspotting.”
A prison I used to work at had a toilet building out in the yard. But they hadn’t buried the pipes deep enough so they froze in the winter time. So every fall, we would drain out the pipes and close the building and tell the prisoners they had to use the toilets inside. Which was unpopular because they had to ask a guard to unlock the door.
One year, our maintenance department went out when it was getting cold and drained the pipes. But they neglected to lock up the building or tell anyone they were closing it down. So for several hours, prisoners kept using the toilet even though it wasn’t working. Eventually somebody went up to a guard and told him the toilet was “full”. Which it was.
I suppose this doesn’t technically belong in this thread because there was no way in hell I was going inside to actually see this toilet. But from the reports I heard it was a strong contender for the title of “most disgusting bathroom ever”.
the most disgusting toilet I have ever seen was in Glendale California off of one of the exits of the 5 (I was a bit lost so I don’t know exactly where) I had to go pee so bad and the only place that had a public bathroom was the Circle K. I had to wait because someone was in the bathroom. If I would have known what I was going to have to deal with, I would have found someplace outside behind a bush to pee…
This old guy- maybe 70 something- comes out of the bathroom… I walk in… OMFG! There is poo on the toilet rim (the seat was up), poo on the floor, on the wall and the sink. :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek: :eek:
The old guy had apparently had tried to clean it up- hence why he was in there forever…I immediately turned around and went to tell the cashier. I felt so bad for her. She said she would clean it so I could use it. But by this point I was about to wet myself.
I used the hideous toilet by pulling out every contortionist move to take a pee without touching it.
Needless to say- I didn’t wash my hands there. I just used some Purell I had in the car.
Do Portosans count? A couple of years ago my kid and I had walked to a park about 3 miles from our house. It was early in the season and the permanent restrooms (i.e., in a building) weren’t open yet. It was a Sunday so the rec center at the park wasn’t open, either (or maybe it was too early in the season for that, too–anyway it was closed). But there was this Portosan. It was apparently the only bathroom for miles. There was a line. Some people, after waiting in the line, walked in, looked at it, and walked back out. (These were the lucky people riding bicycles or on roller blades who could get someplace else in time.) It wasn’t just that it smelled horrible, it was overflowing. You might as well just pee on the floor. Truly a disgusting experience–but no alternative. Although I think that if I had been wearing sandals I might have chosen to take the chance that I would wet my pants (or my bladder would explode) on the walk home. :eek:
There are worse things than being dehydrated.
A Church of Scientology drug rehab house. The walls and ceiling of the washroom had a brown stucco-like textured surface. The floor was under several inches of compacted brown matter.
When we bought the place, we didn’t attempt to clean the washroom. We simply removed it entirely with sledges, crow bars, and shovels, and even had to replace the supporting beams underneath it.
I haven’t read/seen trainspotting (eek!) but that toilet did seem pretty gross.
Worst I’ve been to would actually be the public bathroom underneath Santa Monica pier. I pity the poor tourists that ventured down there.
The gas station in Leupp, Arizona. It was barfably gross, and it had no toilet paper. Compared to that, the outhouse that I lived with for four months was a paradise. Sure, it had no door, smelled kind of funny, and I lived in mortal terror of falling through the wooden plank they called a seat, but, man, did it have a view!
At the new-ish hotel at Everest Base Camp: the “Zhu Feng View and Admire Floor”. One of the Canadian couple who were travelling with us asked to see the toilets. They were unwashed, probably since the hotel opened, and each filthy squatter pan held an Everest of frozen shit. The staff looked in, shrugged, said “no water”, and locked the door to the toilets. “No toilets,” they said, meaning now for the entire hotel and all its guests.
“Where can we go to the toilet then?” I asked. “Outside,” they giggled. And sure enough the entire area around the hotel was surrounded by human turds and toilet paper. This would have been just about fair enough if the hotel didn’t actually have any water, but it did. And even if the pipes into the toilets were frozen, a bucket and scoop to flush would have sufficed, like in many other Asian guesthouses.
ummmm, Chinese countryside in the 1980’s - so many contenders. I guess the worst was a role of holes without even the pretense of seperating walls, piles of decomposing poop everywhere, the pit below heaving with maggots and pigs. :eek:
It doesn’t come close to many described already, but we once visited a house to rent as a group back in university. It looked ok from the outside, and the price was about what everyone else was charging (though I’m amazed they found people to pay for it!) so we went to look… it was so awful. Water stains on most of the walls and ceilings, all the windows were so fucking dirty there was almost no light coming in at all, some caved in walls, a few nails in a closet to hang clothes on (the current tenant’s clothes were piled on the floor), missing floor tiles on the kitchen floor, wall paper falling down and looking like it had been put up centuries ago… and then the washroom…
The toilet was very much like the trainspotting one, except it had a lid (but no actual seat). Brown water, brown stains, and it made a very bizarre hissing sound. The tub was cracked and peeling, and since it had be built under a sloped ceiling, the shower head was only about 3 feet off the ground. Tiles had fallen off the walls a long time ago (you could tell by the mildew) but the guys living there had merely pushed them to the end of the tub. It stank horribly too.
The guy showing it to us was an agent, working on behalf of the owner, who apparently was a fairly well off business man in Toronto. He apologized, said he should probably never have bothered to let us see the place, but it was his job, and oddly enough, since it was located very close to the university, sooner or later some desperate enough students would rent it. I’m surprised it hasn’t been condemned though.
At a short-oval racetrack near here. There used to be a gents which was just three walls and a piece of guttering laid into the ground. The main reason for it being the worst I’ve seen was the SMELL. Eyewatering, actually painful.
I don’t know about worldwide, or even nationwide, but the bathrooms at the Mall of America have to be among the most disgusting in Minnesota. I had the misfortune of using one today. There were two bloody Band-Aids on the floor, and scraps of paper everywhere. The two open stalls had what appeared to be urine splattered all over the seats (I assumed from “hovering”, which always makes the problem worse.). Well, I was desperate, so I wiped the seat clean with some TP. It turns out that it may not have actually been urine after all, though–I bent over to tie my shoe and the automatic flush started while I was still sitting there. Well, perhaps the forward-thinking folks who designed the megamall installed these special toilets in order to cater to those guests who appreciate an icy cold bidet in the afternoon, but I am not one of these. I stood up–and it flushed again, splattering little droplets of water everywhere, including all over the seat!
The mall bathrooms were not especially disgusting when the mall first opened, but in the past, say, 7-10 years, you can count on them to be at least not quite sanitary. (I know it’s a high traffic place, and tourists seem to love it anyway, but…there’s a reason why locals prefer Rosedale to the MoA at Christmas.) I have to say that being sprayed with toilet water (of the bad kind) has to be a MoA first for me, though.