Frogs in Your Toilet? Shock, Awe, and How You Can Get Rid of Them

There are some of nature's creatures that I simply unequivocally hate. I find them gross, repulsive, and downright frightening. Frogs hold the #1 position on my list, having pushed even alligators out of the top spot for this Floridian.

I am not likely to encounter an alligator in my closet or hiding in a corner of my bathroom, but frogs are sneaky little buggers and show up in all the wrong places.

The story that will follow me to my grave by well-meaning friends who love a laugh at my expense, started with a paper hand-wiping towel on the floor of my guest bathroom. I had recently purchased a supply of decorative hand towels and had stacked them neatly on the vanity. As I was walking by the bathroom, I noticed one of the towels on the bathroom floor.

I was perplexed as there was no fan on in that bathroom; there is no window that could be opened. Could the air conditioning vent have been blowing hard enough to whisk paper towels onto the floor? I restacked the towels and didn't give it too much thought after that.

Later that day, I was walking by that bathroom again, when - whoosh - I swear I saw something fly across the tub. Okay, now I'm getting more than a little nervous. The last time I encountered "flying objects" in my house, they turned out to be frogs leaping? flying? from the open patio door to the kitchen stovetop in the house my late husband and I built when we first moved to Florida 16 years ago. As was his job throughout our marriage, he bravely caught the creature for me and threw it back outside.

But this time, I was alone. No husband to rescue me. Heart pounding, sweat beginning to form on my brow, I slammed the bathroom door, placed a heavy towel across the small, slit opening between the bottom of the door and the threshold, and sat down to think.

If it WAS a frog that I saw, how could it have gotten into the house? As previously mentioned, the window above the tub is decorative only. It can't be opened. There were no holes in the floor or cracks in the tile. What? Where? How did this creature enter my bathroom?

It took two days for me to brave opening that bathroom door again, but I couldn't keep it closed with a towel across the threshold forever, so I slowly and carefully removed the towel, gingerly opened the door, peeked in, and warily started to lift the toilet seat. ARRGGH! A FROG in the toilet! I SLAMMED that toilet seat down as hard as I could, ran to get a heavy book, placed it on top of the seat, shut the bathroom door, and again put towels across the threshold to cover the opening through which a crafty frog could slip.

How were these damn frogs getting into my toilet? Thankfully, it was only the guest toilet that was affected. So far, I hadn't encountered any creatures in my master bathroom.

So now what? Who to call to fix this problem? My ever-helpful friends, after checking every toilet in their own houses, suggested I contact the water department.

"No, no, no", insisted the highly offended woman at the water department. She thoroughly explained how the frogs could not possibly have gotten into my toilet via their water system. I didn't understand what she said, except that she wasn't going to help me.

I then turned to the usually supportive neighborhood website - Next Door.com, where everyone seems to have a solution to everyone else's problem. Most respondents were horrified that I asked about "killing" the frogs and went on tangents about protecting nature's creatures and how useful frogs are to the environment. Yeah, maybe, but not the environment in my bathroom!

One woman offered to come to my house, capture the frogs herself, and release them back into nature. I politely declined her offer.

Finally, I remembered Rick, the handyman, who seemed to be able to fix any problem I ever presented to him.

He asked me to go outside and look at my roof to see if tree branches were laying over it. When I told him the roof was full of them, he said that my issue was tree frogs. There are tubes on the roof that lead down to underneath the toilet -don't ask me why. The frogs were leaping off the tree branches and climbing down the tube which led underneath my toilet. A simple mesh covering over the top of the tube would solve the problem and keep the frogs out.

He installed the mesh, and I never again encountered a frog in my toilet.

And those friends of mine who couldn't resist making jokes about my toilet frogs every time they saw me? They confessed to me that they now turn on the light before going to the bathroom in the middle of the night and check the toilet before sitting on it.

If I have been successful, this little story has not only provided you with a few good chuckles, it has been a valuable public service announcement regarding keeping frogs out of your toilets.

Sorry, I have no information about snakes and baby alligators that find their way into toilets- and I hope I never need it, but if anyone else does, I'm willing to listen. Just in case.

Originally published in Medium.com.

© Copyright 2022 Joan Gershman