"I'm sorry in advance for the nightmares," the creator of the @cursedbathrooms Twitter account writes in the description, and from the looks of it — they have a point. Ever since the page was created in January 2011, it never stopped sharing images of the wackiest and most bizarre lavatories that we pray never to step foot in.
The other page in question, @scarytoilet, has only been active for a few years but has already gained a strong foothold on the platform. As of this writing, it has amassed over 236K users on Twitter and a staggering 584K followers on Facebook. The creator of these pages, a UK-based freelance filmmaker Phil Wilson, collects the weirdest toilets from around the world and offers one of the most perplexing galleries online where the pictures range from humorous to straight-up terrifying.
"I was having a night in with my nan and she started talking about her toilet and how she felt it was threatening," Phil told Vice about how he came up with the idea to start his project. "It just spiraled from there." He first started posting these baffling images to Facebook and created the Twitter account "once the original page took off." In the beginning, he scoured the internet and went down Google rabbit holes for extremely intimidating toilet photos. But later on, the pages accumulated enough of a following so he could mainly share new posts from fan-submitted images.
"I generally get about 200 messages a day, so it takes quite a lot of time to sift through it all," the creator of the page told Curbed. You see, Phil considers himself a pretty normal guy with an unusual hobby. He is grateful for all the support his community — "wonderfully odd people" — has given him, so he tries to respond to every comment his pages receive. But can you guess Phil’s biggest takeaway from running the account? "The internet’s a really weird place," he said, and we couldn’t agree more.
But looking through these puzzling pictures does beg the question, how does Phil know which photos capture the essence of a menacing toilet and which ones fall a bit short? Well, he mentioned to INSIDER that there are a few criteria to consider when deciding whether a loo has a threatening aura. "I look for one of two things; actual intimidation, like something derelict or unsettling you wouldn’t usually see associated with toilets," he explained. "Or something funny, which most of the content has become." When asked whether he has any ideas for the future of his project, he said, "At the moment I'm content with just providing a daily dose of toilet."
To learn more about this emerging trend of uneasy and disturbing images that seem to rule the internet, we previously reached out to Frank T. McAndrew, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Knox College. "The 'cursed image' is an internet phenomenon," he told Bored Panda. "It is an image that is unsettling because there is something not quite right about it, but we often cannot pinpoint exactly why it is so disturbing."
"It may combine things that should not go together (a cherry pie with a bleeding human face baked into it?) or it presents an object in a context where it does not belong," the professor continued. When asked why they make us feel uncomfortable, McAndrew explained that we humans dislike the feeling of uncertainty. "We like to make sense of the world around us, and things that defy our expectations or things that are difficult to categorize throw us off our game."
But as we can see from these two Twitter accounts, masses of people enjoy looking at creepy and ridiculously strange images while scrolling through their social media feeds. "People who are tolerant of ambiguity or open to new experiences may be drawn to them because they offer a pleasant diversion from normality and present us with a cognitive puzzle to solve," he noted and added that other people simply find them unpleasant.
"We are programmed by evolution to intently focus on unexpected or unusual things in our environment. It is essential to determine if such things pose some sort of threat to us or not, and cursed images hijack the part of our brain that is responsible for protecting us," McAndrew concluded.
