Oh No! Another Person Fell into a Trailhead Toilet.

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It happened again!

No, I’m not referring to Taylor Swift extending her Eras tour for the umpteenth time. I have a far more pressing (and disgusting) story to share: another person fell into a trailhead toilet while attempting to retrieve an Apple product. This national nightmare must end.

On Tuesday, September 19, rescue personnel in Ostego County, Michigan received a call from a visitor at the Dixon Lake boat launch, a recreation area an hour south of Cheboygan. According to the incident report, the caller said a woman was stuck at the bottom of an outhouse and was screaming for help. Crews from three different agencies arrived about 30 minutes later and hoisted her out. She later told officials that she was attempting to fetch her Apple Watch from the depths of the toilet when she lost her balance and fell into the mountain of poo and pee at the bottom.

“She was covered in feces,” Lieutenant Derrick Carroll of the Michigan State Police told me. “Crews rinsed her off and the EMS team checked her out but she was OK.”

Some readers may recall this eerily similar story from April, 2022. That’s when an unfortunate woman in Washington State toppled into a pit latrine while trying to save her iPhone. In that instance, the woman had disassembled the plastic potty to expose the hole into the pit, and then created a makeshift harness with a dog leash. Bracing herself with the leash, she leaned way down into the abyss to reach the device, but lost her balance and careened into the muck. Luckily, that woman did get her phone back, and was able to call rescuers from the pit to save her.

The 2022 story generated headlines and think pieces across the country, and my hope was that it would become a public service announcement to the wider population to never, under any circumstances, attempt to salvage a lost item from a trailhead toilet. In my estimation, these stinky structures—which yes, do serve a highly important purpose—are among the most foul places on the planet. For that story I interviewed a handful of experts on trailhead toilets, and while they were split on whether you could actually die from falling in one, they did agree on one element of the story: none had ever heard of anyone falling into one while attempting to save a personal item. Alas, now we have two unfortunate stories in a little over a year.

I phoned up Lieutenant Carroll, a public information officer with the Michigan State Police’s regional office, to hear more about the incident on September 19. There were more than a few bizarre similarities between it and the 2022 rescue in Washington State. Like the 2022 story, the woman in Michigan attempted to fasten a harness system using items from her car. Instead of a dog leash, she tied a strap from a carseat to the outside of the toilet.

“She had attached it to the handicap railing, and she believed she would go down there and then use the strap to climb back up,” Carroll said. “She didn’t have the strength to get herself back up.”

Carroll said the woman in Michigan successfully saved the watch. “She found it floating on top of excrement,” he said.

The women in both stories didn’t stick around too long after they were rescued—both washed off, were checked by medical personnel, and then hit the road. And in both events, officials declined to share the names of the victims—likely for fear that neither would ever receive a hug from loved ones ever again.

Here’s hoping that the woman involved in the September 19 incident is truly OK, and that the trauma she suffered from spending half an hour wading around in offal quickly wears off. Let’s also hope that this latest trailhead toilet near-tragedy is circulated far and wide—enough to dissuade any future outdoor enthusiasts from venturing into the disgusting depths of an outhouse to retrieve a lost item.

There’s final glaring similarity between the 2022 incident and the one on September 19: the response of first responders. In both situations, they were left wondering what personal belonging would entice them to climb into a pit toilet.

“If the winning Lotto ticket was down there I’d still count it as a loss and move on,” Carroll said. “The only thing worth saving from there is your child. Anything else is a ‘no.’”