Chilling Tales from the Porcelain Seat: Roto-Rooter's Bathroom Reader Book

Roto-Rooter plumbers see things most people never will.

Over decades of service calls, the technicians who show up at your door at midnight have retrieved prosthetic eyes from city sewer lines, pulled tree roots the weight of a small car from residential pipes, and responded to situations so strange they barely make sense in the retelling.

In 2009, the company decided to write it all down.

Chilling Tales from the Porcelain Seat is Roto-Rooter's own bathroom reader, a collection of true plumbing stories, toilet trivia, historical facts, practical advice, and genuine horror from the field.

It is the book that proves plumbing, at its most unfiltered, is one of the most interesting jobs in America.

What Is Chilling Tales from the Porcelain Seat?

Chilling Tales from the Porcelain Seat is a book published by Roto-Rooter Press, written by Paul Abrams and Jennifer Jones, with commentary by Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson of SyFy's Ghost Hunters. The first print edition was released on August 23, 2010.

The book is small enough to sit flat on a toilet tank lid, built for short sessions rather than long reads. Each entry is a vignette, self-contained, brief, and easy to pick up and put down.

The contents include:

• True stories from Roto-Rooter plumbing technicians across the country
• Plumbing horror stories submitted by homeowners who lived through them
• Toilet trivia and historical plumbing facts
• A classification of flusher personality types
• Practical DIY tips and what-not-to-do guides
• Advice on winterizing pipes and handling plumbing emergencies
• Photos of objects found in pipes

The book sits at the intersection of entertainment and education.

Roto-Rooter public relations manager Paul Abrams described the submissions this way: some of the stories were so outlandish it was impossible to think anyone could have made them up.

When Ghost Hunters Meet Plumbing Horrors

Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson are best known as the founders of The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS) and the stars of Ghost Hunters, the long-running SyFy channel reality series that followed their team as they investigated reported hauntings across the country.

What their fans sometimes forget is that both men were working Roto-Rooter plumbers long before the cameras arrived.

Hawes, based in Warwick, Rhode Island, had been a Roto-Rooter technician for years before Ghost Hunters launched in 2004. It was Hawes who brought Wilson into the plumbing business.

The two were colleagues and close friends who spent their days snaking drains and their nights investigating paranormal reports. Even as the show grew into a cable television hit, both men continued showing up for plumbing calls as working technicians.

Their involvement in Chilling Tales from the Porcelain Seat was a natural fit. Hawes and Wilson contributed commentary throughout the book, appearing alongside the plumbing stories with observations and one-liners that reflect their particular experience of the world.

Plumbing Horror Stories That Actually Happened

The stories in Chilling Tales from the Porcelain Seat came from two sources: Roto-Rooter technicians who submitted accounts from their own service calls, and homeowners across the country who wrote in with their own plumbing disasters.

What follows are some of the stories that defined the book.

The Prosthetic Eye

A Roto-Rooter plumber in Chicago received a call about a lost item in a sink drain. The item in question was a prosthetic eye valued at $5,000.

The eye had slipped from the owner's hand while he was cleaning it over the sink and disappeared down the drain before he could react. By the time the technician arrived, the eye had traveled all the way to the main sewer line.

Using a fiber optic camera, the technician located the eye in the sewer, navigated the camera to its position, and retrieved it intact. The owner washed it off and placed it back in his eye socket on the spot.

The Chocolate Bunny

A homeowner received an Easter basket from her mother-in-law that included a chocolate bunny. Rather than eat the calories, she decided to flush the bunny down the toilet.

Chocolate, it turns out, is not water-soluble enough to move cleanly through a residential toilet trap. The toilet clogged immediately and stayed that way until Roto-Rooter arrived.

The Beer Bottle Disposal

A Roto-Rooter technician was dispatched to what was reported as a simple kitchen sink clog at the apartment of a man in his early twenties.

The homeowner greeted the plumber with a sheepish expression and explained that he had hosted a party the night before. During the party, he and his guests had pushed beer bottles down the kitchen sink drain and run the garbage disposal for entertainment.

The number of bottles: just under two full cases.

The garbage disposal was destroyed. The drain line was packed with broken glass. The repair cost significantly more than the bottles of beer had.

The Monster Root Contest

For many years, Roto-Rooter ran an internal annual competition among its franchisees across the country. The rules were simple: submit photos and measurements of the longest tree root extracted from a drain line during the year.

The winner earned recognition within the company. The contest was called the Monster Root Contest.

What the Monster Root Contest revealed is how extreme this problem can become when a root infiltration goes undetected for long enough.

The roots submitted to the contest were not the thin, hair-like tendrils that a standard drain cleaning removes in minutes.

These were dense, fibrous masses that had been growing inside pipe systems for years, sometimes decades. Some weighed hundreds of pounds. Some required hours of work to extract. Some filled the back of a service truck.

The contest and its entries appear in Chilling Tales from the Porcelain Seat alongside photos that make the written descriptions feel understated.

What the Book Teaches You

Beyond the entertainment, Chilling Tales from the Porcelain Seat carries a consistent thread of practical plumbing knowledge built from decades of real service calls. A few of the practical lessons that surface across the stories:

• Drains are not garbage disposals: Cooking grease solidifies inside pipes. Flushable wipes do not break down in residential sewer systems. Coffee grounds, pasta, and rice expand and compact inside drain lines. Toilets handle human waste and toilet paper. Everything else belongs in a bin.
• DIY plumbing has real consequences: Several stories document homeowners who turned a minor problem into a major one. Hawes put it plainly: his best do-it-yourself plumbing advice is to call a professional. The pattern across these stories is consistent: the original problem was small, and the DIY attempt made it significantly more expensive.
• Tree roots are a slow and invisible threat: The root system of a front yard tree follows moisture underground for years before a symptom appears at a drain. By the time a homeowner notices slow drainage, the root growth inside the pipe may already be substantial. Annual inspections catch this before it reaches Monster Root territory.

Where to Get the Book

Chilling Tales from the Porcelain Seat is available on Amazon in paperback. Search for the title or the ISBN 9781615395668 to find the listing.

Every Plumber Has a Story

The stories in Chilling Tales from the Porcelain Seat are funny, alarming, and occasionally hard to believe. They are also true. Every one of them represents a service call that a real Roto-Rooter technician responded to, diagnosed, and resolved.

If any of them sound familiar, Roto-Rooter is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including weekends and holidays. Whether it is a slow drain, a suspected root infiltration, a frozen pipe, or something stranger, our team has seen it before.

Need our help? Schedule service online today.