We’re always fascinated by animals showing in odd places or doing strange but amusing things—just look at pizza rat. But when one myth recently appeared to come to life, people easily found it both horrifying and endearing.
On TikTok, the account @whatisnewyorkofficial—which posts videos from around the city—shared a video of a rat in a toilet. We don’t see the rat emerge to enter the toilet bowl, but we see the rat raising its head, moving its hands, and even shivering a little.
Rats traveling through a toilet’s pipes aren’t completely unheard of. In 2015, National Geographic released a video showing how it was possible for a rat to do so. With a view of the toilet’s pipes, we see how a rat is able to contort its body to get through some narrow passageways and travel up without drowning or breaking all of the bones in its body.
In reality, watching something like a rat coming out of your toilet would likely be horrifying. But on TikTok? There’s almost something oddly adorable about it.
For instance, Jacqueline Devine serenaded the rat with a short snippet of Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York.”
TikTok @philritz1 posted a duet with the video to explain that something like this doesn’t happen often—it just looks like it does because we tend to film it when it does—and what you should do if you encounter a rat in your toilet.
And commenters were torn about how to handle the rat in the toilet. Some wanted to help him, but others wanted to flush him.
“NOPE,” the Empire State Building’s TikTok account comment.
But no matter how unlikely something like this might happen, sometimes a video like a rat coming out of a toilet is a reminder of a fear you never knew you had; one TikToker even said that this scenario was exactly the reason why he went to the bathroom standing up.
“This is my worse fear,” @aye_its_mheee_unique wrote.