Disclaimer: This is a short story spoof on the “The Twilight Zone” episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” regarding the Main Street Plumbing Issues. This story is in no way an actual report, and the outcome of events in this story have not taken place in real life.
All houses on Main Street have either been abandoned or evacuated. It is a ghost street, but why? It all started two months ago when students and staff were exasperated by sludge from the toilets overflowing into residence halls, as well as academic buildings. All of the RAs were instructed to address this issue with Main Street residents in hall meetings, as a pipe was dug up, and it was found that things that did not belong in the toilet were getting flushed. All were informed that the cause of the sludge was originating from a house on Main Street.
But which? As each day passed, the problem did not seem to be getting better. There was the ever-looming threat of a pipe being dug up, and residents of certain houses needing to temporarily move out. The students of some residence halls decided to take matters into their own hands, and try to root out who was the culprit. For example, in Todd Hall, an insomniac frequented the halls late at night.
Some would spot her making food, doing crafts in the commons, or in the bathrooms most importantly. With certain articles of laundry recently going missing, and some said articles being found in the drains, it only made sense that perhaps these newly missing articles were being thrown down the drain in the middle of the night. The residents agreed to stay up until the wee hours of the morning to try to see if they could find any evidence. Well, they stayed up so late that they all ended up falling asleep.
Some residents missed tests in the morning, and some slept through the day entirely. Arguments erupted on who was the first to be undutiful in their watch so badly, that each decided not to give in, and move out. The insomniac followed suit, as they didn’t want to be alone in the house. They dispersed to other residence halls. Similarly, it was said that kitty litter was found in the pipes… upwards of 100 pounds of it! The residents of Musser Hall knew of people who owned cats… and were never spotted throwing the litter away in the trash. In fact, the cat owners claimed that sometimes they found the litter changed all by itself, and their roommates said that they weren’t the ones changing it!
The residents enforced a ban on changing the kitty litter for a number of weeks, checking on it each day, and seeing if the overflow got better. It did not, even though the kitty litter remained in one place. Meanwhile, a stench of the untouched, neglected litter boxes built up, creating toxic fumes, for they did not know… their cats had IBS. All the residents were displaced, and a fumigation team had to come in to remove airborne biohazards.
With all dorms being filled to capacity elsewhere, the residents had to camp on the Berman lawn, leaving all their belongings subject to the mass amount of squirrels stealing them. In another example, one resident of Commonwealth was always openly peeved about hair being left all over in the shower in the single-person bathroom. They suspected him of messing up the other bathrooms for the rest of the house in revenge for being unable to have a peaceful shower without being faced with wads of hair. In response, they defaced the bathrooms further, leading to them being closed for an extended period so that the hardworking maintenance crew could attempt to remediate the situation. As a result, all of them had to run across the street at all hours of the day and night to use the bathroom at Marzella’s, or other academic buildings… some of the students were not getting there in time. Due to this inconvenience, the residents of this building also set up camp around campus. This string of events continued in all houses across Main Street until each one was empty, with the college attempting to place all the residents into the Freshmen dorms, New, and North. This, of course, caused immense overcrowding, yet everyone refused to go back to Main Street.
But what does it matter? We, the Main Street Pipe Goblins have found ourselves new homes, and we are big fans of Victorian Style Architecture. See, we have been stealing items by crawling out of the toilets every day and night for years, but we ramped up the business so much these past couple of months. For years, we hoped a pipe would burst so that students would leave one of the houses for an extended period. But again, this would only be one. Why not have our pick? The Main Street Pipe Goblin council figured that once this issue was brought to the student’s attention, by human nature, they would inevitably turn on each other to find the culprit, inevitably leaving for good. We now finally have lairs to brew our spells that will turn every Ursinus student into a goblin!