True or false: swimming pools put a chemical in the water that dyes the area around you if you pee?
Craig Barsky: As a kid, I remember being warned not to pee in certain swimming pools because of a chemical that would turn red and let everyone know what I had just done. Did this chemical ever exist? I’m pretty sure it was just another lie that adults tell kids.
Dr Mike: And we’re pretty sure you have encountered one of the western world’s most potent and longest-running urban legends.
The bad news is that we’ve made some pretty extensive enquiries among pool chemical experts both here and in the US without finding anyone who’s ever come across the chemical you refer to. The good news is that we have located several people who reckon they know how the whole story got started.
Water treatment expert John Lamb, for example - whose company Biolab sells the most complete range of pool chemicals available in the UK - says: ‘If this sort of product existed I would know about it, and I don’t. We don’t sell anything of the sort - the story is just a myth.’ Lamb’s theory is that the dye rumour originated in the States nearly half a century ago, at a time when enterprising sign companies are known to have marketed numerous wall plaques which aimed at deterring phantom pool piddlers. ‘They were mostly bought by private pools,’ he says. ‘They were meant to be light-hearted, but I suppose they did also have a deterrent effect. I remember one which showed a figure swimming in the bowl of a WC. IT said: ‘Don’t pee in our pool and we won’t swim in your toilet.’
Signs of this sort started going up in the early 1960s, Lamb believes - and it’s easy to see how rumours could have begun to circulate about dyes put into the pool the enforce the warnings on the signs.
Indeed, after several weeks of firing off enquiries to all and sundry, we made an unexpected breakthrough when we stumbled across the eccentric Derek Acca, head honcho at Surex International, a pool chemicals business based in glamorous, cosmopolitan Biggin Hill. Decca’s the man who claims to have unleashed the secret slash seeker rumour in the UK in the early 70s.
‘The dye story’s bullshit,’ he told Ask Bizarre. ‘What happened was that in the late 60s I came across something called a ‘Pizz Tab’ on a trip to the States. They were made by Gulf Industries in Newark, NJ, I think. Lifeguards there had taken to dropping them into their pools as a joke. A Pizz Tab was an orange effervescent tablet - I can’t remember what it was actually meant to do, I just know that it was over-priced and full of crap. But it turned out to be great for humiliating kids who had been annoying the pool staff.’
So great, Acca admits, that he purchased a consignment of Pizz Tabs and brought them back to the UK, where he and some lifeguard friends made merry with them circa 1970. Which could explain how so many people are sure they know a friend of a friend who peed in a pool once and…