Horror Stories: Keep Your Eye on the Pool

By Alex Stewart, CPO Advisory Council Member

There are few things as disgusting as peeling back a cover on a swimming pool that has been closed for the season. For my warm weather compatriots, this is a probably a foreign process. Count your blessings.

It was a crisp spring afternoon in my sophomore year of high school. My dad owned his own swimming pool company and I was one of two employees, my older brother being the other. We generally opened 30 to 40 pools every spring, and the one we were working on currently felt like just another day in algae-addled paradise. The cover was pulled and folded neatly on the deck and the swimming pool was freshly power-washed and delicately acid-bathed. It had gone from desolate swampland to sparkling oasis in a matter of a few hours.

The only thing left was the last 18 inches of water in the deep end of the pool. The dreaded 18 inches. Filled with the grossest, slimiest, most putrid ingredients that had settled at the bottom of the pool over the winter months (not to mention all the debris that had been sprayed off the walls of the pool during the power-washing), this last 18 inches of water was always the most stomach-churning part of the cleaning process. It also required that someone constantly babysit the pump in order to prevent leaves, large chunks of algae, and other sludge from clogging the pump, thus preventing the pool from being fully drained. On this fateful afternoon, I was the babysitter in the pit.

Protected by my floppy yellow rubber boots, I stood in mid-calf-height sludge tending faithfully to the pump. Every 30 seconds or so I would pull the pump from the sump hole, rake my hand around the debris grate, deposit the slop into a Home Depot bucket, and plunge the pump back down in the murky darkness to continue its work. As I was hunched over the surface of the swampy water, my face inches from its slimy surface, something started to emerge from the inky darkness.

It first started as an abstract shape, shrouded by the swarm of filth and algae, but slowly its form took clearer shape, color, and detail. The orb, about the size of a large gumball, floated to the surface, rotated 180 degrees, and revealed a shriveled blue iris surrounding a gaping black pupil. I was staring at an eyeball in the pool.

Once the realization of what I was looking at dawned on me, I did what any self-respecting sophomore in high school would do: I ran from the pool in a full-blown, horrified panic. Hyperventilating on the deck of the pool, I called my dad. He made his best attempt at calming me down, using only a few expletives in the process. He tried to convince me that it was just a grape, or a tomato, or some sort of plant debris. There was simply no way an eyeball could end up in a swimming pool.

To say it took a mountain of convincing to get me back in the swimming pool is an understatement, but I did eventually enter back into the pit. After all, the job had to be done. I clung to the feeble hope that I had just been mistaken. “It was just a grape” became my mantra that allowed me to cling to my sanity. I continued to plunge my hand into the murky deep and grab out the pump to clear it of debris, all while burying the terror of potentially grazing a knuckle against that elusive orb of horror in the process. Slowly but surely the water level dropped, until I eventually had to remove the last remaining gallons of sludge with a shop vac. My dad was right, I had to be seeing things, because that thing never floated back up to stare into my soul again.

My blood pressure had lowered to normal range and I was back in a good headspace about the whole thing. I sucked up the last of the sludge into the shop vac and wheeled it out to the curb to dump it into the gutter (times were different back then in regard to where you could dump your pool waste). I removed the vac top and dumped the contents out into said gutter. The slimy water ran down and away, but a small mound of sludge remained. And in that little sludge mound rested a single grayish-white orb—shriveled blue iris, inky black pupil, and full optic nerve included. It wasn’t just a grape.

That moment has haunted me for decades now. It’s not that I saw an eyeball in the pool. In fact, over the following years, I would find things much more disturbing in swimming pools than the eyeball. What truly haunts me about this incident is the fact that the animal kingdom has very few instances where blue eyes naturally occur in a full-sized eyeball the size that I saw in the pool that day. There’s really only species I can find where blue eyes are common into adulthood, and that’s…

Well, I’ll let you decide which species that is.