“Do it for the bit,” as they say. But what if “the bit” is filling bottles with urine and surreptitiously placing them in an affluent California town under the cover of night?
The California town of Pasadena has been mystified by just that—a utility box that is regularly topped with bottles of piss. The bottles seem to appear in the middle of the night, a couple of times a week, with urine filling everything from soda bottles to milk cartons and even gallon jugs.
The City of Pasadena tried thwarting the odd caper by affixing a metal barrier around the top of the utility box, therefore blocking the placement of said piss-filled bottles. But the Piss Bandit, as they’re called, doesn’t give up easily: they tore off the barrier and continued delivering bottles filled to the brim with piss. This has apparently been going on for six years and nobody knows why.
The New York Post reports that neighbors don’t find the bit terribly funny. “I found it disgusting,” said one. “Never did I ever consider it an art form in any way shape or form.” Another neighbor threatened the Piss Bandit. “If I catch you leaving your piss here, I will make you drink every last drop!”
The story of the Piss Bandit went viral more recently after a duo on TikTok, Grant Yansura and Derek Milton, launched an investigation using game cameras and fake construction workers to try and catch the bandit and learn about their motives—was it art, a fetish, or something else altogether? Maybe the Piss Bandit isn’t bad at all, but simply is delivering the goods to others who practice the art of Shivambu.
To find out what’s going on, Yansura and Milton started their investigation by surreptitiously installing a game camera in a bush beside the box, so they could get a look at the bandit when they arrived. What happened next shocked them—after reviewing the footage, they discovered the Piss Bandit placed the bottles on the utility box not from the sidewalk but from over the wall behind it. All they saw was the bandit’s arm thrust out from over the wall, placing down bottles like they were confidently setting down chess pieces.
Alas, the Piss Bandit wouldn’t be caught so easily. Yansura and Milton needed more cameras, placed inside the tree on the other side of the wall.
After installing the new cameras, they quickly found their guy: a man in his mid-30s or 40s wearing latex gloves with a flashlight. “This clearly seemed premeditated and very intentional,” Yansura says in one of the videos. “I thought getting a visual of the culprit would give me some closure, but in reality it only doubled my curiosity.”
Eventually after testing some of the urine and finding it was genuine, clean piss, and making some assumptions about his clothing, they decided the culprit must be an artist of some kind. And any self-proclaimed artist will surely want to be interviewed, so they placed a large handwritten pad with questions and a sharpie at the site, hoping he’d write out responses explaining why he’s doing all of this.
That decision backfired, as it alarmed the Piss Bandit, who discovered the camera and stole it, leaving the question pad untouched. Even more alarmingly, the camera, which is internet-connected and remotely sends back footage, days later pinged with a picture of Sunset Cliffs in San Diego. The Piss Bandit was clever and calculated.
Eventually, the Piss Bandit returned to the site and retaliated further by dropping larger bottles of piss and scrawling a demonic smiley face on one.
The duo installed a new, more sophisticated security camera with live video that they could speak through, and caught the Piss Bandit… in a mask, as he pulled down the camera. And that was where the story ended. The duo didn’t feel comfortable trying to physically approach the Piss Bandit at night out of fear of getting shot or stabbed, so it was over. They would never know the true motives of the Piss Bandit.
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