Slash and Burn: My Housemates from Hell

To this day, I’m still not quite sure how I survived all my housemates at university. Before going to university, I never thought I would struggle so much to understand and be understood by other people but living in a house with a bunch of psychopaths really changes your perspective. And trust me, I don’t use that word lightly.

Originally, in my second year, I was going to live with 5 other friends, but two dropped out and were replaced by 2 of my friend’s first year housemates. The combination of all 6 of us was explosive.

The Best Friend

I was excited to start my second year at university living with my best friend from first year. We started off the year continuing our friendship but then she just… stopped talking to me, and everyone else in the house. She isolated herself and spent all her time in her room, never answering her door when we knocked. I thought she just needed space.

We had a major mould problem in this house, and I had read somewhere that white vinegar was the best for getting rid of it, so I put it in a spray bottle to use for cleaning. One day I came home to find that she couldn’t go in her room as she had combined the vinegar with bleach to clean her room, which released toxic chlorine gas. She still didn’t talk to me after this and spent the night sleeping on the sofa, waiting for her room to fumigate. But after 3 months of her not talking to any of us, she just started talking to us again one night. It was wonderful, I had my friend back, she apologised to us for how she had been, but she had needed space because her grandad had died. But then as soon as the reunion had happened, it was over, and she started isolating herself again. Not long after this, a housemate had made a comment about an ex being a ‘cancerous mongrel’ and wrote this on our whiteboard. One of the worst decisions made in that house was to buy a large whiteboard for our living room with the purpose of keeping track of the bins etc. Well, when one of your housemates no longer talks to you, it quickly becomes a mode of communicating with her. The Best Friend thought this comment was about her, and this led to her and my other housemate furiously passing notes under their doors to each other, attacking each other. You may ask me why I didn’t reach out to her when she was clearly suffering, but I just didn’t know how to. Even in our first year, if she was in a bad mood then she would ignore me for days and I just got used to it. I realise now that that’s not how a friendship should work, but I was so wrapped up in my own pain I didn’t know what to do, so I just left her to it. A few weeks after the letter incident she took an overdose and I took her to hospital. I told her how much I had missed her and that I didn’t understand what she had been going through. She was okay, but the next day her mum came up, and she moved out, and she hasn’t talked to me since.

The Racist

This housemate was undeniably awful. He was incredibly racist to Indian people and said the n-word all the time. He seemed to think he had some right to the word because he was gay, and so I soon learnt to just not spend time with him. He had no sense of anyone else’s privacy, and would send pornography to our house group chat, or show it to us in person. He was absolutely shameless. He would go on about how people with mental health problems deserved no accommodations and made fun of The Best Friend’s overdose. 

One night, I had a boy over, and the next morning as I walked him to the door, The Racist ran up to my room to ‘see if there were any condoms in my bin’. I was so grateful for the deadbolt on my bedroom door.

He never washed his dishes.

The Obsessive

This housemate had also been a friend from my first year. Me and her became closer as The Best Friend distanced herself further and further from me. A development of this was that we would go on nights out together at the SU. She wasn’t a big drinker, but my housemates were certainly turning me into one. She was an insanely jealous and possessive person. I would be made to feel bad for spending time with my other friends, accused of ignoring her, and when I needed days to myself for the sake of my mental health, she just wouldn’t give me a break. I would even get messages from her mum about how we were drifting apart. Anytime a guy would talk to me on a night out, I would suffer her rant at me on the way home. She once told me off for smiling at a guy that she thought was cute because he had smiled back. I thought I was just being polite. The worst night out with her, I was incredibly drunk and we both sat down on a bench outside. A guy came and sat next to me and started talking to me, and then he started kissing me. I said no. I was too drunk to move. He continued. I asked her to help me. She didn’t. She said after that she thought I was joking. She told my other housemates that I wanted it.

Another night, I spent talking to a guy I had just met, only to come home to her being absolutely furious at me. How dare I steal her man (who she had also just met that night). How dare I flirt with someone who showed no interest whatsoever in her, she was in love with him (yes, she actually said that), was already imagining their life together from a 5 minute intro. I felt awful, how could I have made my friend feel like that? I had arranged to meet him another night, but as the day approached, she got more and more depressed about me meeting him, so I cancelled and arranged for another night, intending to stay and cheer her up, I told her I valued her friendship more. I wasn’t going to let some fuckboy get between us. Well. A week later and she came into my room and told me she had asked him out, and he had said yes.

She never did go on that date.

The Sadist

One of the housemates that I originally wasn’t meant to be living with, I didn’t properly meet her til we all moved in, but I remember seeing a picture of her and jokingly saying that I couldn’t trust someone with such bad eyebrows. Oh boy was I right. She often talked down to the rest of us, but she sorted out all the bills so I tried not to get on her bad side even though I knew she talked about me behind my back. 

The first incident happened when I came home from my class and found her crying in the kitchen. Her chest was red with chemical burns. She had been having a shower and used her shower gel when she smelt bleach. Someone had put bleach in her shower gel and it had burnt her skin. We never figured out who did it, but that wasn’t even the worst thing to happen with this housemate.

Then there’s the time she got a dog. Without asking the rest of us, she went out and bought a £500 dog to live in a student house that wasn’t allowed pets, and she planned on keeping it in her room. Unfortunately, she couldn’t keep it in the house because I am allergic to dogs, if she’d bothered to ask before buying the dog, it could have saved her a lot of time, so instead the dog went to live with her parents who she told she had found this pristine pedigree as a stray on the streets. Luckily the dog didn’t stay with us long.

It wasn’t until the next year when she was living with new people that we all saw the true extent of her cruelty. I was called by the landlord from the house I shared with her one day, to ask me if I had paid the bills from the previous year as they were still in my name at the house. I told him that all our bills were paid to The Sadist and that she then paid them, that even though they were in my name, I had nothing to do with them. Luckily he believed me, but he told me that none of the bills, not even rent, had been paid for the new academic year. Turns out, The Sadist had been gathering the money for rent and bills off her new housemates, but not using it to pay the bills. And from there, that’s where everything started flooding out and she started showing her true colours. I found out that she wasn’t even a university student anymore, and therefore, didn’t have any student finance. She was lying to everyone, telling them she was still a student, and then using the money off her housemates to live off. The university had to re-house her other housemates as she was threatening them, and the landlord had to eventually evict her.

The Delusional

After I had escaped my second year house, I had a pleasant third year living with some girls I hadn’t previously known. That year was blissfully drama free with them. Then I made the stupid decision to do a master’s degree. I sent off my application late in the year, and so only had two months to find somewhere to live before the term started. I found some girls who I had mutual friends with looking for another housemate. She had a cat that had just had kittens and I was so excited to meet them! I met the smell before the cats. The house absolutely stank of shit. I thought maybe she was having a one off, hadn’t had the time to empty out the litter tray, but it soon became clear she just didn’t know how to look after them. The litter tray was going weeks without being changed, and three cats were sharing it. The same three cats were sharing a single food bowl, and the kittens were not weaning off their mother because they didn’t have enough to eat. Her room was an absolute pig sty, filled with takeaway containers, and I would find the cats walking around with bits of plastic in their mouths because they were so hungry.

She had a short temper like The Sadist, which I had been on the end of when she accused all of us of using her shampoo, and so my mum offered to talk to her about it. Yes, I am a wimp who hides behind her mum. We told her she would need to start looking after them properly or we would contact the RSPCA. She called the police and told them that me and my mum were trying to kidnap her cats. Luckily, I moved out not too long after as I found a new place, but a fuck up with the useless estate agents meant that they didn’t move someone else into my room, and I had to pay for that house and the new house I moved into.

But the new house was so worth it. Unfortunately, due to the coronavirus pandemic, I only got to live in this house for a few months, but I finally felt home in my university housing. I lived with three wonderful girls, and a gorgeous cat. Our house didn’t smell of shit, no one was racist, no one was jealous. We had craft nights, and danced around together in the kitchen as we cleaned our teeth. Our house was filled with fairy lights and candles and plenty of plants and it was a wonderful place to be. It almost made it worth all the horrible housemates I had to go through to get to this point. Almost.