Happy Halloween: we’ve compiled all your spookiest flatshare experiences

Back in the day (the seventies, in this case) people had ghosts. My Dad’s childhood home was plagued by one called Tarnine, for example — she was a pesky but friendly ghost who (purportedly) once snapped all my grandma’s cigarettes in half in the middle of the night. Tarnine hated smokers. She was a bit like Keir Starmer in that sense. Flash forward to 2024, however, and we don’t really get so much of that… Well, ish. Thanks to something of a rental crisis happening over here in the UK, we’re all squished together in flatshares, oftentimes with people we didn’t know prior to arriving at their abode with a load of boxes (one likely containing a rice cooker). And what’s birthed from that is a smorgasbord of experiences, ranging from the lightly menacing to something that might get dramatised for Netflix’s Worst Roommate Ever. We asked HUNGER readers to submit their best, and compiled them here for your reading pleasure. They’re all anonymous in order to protect the identity of those involved, but also because I’ve submitted a fair few of them. If you know me, you can probably guess which ones they are.

Un flatmate petit

My flatmate circa 2018 must have been about 4 foot 8 — she was maybe the smallest person I’ve ever seen. She wore exclusively all black, loose clothes and you’d never see her at “normal times”. Either excessively early (maybe 5am) or really late, when she’d be in the kitchen doing something odd like boiling a tomato. She sought out really niche things to give her sustenance. I think she might have been a witch, or a ghost. Never spoke, never had friends over.

Hair in a pair of pliers

My first flat in London. Suspiciously cheap. Fully-furnished room in a new build, owned by this 29-year-old guy. £350 a month, bills included. He was so sweet — he knew I was broke so would routinely make extra dinner for me, even leave some for me to take to work. Let me pay my measly amount of rent late once. And it was a temporary situation before his sister moved in, so I was only there for four months. Anyway, he had fuck loads of Nazi books because he “loved history” (22-year-old me didn’t think about that too much). But he had this hidden drawer in the coffee table with weed in it that I was welcome to if I wanted. I found a leatherman multitool right at the back — loads of long, black human hair was wrapped around the plier attachment. Never confronted him about it. 

Flat-stroke-corridor 

Not so much a flatmate experience, but odd nonetheless — went back to a guy’s place after a few too many drinks, unbridled from the kind of inhibitions that would make one question if that’s a good idea. As we’re heading to his, he tells me to prepare for the fact that his flat is, in essence, a corridor. I don’t think much of it, but when I enter, I realise he’s really not being hyperbolic. It’s about two metres wide. We have a pizza. Other stuff happens. He returns to the pizza, naked, and eats it in front of a window that overlooks Bow high street. If he stretched his arm out, he would be able to touch the wall. 

Never take your shoes off 

When I frequented warehouse parties in the Manor House area, I’d meet an absolutely mental assortment of characters. The same night I saw someone smoking crack, I heard this guy talking about what he “would” do if he wanted to spend a night with a “prostitute”. He knew a lot of details — the kind you’d only know if you had a fair bit of experience with soliciting a sex worker. I also got sucked into a conversation with this girl who insisted on telling me about her idea for a startup. It was personalised boxes of cheese that would be posted through your letterbox. I had a lot of questions about what would happen to the cheese if, say, you were away and the cheese was just festering on your doormat. She didn’t really have an answer for that, but we went over the logistics of the hypothetical cheese company many, many times while (trapped) in her room. Also, when I got to the party I’d asked if I should take my shoes off. She replied with, “The first rule of warehouse parties: never take your shoes off”. 

The bag of hair

I spent so much time with this one girl at uni that she became akin to a flatmate of sorts. I’d be around hers all the time, but the more and more time I spent there I’d find increasingly weird shit. Once she very kindly allowed me to use her hall’s room to host this guy I was seeing (she was away and I’d already moved out of my place). I had to do a real deep-clean to make it inhabitable and while doing so I found this bag of hair. It was like all the bits of hair that you’d pull from a hairbrush, clearly collected over a long time. That wasn’t an isolated event either. When she moved somewhere else a few years later she had a phlegm pot — a pot by her bed that she’d just hack into. It had solidified a bit. 

Mark the gimp

Another warehouse party story — I went to one in Hackney Wick and met this American woman who was talking very loudly about how she wanted to have sex with men named after Jesus’ apostles. She had this guy with her called Mark, too. He was (perhaps really begrudgingly) okay with the apostles thing, though I think he might have been her gimp. He enjoyed being cucked, at least. 

Views

When I lived in uni halls that overlooked Regent’s Canal, I’d regularly see divers looking for dead bodies. 

The petrified mop

I went to a BBQ at this big house in Peckham that I’d describe as the closest thing to an IRL version of Count Olaf’s house in A Series of Unfortunate Events. I had to rifle through drawers to find any semblance of cutlery and there was so much random shit in every one that it felt like you might see a mouse scuttling about in there. When I sat in the garden, I became particularly fixated on this mop — it had clearly been used at one point, then just left to fester. It was literally petrified, frozen in motion. Me and the mate I went with had also found this quite nice chair on the street on the way. We’d popped it in a room where we assumed it would be safe from theft, but when we went to leave (maybe forty-five minutes later) it was like it had become part of the house’s weird microbiome. There was shit all over it. It was like something out of Annihilation. I think if we’d given it a couple more hours, it would have been like the mop. 

Breaking point

The guys that live in the flat below me aren’t the best to live with. They leave the communal front door wide open and the smell of smoke (they’re heavy smokers) is always seeping up through the drains. They also operate at mad times. I reached breaking point when I could hear one of them yelling down the phone. I got a hammer out and just went at my floor (and his ceiling). He marched up to my door and spoke to me through it. I pretended I’d been putting up a picture. He told me it was “too early” for hammering — it was 3pm. One of them even accused me of being “crazy” and “hearing voices” because I once went down to theirs and said I could hear someone talking really loudly on the phone. After this interaction (which happened at about 2am) they came up and complained about the noise from our party (which we pre-warned them about). Then another guy came up and said, “Sorry about him. He has mental problems”. Also, whenever I go to WhatsApp one of them, his display picture has changed. One day it will be a wolf, the next the eiffel tower.

The exhibitionist

Once I had a flatmate who’d have threesomes with his bedroom door open.

Salad cream pasta

Not necessarily spooky, but I lived with this woman who was so filthy — she would store all her pots, pans, utensils and dried foods in her room because she thought we’d steal from her. The one meal she’d make was a whole packet of pasta mixed with half a bottle of salad cream, a whole large tin of tuna… and microwaved ham. I’d be cooking in the kitchen and she’d make it in front me. She’d be microwaving that ham like it wasn’t the most heinous thing in the world. Then she’d shove it all in this massive plastic salad bowl and waddle off to her room to eat it.

The Seven Sisters house

My time in a flatshare in Seven Sisters came to an end after having a small nervous breakdown, and my mum having to come pick me up. Right off the bat, the flat, which was mostly basement level, was pervasively damp. It was so damp that the sofas (one of which was practically a row of tube seats) were constantly cold to the touch. And the flatmates… One got really into making sourdough during the lockdown. On the surface, that sounds like a nice thing, but he got really irate with me when I didn’t cut it in the “right” way. I would be fine with that if it weren’t for the fact that he also cooked these massive hunks of meat which would live on the surface tops for days. We had a particularly bad domestic about this meat fat he wanted to keep in the fridge. It was there for weeks and every time I suggested it might be time for it to go in the bin, he would insist it was a vital element of our foodstores. Perhaps the worst night at the flatshare was when I tried to host a murder mystery party. It was meant to be a costumed affair, but I was the only person who put any effort in. I descended the stairs to the horrible basement in full Sherlock Holmes-esque garbs, only to be met with the blank faces of many un-costumed people. I went up to my room to cry at one point. Unfortunately, my bedroom window looked over our garden and I heard one of my guests bitching about me. 

Unsolicited taxidermy 

I once lived with a flatmate who collected taxidermy but didn’t warn us about it. He didn’t just keep it in his room either — there were all these weird animals everywhere. 

The basement in Bow 

Not so much a flatshare, but somewhere I’d frequent for an afters a lot. A key fixture was this huge, deep oven tray that would perpetually be on the floor, filled with their favourite meal: a load of cooked frozen chips covered in mayo and various other condiments. They’d pick at it over the course of a few days. They’d also smoke indoors, which would be forgivable if they weren’t also ashing into their carpet. If you went round, you’d be forced to rap a verse on whatever “music” they were producing and they had a particularly fraught relationship with their neighbour Julian, who, unfortunately, was a priest. He would be knocking on the door at all hours. They were threatened with eviction on a bi-weekly basis.