Cockroaches in My 80s Student House: A Lifelong Phobia — SkimNews
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- The author moved into a Longsight, Manchester student house in the 80s after the landlord claimed the current tenants were third-years doing finals; a knock on the door days later revealed the house was infested with cockroaches.
- German cockroaches can multiply from two individuals to roughly two million in a couple of years, eat anything including rubbish and sleeping humans, and can survive for days without heads.
- A daytime cockroach sighting behind a housemate's armchair — in broad daylight, when roaches normally hide — signaled a serious overcrowding issue, which proved accurate.
- A hazmat-suited pest controller sprayed white powder throughout the house regularly, and the chemicals on the carpet accidentally cured a housemate's three-year-old verruca.
- The housemates placed each leg of their beds in saucepans of water to drown climbing roaches — though the author later learned cockroaches can close their breathing valves and survive submerged for 30 minutes.
- The author developed katsaridaphobia and still dreams about the experience, but frames it as making them tougher: subsequent encounters with mice, head lice, threadworms, and scabies all pale next to cockroaches.
Why it matters: The essay reframes a routine student-housing hazard — pest infestation — as a formative trauma, and the cockroach facts it surfaces (two-to-two-million reproduction, 30-minute submersion survival) explain why extermination efforts so often fail and why infestation disclosure is genuinely consequential for tenants signing leases.
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