A student house in Longsight, Manchester, was home to several thousand cockroaches, despite pest controllers regularly treating the property. The glossy, greasy insects marched on, endlessly reproducing, and left one former resident with a lifelong phobia.
First Warning of the Infestation
The warning came from one of the occupants of the house, who said: “You do know about the cockroaches?” The landlord had shown the property to the future tenants while the current residents were out, describing them as third years doing their finals who must not be disturbed. Days before the summer term ended, a knock on the door revealed the house was infested.
The writer moved in anyway, not fully understanding what a cockroach was. With no internet, they didn't know about their march, canter, or crunch underfoot, nor their soft, sweet, sour smell from uric acid stored in their fat.
Indestructible and Relentless
The writer recalls that just two German cockroaches in one crevice behind a fridge can become two million in a couple of years. They eat anything – rubbish, rot, dead skin, sleeping humans, and each other – and can survive for days without heads. A pest controller in a hazmat suit sprayed white powder regularly, the only benefit being that it eradicated a housemate's verruca she'd had for three years.
The first sighting stayed with the writer: a cockroach appeared behind a housemate's shoulder like a pantomime villain. It lumbered over the chair in broad daylight, which the writer says indicates serious overcrowding, as cockroaches prefer darkness. This proved to be the case.
Lasting Impact and Coping
By the end of the year, the housemates stood each bed leg in saucepans of water to drown any cockroach attempting to join them, though the writer notes they can survive submerged for 30 minutes. The writer still dreams about them and has a lifelong cockroach phobia, or katsaridaphobia, but says it's made them tougher, dealing with mice, head lice, threadworms, and scabies by thinking: “At least it's not cockroaches.”
