Adam approached the bed with a growing sense of dread, lifted up the sheet and pushed the mattress to one side. It was, he says, “like a wound opening”. Hundreds of bedbugs poured out. Earlier that day, he had noticed blood spots on his bedlinen around the area where his feet were, thought perhaps he had been scratching himself in his sleep, and taken everything to the launderette. Later, working from home and sitting at the desk in his room, he had noticed a small dark insect, then another, and another. Looking over at his bed, he saw one on the clean duvet cover. That’s when he made his sickening discovery. “I was, like, oh my God, this is horrific,” he says. He thinks he’d had them for several months, but because he is one of the estimated 30% of people who don’t react to bites, hadn’t realised they were feeding on him.
Adam, who is British but was flat-sharing in New York at the time, threw out his bed, sofa, desk and many possessions. He wrapped his vinyl records in clingfilm and sealed them with tape; it was three years before he opened them again. “The bedbugs were in the bedframe. They were inside my books, in the spines – they can hide there until they can come out and destroy your life again.” Bedbugs can become dormant for many months without food. “All our clothes were bagged up and sent to the launderette to be washed and dried at ridiculous temperatures. By the end of that day, I basically had nothing.” He laughs at the memory, but adds: “On a serious note, I don’t think people realise how much you have to get rid of.” For people with no money, in substandard housing, and with negligent landlords, a bedbug infestation can be devastating.
Adam’s apartment was treated by pest control three times. “Every time we thought the bedbugs had gone, we’d see another one.” He would spot them walking up the walls, “waddling along full of blood”. Thinking they were likely to be coming up through the floorboards, from the apartment below, he and his flatmate sealed every single gap with caulk. He became “obsessed”, he says, reading everything he could about bedbugs, and buying special traps to put under the legs of his new bed.
Five years on, he is just as concerned. If he stays somewhere where the mattress isn’t properly covered, he won’t sleep on it. “Even now I still get a sort of itchy feeling around my feet like something’s in the bed, and I’ll have to get up and make sure that there’s nothing there. If I see random specks of dirt on the floor, I’ll have an absolute freak-out about it.”
News of a bedbug infestation in Paris has heightened anxiety. You can feel the itch, just reading about it. In the UK, reports of bugs spotted on the London Underground add to the sense that we are under siege. Bedbugs are thought to be on the rise globally – warmer temperatures create good breeding conditions, and they are believed to be becoming more resistant to pesticides.
The news stories can be particularly triggering for anyone who has had to deal with bedbugs. “We’re just constantly thinking about it – we are seriously worried about having it again, all the time,” says Noel Butterworth, who lives in Switzerland with his family.
Two years ago, he noticed a rash on his arm; a week later, his wife had one too. They called in pest control, and the treatment included spraying the entire apartment with insecticide and packaging everything from the two bedrooms affected into boxes to be taken to giant freezers. Moving to blow-up beds in the living room, the family were warned that the bugs might follow them, “seeking food”.
When that first intervention didn’t work, weeks of treatment followed. It was disruptive and upsetting – furniture that had been in the family for generations was destroyed, they had to move to a hotel for a couple of weeks, and relations with the neighbours deteriorated. It was also extremely expensive – he estimates that the total cost was upwards of £25,000. The stress was so bad, says Butterworth, that he and his wife had several counselling sessions to deal with it. “It was a situation that was almost getting out of control, and we didn’t know what to do about it,” he says. “It just didn’t feel like our home any more.” It no longer felt like a place of security. Worse, he adds, “it’s your bed. Your bed is your comfort zone in many ways, and it felt like it had been taken away from us.” Two years on, he still checks the bed every day. “Any time we’re travelling, we’re focused on making sure that we protect ourselves.” They bought a heat tent, which they put suitcases and clothes into to treat them after travelling.
For Orla, who has dealt with a recent infestation, it has been a stressful combination of financial cost, practical effort (the treatments require a lot of upheaval, including packing things away and washing everything) and anxiety about the effects of pesticides on her unborn baby and young child – without the relief of being able to tell people about it. “You can’t really talk about it. I understand, but if you tell a friend that you have bedbugs, they don’t really want to be around you because they’re scared they’re going to get them. So it feels like this shameful thing, even though it’s nothing to do with how clean your house is – it’s just really bad luck if you get them.”
In mid-July, she and her partner noticed they were getting bitten by something, but put it down to mosquitoes. When she found a bug in the bed, she wasn’t sure what it was, but put it in a pot; the next day, she found another. Noticing strange black dust around a bedside lamp, she picked it up. “There were bugs everywhere, all underneath the lamp,” she says. She looked at the headboard, which had hollow areas and shelves, “and found them in every gap. Suddenly, you realise there’s a really big problem. It was awful. You have that shocked moment. I’m not that squeamish, but when you realise that there have been bugs living above your head, it’s just disgusting, the idea that every night they’re coming out and crawling on you.”
They moved into the spare room. “We sealed the bedroom up, but it doesn’t work because they follow you when they’re looking for food.” Home no longer felt relaxing and calm. “You just have that instinct of, ‘I just want to get rid of everything, I want to move house, I want to get out of here’ because it feels like there’s no end to it.” Neither Orla nor her partner could sleep. “You’re conscious all the time of them coming out at night. I was really worried they were going to go into my kid’s room. You’re worried about the chemical effects on the family. I had to take a few days off work because I felt really stressed.” They have had four treatments and still don’t know if it has worked. “Every night we sleep in fear of finding new bites in the morning and a resurgence.”
That’s one of the worst things, says Linda – you’re never truly sure if you’ve dealt with the problem. You only know if you have bedbugs when you spot one, which makes you constantly vigilant. “It drives you mad,” she says.
A couple of years ago, she and her husband, who live in north London, noticed bites on one of their children; then they found a bedbug in his bed a few days later. They contacted a pest control company immediately. The treatment, which involved heating the flat to high temperatures, cost £1,400 and was guaranteed to eradicate them in 24 hours. “Despite that, they kept returning,” says Linda. They didn’t know where the bugs were coming from – for around six months she wouldn’t allow her children to sit down on public transport – until they traced the source to the empty flat below. They paid for all the treatment themselves, thinking they were responsible for the infestation, rather than getting their landlord to fix it.
Three more treatments followed, each involving vacating the flat, along with their possessions, and Linda estimates she did about 90 loads of laundry. It was frustrating, expensive and stressful, and more than two years on, the family are still extremely cautious. Last week, her husband turned down an opportunity to visit Paris because of the reports of bedbugs. “Whenever I stay in a hotel or an Airbnb, I check the mattress for any evidence, like little black spots – their faeces are dark because they feed on blood,” says Linda. She wishes she didn’t have so much bedbug knowledge, she adds. It’s just “a nightmare. It brought me pretty close to the brink.”
• (Some) people featured in the article responded to a Community callout. You can contribute to open callouts here
‘I took on the bedbugs and won’
By Barbara Speed
If you were to ask me for my greatest ever achievement, I’d have no doubt in my mind: it’s the time I took on the bedbugs, and won.
The good news, in the midst of the Parisian panic and fresh terror on the tube, is that getting rid of bedbugs in your average home is actually quite straightforward. All they’re interested in is feeding (sucking your blood), and so if you put out poison, and lay there every night as a lump of human bait, they will eventually all be eliminated.
The bad news is that sometimes you don’t have the luxury of “eventually”. I didn’t in the summer of 2016 when I discovered that I had brought an unwanted hitchhiker back from a holiday in Portugal. I was due to move out from a five-person shared house, and, based on my Googling of “can I move house without taking bedbugs with?”, the prognosis was not good. Quoting Aliens, one commenter helpfully advised: “Nuke the whole site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”
My housemates were extremely understanding (and, given we had already suffered through the renters’ delights of rats, a cockroach, a collapsing ceiling, and a plague of flies, rather stoic by this point), while our landlord paid for the treatment that would clear that house’s problem. But what about my new ones? Kindly – and, let’s be honest, recklessly – they said I could still move in. I had a week in the empty flat before they arrived in which to make sure the plague didn’t follow me, and so I armed myself with every article and forum post I could find, and enlisted an exterminator, who I’ll call Rob. He would provide a “prophylatic treatment” in every room and I would arrive with each of my possessions in sealed bags, then painstakingly neutralise them to kill any insects or eggs. Anything that could be tumble-dried would be, books would be hoovered, solid items sprayed with rubbing alcohol. Furniture is often a write-off, but luckily I didn’t have any. Electricals are tricky – you’re best sealing them away for as long as you can.
Fast forward a week, and my life had shrunk down to an empty room covered in a white, powdery poison, a bed in the middle of the floor with no sheets or duvet, and piles of bags ready to be ritually cleansed. My social life fell away, replaced by regular texting with Rob, which mainly consisted of me sending grainy photos of my limbs, panicking that I had seen a bite, and him replying that there was nothing there. I spent my evenings at the launderette, and my nights lying awake, hoping against hope that any remaining insects would come and bite me, thereby committing kamikaze as they scuttled through the poison.
A week passed without a bite, or any sign of bugs on my mattress. My first housemate was due to move in the next day, and Rob was coming over for his second round of poison, and to check, with his hyper-trained eye, for any signs of infestation. I dared to feel hopeful, but as I looked around the flat – my limp piles of remaining possessions, the bare bed, the smears of poison – I despaired. What if it hadn’t worked, despite all this effort? How would I feel if I visited all this on my friends? But later that day, Roberto texted: All clear! ;). They never returned. I had my life back. Well, apart from my laptop. Seven years and counting, and it’s still sealed away. Just to be safe.
