By Erica Thompson, News Staff
The children’s rhyme “sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite” gained an entirely new meaning this past year, as students living in both university leased buildings and off-campus apartments reported infestations of the insects in their homes.
A student living in a university leased apartment on St. Stephen Street came to The News seeking help regarding an outbreak of bedbugs, after claiming she was ignored by Northeastern’s Department of Residential Life (Res Life).
The student, who requested to remain anonymous, said, “It’s an unfortunate situation, but the worst part is the lack of help.”
She said she discovered bites right after September move-in, but assumed they were from mosquitos because her window did not have a screen. When the University Health and Counseling Services (UHCS) confirmed the bites were from bedbugs four days after moving in, the student told the Residence Director (RD) about the issue.
According to the student, the RD replied that there was not much he could do because there was no proof whether or not she brought the bed bugs with her when she moved in. She said that the RD gave her a pamphlet containing information about why students shouldn’t bring outside furniture and told her that since the facilities worker was out that day, she would have to wait.
The RD made it “a lot more traumatic than it had to be,” the student said.
Eventually, Res Life sent an exterminator, who told the resident that it could take three or four treatments to get rid of the bugs, which could mean a month, she said.
Senior music industry major Stephanie Schmura experienced a similar situation within a few weeks of moving into her Huntington Avenue apartment last September.
After realizing the bites were from bedbugs, Schmura called her landlord, who eventually contacted an exterminator. The exterminator confirmed the bites were from bedbugs and said he would come back to do a “three-wave” extermination process. Schmura said she was relieved to hear her problem could be easily fixed, until she found out what the “three-wave” process entailed.
“I came home at 10 p.m., intending to shower and go out with my friends, to a complete disaster,” she said. “My brand new mattress was soaked with some sort of chemical, as was my roommate’s. There were standing puddles of chemical all down my hallway, in both our bedrooms, in our kitchen and a pool in my living room, with a sofa cushion sitting in the puddle. And the worst part was, it had to happen two more times.”
After the third wave of extermination, Schmura said she would still find bites on her body occasionally, but found it too emotionally exhausting to worry about them.
“I would just pretend I didn’t notice them. I couldn’t deal with it again, it was such a laborious and stressful process,” she said, adding she was scared for months. “I used to have to turn off the lights at night and then get into bed because I didn’t want to know if there were bugs in my bed. It was mentally safer for me to pretend it wasn’t happening.”
After experiencing a similar extermination process, the anonymous student said she has been living out of trash bags for the past several weeks and has spent a large amount of money on new sheets, a steamer and bedbug repellant.
“I’ve done laundry more times than I can count,” she said. “It’s been frustrating because we haven’t been able to get any work done. It was so hot and I literally had bites all over my body. I looked like a leper.”
Associate Director of Communications at Northeastern Lucy Warsh said in an email to The News that the university has not experienced any bedbug problems in Northeastern-owned facilities.
As for problems in leased-properties, Warsh said “We are aware of incidents of bed bugs in a single off-campus, university-affiliated building. The university is taking a range of steps to clean this particular resident and to carefully monitor the situation going forward.”
Despite the university’s response, the student felt she was let down.
“I’ve never been more disappointed in Northeastern,” she said. “They did not help us at all.”
