Poodunnit? Mystery assailant leaves smelly surprise in Hyde Park house

Most of us are used to waking up to a bit of a mess after a night on the tiles, but one Hyde Park house got more than they bargained for after a particularly heavy one last week.

“It was my 21^st birthday on the Thursday night, so we went on a spontaneous night out,” said Steph*, a third-year Nursing student who lives in the house near Hyde Park corner.

“We all got back at different times – we were quite drunk, but nobody noticed anything unusual.”

But there was a nasty surprise in store for them when they woke up the next morning.

“Two of our housemates got up at about half eight to go into uni.”

“One of them was standing there, foot hovering over the carpet, when the other shouted at them to stop because there was a huge poo on the floor.”

“There’s five toilets in our house, and someone had honestly pooed on the stairs.”

The residents were understandably shaken, and began to make enquiries immediately.

“We were all in a state of shock,” Steph says. “We were asking the obvious questions – is this for real? Is it not just chocolate icing?”

When they had confirmed from the stench that the offending material wasn’t any kind of dessert topping, they started to look for a culprit.

“A lot of us are nurses in the house, so we got the Bristol Stool Chart out and rated the poo.”

“It was a healthy tight 4, very large and medium brown. We commended the healthiness of the person who’d done it – we just wished they hadn’t chosen our stairs.”

“Our first thought was that it was an animal, or an intruder – but to do that they’d have to let themselves in and walk through the entire house.”

“We wanted to believe it because the truth was more horrible: that it had to be one of the twelve people standing there.”

The truth soon dawned on the disgusted housemates. Steph says: “We hadn’t had an after party, so the most likely suspect was going to be standing in the room with us.”

“We all started suspecting each other – accusations were flying round.”

“I even doubted myself at one point. I had to get my housemate to assure me that I hadn’t done it and forgotten.”

With no-one coming forward to take the blame, Steph was charged with hunting down the offender.

“I was appointed lead detective, as it was the morning after my birthday so I had the least reason to do it.”

“I was terrified that every day afterwards was going to be like this – that every morning after you turn 21 you wake up to a huge shit in a different part of your house.”

Precautions were taken in the aftermath

Horrified, Steph turned to her parents for help. She says: “My first thought was to text my dad.

“I said ‘Dad, someone has done a legit shit on our stairs’ and his immediate response was ‘Did they not wipe?’”

“It turns out they had – on the top step.”

With friends and family arriving just a few hours later for birthday celebrations, Steph was forced to take matters into her own hands.

“It wasn’t like a dog poo that you just drop in a bag – we had to use bleach, kitchen cleaner, bathroom cleaner, every kind of cleaner you can imagine.”

“Fifteen minutes of retching, a whole bottle of air freshener and two perfectly good spoons later, all that was left was a big orange stain.”

“We had a broken bar stool lying around, so we used that to cover it. The whole stool-on-stool thing would probably have been funnier in a less horrific situation.”

“We still have no leads on who did it, but when certain people found out I was talking to The Tab they were extremely adamant about keeping anonymity.”

“We’ve discussed DNA testing and everything. I mean, the worst thing is we’ll probably never know who it was.”

The area post-cleanup

After hearing word from their landlord about a planned house viewing, the stain was finally tackled two days ago.

“The stain is gone now – but there will be a skidmark forever engrained in our trust.”

*names have been changed to protect potential guilty parties