Halls HORROR stories

WE’VE ALL HEARD THE SAYING: living in student halls is the best time of your life, apparently. For those who have passed the first year and are living a sedentary […]


WE’VE ALL HEARD THE SAYING: living in student halls is the best time of your life, apparently. For those who have passed the first year and are living a sedentary lifestyle in front of the telly, you might find yourself pining for those halcyon days where vomiting was a rite and cheese toasties were about as Michelin as it got.

Or you might find yourself squirming at the memory of a halls fiasco you’d rather forget. No matter what your stance on fresherdom is, there is one thing we all share: the halls horror story.

We asked our readers and contributors and picked from the frankly standard to the outrageous – all unedited and all of which will have you in stitches. The laughing kind, we hope. Have a look below.

Oliver shares a universal experience: One of the guys I lived with blew up a microwave by putting a baked potato in foil inside for twenty minutes.

Heather recalls: Magnetic dart breaking the window and football smashing the light…that’s about it… or the time they tried to make hash brownies, halfway through doing whatever to the weed fire alarm went off and he had to hide the saucepan under his bed!

Terrified Dan writes: This is 100% true. In Monte the floor above me some Chinese student went crazy and started threatening some guy with a knife (something about he had damaged his honour or something) and police ended up coming and arresting him. Then all of the people on his floor had a go at us for phoning the police, despite the madman with a knife and he had cut himself so there was blood dripping everywhere.

Bridget laments: one weekend when I was at home my flatmates back in Soton discovered that our keys fit each others’ doors, so they went into my room and messed with my lighter so the flame was huge. Then when I lit it to have a cigarette it burnt a bit of my fringe off and I had a scab on my forehead

Studious Glenmates by day, loutish menaces by night

For some this article prompt inspired a weft of halls nostalgia.

Alice writes: God I miss freshers. I saw Luke O’Brien [The Tab’s Co-Editor in Chief] do a naked run a few times too which was fairly banterous and someone else who will not be named piss all over Glen Bar… [we] also got fined for vandalising a bench at 5am then running away screaming. How did we get caught? CCTV footage of our JCR shirts complete with full names running away from the scene of the crime.

The Tab has learnt that Glen residents have a bent for destruction.Two years ago a Glen Eyrian was threatened with a whopping £1,000 fine for letting off all the fire extinguishers in his flat.

Three years back, an entire flat of Hartley lads were kicked out of halls after they caved in the Hartley laundry roof by throwing their kitchen table out of the window.

A contributor tells us: I know a guy who got room raped and we grew cress in his carpet. Somehow he still passed inspection. He actually had his sink overflowing with baked beans, rotten eggs on his window and his mattress hanging from the ceiling as well!

Alex ‘The Money Pit’ admits: cooking disasters were my forte. I once shoved a whole chicken in the oven after stumbling back from Sobar, by the afternoon when I got up it looked like a cannonball and was about as hard.

Unfortunately for Ed Simms, an A1 Chamberlain lad from three years ago, his flatmates went much too far for comfort. Not content with the usual rigmarole of covering everything in foil and hanging the mattress from the ceiling, Simms’ ambitious flatmates decided to do something that was less room rape and more Ground Force.

Ed grumbles: I went on a night out and left my mate watching a DVD in my room in Chamberlain. Came back and they had emptied my room of all my stuff and put a park bench, a bin and a pond in there. I had to sleep in the toilet.

Check out the video below to see for yourself. It’s truly incredible.

Have you got your own story to send us? Don’t consign it to the depths of Soton’s rumour-laden oral storytelling tradition, see it written down in The Tab by sending us your story here!