On Christmas morning, my partner woke up to a schizophrenic neighbor trying to break into the apartment. The tenant was in a silk nightgown, and demanded my partner let her in and left in a huff after being repeatedly denied entry. The hosts has to change the lock code to the flat because the mentally ill tenant knew the code; the only thing that stopped her from entering was the deadlock.
My partner found our from the police that the tenant had a history of harassing neighbors. There were past tenants, who stayed in our flat, that needed to be police escorted out of the building just to stop the mentally ill tenant from further harassing them. The police also told us that the mentally ill tenant believes that her former employers, doctors, are out to get her … I came home wearing my scrubs on the morning that she tried to break into our apartment. We were put in a dangerous situation due to the hosts failure to disclose the ongoing situation.
Why weren’t we told about this woman before booking a 3 month stay? The hosts used the excuse that the woman was moving out on the 1st of January (or some time around then), and they didn’t feel the need to tell us about her because she had supposedly not had an episode for a few weeks. There are no excuses for their unethical decision to not disclose a dangerous situation to us, and this is evidenced by the fact that our temporary flat was almost broken into after less than a week’s stay. How could a host knowingly put someone in that situation in good conscience?
They also had boundary issues: we unknowingly were put in an ongoing situation with this tenant and the hosts. The hosts told my partner that she needed to “file a police report” and do extra things in order to handle the situation with the mentally ill tenant: my partner had to tell them that this situation isn’t our problem, as temporary stay Airbnb guests, and that they were crossing boundaries by even asking us to spend more time dealing with a situation that we shouldn’t have been in. Like, are you serious?
Anyway, other things that made this page a no go: super creaky floors, a dishwasher that didn’t work, and a bedroom doorknob that fell off ever time it was grasped.
My partner’s description of the surprise she received on Christmas morning: “someone was trying to get in, but was unable to because of the deadlock and chain we had put on… I jumped back when I looked through the peep hole because a disheveled woman in a silk night gown was on the other side. It was like a horror movie.”