Covering which damages are covered under standard tenancy agreements, how to phrase the three-day-a-month absence in your house WhatsApp group, and at what point the landlord is legally obligated to be told.

Nine witnesses have contributed to this piece. I am not naming them, partly for their protection and partly because two of them were mid-renovation when they made contact and I have found, over the years, that people who are mid-renovation are not at their most precise. What I can tell you is that the situation of sharing a rented property with a werewolf flatmate is, according to this network’s case files, more common than most lettings agents will acknowledge and more manageable than most renters initially fear. The purpose of this article is practical. I have no interest in alarming you. I have, however, some interest in making sure you are not caught without a plan on the fourteenth of the month.

The Tenancy Agreement: What Is and Is Not Your Problem

Standard assured shorthold tenancy agreements in England and Wales — and the majority of equivalent instruments in Vermont, New Hampshire, and the relevant Canadian provinces — do not distinguish between damage caused by a human occupant in a heightened emotional state and damage caused by an occupant who has temporarily ceased to be human in the conventional sense. This is, depending on your position, either a relief or a significant oversight on the part of the drafters. Claw marks to interior woodwork fall, under most interpretations, into the same category as marks caused by furniture being dragged: fair wear and tear is a contested term, and your deposit protection scheme’s adjudicators are working from photographs, not from an understanding of what made them. Scratches to exterior windowsills, however, are almost universally treated as tenant liability, as is anything that has happened to the bathroom door if it opened inward. I recommend replacing it with a curtain in October and explaining this to no one.

Community Notice

He was a perfectly reasonable person to live with for twenty-nine days a month. The difficulty was always the door frames. We went through three sets of hinges in fourteen months and I told the landlord it was subsidence. He believed me. They always believe subsidence.

— Mara Okonkwo, former co-tenant, Leamington Spa

The WhatsApp Group: A Question of Phrasing

Every shared house has a WhatsApp group. Every shared house WhatsApp group has a specific and unspoken tone that took approximately three months to establish and which nobody is willing to disturb. The three-day absence around the full moon is not, in itself, an unusual thing to communicate. People go to see family. People attend conferences. People take long weekends in places with no reliable signal. The issue arises when the absence is so predictable, so precisely lunar in its regularity, that other flatmates begin to notice the pattern. My recommendation — and this is based on testimony from four of the nine witnesses, independently — is to vary the framing rather than the timing. "Heading to my mum’s" is acceptable once. "That work thing again" is acceptable twice. After that, I would suggest "phone off this weekend, back Monday" and leaving it there. People will assume a complicated personal situation. This is not, in the strict sense, inaccurate.

The Landlord Question

At what point are you legally obligated to inform the landlord? The honest answer, and I say this as someone who has read more tenancy agreements than is probably healthy and who keeps a filing cabinet with a dedicated section for documentation she does not share with anyone, is that you are almost certainly not. Tenancy agreements require you to disclose subletting, criminal convictions in some cases, and material changes to the property. A flatmate’s lycanthropy is not a material change to the property. It is a material change to the flatmate, and that is a distinction which, while it may feel philosophically uncomfortable, is the one that stands up. Where you do have an obligation is if the condition is causing structural damage that you are concealing — and here we return to the door frames. Keep records. Keep photographs. Do not let the damage compound unreported because you are hoping it will resolve itself. It will not resolve itself. The moon is not going to change its schedule because you have a deposit review coming up.

The landlord came round in February for the annual inspection. He walked through the whole flat, looked at the bathroom doorway — which we’d re-framed twice — and said the woodwork had good character. I have never been so grateful for a man with no eye for detail.

— Declan Fairweather, co-tenant, name used with permission

A final note, and I offer it in the spirit of practicality rather than reassurance, because I find reassurance tends to make people complacent about things that deserve modest ongoing attention. Living with a werewolf flatmate is not the same as living with an unpredictable one. The cycle is, by its nature, predictable. The moon rises on schedule. The dates are available in advance. Most of the witnesses who reported difficulties did so not because the situation was inherently unmanageable but because they had not planned for it — had not thought through the logistics of the bathroom rota, had not arranged the conversation with their other flatmates, had not considered what to do about the WiFi router that was mounted just low enough to be a problem. These are solvable problems. Write a list. Keep it somewhere sensible. I keep mine in a locked filing cabinet, which is perhaps excessive for flatmate logistics, but I find the habit useful across a range of situations and I have no intention of changing it now.