I have a strange story to relate about my bathroom door. Yeah, really.
I got home last night (well, early this morning) slightly worse for wear, and wanted to go to the loo—but the bathroom was apparently occupied. Strange, because of my two house-mates, one was in London and the other was in his room. Must have been someone John brought round, I thought, or I'm just being stupid, so I went off for a smoke and to check my mail.
After a little while, John comes up to my room and says, “This may be a silly question, but who's in the bathroom?” So it wasn't just me, there was definitely something amiss. We knocked and shouted, but we were sure no one was in there. John had been worried about it for a while, because while I was out he'd tried to go in when the door was open, but it had closed, and he'd felt something pushing the door to, and had later heard noises inside. I thought it must have been the wind, because the window was open, but it wasn't windy last night. We discussed possible supernatural explanations.
Anyway, we decided that the only way we could reclaim our bathroom was to break the door open. It's only got a little bolt, so we thought we'd just bust the lock off, no problem. There followed about an hour of barging and kicking and swearing, and all we got were a few cracks in one of the panels and bruises to the shoulders. I eventually thought “fuck this” and went out looking for some dark corner to take a leak—“it'll all look better in the morning”, I thought.
Today I tried to ignore the problem, but it didn't go away. Suddenly not having access to one's bathroom can be very disconcerting. I started to feel smelly. I needed coffee, but daren't risk it. I had a half-hearted charge at the door and then went out, thinking “the cops on tele just knock doors down with a casual kick; what bollocks”, and tried in vain to find a shop in Headingley that would sell big hammers.
Later I heard John trying to bash the door down again. I went to lend what little aid I could. I'm not exactly built for breaking down doors. We tried again to push it open by bracing ourselves against the opposite wall, but it's just the wrong distance away from the door. We tried kicking it again, but the middle of the door where the bolt was was solid, and the rest of the door was starting to crack. We accidentally kicked the handle into bits. We don't really want to destroy our door, because that'll be our deposit gone, and they'll be all the fuss trying to find a new one and get it to fit.
We eventually admitted defeat and agreed that there was no way we could open the thing without doing some serious damage to it. About the least destructive thing we could do would be to break through one of the panels and reach through to the bolt, so I kicked the one that was cracking and managed to make a hole. It was still a bit tricky to open the bolt, because we'd actually bent the barrel bit, so now the bolt wouldn't slide out properly, but we managed to force the door open. Our bathroom was liberated!
We'd actually succeeded in getting a long way to breaking the bolt. It's all bent up, and where it slots into a thing in the wall we've got a big hole. There are bits of wood round the panel hanging off both sides of the door too, and slivers of paint strewn through the bathroom. As far as I can tell from the state of the bathroom, the noises John heard were made by the wind breaking a handle on the blinds, which while falling managed to knock bits off the blinds themselves and send shampoo bottles, etc., all over the bathroom. There were, though, no visible spirits, manifestations or corpses in the bathroom to explain how the door got locked in the first place. Perhaps that will forever remain a mystery…