A YOUNG mum claims she is sharing her Ringwood hostel home with rats.

Carla Weeks is so scared of the rodents she has not used the loo in her home in Parsonage Barn Lane for a week since first spotting one.

Instead, every time she needs to spend a penny she gets in her car and drives to her mother’s home more than half-a-mile away in Gorley Road.

Single mum Carla, 22, made her first rat sighting in her front room on April 6.

“I started eating my baguette and this huge rat came jumping over my friend’s legs and then it jumped over my son. He was on the floor. It darted into the toilet and down the pipes,” she said.

“My son screamed his head off and I ran out because I’m absolutely petrified of the things.”

A New Forest District Council ratman put down poison the next day.

But since then Carla has heard scratching and squeaking from Calvin’s bedroom.

Last Thursday night, at about 3am, Carla had an encounter with a rat she says was a foot long.

Her boyfriend Ralph Starks found it behind the settee and it dashed off to the bathroom where it disappeared down the hole in the woodwork with the plumbing.

Carla has since blocked the hole with a foam filler but wants the council to thoroughly cleanse the flat so Calvin does not have to play on a floor that could have been fouled by rats.

After speaking to his pest control officer, council housing chief Dave Brown said: “It’s a normal occurrence. It could happen to any one of us.”

He said the pest control officer had put more poison in the loo and the loft this week.

“He will keep going back until the problem is resolved.”