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He knew immediately what it was, even before he saw the blood droplets on his sheet.
When he turned on his lights, he saw them, skittering under the covers: bedbugs.
It was the second time since February that his apartment at Parkway House, a high-rise residence in the Art Museum district, was infested.
And he's not alone. Several other residents have been victimized by the hateful little creatures.
Icky for us to read - especially a day after our story about a Jersey couple who had been sold an infested bedroom set by JC Penney.
Terrible for the tenants to experience.
And potentially harmful for all of us, because building management is treating the infestation piecemeal, failing to alert other residents who may spread the problem by selling infested belongings, or moving out with them, Hemphill said.
Management's intransigence has forced Hemphill and another tenant, Janet Flood, to hire lawyers.
Flood recently moved out after months of being tortured by the insects. But the landlord won't let her out of her lease, she said.
Barbara Williams, who manages the building at 2201 Pennsylvania Ave. for Philadelphia Management Co., would not comment. The owners, Parkway Associates, also declined to comment, Williams said.
"I feel like tenants need to know what's going on," said Flood, 22, who had moved into the building in November.
"What Barbara does is isolate you and makes you feel it's your fault.
"She keeps hiding the infestation problem so that other apartments keep getting infested. The problem keeps getting bigger and bigger and it goes from unit to unit."
This is the second time a bedbug infestation in an Art Museum area high-rise has come to light. Last time, it was Park Towne Place, on Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
The city's Health Department said bedbug complaints are few. But a national expert on bedbugs - really, he is - said that Philadelphia has a serious problem.
"But so does New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Las Vegas," said Richard Cooper, technical director of Cooper Pest Solutions and the author of a book - yes, a book - on bedbugs.
Cooper said that they're not caused by dirt (despite what some building managers tell their tenants).
Nor do they transmit disease, except - as another national expert put it - "hysteria."
But they are devastating to deal with, Cooper said - both from lack of sleep and the notion of being prey to blood-sucking insects while supposedly snuggled safe in your bed.
"I can't even tell you, even now living in the new place, I'm bonkers," said Flood, 22.
"It makes you feel so disgusting. You feel so violated because they're in all your things and you don't know where they are.
"I wake up in the middle of the night. I didn't sleep for two months. It ruins peoples' lives."
Flood's story is typical: She began getting red, itchy welts on her arms in May and went from doctor to doctor until an Internet search solved the mystery: She had bedbug bites. (See accompanying photo.)
Parkway management had a pest-control company treat Flood's apartment. But when the bedbugs came back, management insisted that the infestation had been corrected and claimed that there was no problem in the building, Flood said.
Meanwhile, Flood met Hemphill, and talked to several other tenants in the building who also had bedbugs.
Management's reluctance to acknowledge the problem and alert the residents is irresponsible, not to mention counter-productive.
"Property managers are concerned about what that might do to their property's reputation, they're worried about creating mass hysteria," Cooper said, speaking in general.
But that denial has repercussions: The longer an infestation is undetected, the worse it gets, the harder and more expensive it is to eradicate and the more likely it is to spread to other units.
"People in the apartment community have got to be educated or you could have a building-wide problem," Cooper said.
Hemphill said that he plans to move out of the building soon.
But he'll never recover at least one of the things he lost: his girlfriend.
She got bedbug bites when she slept over.
"She blames me," he said. *
E-mail porterj@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5850. For recent columns:
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