OAKLAND — They called it the “Hood Hotel.”

The house on Hood Street in the Oakland hills that burned this week — killing its oldest and last remaining tenant — was a place for parties, where people could jump off a diving board from the attic to the pool below. Its layout was as odd as the characters; at one time as many as 12 people called it home.

But much of the construction done there was illegal, city records show. And the labyrinth-like design, two former tenants said, was a firefighter’s worst nightmare.

That proved so this week when a large fire tore through the home and 63-year-old Carol Levine was found dead inside. One firefighter was injured in the inferno fueled by furniture, debris and a gas-line break, a fire official said. It took crews about an hour and a half to extinguish the blaze, and even longer to find Levine’s body.

“The place was a hodgepodge of crazy rooms,” Levine’s attorney, Russell Robinson, said Thursday. “It was a maze. Every time I would go upstairs in that house I would get lost and wouldn’t know how to get downstairs. Talk about just weird.”

Located one block from the Oakland Zoo, 3221 Hood Street was described by former residents as Winchester Mystery House meets “Animal House.” The revolving door of residents over the past two years included a musician, college students, young couples looking for cheap rent, a transgender woman, a Kentucky transplant, Levine, and the “idea man” — landlord Mitchell Ambro, said former tenant Miranda Kanter.

Over the years, Ambro had transformed the nondescript two-story house his family owned since the 1950s into a wonderland of rooms converted into multiple bedrooms. A garage was turned into a garden apartment, there was a fireplace and kitchen on each of the home’s two floors, a barroom downstairs, and a diving board protruding from the attic, Kanter said.

“That guy had the silliest and craziest ideas, hence why I call him ‘the idea man,’ ” Kanter, 26, said. “He had ideas like making a dome in the bottom of the pool just big enough for two people to play Connect Four, his favorite game. I was never sure if he was actually joking.

Mitchell Ambro and his brother, Andrew Ambro, who are the heirs of the estate that owns the property, declined to comment for this story.

If there was an odd person out in the home, it was Levine. At 63, she was much older than her roommates. She did not drink or do recreational drugs, had a high IQ and had attended UC Berkeley, her attorney Robinson said.

Levine was awarded a judgment of $2.5 million in 2001 against lawyers representing her in a sexual harassment and gender-bias action against the University of California, according to court records. She never received a dime because of filing errors by a different attorney, and the judgment ended up being voided.

City inspectors called to the home in March 2015 on a plumbing complaint discovered the illegal construction work and ordered the landlord to fix it, said Rich Fielding, the supervisor of the city inspection unit.

Residents were relocated over the next several months, but Levine refused to leave and was in the process of being evicted, according to authorities and court records. A court order required her to leave the property Dec. 21. At the time of the fire, she was the only one living there.

A neighbor reported the fire at 10:49 p.m. Monday. By the time firefighters arrived, flames were shooting from the home. Twenty-two firefighters fought the blaze until 12:20 a.m. Levine’s body was in a bedroom on the first floor below street level, said Oakland Fire Department Battalion Chief Coy Justice. To reach the main door from her room, Levine would have to climb up a spiral staircase to the second level, people familiar with the home said.

“It was going like a son of a gun. That was a big fire,” Justice said. “We encountered just about any problem you could have.”

Fire investigators and police are investigating the cause and origin of the fire. Former tenants described the place as a ticking time bomb.

“This could have been me,” said Morgan Nelson, who lived there with her boyfriend from October 2014 to May 2015. “This was absolutely avoidable. We saw this coming a mile away.”

Kanter said she left after six weeks.

“I remember thinking to myself that there was no way for me to exit the house if there was a fire in the living room. I literally would have to run through piles of junk to get to the same exit. I would be trapped,” she said.

Staff writers George Kelly and Harry Harris contributed to this report. David DeBolt covers breaking news. Contact him in Oakland at 510-208-6453. Follow him at Twitter.com/daviddebolt.