Not every roommate is going to be your best friend. However, most reasonable people are willing to compromise and work together to make everyone feel at home. These people...weren't so lucky. The following Redditors share the gruesome stories of the worst roommates they've ever had—and they've got us looking for one-bedroom apartments.
1. A Lack Of Life Skills
My roommate was a total slob, and I am not saying this lightly. He would eat dinner on the couch, then put his dirty plate (with scraps and bones) under the couch. I would have to check constantly for that or else we would get some foul smells. One time he had pancakes and put the plate under the chair, and due to the large amount of leftover maple syrup, we got ants.
He would just trash everything and made the house disgusting. Finally, I had enough and I stopped cleaning up after him. I just let the house fall into total ruin. But that's not the part that made me furious. He then started staying at his parents' house, telling them and our friends that I was a slob and he couldn't handle it anymore. I wanted to scream when I found out!
He eventually moved out and lives with his girlfriend now. She complains constantly that he is a slob.
2. Not Such A Small Thing
He woke up every day to Blink-182’s “All The Small Things” at 4 a.m. for swim practice. Except he’d keep hitting snooze, so I’d hear it 2-5 times in a row. And he’d be late, so his teammates would start banging on the door. It literally drove me half-mad. I was a double science major working multiple jobs. I went to bed at two most nights, after coming home from the library. So no sleep for me I guess.
On the other hand, I would have to wake up early on weekends for my landscaping job and he would whine and moan about it. He also never left the room, even when I would bring a girl back, and would just sit there and watch Netflix on my TV. I can’t smell, so it didn’t bother me, but all my guests said it reeked in there since he never showered.
Second semester I moved out and lived in the chemistry library. Instant improvement. Never had a roommate since.
3. Never Live With Your Friends
Before my husband and I were married with kids, we had a terrible roommate. He was an addict and would do weird things like eat a whole package of hotdog buns and throw the wrapping back in the pantry. The one time he did dishes he got extremely mad the rest of the day. He tried to come between my husband and I as a couple many, many times. But one thing he did was more messed up than anything else.
He proudly claimed that once my husband had passed out and that he, said roommate, had his way with him. It’s not true, but he said it for years anyway, despite that actively being a punishable offense. He also tormented our cat and then wondered why the cat didn't like him. He was a bad roommate but even more, a bad friend.
4. The Entitlement Is Strong
At first she was fine, no big red flags, but she didn’t have her own laptop (this was in 2005), so she would frequently borrow mine. Not a huge deal, but I’d sometimes come home to find her midway through an hours-long project when I needed to do my own homework. So I’d just wait to start mine after dinner, because I was a bit of a pushover.
But then, she would go to bed rather early, like 9 p.m., and she would sit up in bed and sigh and say my typing was keeping her up and could I just not type please. She would be using my laptop when I’d get MSN Messenger alerts from friends, and she’d see the messages pop up, and she’d close them out and not tell me anything.
There was one from a family I’d been a nanny for the last two years of high school, and their special needs boy was being hospitalized in an emergency situation, and I completely missed the messages because she’d close them and not tell me. I was so mad—but this was just the start. The two of us shared a bathroom with the room next to ours which housed two other women.
The bathroom doors would lock from the inside for privacy. Despite the 4 of us having an agreement of knocking anytime the door was closed, my roommate would constantly lock both doors when she would shower or use the bathroom, and EVERY SINGLE TIME would forget to unlock the other door, so the neighbors couldn’t access the bathroom.
I couldn’t tell you how many times I heard banging on the other side of the bathroom for their side to be unlocked. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when she took her laundry down to the basement laundry room. The machines were frequently out of order or just always in use making it difficult to get a machine.
It was common to go up and down several times before being able to actually start laundry, but for some reason one day, she came back up in a RAGE, and started throwing her dirty laundry all over our room. Including on me. That was it. I got up, walked out and down the dorm hallway, and asked my sweet kind friend whose roomie had moved out after fall semester if she would allow me to move into her room.
I just couldn’t take the crazy any longer. Thankfully my kind friend was happy to have me move into her room, and I finished out that year with much less stress!
5. Get Out While You Can
They started doing small amounts of crystal regularly to treat their self-diagnosed ADHD. No I'm not joking. Bizarrely, it did seem to help for a short time but then quickly descended into large amounts of crystal almost all the time. My breaking point was when they presented a 30+ point itemized list to all roommates about the things they didn’t like about us.
It included things like “three crumbs were left on counter after cooking” and “chair not pushed in perfectly at table after standing up.” Then they began stockpiling guns in their room. Luckily lease was up for renewal and we all noped out off there quickly.
6. The Cat’s Roommate
In my early 20s I fell on hard times and was living in a place where I couldn't have my cat temporarily. A childhood friend, Jeremy, who had lived with me and said cat previously, offered to take him for two weeks while I found us a new home. After work every night I'd go over to see him. A week in, I went over and the friend was nowhere to be found, but I found Anubis hiding under his bed.
His mouth was split up to his nose. I entirely lost it. I rushed him to his vet, after-hours costing a fortune, where they stitched his face and kept him for a few days because essentially he had a bad concussion. I drove back to the friend’s house. He told me he had no idea what happened. As I was leaving, his roommate pulled me aside.
He said that Jeremy had gotten tipsy and punched Anubis. I will not go into detail, but I'm 5'0 of pure rage and earned a reputation that night I've yet to live down. I ended up living in my car for a few weeks with Anubis, but he lived another 12 years, comfortable, and spoiled absolutely rotten—with a quirky smile.
7. In The Eye Of The Beholder
My sophomore year of college, my roommate invited her boyfriend from New Zealand to come live with us. These were dorm rooms, so it’s not like she had a private space. This guy was living rent-free in our room all the time. He was nice enough, but it was impossible to get anything done, including studying during finals week.
He had nothing else to do so he just watched TV constantly. When I brought this up to my roommate, and said that I would appreciate it if he did not stay for the next semester, she got extremely huffy and moved out. Thankfully they didn’t charge me for her half of the room, so I ended up with a single for the cost I had been paying for a double, so I guess it all evened out.
There was also the time that she, an art major, decided her final project would be to leave a plate of food in the room and let it rot and take photos as some sort of a statement on the breakdown of society? Didn’t really understand that one, but that didn’t help for sure.
8. A Drastic Overreaction
He would always leave his dog for too long and she would relieve herself on the floor. It was an old dog and I’m sure at one point it wasn't an issue. The problem was this guy didn't even try to do anything to fix the issue. I'd get home from work every day and walk into a house that punched me in the face with a smell when I opened the door.
We talked to him about it over and over again and he'd just shrug it off. Finally, we got him to do something—but it made me regret ever saying anything. He just put the dog down. We just wanted him to maybe come walk her while on break at work. His job was five minutes down the road. I can still feel the tension in the room when we found out she was gone.
9. The Downward Spiral
He got mad and threw my PS4 controller at my TV, which shattered the screen. Instead of admitting this, he staged a scene in which robbers ransacked my place and took all of my stuff. Every piece of furniture was overturned, smashed, and broken. But he made a very stupid decision, and it led me to the truth.
He threw everything I owned of value into the dumpsters outside to make it look like they had been taken. Well, the neighbors apparently called 9-1-1 on him because they heard the commotion. Officers found him in his room crying his eyes out, belligerently blasted. I went and spoke to them (after dumpster diving for my personal belongings).
They asked if I wanted to press charges. I said no, but told his parents he needed some help. Never spoke to him again after quite a long friendship.
10. Lacking Discipline
I was placed in the barracks with a dude the barracks NCO nicknamed Pigpen. This dude was on the boxing team. Because he worked out hard, he was asleep when I left for work, after training, and was out on the town when I got home. I would come back to sweat-soaked gear on the floor of the bathroom, toiletries on the sink area, and no toilet paper.
I asked him multiple times to clean up after himself because if one of the barracks people walked by and saw the mess that he left, it would be me that gets in trouble because I outranked him. I told him I would throw away his toiletries if he didn't pick them up. So I did. I put a new bag in the trash can and gently placed all of his toiletries in the can.
When he came home and questioned where his stuff was, he proceeded to thrash the trash bag around, breaking all his own things.
11. That’s One Way To Live
Back in the early 90s, a bunch of us rented a house from a local boxing promoter. After a few months, 3 of my friends moved out to go to university and the landlord moved in 3 of his associates. One was Gus. He was a friendly alcoholic. On the first night, he fell asleep on our sofa in the front room and peed his pants. And somehow, he got worse from there.
He once dragged me into his room for a chat and proceeded to proudly show me his only possessions: a pile of newspapers, a 10" adult toy, and a sawed-off. He was married to two women simultaneously, neither knew of the existence of the other and their kids, but neither of them could stand him, so he spent most of his nights falling down in various parts of our house.
I once found him asleep with his face in a plate of curry and his trousers round his ankles. Once his wives found out where he was staying and started turning up on the doorstep at all hours, I knew it was just a matter of time before their visits coincided and all heck broke loose, so it was time to make an effort to find another home, minus the yellow-dyed sofa.
12. Unsolved Mystery
He was technically my boyfriend. But he was staying with me so he was also my roommate. Anyway, I caught him cheating and promptly kicked him out. Since he didn't have key to the apartment, I left my place unlocked while I was at work so that he could get his things out. Which he didn't do. I ended up dropping his stuff off at his mom's house.
What he did do instead was take my pet snake and I don't know what he did to him. I don’t know if he just let him go outside or if he took him with him. I know he's not in my apartment. It's really not that big of a place and I tore it up every single day for nearly a month straight trying to find him. He had escaped once before when his old enclosure broke but I found him within a few hours.
The enclosure I had for him after that incident was escape-proof. And there's absolutely no trace of him anywhere. I have two cats, both of which would have torn him to pieces had they had the chance. There's no sign of anything. He was just gone. The sad thing is, I didn't notice until a few days after the fact. If you know snakes, they spend a lot of time hiding out of sight.
So, during those few days between me kicking him out and me realizing he was gone, I figured my snake was curled up inside his little cave. But then feeding day came, and I flipped up the cave and saw he wasn't there. I frantically searched the whole enclosure, and he was nowhere.
13. A Series Of Terrible Actions
She wrecked my collection of Japanese kitchen utensils. She ate the lunch I had prepared for my child for school. She prepped an entire Costco pack of chicken cutlets that I had purchased and claimed them all as hers. She left a bottle of hair dye on the floor after dying her hair and ruined the hardwood and carpet. The list goes on and on.
She was a classmate of my wife’s who was down on her luck, so we let her rent a room off of us for a few months to help her out. At the end of 4 months, she packed her stuff up and said that she didn’t think she owed us anything as she is a single woman and we were a family of three. She did not pay a single bill or for any groceries for the entire 4 months she stayed at our place.
14. It’s The Pettiness That Does It
This was my senior year of college. There were plenty of things that crowned her the world's worst roommate including: going through 6 blunts a day and leaving the ashes all over the bathroom and kitchen, having her boyfriend and his dog move in without asking, plus the very loud and frequent fighting and relations. But honestly, I could handle this stuff. It was something else that broke me.
Every time she cooked with her boyfriend, which was almost nightly, she left a pile of dishes in the sink. So, naturally, within two days the sink was overflowing and there were no dishes or utensils to eat with. We had a dishwasher, which made this way more infuriating. Anyway, one day I had completely had it when I saw little bugs flying around the kitchen.
I told her she needed to do the dishes immediately and left for work. When I came back, the dishes were in fact done. However, she had left behind the one single spoon I had used that morning, dirty in the sink. Even after I had washed and cleaned up after her for months.
15. There Was An Easier Way
I shared a single-bedroom flat with a junior when I was a senior in college. Her sister moved to town and was staying in a rented room a floor down (in the same building). She wanted her sister to move in with her and instead of asking me to take the rented room (the flat has a balcony, kitchen, and stove), she made a wild decision.
She told the building landlord I was taking her things and got me kicked out of the flat. Mind you, I had a fractured left toe and a cast up to my shin at the time, but that didn't stop them from throwing a full tantrum until the landlord convinced me he would help me move and I could still pay the same rent for the room that I was paying for the flat.
The same weekend, three of my friends from college helped me pack up my 4 years’ worth of stuff and helped me hobble back and forth, up and down a floor (there wasn't an elevator, only stairs) to move into my new room while my (ex) roommate and her sister sat on her bed and scrolled through Instagram.
16. One Can Only Put Up With So Much
Coming home from a long day of school and work, I found him regularly using one of my curtains as a cloak and swinging around a sword. That wasn't enough to put me off, despite him bringing the sword around town with him all the time. What really got bad is that his first 3 months of rent were paid upfront by his church.
The month 4 payment never happened, month 5 he finally got a job, and month 6 payments were still not made and my refrigerator was filled up with all of the excess baked potatoes from the local steak house where he now worked. The church that paid for his initial rent wasn't responding and I was getting tired of paying his share.
I was able to get him out a couple of weeks later, albeit I was now super behind on my own rent and ended up needing to forfeit the rest of my lease and live out of my car for a while.
17. Collateral Damage
I was renting a room from a guy who was separated from his wife (it turned out I knew her, but I didn't know that she was married to him). He was also renting a room to a really annoying woman. They got into a huge fight, and he turned off the power, trying to force her out of the house, so naturally, she called the authorities on him.
They told him he had to go through specific processes to get rid of her. So she was still there—then guess what happened? His wife came back. They got into a huge fight, and he smashed the TV onto the floor, shattering it. I moved out as soon as I could. While I was living there, I actually had my mail go to the post office, because I didn't trust either of them to not go through my mail.
18. Class A Hypocrite
I had this one roommate who would send long angry texts when I left so little as a plate out to dry or left some bottles in the recycling pile. She would smash glasses of sugar and leave rotting fruit out so she put a huge fly zapper in the kitchen window which, guess what? The light attracted more flies and left their carcasses all over the floor.
She'd leave garbage bags outside that the rats would rip up because we lived in an apartment above a KFC. Then she stopped paying her half of the bills. She had also moved her boyfriend in a day before I moved in, so the only place I could put any of my stuff was in my room—literally no kitchen cupboards or even a shelf in the fridge or freezer.
She let her friends into my room and they tried to play with my baby praying mantis, it was gone when I got home. She cheated on her boyfriend and was an extremely awful partner to her new one. She excluded him from his friends, calorie counted him, and shamed him for eating a cake. If you called her out on it then her only response was to cry.
19. Agreed To One, Got Six
In the early years of my marriage, before we had kids, my wife and I had two extra bedrooms. I had a co-worker going through a divorce and offered him a room temporarily. After a couple of weeks and things going pretty well, especially since he was working a lot, we offered he could stay longer-term and start paying rent and bills. Huge. Mistake.
After about 2 months he gets a new girlfriend, not that big of a deal, she is around mostly on a weekend here or there. Fast forward another month or so and he has her bring her 4 kids to stay the entire weekend with us! There were suddenly a bunch of children that we don't even know taking over our place and we felt like prisoners in our own bedroom.
20. How Many Is That Now?
He was a cook at a fancy local restaurant and used to make me meals I didn't ask for, then tell me, “You can do the dishes because I cooked,” leaving me with the filthiest kitchen you have ever seen. Meanwhile, he was also bringing home his girlfriend, which I wouldn't have had an issue with...save that his wife would complain if she found out. But it was even messier than that.
It turned out that she wasn't even his girlfriend but the girl he was cheating on his girlfriend with after his wife had found out. Then he brought home a dog into my pets-free flat, who proceeded to mark its territory into my £150 collection of citadel paints. The only upside was that Trig the dog looked like Baxter from Anchorman.
After a month, my friends and I retrained him to answer to Baxter. But then I kicked the guy out after he brought home a third girlfriend.
21. A Whole New Level Of Filth
I rented a house with three coworkers, two of them were dating. It was really fun for the most part but the couple just never cleaned their stuff. They were great people but they had three or four garbage bags full of food and other garbage on the floor of their room at all times. Open, just sitting there. And the sink was full of their dishes.
The living room was unusable due to all their stuff being there. There were ants all in their room and on their bed due to the leftover drinks, plates and cups just sitting there. The garage was just full of their stuff which that didn’t bother me because I parked on the street. I just ordered food instead of cooking or using anything in the kitchen.
The worst part though was one of them at work telling people that the other roommate and I were super dirty. But Karma got them in the end. Eventually, we hosted a work party, Friendsgiving I believe, at our house and my coworkers got to see their filth of a room in its full glory. Seeing my coworkers tip toe through trash and apologize to me for thinking I was dirty was a great feeling.
22. They’re Rules To Follow, Not Goals To Achieve
One roommate I was friends with before we moved in, I told her that I have 3 rules: don’t eat my food, clean up after yourself, don’t invite random people over. I know I sound like a lot of fun, but I furnished the entire house, and it was my first real place. Anyways, she always ate my food, because she said it just looked so good.
Also, I had brand new furniture mixed with my grandparents' antiques. I would often sit on the couch and find dirty dishes in between the cushions; it was annoying but at first, I shrugged it off. Then she got hammered and puked on my antique coffee table and left it there. That was my final straw.
23. Shower Snacks
There were three of us and one shower, which wasn’t terrible....until he’d saved his chewed gum by sticking to the wall in the shower and forgetting to put it back in his mouth when he was done. That was only one of the many things that drove me and our other roommate mad.
24. A Confounding Request
My then-boyfriend and I lived with another couple many years ago. They were horrible to live with for so many reasons. But their final "request" takes the cake. Upon moving out because we couldn't take it anymore, they asked for one more sit-down meeting. They said, "We'd like to take Gatsby." To which we said, "What? Gatsby is OUR cat, we owned him before we lived with you!"
They said, "Yes, we know, we'd like to have him." We replied, "Absolutely not. He's OUR cat." They said, "You don't have to answer right away." Gatsby was the first thing we moved to the new apartment.
25. Ruined The Whole Show
My roommate in college would fall asleep watching The Office when it was on Netflix. Back then the audio levels were broken or something and so the whole show would be in low volume even though his TV was cranked up super high, but when the intro played IT WOULD BE REALLY LOUD. It would wake me up all the time.
I would get up and turn the TV off because he was usually sleeping, but then he'd wake up and put it back on. Rinse and repeat for two semesters.
26. Immediate Red Flags
When we first met, we went to a concert during the summer to do some bonding, until she got kicked out. Then, not even two weeks into the school year, she broke up with her boyfriend of 2 years and insisted I talk to him via Skype to talk him out of it. To cope, she took my watermelon spirits. Then, she proceeded to go on multiple benders.
She would kick me out to hook up, get high, and take my car to go get pizza (I drove stick, she did not. I was not pleased). I spent the remainder of the semester locking up all of my important possessions, including my keys. The final straw was when I came back to our smoke detector dangling from the wall while she just sat there.
She tore it off after she claimed the smoke from her hair straightener set it off. It also conveniently smelled like weed in the room. This was all within one semester.
27. I’m Your Roommate, Not Your Mom
I moved in with a buddy for college (big mistake, never move in with friends). He sucked so bad. He expected me to wake him up every morning for class because that’s what his mum used to do. The problem was he hated being woken up and would come up swinging. Then he'd be mad at me for the next hour for waking him.
I'm one of those people who, if I use a dish, I wash it and put it away so I never left dishes. He however would fill the sink. Then once every week or two he would tell me it was my turn to do the dishes. I'd refuse and he'd complain about me to all our friends saying I never did dishes. I found out he'd left college when he didn't show up for an exam.
When I got home he was gone. Two weeks later he took his stuff and left without saying anything. He sucked.
28. Overwhelming Jealousy
This one roommate made increasingly odd comments and pointed remarks whenever I would bring my boyfriend over (long-distance) about how we needed to be more “discrete” about affection and intimate habits. He texted me he “didn’t want to hear things” when we were just doing homework in my room and laughing. It was unsettling.
He also played heavy metal music loud enough to shake the walls whenever he thought we were messing around. As well, he used to complain about being 24 and but he had never had a girlfriend to us unprompted. He was constantly being self-deprecating until he got sympathy. So, I asked him not to talk to me about anything but roommate matters.
29. It’s Never Temporary
I let a girl I knew move in with me and my roommate temporarily to escape a bad relationship. Shortly after I realized she had either borderline personality disorder or bipolar disorder or both. My life quickly turned into a nightmare. She was extremely passive-aggressive and began trying to manipulate my roommate to turn against me by making up ridiculous lies.
One day, after month three of living with me, I informed her I could not give her a ride somewhere because it did not work with my schedule. When I returned from work, she had cut all the flowers in my garden I had planted that spring at the base. When I confronted her about it, she said they were touching her windows (they were vine flowers).
I moved out the following month with my boyfriend. Told my roommate to watch out. She’s next. Three weeks later the psycho roommate went through the house and crossed out all her art and posters with black permanent marker.
30. No Worries, Bro
My roommate up and left to travel before rent was due. He left us a silly note saying, “Hey guys, great times with you, sorry to leave you like this but just caught a last-minute flight to Cambodia. Been a pleasure!” Yeah pleasures were not reciprocated since we had to clean up after him and cover his rent and utilities.
31. A Complete Disregard For Others
This was a forced roommate situation. I lived in an apartment style dorm for college. I moved in after him and he had taken a good chunk of the furniture we had into his room, leaving me with a small half-dresser, a bed, and a desk. We had a common area but it always had all his clothes all over everywhere so it was unusable.
He didn't bring any dishes or utensils so when I moved in with some, suddenly the sink was always full. He constantly smoked. INSIDE. He smoked all sorts of things constantly. It made the whole apartment smell super bad. The worst thing was he apparently kept forgetting he had a roommate because my girlfriend and I constantly walked in on him and his girlfriend. It was...not pretty.
One time we were woken up around 2 or 3 in the morning because they thought it would be a good idea to have super loud teenage-style relations against my door. I moved out early into an apartment and he had the audacity to make it difficult on official move out day which would have ended up costing each of us our $500 deposits.
I hadn't lived there in 2 months and the place was COMPLETELY trashed and he refused to clean it. But he wasn't getting away with this one. I told the RA I hadn't lived there for two months and provided proof as well as unlocked my room door to show it was spotless. He got stuck with either cleaning it or losing his deposit. I don't even care what happened.
32. That’s One Way Of Doing It
This couple I'm friends with used to live in a two-bedroom apartment and rent out the bedroom just to supplement costs. One of their roommates used to use dishes, wrap his dirty clothes around the used dishes and stash them in his dresser instead of just cleaning them.
33. Should Have Stayed In Vegas
My wife and I went to Vegas for a week around Valentine’s Day. Our roommate let one of his college friends crash at our apartment. We found out 3 days after we got home about it and the fact that he stayed there because his dorm had BED BUGS. That moron infested our apartment. I had to grovel to our landlord to not charge us for the fumigation.
I had to throw out a lot of my furniture and my brand-new bed. My roommate did not care and refused to help clean. My name is on the lease so I evicted him myself with the landlord’s approval. But of course, nothing is that easy. He was so lazy that it took him a month to START packing stuff and did nothing to clean up the horrific nests of bugs.
I offered to help many, many times with his share or packing but he always refused. It got to the point that I just had to throw out his bed and clean out his room. I lifted his mattress and I bet you there were a thousand bed bugs under there. He was supposed to throw his mattress out, he said he did, but obviously didn’t.
It cost me our damage deposit and hundreds of dollars to replace my infested stuff. He never took responsibility once or tried to make up for it.
34. Differing Beliefs
This one roommate of a friend of mine was crazy. He'd randomly storm into my friend's room saying that my friend gave him bad vibes and that his aura was so dark. He believed in a double world and that we could switch sides. He would threaten all the roommates he'd attack them if they didn't do as he told them to do.
He hid the voting papers for his roommates so they wouldn't be able to vote, but put them back when somebody asked where they were. It all got worse over time. He finally got kicked out and put into an institution by his parents. And on the last day, he hid the WiFi router in his room and locked the door so the roommates didn't have internet for a long while.
35. They Teach Sharing In Kindergarten
She ate all my food to the point where I had to hide the non-perishables in my room. She would go through my room when I wasn’t home and eat those non-perishables. She never helped clean common areas, and took my furniture to make her room more cozy. Finally I had enough and asked her to move out so she refused to pay the last months rent.
I had to buy a lock for my bedroom and lock my cat in my room for the last month she lived there because I was afraid she’d hurt my cat. She sent me a cute typed Christmas letter a few years after she moved out saying she was so sorry because I was clearly going through my own issues.
36. Slippery Slope
I had a roommate who seemed normal...at first. She started to have mental issues a few months after moving in. She never left her room after that, and refused to pay rent or her share of the utilities. When myself and the other housemates would confront her about this she would tell us to our face that she had paid the rent.
Nothing we could say or do would convince her that she had in fact not paid rent for two months. After another month of this we tried to get the property management company to kick her out. They told us that due to squatters' rights they couldn’t. So we had to get the authorities involved which made things so much worse.
Once she realized this she started to accuse all of us of beating her, thus why she hadn’t paid rent in 3 months. After much headache and multiple visits from officers, she was eventually taken to a 72-hour psych hold. We changed the locks and refused to let her back into the house once she got out and moved all her stuff onto the lawn. Then she went out with a bang.
She then proceeded to try and burn the house down later that night before her parents took her away again. I never saw her again after that thankfully and all her stuff ended up being thrown away by property management.
37. A Confusing Conclusion
He took the doorknob off the bathroom door. The main hall bathroom had a door into the room that my fiancé and I shared with a girl who liked to be undressed all the time (separate issue) and sometimes we would forget to unlock the hall door, so he just up and removed the door knob one day because he got annoyed with it.
He also could have easily walked through our door to get into that bathroom if he wanted, that door was always open.
38. In A World Of Their Own
They and their partner never cleaned up after themselves. They also drank a lot of soft drinks and got a lot of Uber Eats. It got to the point that their desks and the surrounding area had boxes and boxes of half empty drink cans, piles of rubbish made up of food containers and boxes from Amazon packages, and had dirt and grime everywhere.
The kitchen was small but was regularly filled with dishes that they very rarely did. Their room was covered in dirty clothes because they rarely did laundry. They also ruined my cast iron pan by leaving it soaking in the sink for a week, sitting in water and caked in tomato sauce. I am someone who needs things to be somewhat clean.
The extent of the mess from these two led to multiple talks with my psychologist because it was making me angry and depressed. If I spoke to the housemates about it, I'd get empty promises or tears. I ended up moving out after basically being a cleaner for them for the better part of a year.
39. Inappropriate Apology
In week one of lockdown, my roommate brought her very much still working boyfriend over for a super loud hump-sesh. Had to get the landlord involved to get rid of him. She then vented at the landlord that the rest of us don’t share our personal pots and pans with her. Which we did but whatever, landlord asked us to play nice and the boyfriend left.
He then made a whole show of coming downstairs in gloves and a mask to say sorry, before doing a toilet blocking, no flush, horror dump in the shared toilet, and leaving. She then refused to clean or wash up for a month.
40. Time To Go
I started learning that my roommate was pretty unhinged so I found a new place and started quietly moving everything out. When he found out, I fully feared for my life. The evening I told him, I had very little left to move out, but he grabbed a hammer and started swinging it at me. He missed and knocked a hole in the drywall. I was able to get the hammer away from him.
I called the authorities, but it was my word against his so nothing happened. Needless to say, I was out that night.
41. A Complete 180
I was in a small triple freshman year. Early on, my roommate was extremely studious and would accept nothing lower than pretty much an A on everything. He would beat himself up if it wasn't good enough and we would try to get him to relax a bit. Second half of freshman year he buys a new computer and World of Warcraft.
He refuses to go to class and played WoW nonstop all night and would sleep through the whole day. It was disrupting to me and my other roommate. He eventually ended up pretty much dropping out of school. I've never seen such a change around. He has actually gotten back on track though and has been doing pretty well for himself.
42. Be My Friend Or Else
She was sweet as a peach to your face, but honest to God couldn't stand NOT being the center of attention. She lied about insomnia to her teachers because she stayed up late playing video games and laughing super loud and calling her friends. Then she started "seeing things " the more time I spent with my boyfriend and not with her.
She tried to, against campus policy, rewrite our roommate contract so that she could claim I was breaking our agreement and get me kicked out since I was no longer paying her any attention.
43. Unreciprocated Kindness
She got the swine flu and was laid up in bed for days, during which time she would ask me to get her food from the dining hall and I would. Inevitably, I caught it from her. It hit me hard after she had already recovered and had her boyfriend visiting. I asked her if she please could get me something to eat because I was starving.
She told me to get it myself and said, "I really think you could use the fresh air." I ended up having to get my parents to take me home until I recovered.
44. This Is A No-Sleep Zone
My freshman year roommate had this god-awful alarm clock that had wheels and would roll off the desk and around the room, banging into things and making this astoundingly loud blaring sound until you turned it off. He had to get up earlier than me 3 or so days a week and he would also just let the thing careen around the room for a few minutes every morning.
This was also after he'd stay up until around 3 or 4 a.m. most nights playing some video game that had a team chat, so I was forced to listen to him muttering, "Okay, I'm sending in my division of space marines", while I tried to sleep. I had a talk with him pretty soon after all this started but nothing came of it.
45. The Fly Bag
I lived in an apartment-style dorm with a kitchen, living room, and two double bedrooms. One of the guys in the other bedroom fancied himself a chef (in reality, I think he was a dishwasher at Outback) so he would cook all the time in the apartment. He had this habit of hanging a plastic shopping bag from the oven door handle and just tossing cut scraps into it.
The problem is, he never actually threw that bag away. I was never around while he was cooking so I didn't pay that bag much mind nor realize it was always the same bag. After couple of weeks, we started to notice a foul smell and the presence of fruit flies in the apartment. I was deep cleaning the kitchen and I brushed up against that bag. Then my worst nightmare came true.
No less than a hundred fruit flies burst up from inside it. Needless to say, I freaked out. After a visit from the RA and the maintenance team to spray, he was required to clean up after every meal and take the trash out twice a week, on penalty of being kicked out of the dorms.
46. Go Big Or Go Home
When I was 19 I lived in a small rental house with 3 other dudes, and there were shenanigans. The worst was Joe, he came home blacked out once and broke the bathroom. He broke a mirror, then fell onto the toilet, and then into the shower, which bent the rod in half, and somehow pushed the toilet off of the mount.
This caused a huge wave of water to spill in the basement, which started a whole other series of issues. He literally broke the whole bathroom.
47. Spanish Pizza
I once had a roommate who kept cranking the temperature way up, I'm talking like 28 degrees Celsius or 85 Fahrenheit. The landlord kept coming over to turn it way down as he was paying the bill. We had the landlord coming over basically every day for a month. Finally, he turned the temperature to a very generous 22 Celsius and set up a lock box to cover the thermostat.
My roommate's reaction was deranged. He came home, got tipsy, took a hammer, smashed the box to pieces, and turned the temperature up to 28 degrees again. This by itself was just mainly amusing...but he also was swiping my stuff, borrowing money without paying it back, and hosting late-night dance parties to Nelly Furtado music.
He claimed he had never used a vacuum in his life and didn't know how. One time he put a frozen pizza in the oven together with the cardboard. I smelled burning and raced downstairs to remove the smoldering paper from the oven before it caught fire and burnt our house down. I asked him what he was thinking and he said, “That's the way we do it in Spain”.
48. Too Many Legs
We had a horrible centipede problem at one of the apartments I lived in that came about suddenly. They were in every single room, including the bathroom and my bedroom. I would wake up to find multiple right above my head or next to the light switch in the bathroom. My fear of centipedes was already one step away from being a full-blown phobia before this.
Neither of my roommates cared even in the slightest bit because they were both disgusting human beings; so one day I told the one whose father was the landlord that I was calling an exterminator and billing her dad if she didn't take care of the issue by the end of the day. Within an hour I got a call from her saying that she found the centipedes' food source.
There was a build-up of maggots in, around, and under her cats' food dishes. It was truly like a horror movie. She took just as bad a care of her cats as she did herself, and this was the result.
49. The Truth Shall Set You Free
We went to a party, he got blasted super quick and saw some people he didn't want to be around and walked home. About an hour later, me and my other roommate headed home too. When we pulled into the driveway we saw lights on in the living room, which quickly went off. We were in for quite the surprise... When we got inside we saw a massive person-sized hole in the hallway wall into the bathroom.
Our roommate was pretending to sleep and when we asked him what happened, he said someone "broke in." They didn't try to take anything but just busted a hole in our wall (from inside of the bathroom into the hall I should add), then slipped out the still locked back door (they didn't see him laying on the couch at all either apparently).
50. A Confusing Series Of Events
I had a co-worker who was living at my home for some weeks. He wasn't especially clean and sometimes he drank my beverages, but overall it was an okay situation. One day he told me he was moving back with his wife, and I said it was cool, he could take his things out whenever he needed. I wasn’t in a rush so I allowed him some time.
Almost immediately I found someone else who was looking for a room and I told him he can move in on Monday. Monday morning I wake up and there is a bicycle in my living room. Which, you know, I thought was a weird place for a bicycle. What I found next was far more shocking. I went to the kitchen and found ex-roomie banging a woman there. Someone who wasn’t his wife.
I threw his stuff outside and asked for the keys. It was a little awkward afterward at work and he never explained why he had decided to park the bike in the living room when I have a perfectly good garage.
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