Living with someone can be difficult even when they're a saint, but having an unhinged roommate can turn your life into a downright horror story. These stories will make you think twice about sharing your precious space.
1. Gollum, Is That You?
I woke up around 5:30 a.m. and shuffled into the kitchen, still half asleep. As I turned the corner, I froze.
My roommate of three months was crouched on the counter wearing a speedo. In a Gollum voice, he whispered, “My precious"! while copying Gollum’s odd little movements. I decided not to react and just made my breakfast. It’s been 10 years since that bizarre moment, and we’re still great friends.
2. It’s Getting Hot In Here
I once had a roommate who kept turning the heat way up—like 28°C or 85°F. The landlord, who paid the bill, kept coming over to turn it back down. So for about a month, the landlord was stopping by every single day. Eventually, he set the temperature to a very fair 22°C and installed a lockbox over the thermostat.
My roommate came home trashed one night and grabbed a hammer. That’s when things really went off the rails.
He smashed the box apart and turned the heat right back up to 28°C. That by itself wasn’t funny. He was also taking my things, borrowing money and never paying it back, and throwing late-night dance parties to Nelly Furtado. He even said he had never used a vacuum before and had no idea how one worked.
One time, he put a frozen pizza in the oven with the cardboard still on it. I smelled something burning and ran downstairs to pull the blazing cardboard out before it caught fire and burned the house down. When I asked what he was thinking, he said, “That’s how we do it in Spain". No embarrassment, no apology.
3. Troubled Times
I had a housemate who seemed completely normal at first—volunteer firefighter in a mining town, black belt in judo, genuinely nice guy. Then two weeks later, he hadn’t paid rent and had vanished. For the next few weeks, he showed up about once a week. One night, he came back at 2 a.m. just to grab a nightstick. When I learned why, I was stunned. Apparently, he had gotten on the bad side of a local biker gang, and they had taken his girlfriend.
He said he was going to get her out of a clubhouse in a nearby suburb. The next day, he came back with his girlfriend and all the rent he owed, plus two extra weeks. He apologized for the trouble and moved out that same day.
4. Paranoia Will Destroy Ya
I moved into a house with a couple of friends, but we still had two empty rooms, so they posted the listing online. One random guy took one of them. He moved all his stuff in at around 5 a.m. one day, which already seemed a little strange.
He wasn’t a student at our school. He had moved to the city to be with his girlfriend, who was. Unfortunately for him, just a couple of weeks after he signed the lease, she broke up with him. He was the messiest person I’ve ever lived with.
One day he came home from his factory job and made himself a sandwich with hands that were completely black with grease. It was gross and weird, especially since we had soap. For a while, he actually started seeming a little more normal. Then things began to take a turn.
He developed some kind of rash, which I assumed was probably because his room was filthy and maybe full of bugs. But he had a different theory. He told my friend he thought we had been putting chemicals in his laundry detergent to give him the rash, which of course we hadn’t.
The paranoia kept building. When he misplaced his driver’s license, he decided we had hidden it so he couldn’t come to the bar with us anymore. Again, not true. After a few weeks of this, everything exploded one morning. I woke up around 6 a.m. to the sound of someone sprinting up and down the stairs.
I was half asleep and figured one of my roommates was just late for class. Then I heard more frantic running, followed by my other roommate yelling.
I jumped out of bed and ran to the kitchen. My usual roommate was standing there, and when I came around the corner, I saw the paranoid roommate in front of the fridge wearing a bathrobe, sweatpants, and a baseball cap.
All my food and my friends’ food had been ripped out of the fridge and smashed onto the floor. Pickles, milk, chili—everything was everywhere. My roommate asked him what was happening, and he said, “I took 11 Benadryl".
We had no idea what to do, so we brought him into the living room, sat him on the couch, and tried to calm him down. He was shaking, shivering, sweating, and had this wild look in his eyes. Then suddenly he jumped up, yelled, and charged at my roommate, who shoved him straight through one of our dining room chairs.
I grabbed his legs, and together we pinned him down. He thrashed around and swung at us, trying to break free. He started shouting bizarre things like, “The media always wins"! After a while, when it was clear he wasn’t coming back to reality, we called for help and waited for officers and EMS to take him to the hospital.
After they left with him, we were still in shock and also curious, so we looked in his room to see what he’d been doing all night. We found a bunch of our food, a bottle of Tylenol missing a lot of pills, and Benadryl scattered across the floor.
There was also a box with a photo album and other things that looked like reminders of his relationship with the girl who had dumped him. We figured he had probably tried to end his life, but instead had a severe reaction. We only saw him one more time, when he came back to collect his things and move out.
5. The Real Hobbit
I’m pretty sure I once lived with a hobbit. He was a man about five feet tall, with curly brown hair and an endlessly cheerful attitude. He never wore shoes, whether he was inside or outside. He literally slept on the floor in what I can only describe as a nest of blankets. He started a garden and was always encouraging me to eat his tomatoes.
He also brought home samosas and other snacks all the time, and he always gave me half. He and his wife dreamed of living off the grid in a tiny house on a truck. I hope he’s doing well.
6. Good On Paper, Bad In Real Life
I own a house and rent out rooms in it. Right after I bought it, money was pretty tight, so I needed to fill both rooms as fast as I could. The timing was awkward, though, because it didn’t match the usual lease cycles in town—January, May, and September are the standard move-in times in a university town. A woman in her mid-30s came by wanting the furnished room, but something about it felt a little unusual.
I kept wondering why a woman her age had no furniture. My friends basically told me not to be so quick to judge. Maybe she had just left a bad relationship, maybe she was new to the city, and so on. So I rented to her. It turned out she had recently been released from behind bars for dealing. And honestly? She was still better than the other tenant.
She handled her business away from my house, usually in hotel rooms. She paid cash and always on time. She wasn’t around much. Once, she left a small scale in the living room, and that actually inspired me to buy a food scale, which ended up being a huge help in my weight loss journey. A serving of spaghetti is unbelievably small, and I never would have realized that without weighing it.
I eventually came up with an excuse to ask her to move out after she brought home a clearly unwell friend in the middle of the night, which was more than I was comfortable with. Meanwhile, the other tenant looked great on paper—she worked as an early childhood educator on the supply list. But she drank heavily and almost never made it to work because she couldn’t wake up on time.
And that wasn’t even the worst part. She never paid rent when it was due, brought a random group home from the bar in the middle of the night on a Wednesday, took three-hour baths in my only bathroom, and just wasn’t someone I could live with. I finally asked her to leave after she started helping herself to my drinks. I caught her once and warned her.
Then she did it again a few days later. I confronted her, gave her a month’s notice, and she actually asked if she could have the rest of my drinks. So, by comparison... the first tenant was better.
7. Lost In The Darkness
I had one roommate who did something completely bizarre. One day, while I was out at lunch with my girlfriend and her family, I got a text from him that said, “I owe you a new dresser". Back in my junior year, I lived in a two-bedroom apartment with two friends, and I shared a room with one of them, Jeff. One night, Jeff and our other roommate, Eric, went out partying while I stayed at my girlfriend’s place.
They came home very trashed, and Eric passed out on the couch while Jeff somehow made it back to our room and collapsed into bed. Normally that would have been the end of it, but Jeff had a strange habit: when he got really trashed, he would sleepwalk. That night, he got up, wandered into our walk-in closet where my dresser was, shut the door behind him, and passed out on the floor.
A few hours later, he woke up in complete darkness, surrounded by unfamiliar objects, with no memory of how he had gotten there. To this day, he says he thought he had been abducted. Once he decided he’d been “abducted,” he panicked and started trying to escape. He banged on the walls and door and yelled for Eric, who was still comfortably unconscious on the couch.
When that didn’t work, he started tearing his way out. He punched a hole in one wall leading to the bathroom, then ripped a body-sized hole in the opposite wall with his bare hands. When he reached the vinyl siding on the outside of the building, he pulled down the metal hanging rod, bent it like something out of a comic book, and tried to stab through the siding.
If the building had wood siding instead, he probably would have broken through and fallen out. You could see the damage from outside for the rest of the time we lived there. Eventually, he gave up. He really had to pee and started crying because he felt so trapped. Then, sitting on the closet floor in defeat, he noticed light coming in under the door. Inspired by that tiny bit of light—and by the need to use the bathroom—he finally found the doorknob and walked right back into our room.
8. He Had To Face The Music
During my first year at Boston University, I applied for housing late and ended up in an apartment meant for juniors and freshmen. I lived with three juniors, and one of them—Brad—was completely unpredictable. One day I got back from class and found Brad excitedly talking about his plan to put on a concert at “BU Beach,” and he asked to borrow a bunch of CDs and stereo equipment.
I didn’t think much of it and went on with my day. About four hours later, the other two roommates came in looking stunned and told me that at the end of his “concert,” Brad got so overwhelmed with love for the crowd that he gave away all the music and equipment he had borrowed. He got so carried away that he even gave away the shirt he was wearing.
9. Bubbles Everywhere!
My college roommate had no idea how to do laundry when we started school. We had a shared washer and dryer on our floor. During the third week of the semester, I went downstairs to grab a soda from the vending machine, and when I walked in, there were bubbles piled four inches deep across the floor. My roommate came in right behind me to check on his laundry.
He had dumped three full scoops of Tide into the washer with one load of clothes. I ended up taking him to an off-campus laundromat so we could rinse all the extra soap out of everything.
History's most fascinating stories and darkest secrets, delivered to your inbox daily.
10. The Chef And Dish Hoarder
This is my one and only roommate story. After this, I promised myself never again. My roommates were a childhood friend and her boyfriend. He was a “chef”—really a line cook at a chain restaurant—who liked to make average meals whenever he felt like it. He used almost every bowl and pan in the kitchen each time he cooked, and then left the mess behind for someone else to deal with.
He also had a cat and never bought food for it, so I ended up feeding it because I couldn’t just let it go hungry. My childhood friend, meanwhile, was an unemployed student who used the cups from my dinner set as ashtrays. She would pile food onto a plate, take it into her room, pick at it throughout the day, and then leave it there.
She kept doing this until we had no clean plates left. I told her I would even wash them if she would just bring them back to the kitchen, but she never did. I had to wait until she left the apartment and then go into her room to collect them myself, complete with old food still stuck to them. Eventually, my boyfriend moved in with us, and I started setting some boundaries.
Those boundaries eventually led to a huge screaming argument, and in the end, my boyfriend and I moved out. My only regret is that I didn’t take the cat with me.
11. It Wasn’t All Sunshine And Rainbows
The person I lived with in college was completely unhinged. One night, he came into the apartment talking to himself. I heard him go into his room and start making a ton of noise. His door was open, so I glanced in. What I saw was chilling. He was tearing the room apart; nothing was standing upright, and everything was scattered across the floor. Without even looking at me, he hurled a record at the wall, and it shattered just a few inches from my head.
He never acknowledged I was there. I went into my room and shut the door. A little later, he started taking a shower in my bathroom. While he was in there, our RA knocked and asked us to keep it down. As I tried to explain that I wasn’t the one making all the noise, a huge crash came from the shower. The RA just shrugged and left, and I went back to my room.
After about two hours, I wanted to make dinner, but I could still hear the shower running. I stepped out and saw a wet trail of CDs and records leading into my bathroom. The door was wide open, so I could clearly see him completely without clothing on—except for his rainbow hat—sitting on top of the back of a dining room chair in the shower.
The shower curtain was on the floor, and the comforter from his bed was draped over his feet. The tub below him was filled with broken CDs and records. Water was blasting everywhere straight out of the wall, because that loud crash earlier had apparently been him ripping the shower head completely off.
I walked into the kitchen and started cooking. He eventually left the bathroom and walked right past me into his room without seeming to notice me. Then he came back out, still without any clothing on, stopped in front of me, slowly turned his head, and looked at me for the first time. He said, “Oh,” then walked out the front door wearing nothing but his rainbow hat.
12. Who’s Laughing Now?
Back in college, an old girlfriend and a friend of mine shared a room. One time, they decided to play a prank on me by switching beds. My friend usually went home on weekends, so I assumed he wouldn’t be there. I got back super late from a gig and was too tired to bother with pajamas. I took off all my clothes and climbed into bed.
I started to cuddle up, then gently grabbed his behind and said, “Goodnight". He jumped out of bed and ran down the hall screaming, while my girlfriend laughed from the corner. I guess the prank ended up being on him.
13. They’re Watching
I had a college roommate who was obsessed with CSI. She had CSI pillows and blankets. She refused to turn on lights and kept all the blinds closed. She hated any kind of brightness and would sigh dramatically if I switched on a light to do anything. She used to tell me Facebook was how people spy on you. She said she would never have a MySpace or anything like that.
She constantly called me a sheep and said “they” were going to take my identity. Another roommate of mine—we had four people split between two bedrooms—was loud at all hours. If you asked her to quiet down, even politely, she would deliberately start doing cartwheels, banging on things, and singing. She also claimed she was Jay Leno’s niece.
14. Deadly Cleaner
One of my college roommates wanted to clean the silt stains out of our shared bathtub, so he mixed bleach and vinegar to make what he called a “super powerful cleaner". After I used the bathroom and started feeling lightheaded, I asked him what he had put in the tub.
When he told me, it didn’t sound right, so I quickly looked it up online and my stomach sank. The first result said the mixture could be fatal. It creates chlorine gas, which can suffocate someone within minutes.
15. Oh, Sister!
I had a roommate who asked if his sister could move into the third bedroom of my house. He was a decent guy, so I figured his sister would be fine too. I was very wrong. She was awful to my dog. I caught her once and had to seriously hold back my anger. She also dated some rough people and brought them back to our house all the time.
Then one day, I got home from work and found bounty hunters at my door looking for her boyfriend. She showed up with him, and he immediately spotted one of the bounty hunters waiting in my yard. He punched her in the face and sped off in her car. Not long after that, she was gone too.
16. He Rat-tled Our Cage
I moved into a new house with a few other people. One of my long-term roommates was a professional student who had earned degrees in law, medicine, and fine arts. About a week after moving in, I realized he was struggling with addiction. After six months of long talks, it became clear he was deeply disturbed. He told me in detail how and where he had taken the lives of two people on separate occasions.
During one argument, he bit the head off his pet rat and threw the body across the room while grinning at us with the head still in his mouth. After things kept getting worse, another friend and I moved out.
17. Apartment Griller
I lived in Southern California, where the weather is usually great. We had a huge porch that was about the same size as our apartment. It was actually the roof of the unit below us, and we kept a charcoal grill out there. One day after practice, I came home and saw something I could hardly believe.
My roommate was using the charcoal grill inside the apartment. I walked in, looked at him, looked at the grill, and then looked back at him. It felt unreal. Who grills indoors? I yelled at him, then left for a friend’s house while I waited for the carbon monoxide to clear out.
18. Not A Lightbulb In Sight
I had to work overseas for three months. When I came home, I found out the bathroom light bulb had burned out right after I left. My roommate felt she couldn’t replace it herself, so she called an electrician. He laughed and told her she could save a lot of money by just doing it herself. She still hadn’t changed it by the time I got back.
Of course, I fixed it in about five minutes. It probably would have taken less time, but I couldn’t stop laughing at the idea of her using the bathroom in the dark for months.
19. The Painted Volvo
One night, my roommate decided to repaint her car in the garage. She started sanding down the silver paint on her old Volvo by hand, then pulled out cans of red spray paint. She spent forever spray-painting the whole car freehand with the garage door shut and no ventilation at all.
After she moved out, I was visiting a friend in another city and noticed a red spray-painted Volvo parked outside the apartment below. Somehow, she had ended up living with my completely unrelated friend for a while and had convinced the older man downstairs to buy the badly painted car. This same roommate also worked odd hours and would vacuum and stack dishes at 3:00 am.
20. Almost Burned The House Down
One night after drinking too much, my roommate tried to heat up frozen macaroni in a pan on our gas stove. Then he went to his room and passed out on his bed. Around 4:00 am, I woke up to the smell of smoke in my room.
The whole house was full of smoke. On the stove was a pan containing blackened, completely burned macaroni. And, somehow, that pan was later stolen after I left it outside on our doorstep for a few hours.
21. Bob The Bingeating Boozehound
I had a roommate, Bob, who moved in halfway through the semester after one of our old roommates left. He told us he’d moved out of his previous place because his old roommates were using illicit substances. After that, things slowly started to get worse. The first sign was when I noticed a half-eaten package of Girl Scout cookies missing. I was way too passive about it and just thought, “Whatever. Roommates eat each other’s food all the time".
What I didn’t realize was that Bob would turn into someone who not only ate everything in sight, but also peed all over the place whenever he got trashed. One night, one of my roommates texted me and asked me to check on Bob, who had gone down into the basement where the hippie roommates lived. She was worried because she had just pulled out a huge tray of burning chicken nuggets—which were mine—and had seen Bob head downstairs.
One of the basement roommates, Sue, had just gotten home, so we went down together and found Bob passed out on their couch. He’d been drinking and had gone down there to get more drinks from their mini fridge. Sue and I helped him upstairs and left him passed out on his bed. When we laid him down, there was already a wet spot around his crotch.
Another time, he came home being held up by two girls. I was in my room studying with music on, but Sue was in the kitchen. The second Bob got inside, the two girls left, and Bob immediately peed all over the kitchen floor. Sue yelled at him, but he was too trashed to respond and ended up passing out in it. She dragged him back to his room.
She left him on the floor and cleaned up the mess. Then she went downstairs to relax after dealing with all that and started hearing movement above her. Apparently Bob had to pee again, was still too trashed to make it anywhere, and went on his bedroom floor, where it leaked down into the basement. That kind of thing kept happening. He drank constantly, took everyone’s food, and peed everywhere. He was awful.
22. What The Hill?
One of my college roommates suddenly sat straight up in bed around 2 a.m. and said, “This is the hill". I asked, “What hill"? His answer was genuinely unsettling. He said, “This is the hill we go out on,” and then just laid back down and went to sleep. He never sleep-talked again for the rest of the year. He also really liked white powder. One time he came in clearly under the influence of several things and tried to snort salt that someone had spilled on the carpet.
Another time, I walked in and found him throwing everything he could grab from the kitchen at the wall. I guess he was trying to see what would stick. He threw a few knives, a metal spatula, and something that actually went through the wall and left a hole. After that, I figured it was probably smart to keep my knives in my room.
23. Thirty Days And Thirty Nights
I had a roommate who made a wildly ambitious bet that he could sleep with thirty different women in thirty days. Each person involved paid me $25 up front to act as an impartial witness. This wasn’t some harmless joke of a bet. My roommate was extremely calculating in the way he dealt with women. He lied constantly and kept detailed notes in a huge 8.5-by-11-inch binder. He wrote down their favorite flowers, colors, important dates, and details from every conversation.
He carried that binder everywhere and reviewed it whenever he called his “honeys". It was impressive in a disturbing way. They were all attractive, and the range was surprising—from a bank teller to a pole dancer to the married woman next door, whose husband eventually found out. One night, her husband came pounding on our door at 2 a.m. and woke me up, saying he needed my help.
When I opened the door, he started trying to pull a piece out of his jacket. He saw mine, and I slammed the door shut. We had a very polite but very loud conversation through the door, and eventually he went home. I accidentally broke my roommate’s door, thoroughly frightened the wife, and not long after that, she got divorced. I also got a new roommate. And yes, he did win the bet.
24. Friend Of The Pigeons
A few years ago, my former roommate and I let our downstairs neighbor move in with us because the guy he’d been living with had developed a very strange new habit. He had started befriending the pigeons that gathered on the rooftop outside his bedroom window, and before long he was bringing them inside and taking care of them like pets. The place got filthy very fast.
25. Sleepwalking Psycho
I used to make dinner pretty often, and I always cooked enough to offer some to our roommate. He always paid rent and utilities, but sometimes he didn’t have much money left for food, so I’d say, “Hey man, want to have dinner with us"? Usually he’d say he didn’t like whatever I was making. Then the next morning, all the leftovers would be gone.
His explanation was that he must have sleepwalked and eaten it in his sleep. This happened at least fifteen to twenty times over the course of a year. He’d put on a big show about how gross my cooking sounded, so I’d save enough leftovers for two lunches for my boyfriend and me, and then we’d go to bed. By morning, the food would be gone and dirty utensils would be sitting in the sink.
Then, about five years later, he called me at 3 a.m. after not speaking to me or my partner for three years. He claimed my now-husband—the same boyfriend I mentioned earlier—was using illicit substances in front of our four-year-old child. I called my husband, who was asleep at home. Neither of us had spoken to this guy in years, so the whole thing was bizarre. And then the story got even darker.
Another five years passed, and he ended up behind bars for taking the life his roommate. His defense? He claimed he did it while sleepwalking.
26. Air Vent Escapee
My freshman-year college roommate was a random match. This guy partied all night and slept all day—he honestly wouldn’t wake up until 5:00 PM. Then he disappeared for about a week. I called my mom because I wasn’t even sure he was still alive. She looked into whether he’d been picked up by the authorities. Before she could call me back, officers were at our door asking if we’d seen him.
A few minutes later, my mom called back. He’d been detained for robbing the convenience store in our dorm building. But that’s not even the wildest part.
He tried to hide in an air vent. He ended up on the front page of the campus newspaper, got expelled, and I had the whole dorm room to myself for the rest of the fall and spring semesters.
27. Lovesick Lunatic
When I was in college, I lived in an apartment with a few guys, and we decided to rent a house together. The problem was that we needed one more person, since there were four of us and the house had five bedrooms. In what was probably my friend’s worst idea, he asked his girlfriend of a year to move in with us. At first, the other two of us thought it was a bad plan. Then we found out the house had two separate leases.
We figured the three of us could live downstairs, and the two of them could stay upstairs. Summer came, and they broke up, just like we expected. At first it was manageable—but then he started acting differently. He became really withdrawn. He had an old Bowflex upstairs and would lift weights, always letting them slam down.
After his workouts, he’d grunt a lot and walk past her door completely unclothed. He also had a huge pile of used tissues sitting on his desk by his monitor. His room was always covered in cans, clothes, books, and all kinds of junk, to the point where you couldn’t even see the floor. We also weren’t convinced he showered more than once a month during that stretch.
He played World of Warcraft until around 4 AM every night, with the volume so loud we could hear voices all through the house. We eventually dealt with that by unplugging the cable modem, which was in another roommate’s bedroom. To this day, we don’t know if he ever figured it out, because we’d hear him shout, “Insight cable is terrible—it always cuts out at night"!
As time went on, his ex kept ignoring him—but she told us all kinds of strange stories about him. He’d walk around unclothed, leave her notes, and try to start painfully awkward conversations. He wrote her poetry a few times that was unbelievably bad and barely readable. We threw a lot of parties, and halfway through he’d come downstairs, take a few swigs from a bottle, then run back upstairs to play WoW.
We even tried bringing the party upstairs so he wouldn’t feel left out, but he just ignored us. Eventually his ex started dating someone new. One night she came home late with her new boyfriend. They tried to be quiet and get to her room without making any noise, but they got back at the same time her ex did. That might not have mattered—except he was completely trashed.
He went into his room and started throwing things around and making a huge amount of noise. The new boyfriend went in and said, “Hey man, we’re tired and trying to sleep. Could you please keep it down"? He snapped and sucker-punched the new boyfriend. He wouldn’t calm down and kept saying he was going to do stuff to him, so the new guy called the authorities.
Officers showed up, and the roommate kept talking back to them nonstop until they warned him they’d handcuff him and put him in the car. He kept going, and next thing we knew, he was in the back of the cruiser while the new boyfriend showed the officers his bloody face. Our roommate got taken away and spent time behind bars. That summer, we had to go to court and testify about what happened that night.
28. Weedhead Woes
I lived with my good friend and another guy who had been assigned to our room. The other guy, Fred, smoked weed constantly, which really bothered my friend Pat. One day Fred was cleaning his bong in the shower he shared with Pat. He broke it and never said anything. Later, Pat took a shower and realized his foot hurt and was bleeding from a big piece of glass. He asked Fred why there was glass in the shower. Fred’s only response was, “Gotcha"!
29. Life Lessons
I had a roommate during my first year of college who had no interest in dating anyone, and apparently no interest in showering either. He had a MacBook and spent all his time playing WoW and Second Life at once, constantly switching between the two. He was also writing a book in a DBZ-inspired style, with dragons like Tiamat and TIME DRAGONS shouting in all caps. The main characters were named Omega and Ultima. For some reason, he started with book four in the series.
The last time I checked, he had written over 100,000 words, and the story included dragon-vampire relations. He drew the symbol for his book on the whiteboard by our front door. When someone asked why he started with number four instead of number one, he said he wanted it to be more like Star Wars. But that wasn’t the worst part.
At one point, his MacBook charger broke, and while we were asleep, he swapped his charger with mine. The next day in class, I noticed my laptop wouldn’t charge, and the plug had scorch marks all over it. The night before, he had complained that his laptop wouldn’t charge. When I checked his laptop and the cord, both were covered in the same dirt that covered all his stuff, and the scorch marks on the plug matched the marks on his computer exactly.
He denied it, but campus officials pressured him until he admitted what he’d done and gave mine back. He was extremely conservative, always slacking off in school, bragged about the Samurai Island server he bought in Second Life, and generally made my first year of college awkward and miserable. When we found out he played a female character in Second Life, one of my friends asked, “Do you tell the people you play with that you’re a girl"? He replied, “We don’t talk about first life".
30. Mafia Business
My college roommate said he was connected to the mafia. He was always sweaty, easily startled, and kept a lot of cash in his car. He was never around on weekends, and I never once saw him drink. Strangest of all, he never slept in his room. He always slept on the couch by the door. Eventually, he told me why.
He said that if anyone ever broke in looking for him, he wanted “them” to find him right away so nobody else would get hurt. I still don’t know whether he was telling the truth, but I locked my bedroom door every night.
31. No Boundaries
During my freshman year of college, I ended up with a roommate who had no sense of boundaries. The night before classes started, she asked if she could have one of my granola bars and a K-Cup for coffee the next morning, and I said yes. Big mistake.
After that, she kept helping herself to my snacks without asking. I didn’t realize it at first, but one day I got really shaky from not eating, went to grab a granola bar, and found out they were all gone. She was always going through my stuff and keeping track of everything I did, just so she could comment on every part of my life.
Eventually, she told me she would only stay in the room overnight on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays so her boyfriend could drive her to class. Even then, she would still show up at random and burst into the room without warning.
That December, I ended up in the ER after spraining my knee in a skateboard fall. I left the paperwork on my desk when I went home for winter break. That night, she called me and casually told me she had read all of it, including everything they prescribed for my knee. I submitted a room change request as soon as I could.
Then, the week before we came back, she called to tell me she had dropped out—or, as she put it, was “taking a semester off”—because she had missed so many classes that financial aid had warned her. I had the room to myself for the rest of the year.
32. If It Looks Like Roast Beef...
I was living with a friend and had flown home for a couple of weeks. When I got back, he picked me up from the airport in my car, and we were catching up about what we had both done while I was away. Then he said, “Hope you don’t mind, but I ate all the roast beef you had in the fridge". I just stared at him.
I told him I have never, not once, bought roast beef as lunch meat. What he had actually eaten was ham that had expired long before I left and had apparently gotten so bad it looked like roast beef. Luckily, it didn’t make him sick, but it was still pretty hilarious.
33. A Bizarre Bunkmate
I’ve only had two roommates, and one of them was later diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. At one point, she brought home a bottle of cholesterol she had extracted from a cow’s heart in class and kept it under her bed for months. She once asked me to look at her menstrual blood and tell her if it seemed strange, which I immediately refused. She also made repeated attempts at self harm, about once a month.
For several months, she pretended to have grand mal seizures for attention and had severe conversion symptoms that often led to midnight ER trips. So many bizarre things happened while I lived with her that it’s hard to sort out which ones were the strangest. After I moved out, her family came to visit. Her mother wanted her to move back home, and when she refused, her mother tied her to a chair in the apartment and kept her there until her siblings untied her and helped her escape.
34. Act Like An Adult!
I had one flatmate who seemed upset about what I was or wasn’t doing around the apartment, but she was too passive-aggressive to ever say it directly. This was despite the fact that I mostly kept to myself, regularly baked things for both of us, and did all the cleaning. Eventually, she disappeared for three months. Not long after posting Facebook photos of herself with her “cool new roomies,” she pretended to be engaged to her boyfriend so she could move out.
35. Leaving The Nest
In the mid-2000s, I moved out, started college, and began figuring out life on my own. I moved into the dorms with a couple of roommates and had to adjust to all the usual things—sharing a kitchen, waiting my turn, taking turns in the shower, stretching food, and all that. I had two official roommates who were both older than me. One was constantly high, and the other was easygoing and chill.
For the first month or so, everything was fine, and I was settling in. Then things started getting strange. More and more often, my always-high roommate brought over a sort-of girlfriend. I usually went home on weekends to see friends, and every time I came back, something felt off. She was always around, but I never actually saw her sleep in his room.
One day, while they were both in class, I got curious and looked around a little. I checked his room and didn’t find anything. As I was leaving, I noticed a bit of fabric sticking out of the closet. I opened it and found a pile of blankets and a pillow. The girl had made herself a little nest in her boyfriend’s closet, hidden from my other roommate and me.
After that, I tried to stay out of it. I’d say hi to my roommate, go into my room, and pretend I didn’t have roommates at all. Then one night, I came home after class and found the high roommate standing on the stairwell, staring at the wall from about two inches away. My room was upstairs.
I stood at the bottom of the steps for a second, trying to decide what to do, when Closet Girl appeared at the top and told me he was on Dramamine. I just nodded and carefully made my way past him. He didn’t even notice me. I shut my door and tried to go to sleep. A while later, I woke up to flashlights shining right in my face.
I covered my eyes, looked at the clock, and saw it was 2 AM. Two officers were telling me to get out of bed and come downstairs. Completely confused, I threw on some pants and followed them. Once downstairs, they started asking whether I knew I had almost hit an officer, run a red light, driven over a curb, and parked at my dorm sideways with half the car on the grass.
I told them I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. Closet Girl, my laid-back roommate, and the high roommate were all sitting against the wall nearby, just like I was. Then Closet Girl told the officers I had nothing to do with it, looked at me, and said she was really sorry. My roommate apologized too, while the laid-back one just nodded. The officer explained that they had gotten my name because my roommate had taken my car and done all of that. I moved out the next week.
36. The Moth Whisperer
My roommate painted his room completely black. He kept the window wide open all year and left out all kinds of containers filled with some homemade mixture to attract moths. He’d leave the house barefoot, wearing a black hoodie, and disappear for days. He also wrote a 500-plus-page manuscript about a man who starts a cult and asked me to proofread it.
One day, I came home and found a bunch of kitchen knives left out on the counter. It seemed strange, but I just washed them and put them away. Later I found out he had used them that morning to rob a store at the end of our street. Security footage showed him walking back to the house, and he was detained the next day and thrown behind bars.
37. The Oddball
The university cycling team had its own floor in the dorms during my freshman year. Cyclists can be a little unusual, and my roommate, “John,” was no exception. He grew up Quaker. His parents had recently divorced, and his mom was building a house in the D.C. area right next to her ex-husband’s, with both houses being exactly the same.
His family was extremely wealthy, and he got pretty much anything he wanted. He had come to this school specifically to race mountain bikes, even though he had never actually raced a bike before or even owned a mountain bike. On the first day of school, he showed up with a $5,000 road bike and a $7,000 mountain bike. Whenever he went shopping, he usually paid in cash.
He also had the biggest jar of loose change I’d ever seen. When I say he was odd, I mean he always seemed just slightly out of sync. He was taking 70mg of Vyvanse, but still couldn’t focus on anything for very long. He would interrupt conversations with completely unexpected thoughts and would often leave the room forgetting something important, like socks or a shirt.
It’s hard to explain because there wasn’t really anything obviously wrong with him; he just never seemed fully present. For example, during one team trip, we all went to Cracker Barrel. He sat quietly for about 45 minutes while everyone else talked. Then, suddenly and loud enough for the entire restaurant to hear, he announced the most random observation imaginable:
“Everyone here is old except for us".
It was true, but definitely not something that needed to be shouted. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether the amphetamines he’d been prescribed since childhood had affected him. Still, he was honestly fun to be around because you never knew what he might do next.
We lived together off campus again sophomore year with two other guys from the cycling team. The summer between sophomore and junior year, he was supposed to do a two-week study abroad program in Austria. The rest of us joked, only half-kidding, that it might be the last time we ever saw John. If anyone could get lost in another country, it was him.
A few weeks before the trip, he told us he had met an Italian girl online and hoped to meet her while he was abroad. While packing, he showed us a selfie she had just sent him. She was in a car, wearing a seatbelt. When he showed it to us, he looked genuinely panicked.
He was convinced that because she was looking out the window, it was actually a secret cry for help and that he needed to rescue her. On his second day abroad, I got a call from his mother. I had a feeling I knew exactly what this was about, so I put the call on speaker so the other roommates could hear too.
She asked, “Have you heard from John"?
“Uh, no. He’s in Austria,” I said.
Then she replied, “The school called. He’s missing. They can’t find him".
So we told her about the girl.
His mom ended up hiring a private investigator, who found him five days later wandering around a small town near the Italian border. He was expelled from the university, and I never saw him again. His family hired movers to clear out his stuff from our apartment. He had completely derailed the study abroad trip for everyone.
We asked him what happened, but we never got any real explanation. Over the years, he sent me a few incredibly random Facebook messages. One time he wrote, “What degrees did you achieved"? I answered, and then six months later he replied, “That’s really cool that you are successful, who else do I know that is successful"?
38. Marilyn Manson Fan
I had a roommate during my Navy technical training. He was quiet, worked the night shift, and always seemed just a little unusual. He was really nice, though, so we never had any real issues. One day during lunch, I went back to our room to grab something and heard music playing.
I was confused about why Marilyn Manson was blasting at full volume during a time when he was usually asleep. I opened the door and saw him lying on top of his blankets with his arms folded across his chest like Nosferatu. After taking a second to process how strange that looked, I walked over to the speaker and turned the volume down a bit.
That’s when his eyes flew open, and without turning his head, he asked, “What are you doing"?
I awkwardly replied, “Oh, sorry, I thought you were asleep. I was just turning it down".
He paused for a moment, then said, “Oh... sorry,” and closed his eyes again.
He was definitely an odd guy, but over time he opened up a bit, and we started gaming together. Wherever you are, man, I hope the Navy worked out for you.
39. Her Nonsense Was Of Biblical Proportions
I had a roommate who was incredibly clueless. When she moved in, I knew her boyfriend lived upstairs, so I told her to just text me if they ever wanted the room to themselves. She replied, “Oh no! I’m too Christian-ish for that"! After that, I ended up walking in on them together probably every other week for the rest of the school year.
One time, I even texted her to say I’d be back in 15 minutes, and she replied, “Okie Dokes, see you soon". When I got back to the room, they were still at it. So I spent time with some friends in the lounge until around 3:30 a.m. When I finally texted, knocked, and carefully came in, she giggled and asked what had taken me so long, then said, “We were only watching a movie".
40. Dozing Deceiver
I had a roommate who slept constantly. Every time I walked into the room, he seemed to be napping. If I woke him up in the middle of one of these naps, he would sit up, introduce himself as Bob, which was not his actual name, and then go right back to sleep. The first time it happened, I assumed he was joking. But when I asked him about it later, he had no memory of the conversation.
So the next time he was asleep, I tried it again, and once again he was “Bob". I stopped mentioning it because I was still sure he was just messing with me. He never brought it up himself. Over the next four years, a few of us would wake him up every now and then, and we slowly learned more and more about my roommate’s “Bob” personality.
A few years later, I ran into him again and decided to finally tell him about his Bob alter ego. I explained how I used to wake him up and “Bob” would answer. After I finished telling him this very strange story, I finally got the truth.
He said, “Oh yeah, that was me the whole time. I was just messing with you guys".
My roommate kept that joke going for four straight years and never slipped once.
41. My Roomie Was A Total Meathead
One time in college, my roommate left a 50-quart cooler with about 20 pounds of meat in it sitting in our living room for a few months. One day I went to move it, heard liquid sloshing around, and thought, “What on earth is in here"? Inside was 20 pounds of rotten meat and a few bags of melted ice. I told him he needed to get rid of it, so he opened the front door and dumped the whole thing onto our porch.
42. Missing Roommate
When I was a college freshman, I had a random roommate. She was hardly ever around, usually out partying and sleeping in friends’ rooms. One Monday morning, sometime around Halloween, she left a confidential report right in the middle of the floor.
It described her underage, disorderly behavior. Along with it was a letter from the school saying she had to attend responsibility classes and write an essay explaining why what she did was wrong. She was gone the whole day, but came back around 11:00 p.m.
She threw some things into a duffel bag, told me I could keep anything of hers if I wanted, and left. At the end of the week, someone from the school called and asked if I had seen her. I told him the last time I’d seen her. He asked why I hadn’t reported her missing, and that was the end of the conversation. I didn’t report her because she had clearly left on her own.
I eventually heard through the grapevine that she had run off to California—our school was in Pennsylvania—to stay with her brother, and neither of them had told their parents she was there. I had the room to myself for the rest of the year.
I piled all her things into a corner, enjoyed the extra space, and sat through a very awkward, completely silent 15 minutes when she and her mother showed up on move-out day to collect her stuff.
43. The Man Child
I had a “friend” who turned out to be unbelievably immature. Not just childish, but at 32 years old, he wouldn’t do basic things for himself—things like brushing his teeth, trimming his nails, cooking, cleaning, or showering. He tried to cook once by dumping three boxes of pasta into one bowl and adding ground beef and shredded cheese.
He ate loudly, his hair was badly tangled because he wouldn’t take care of it, and he moved in with my partner and me because he wanted better education and job opportunities. He stayed with us for eight months and, in all that time, maybe sent out two job applications. I told him to stick with community colleges, but he insisted on some overpriced private program.
He asked if he could stay with us for the year and a half it would take him to finish. I said absolutely not. He was also incredibly immature. There was probably a reason his best years seemed to be in high school. And if you looked up “incompetence,” I’m pretty sure you’d find his picture there. Every time my partner or I cooked, he would just stare at us until we offered him some.
He ate our food and never replaced it, wandered around in his boxers, and almost never left the apartment. If you tried to show him something simple, like how the coffee maker worked, he’d panic and say he couldn’t do it. When he finally moved out and went back to live with his mom, we celebrated.
44. Hole In The Wall
One time, my roommate and I went to a party. He got completely trashed, saw some people he didn’t want to be around, and walked home. About an hour later, my other roommate and I headed back too. When we pulled into the driveway, we saw the living room lights on, and then they suddenly switched off. When we got inside, we couldn’t believe what we saw.
There was a huge hole in the hallway wall. Our roommate was pretending to be asleep, and when we asked him what happened, he claimed someone had “broken in,” decided not to take anything, punched a hole in our wall from inside the bathroom, and then somehow slipped out through the locked back door. And apparently they didn’t notice him lying on the couch. The guy was a compulsive liar.
45. Foreign Freak
During freshman year, I had a roommate who barely spoke to me and once had an accident in the room while I was in class. I came back to a terrible smell. She also smoked in the room even though I kept telling her that wasn’t allowed in the dorms. She was an international student who spoke very little English and spent all day playing WoW.
She would also Skype with her online boyfriend in New Zealand until the middle of the night. I tried to get along with her as much as I could, but there were too many strange incidents, and walking in on her being intimate with herself every morning made it nearly impossible.
46. Happy Landings
One of my three roommates came home late one night with a coworker who was completely trashed. Our apartment had two bedrooms upstairs, with a sort of loft hallway between them that looked down into the living room; we kept a couch up there. The coworker passed out on that couch.
I was downstairs watching TV with my girlfriend when I suddenly heard a very soft “Ohhhh". My girlfriend didn’t hear it, so I ignored it. About a minute later, I heard more moaning, and this time it was louder. My girlfriend heard it too. We turned the TV down, and the noise kept getting louder. At first, we honestly weren’t sure what was happening upstairs.
That seemed strange, since my roommate had a perfectly good bedroom if she wanted privacy. So we decided to quietly go up the stairs and peek over. What we saw was really unsettling. The coworker was having a good time with herself, if you catch my drift, with her pants around her ankles. She either didn’t notice us or didn’t care, because she just kept going. We went back downstairs and tried to decide what to do.
We were talking about whether to call my other roommate when, after a minute or two, the noise stopped. My girlfriend went back upstairs and found the woman passed out again, still with her pants around her ankles. She covered her with a blanket, and my roommate later said she hadn’t heard any of it.
47. A Cheesy Scenario
I came home late from work one night and found my roommate crying in the bathtub, drinking Malibu coconut straight from the bottle, wearing a pair of men’s swim trunks I had never seen before, while Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” played in the background. Then I looked to the left and realized she had stapled slices of cheese to the wall.
48. The Hypocrite
I had a roommate who was an extreme neat freak and completely unreasonable. She would literally yell and start cleaning up after you while you were still cooking. I’d be chopping vegetables and adding the first batch to a pan, and she’d storm over angry that I had left the cutting board out for her to clean, even though I was obviously still using it. And that was only the start of it.
She only ate two things: chicken nuggets and popcorn. Every day, she cooked the nuggets on the same baking sheet. Once it got covered in baked-on residue, she would just put a layer of foil over it and cook on top of that. Then when that got gross, instead of removing the old foil, she’d just add another layer!
When she moved out, she left the pan in the drawer under the stove with six layers of greasy, burnt chicken nugget crumbs stuck to it. Apparently I was terrible for not washing a cutting board in the middle of cooking, but a baking sheet covered in months of grease and crumbs could go right back in the drawer.
She also made popcorn every night and left the dirty bowl sitting on the stove constantly. That bowl was never washed. She did all of this before going to bed at 7:00 pm. She had apparently kept that bedtime since childhood and never stayed up past 8:00 pm. She was also such a heavy sleeper that noise never woke her up.
She would invite her nieces over without any warning. At the time, I was working retail and had once come home at 4:00 am after an inventory shift. At 6:00 am, she and her nieces, who were six and nine, started playing loud games that involved a lot of shrieking.
We usually had no idea the kids were even there until the noise started in the morning, and she would get furious if we suggested they keep it down until 8:00 or 9:00 am. Meanwhile, if we had a guest over for more than two hours, she’d say we should pay more rent because they counted as another resident.
She also watched TV in her room with the door open and got annoyed if anyone made too much noise in the living room at the far end of the house while she was watching. But she would never turn up the volume or close the door. If she couldn’t hear, she’d lecture you about respect.
She constantly talked about how important kitchen cleanliness was. Then one day I got off work two hours early, walked in, and almost screamed.
I found her cutting someone’s hair in the kitchen. There was hair all over the stove, the counters, and the floor. Apparently vegetables made the kitchen unacceptable, but cutting hair in there twice a week was somehow fine. Eventually she announced she was moving out and gave us about a month’s notice.
Her final and most ridiculous move was charging us for the last month of internet service, then taking the router with her as the very first thing she moved out, since it belonged to her. She refused to pay us back and hadn’t warned us she was taking it. Then, when we asked for our money back, she got even more petty.
The table and chairs we used were also hers, because she insisted her furniture had to be the shared furniture. We couldn’t bring our own table and chairs in until hers were gone, and she knew that. So she left the table and left the chairs, but took the cushions off them.
She had her brothers unscrew the cushions from every chair and take them, but left the useless chairs and table there for another 29 days out of spite. When we tried moving her chairs so we could use ours, she hid our chairs in her bedroom closet and set the seatless ones back around the table. I still can’t stand her.
49. It’s All Downhill From Here
My very first roommate during freshman year of college was one of the most impressive people I had ever met. He had a great job that paid for his living expenses and tuition, had his own place, earned great grades in a difficult program, and was dating an amazing woman. I was really excited when he offered to let me rent the second room.
Over the following year, I watched all of that slowly fall apart because of a sudden and intense addiction to World of Warcraft. I still remember trying to get him to log off because he was about to miss a long-planned fancy night out with his girlfriend. He looked at me with real regret and said, “I can’t".
50. Bro, What Are You Doing?
I had a completely unhinged roommate in college. During finals week, after dealing with loud partying and music all night, I finally yelled at him at 4 AM to stop and turn it down. I woke up an hour later to find him standing on the table between our beds, urinating on my bed and on me.
Unfortunately, that ridiculous roommate was my brother.
51. I Had To See It To Believe It
A friend and I shared an apartment suite on campus for a school year. We each had our own room, but we shared the kitchen and bathroom. I moved out for the summer and went back to my parents’ house, but he stayed. For most of that summer, my side of the apartment sat empty—until a new guy moved in. He had never been to America before.
For some reason, his grandmother was also staying with him in the tiny apartment. He was a little unusual, but we figured that wasn’t too surprising for someone adjusting to a new place. One day, some friends and I were hanging out on my old suitemate’s side of the apartment. After a few hours, we all left. As soon as I got home, my friend started sending me frantic messages.
He had gotten ready for bed and was already lying down when the bathroom door slowly opened a crack, and he heard the new roommate say, “Hey, buddy". My friend walked over, opened the door, and saw the guy crouched on the floor in a yellow raincoat, facing away from him. He had no idea what he was looking at, so he shut the door and went back to bed.
A little while later, the door opened again, and once more the guy said, “Hey, buddy, come here". So my friend got up, walked over, and this time saw him sitting on the toilet with no clothes on, touching himself. My friend backed away and said, “Uh, I do not want any part of this,” then quickly left, locked the bathroom door, and went back to bed.
The next time I was over there, we stayed really quiet for a while. Eventually we heard a knock at that same door, and it opened just a crack again. I went over to check, and sure enough, there he was—crouched on the floor in the yellow raincoat, touching himself furiously. Even though I had been warned, I still did not expect it to actually happen.
52. Laptop Larry
My roommate used to come home from parties with his laptop. The only reason I noticed was because he would walk in late at night carrying it. The strange part was, I never actually saw him leave with the laptop in the first place. Then he started bringing home more than one. One night, he came back with a stack of four.
Sometimes he couldn’t pay his share of the utilities, so I would cover him for a week or two. Then more laptops would appear, disappear, and suddenly he’d have the money to pay me back.
53. A Gem Of A Roommate
I once had a roommate for about five years who was genuinely brilliant and also one of the best people I have ever known. She built a 3D printer from scratch in our living room before 3D printers were something people could just go out and buy, and she did it simply because she wanted to. She also built me a Hackintosh because I needed more bandwidth and storage than other computers could offer at the time.
She also made traditional bagels from scratch in our kitchen at least once every few months, and the best cheesecake I have ever had in my life. She is basically a unicorn, and we are still close friends even though we no longer live together. I have absolutely no regrets. If people still exchanged friendship bracelets or rings, I would give hers the biggest gems possible.
Honestly, this Earth—or maybe even this universe—doesn’t deserve her. I am not sure what dimension does. I just know I am proud to call her my friend. What do I bring to our friendship? Probably not enough. But from the beginning, I was honest and kind. It is amazing how often people overlook others just because they do not fit some expected mold.
My dear friend—the genius and amazing baker—is also one of the kindest people I have ever met. We are both obsessed with word games, and I beat her at them pretty often. I have helped her in my own areas of expertise too, and we make each other laugh harder than almost anyone else can. We have been friends for about 15 years.
54. A Happy Ending
I had a roommate for several years who was a decent guy. He was quiet, cleaned up after himself, and was respectful. But the poor guy had a really hard life. He dropped out of high school at 17, then started selling illicit substances and got caught by an undercover officer. Because he was young and didn’t know how to handle things, he ended up with a permanent record.
On top of that, he had a child, and things didn’t work out with the child’s mother, so he owed child support. He was working as a dishwasher in restaurants for about $10 an hour, maybe less. He didn’t have a car, and the nearest bus stop was a mile away, uphill from our apartment. He made that walk every day.
One day, I was talking to my dad, who loves bicycles and owns several. I asked if he had one my roommate could use. He fixed up one of his road bikes with new pedals, and I gave it to my roommate. On the third day after he got the bike, I woke up to knocking on my bedroom door and some muffled talking.
I opened the door, and there was my roommate with his hand pressed to his mouth, covered in blood, and maybe even holding a tooth. He had hung his bag of clothes on the handlebars, and it got pulled into the front tire, causing him to slam face-first into the pavement. I remember taking him to the hospital, and he asked me to look at his mouth.
Believe it or not, this story does have a hopeful ending. After the accident, he decided he was done walking to the bus, so he got a second job and started saving for a car. For the first few weeks, though, he was still walking to the bus and then working 16-hour days. There was very little downtime between jobs, so he was probably only getting four hours of sleep a night.
He was saving every dollar, and because of child support, all he could really afford to eat were those one-dollar frozen dinners. That was basically all he lived on. He eventually bought a car, and his quality of life improved a little before we went our separate ways. Later, he moved in with family and closer to bus lines.
It may not be the wildest story ever, but I still can’t imagine going through what he did. He told me that when he was walking home at night, he sometimes thought about stepping into traffic. Thankfully, he never did. After we moved out and went separate ways, we stayed in touch.
But he often had phone problems, even when we lived together. I tried reaching out about five years ago to check on him and never heard back. I hope he’s doing okay.
55. The Not-So-Great Trumpet Player
I once lived with a guy who drank constantly and played the trumpet. But that was just the start of it. He couldn’t really play very well. He would try to play the theme from The Flintstones, but he always got stuck on the same note. Every time he reached that part, I felt like smashing the trumpet just to end both of our suffering.
He also had a saltwater fish tank. No fish could survive in it because it had turned into a disgusting green algae swamp. The smell was like a soaked sneaker left in a hot gym locker. He would just stand there staring at it and quietly laughing to himself. On top of that, he cooked huge amounts of kale and then tried shoving the stems down the garbage disposal, which always broke it.
And then there was the purple robe, which he wore with nothing underneath. To be fair, he wasn’t trying to cause problems—he was just unbelievably irritating to live with. I still wonder where he ended up. He went by a different name from his original one, so I would not even know how to look him up.
56. Blocked By My Bestie
I lived in an apartment with three of my sorority sisters during my senior year. We were all really close, and everything was great until we got back from winter break. Then one of the girls suddenly started acting distant and strange toward us. She was perfectly nice to all the other sisters, and after a while, she even seemed to be trying to turn them against us. It was little things, like walking into a room and me saying, “Hey, how’s it going"? and her just completely ignoring me.
She also started leaving passive-aggressive notes about small things that were bothering her, all of which were somehow our fault. One day, we sat her down and asked, “Why are you upset with us? Did we do something"? She said, “No, how have I been acting upset with you"? like we were imagining it. So we asked if something else was going on in her life and whether she wanted to talk.
Instead, she started yelling at us and stormed upstairs to her room. For the rest of the spring semester, we mostly just stayed out of each other’s way. After graduation, she unfriended and blocked all of us and completely cut us out of her life. We still have no idea what caused any of it.
57. All Drama, No Dignity
I lived with my sister and one of her high school friends. Her friend would go into full screaming meltdowns over tiny things, like the printer not working, and once accused my sister of “cleaning the house too much". She would eat our food but get upset if we even touched a single packet of ramen that belonged to her. She threw wild parties, let people hook up on my bed and blankets, and then didn’t bother cleaning anything afterward. But somehow that still wasn’t the worst part.
Things got even more miserable when a guy showed up, and he liked my sister, but the roommate liked him too. After that, she became impossible to live with, calling my sister names, snapping at her, and constantly starting drama. She was inconsiderate, rude, dramatic, and just exhausting to be around. Every little issue turned into a huge crisis; if we ran out of toilet paper, you’d think the world was ending.
58. Pee Pods
My roommate upstairs kept open cans of urine in her room. They weren’t labeled, stored neatly, or cleaned out. She was an engineering student, and nothing she was studying would have made this part of any experiment. I only discovered it because I had to fix the house router, which was in her room. I was completely baffled.
59. Soothing StarCraft
My South Korean roommate in college used to play StarCraft late into the night. I mean I’d be waking up to get ready for class, and he’d just be logging off. Oddly enough, it cured my insomnia. Hearing a game in a language I didn’t understand turned out to be incredibly relaxing. I went from lying awake for three or four hours every night, if I slept at all, to falling asleep within 30 seconds of putting my head on the pillow.
60. Sleeping Shakespeare
I’ve had plenty of strange roommate experiences, but one of my roommates used to sleepwalk and sleep-talk almost every night. I was the only one who happened to be awake when it happened. I’d watch her clean out the fridge, seal up our open bag of chips, and recite Shakespeare in her sleep. The thing that always got her to go back to bed was me telling her to go to sleep.
She’d look at me, close her eyes, and head back to bed. Anytime I asked her later if she remembered any of it, she always said no.
61. Quirky Roommate
When I lived in a dorm, I had a roommate who was mostly a normal, nice guy, but he definitely had a few unusual habits.
He would often pace back and forth, making hand gestures, whispering, and laughing to himself. It was a little unsettling because I’d be playing video games or watching a movie around midnight on the weekend and catch him out of the corner of my eye, just pacing in the dark.
I never had a truly bad experience with him, though, and he was fine to live with for the half year or so that I did. I’m fairly sure he may have had some undiagnosed condition.
62. Cool It, Cat Lady!
My very first roommate during my second year of college was a woman in her 30s who had several cats and looked like a mix between Chris Farley and Mario Batali. Every night I’d go upstairs and turn off the lights, only to wake up with them all back on. I’d also come home after class to find every light on and the heat cranked up to 75°F.
Heat and electricity were not included in the rent. After two unbelievably expensive bills, I finally brought up the lights and power use with her. She burst into tears and explained that one of her cats had severe anxiety, and that the bright lights and heat were necessary to keep it calm and comfortable. She moved out two months later because I wouldn’t adjust everything for her cat.
63. The Matturbator
I had a roommate freshman year who constantly touched himself. His name was Matt, so we nicknamed him the Matturbator. I would always walk in on him, even when I rattled the doorknob for a full 30 seconds first. On top of that, my schedule was clearly posted on the wall, so he knew exactly when I’d be coming in every day. Still, there he was, with his rag on his knee. Another year, I had a roommate who kept trying to spoon me—not okay.
64. He Was A Real Piece Of Work
I had a college roommate who was unbelievably bad at sharing, especially when it came to toilet paper. I’d regularly buy a six-pack, only to find all six rolls gone by the end of the week. After dealing with that for an entire semester, I was done. I started hiding my own toilet paper as a kind of social experiment. A month went by, and not once did the paper get replaced.
Later, I overheard my roommate on an angry, complaining phone call with his mother about his allowance and how hard it was to keep up his lifestyle. That’s when I found out the gross truth about what he had been doing.
By the end of the call, he was furious, and right before hanging up on his mom, he shouted, “I’ve been wiping with printer paper for a week"! I had lent him the printer paper.
65. Too Quick To Call The Authorities
My roommate called an ambulance for our other roommate in the middle of the night because she thought our roommate had been harming herself. Her evidence was that there were red spots on a towel. What had actually happened was that our roommate had dyed her hair red, which she had shown everyone the day before. She didn’t ask anyone what happened—she just jumped straight to the worst conclusion.
66. Moldy Beans
My roommate once practically created a new life-form by leaving beans in the fridge until they got so moldy they turned completely white. Then she got upset when I threw them away because she said she was planning to use them later.
67. Friends Forever
We met when we were assigned dorm rooms during our freshman year of college. Nearly 50 years later, we’re still the best of friends. I recently went to his daughter’s wedding. It was a huge, elegant event, since he’s become extremely wealthy. At one point, I found myself getting emotional—and it wasn’t because of the bride and groom. It was because of him and me, and how far we’ve come together.
68. Holy Hippy, He Was Nuts!
After my girlfriend and I broke up, I moved in with a really strange hippie. Life was pretty good, and the rent was cheap. He sold weed and smoked it all day; for seven months, I woke up every single morning with a blunt in my mouth. He was creepy and smelled terrible, but he liked buying my acid or trading for rent and other things. We decided to drive from Ohio to Wyoming for a festival, so we packed the car with a ridiculous amount of illicit substances and hit the road.
We were detained just two miles from the festival. After he was released, we went back to Ohio, packed up our things, and returned to Wyoming for court. On the first day back, we went to our campsite at 10 in the morning and started drinking. Around 5 PM, he started crawling around on the ground and growling at me. I sat him down to try to talk, but he was completely out of it, rambling about strange things.
I started to panic because he was rubbing my leg, grabbing my ankle, and saying, “WITH THIS ANKLE! YOU WILL LISTEN"! Then he slammed himself onto the ground. I left him there and went back to drinking, but a few minutes later, he ran out of the campsite. He ended up face-first in the mud at another campsite, right in front of a mother and her three kids. The mom stayed calm and told me to come get my friend. I really wish I hadn’t.
When I walked up to him, he bit my leg, tore out a chunk of flesh, and knocked me to the ground. I told the mom to call the authorities while I wrestled with him. I broke his nose and dislocated his jaw, but not before he bit another piece out of my side.
69. She Was Off Her Noodle
During freshman year, I lived with ten girls in two triple rooms and four singles. I had a roommate in one of the triple rooms. She seemed shy at first, so the other nine of us tried to help her settle in by showing her around campus and introducing her to people. After a few weeks, though, she still hadn’t warmed up to any of us, so we mostly stopped trying and just said hello when we saw her—which was hardly ever.
She was usually asleep from 8 AM to 8 PM. She never went to class and always asked for our notes when she woke up. After a while it got frustrating, but we assumed she was homesick, so we went along with it. We were never cruel to her, just not especially close since she didn’t seem interested. About a month into the quarter, she started getting really rude with the two girls in her room.
She’d yell at them for talking during the day while she was trying to sleep. Then she’d sit in the living room watching TV at 3 AM, keeping the rest of us up. She started eating nothing but ramen and chicken, and when she finished, she’d just leave the containers and plates on her desk. Over the next two months, the empty ramen cups and dirty dishes—with chicken bones still on them—kept piling up.
Eventually, you couldn’t even see the window anymore. At some point, we realized none of us had ever seen her shower. After paying attention for a week, we noticed she had no shampoo or conditioner, no pants besides the pair she always wore, and apparently no underwear. When we asked about the shampoo, she said she used mayonnaise in her hair to make it shiny.
Eventually, she snapped. She started stomping around the living room and crying at all hours of the night. Whenever we tried to help, she’d scream at us and call us terrible people. The RAs eventually stopped coming because she called them every single night. One night, she stepped onto the balcony and said she was going to jump off our six-story building.
We called the RAs, but when they arrived, she locked herself in her room—locking her two roommates out—and insisted we were all lying and that she wasn’t going to hurt herself. Sadly, we still couldn’t get her removed until she slapped one of us across the face.
The residential dean said our roommate was a fire hazard because of all the trash piled in front of the window.
She was told to move out within 24 hours. As she cleaned out her room, cockroaches started scattering everywhere. She moved out of two more on-campus apartments that same year, and then none of us ever heard from her again. She was in really bad shape.
70. When Parents Don’t Know Best
I walked into the room for the first time during freshman year and was met with a pretty unsettling scene. My future roommate was standing in the middle of the room, yelling at his dad. He kept saying he didn’t want to be there and blamed his mom for writing his college essay and filling out the application. His dad kept calling him, who I’ll call Eduardo, an “ungrateful piece of trash". Except he used a much harsher word.
Then his dad started saying he was going to beat him up if he tried to leave. Right after that, they noticed I was standing there. They both instantly acted like nothing had happened, shook my hand, and introduced themselves. Thankfully, my parents hadn’t come in with me, so they didn’t have to witness that and panic.
Eventually, my parents met his parents while helping me get the room set up, and everyone talked about how proud they were of us. Eduardo’s dad kept saying things like, “It’s either college or the street, because I’m not paying to support a failure". Naturally, my parents assumed he was joking. But every single day, Eduardo told me how much he hated school.
He never went to class. He would sit in the room drinking all day with the door wide open, even though we were on a dry campus and drinks were strictly banned. He yelled at everyone, stayed out partying all night, and was generally just awful to be around. Every night he watched VH1 until almost 4:00 in the morning, with the volume turned up so loud you couldn’t focus on anything else.
When I asked him to lower it because I couldn’t hear anything over it, he said he would only do it if I wrestled him. And he was completely serious. He wanted to fight me just because I asked him to turn down that Bret Michaels Rock of Love show. I said no and went to bed. The next day, he called his mom and asked her to come pick him up.
She said she would and told him she was getting in the car. I thought my nightmare was finally ending—but I was completely wrong. She never showed up. He completely snapped. He destroyed everything he owned. He punched a hole through his TV, smashed his Guitar Hero controllers on the floor over and over, threw his Xbox out the window, cracked his phone in half, ripped up his sheets—basically anything you can imagine. He wrecked his entire side of the room.
I left while this was happening because I assumed he was just trying to let off steam. I had no idea he was actually destroying all his stuff. When I came back, the room looked like a disaster zone. He was standing in the middle of it, crying, drinking laundry detergent, and yelling that he didn’t want to live anymore. He said he had taken an entire bottle of Advil after wrecking everything.
I ran to get the RA. In the meantime, he grabbed broken glass and plastic from his shattered computer monitor and started cutting his wrists. The RA and I came back to find him throwing up detergent and bleeding. Emergency responders were called. They gave him charcoal to keep the detergent and pills from hurting him.
Apparently, that’s what they use instead of ipecac. He left that night and woke me up on his way out to say goodbye. The last thing he said to me was, “Goodbye buddy, sorry about ruining your birthday"! I still have no idea what he meant by that. I swear this story is completely true. And so is the part where he tried to sneak back in and hurt me a few months later.
71. Pumpkin Permit
My roommate wanted to buy a huge pumpkin for Halloween. I told him he had to go to city hall and apply for a pumpkin permit. And here’s the wild part: he actually went and tried to apply.
72. Disney Dreams
I had a roommate in college who could only fall asleep if Disney movies were playing at night. I had to listen to them for hours every night while trying to sleep. Now I hate The Lion King with the fury of a thousand burning suns.
73. Recharging
My old roommate, who is also my best friend, used to put crystals or rocks on the fence outside during full moons so they could “recharge". It was completely unlike him. I thought it was hilarious, but I never made fun of him or asked questions.
74. No Money Back Guarantee
I once had a roommate who nearly burned the whole house down because he used a paper towel to hold his food in the toaster oven. He said the oven rack was dirty, so he used paper instead. It probably didn’t help that he also put a thin plastic dish on top of the oven while it was heating his food. The dish melted, and then the toaster oven caught fire.
After that, he wanted me to pay him back for his sandwich because fire extinguisher residue got on his food. I hit him in the nose, hard. He moved out two days later.
75. Cam Girl
Before we moved in together, she called to ask if she could draw bunnies on our wall. I said no. But of course, when I moved in, there were bunnies drawn all over the wall anyway. A few weeks later, I found out she was doing webcam shows while I was in the background trying to do my chemistry homework. I ended up moving out soon after because she stayed up all night doing those shows, and I couldn’t sleep. But that still wasn’t the worst part.
One time I came home and found her playing Twister in the living room with strangers, without any clothes on. She also left used tampons around the apartment. That was the last straw for me.
76. A Sick Joke
In college, I lived on the same floor as a girl named LeeAnn. Another person on our floor and I were the only ones with cars. One day, LeeAnn had a cold. She asked another floormate where one of us was so we could drive her to Walgreens. But both of us were in class, so she got “revenge” on us.
She went around and coughed on our doorknobs.
77. The Forger
My roommate forged a paycheck from the restaurant I was managing while I was out of town. He used the money to buy a plane ticket to the Caribbean. This happened in the fall of 1999, and no one has seen or heard from him since.
78. The Everlasting Turkey
My former roommate cooked a turkey on Thanksgiving and left it sitting there for a month, picking at it and eating it the whole time. I finally threw it away, and she pulled it back out of the trash and told me she’d sue me if I ever touched her stuff again. She kept eating the turkey after taking it out of the garbage, and yes, it had been uncovered on the stove the entire month.
79. Can’t Boil Water
I once had to teach a roommate how to boil water. The first thing she ever made, besides sandwiches and salads, was iced tea.
80. From Friends To Enemies
During my sophomore and junior years of college, I lived with two friends. One is still a close friend and current roommate; the other is now basically my sworn enemy. When we first moved in, everything seemed fine. We each had our own bed and bath area, plus a big shared living room that quickly became a main hangout spot for our friends. The roommate in question was kind of awkward, but at first he seemed harmless enough.
A couple months after move-in, he got really into drinking tea and kept leaving his dripping tea ball and loose leaves all over the counter. We talked to him about it several times, and eventually we hid the tea ball when he left. We thought that solved the problem, but then he started cooking more, and it was some of the nastiest food imaginable.
The smell was awful, and the huge amounts he ate somehow made it even worse. But the worst part was his bedroom. It was absolutely disgusting. Dirty clothes were everywhere, along with empty wrappers, half-eaten plates left out for days, and piles of empty soda cans and bottles. His room was right by the front door, and he always left it open, so the smell spread through the whole apartment.
I got into the habit of shutting his door every time I saw it open, whether he was home or not, and spraying air freshener through the vent above it just to make the place bearable. He also treated his gaming systems terribly. One night he offered to let us use his PS2 to watch a movie. About 10 minutes in, it stopped reading the disc. We opened it up and found melted chocolate smeared all over the lens and track.
As bad as the mess was, his personality was what finally pushed me over the edge. He was the kind of person who constantly tagged along and had no sense of personal responsibility. He was so messy and socially awkward that our friends upstairs started doing what they called “Anne Franking” whenever someone knocked. The moment they heard a knock, they’d sit in total silence with the lights off.
Then they’d quietly check who it was, and if it was anyone other than him, they’d answer the door. One time I came back after being away for a week visiting home and found the apartment completely trashed. Then I heard he had told one of my friends how nice it was to have a week without my mess. I almost lost it. His walls, all the way back to his bed, were covered in black streaks and stains from mold. In the end, we had management bleach his walls and bathroom because it was becoming a health issue for everyone who came over.
81. Out The Window
During my freshman year of college, I lived on the first floor of a dorm with a window that looked into a gated courtyard. My roommate and his friends kept climbing in and out through that window instead of using the door, dragging dirt inside and using our coffee table as a step. It wasn’t a fancy table, but it worked, and having to clean dirt off it all the time got old fast.
It was also unsettling that the window couldn’t be locked. One day, my roommate’s friends wanted to come by and hang out, but he wasn’t answering his phone. So, in their infinite wisdom, they jumped the fence into the courtyard, went to the window, and let themselves in. A campus officer saw them climb the gate and enter a room through a window, so naturally he assumed they were breaking in.
He came over, pounded on the window, yelled at them to come out, and made them stand outside with their hands against the wall until he could confirm that my roommate actually lived there and that they were his friends. On top of that, my roommate would call me at three or four in the morning to let him in after forgetting his key, leave dirty underwear all over the room, and scatter empty cans everywhere. I’m very happy I never have to see him again.
82. What A Cry Baby!
My friends had a roommate named Dan. Dan’s girlfriend went streaking with one of her friends—a tradition at our school—and Dan did not take it well. His reaction was honestly unsettling. For the next three nights, he stayed in his room blasting “Ave Maria” and sobbing. It was hard to watch. At first, we assumed he was so upset because this girl, who seemed way out of his league, had broken up with him, but that wasn’t it.
He was upset simply because she had gone streaking. He also had a habit of breaking window screens and doors—about three doors a year. One time, he keyed some random woman’s Audi just because he was trashed and felt like it. He also wrecked a five-foot aluminum suit of armor that belonged to one of our friends. He regularly started arguments, then ran off crying the moment someone pushed back.
83. Burnt Beans
I lived with a female friend, strictly as roommates, in the early 2000s. One day, she decided to microwave a burrito. For some reason, though, she set the time as if she were using a conventional oven. So instead of three minutes, she set it for 40. The apartment smelled like burned beans for days.
84. The Ghost Did It
My roommate went into my room while I was out and left her curling iron sitting on top of my laptop. It melted the top and damaged the screen. The screen was completely ruined. When I got home and saw it, I asked if she had done it, since I don’t even own a curling iron. She denied it and said it must have been “a ghost or a burglar".
85. These Books Don’t Belong
I had a roommate who got mad at me for reading my own books because it ruined the decor. The books were arranged by color instead of subject, and apparently reading them made them look less new. Yes—my own books.
86. Who Ate My Food?
I had roommates who were Seventh-day Adventists, and they were always eating my food. They said they weren’t allowed to eat pork, so I started buying lunch meat that clearly had pork in it, but they ate it anyway.
87. Pimple Popper
My freshman-year dormmate seemed like a nice guy at first. Then one rainy day, I picked up a sandwich and was eating on my bed while he sat at the foot of it using his computer. He always seemed really sweaty, greasy, and covered in pimples. I had bad skin too, so I didn’t think much of it until something happened that I still can’t forget.
He had this huge pimple or boil or whatever it was on the inside of his elbow. While watching TV, he slowly squeezed it until his arm was covered in blood and pus. This was all happening while I was eating my sandwich. I watched in horrified fascination as he pulled off the sock he was wearing, wiped his arm clean with it, then put the sock back on and wore it for the rest of the day.
A few days later, I still couldn’t stop thinking about it, so while he was gone, I looked in his closet and found white T-shirts, socks, and shorts stained with blood everywhere. After that, I never touched any of his stuff.
88. He Needed A Code Of Silence
For a year, my friends and I lived with a very intense Catholic roommate. He believed every single word of the Bible was literally true. What made it worse was that this was around the time The Da Vinci Code was getting a ton of attention. He said he wasn’t the preachy type, but anytime the book came up, he completely lost it and told us we were all going to burn in heck.
89. Beam Me Up Please!
One day, I came home and found my roommate watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, like he did all day, every day. I told him, “Star Trek is terrible". He immediately started screaming and crying, smashed a bunch of things, and kept saying he was going to “punch me right in the nose". Then he stormed off to his room, slammed the door, and cried himself to sleep.
90. Seldomly Showers
I had a random roommate who only showered once a week. Yes, really. Thankfully, he was also too lazy to go to class, and he only made it through two semesters.
91. Clowning Around
I lived with two clowns, literally. More than once, I woke up to them rehearsing in our place. Sometimes it was lying on a bed of nails while cutting up a watermelon with a chainsaw; other times it was sword swallowing. Honestly, it was pretty great.
92. Some Things Never Change
I had a roommate who was terrible at keeping anything clean. He had a white bedsheet. About three months later, I noticed it looked different because it was brown now. I said, “Wow, you finally changed your sheets"! What he said next honestly made my skin crawl.
He looked at me and said, “What are you talking about? I haven’t changed it". I cringed. The worst part? It’s been eight years, and he’s still exactly like that.
93. TV Junkie
My first college roommate watched nothing but courtroom shows—Judge Judy, Judge Alex, Judge Mathis, Judge Joe Brown, People’s Court, and Divorce Court. Every now and then he’d throw in a little Charmed or that cartoon with the cards. He almost never left the room. His classes started later than mine and ended earlier. If he went out for food, he brought it straight back, so he was basically always there watching those ridiculous shows.
A week or two in, I found out the strange part. He wasn’t just watching them live—he had actually been recording them and replaying them over and over. He’d seen some episodes so many times that he could say the lines along with the people on screen, and he still laughed. I was losing my mind. If he happened to be watching live TV, he’d call one of his two friends so they could watch the same episode at the same time and talk on the phone about it. I suggested maybe he could just go to their place and watch together, but apparently he wasn’t into that.
94. The Odd Gal Out
In college, my girlfriend lived in an apartment with three other girls. Even though she’d had bad roommates before, she had started to appreciate this group because they were such a strange mix. There was the “country girl,” kind of a Southern belle who carried a small pistol for protection; the “shy girl,” a smart but sheltered introvert who seemed almost too innocent for college; and then there was the “crazy girl,” who at first just seemed like a typical outgoing sorority type.
Like a lot of random roommate setups, everyone had their own dishes, while a few things in the apartment were shared. The couch and dining table in the living room belonged to my girlfriend, left over from a previous apartment.
The first problem was that her things started disappearing.
At first it was glasses and dishes, and eventually all the dining chairs vanished too. When Crazy was away in class, the girls would sometimes peek into her room if the door was unlocked. Sure enough, they’d find their dishes and glasses stacked there, with the dining chairs being used as TV trays so Crazy could eat in bed while watching television.
Because their schedules didn’t line up, and because the other girls were pretty passive-aggressive, they mostly handled it by leaving carefully worded, friendly little notes. Crazy, of course, exploded every time she got one. She’d storm into her room and yell about living with a bunch of complainers. Around then, my girlfriend started staying at my apartment instead of her own.
She only stayed at her apartment a couple nights a week to check on her things and make sure Country and Shy were okay. Almost every time she was there, they’d come out with some new horror story about how things had gotten worse. They’d laugh about it for a bit, but the second Crazy got home, they’d retreat to their rooms and lock the doors.
Things really escalated around Mardi Gras. Crazy went to New Orleans with some friends, got so trashed she literally lost her car, and somehow hitched a ride home. To this day, we still have no idea what happened to the car. Without transportation, she suddenly started acting nice to the other girls so she could ask them for rides.
Then she started seeing a much older man who drove a beat-up car. She let this forty-something guy stay in the apartment, even when she was gone in class. Not surprisingly, Shy and Country were not okay with that, so they complained to the property managers. Management made Crazy kick him out, and that’s when things went completely off the rails.
She started coming home from sorority events and throwing things at Shy and Country’s locked bedroom doors. She left notes saying she was going to take their lives in their sleep or set the apartment on fire. More than once, they woke up and found burned matches pushed under their doors.
After a few days of that, they went to the authorities to see what they could do. By then, my girlfriend refused to go back there at all. Eventually Crazy disappeared, but not before smashing everyone’s dishes, including two crystal glasses my girlfriend had inherited. My girlfriend graduated, and I transferred out.
Later we found out that Crazy, still driving her older boyfriend’s junky car, saw Shy walking through a crosswalk on campus and tried to hit her. Thankfully, Shy was only slightly injured, and Crazy was finally taken into custody.
95. Dirty Deeds
In college, I lived with some truly filthy guys. They didn’t have any dishes of their own, so they were always borrowing mine. Instead of washing them and bringing them back, they’d shove everything into a cupboard full of dirty dishes. If I wanted any of my stuff back, I had to clean it myself after it had been sitting there long enough to grow mold. Later, I got ringworm from sitting on their couch. They also had what they called a “pee couch". At one point they moved it outside under the balcony so they could all stand there and pee on it together.
96. The Exorcist
I once had a very religious roommate named Mike, and for some reason he assumed I was religious too. He’d say things like, “Oh my gosh! There are so many people outside! We should be evangelizing"! He literally never read anything except the Bible, and he would sometimes stop in the middle of the shared space to pray on his hands and knees.
He was definitely an unusual guy, but he always paid rent on time, kept his dishes clean, and good roommates are hard to find. Anyway, one day I was reading in the living room when Mike came out looking really worried and asked if we could talk. The first thing he said made my blood run cold.
“I think there’s a demon living in this house,” he said. I’m the kind of person who always wants details, so I asked him to explain. “Well,” he began, “last night I had a dream… no, not a dream, a nightmare. A snake was choking me, and I was fighting it".
He acted out the struggle with some pretty intense hand motions. “Finally I threw it off me, but then I realized I was awake, so I sat up". Then he said, “I looked over at your side of the room, and that’s when I saw it". I asked what he saw, getting more curious by the second.
He said, “The demon. A dark cloud man was standing next to your bed, watching you sleep. He looked like a shadow made of smoke with white eyes. I think it’s possessing the house". Completely stunned, I asked what he thought we should do. “Have an exorcism,” he said. I nearly dribbled out my drink.
“Well, I’ve never done that before,” I told him.
“I have,” he said.
So I went along with it. Basically, he used “holy water” he had blessed himself from the tap and walked around the room sprinkling it everywhere while shouting, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to leave, demon"!
Meanwhile, I was doing everything I could not to laugh for the full 30 minutes. He was sweating from praying so hard, and when he finally finished, he stood up, said, “It is done,” and went back to his room. We never mentioned it again.
97. Opposites Don’t Attract
Needless to say, the next six months were rough. He left trash everywhere, blasted loud country music, and messed with my stuff, including carving a nasty insult into my good stapler. As the year went on, he got even worse, probably because he found a group of similar people in the dorms.
Long story short, he got kicked out of the dorms about two weeks before spring break. He and another guy had gone tearing through the building with Airsofts, hitting the whiteboards on everyone’s doors. For some reason, though, he was still allowed to stay until break. I made the mistake of going home before he moved out, and when I came back, my nice gaming PC was gone.
I reported it missing and told campus authorities exactly where I thought it was—at his new place. They searched it, and while they didn’t find my computer, they did find enough stolen property to get him expelled. Thankfully, my replacement roommate was quiet, kind, and easy to live with, and the rest of the year went much better.
98. Foreign Behavior
I definitely lost the random roommate lottery my freshman year of college. My roommate was an exchange student from China, and we had almost nothing in common. She did a lot of things I found strange. For example, she washed her clothes in the sink instead of using the washing machine. Then she would hang them up to dry, even on my side of the room.
I finally convinced her that she couldn’t hang wet clothes on my TV. Then one day I came back and found she had draped a wet dress over my closet door. It was dripping and ruined all my pictures from home. When she came back and saw me crying on the floor, she patted my shoulder and said, “It’s okay. It’s only photos". But that wasn’t even the worst part.
She also liked the room hot. Not warm—hot. She would turn the thermostat up to 85 degrees. I tried over and over to talk about some kind of compromise, but eventually I got fed up. I ended up opening the window when it was 15 degrees outside. We both got sick, but at least I wasn’t overheating anymore. She also told me I had to take down my room decorations.
She couldn’t stand my boyfriend either. He would come over and we’d sit on my bed playing Xbox. Whenever she came back from class and saw him there, she’d take off all her clothes, switch off the lights, and go to bed—whether it was 3:00 in the afternoon or 9:00 at night. Then things got even worse.
Instead of talking to me directly about my boyfriend, she told the RA that I was being mean to her. She would also dry her hair while I was in the room trying to do homework. On top of that, she refused to take medicine for anything. I understand that this may have been part of her culture, but she would lie on the bed screaming from menstrual cramps while chewing on ginger root. In short, living with her was miserable.
99. Feel The Heat
My freshman-year roommate was an Army ROTC cadet with no sense of self-preservation. He constantly talked nonsense and kept doing reckless things just to get attention. One day I was on my computer when he asked, “Want to see me light myself on fire"? I said no, and he replied, “Okay! Watch this".
Apparently there’s some trick where you dip your hand in water, then quickly in alcohol, and light it on fire without actually burning yourself. But my roommate was not the kind of person who figured out the details before trying something like that. He gave it a try, and the next thing I knew, he was yelling in pain. His response was, “I didn’t think it would be that hot"!
100. Baby, Please Don’t Go…
I was renting a house with a middle-aged woman on a month-to-month lease. A friend of mine was moving out of the country and needed someone to take over the rest of her lease, so I told her I would. I gave my roommate 30 days’ notice, and at first she seemed completely fine with it. A few days later, though, I found out how she really felt.
I came home to an eight-page handwritten manifesto, front and back, nailed to my door, explaining that I was tearing a hole in her soul that could never be repaired. I had only lived there for three months.
101. Spooky
There was one night when my roommate had gone home because he was sick, so I was pretty excited to have the room to myself.
Later that night, I woke up to the sound of our door opening. I didn’t think much of it at first because I assumed my roommate had decided to come back. Then I heard footsteps cross the floor and the sound of someone jumping into his bed. It seemed a little strange that he’d returned so soon, but I brushed it off.
When I woke up the next morning, his bed was still perfectly made, and he had never come back that night. I have never been more terrified in my life.
102. You Used To Have A Friend In Me
My former roommate and I got along terribly while we lived together. She would let strangers sleep in my bed when I wasn’t there, use my makeup, and complain that I wasn’t home enough, even though I still paid my full share of the rent and bills while working full time and going to school. And honestly, it wasn’t her business how I spent my personal time.
Things got so bad that I asked, very reasonably, if I could find someone to take over my part of the lease, with the landlord’s approval. We had been best friends before living together, so when she said she “didn’t want to live with anyone else but me” and that she “couldn’t afford the place without me,” I believed her and let it go.
I decided to grit my teeth and just get through the last six months of our one-year lease. That turned out to be a huge mistake. About a month later, I got a phone call from her saying her mom had somehow “got us out of the lease” and that I needed to have all my stuff out of the apartment by Monday.
It was Friday night, and I had full shifts at work on both Saturday and Sunday. So I called in every favor I could from my friends and somehow managed to move everything out in record time. The best part? While I was packing, I found a receipt sitting right on the counter showing that she had spent over $1,000 on eyelash implants. Seriously.
All that time she had been telling me she couldn’t afford the apartment on her own, she was actually spending that kind of money on eyelashes. What she spent would have covered our rent for three full months, since the place was a cheap dump. It’s been almost five years now, and we still haven’t spoken since I confronted her about the eyelash receipt.
This was after we had been best friends for years before moving in together. Living with her showed me that she was rude, shallow, dishonest, and willing to take advantage of me. She let strangers sleep in my bed, lied to me, and manipulated me into spending my own time and money trying to help her when she was really just using me. I should have broken that lease after the first major problem and never let it go this far.
So take this as a warning: don’t ignore behavior you already know is wrong. It won’t work out in the long run.
103. It’s Payback Time
My college roommate acted like an only child in the most ridiculous ways. She actually taped a piece of paper over her clock because she didn’t want to “share it with me". Never mind that she couldn’t even see the clock herself after doing that—she would rather neither of us see it than let me look at it.
After that, I started taking one sock from a matching pair every week.
I did it slowly enough that she never figured out I was the one messing with her socks, but often enough that she stayed completely confused and annoyed about where all her matching socks were disappearing to.
104. Twisted Firestarter
I had a roommate who set the couch on fire to “clean off the germs". She had convinced herself that my female friend and I were lesbians who had hooked up on it because she heard grunting from the room one night. Really, the remote had slipped under the couch, and the grunting was just us lifting the four-seater to get it back. The whole thing lasted maybe 10 seconds, so I have no idea how she decided we could have done anything that fast.
105. Trying To Keep Up With The Craziness
I once had a roommate who had a mild breakdown while we were living together. A friend suggested someone he’d known in high school as her replacement. He described this new girl as very straight-laced, deeply religious, and quiet. I wasn’t really any of those things, but I figured that might make her an easy, low-key roommate. It turned out that whatever she was like around her parents, that was not who she was in college.
She was messy, smoked and drank every day, and shut herself in her room while eating whatever food was in the house, including mine. She was also bizarrely inappropriate—constantly having loud relations with her awful boyfriend and announcing in a restaurant how “turned on” she was. She wasn’t so much unstable as just really disgusting. But one moment was far worse than everything else.
One day I was sitting on my bed studying. I must have been deeply focused, because I noticed her come into my room but didn’t really pay attention to what she was doing. A few seconds later, she had pulled her shirt down and pressed her chest against my face. Then she laughed and walked out.
106. ReCraigslisted
I sublet a room from the most unreasonable woman I’ve ever met. Just one week after moving in, I was browsing Craigslist and happened to see my own room listed for rent again. I came home ready to confront her, and sure enough, she was in the middle of showing my room to someone else.
When I asked her what was going on, it turned out she wasn’t trying to kick me out exactly.
Instead, she wanted me to move all of my belongings into her room for one month because she planned to go to Europe. On top of that, she expected me to pay an extra $200 during that month. So basically, I would lose access to the room I was renting, move all my things into her room while someone else stayed in mine, and then move everything back again when she returned. It made absolutely no sense.
