In a way, all roommate stories are horror stories. Whether you start off as strangers or as friends, it's extremely rare that things end well. But these roommates...well, they're next-level bad. From creeps to food thieves to just plain weirdos, these nightmare roommates will leave you feeling grateful for your living situation.
1. A Confusing Series Of Events
I had a co-worker who was living at my home for some weeks. He wasn't especially clean and sometimes he drank my beverages, but overall it was an okay situation. One day he told me he was moving back with his wife, and I said it was cool, he could take his things out whenever he needed. I wasn’t in a rush so I allowed him some time.
Almost immediately I found someone else who was looking for a room and I told him he can move in on Monday. Monday morning I wake up and there is a bicycle in my living room. Which, you know, I thought was a weird place for a bicycle. What I found next was far more shocking. I went to the kitchen and found ex-roomie banging a woman there. Someone who wasn’t his wife.
I threw his stuff outside and asked for the keys. It was a little awkward afterward at work and he never explained why he had decided to park the bike in the living room when I have a perfectly good garage.
2. Leaving His Mark On The Scene
My roommate had been pooping in his room for several years before anyone found out. Yes, you read that right. And yes, it is truly that gross. This story requires some context, so let me start from the beginning. I packed up and moved into a student house for my first year of university. It was exciting, as I got to live with six other people and they were all super cool.
But this one dude, who I’ll call Jack, had a really bad odor all of the time. None of us said anything because, first of all, it would have been extremely awkward, and second of all, maybe he had some medical issues or something that we didn’t know about. We didn’t want to make an issue out of it, but all of us were aware of the problem.
So, it eventually comes to the end of the year and, since we all get along really well, we decide to move to a new place together. We move in to start the second year of univeristy. Then the awful truth hits us. This guy's smell is getting dramatically worse as time goes on. I don’t even know how to describe it. It was like a mixture of mold, old cheese, and BO.
It got so bad that none of us could eat in the same room as him anymore, let alone sit next to him and actually have a conversation. What was also weird was that he used to wear THREE pairs of trousers at one time, like some jogging bottoms, some jeans, and then ANOTHER pair of jeans on top. We ignored the smell for another year, until it finally became too much for us to handle.
We all discussed the very obvious issue and, after weeks of dropping hints, we decided that the guy he was closest to should tell him directly. So he did. I still don't understand his response. He got ignored completely. But then another issue arises. We not only get mice, but a bed bug infestation throughout the entire house. It was horrific.
Our landlord called out an exterminator who had to go into all of our rooms to fumigate. While this was taking place, “Jack” got pulled aside and spoken to individually by the landlord. At first, we thought maybe he was talking about bills or something like that, and didn’t think to even ask what the conversation had been about.
Everything seemed okay and they said they’d be back in 10 days to make sure their efforts had worked. Jack still smelled really bad, but that seemed like the least of our troubles at this point. Then, suddenly, everything changed. Jack disappeared, saying he had gone home for a break or whatever, even though we were in the middle of the academic year.
Anyway, the fumigators came back, and me and two other girls were in the living room letting them do their thing when the men come downstairs. I will never forget this conversation for as long as I live. Fumigator Guy: “Have you noticed a strange smell around the guy in Room Three?” Me: “Yes, ever since we’ve known him, he’s had a foul smell. Why?”
Fumigator Guy: “And how exactly would you describe that smell?” Girl: “It basically smells like poop”. Fumigator Guy: “Yep”. We all went white and stared at each other in disbelief, thinking that he was trying to wind us up for some kind of joke. But no. Not only was his room crawling with bugs and all sorts of other unwanted creatures, but there was years’ worth of poop hidden throughout every single part of his room.
He had just been pooping in his room for the entire time that he’d been living with us. He pooped in seven different suitcases, and had been using his window curtains as toilet paper. Even though the bathroom was literally right next door to him all that time. The men proceeded to bring down all the evidence and go through every item in the garden.
They were clearly also in shock, because they kept nervously laughing and gagging each time they found a new huge lump of poop, or a really badly stained pair of jeans covered in poop. That wasn't the worst part. Since it’s definitely not their job to dispose of all that, they left it all for us in bin bags in our garden. The landlord tried to help us, but he was so disturbed and angry about the whole thing that he wasn’t much help.
As you probably could have already guessed, it’s safe to say that the guy never returned to the house, and had to pay us thousands of dollars to cover all the damage. They put in a new carpet, bed, curtains, painted the walls, you name it. It was all destroyed by the human waste. His mom eventually caught wind of the situation and turned up to clean on his behalf, though.
It was quite an upsetting scene to witness. She literally cried when she saw his room. Maybe he had some mental health problems that caused him to act this way. I don’t even know, but still thinking about it to this day makes me cringe. So, to make a long story short, my worst roommate of all time was the guy who secretly filled his room and seven suitcases with poop for two entire years, then disappeared.
3. What A Pill
There was a guy in the house I was living in that would get high all the time. One night he took something he described as a "yellow pill." He didn't even know what it was. I returned after having been away to find the kitchen floor covered in glass, poop, and toilet paper. He was so gone that he crapped himself in our kitchen and smashed a bunch of glass into it.
He then tried to clean it up using toilet paper, which he left on the floor and in the kitchen bin. None of us could go into the kitchen to cook or even get food out of the fridge until he finally cleaned it up two days later. But it didn't end there. He also managed to forget about a tap long enough to flood the entire kitchen and leave the water running long enough for it to make a pool in the corridor outside.
It completely soaked the carpet in another housemate's room. The guy whose room it was was away for five days and he had locked his door, so the room stank like a swamp.
4. Garbage In, Garbage Out
Wanna hear a story about a whole new level of being a terrible roommate? The other day, I asked my roommate to take the trash out, as I had been gone for a week and a half and was unable to do it myself. She then proceeded to pick through the trash and only throw away the things that she had thrown into the bin! Umm, what???
5. The Truth Shall Set You Free
We went to a party, he got blasted super quick and saw some people he didn't want to be around and walked home. About an hour later, me and my other roommate headed home too. When we pulled into the driveway we saw lights on in the living room, which quickly went off. We were in for quite the surprise... When we got inside we saw a massive person-sized hole in the hallway wall into the bathroom.
Our roommate was pretending to sleep and when we asked him what happened, he said someone "broke in." They didn't try to take anything but just busted a hole in our wall (from inside of the bathroom into the hall I should add), then slipped out the still locked back door (they didn't see him laying on the couch at all either apparently).
6. Spanish Pizza
I once had a roommate who kept cranking the temperature way up, I'm talking like 28 degrees Celsius or 85 Fahrenheit. The landlord kept coming over to turn it way down as he was paying the bill. We had the landlord coming over basically every day for a month. Finally, he turned the temperature to a very generous 22 Celsius and set up a lock box to cover the thermostat.
My roommate's reaction was deranged. He came home, got tipsy, took a hammer, smashed the box to pieces, and turned the temperature up to 28 degrees again. This by itself was just mainly amusing...but he also was swiping my stuff, borrowing money without paying it back, and hosting late-night dance parties to Nelly Furtado music.
He claimed he had never used a vacuum in his life and didn't know how. One time he put a frozen pizza in the oven together with the cardboard. I smelled burning and raced downstairs to remove the smoldering paper from the oven before it caught fire and burnt our house down. I asked him what he was thinking and he said, “That's the way we do it in Spain”.
7. Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde
My roommate seemed like a normal, nice dude. He was a student at the local university. I had no problems with him until one day, law enforcement busted in and apprehended him while he was sleeping. The reason was utterly horrifying. I had no idea he had taken two guys and held them for ransom. One was set free weeks later, while the other wasn't so lucky.
The body was eventually found in a basement buried in the ground. I quickly moved out of there.
8. Don’t Get Your Panties In A Pile
My roommate was a bit of a nightmare. She was the kind of person who would come home at three am on a weeknight, bringing half the pub in tow. She was perpetually late on bills and useless at keeping the kitchen clean. She also had a bad habit when she went to take a shower. She would just drop/step out of her clothes, leaving them in a fabric pile on the floor in the bathroom, and not collect them for days.
One day when I got home from work, I went to take a shower. I encountered her usual filth pile, but something seemed off. I recoiled in horror when I realized that MY underpants were in her pile. The fabric was unique, and they were now beyond ruined, caked with poo and blood. I confronted her. It turned out she was not good at remembering to do her laundry, so would regularly take my clean underwear out of the drier then eventually sneak them back into my laundry basket.
I went to get a health screening after that.
9. She’s Not Neat, But She’s A Freak
I was looking for a roommate when I was starting graduate school. I'm a guy, but I enjoy living in a clean apartment. I'm not a neat freak or anything, but I like things to be presentable. Most of my college guy friends were pretty gross, so I thought, "Girls are clean! I'll live with one of my female friends!" As it so happened, one of my friends was also looking for a place.
She told me that she was a neat freak, and loved to clean. I thought, "Great! This will work out well." Nothing could have been further from the truth...She turned out to be the most disgusting human being I have ever encountered in my life, and also a pathological liar. When she ate a banana, she would peel the banana and just drop the peel on the floor. When she used eggs to cook, she would put the broken eggshells back in the fridge.
Every day I would ask her to do her dishes, and four days later the same dishes were in the sink building up a nice layer of mold. The worst part of it all is that WE HAD A DISHWASHER! She didn't even have to DO anything! Just put them in the dishwasher! She also took two to three hour-long showers every day and would run through half a roll of toilet paper every day.
She would proceed to fill up our trash can with the thirty cans of Coke Zero that she drank every day, then make me take out the trash. Every day when she got home from classes, she would take an hour-long shower, put on a bathrobe, sit on the floor, and eat junk food in front of the TV. The bottom half of her robe was all grimy, and the spot where she sat on the floor got grimy too. There was a massive, circular stain left on the carpet.
10. Be My Guest
My roommate keeps the place extremely messy and never helps with any of the household chores. So, I pretended to be a hot girl on Tinder and matched with him, telling him I was coming over in the hopes that this would get him to clean up the apartment. My plan failed spectacularly. He did not clean up, and also sent me a picture of his junk that I didn’t need to see…
11. When The Cat’s Away, The Roommates Will Play
I've sat on this story for years, but I think it’s finally time to tell it. Just pure jerkery and the end of life-long friendship. A good friend of mine, Jay, was moving to New York City with his girlfriend and another friend of theirs from college named Lisa. I had been in New York City for a few years already, in a lousy but manageable apartment.
I traveled a lot for work and I was fine with my situation. Once they realized the rent costs out here, Jay and his girlfriend started pushing me to join them in getting a nicer two-bedroom apartment, saying that we would split the costs three ways. Since they arrived, Lisa pretty much disappeared, having her own friends, who she spent most of her time with.
She would occasionally stop by on the weekends and crash on the couch, but that was about it. Every bone in my body was saying that this was a bad idea, but I decided to give it a go. I lived to regret it BIG TIME. Upon moving in, I really don't see them much. I'm on the road nearly every week for work, so we hardly interact.
I would basically get back home late every Friday night, do my expense reports for work, check in on the bills for the apartment, and then leave town again Sunday afternoon. Jay asks that I let him know in advance any time there is a rare week when I'm not traveling, so he knows whether or not he and his girlfriend could be home alone.
I didn't think much of it and happily gave him a heads up when I knew I was going to be around. For the first few months, the bills were growing and I was paying a little more than I expected, but overall, things were fine. Until one weekend, it all changed. The girlfriend gives me a note with my share of the bills. I can't believe my eyes.
I see a $500 phone and TV bill with my name on it. Note that my two roommates, who live there all the time and don’t travel, claimed only a combined $80 of the bill as their own responsibility. The bill included a bunch of calls from the phone landline to California and a ton of On-Demand movie purchases. I knew I hadn’t been behind any of these purchases.
I confronted the others. Me: “These aren't my purchases, there is no way I'm paying for them”. The girlfriend: “This is simple math. They aren't mine, they aren't Jay’s, so they have to be yours”. Me, brandishing a folder with all my travel receipts that I keep in a file until I get my reimbursement: “I was in Boston and Baltimore for the periods that all of these bills are for".
As in, there is literally no physical way I could have made those calls. Girlfriend: “I don't care what your papers say, it wasn't me and it wasn't Jay”. This loop continues for about an hour or so, at which point I politely ask her to leave my room. Red in the face, she vows that I'm paying my share. Jay finally turns up late at night. All hope was crushed at that point.
Understandably, he takes his girlfriend’s side and is trying to appeal to me rationally to own up to my side of the deal. I'm showing him dozens of receipts placing me hundreds of miles away and the loop starts all over again; that it wasn't Jay or the girlfriend, so it had to be me. I lock my door, leave, and meet up with my boss for dinner.
Again, as I travel so much, we try to catch up over dinner and a drink when I'm back in town. I explain the situation and he thinks something else must be going on. He asks if I'm on the lease. This is when I begin to get a genius idea. I mention that I'm not, as it’s just Jay and the girlfriend who had signed their names to it.
He advises me to keep all my receipts showing where I was in case they try to go after me in small claims court. But also, as I'm not on the lease, he suggests that I should really consider moving out. He's telling me the situation is only going to get worse from here. He tells me to take a few days this week and see what I can find, as normally I'd be on my way to Boston Sunday night.
He also tells me to change the lock on my room. That Sunday morning, I change my door handle from the generic indoor lock to a keyed lock. The tensions in our apartment at this point are still thick between us, as the bill issue is still not resolved. I don't talk to Jay or the girlfriend for the rest of the day, as they are out and about.
Sunday night, I'm in my room, door locked in bed trying to figure out what the heck I'm going to do. Then the fun begins. Please note this extremely important detail of the story: They don't know I'm still home, as I'd normally be on the train to Boston by 5:00 pm. 8:00 pm rolls by and I suddenly hear my doorknob jiggle.
I then hear the girlfriend say, "That little jerk changed the lock, YOU JERK!!! YOU HUGE JERK!!!" She starts screaming hysterically at the top of her lungs. I'm trying to figure out A) Why is she so angry?, and B) Why is she trying to open my door in the first place? Now I hear Jay trying to open the door. The next words out of his mouth shocked me.
He calmly says to the girlfriend that they can just jimmy open the door with a butter knife. That is when I open the door and demand to know what the heck they are doing. Their faces both immediately go as pale as a ghost. I ask again, "What the heck are you doing trying to open my locked door?" They reply asking why I changed the lock.
I reply, "It doesn't matter, I'm paying rent, it's my room". They start with the mind games again, saying: "That is really messed up that you would change the locks, don’t you trust us?" They get really angry and are shouting all sorts of stuff at me for the next few minutes. The next moment changed everything. The lock to the main door of the apartment opens.
In walks their friend Lisa with a suitcase…and looking like she's also seen a ghost as soon as she spots me. It all comes together for me at that moment. Lisa has obviously been staying in my room when I'm traveling, and all the mysterious bills they were asking me to pay were hers. I was absolutely livid. She had been staying in my room with all my belongings without my knowledge.
I felt betrayed. When I voiced these complaints, the girlfriend just shrugged and uttered something about me not using the room that much anyway. I didn't say another word. I just locked the door, packed up my clothes and belongings, and walked out the door. I made a few calls and one of my cousins was more than accommodating until I was able to find a permanent new spot.
I left that night and never spoke to them again. Over the next week or so, Jay left a ton of voicemails for me, starting off with asking when I was coming back, then getting to when am I dropping off my share of the rent and bill payments. I never responded to any of these messages. I did see them pop up on my Facebook recently as suggested friends.
Turns out they are married now and living in New England somewhere. Screw the both of them!
12. Not Seeing The Connection
After weeks of struggling to get the internet functioning in our apartment when I needed it for work, I woke up this morning to a bizarre sight. It was a handwritten note from my roommate, who apparently isn’t aware that WiFi is just radio signals that are constantly around you in the air whether or not you turn your computer’s receiver on.
“Hey, I’ve been shutting off our WiFi because it turns out it’s really bad for your health! Sorry about the inconvenience. I was trying to only do it after you fell asleep. There’s info on the web about how it can cause cancer, infertility, headaches, and disruption of your cell repair while you sleep. If you’re interested, you can look it up for more information”.
I can’t look it up for more information, because somebody cut off my internet connection!
13. The Entitlement Is Strong
At first she was fine, no big red flags, but she didn’t have her own laptop (this was in 2005), so she would frequently borrow mine. Not a huge deal, but I’d sometimes come home to find her midway through an hours-long project when I needed to do my own homework. So I’d just wait to start mine after dinner, because I was a bit of a pushover.
But then, she would go to bed rather early, like 9 p.m., and she would sit up in bed and sigh and say my typing was keeping her up and could I just not type please. She would be using my laptop when I’d get MSN Messenger alerts from friends, and she’d see the messages pop up, and she’d close them out and not tell me anything.
There was one from a family I’d been a nanny for the last two years of high school, and their special needs boy was being hospitalized in an emergency situation, and I completely missed the messages because she’d close them and not tell me. I was so mad—but this was just the start. The two of us shared a bathroom with the room next to ours which housed two other women.
The bathroom doors would lock from the inside for privacy. Despite the 4 of us having an agreement of knocking anytime the door was closed, my roommate would constantly lock both doors when she would shower or use the bathroom, and EVERY SINGLE TIME would forget to unlock the other door, so the neighbors couldn’t access the bathroom.
I couldn’t tell you how many times I heard banging on the other side of the bathroom for their side to be unlocked. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when she took her laundry down to the basement laundry room. The machines were frequently out of order or just always in use making it difficult to get a machine.
It was common to go up and down several times before being able to actually start laundry, but for some reason one day, she came back up in a RAGE, and started throwing her dirty laundry all over our room. Including on me. That was it. I got up, walked out and down the dorm hallway, and asked my sweet kind friend whose roomie had moved out after fall semester if she would allow me to move into her room.
I just couldn’t take the crazy any longer. Thankfully my kind friend was happy to have me move into her room, and I finished out that year with much less stress!
14. She Spewed On My Suitcase
My freshman college roommate. One night, during finals period, she had one of her high school friends come to visit. They went out drinking and came back at 2:00 am or so. We had just been trying out this new bunk bed idea, and I was on the top bunk. She stumbled into her bottom bunk and tossed around a little. I thought she was asleep.
I heard her get out of bed and assumed she was going to the bathroom to puke or something. Instead, I saw her stumble over to my closet and sit down inside. I realized the horror that what was about to happen. I tried to jump down from my bed, but she began to projectile vomit. She puked all over my stuff: my suitcase, my shoes, and all my clothes.
Then, she promptly went back to her bed, passed out, and ignored me the rest of the night. Anyway, I was seething mad, so I got the resident assistant so that I could handle it reasonably. I took all the quarters she had for laundry and started to do my laundry at three am. By the time I finished, it was around five am, so I went to bed.
I woke up two hours later to go to my 8:30 am class. I got back after my classes at 11:00 am, and promptly went back to sleep. I left a note telling her not to wake me up under any circumstances, and that we were going to have to have a real talk about the situation later. At around 1:00 pm, she woke me up and started apologizing.
I told her that if she wanted to apologize, then she should clean out my suitcase because it was covered in her vomit. She damp-sponged it once and said she was done. It still had puke in all the crevices and stuff, so I told her to actually clean it because I don't want her puke on my suitcase, to which she replied, "Ugh, I made one mistake, stop punishing me for it.”
I suggested she buy me another suitcase if she didn't want to clean this one, and she refused to do that either. On top of everything, she also told me that I had no right to take her laundry quarters without asking her the night before. We still don't talk, and that suitcase sits, puke stained and all, in my closet.
15. The Wicked Witch Of The Room Next Door
Last year, I had three roommates. They were two of my guy friends, and the wife of one of them, who was a complete witch from the beginning right through till the end. She really never bothered me directly. She kept to herself in her room for the most part, but I couldn't stand the fact that she was married to my best friend, to be honest.
They have been together for three years now, and have been officially married for a year’s worth of that time. Throughout their relationship, she has done nothing but give him trouble for absolutely nothing. My best friend would always come back to the apartment, and immediately get summoned into their room and wouldn't come out for about an hour.
Do you know what happened during that hour? It wasn't fun times, if that’s what you were thinking. No, far from it. It's an hour-long whining session, going exclusively from her to him. She just comes up with excuses to make him feel like complete garbage. Oh, and she hated my girlfriend because she knew my girlfriend was way better looking and more fun to hang around with.
For some reason, she gave him grief for that, too. One day, he was caught viewing a racy video on his cell phone. She went absolutely crazy over this. She beat the living daylights out of him and threatened to get a divorce. I wish they had gone through with it. Instead, they decided to stay together so she can remind him how he "broke her heart and ruined their trust" every day for the rest of his life.
Now they have their own place, which is at least good for me. It's not good for him. He's working two jobs and going to school full time to get a master's degree to pay for their expenses, while she sits on her butt watching the latest Twilight movies, which she forces him to watch with her from time to time. She single-handedly ruined my best friend's life.
16. Toying With Their Emotions
I once lived in a house with six other friends. We had cheap rent and good roommates. We had parties every weekend with more than 50 people in attendance. Life was good. There was just one problem. It started because a buddy of ours who lived in the house when we first moved in was unfortunately very prejudiced, and it was getting worse.
His parents said that they would disown him if he was gay, so he basically developed this irational fear of anything to do with gay people. In response to this, one of the guys in the house who knew him best bought a pink suction cup glow in the dark "toy", just to cause mischief for this buddy. The idea was to stick the toy to the front of his truck.
That way, he would either have to touch it to get it off, or leave it on when driving around town. At which point, in either scenario, we would all collectively laugh at him. We thought it was funny, but it never happened in the end, because he moved out a couple of days after the thing was bought. So, ultimately, the rest of us just had it around the house and would use it to mess with each other and play pranks.
Fall asleep on the couch? You get a picture taken with it in your mouth. Don’t worry, we sanitized it regularly. We stuck it to the wall and hung Christmas decorations on it. We hid it in the cupboards, placing it just right so that if you opened the cupboard door it would fall out at you. We all got pretty good at throwing it at a wall and getting it to stick.
Some kids had Elf On A Shelf. We had Pink Dink In The Sink. We had rotating roommates, as some people started moving out and starting their lives after college. Until, finally, I was the last one still living there and it was finally time for me to move out, leaving the house for the next group of tenants to move in. I had just the idea.
I decided to leave the toy in the shower on the day I moved out, with a note. The note said: “This is Pink Dink. He may be small, but he can bring so much joy to the world if you use him properly”. The landlord wouldn't answer any of my text messages anymore after that. I assume he was completely embarrassed by what the new tenants had found when they moved in.
Anyway, turns out it was me. I was the bad roommate.
17. In The Eye Of The Beholder
My sophomore year of college, my roommate invited her boyfriend from New Zealand to come live with us. These were dorm rooms, so it’s not like she had a private space. This guy was living rent-free in our room all the time. He was nice enough, but it was impossible to get anything done, including studying during finals week.
He had nothing else to do so he just watched TV constantly. When I brought this up to my roommate, and said that I would appreciate it if he did not stay for the next semester, she got extremely huffy and moved out. Thankfully they didn’t charge me for her half of the room, so I ended up with a single for the cost I had been paying for a double, so I guess it all evened out.
There was also the time that she, an art major, decided her final project would be to leave a plate of food in the room and let it rot and take photos as some sort of a statement on the breakdown of society? Didn’t really understand that one, but that didn’t help for sure.
18. The Downward Spiral
He got mad and threw my PS4 controller at my TV, which shattered the screen. Instead of admitting this, he staged a scene in which robbers ransacked my place and took all of my stuff. Every piece of furniture was overturned, smashed, and broken. But he made a very stupid decision, and it led me to the truth.
He threw everything I owned of value into the dumpsters outside to make it look like they had been taken. Well, the neighbors apparently called 9-1-1 on him because they heard the commotion. Officers found him in his room crying his eyes out, belligerently blasted. I went and spoke to them (after dumpster diving for my personal belongings).
They asked if I wanted to press charges. I said no, but told his parents he needed some help. Never spoke to him again after quite a long friendship.
19. Lacking Discipline
I was placed in the barracks with a dude the barracks NCO nicknamed Pigpen. This dude was on the boxing team. Because he worked out hard, he was asleep when I left for work, after training, and was out on the town when I got home. I would come back to sweat-soaked gear on the floor of the bathroom, toiletries on the sink area, and no toilet paper.
I asked him multiple times to clean up after himself because if one of the barracks people walked by and saw the mess that he left, it would be me that gets in trouble because I outranked him. I told him I would throw away his toiletries if he didn't pick them up. So I did. I put a new bag in the trash can and gently placed all of his toiletries in the can.
When he came home and questioned where his stuff was, he proceeded to thrash the trash bag around, breaking all his own things.
20. That’s One Way To Live
Back in the early 90s, a bunch of us rented a house from a local boxing promoter. After a few months, 3 of my friends moved out to go to university and the landlord moved in 3 of his associates. One was Gus. He was a friendly alcoholic. On the first night, he fell asleep on our sofa in the front room and peed his pants. And somehow, he got worse from there.
He once dragged me into his room for a chat and proceeded to proudly show me his only possessions: a pile of newspapers, a 10" adult toy, and a sawed-off. He was married to two women simultaneously, neither knew of the existence of the other and their kids, but neither of them could stand him, so he spent most of his nights falling down in various parts of our house.
I once found him asleep with his face in a plate of curry and his trousers round his ankles. Once his wives found out where he was staying and started turning up on the doorstep at all hours, I knew it was just a matter of time before their visits coincided and all heck broke loose, so it was time to make an effort to find another home, minus the yellow-dyed sofa.
21. That Girl Is Crazy
It started with the four of us rooming together. My one roommate developed a weird clinginess to one of my other roommates. She would shut herself in her room and spew details of her personal hygiene at random while crying for no reason. She then obsessed over the guy living below us. She referred to him as her husband and would get very defensively jealous if I or any other female talked to him. Then things got worse.
She started vacuuming maniacally at 4:00 am, but she called law enforcement on me and another roommate at 11:30 pm for being too loud. Officers showed up and she lied, accusing us of taking illicit substances. The officers found the whole thing crazy and left after we offered to let them search our apartment. Then the knives disappeared.
Weird noises began emanating from her room. On one of the most harrowing nights, she showed up in just a towel at my door, screaming at me because she didn’t wear makeup and her chest was real. She then pledged that she was going to off one of our other roommates. I started recording our interactions and my roommates filed a report. After showing the Dean the recordings, she got moved out.
It was by far the scariest and most bizarre interaction I’ve ever had with a person.
22. Free Bleedin’
I shared a 12x12 dorm room with a girl who would free bleed when she was menstruating and leave trails of her blood from our room to the bathroom and not clean it up. She would leave crusty underwear on the floor on my side of the room, next to my bed, while at the same time she insisted we divide the room with tape, and freaked out if anything of mine crossed that border. But that was only the beginning of the nightmare.
She was 18 and had a creepy 31-year-old fiance that she had been with for six years that would stay over every weekend, and watch her sleep over Skype every weeknight, while I was in view of the camera. She smelled so bad that other students in our hall started lodging complaints about the horrible stench coming from our room.
And to top it off, she had a bunch of plants in the room that I was allergic to that were making me miserable, and she refused to get rid of them.
23. Man’s Best Friend Meets Man’s Worst Enemy
Today, I walked into my house to find my dog’s lifeless body. My dog is diabetic. He is also blind. But he was in good hands under my care, since I followed all of the doctor’s orders very precisely in order to help him with those issues. I gave him his insulin every morning when I got home from work, and before I left for work for his meals.
Today, despite knowing about all of this, my roommate decided to leave his door open with a basket blocking his door. Said roommate also left candy on his floor, as well as a bag of twizzlers. My diabetic dog ate all of it. My roommate sends me a Snapchat video of what happened and I politely asked him if he can give Randy (my dog) his insulin.
This seemed like a pretty simple and natural request, because… ya know…he just ate a ton of candy thanks to you!!! I also asked him if he could keep an eye on him for the next few hours, and he said yeah. I'm so, so angry at the outcome. Turns out he forgot to check on my dog even one single time within the two hours he was home between when he sent me the Snapchat video and when he had to leave for work.
Six hours later, I get home to my dog, who is lying motionless on the kitchen floor in a pool of his own pee, drool, and vomit everywhere. My roommate apparently walked past him before leaving for work, and assumed he was just sleeping. Like, what???? I live in a trailer, to preface this, and he's about 30 feet from the kitchen in his room. It doesn't end there.
When I gave him the news, he just casually went: “Oh, my bad”. He literally didn’t even act like it was a big deal at all or like he was sorry for what he did. The closest he came to showing remorse was casually stating “That sucks that I didn’t get home sooner so he didn't get into the candy”. Later on, he said: “So is it my turn to clean the house? And when do you want the $400 for this month’s rent"?
Completely changing the subject and acting like this whole thing was no big deal. I am in total shock. Today, I lost my dog of 11 years and my best friend. And it all sucks knowing he went out that way instead of in a peaceful manner. I had a terrible day at work and was ready for my cuddles with my dog since he really loved cuddling with me when I would sleep. I'll miss those dearly.
24. It’s The Pettiness That Does It
This was my senior year of college. There were plenty of things that crowned her the world's worst roommate including: going through 6 blunts a day and leaving the ashes all over the bathroom and kitchen, having her boyfriend and his dog move in without asking, plus the very loud and frequent fighting and relations. But honestly, I could handle this stuff. It was something else that broke me.
Every time she cooked with her boyfriend, which was almost nightly, she left a pile of dishes in the sink. So, naturally, within two days the sink was overflowing and there were no dishes or utensils to eat with. We had a dishwasher, which made this way more infuriating. Anyway, one day I had completely had it when I saw little bugs flying around the kitchen.
I told her she needed to do the dishes immediately and left for work. When I came back, the dishes were in fact done. However, she had left behind the one single spoon I had used that morning, dirty in the sink. Even after I had washed and cleaned up after her for months.
25. The Imaginary Friend
There was one guy who had a rather interesting routine. He would begin by closing the door to his room and address some imaginary woman who had snuck inside when he wasn't looking. He would say, "Well, what are you doing here? Uh-huh. Oh, really? Well, I guess I'd better take my pants off, then." A few seconds would pass, after which he would speak again. "So, how about you get undressed too? I'll just lay here and wait for you to be ready.”
“Oh, you're ready now? Well, go ahead and climb on top of me, then." Several minutes would pass before anything else would become audible again, and then the next part of his messed-up routine would begin. He would open, then slam his bedroom door, then sprint down the hallway to the bathroom and slam that door. He'd be in there for a few minutes, flush the toilet, slam the door again, run down the hall, then lock himself in his bedroom.
He would do this every night!
26. Let’s Have Another Cup Of Coffee
Today, my roommate threw out an entire fresh pot of coffee that I had made, simply because she doesn’t like pumpkin. Call me THAT basic girl, but I love pumpkin things. One of those things is pumpkin coffee. Now, my roommate, Cheryl, on top of drinking all the regular coffee that she doesn’t even pay for, hates pumpkin coffee.
The other day, I just wanted my coffee. Keep in mind also that I own the coffee maker and all the bags of beans because Cheryl can’t buy anything for herself. So I brewed and poured myself a cup before sitting on the couch to relax. Cheryl comes upstairs and sees the coffee, still hot and everything. I watched her do this next part with my own eyes.
She smells it, finds out that it’s pumpkin, walks over to the sink, and dumps out my whole coffee. I immediately jump up and ask just what the heck she thinks that she is doing. She looks at me and then the coffee and then tells me that she thought it was old. I call her nonsense out and tell her it was still piping hot and fresh brewed.
She says “Well, I don’t like pumpkin coffee anyway”. She puts the empty container back and starts reaching for a different bag to brew a type of coffee that she actually likes. And I immediately say “Nope, not happening”. I unplugged the coffee maker, took it into my room, and then locked the door behind me. She got extremely angry, followed me to my room, and started whining and demanding coffee.
I said that she lost her coffee privileges for being an entitled jerk. She tried to pull the “You can’t just take the coffee maker into your room!” card and I said “Yes I can, because I own it”. She stormed off to her room after that and we have not spoken again since. I’m so angry, I really wanted that pumpkin coffee. Seriously, the audacity of this woman!
27. Food Fight
My roommate justified eating my steaks by pointing out that he thought I wasn’t going to eat the food anytime soon. Plus, I got yelled at for touching my own food. My house has a detached garage, which has a chest freezer, that I bought. The garage for us is just for storage space since the garage doorways aren’t big enough for our vehicles.
Anyways, last year I bought freezer beef from the butcher shop, and of course stuffed it away in my chest freezer. My roommate also happens to use the chest freezer, and he tends to stuff his frozen foods into it. Space tends to get limited, but we’ve never really had an issue. Until this incident happened, that is. My steaks were in low supply, and I think I was down to just two of them.
I planned on having some for supper, so I decided to head home from the gym to start thawing the steaks. That didn’t exactly get to happen, because they were already on the counter thawing. I verified they were mine by checking the name on the seal, and yep, they belonged to me. I didn’t give it much thought at that point.
After all, I assumed my roommate was just being nice to me and getting them ready for me, but I can’t eat two ribeye steaks by myself. So, I tossed one in the fridge freezer. My roommate hears the commotion, and comes down the stairs. He sees that I’m looking over the steak, and just sharply asks me “What are you doing!?”
I look up and thank him for setting steaks out for me. He gives me a look like I had kicked his dog, and he replies with: “This isn’t a charity! I have a dinner guest coming over!” I was puzzled and asked why he’s eating my food, and then he says: “Because you weren’t going to!” I defended myself by mentioning that I ate through nearly 14 packages of steak from an entire cow in the span of one year, so I was definitely eating them.
That didn’t sway him, and so I decided I’d ignore him and I started to cut open the seal. He screams at me: “I hope you washed your hands before touching food that I’m going to eat!” I reply with: “Did ya buy it?” He goes: “Does that matter??” I gave a sinister grin, and said “Yeah, but just a little bit, though”. Anyways, he had to explain to his dinner guest why he had to grill his own burgers for them after having promised them a steak dinner.
It was pretty funny to listen to, to be honest. Overhearing their conversation, I learned that me repossessing my own food makes me a “tremendous jerk”.
28. Little By Little, And Bit By Bit
I once had a roommate who did the following. When the four of us won a "decorate your door for Christmas" prize, she demanded that the three of us hand her our cash prizes because "her work had caused our apartment to win". This was just the tip of the iceberg, though. She would never pay for groceries, but would then invite her friends over so that she could cook enormous meals for them using the stuff that everyone else had purchased.
She once drank an entire bottle of straight stuff in one sitting, vomited all over the couch, and then left for a week's vacation the next day, with all of the furniture still reeking of her mess. She also believed in some sort of backwards karma system where if she did something good for a stranger, that would allow her to take something from one of us.
For example, if she helped an associate move a heavy piece of furniture, that meant that she should be able to get away with not buying any groceries for a full month because "she earned it by helping her friend with moving furniture". She once agreed to give a mutual friend some of my extra clothing because she was headed to the building where that friend worked. What she really did was ridiculous.
She then gave that clothing to a stranger on the way instead. She would frequently borrow money and then never pay it back. She would turn the channel on the TV while other people were in the middle of watching stuff. Things escalated to the point where, by the end of the year, she could do something as minor as eat one of my bananas, and I'd be all, "SCREW YOU, WITCH!!!!" because of all that resentment.
She had good sides to her personality, too, but those parts were often overshadowed by the endless examples of her selfish short-sightedness and lack of consideration for anyone but herself.
29. Do You Know The Muffin Man?
Three short stories about my worst roommate of all time. We stayed in our college apartment over a summer. He got himself a membership to Costco. He then proceeds to stock up on massive amounts of junk food: hot pockets, pop tarts, various bulk candy, etc. He also bought two boxes of prepackaged muffins. He then comes home with all of this and tells me, “Hey man, if you're ever hungry, help yourself”.
Then, he hides EVERYTHING except the muffins. Being self-sufficient at the time, I declined his offer. Later that summer, I decided to take him up on his offer. Out of the two dozen or so muffins, I think I must have had three or four over the course of as many days. A few days later, I am awoken at 6:00 in the morning to him freaking out and shouting that I ate too many muffins!
I pay him $10 to shut him up. Two days later, in the pantry, I find a tupperware container FULL of muffins. This was no ordinary container, though. He drilled the hand-holds on each side and put two master lock devices on it. And he intentionally left it there for me to find. I called him "Muffins" to his face until the time I moved out.
The second story is that we had two girl roommates at one point. He, being the socially adept fellow that he is, continually left racy videos playing on his computer. Whether I was there or not, whether he was there or not, whether our female roommates were there or not, it was just always playing. And he didn't see what was so wrong about that.
Finally, I had to sit him down and explain why that wasn't acceptable social behavior, because we were living with girls and it was extremely creepy. Honestly, it was creepy even if it was just the two of us. He still would occasionally leave it playing loudly when he had to leave in a hurry to make it to a class on time. But then came the grossest part.
The third story is that, in our bathroom, the sink was located right when you walked in, then the toilet was next to it, and finally the shower took up the whole far wall end of the bathroom. I walked in around noon one day to find a half-eaten baguette sandwich on the sink next to the toilet. Obviously, he had felt the urge to snack while dropping a load.
I leave it. The girls refused to touch it. Muffins strolls back in around 5:00 or 6:00 PM, and we tell him he left something in the bathroom. He walks in, exclaims,"Oh, there it is!" and finishes eating the sandwich. I almost got physically ill upon seeing that…
30. The Scariest Story On Here?
I have personally had some bad roommates over the years, but nothing compares to my friend’s worst nightmare roomie. My friend had this real shifty roommate who was always in his room or not in the house at all. He was also really dirty all the time, and my friend was starting to think that he had some kind of serious mental problems.
One day, he came home and, figuring that his roommate was home, he called out his name, "Kevin! Kevin!" Hearing no response directly, he hears some noise in the unfinished basement. He goes down into the basement where there's cement floor, washer and dryer, and very little to no natural light coming in. He goes down the stairs and tries to turn on the lights, but nothing happens.
He then moves over to the light in the center of the room. He got real weird, real fast. He finds that there is broken glass on the floor from a smashed lightbulb in the fixture above him. All of a sudden, out comes my friend's roommate from the dark corner at the side of the room. He is brandishing a kitchen knife, and immediately stabs my friend in the stomach with it.
My friend wrestles it from the guy and makes it up the stairs and out of the house to safety. This is before cell phones, so he had to go to the neighbors’ house to call the authorities. Turns out that this bad roomie was going schizophrenic and having a psychotic break. I've got more stories, too, but this one will always take the cake.
31. Class A Hypocrite
I had this one roommate who would send long angry texts when I left so little as a plate out to dry or left some bottles in the recycling pile. She would smash glasses of sugar and leave rotting fruit out so she put a huge fly zapper in the kitchen window which, guess what? The light attracted more flies and left their carcasses all over the floor.
She'd leave garbage bags outside that the rats would rip up because we lived in an apartment above a KFC. Then she stopped paying her half of the bills. She had also moved her boyfriend in a day before I moved in, so the only place I could put any of my stuff was in my room—literally no kitchen cupboards or even a shelf in the fridge or freezer.
She let her friends into my room and they tried to play with my baby praying mantis, it was gone when I got home. She cheated on her boyfriend and was an extremely awful partner to her new one. She excluded him from his friends, calorie counted him, and shamed him for eating a cake. If you called her out on it then her only response was to cry.
32. A Whole New Level Of Filth
I rented a house with three coworkers, two of them were dating. It was really fun for the most part but the couple just never cleaned their stuff. They were great people but they had three or four garbage bags full of food and other garbage on the floor of their room at all times. Open, just sitting there. And the sink was full of their dishes.
The living room was unusable due to all their stuff being there. There were ants all in their room and on their bed due to the leftover drinks, plates and cups just sitting there. The garage was just full of their stuff which that didn’t bother me because I parked on the street. I just ordered food instead of cooking or using anything in the kitchen.
The worst part though was one of them at work telling people that the other roommate and I were super dirty. But Karma got them in the end. Eventually, we hosted a work party, Friendsgiving I believe, at our house and my coworkers got to see their filth of a room in its full glory. Seeing my coworkers tip toe through trash and apologize to me for thinking I was dirty was a great feeling.
33. The Day The Xbox Died
I had a friend of mine move in with me. He was a cool guy, I even introduced him to my friends. He was working for his uncle, until he got hit by a car, broke his arm, and ended up moving back home, about seven hours away. After a few months at home, he came back to visit. He was spending more and more time at my place and wanted to move back.
His uncle wouldn't hire him back, so he needed a job. About two months before he moved back, he came to visit and spent a week handing out resumes so he would have a job when he moved in. He told me he had six interviews lined up for the week after he got back. I was working 50+ hours a week at the time, so I didn't know what he was doing with his time, which was nothing. Letting him move in with me was a huge mistake.
I would get home from my shift at 4:00 am and he would be awake playing games on my Xbox. He played non-stop for most of the time he lived with me. I noticed he hadn't played my Xbox for about a week, which was unusual for him. I went to play it, and sure enough, it didn’t work. When I confronted him about it, he got angry and defensive, saying he didn't know what had happened.
He would routinely light up in the apartment when I wasn't home thinking I wouldn't find out. All the furniture was mine and I was not okay with this. Even though he was home all day, he never did dishes or cleaned, and denied making any mess, even if it was made when I was at work or asleep. Towards the end, he even stopped bathing and all my furniture smelled like garbage and smoke.
When he didn't pay rent and started treating my friends poorly, I convinced him to move back with his mom.
34. Something’s Not Right
We found him on Craigslist to fill a room. He moved in and seemed a little weird for the first couple of days as he was getting settled. Soon, a smell started developing, and we slowly realized it was him. We never once saw him go to a laundromat. Occasionally, he would camp out in the bathroom for over an hour, and we'd hear these wet slapping sounds from inside.
We figured he's probably washing his clothes in the bathtub. We thought he was a little different, but we were all pretty laid back and thought we could make it work. Then it got worse. First, he tried making us dinner. He placed frozen chicken on a cookie sheet to bake. When we got back, not only had he eaten all of it, but the bones were in the trash, red like cherries because he'd basically eaten it all raw.
Next, he told us that every Monday he MUST watch RAW wrestling. We couldn’t help but make some snide comments, to which he exploded, screamed in a rage, and demanded that we take back everything we said about pro wrestling being scripted. He absolutely, 100% believed pro wrestling was candid and real. We found it sad, but we lost any pity for him quickly thereafter.
He would stay up chatting online all night until sunrise. We asked him to stop, but he didn’t. It turned out, he was voice chatting with high school girls from his hometown. We were all in our 20s. Soon thereafter, he started getting packages from these girls, which were full of food and money, because they were his girlfriends. Our annoyance quickly turned to full-blown repulsion.
One day he told us that his 16-year-old girlfriend was going to move into his room. We put our foot down. That was it for us. He was STILL voice chatting all night, so we started to remove the splitter that allowed him to have an internet connection in his room whenever we went to sleep. It only took two nights before he started screaming at one of our female roommates.
This dude was over six feet, the roomie he was yelling at was only five feet. Inappropriate to the extreme. Then my girlfriend got into the mix. I intervened and reminded him that he was merely subletting, and had signed a document saying he has no right to any notice. We called him a cab and told him to get out. He was gone within the hour.
35. Birthday Suit
My fat obnoxious jerk of a roommate completely ruined my birthday. It was Monday. I wasn't expecting a huge to-do, so I decided I wanted to go to three-dollar any pint night at the local pub. My roommate's parents were both doctors, so he was financially loaded. He says he'll take me to a fancy drink spot instead to celebrate.
We get there and he orders the baked brie and some other expensive appetizers. The drinks he selected for us were not cheap, of course. After our appetizers came and he had finished his glass of expensive liquid, he suddenly says: "Well, I have a lab project. Later! Hey man, can you cover the rest of the bill? I'm short right now”.
He then tosses a 20 dollar bill on the table, for a 65 dollar tab. And that wasn’t all. He then adds: “By the way, what do you think of this place? I like it, I'm glad I scouted it out tonight. I'm totally renting this out for my birthday". He then leaves before I can even process what had just happened. So yeah, my roommate tricked me into paying for a place that I didn't even want to go to on my birthday, just so that he could scope it out for his own birthday party.
36. The Odd Man Out
So in my second year of university, I lived in an apartment on the 15th floor of a building, with five other dudes as my roommates. One of them was named Kevin. Kevin did all of your standard lousy roommate things. He never washed a single dish. He piled dirty pans in the sink after cooking something horrid-smelling from whatever in his fridge shelf wasn't rotten.
He got tons of take-out meals with his excessively loud friends and then left the garbage piled on the coffee table. And for all that, he was barely ever around somehow, so we couldn't even hassle him about changing any of these habits. Although one time we did get on him enough to make him deal with two sinks’ worth of dirty dishes.
One time, when we were having a fairly large party at our place, Kevin looked at our kitchen garbage, which was close to overflowing. He yelled something about: "This is gross and it's gotta go now!" and picked up the trash can, which had me thinking "Wow, this is awfully responsible for him, especially while intoxicated".
Then, he started walking toward the balcony. I immediately knew what was up. However, while I was imagining he would shake the garbage from the can with a sort of side hand motion, instead he proceeds to throw the entire garbage can itself over the railing. Off the 15th floor of a tall building. If someone had been standing underneath, their life would have been over due to this idiot’s stupidity.
Luckily, he moved out halfway through the year, though he left bags of his stuff everywhere for a month or so. Oh, and remember those two sinks of dishes that he "dealt with" earlier in the year? Well, ever since then, we had the sense that we had less dishes than we did previously. Although it must be obvious now in this retelling, at the time we didn't make the connection.
He clearly had decided to start hiding dirty dishes so that he wouldn’t be asked to clean them again. One day, we were cleaning a pile of recycling off the balcony and found a black garbage bag. We opened it to discover a horror show. It was full of the most horrid, gross dishes you've ever seen in your life. Instead of doing the dishes, he had put two sinks’ worth of everyone's dishes into a garbage bag and left them on the balcony.
Conclusion: Screw Kevin.
37. The Wrong Man
Years ago, what now seems like a lifetime ago, I moved into a friend's place when my parents moved out of state. I was 19 years old with a job, and paid them about $100 a month to sleep in a converted woodshed. Yup, a woodshed. I shared it with a friend of mine in a similar situation. So we were two 19-year0old guys living in a woodshed in the backyard of our friend's parents’ place.
We insulated the thing, it was heated, it had TV with cable and a PlayStation (yes that long ago), it wasn't that bad really. I'd been there almost a year, just stocking up cash so I could get a real place and go to college. I would have to pay for that myself. Anyway, I get a call at work that my grandma is on her last moments on this Earth.
I get a leave from work and jet off to another state. When I get back, my buddy (the one that I shared the little shed with) is there and tells me that he is angry that I took off like that without saying anything. Then he said a fateful sentence. He demanded that I had to move out, because of how offended he was about this.
He claimed it would be best if I just left now and didn't talk to anyone, because all of our mutual friends were allegedly soooo upset with me over not informing them that I had left town. Well, I call some friends he doesn’t know. One of them had offered me a place to stay before, and he said sure I could come on over until this got sorted out…
It later turned out that my “buddy” was lying. What actually happened is that he had swiped a bunch of money and things from the hosting parents’ house while I was out of town, and blamed the whole thing on me when they discovered the missing items. The real reason he wanted me to move out was so that I wouldn’t discover this and tell them the truth.
He told them he was going to kick me out as punishment for what I did, so that he would never be caught or suspected, and could also keep his living arrangement. But I only found this all out a few years later, when I showed up to visit our former landlords (the parents). They were utterly shocked to see me, and after some back and forth confusion I explained and cleared everything up between us. This has an even worse ending.
Turns out our “buddy” there later went on a binge and lost his life in a car accident, just a month or so after I moved out. They said they figured it wasn't me all along after that. Plus, they noticed that the dude suddenly came up with a lot of cash to spend on fancy new furnishings shortly after the incident. Not the way I would have wanted to be exonerated.
38. A Brainy Kind Of Story
One of my roommates during freshman year of college was a really sheltered kid, and I could tell that he was gonna have a hard time getting adjusted to life in the outside world. Me, my other roommate, and the rest of our suite were really accommodating and tried to talk to him, but he was kinda weird and extremely shy. For a while, it seemed that he was a nice kid, albeit a bit awkward and strange.
A few weeks into the semester, while I was in the room, he would start asking me really weird questions. He once asked me if I thought vampires existed, to which I responded that they didn't. He said: "Are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure I saw one the other day". Then, this other time, he was looking at a list of students in his discussion section, and one of them had the same name as someone in our suite.
No big deal, right? Well, my roommate thought it was the funniest freaking thing in the entire world. He actually brought the other dude over and pointed it out to him while laughing his butt off. "You guys…have the same name!!!!" He kept on pointing at the screen and his face was turning red because of how hard he was laughing.
At that point, me and my other suitemates realized that he was definitely very strange, and not just a little awkward in a harmless kind of way. It began to get downright disturbing. He also asked me once about mind-reading and whether or not I could read his mind. I'm a pretty tolerant person, even of odd beliefs, so I just shrugged most of it off and I figured he was just a really weird kid.
Fast forward toward the end of the semester, about a week before final exams. I come into my suite and I see him, his mom, and the Dean of my college. I find out that he's moving out and he's going to take his final exams next quarter. I didn't want to pry, so I refrained from asking any questions. I just said goodbye and wished him the best.
He took most of his stuff, but a good portion of his things were still there, enough for me to think that he would eventually come back. A week later, after all of our finals are done, I walk into my room and all of his stuff is now gone. Apparently, he moved out for good. I didn't really know what to think of it, and since it was the last day of finals, I was going home that afternoon for Christmas break.
I kind of just shrugged it off since we could all tell that he wasn't really adjusted to college life and he was just way too sheltered to fit in. Then, on the way home later that afternoon, I suddenly get an unexpected call. It's from him. He had this weird habit of asking my name in the form of a question before he asked me anything, as if he had to make sure it was really me.
For context, James and Kevin are the names of the other people in my suite. Here is how the ensuing phone conversation went. Him: "[Insert my name here]?" Me: "Yeah?" Him: "Can you tell James to stop reading my mind? I know he's doing it, so can you please just tell him to stop?" Me: "................... uh.......... Alright."
Him: "And can you tell Kevin to stop too? I'm not sure if he's doing it also, but just tell him too. Alright, bye now". And then he hung up before I could even process this. He apparently moved out and left school altogether, all because he had convinced himself that our roommates were reading his mind and spying on his thoughts.
He ended up coming back a few quarters later. He looked really different because he had gained a bunch of weight, but we suspected that it might have to do with the medication he was put on. Whenever I saw him, I always said hi to him and asked him how he was doing. He's doing well now. I even had lunch with him and a few of my other suitemates.
He's still sort of weird, but he is genuinely a nice guy, so I don't have any problems with him. But man, those few months living with him were confusing as heck.
39. Immediate Red Flags
When we first met, we went to a concert during the summer to do some bonding, until she got kicked out. Then, not even two weeks into the school year, she broke up with her boyfriend of 2 years and insisted I talk to him via Skype to talk him out of it. To cope, she took my watermelon spirits. Then, she proceeded to go on multiple benders.
She would kick me out to hook up, get high, and take my car to go get pizza (I drove stick, she did not. I was not pleased). I spent the remainder of the semester locking up all of my important possessions, including my keys. The final straw was when I came back to our smoke detector dangling from the wall while she just sat there.
She tore it off after she claimed the smoke from her hair straightener set it off. It also conveniently smelled like weed in the room. This was all within one semester.
40. I’m Your Roommate, Not Your Mom
I moved in with a buddy for college (big mistake, never move in with friends). He sucked so bad. He expected me to wake him up every morning for class because that’s what his mum used to do. The problem was he hated being woken up and would come up swinging. Then he'd be mad at me for the next hour for waking him.
I'm one of those people who, if I use a dish, I wash it and put it away so I never left dishes. He however would fill the sink. Then once every week or two he would tell me it was my turn to do the dishes. I'd refuse and he'd complain about me to all our friends saying I never did dishes. I found out he'd left college when he didn't show up for an exam.
When I got home he was gone. Two weeks later he took his stuff and left without saying anything. He sucked.
41. It’s Never Temporary
I let a girl I knew move in with me and my roommate temporarily to escape a bad relationship. Shortly after I realized she had either borderline personality disorder or bipolar disorder or both. My life quickly turned into a nightmare. She was extremely passive-aggressive and began trying to manipulate my roommate to turn against me by making up ridiculous lies.
One day, after month three of living with me, I informed her I could not give her a ride somewhere because it did not work with my schedule. When I returned from work, she had cut all the flowers in my garden I had planted that spring at the base. When I confronted her about it, she said they were touching her windows (they were vine flowers).
I moved out the following month with my boyfriend. Told my roommate to watch out. She’s next. Three weeks later the psycho roommate went through the house and crossed out all her art and posters with black permanent marker.
42. There Are No Flowers In This Attic
I lived in a house with the girl who owned the house, my boyfriend, our six-month-old, and another friend. The owner didn't have a job and asked us all to move in to help pay the bills, so her parents, who bought her the house, wouldn't default on their loan. We had been there about a month when we noticed that the owner rarely left her bedroom in the attic.
The only time she left was to sneak down to eat my food. She never got a job, or contributed in any way, except to ask when we were paying her. She also owned three cats that she couldn't afford. I had to buy them food or they would have starved. She never even cleaned their litter box. It reeked of ammonia. I finally got sick of cleaning up her mess and told her that when I got back from work, that she had better clean the litter box.
I had a baby living there and didn’t like for her to be out of our room because it smelled. I went to work and my boyfriend took our baby in the stroller to the store a block away. He forgot to take his keys and that crazy woman locked them out and refused to let them in. The baby was screaming for a bottle so he broke a window to try to crawl in to get her formula, which she refused to give us.
He called me at work, told me what happened and that officers could only make her give us our baby things back. She swore we had NOTHING else there and that we were trying to pilfer from her. I managed to get some of my things back after paying her rent for all the time our stuff sat there while she was holding it hostage. However, she kept all my cool stuff.
43. Who Invited These People?
Our one roommate would throw parties in our dorm without telling any of us. The people who would come weren’t even college students. I remember once, I saw a woman who looked like she was 35. She'd brought her baby to one of the parties. These weren't low-key parties either. There was music blaring until 7:00 am on a weekday.
All night long, random people were getting busy on our couch in front of everyone, and the place would be trashed when we got up. He even had the nerve to refuse to clean up, telling us that the mess wasn't his fault, it was his "friends" and why should he have to clean up their mess? When he broke up with his boyfriend, his boyfriend spent the entire night crying and screaming outside this guy's door in our dorm room.
During the night our roommate slammed the door on his ex’s hand, cutting it, and his ex then went around our dorm smearing his blood all over everything.
44. Cable Watching Cousin
I shared a house with two other guys, and we all shared the bills three ways. One day, one of the guys asked if his cousin who was backpacking around Europe could crash with us for a couple of weeks. My other roommate and I agreed, as we had met his cousin before and he seemed pretty cool. Oh, how wrong we were. After the two weeks were up, the cousin went on his adventures and a week later the dreaded cable bill arrived.
The cousin had sat on the couch and watched racy pay-per-view movies all day, every day. According to the bill, he would watch between 10 to 45 minutes of a movie before getting bored and starting a new one. The code for the PPV was the default 0000 as we all had agreed that we would never use it unless the three of us were there.
The cable bill was an extra $300 as a result of the cousin’s PPV habit. Our roommate refused to chip in extra to cover it. His argument was that we always split the bill three ways and we had all agreed that his cousin could stay. The bill was invoiced to me and I wasn't going to get a bad credit report as a result of movies I didn't watch.
After shouting and fussing, we paid the bill—but it ruined everything. After a few months, we all went our separate ways. Things were never quite the same after.
45. Watch Out For This One
My worst roommate wasn't a bad guy until Halloween. We were both freshmen, living on campus in the dorms, trying to make friends and do well in school. We hung out a decent amount of time ,as we had some things in common. I actually played high school baseball against him. Well, Halloween rolls around and he asks me how small they can make cameras.
I think it's a normal question, nothing too suspicious at that point to be honest. Since I'm a computer engineering major, he figures it's something I'd have some knowledge of. Naturally, I tell him how small they can make cameras, noting that they make some spy ones that can fit on the button of a shirt or in the eyes of a teddy bear.
He thanks me for this information, and then a little bit later he starts complaining about being able to hear our neighbors. It's 2:00 in the morning and it's completely silent. I had just gone to bed and he's sitting at his desk browsing the internet. I tell him I don't hear anything, but he insists that he has better ears than I do.
So I tell him to just put his headphones on so he won’t be able to hear them anymore. He refuses to do so, and informs me that he wants to hear what they are talking about. So I get our other roommate. The other roommate comes in and says there is nothing but silence that he can perceive. Of course, this isn't good enough for my roommate.
Whatever, I still don’t think that much of it. I'm going to bed. And for the time being, that was the end of that. I had no idea what I was in for. I come home from class the next day and this kid is pacing back and forth across our room. He's kind of sweaty, and he's holding his hands and rubbing them against each other weirdly.
I'm no genius when it comes to reading body language, but I can clearly see that something is awry. I ask him what’s up; did he fail a test or miss a big assignment or something? No, of course it can’t be something innocent. He informs me that the roommates next to us (not the ones from last night, but the other four guys that share a bathroom next to us) have footage of him walking around the dorm room undressed.
I ask him if he’s walked around the dorm room undressed and he says: “No… but I probably must have at some point!” He tells me that there are cameras in the room and that the kids next door are trying to railroad him with the footage, for money. I ask him what they want and he says they haven’t told him. He suggests they might be doing this just to torment him, perhaps.
I offer to help him look for the cameras, knowing that there aren’t any. But he declines, saying that he’s searched everywhere already. Whatever, I’m home from class and I’ve got some video games to play. But it was far from over. This odd behavior starts escalating over the next few days. He’s repeatedly talking about what he’s going to do to the guys who are behind this alleged scheme.
He's trying to figure out how he can get the tape from them, stop the cameras, and all that nonsense. It gets worse. I’m a deep sleeper, but this kid woke me up one day with incessant yelling at 9:00 in the morning. This time, he’s yelling for this girl Amanda. Mind you, this kid has not had a girlfriend the entire semester, so I have no idea who Amanda is.
Our building was co-ed, with guys on one side of the floor and ladies on the other half. Maybe she was someone on our floor? He’s pacing up and down the room again, whispering about how he’s sorry. He’s not sure what she’s mad at him about, but he’s sorry for whatever it is. He decides that he’s going to go out into the hallway and yell for Amanda at the top of his lungs.
This kid screams ridiculously loud! He actually started waking people up and they’re all instant messaging me asking what the heck my crazy roommate is yelling about. After a good 30 minutes or so and many laughs by our classmates, he comes back into the room. Now he’s mad because he has no voice from yelling and "Amanda" won’t come out after 30 minutes of him pleading.
Cue time for me to leave the room and do something besides be around this kid. I come back later in the early morning hours, maybe 2:00 or 3:00 am. When I walk in the door, a shiver goes down my spine. He’s still in the room, still awake. I’ve got my wallet and phone in my front pockets. I’m exhausted and climb into my bed ready to sleep.
Now, Captain Crazy wants to question me on what’s in my pockets. Knowing that I’m dealing with a crazy person, I show him that it’s just my phone and wallet. Little does he know that I have my baseball bat and metal cleats already on the side of my bed, in case that steak knife he has comes anywhere near me while I’m sleeping.
As aforementioned, I’m a deep sleeper and Captain Crazy is yelling again, so loud this time that he wakes me up in the middle of the night. And this time, he’s sitting on the edge of his bed, facing mine and looking at the wall that is shared by our neighbors. Now, seeing as I have just been awakened by someone crazy yelling and facing me, I assume he’s yelling at me.
So, I book it out of the room with my cellphone. I go to the RA (Residency Assistant) and am pounding on her door at 4:00 in the morning, begging her to open the darn door and let me the heck in. I tell her what happened and what has been going on. She calls her boss, who calls his boss, who informs the RA to call the campus authorities.
Since we are a large university, our officers are real officers, not just security guards. The officers come, question him, and tell me that it’s my word against his and that nothing can be done. If he is harmful to himself or anyone else, then I can call them again, and they will “Baker Act” him. My response: “Great, I’ll give you a call when he attacks me in my sleep”.
One of the officers fetches my pillow and I spend the night sleeping on the couch in the study room for our floor with the door locked (around a wall so he can’t see me). He is supposed to have a class when I wake up, but he hasn’t been going. I chance it since I have nothing on me but my phone, pajamas, and a pillow. I called my parents after the officers came and my mom freaked about this whole story.
When I returned to the room, Captain Crazy was still there, and still wide awake. He informs me to just tell him to stop yelling next time and he’ll stop. His next explanation makes me feel even more unsafe. He explains that he was yelling at our neighbors. Later, he tells me, the guy we share the bathroom with, and a friend of his about this awesome movie he was watching.
However, he was never watching a movie. He was just sitting on his bed with the remote, facing the TV, but the darn TV wasn’t even turned on! So I’m starting the process of moving out of the dorm room, because I don’t want to get in the middle of something bad at some point. Except then Captain Crazy started banging on every single floormate's door.
He would then force his way into the room as soon as they opened the door. If you didn’t open the door, he’d stand out there yelling for "Amanda" for 30 minutes. According to my floormates, he was checking in the weirdest of places: garbage cans, the cracks between the cabinets and the floor, etc. Well, he’s now forced entry into over 40 rooms.
The guys he thinks have been spying on him refuse to open the door. That starts fight number two, because Captain Crazy wants to find Amanda and he wants to find that footage. The officers come and finally Baker Act this guy, meaning lock him up against his will due to the clear fact that he was a danger to those around him.
I ended up getting a massive dorm room all to myself for the rest of the semester and the spring semester too. The guy I had shared the bathroom with hadn’t had a roommate the entire semester and moved out because of the crazy guy, so when the university filled the room, it was only with one person! So the two of us had massive rooms all to ourselves and I pushed the beds together for a king-size bed.
It worked out pretty well for me in the end, but Captain Crazy was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia which I feel bad for him about. Crazy how it all went down.
46. Looking Out For Number One
I had a roommate who I consider to have been a complete, probably diagnosable sociopath. He was a great guy when he needed something from you, but the second you weren't somehow of immediate use to him, he put effort into causing trouble for you. When we first moved in, we got along great. Then, as he started dating a neighbor, his priorities suddenly shifted.
He'd put a CD into the machine and start playing it on repeat once I had gone to bed, and then leave for his girlfriend's place with the music still blasting. No regard or concern for my needs whatsoever, even though I was clearly in bed and trying to go to sleep. He pulled that garbage twice, and permanently ruined the band Smashing Pumpkins for me.
As he moved most of his stuff to his new girlfriend's place, he told a friend and a guy he had never met that they could move in. This was without consulting or even informing me that he had done so. He had a pet iguana that he lost interest in, so I am saddled with a lizard and two roommates that aren't paying bills. There was only one thing I could do.
I gave away the iguana and had the manager force out the unwanted new roommates. He responded back by returning to the apartment, turning up the heat, closing the windows, and spreading chocolate chips all over the apartment, just to annoy me as punishment for standing up to his nonsense. That guy was by far the worst and most unpleasant person I’ve ever had to spend time with, let alone had to actually live with for a period of time.
47. A Complete Disregard For Others
This was a forced roommate situation. I lived in an apartment style dorm for college. I moved in after him and he had taken a good chunk of the furniture we had into his room, leaving me with a small half-dresser, a bed, and a desk. We had a common area but it always had all his clothes all over everywhere so it was unusable.
He didn't bring any dishes or utensils so when I moved in with some, suddenly the sink was always full. He constantly smoked. INSIDE. He smoked all sorts of things constantly. It made the whole apartment smell super bad. The worst thing was he apparently kept forgetting he had a roommate because my girlfriend and I constantly walked in on him and his girlfriend. It was...not pretty.
One time we were woken up around 2 or 3 in the morning because they thought it would be a good idea to have super loud teenage-style relations against my door. I moved out early into an apartment and he had the audacity to make it difficult on official move out day which would have ended up costing each of us our $500 deposits.
I hadn't lived there in 2 months and the place was COMPLETELY trashed and he refused to clean it. But he wasn't getting away with this one. I told the RA I hadn't lived there for two months and provided proof as well as unlocked my room door to show it was spotless. He got stuck with either cleaning it or losing his deposit. I don't even care what happened.
48. Should Have Stayed In Vegas
My wife and I went to Vegas for a week around Valentine’s Day. Our roommate let one of his college friends crash at our apartment. We found out 3 days after we got home about it and the fact that he stayed there because his dorm had BED BUGS. That moron infested our apartment. I had to grovel to our landlord to not charge us for the fumigation.
I had to throw out a lot of my furniture and my brand-new bed. My roommate did not care and refused to help clean. My name is on the lease so I evicted him myself with the landlord’s approval. But of course, nothing is that easy. He was so lazy that it took him a month to START packing stuff and did nothing to clean up the horrific nests of bugs.
I offered to help many, many times with his share or packing but he always refused. It got to the point that I just had to throw out his bed and clean out his room. I lifted his mattress and I bet you there were a thousand bed bugs under there. He was supposed to throw his mattress out, he said he did, but obviously didn’t.
It cost me our damage deposit and hundreds of dollars to replace my infested stuff. He never took responsibility once or tried to make up for it.
49. Slippery Slope
I had a roommate who seemed normal...at first. She started to have mental issues a few months after moving in. She never left her room after that, and refused to pay rent or her share of the utilities. When myself and the other housemates would confront her about this she would tell us to our face that she had paid the rent.
Nothing we could say or do would convince her that she had in fact not paid rent for two months. After another month of this we tried to get the property management company to kick her out. They told us that due to squatters' rights they couldn’t. So we had to get the authorities involved which made things so much worse.
Once she realized this she started to accuse all of us of beating her, thus why she hadn’t paid rent in 3 months. After much headache and multiple visits from officers, she was eventually taken to a 72-hour psych hold. We changed the locks and refused to let her back into the house once she got out and moved all her stuff onto the lawn. Then she went out with a bang.
She then proceeded to try and burn the house down later that night before her parents took her away again. I never saw her again after that thankfully and all her stuff ended up being thrown away by property management.
50. Gone Without A Trace
I've had some bad roommates, but I think the worst one was bad due to extenuating circumstances that were not entirely his fault. He would have manic episodes where he would freak out, yell at everything and everyone, including himself. He would pace the apartment at frantic speeds breathing super hard until I would finally get him some water and have him sit down long enough to breathe. One day, he freaked us out big time...He just disappeared.
This guy would disappear for days at a time, so for the first three or four days, my other two roommates and I did not do anything about it. At the time he was a sophomore in college and none of us knew what his class schedule was like, or if he possibly had a girlfriend. He was in a fraternity, and I was friends with one of his fraternity brothers.
After I told my roommates about the manic episodes they had me call his fraternity brother and it turned out that no one in the fraternity had seen or heard from him. After some discussion, we filed a missing persons report. He had been missing for about five or six days at that point. Officers showed up and we went through the normal motions.
About three hours later one of the officers came back and said, "We can't tell you where he is, but we can say he is okay."
51. An Expert At What She Does
I once had a roommate that swiped and pawned my Texas Instruments graphing calculator, which in addition to being super expensive was also priceless to me since it had four years’ worth of notes and formulas on it. She also took a camera with a bunch of vacation photos on it and 100 bucks of cash from my girlfriend's wallet.
She also used our toothbrushes and ate all our food. She smelled awful. She used our towels, took my girlfriend's jewelry, and had a Tupperware container of urine constantly sitting in the middle of the floor of her room. One time, our neighbor dropped her credit card, and the roommate swiped it right in front of her, then ran away with it and went on a shopping spree.
She lifted books from the library, and she also paid for her first month's rent but then stopped paying for the rest of the semester. We went on to evict her, and realized the process takes up to two months, which she seemed to know well in advance, and made herself quite comfortable. It turns out, the law is very much on her side and we would get into trouble with the law if we had just tossed her things out.
When we looked up her record, it turned out that she had been evicted five times before, and is a deadbeat mom. Yeah. I don't miss her, to say the least…
52. A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words
This roommate was pretty awful. I lived with a friend after moving out for the first time and things were pretty great. Granted, she never cleaned and borrowed my clothes without asking all the time, but it was awesome living away from home for the first time and we had some good times during our initial time together. Then, it started to go downhill fast.
I started to get fed up with her behavior and how she never cleaned up after herself, among other things. Anyways, I had my laptop permanently on a desk in the living room, so she quite frequently would use it. One day, I'm on it and I go to search for a picture to send to a friend, and I stumble upon an unfamiliar folder in my pictures.
Curious as to why the heck this random folder is on my computer, I click on it. Turns out it was a bunch of my roommate’s photos, complete with full-on, spread eagle photos of her in various positions. What. The. Heck. Needless to say, that was the end of our shared computer time. For the record, though, I never told her about finding her photos.
53. Just A Lovely Person All-Around
During my freshman year of college, I had a roommate. I'm lactose intolerant and bought soy milk to put in our pitifully tiny dorm fridge. Despite never giving me money for groceries, she would call me while I was at the grocery store and ask me not to get soy milk because she didn't like it. She also whined about the low sodium soup I would buy.
She did buy a case of ramen once in the nine months we lived together, which she graciously let us eat. She walked around our shared room in her underwear, and left dirty underwear and bras laying out in the open all over the place. She walked up to me while I was watching a DVD on the television that I had brought with me, and demanded that I give her the remote so she could watch her soap operas.
Her justification was that I'd "already seen this movie too many times". She would also stay up late watching reruns of her soap operas with the volume blasting while I was trying to get to sleep for an 8:00 am class. When I sleep on my back, I snore. This usually isn't a problem, because I've trained myself to sleep on my side.
But every tiny fraction of a percentage of the time, I accidentally roll onto my back in the middle of the night. I warned her about this and told her to throw a pillow at me whenever it happens. This would wake me up so that I’ll instinctively roll onto my side. Her solution was much more terrifying. I was woken up one night by her shaking my shoulder with one hand, and shaking my throat with her other hand.
She says she thought it was my other shoulder. I still don't believe her. Thankfully, I have since gotten into a new apartment with an amazing roommate for the next year, while my other former suitemates (whom I would have liked to live with) decided to live with the crazy girl, even against my better advice. It took them a month before they were telling me I was right and that they wanted to run the heck away.
54. In A World Of Their Own
They and their partner never cleaned up after themselves. They also drank a lot of soft drinks and got a lot of Uber Eats. It got to the point that their desks and the surrounding area had boxes and boxes of half empty drink cans, piles of rubbish made up of food containers and boxes from Amazon packages, and had dirt and grime everywhere.
The kitchen was small but was regularly filled with dishes that they very rarely did. Their room was covered in dirty clothes because they rarely did laundry. They also ruined my cast iron pan by leaving it soaking in the sink for a week, sitting in water and caked in tomato sauce. I am someone who needs things to be somewhat clean.
The extent of the mess from these two led to multiple talks with my psychologist because it was making me angry and depressed. If I spoke to the housemates about it, I'd get empty promises or tears. I ended up moving out after basically being a cleaner for them for the better part of a year.
55. Inappropriate Apology
In week one of lockdown, my roommate brought her very much still working boyfriend over for a super loud hump-sesh. Had to get the landlord involved to get rid of him. She then vented at the landlord that the rest of us don’t share our personal pots and pans with her. Which we did but whatever, landlord asked us to play nice and the boyfriend left.
He then made a whole show of coming downstairs in gloves and a mask to say sorry, before doing a toilet blocking, no flush, horror dump in the shared toilet, and leaving. She then refused to clean or wash up for a month.
56. Lazy Loungers
I had three roommates that were the laziest people alive. I was the only one that did dishes ever. I saw one eating a bowl of cereal with a fork once because we had no clean spoons. One lived in the basement, and I went down there for the first time in a few months and all the lights were off. The light bulbs had burned out and he was too lazy to change them.
It was more convenient for him to simply sit in the dark. However, the biggest awakening for me was when I went out of town for a weekend. I used the bathroom Friday morning before heading to the airport and saw that we were out of toilet paper. I had to resort to using paper towels. I came back late Sunday night and walked into the bathroom to the same roll of paper towels.
All three of them were off the whole weekend and decided that wiping with Bounty was a better option than driving two minutes to the store to buy more toilet paper.
57. You’re Not My Mom
The worst roommate I ever had was a 56-year-old lady who let me stay in a room for free. She was somewhat of a family friend. I was a 20-year-old female who kept things clean, wasn’t too loud, and tried to be considerate. This woman told me that my boyfriend at the time had to leave before midnight. I agreed and abided by the rule. She then told me I was not allowed to keep my bedroom door closed anymore, for any reason.
Again, I abided and tried to hang out elsewhere. I came back one night a week later and found she had placed all my stuff on the curb and said I was acting inappropriately and irresponsibly. She lectured me about how my boyfriend was no good and a failure. Needless to say, I grabbed my things and never spoke to her again until she asked for custody of my siblings, should my parents pass away.
58. Promises Made, Promises Broken
Alright, it was the first apartment that I’d ever had and I was super pumped. I meet this girl through a mutual friend. She's nice, not my type though, but says she needs a roommate. I find the apartment, get the place, and she moves in. Here's the first problem. She brings a boyfriend and freaking cat, all without telling me. I'm pretty passive though.
It's whatever as long, as he pays rent and the cat doesn't poop on my bed. I make that pretty clear. Other than that, we don't have any problem. I have my own bedroom, bathroom, and even my own door to the apartment. So I'm working at a pizza place, in a college town, where we don't get done til 2:00 in the morning.
I get home after work, walk in, get ready to just plop down…Aaaaaaand the cat had pooped on my bed. I'm still pretty collected at this point. I walk in, I say: “Hey, your cat pooped on my bed, do you mind cleaning it up?” Her reply was mind-blowing. This chick tells me: “Well, you left your door open, you should've closed it, so you can take care of it”. I let that sink it real well.
I attempt to wrap my head around her logic. I try to see it from her perspective. SCREW THAT. This is the logic of a crazy person. I tell her she needs to clean it up or I'm chucking the cat out of the window. For the record, I'd never toss a cat out of a window. The boyfriend stands up and is like: “Hey, don't yell”. I'm not yelling, but you know, the tension is getting higher.
I state, not yelling, this is just unacceptable. He tells me to get bent. Clearly, they don't understand the situation, so I tell her that I am going out and that she had better freaking clean it up, or I will be dealing with this in an aggressive fashion. I come home at 4:00. The cat poop is gone. Thank the Lord. I still change my sheets, but I'm happy.
The next morning, the boyfriend comes down and apologizes to me. No problem, bro. We play Xbox together. She comes home from "work" and starts flipping out that neither of us did anything. Alright, understandable that you want your boyfriend to be somebody. But one day of video games and bonding with your roommate isn't a big deal.
But then, why the heck is she yelling at me? Here's the best development. I later find out she didn't actually have a job, and she was just out spending time with this other guy whenever she was claiming to be at work. In any case, a few months go by, it's Halloween, and I come home tipsy but happy. I quietly walk into my room, lay down, and start to go to sleep.
All of a sudden, she comes bursting through the door screaming. It's 3:00 am. Why didn't I call, who do I think I am? But a well-placed grunt and growl chases her away. The next night, I bring my current girlfriend home. The freedom of adulthood and intimacy in one’s own apartment is in view. Until the roommate again comes storming in.
Her: "Who's this witch? We didn't talk about you having guests over!" AS IF WE TALKED ABOUT YOU BRINGING A LIVE-IN BOYFRIEND???! OH, AND SINCE WHEN IS THIS ANY OF YOUR BUSINESS!? So clearly, I state all of this. She leaves. My girlfriend feels awkward, so we go to her place. I spend a week there. Every night I was gone, I get a phone call, voicemail, and text message.
A month goes by, and I finally decide to return. I walk home early from work, and as soon as I enter the apartment I want to scream. I hear the two of them getting it on. Still, I go about my business. A few minutes later, some unknown guy walks out of her bedroom. Wait a minute, who the heck is this? Not her boyfriend.
Well, I keep my mouth shut. If he moves out, then I lose rent, an Xbox, and a friend, right? But turns out I didn’t even have to tell anyone about what I had witnessed, because my roommate was dumb enough to call the boyfriend’s sister and tell her about how she had just slept with some guy. WHAT?! He finds out. Within the next few weeks, he moves out, in an emotional departure.
I'm crushed. He was cool. We drank together, played video games, made hand puppets, and lots of other silly stuff like that. Two months go by, and now the final battle occurs. The girl comes walking in, stares me in the face, and says: “You haven't paid your half of the rent”. I say: “Excuse me?” To make a long story short, she expected me to now cover the part of her rent that her boyfriend had been paying.
Whoa. What? When was this established? I tell her that she will be paying not only his full amount, but mine too. I packed my things, got the heck out of there for the last time, and never looked back. But just for good measure, she damaged a bunch of my property during a temper tantrum she threw while I was packing up my stuff and making my way out.
She even tried to drag part of my bed through the streets before I could get a mover to pick it up. Almost a year later, I walk into a peeler club. GUESS WHO IS DANCING NEXT! You got it—her! I beelined it the heck outta there. She continues to occasionally show up in the worst places to this day. I see her around the campus from time to time.
She doesn't actually go to school, just lives off of one of the guys who is totally wrapped around her weird, deformed, little finger. This idiot was the Joker of roommates. Total nightmare.
59. Watering Things Down
I once got a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue for my birthday from a friend. I went out of town for a few days. My roommate proceeds to drink half the bottle and then fill it up with water, as if I wouldn't notice. And then, he had the audacity to lie about it, and continues to do so to this very day. I do believe he doesn't remember, though.
He got laid off after getting charged with a driving infraction. He proceeded to drink himself stupid for eight months and was eventually taking our rent money to pay his car bill. I didn't realize until we had an eviction notice posted on our door. This forced him to get his parents to pay for our three months of rent that he didn't pay, but I still have an eviction on my record now.
I have a copy of the notice that says I was not the one evicted, so wherever I go I have to show that to future landlords or when I buy a house so we don't get denied.
60. The Fly Bag
I lived in an apartment-style dorm with a kitchen, living room, and two double bedrooms. One of the guys in the other bedroom fancied himself a chef (in reality, I think he was a dishwasher at Outback) so he would cook all the time in the apartment. He had this habit of hanging a plastic shopping bag from the oven door handle and just tossing cut scraps into it.
The problem is, he never actually threw that bag away. I was never around while he was cooking so I didn't pay that bag much mind nor realize it was always the same bag. After a couple of weeks, we started to notice a foul smell and the presence of fruit flies in the apartment. I was deep cleaning the kitchen and I brushed up against that bag. Then my worst nightmare came true.
No less than a hundred fruit flies burst up from inside it. Needless to say, I freaked out. After a visit from the RA and the maintenance team to spray, he was required to clean up after every meal and take the trash out twice a week, on penalty of being kicked out of the dorms.
61. We Do Not Seek Your Confession, Only The Rent Money
We had a guy who was your typical bad roommate. He didn't do anything around the house, and his room smelled, quite inexplicably, of salami. He set up his PC in the living room one day, essentially taking over our social space without asking anyone. He would sit there for days on end playing video games. Then he disappeared.
We realized that he had skipped out without having paid his rent for a few weeks. He owed us a few hundred dollars. Good thing for us, he inadvertently left his Warhammer figurine collection behind. It was quite a collection, all hand-painted. A friend of ours who knew about Warhammer stuff said this collection was easily worth three or four times more than what he owed us.
We started looking into selling it to cover rent, maybe fund a weekend of partying, and move on with our lives. One day about a week later, he showed up. He was blatantly looking behind couches and things trying to look for his collection while trying to act cool and pretend he didn’t owe us any money. We had a few minutes of awkward small talk before he asked if we had seen his black Warhammer chest.
My roomie who handled the bills said, “Nah man sorry. We've had a few pretty epic parties since you moved out. Hopefully, no one took it or something. Oh and hey man some of your rent didn't go through can we grab that off you when it's convenient?” The guy turned white as a sheet and gave us a line about paying us tomorrow, then left.
About an hour later, we finally got our revenge. We sent him a text saying, “General Anatole. Your army is in our clutches. Honor your agreement and we will be lenient and grant their freedom. Should you choose not to pay the reparations owed to us, we will slaughter them to a man. You have until nightfall, three days hence to meet our ultimatum. For good or for ill."
He paid us the next day and we gave him back his stuff.
62. Bringing Your Work Life Home
This was circa 2001. It was my first apartment and I wasn't a good judge of roommate character back then. I paid a high price for my naivety. I was working at a welding shop and had befriended this big Mexican guy after driving him home from work. It was enough to start hanging out at his house after work for a few drinks and his mom's excellent biscuits and gravy she'd make for us.
Naturally, we thought it would be a good idea to become roommates at my place, to cut down on our expenses. Little did I know, he was one of those drinkers who blacks out and destroys everything. Each day after work it was him with a case of drinks and getting into arguments with kids in Yahoo chat rooms over a mic until he would pass out. It escalated from quickly.
He quit going to work completely, and I'd just come home with him passed out, vomit all over the floors, pee in the corners, half-eaten pizza face down on the couch, the works. I started telling him that he needed to leave, but he wasn't hearing it. Eventually, he got thrown behind bars for something or other. I was free. For a while.
He got out and I woke to a banging on my door one morning. I didn't let him in. His mom had collected all his things when he got locked up, so I’m not even sure why he was trying to return when he knew I didn’t want him there anymore. Fast forward to recently. I'd been overseas for six years and moved back to my home state afterward.
I recently stumbled across his Facebook page after not having seen or heard from him in 13 years. And there’s a happy ending at last. We talked. He's doing really well now and is training to be an addiction counselor to help others in situations similar to the one he was in way back then. And I'm very happy for him.
63. This One Is Legitimately Terrifying…
About two years ago, I used to live with two girls named Susan and Geo. Geo was dating Susan's brother Chris, who was a gigantic creep and Susan knew it, but Geo was hooked. He was physically and verbally bad towards Geo, and oftentimes I would wake up to them screaming at one another. Unfortunately, it would always end with Chris hitting her, and Geo crying as he stormed away from our house.
This never made much sense to me, because Chris was a skinny little runt and Geo was a pretty big, tough girl who could easily knock the daylights out of him. One day, I woke up to the two of them fighting over something in a jar, which Geo had in her hand. Chris decided to squeeze her hand until the jar broke, cutting her hand pretty badly on the glass.
Blood was everywhere. She dropped the jar. He shoved her over, called her awful names, and proceeded to pick up the largest chunk of the broken jar and throw it as hard as he could at her face, cutting her face pretty badly as well. He left, and we comforted Geo. Both Susan and I told her that he was no longer allowed in our house, for everyone's safety. This didn't go how we planned at all.
Geo flipped out about this and left as well. The next few weeks were horrific. Chris continued to come over, insulting and threatening both Susan and myself. There were many times when we all got into fist fights. Geo never threw punches, but it always ended in one of us kicking Chris' butt, and Geo would rush to his aid and talk all kinds of smack to Susan and me, threatening us as well.
Geo and Chris ate ALL of our food when we were gone and left snarky notes to us, taunting us about it. They broke into my room several times and trashed it, and "tried" to swipe my movies and video games. I say “try” because they would just take them and put them in her room. We only had a few weeks of the lease left, so I just put locks on everything and decided to stick it out.
By the end of it, Geo had stopped paying her bills and owed Susan and me over $600 due to damages, bills, food, last month's rent, etc. When Susan and I moved out, we just took all of their movies and video games and called it even. Susan still had to deal with Chris at times, seeing as how they were related, so she knew all the disturbing things he was up to.
Their mom told Susan that, after we had moved out together, Chris was asking her for our new address so he could slash our tires, wreck our cars, and break into our house to do who knows what. Susan and I eventually had a falling out, and Geo and her have since made amends. I still can't stand any of them now and am so glad to finally have a normal roommate.
64. Leaving A Trail
My first roommate in college was a nightmare. She'd party all night and then wake me up at 4:00 in the morning when she got in to see if she got any phone calls. This was before cell phones were common, but our college phones had voicemail. It was a dry campus, and she would drink all the time in the dorm and leave bottles and cans all over the place.
I drank too, but I at least had the common sense to hide the bottles after! She'd come back from sorority parties gone out of her mind and expected me to take care of her. It came to a head when I went back home for the weekend, and when I got back she had put a leaky McDonald's cup on my brand new laptop. Who knows how long it had been sitting there.
I told her I was going down to the student life office to see about getting my own dorm. It was worth the extra fee to live alone. Luckily, there was an empty dorm on the same floor I had been on and I was able to move there. I went back to my dorm to start packing up, and the jerk had already moved all of my stuff out into the hallway.
I hadn't even told her I was able to move out yet. Turns out she wasn't cut out for college, anyway. She dropped out after one year.
65. Smoke And Mirrors
One of my housemates caught my bad roommate smoking in the house. When confronted about this behavior, this bad roommate decided to lie and claim I told him it was okay. Obviously, I called him out for lying when I heard about this. I can't believe his reply. I saved the text exchange to illustrate just how ridiculous this situation truly was.
The exchange went like this. Me: “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell people I said it was okay to smoke in the house when I never said that”. Him: “You said it in the group message a long time ago. I asked if cigs inside was cool and you said no, but only in your room”. Me: “Find the text and I’ll take it back”. Him: “I can’t because I delete my messages every so often to conserve storage”.
Me: “Darn, that sucks. Don’t smoke in the house”. And that was the end of that!
66. Too Many Legs
We had a horrible centipede problem at one of the apartments I lived in that came about suddenly. They were in every single room, including the bathroom and my bedroom. I would wake up to find multiple right above my head or next to the light switch in the bathroom. My fear of centipedes was already one step away from being a full-blown phobia before this.
Neither of my roommates cared even in the slightest bit because they were both disgusting human beings; so one day I told the one whose father was the landlord that I was calling an exterminator and billing her dad if she didn't take care of the issue by the end of the day. Within an hour I got a call from her saying that she found the centipedes' food source.
There was a build-up of maggots in, around, and under her cats' food dishes. It was truly like a horror movie. She took just as bad a care of her cats as she did herself, and this was the result.
67. No Way Out
I had a randomly-assigned roommate in my college dorm. The RA put cute little artsy name tags on the front of everyone's door before we moved in, so we would know which room we were in and we could learn other students’ names. I moved in the week before classes started. A few days later, at 2:00 in the morning, I hear a bunch of banging and the door suddenly swings open.
A girl yells "What the heck is this ugly garbage on my door, and why did you leave it up"? as she crumpled up the name tag. Three guys filed in behind her. They all lived on our floor for the first week because they had driven with her from her hometown 10 hours away and had no means of getting back. It was a bad start to a bad relationship.
68. The Paper Girl
I had a roommate who absolutely refused to buy toilet paper. After weeks of her swiping ours, the other three of us started hiding it so that she would be forced to buy her own. We could have never predicted the way it backfired. Instead, she started taking heaps of napkins from restaurants and swiping rolls of our paper towels to use in the bathroom.
One night, we all went out to dinner, came home, and found the entire basement flooded because she had plugged up the toilet with who knows how thick paper and other stuff that shouldn't ever be flushed. That, and she would keep piles of old food laying around her room…and also never did laundry. She was literally the most disgusting human being that I've ever met.
69. Love Letters
I had a roommate who would (attempt to) leave unjustified scathing, passive-aggressive notes for just about everyone: our apartment neighbors, cars parked outside, and even our landlady. The kind of notes with overly-polite language, underlines, and randomly capitalized words. Always written in red marker. Always rude enough to get the daylights beaten out of her.
Always signed from BOTH of us, even though I had nothing to do with it. I spent that year following her around and removing the notes as quickly and quietly as possible.
70. A Lack Of Life Skills
My roommate was a total slob, and I am not saying this lightly. He would eat dinner on the couch, then put his dirty plate (with scraps and bones) under the couch. I would have to check constantly for that or else we would get some foul smells. One time he had pancakes and put the plate under the chair, and due to the large amount of leftover maple syrup, we got ants.
He would just trash everything and made the house disgusting. Finally, I had enough and I stopped cleaning up after him. I just let the house fall into total ruin. But that's not the part that made me furious. He then started staying at his parents' house, telling them and our friends that I was a slob and he couldn't handle it anymore. I wanted to scream when I found out!
He eventually moved out and lives with his girlfriend now. She complains constantly that he is a slob.
71. Not Such A Small Thing
He woke up every day to Blink-182’s “All The Small Things” at 4 a.m. for swim practice. Except he’d keep hitting snooze, so I’d hear it 2-5 times in a row. And he’d be late, so his teammates would start banging on the door. It literally drove me half-mad. I was a double science major working multiple jobs. I went to bed at two most nights, after coming home from the library. So no sleep for me I guess.
On the other hand, I would have to wake up early on weekends for my landscaping job and he would whine and moan about it. He also never left the room, even when I would bring a girl back, and would just sit there and watch Netflix on my TV. I can’t smell, so it didn’t bother me, but all my guests said it reeked in there since he never showered.
Second semester I moved out and lived in the chemistry library. Instant improvement. Never had a roommate since.
72. Never Live With Your Friends
Before my husband and I were married with kids, we had a terrible roommate. He was an addict and would do weird things like eat a whole package of hotdog buns and throw the wrapping back in the pantry. The one time he did dishes he got extremely mad the rest of the day. He tried to come between my husband and I as a couple many, many times. But one thing he did was more messed up than anything else.
He proudly claimed that once my husband had passed out and that he, said roommate, had his way with him. It’s not true, but he said it for years anyway, despite that actively being a punishable offense. He also tormented our cat and then wondered why the cat didn't like him. He was a bad roommate but even more, a bad friend.
73. Unsolved Mystery
He was technically my boyfriend. But he was staying with me so he was also my roommate. Anyway, I caught him cheating and promptly kicked him out. Since he didn't have key to the apartment, I left my place unlocked while I was at work so that he could get his things out. Which he didn't do. I ended up dropping his stuff off at his mom's house.
What he did do instead was take my pet snake and I don't know what he did to him. I don’t know if he just let him go outside or if he took him with him. I know he's not in my apartment. It's really not that big of a place and I tore it up every single day for nearly a month straight trying to find him. He had escaped once before when his old enclosure broke but I found him within a few hours.
The enclosure I had for him after that incident was escape-proof. And there's absolutely no trace of him anywhere. I have two cats, both of which would have torn him to pieces had they had the chance. There's no sign of anything. He was just gone. The sad thing is, I didn't notice until a few days after the fact. If you know snakes, they spend a lot of time hiding out of sight.
So, during those few days between me booting him out and me realizing he was gone, I figured my snake was curled up inside his little cave. But then feeding day came, and I flipped up the cave and saw he wasn't there. I frantically searched the whole enclosure, and he was nowhere.
74. A Series Of Terrible Actions
She wrecked my collection of Japanese kitchen utensils. She ate the lunch I had prepared for my child for school. She prepped an entire Costco pack of chicken cutlets that I had purchased and claimed them all as hers. She left a bottle of hair dye on the floor after dying her hair and ruined the hardwood and carpet. The list goes on and on.
She was a classmate of my wife’s who was down on her luck, so we let her rent a room off of us for a few months to help her out. At the end of 4 months, she packed her stuff up and said that she didn’t think she owed us anything as she is a single woman and we were a family of three. She did not pay a single bill or for any groceries for the entire 4 months she stayed at our place.
75. There Was An Easier Way
I shared a single-bedroom flat with a junior when I was a senior in college. Her sister moved to town and was staying in a rented room a floor down (in the same building). She wanted her sister to move in with her and instead of asking me to take the rented room (the flat has a balcony, kitchen, and stove), she made a wild decision.
She told the building landlord I was taking her things and got me kicked out of the flat. Mind you, I had a fractured left toe and a cast up to my shin at the time, but that didn't stop them from throwing a full tantrum until the landlord convinced me he would help me move and I could still pay the same rent for the room that I was paying for the flat.
The same weekend, three of my friends from college helped me pack up my 4 years’ worth of stuff and helped me hobble back and forth, up and down a floor (there wasn't an elevator, only stairs) to move into my new room while my (ex) roommate and her sister sat on her bed and scrolled through Instagram.
76. One Can Only Put Up With So Much
Coming home from a long day of school and work, I found him regularly using one of my curtains as a cloak and swinging around a sword. That wasn't enough to put me off, despite him bringing the sword around town with him all the time. What really got bad is that his first 3 months of rent were paid upfront by his church.
The month 4 payment never happened, month 5 he finally got a job, and month 6 payments were still not made and my refrigerator was filled up with all of the excess baked potatoes from the local steak house where he now worked. The church that paid for his initial rent wasn't responding and I was getting tired of paying his share.
I was able to get him out a couple of weeks later, albeit I was now super behind on my own rent and ended up needing to forfeit the rest of my lease and live out of my car for a while.
77. Stop Following Me!
One of my roommates in college insulted me daily, threw stuff at me from across the room, wrote mildly insulting music regarding me, and sang it poorly. However, what was even worse was his borderline stalking behavior. If I went to the library, so did he. If I left to go somewhere, he would hunt me down. He was good at figuring out where I was going.
He eventually stopped when he landed a girlfriend. I was about a day away from going to the room advisory office and demanding one of us be moved to a different room.
78. Notification Nightmare
Back during my dorm days, I had an apartment-style setup, so we all had our own rooms. One of my roommates had large speakers that he liked to use every morning at 3:00 am. However, he didn't use them for music. Instead, he used them for the notification sound Facebook gives you when you get a message, so there was a constant popping sound.
He also didn't like to do dishes or clean his room, so he didn't. We all had our own rooms, so it didn't seem like a huge deal, and it wasn't at first. However, his room soon started to smell really bad, as if something had expired in there.
79. An All-Around Dirtbag
I had a roommate that ate all of my groceries ($60 worth) the day I got them while I was gone. He made a very nice meal for his girlfriend, and her friend as well, and claimed he didn’t have the cash and didn’t want to go to the store. He also drank all my beer, didn’t clean or do the dishes, and slept with my girlfriend when I was out of town.
80. Overwhelming Jealousy
This one roommate made increasingly odd comments and pointed remarks whenever I would bring my boyfriend over (long-distance) about how we needed to be more “discrete” about affection and intimate habits. He texted me he “didn’t want to hear things” when we were just doing homework in my room and laughing. It was unsettling.
He also played heavy metal music loud enough to shake the walls whenever he thought we were messing around. As well, he used to complain about being 24 and but he had never had a girlfriend to us unprompted. He was constantly being self-deprecating until he got sympathy. So, I asked him not to talk to me about anything but roommate matters.
81. No Worries, Bro
My roommate up and left to travel before rent was due. He left us a silly note saying, “Hey guys, great times with you, sorry to leave you like this but just caught a last-minute flight to Cambodia. Been a pleasure!” Yeah pleasures were not reciprocated since we had to clean up after him and cover his rent and utilities.
82. That’s One Way Of Doing It
This couple I'm friends with used to live in a two-bedroom apartment and rent out the bedroom just to supplement costs. One of their roommates used to use dishes, wrap his dirty clothes around the used dishes and stash them in his dresser instead of just cleaning them.
83. Jumping To Conclusions
One of my roommates called an ambulance on our other roommate in the middle of the night because she thought our roommate was harming herself. Her evidence was outrageous. She thought so because there were red spots on a towel. What actually happened: our roommate had dyed her hair red. Which she had shown off to everyone the day before.
The roommate didn't even tell anyone what she found. She just assumed the worst and called the authorities.
84. Can You Feel The Annoyance Tonight?
I had a roommate in college who could only fall asleep if he watched Disney movies at night. In his room. On full blast. With no way for me to turn them off at any point. He would always fall asleep partway through the movie, and the movie would continue playing for hours. So I had to listen to them every night for hours while trying to sleep.
And I now hate The Lion King with the passion of a thousand burning suns.
85. The Cat’s Roommate
In my early 20s I fell on hard times and was living in a place where I couldn't have my cat temporarily. A childhood friend, Jeremy, who had lived with me and said cat previously, offered to take him for two weeks while I found us a new home. After work every night I'd go over to see him. A week in, I went over and the friend was nowhere to be found, but I found Anubis hiding under his bed.
His mouth was split up to his nose. I entirely lost it. I rushed him to his vet, after-hours costing a fortune, where they stitched his face and kept him for a few days because essentially he had a bad concussion. I drove back to the friend’s house. He told me he had no idea what happened. As I was leaving, his roommate pulled me aside.
He said that Jeremy had gotten tipsy and punched Anubis. I will not go into detail, but I'm 5'0 of pure rage and earned a reputation that night I've yet to live down. I ended up living in my car for a few weeks with Anubis, but he lived another 12 years, comfortable, and spoiled absolutely rotten—with a quirky smile.
86. A Drastic Overreaction
He would always leave his dog for too long and she would relieve herself on the floor. It was an old dog and I’m sure at one point it wasn't an issue. The problem was this guy didn't even try to do anything to fix the issue. I'd get home from work every day and walk into a house that punched me in the face with a smell when I opened the door.
We talked to him about it over and over again and he'd just shrug it off. Finally, we got him to do something—but it made me regret ever saying anything. He just put the dog down. We just wanted him to maybe come walk her while on break at work. His job was five minutes down the road. I can still feel the tension in the room when we found out she was gone.
87. Collateral Damage
I was renting a room from a guy who was separated from his wife (it turned out I knew her, but I didn't know that she was married to him). He was also renting a room to a really annoying woman. They got into a huge fight, and he turned off the power, trying to force her out of the house, so naturally, she called the authorities on him.
They told him he had to go through specific processes to get rid of her. So she was still there—then guess what happened? His wife came back. They got into a huge fight, and he smashed the TV onto the floor, shattering it. I moved out as soon as I could. While I was living there, I actually had my mail go to the post office, because I didn't trust either of them to not go through my mail.
88. Agreed To One, Got Six
In the early years of my marriage, before we had kids, my wife and I had two extra bedrooms. I had a co-worker going through a divorce and offered him a room temporarily. After a couple of weeks and things going pretty well, especially since he was working a lot, we offered he could stay longer-term and start paying rent and bills. Huge. Mistake.
After about 2 months he gets a new girlfriend, not that big of a deal, she is around mostly on a weekend here or there. Fast forward another month or so and he has her bring her 4 kids to stay the entire weekend with us! There were suddenly a bunch of children that we don't even know taking over our place and we felt like prisoners in our own bedroom.
89. They’re Rules To Follow, Not Goals To Achieve
One roommate I was friends with before we moved in, I told her that I have 3 rules: don’t eat my food, clean up after yourself, don’t invite random people over. I know I sound like a lot of fun, but I furnished the entire house, and it was my first real place. Anyways, she always ate my food, because she said it just looked so good.
Also, I had brand new furniture mixed with my grandparents' antiques. I would often sit on the couch and find dirty dishes in between the cushions; it was annoying but at first, I shrugged it off. Then she got hammered and puked on my antique coffee table and left it there. That was my final straw.
90. Shower Snacks
There were three of us and one shower, which wasn’t terrible....until he’d saved his chewed gum by sticking to the wall in the shower and forgetting to put it back in his mouth when he was done. That was only one of the many things that drove me and our other roommate mad.
91. A Confounding Request
My then-boyfriend and I lived with another couple many years ago. They were horrible to live with for so many reasons. But their final "request" takes the cake. Upon moving out because we couldn't take it anymore, they asked for one more sit-down meeting. They said, "We'd like to take Gatsby." To which we said, "What? Gatsby is OUR cat, we owned him before we lived with you!"
They said, "Yes, we know, we'd like to have him." We replied, "Absolutely not. He's OUR cat." They said, "You don't have to answer right away." Gatsby was the first thing we moved to the new apartment.
92. Party Poopers
I used to work the afternoon shift, which meant that I'd usually get home around 1:00 am. My new roommate had just moved in a few days prior. One night I got home and walked in the door to find 50 odd people in our tiny apartment—and it was pure chaos. There were people punching holes in the walls, my TV was smashed on the ground, and a few people drinking on my couch.
The place was completely trashed. Not really knowing how to handle the situation, I went into my room to try to think. When I opened the door, I got hit with a stink that would outlast anything. My new roommate was getting busy with another guy in some rather messy way on my bed. There was poop all over my bed. So I went outside, called law enforcement, and watched the show unfold.
93. Keeping Track
My college roommate freshman year secretly kept an Excel spreadsheet monitoring my study habits. She would count the number of hours she saw my nose in a book. Later in the semester, after I had returned from a party, she attempted an intervention. I couldn't believe what I was hearing and was thoroughly creeped out.
She said, “I'm concerned about your study habits," and brought out a spreadsheet from the entire semester, comparing my total number of hours studying to the number of hours that were "recommended by my advisor” for the number of credits I was taking.
94. Divided Lines
She was a nightmare. Her side of the room looked like a catastrophe, while my side was clearly divisible by this line of cleanliness beginning halfway between the beds. I was trying to get some alone time when she decided to watch a movie with four of her friends on her bed. Two of whom were proudly emitting the most noxious gas, and she had the volume on her bass-heavy speakers so loud that a neighbor came round to complain.
She also drank constantly and claimed a guy friend violated her when he hadn’t. She put the house through interviews and law enforcement went through my bedroom to collect evidence, only to break down and admit that it didn't happen. She vanished for four days, then moved out without a word. Good riddance.
95. Breakup Breakdown
I made the mistake of signing a lease with two good friends that were dating at the time. I had gotten to know them my first year of college and they were both pretty good people. They ended up breaking up before we even moved in. I had to live through nine months of fighting, doors being broken, and holes being punched in the walls.
The neighbors filed noise complaints often, and law enforcement was called three times. To top it off, they didn’t pay their share of the last electric bill, and I ended up losing my security deposit of $250. But guess what? The joke's on me...They’re married now.
96. It’s Payback Time
My roommate in college had only child syndrome and taped a piece of paper over her clock because she didn’t want to “share it with me.” Never mind that she couldn’t see the clock herself, but she would rather no one see the clock than share the clock with my eyes. So, from then on, I would take one sock from a set once a week.
It was slow enough that she didn’t realize it was me sabotaging her socks, but fast enough for her to be really annoyed and wondering that the heck was happening to all of her matching socks.
97. Room Service
For a full year, my college roommate secretly slept with my boyfriend while I was at class. I routinely took more than a full course load and was in math and science classes or study groups every morning. One day, I walked in to see a horrifying sight. They were just fully in the act after I came back early from a cancelled class.
I moved out. I was more angry at her than heartbroken. I also lost most of my friends through the breakup, and they stuck together for a good while. Fast forward five years later. Those two throw a crazy expensive engagement party at the guy's parents' beach house, which was attended by some still-mutual friends who told me everything.
At the party, she caught him sleeping with one of the waitresses from the catering company in a bathroom. They still got married. I feel a little bad for her despite the karma balance. She feels like she can't do better than being with a cheater.
98. Hitting Back Where It Hurts
I had two freshman roommates that kept eating all of my food. Within the first week, when classes hadn't even started yet, I went to make myself a peanut butter sandwich. My first peanut butter sandwich in this dorm. A special moment. But when I arrived at the kitchen to prepare it, the entire tub of peanut butter was completely gone. They also left the empty tub in my cupboard.
Anyway, I flipped the heck out, because who on earth eats a whole tub of someone else’s peanut butter by themselves, without even bothering to introduce themselves first? These girls would literally scarf down all my food, yet complain if they thought anyone was touching theirs. So I came up with a plan for revenge.
I started buying really fattening food, lots of chips and doughnuts, etc. I was trying to teach them self-restraint, but these idiots would go through these bags and boxes within two days. So I kept buying doughnuts. And then, one day, they started complaining about how they couldn't fit into their jeans anymore. Success.
I also put laxatives in my peanut butter. That’ll teach ‘em to mess with me and my food!
99. Leaving A Memorable Impression
I once walked in on my roommate getting spanked on his bare butt by his parents. Yes folks, you read that right. I walked in on my college-age roommate getting spanked on his bare butt by his parents for not having his stuff packed up on move-out day. Here’s the full story: It was move-out day and my roommate was working on a paper last minute.
I was packing my stuff. His parents walked in and were absolutely enraged that he wasn't packed yet. They immediately started scolding him while I was still in the room, but thankfully I had a final to go to and figured I'd dodge the storm. I said my goodbyes, assuming they'd be gone by the time I got back from my two-hour final and went on my way.
As it happened, my final only took 20 minutes, so I got back much sooner than they'd have expected. I opened the door and saw my roommate bent over his bed with his behind showing, just as his mom wound up for a spank. I slammed the door shut as quickly as I possibly could. I went over to a friend's dorm and helped her pack for a while until I felt safe enough to return. I never brought it up to him after that.
100. A Different Type Of Clogging
My roommate had a room with her own bathroom. She would constantly clog her toilet by using napkins as toilet paper since she didn't want to buy toilet paper. After she clogged it, she would resort to using everyone else's bathroom in the hallway with no intention of fixing her own. One day she clogged the toilet my other roommates and I used as well.
While she was out, my roommates and I went into her room to see what was up with her bathroom. When I opened the door, my jaw dropped. There was month-old poop still in the toilet, along with piles of clothes all over the floor. She also had two dogs that she had neglected and she always tried to take our community recycling so she could keep the money for herself.
101. You Used To Have A Friend In Me
My crazy ex-roommate and I got along so horribly during the time when we were living together. She'd let strangers sleep in my bed when I wasn't there, swipe my makeup, and whine that I wasn't home often enough, even though I still fully paid my half of rent and bills while working full time and going to school. Plus, It was none of her business where I chose to spend my own personal time.
It got so horrible between us that I very reasonably asked if I could find someone to replace me in the lease, with the landlord's permission. We had been best friends before living together, and so when she said that she "didn't want to live with anyone else but me", and that she "couldn't afford the place without me" I trusted her and didn't press the issue.
I decided to just grit my teeth and make it through the remaining six months of the one year lease. This was a huge mistake. A month or so had passed, and I suddenly get a phone call from her, saying that her mom "got us out of the lease" (umm, excuse me?) and that I have to have my stuff out of the apartment by that coming Monday.
It was Friday night, and I had to work full shifts on Saturday and Sunday. So, I cashed in my favors with all my friends and got my stuff out somehow in record time. The best part? When I was getting my stuff out, I found a receipt (right on the counter, mind you) stating that she had spent over $1,000 on EYELASH IMPLANTS. Yes, I kid you not.
The whole time she'd been telling me she couldn't afford to float the place on her own, she was spending money on freaking eyelashes! The amount she had spent was more than enough to have paid our rent for a full three months, seeing as it was a cheap rathole. It's now four, nearly five years later, and we still haven't spoken again a single time after I called her out on the eyelash thing.
This, after having been best friends for years before living together. Living together taught me that she was a rude, vain thief who let strangers sleep in my bed, lied, and tricked me into spending a bunch of my own time and money on trying to help her when she was only trying to take advantage of me all along. I should have broken that lease after the first serious infraction on her part and never let it get to this point.
Friends, take a warning from me. Don’t overlook things you know are wrong. It won’t pay off in the long term.
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