Living with roommates is always a dice roll—but when you get a roommate this bad, the odds have truly been stacked against you. From the loud to the messy to the completely bizarre, these nightmare roommates make even the most uncomfortable living situation seem heavenly.
1. No Lessons Learned
In college, I rented a room in a house owned by a terrible landlord. My roommates were twin brothers with addiction issues, and they were always taking my food. Eventually I got so frustrated that I decided to get a little petty revenge.
I baked a pan of brownies and mixed in a full pack of Ex-Lax, thinking they’d each grab one or two, have a rough afternoon, and I could warn them not to touch my stuff again. That is not what happened.
One of the brothers ate the entire pan. That night I heard him getting sick, then dry heaving, over and over for quite a while. The next day he told me he had food poisoning and that it had hit him from both directions.
I never told him.
2. Roger That
During my last two years of school, I lived in a house with five guys. One of them was a last-minute addition I strongly argued against. I even offered to cover his rent until we found someone else. But I got outvoted, and that’s how we ended up with this guy, who I’ll call Roger because he looked like Roger from American Dad.
Roger somehow managed to stomp everywhere he went. Multiple visitors commented on how loud he was. He also wore his winter boots around the house. Roger complained that our Wi-Fi was too slow because he wanted to play Xbox Live while streaming Netflix, so he ran an ethernet cable from the kitchen, through the front hall, and up the stairs to his bedroom.
He barely taped it down, and it drooped in several places, making the house look like some broken-down spaceship. He proudly announced how smart he was and how much faster his internet was now, completely unaware that someone had already cut the cable.
Roger also had a habit of falling asleep with his music or TV blasting through giant speakers, and he’d only turn it down if his favorite roommate asked him to. The rest of us would get brushed off, but if Juan asked, Roger suddenly became apologetic.
One night during exams, it finally boiled over. He fell asleep with loud music playing and woke up the whole house. All of us, including Juan, knocked on his door for almost an hour trying to get him to turn it down. When he wouldn’t answer, we decided to force the lock and do it ourselves. That’s when we found out what had really been going on.
He was completely asleep, wearing noise-canceling headphones. All those times he’d fallen asleep with music or TV blaring, he wasn’t listening to any of it. He was just making the rest of us suffer.
3. But An Elephant Never Forgets?
Right after college, I lived in a house that rented rooms individually. Most of the people were fine, but every now and then you got a truly awful roommate. Then there was Doug. He was around our age, unemployed, and such a heavy drinker that he blacked out almost every day.
He was also a complete slob. He’d leave huge messes in the kitchen, then head back to his room to keep drinking and blast loud music. The next morning, he wouldn’t remember any of it, see the mess, and complain about how disgusting everyone else was.
And of course, whenever one of us pointed out that it was his mess, he’d insist it couldn’t be because he didn’t remember making it. Right, Doug. I’m sure the bottle you finished the night before had nothing to do with your memory loss.
Eventually he got kicked out because his parents stopped paying his rent. I honestly hope he got help, because the amount he drank every day was shocking.
4. Shifting The Blame
During my senior year of boarding school, my roommate stole my Adderall prescription, the painkillers I got after having my wisdom teeth removed, and a bottle I had hidden in a chest under my bed while I was away for the weekend. She ended up overdosing and then told the school I had given everything to her. The fallout was brutal.
I was suspended, lost my scholarship for the rest of the semester, and almost had my college acceptances taken away. They eventually let me come back on conduct probation so I could finish my final semester. I nearly failed physics because I missed so many labs during the three-week suspension.
My roommate, who was a year younger, basically got a light punishment, a lot of sympathy, and a couple of weeks in an inpatient program. This happened back in 2014, but the last I heard, she had dropped out of college and was living with her parents. She came from a very wealthy family, constantly stole things, and lied all the time, so I never felt especially sorry for her.
5. A Drop In The Bucket
In college, I lived in a suite-style apartment with four bedrooms, private bathrooms, a shared living room, and a shared kitchen. One room was mine, one belonged to my friend, and the other two were assigned to random roommates. After a few months, the apartment started to smell worse and worse, and we had no idea why.
We deep-cleaned everything and used bleach all over the place, but we still couldn’t find the source. The only thing we hadn’t done was search the two random roommates’ rooms. One weekend, one of them went home, and my friend and I went into his room and found something deeply unsettling.
He had been using a plastic bin as a toilet and storing it under his bed. After a long moment of disbelief, we got rid of it and confronted him. Naturally, he denied everything and claimed he had never done anything like that. But after that, the smell disappeared and never came back. The wildest part? He’s a police officer now.
6. Stuck In The Middle With You
I was dating a woman during Covid. Things ended badly, so I broke up with her, but afterward she started talking to my roommate to get information about me. She convinced him that I had treated her badly, and the two of them worked together to report me on all my dating apps. I ended up getting banned from almost every one of them.
When I found out, my roommate filed a false restraining order and claimed that I had cornered him, shoved him, and other things that never happened. I had to hire a lawyer, which cost me $5,000. When we finally went to court, I had so much evidence that he was lying that he decided not to continue with the case, and we ended up signing a mutual settlement agreement.
I lost my TSA PreCheck and Global Entry, and it took eight months of going back and forth with TSA to get them restored. The worst part was that I still had to live with him for another five months because of money, and because of the agreement, I couldn’t even talk to him about any of it.
7. No Deal Is Worth Living Like That
I moved into a house with three friends. One was my best friend, and he was great. The other two were his girlfriend and another mutual friend. We felt incredibly lucky because we were renting a three-bedroom house for only $500 a month.
My friend grew up poor, and I had been homeless for a year, so we both understood how fortunate we were. We had worked hard for everything we had. The problem was that the two women we lived with had been spoiled their whole lives, and it completely ruined the living situation. They made everything harder for us.
They did everything from inviting strangers over to party on weeknights without asking, to skipping rent entirely. They would eat our food and never buy groceries. They would set the AC to 63 degrees during 100-degree heat waves, which made the utility bill higher than the rent.
They also broke things around the house and constantly started arguments. At one point, one of them moved two friends into her bedroom for six months without even asking us. I was working an extremely demanding job then. I got up at 4 a.m. every day, left for work by 5, and often didn’t get home until anywhere from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. It was exhausting.
That made it even worse when they kept inviting anywhere from ten to thirty people over to party at the house every single night. One time I came home at 1 a.m. and found a stranger passed out in my bed, covered in vomit. They also played music so loudly every night that my bedroom wall would shake.
The girls didn’t care because they were constantly calling out of work and eventually quit their jobs altogether. On top of that, many of these strangers were teenagers drinking at our house and then driving home. Eventually, everything built up to one especially awful night.
One night, my friend’s girlfriend got heavily drunk and started stabbing the bedroom door. It wasn’t even our property. My friend tried to stop her, and she hit him three times. I had to pin her against the wall until some random person helped take her away. It was chaos.
I had to beg the landlord not to evict us, and I replaced the door myself. Another time, someone ripped the shower head off during one of their parties. The threads were damaged, so I had to replace the whole pipe. They also emptied our fridge and went through a month’s worth of groceries I had just bought in one night. That happened more than once.
Eventually I bought a mini fridge and a lock for my bedroom door. That worked for a while, until someone fell through my door in the middle of the night while I was sleeping. One of the girls’ friends disliked me because I was always the one telling people to leave.
My roommate was small and would always promise she’d stop doing this kind of thing, then do it again the very next day. She eventually became close with a larger woman who constantly talked badly about me in my own house. She would openly disrespect me in front of everyone and encourage people to keep partying.
She didn’t even live there. She just showed up to argue and get drunk. Then came the worst party of all. There were so many people in the house that one of the floor joists actually broke. My friend and I had to repair it ourselves so we wouldn’t all get kicked out.
It cost us a lot of money and took up an entire weekend that I desperately needed to recover. And that was just one item on a very long list of repairs. I fixed broken lights, shattered windows, holes punched in drywall, damaged toilets, ruts in the yard from people parking on it, ripped-out outlets, scratched paint, a mailbox that got hit by an impaired teenager, burned countertops, burst pipes from people crawling under the sink—I could keep going.
I spent thousands of dollars on that house just to avoid losing the only place I could afford to live. Then one day I came home from work to a total disaster. Half the drywall in the living room had been destroyed. The hardwood floor was so badly scratched that a huge section would need to be replaced.
Curtain rods had been torn off two windows. The kitchen sink had been ripped loose and had leaked into the floor all night. The refrigerator had been tipped over completely. That was also the night the table I had bought was snapped in half.
There was vomit all over the house. People were passed out on the floor everywhere. My bookshelf had been knocked over, and I later heard that half my books had been burned in the yard. That was the point where I gave up. I recorded everything, met with the landlord, and showed her the video later that same day. She was furious, and understandably so.
I admitted that I had been quietly repairing damage for almost a year to keep her from finding out. Surprisingly, she wasn’t angry at me. She was just relieved that at least one tenant was finally being honest. I sent her all the video evidence and told her everyone was still there when I left, passed out on the floor.
I explained that I had found somewhere else to stay and needed to move out. She thanked me, and I left. I packed everything that night and moved out without saying a word. Around the same time I was talking to the landlord, my roommate was texting me saying she needed help cleaning and repairing the house.
I ignored her and moved my things to my girlfriend’s place. Later she messaged me again to say that the authorities had shown up. She ended up in court over everything and was evicted. She had to pay the last month’s rent, the utilities, and all the damage costs on her own. I haven’t spoken to her since.
8. They Can Dish It Out But They Can’t Wash It
Early in college, I lived in a house with three roommates. In the eight months I was there, they washed dishes maybe three or four times. Instead of actually cleaning them, they would just leave them soaking for days or even weeks, sometimes in bleach water.
It got so bad that they would sometimes buy new pots and pans instead of washing the ones they already had. I eventually limited myself to one cup, one plate, one bowl, and so on, and kept all of it in my room so I wouldn’t add to the mess. I even kept my groceries in a mini fridge in my room.
A few times, I spent a couple of hours cleaning all of their dishes just so I’d have enough sink space to wash my own. Part of me also hoped that if they had a clean kitchen again, maybe they would keep it that way. Of course, that never happened.
Eventually I got so frustrated that I started washing my dishes in the bathroom. Not long after that, I moved out and got my own place. I’m still friends with most of them nearly 25 years later, but I never lived with roommates again.
9. When 3 Become 2
At one point I lived with two close friends. One was mostly fine, except that he would cook, leave his dirty dishes sitting there, and then complain that there were no clean dishes left because we had stopped cleaning up after him. The other is someone I’m no longer friends with, and living together is exactly why.
He worked as a bartender and loved to party. He regularly brought groups of people back to our place after work, often around 3 a.m. One time, I had to be up at 6 a.m. for work, and he came back with a bunch of drunk coworkers who started playing Rock Band at 3:30 in the morning. Then they were offended when I told them to leave.
Because he partied so much, he also slept late all the time. He had an alarm clock that would keep going until he turned it off, and you could hear it through the whole apartment. Somehow it never woke him up, so it would ring for 30 minutes straight.
The moment you opened his bedroom door, though, he would wake up and say, “Oh, sorry,” and shut it off. This happened almost every day. I would pound on the wall and yell for him to turn it off, but he wouldn’t unless someone physically went into his room.
Then he would get annoyed if you did go in and shut it off. Even though he worked nights, for some reason he had it set for early mornings. Eventually our lease was about to end, and we all agreed to renew it. We needed all three of us to afford the place. We kept asking him if he was definitely signing again, and every time he said yes.
On the day we had to renew, I went to work, and my other roommate did too. We planned to meet later and sign the lease together. A few hours later, while I was at work, my other roommate called me and said, “Hey, I just got home, and all of his stuff is gone.”
I was stunned. He said, “Yeah, everything’s gone, and there’s just a note saying sorry, I’m not renewing.” After that, he completely avoided us for weeks. Eventually we confronted him at his job, and what he told us only made it worse.
He admitted that he had never planned to renew the lease at all. He said he thought the best way to handle it was to wait until we were both gone, move out, and avoid dealing with the confrontation.
This was also the same person who had struggled badly with drinking and substance use, and we had helped him get through that. Then he turned around and blamed us, saying we had enabled him, even though we had done nothing of the sort. He made those choices himself. We don’t speak anymore.
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10. The Smell Test
My worst roommate was in college, junior year, about seven years ago. We shared an on-campus townhouse. One day I found evidence in the shower that he had very poor hygiene. He also had a strong odor that seemed to follow him everywhere. Thankfully, it turned out he had a cyst, and once he went home and had it treated, the smell went away. Unfortunately, there was also one time when I found blood spatter on the wall by the toilet.
One weekend he went to visit his parents and left his bedroom door open. You could smell something awful from down the hall. Another roommate and I looked in to figure out where it was coming from. My roommate said, “Don’t look down.” I looked down anyway, and there was a pair of dirty underwear on the floor. We immediately shut the door. The smell eventually faded.
He also kept a bar of soap in the shower, which would have been fine, except we all knew he wasn’t using it much because it never seemed to get any smaller. He also cooked regularly and never cleaned up afterward. He was pleasant enough to talk to, but not much fun in any other situation. Not fun to play games with, and not fun to study with either.
11. Act Your Age
I was in college and ended up living with random girls because I’d been in a car accident and had to wait until the last minute to find housing. They were all already friends, and one of them was pregnant and moved out when she got close to her due date. Another random girl moved in and was hardly ever around.
She got a kitten even though pets weren’t allowed, and she’d leave it locked in her room all day with no attention, so we’d sneak in and try to spend time with it. Looking back, I really should have reported her. One day, when her boyfriend was visiting, she made bacon and left it unattended.
Grease splattered everywhere, the kitchen caught fire, and she refused to admit it was her fault. It was chaos. We all had to help pay to remodel the kitchen because she wouldn’t take responsibility. She eventually moved out and brought her aunt and cousins with her because she knew she’d messed up.
The other roommates got into it with her family, and then they started physically fighting. I pulled out my phone to record, and one of them came at me like, “Oh, you’re trying to film us?” I ran upstairs and called the authorities. It was unbelievable that grown women in their 30s or 40s were really trying to fight college girls because their niece was lying. It was surreal.
12. I Want To Break Free
I had three bad roommates at once. One was a heavy drinker and a total creep who would often pass out on the kitchen floor and regularly left the stove on. I ended up feeding his poor cat a lot. When he was drunk, I made sure not to be alone with him. Another roommate was unbelievably messy.
He never washed clothes; he just bought new ones. Whenever we ran out of dishes, I’d have to collect piles of moldy plates and cups from his room. He also never cleaned his bong, and it smelled awful. He’d get offended when he offered to smoke with me and I said no because of the dirty bong water.
Worst of all, he left his personal toys in the shower we all shared. When I asked him to be more considerate, his response was unbelievable. He said, “I thought we were open-minded in this house.” I really don’t know how to explain that leaving your toys in a shared shower is just disgusting.
In the middle of all that, my boyfriend, who shared a room with me, developed a video game addiction and started peeing in jugs. I was miserable that whole year, and when I finally saved enough to move out and break up with him, my cat and I went on to enjoy our best single lives.
I do not miss my early twenties.
13. Hope The Third Time Was The Charm
I had one roommate who I found out was selling random pills. Then one day he came home with a huge chemical burn on his arm, and a few days later a mysterious man who barely spoke English showed up at our door holding a giant aloe leaf. We figured he was involved in some real Breaking Bad-type stuff. Nice guy, though.
The roommate I had after that was a woman with a 10-year-old daughter. She was completely unhinged. She told me it would just be the three of us, but as soon as I moved in, her daughter’s father was suddenly living full-time on the couch and in the house all day, every day. Two months later, she told me she was raising the rent because “we’re using more water than three people should be.” Yeah, I wonder why.
I told her I was going to get my own place since rent was basically the same by then. It was pouring rain on moving day, so we had to reschedule. I told her, and she seemed fine with it, but then she suddenly changed her mind and kicked down my door. She started shoving me around, trying to start a fight, and screaming at me.
I gently pushed her back, and she yelled, “Don’t touch me!” I just looked at her and said, “Do you really want to fight me?” She looked confused and said, “Uh... no.” So I made her leave the room and kept packing. When I went downstairs to grab more stuff, she launched into this wild conspiracy theory.
She said I was a dancer sleeping with married men and using illegal substances. When I asked where she got that idea, she said, “I know you’ve been working at the club. You lied to me! I should have you locked up.” The thing is, I actually did work at a club.
I said, “I put my job on the application, along with the club’s phone number.” She said, “...Oh. Well, I didn’t read it.” Right.
14. Overexposed
One of my college roommates used to leave her used menstrual pads face-up on top of the bathroom trash can. For anyone who doesn’t menstruate, this is not something you do for a few reasons: it’s unsanitary, it’s upsetting to look at, and it smells terrible.
Uterine lining plus blood plus air creates a strong, very distinct odor that a lot of people find unpleasant. So usually you roll them up and tuck them farther down in the trash. The rest of us tried to talk to her about it, but she never seemed to understand that we—and our guests—didn’t want to see that while just trying to use the bathroom.
15. Playing Chicken
My college roommate was from another country. He came from a wealthy family and had always had servants, so I had to teach him the basics of taking care of himself, especially cooking. At one point, he was thawing a whole chicken in the sink, and after about a week, I told him to throw it out.
Two weeks later, I started smelling something awful. So I asked him what he had done with the chicken. His answer was so gross I’ll never forget it. He told me he had stored it in the drawer under the oven. It was rotten.
16. TV Wars
I once lived with the cheapest, most self-centered person I’ve ever met. The only TV in our apartment belonged to him, and it was at least 10 years old and barely hanging on. One night before bed, I turned it off because I honestly thought it might be a fire hazard.
A little after midnight, he came home and woke me up, furious, saying I had “broken his TV” because it wouldn’t turn back on. He demanded I pay him back and got really aggressive. I went out to call 9-1-1—this was the early 90s, so no cell phones. When I came back, he had completely changed his attitude and was calm and reasonable.
My mom ended up buying a new TV, but it belonged to me, and I let him use it. One night I was watching Star Trek when he walked in and changed the channel in the middle of the episode. I told him that wasn’t okay and asked him to switch it back. He lost his temper, got aggressive, and we ended up in a physical fight.
I moved out and took the TV with me, so then he had no TV at all. The last I heard, he was threatening to press charges against me. This was in 1993, and nothing ever came of it.
17. Hide & Seek
My freshman-year college roommate stayed up until all hours with her bright desk lamp on. I had 8 a.m. classes my first semester—like most freshmen—so I was usually in bed before midnight, while she often stayed up until 2 or 3.
When I asked her to turn the light off or use one of the many lounges in the building, she said she had just as much right to the room as I did. She also had a boyfriend at least three years older who came every weekend and stayed in our dorm.
She didn’t buy a full meal plan and instead ate more than her share of the food I brought into the room. I’d buy snacks and keep them in a bin on my side, only to come back and find nothing but crumbs left. And if I brought food from home that my mom had made, she would eat straight from the containers instead of serving herself properly.
One time, I opened a container with two pieces of birthday cake from a family party, and both pieces had been half eaten, with the fork still sitting inside. But the strangest part of all? She would hide under her bed.
I had lofted my bed, so I had about five feet of space underneath it, but her bed was at a normal height, only about a foot off the floor, so it wasn’t easy to notice her there. More than once, I came back to the room and went about my routine for 10 minutes before realizing she was under the bed.
I have no idea why she did it, or why she wouldn’t at least say “hey” when I walked in so I knew she was there, but it really unsettled me. She also slammed everything in the room whenever she had to get up before I did. It didn’t happen often, but if my class was canceled or something and she was up first, she made as much noise as possible.
She would always say, “You’re so quiet, I never even hear you get up!” and then be incredibly loud whenever it was my turn to sleep in. Thankfully, she decided she wanted to pay extra for a single room and moved out right before winter break.
18. The Blame Game
My neighbor and her boyfriend, who I had only known for about a month, convinced me to move in with them by saying I could “save money.” I was emotionally drained and in a really vulnerable place at the time. I had gone to them for support and someone to talk to, and they took advantage of that immediately.
They were lazy, self-absorbed people who refused to work. He—we’ll call him Walter—was trying to get disability for a supposed back injury that only seemed to matter when he had court, doctor visits, or housework to avoid.
She—we’ll call her JoLynn—was on SSI for a learning disability, but her check mostly went to movies and entertainment whenever it came in. The person actually paying the bills was Walter’s elderly father, using his social security. They also had a baby, and JoLynn used that child as leverage in every argument.
Any time life got difficult, she would start with, “I have an xx-month-old baby…” She also constantly brought up the possibility of CPS visiting the house, along with plenty of threats toward anyone who might consider calling them.
If the house needed cleaning, that became my job. If there was an unexpected bill, my rent went up—eventually I was paying these people over $400 a month by the time I moved out. Privacy wasn’t allowed, because JoLynn was afraid I’d tell people about their family and somehow get CPS involved.
They came into my room whenever they wanted, day or night, especially when she felt like ranting. I couldn’t sleep well, and I had to be at work by 6 a.m. with a 45-minute commute. The most ridiculous part was that somehow I was the one supposedly treating them badly.
When I finally left, they demanded money for all the food I had eaten, accused me of hurting the baby—which was absolutely false—claimed my family had threatened them, and said I had sworn at her, which also wasn’t true. They even tried to keep my things until I paid them.
I got most of my belongings back only after threatening to come with the authorities, and that was my one win in the whole situation. I left after four months and never looked back. This happened nearly 15 years ago, and I still deal with some lingering PTSD from living with them.
19. Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness
I had one dorm roommate who was too lazy to go to the bathroom to change her pads, so she would do it under the covers while I was in the room. She did this every single time she had her period. She would set alarms for around 5 a.m. and then leave with the alarm still going off. She would also come in around 3 a.m. and loudly eat cereal. And then there was my other roommate.
She was immunocompromised but still went to parties every night when COVID was at its worst. She caught COVID, and as far as I know, she still hasn’t fully recovered. It’s been about a year. She still parties all the time. She also liked to make up stories about what an amazing hacker she was. Later I found out she was just editing HTML in Chrome.
20. Bad Track Record
During my second year of college, I was assigned to a residence with the two messiest people I’ve ever lived with. They weren’t bad people, to be fair, but they had absolutely no regard for basic cleanliness. It was the kind of messiness you only expect to see in a sitcom.
When I opened the fridge to put my food away, the smell nearly knocked me over. I immediately asked to be moved to another unit, and the residence staff told me they weren’t surprised. Apparently, those two already had a reputation in the building.
21. Sympathy Pains
I had a roommate in college who learned she had a tumor in her throat just a few months after going into remission from thyroid cancer. After she told all of us, my other roommate responded in a really disturbing way.
She invented a story claiming she had cancer as a child and had nearly died from it. The whole thing was completely made up.
22. Dinner For One
I lived in a house with two other guys, and I was the only one who cared about keeping things clean and organized. The other two really didn’t.
All the dishes, cups, and silverware would constantly end up in their rooms, with dried chocolate milk stuck inside the glasses. Plates and utensils were covered in week-old food, and everything had to soak in hot water before it could even be washed properly.
Eventually, I bought my own silverware, cups, and plates. I took out only what I needed and packed the rest away. I washed my dishes after every use and kept them in a container in my room, just so I’d always have something clean to use when I wanted to eat.
23. Sleepscrolling
During my first year of university, I was randomly assigned a roommate. We got along for the first three months. One weekend, I went home, and before I left, I did what I usually do: cleaned my side of the room and finished my weekly chores. When I came back, I was stunned. My side of the dorm was a complete mess.
My bed was wrecked, there were crumbs all over my desk, and my storage bins had clearly been gone through. I was confused because I knew I had left everything clean. I asked my roommate if she had people over and if they had messed up my side of the room. She said no. That night, I texted my mom and told her I was pretty sure my roommate had used my side, which would have been fine if she had cleaned up afterward.
I kept venting to my mom about how unfair it was and how she should just admit what happened. Then I cleaned the mess myself, because she refused to clean up something she insisted she hadn’t done, and went to bed. After that, she stopped speaking to me entirely for weeks.
During that time, I kept texting my mom and friends about how strange the whole thing was. Then a mutual friend of ours asked if my roommate and I still weren’t speaking. I told him no, that she had stopped talking to me after I went home that weekend. That’s when he told me what had really been going on.
For months, my roommate had apparently been waiting until I fell asleep, taking my thumb, and using it to unlock my iPhone so she could read my messages. He told me she had stopped talking to me because of what I had been saying to my mom and friends.
He only told me because he had actually seen her do it, and when he questioned it, she said, “It’s fine, she’s a heavy sleeper,” though he thought it was completely wrong. I couldn’t believe it. One night after he told me, I decided to see if she would do it again. I drank coffee and pretended to fall asleep.
Once she thought I was asleep, I felt her use my thumb and go through my phone for about 20 minutes. After that, I went straight to the housing office and changed rooms. She has denied it ever since. That was the last time I saw her. She dropped out of school the following year.
24. Turning The Tables
I was staying with a couple for a while after my ex-boyfriend left me in a really difficult situation. They were some of the worst roommates I’ve ever had, and they were incredibly messy. While they were away on vacation, I found out they were almost three months behind on rent and had lied to the landlord by saying one of them had lost a job.
The landlord was kind enough to offer a payment plan, but by then he had clearly run out of patience. When I asked them what had happened to my share of the rent over the previous three months, they exploded, accused me of stealing from them, and told me I had 48 hours to move out.
25. Jekyll & Hyde
At first, she seemed wonderful. We became friends, and later I needed a place to live just as she needed a roommate, so I moved in. That turned out to be a huge mistake. She went from seeming like a kind friend to being incredibly controlling and exhausting to live with.
I had a few belongings that wouldn’t fit in my room because it was too small. She knew that before I moved in and told me I could keep them in the shed out back. About a week after I moved in, she asked me to move everything into the unused dining room because she wanted to turn the shed into a playroom for her kids.
Then she wanted the boxes moved to the living room. After that, she told me to move everything back to the shed. The last time she asked was right before I left for work. While I was gone, her full-time nanny tried to help and started moving the boxes to the shed while the kids were napping, without my knowing.
My roommate got home before I did and saw the nanny moving my things. When I got back, she started yelling, demanding to know how I could ask the nanny to do something she had told me to do myself. She yelled at me for nearly an hour, and every time she started to calm down, I’d try to explain what happened, and she’d start all over again.
She yelled at me every day. Sometimes it was over things her kids had done. Other times it was because I had gotten takeout just for myself instead of for the whole household. Once, I actually did bring home food for everyone, and she still yelled because it wasn’t what she wanted. Nothing I did was ever right.
There was hardly ever any food in the house, so her kids would go through my fridge and eat my groceries. She and her children also used my personal things whenever they felt like it. I’d use my conditioner once, and the next time half the bottle would be gone.
They used my razor, too. She even used my facecloth while changing her baby’s diaper. It was disgusting, and replacing everything kept getting expensive. Eventually, I started locking my bedroom door whenever I left the house.
She got angry because she and her kids couldn’t get into my room to take my things, so she broke the door. That was the final straw. I found somewhere else to live and moved out a few days later. Luckily, it had been an informal arrangement. I wasn’t on the lease, hadn’t signed anything, and hadn’t paid a deposit, so leaving didn’t cost me anything.
My mental health got much worse during the two months I lived there, and by the time I left, I was constantly on edge. Not long afterward, I ended up spending three weeks in a psychiatric ward. Before I moved in, I had felt sorry for her because her husband had died by suicide a few months before I met her. But after living with her constant yelling for two months, that sympathy disappeared.
26. Think Outside The Box
I had a roommate in college who could never get up when his alarm went off. He’d automatically hit the snooze button. Seven minutes later, it would go off again, and he’d hit snooze again. He did this at least seven or eight times before he finally got out of bed.
I suggested he just set his alarm later and get up the first time it rang. He looked at me like I was completely crazy.
27. A Bird In Hand Is Worth Two In The Busch
I had a roommate in college who grew up in the country. At first we sort of got along, but as the year went on we got along much better and became friends. Over the summer, though, he got into drugs, really lost it, and dropped out of school.
He came to visit me on my birthday and said he’d left a little surprise for me in my apartment. He was acting strange, so I didn’t think much of it. A week or two later, I started smelling something rotten but had no idea what it was.
After checking everywhere, I noticed an empty Busch Light box under my bed. I ignored it at first, but came back to it a few days later. When I opened it, there was a dead bird inside. Thankfully, I don’t think I ever saw him again.
28. Expensive Mistake
I had a roommate when I was in the forces who had the maturity of a 12-year-old.
He asked if his girlfriend could move in. There were three parties living in the house, and we’d all agreed to split the rent evenly. My wife and I had the master bedroom, but we’d bought the washer and dryer and furnished the whole house, and everyone had agreed that was fair. Then his girlfriend moved in, and she was completely useless.
The two of them never cleaned anything, not their room or any shared part of the house. They’d sit on the couch and watch the other three people clean every weekend. Then his girlfriend started complaining that it wasn’t fair to split the rent evenly. She had just quit her job and wasn’t working.
One month, the roommate decided not to pay his share of the rent because he made the brilliant financial choice to spend $800 on a drone and couldn’t afford rent after that. Then he started using the drone to chase my dogs.
My wife and I had to leave town for 10 days for our wedding ceremony on the other side of the country. We had arranged for someone to watch the dogs while we were gone, but the roommate’s girlfriend said she “wasn’t comfortable having strangers over.” We asked if she could watch them instead, and she agreed.
Turns out she spent the whole time sitting on the couch and not letting the dogs out during the day. They peed everywhere. She shut them in my empty bedroom at night, and they destroyed their dog beds. We came home from our honeymoon to a house that reeked of puppy pee, and I had to spend almost $300 replacing the beds and renting a carpet cleaner.
Then she asked if we would cover $100 of their rent because she had “watched the dogs for us.” By that point, I had maxed out a credit card trying to make sure my wife and I didn’t get evicted. During a house meeting with these idiots, this guy actually told me, “Sometimes, you just go into debt,” and compared skipping rent to a time he loaned his truck to a friend and it got into an accident.
Then, just 10 days before the yearly lease renewed, they told us they were moving out. They really put us in a terrible position, and our third roommate ended up in the worst spot of all. I had to take out a consolidation loan to pay off the credit card debt, and I only finished paying it off this month.
All of this happened six years ago. I still can’t stand that guy.
29. Moving In Absentia
I was in the Navy, stationed on a ship at Pearl Harbor. My roommate back home was the worst.
While I was away on the ship, he decided to move out. But he told the moving company to take the entire apartment, including my stuff. He was moving from the island to New York and had already left.
Luckily for me, the moving company he hired employed my then-girlfriend’s brother-in-law. He showed up at the apartment, realized what was happening, and called my girlfriend. That’s when we made a plan.
She went to the apartment and told the movers exactly what should be taken, which saved all of my belongings. The brother-in-law “joked” that my roommate’s stuff might end up getting lost in transit.
30. Escape Plan
After getting her own car stolen by leaving it unlocked in a parking lot all summer, she borrowed mine without asking while I was out of town and totaled it. Before that, she also racked up enough toll violations to get my license suspended.
Her excuse was that she was late for an exam, but a mutual friend told me she had actually gone to buy drugs from her. When I confronted her, she moved out the next day and left me to pay for all the damage her dog had done to the house.
31. Throw The Whole Van Out
My ex and I dated and lived together for about three years. One day, I went looking for some plastic containers to put away food, but realized we didn’t have a single clean one left. They were all gone.
I asked my ex where all the containers had gone, already pretty sure she had them since they definitely weren’t in the kitchen and I didn’t have them. Instead of just saying, “They’re in my van,” she went into a long round of complaining and grumbling until I finally said, “Forget it,” and went outside to get them myself.
What I found was honestly the kind of thing nightmares are made of. There were stacks and stacks of containers filled with weeks—maybe even months—old food: chicken, rice, steak bites, wraps, sandwiches, and more, all covered in hair, fungus, and mold. The smell that hit me when I opened them almost made me throw up.
I completely lost my patience, because this had happened several times before and I felt like I was saying the same thing over and over. We both worked full time, but somehow I was always the one cleaning up after both of us. So yes, I snapped, and it turned into a huge fight.
I’ve never heard of this happening to anyone else, but then again, I was the only person I knew who was naive enough to spend my early 20s living with someone that irresponsible.
32. Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind
There was Joe and Zoey. They rented a room from me for around six months. They broke up after a few months, and she moved into a tent in the backyard until I told her she needed to take it down. I had just reseeded the yard. Then she suddenly disappeared, and I never saw her again. He stayed a little longer and kept taking my food.
After he moved out, I found his room completely trashed. Instead of using a trash can, he had been tossing his garbage out the window onto the side of the house. It took ages to clean up. He definitely did not get his deposit back.
33. Vengeance Is Sweet
Isaac was an older man in his 50s. He spilled soda all over the counters and never cleaned it up. He broke my nice hourglass and left the glass and sand on the floor for someone to step on. He also refused to pay rent for his last month, so I kept his deposit.
He never cleaned anything and left behind a pile of trash. A few months after he moved out, someone knocked on my door. When I answered it, I could hardly believe it. It was a process server handing me court papers. Isaac was suing me for $5,000, claiming I had taken his cookware and his deposit. I actually laughed.
I got ready for court. He didn’t. He lost badly. My countersuit was fully awarded. I knew I’d probably never see the money, but I was just happy to have him out of my life.
34. Don’t Mix Friends And Living Spaces
I was trying to help out my best friend at the time. He had just broken up with his girlfriend and couldn’t afford the rent on his own after she moved out. I told him I was willing to help, but that even though we were close friends, we were also roommates, and he needed to respect that. Within a week, I was already at my limit.
He left dishes everywhere, had people over to party all the time without asking, and they would stay loud and out of control until early in the morning. What really pushed me over the edge was when I came home from work one night and, after settling in, reached for the remote to my TV. It wasn’t on my nightstand where I usually kept it. Then I noticed my TV wasn’t on my dresser either.
He had brought a one-night stand home and decided to move my TV into his room without asking. In the process, he dropped it and broke it. Then, over the next few weeks, he acted like I was the one in the wrong for telling him he needed to find somewhere else to live. It took a long time for that friendship to recover, but it was a huge lesson for both of us—especially for me when it came to choosing who I live with and how I help people.
35. Gone In An Instant
One time, my roommate went into my room looking for a USB drive he had seen me use for school files. When he plugged it in, it told him it needed to be reformatted, and in his very impaired state, he just clicked “Okay.” What happened next was heartbreaking.
I had all of my photos saved on that USB drive—every picture from when I was 19 to 27 years old. Just gone. I know I should have kept it somewhere safer, but my computer had crashed the week before, and I hadn’t had time to replace it and make another backup. That USB was the backup.
I managed to recover a few photos from Facebook, but there were pictures of my late brother on there that I’ll never get back.
36. Putting The “Hidden” In Hidden Valley
I lived with a guy who drove me crazy.
He had ADHD—not in a “people say it’s overdiagnosed” way, but in a very real way. He also didn’t like taking his medication when he wasn’t in school. So living with him often meant him insisting that our other roommate and I clean the house because he couldn’t handle living in a mess.
To be fair, the house was a little dirty. Three guys in their 20s lived there, so it wasn’t spotless, but it also wasn’t that bad. We’d agree to help and start wiping down counters and tidying up while he moved furniture around so he could clean underneath it.
The problem was that he never had the focus for a project that big. Before long, he’d disappear, and suddenly my other roommate and I were left cleaning an apartment we didn’t even think needed that much work, plus putting all the furniture back where he had moved it. The worst part was that he wasn’t exactly a clean person himself.
During one of these cleaning frenzies, he found a bottle of ranch behind his bed and proudly showed it to the rest of us. It wasn’t some bottle that had accidentally fallen back there. No—he had hidden it so nobody else would use it. Then he drank straight from the bottle of ranch that had been sitting behind his bed for months.
I almost got sick on the spot.
37. Cat Scratch Fever
My last roommate told me he could never trust me again because, more than a year earlier, I had said I wouldn’t get a cat since he was getting one. At the time I had two rats, and after they passed away, I wasn’t planning on getting any other pets.
Then one day, a cat showed up on my front step. Every day, he’d wait there and cry for me. Eventually I took him to a shelter, hoping someone would adopt him, but instead they neutered him and released him—and he came right back. At that point, I accepted it and asked my roommates if I could bring this little guy inside.
They agreed. Where I messed up was not making a real plan first and just bringing him in one day. I did make sure the introductions were handled properly, though. I spent about a month watching them carefully, and before long they were even sleeping and playing together.
Then one day, while both cats were playing, my cat scratched his cat. Apparently that was my roommate’s final straw. He packed his things, took his cat to his boyfriend’s place, and later moved into another apartment with him.
We already knew he wanted to move out and live with his partner, and nobody would have had a problem with that. Instead, he torched the relationship. He sent me a string of angry, awful texts about how selfish I was for adopting a cat after saying almost two years earlier that I wouldn’t.
Still no regrets. I would do anything for that cat.
38. Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number
I had an older roommate, in his 50s, who moved in after his previous place was sold. He had shared that place with other people too. When he moved in, he brought so much stuff that his room was completely packed, and he even had to store extra things out on the balcony, which was open to the weather but only accessible through his room.
He lived with me for about a year, and he always kept his door shut, so I tried not to pry. But every now and then, when he opened it, I caught glimpses inside. It was absolutely filthy.
Then we started having a rodent problem. My dog kept alerting to it, always chasing some rat that moved too fast for me to see. Another roommate and I decided to seal up all the cracks in the kitchen—between the walls, appliances, and everywhere else we could—with steel wool.
Even after that, the rats were still showing up in the kitchen, and we couldn’t figure out why until one day I saw one run straight back into his room, slipping under the door. I had installed a draft stopper, but the rats were still getting through.
Eventually we decided he had to move out, but because of the pandemic lockdown, I couldn’t make that happen right away, so I had to put up with it for a while. When I confronted him about the rats, he just looked defeated. That’s when he admitted the real issue: he had never learned how to vacuum, and he ate in his room with crumbs and candy all over the floor.
The carpet was covered in liquid stains, and the room smelled terrible. Even the bed and curtains smelled so bad that I had to throw them out. And who knows what else he may have brought in or attracted in terms of pests.
He actually had a decent job and made good money, but imagine getting to that age without ever learning how to clean up after yourself or even cook. He always ate out or ordered in. Once I saw him reheating leftover pasta, and I am not kidding, he poured a whole cup of water onto it before putting it in the microwave.
He ended up getting a place a few blocks away, and before he left, he told me he planned to hire someone to clean every week. I haven’t spoken to him since. But I will say this: the movers he hired told me they had “never seen anything like it.”
39. Turn Down Service
Because of a really severe housing shortage while I was studying, I moved in with my then-boyfriend and one of his friends. I’m not normally a violent person, but after a while, I spent a lot of time imagining putting a pillow over his face while he slept. I have so many stories about this guy.
A lot of them were your standard terrible roommate stories—him being an absolute slob and treating the apartment like a hotel. He’d come home every three or four days, destroy the whole place, then leave again and come back only after we had finally given in and cleaned everything, just to do it all over again. But I also have some wilder stories, so I’ll share one of those.
It’s important to mention that he was constantly chasing women. I’m generally not into shaming anyone for that kind of thing, but he was unbearable about it. He thought he was the most attractive man alive—he definitely wasn’t—and he made partying and bringing women home his entire personality.
One day he called me and asked if I was home. I said yes. Then he asked if I could do him “just a small favor.” We needed his share of the rent to keep the apartment, and he was friends with my boyfriend at the time, so I couldn’t really start a huge fight. So I said, sure, whatever, just to get him off the phone.
Then he explained that he was on his way home with a woman, but hadn’t had time to clean his room, and wanted me to “just shove some stuff under the bed and put clean sheets on for him.” By that point I was so worn down that I actually did it.
I know. I’ll never stop cringing about it. So there I was, making this guy’s bed like I was his mother, only to lie awake half the night in the next room hearing them loudly carrying on, while I stared at the ceiling and thought about revenge.
40. 14 Against 1
I had 15 roommates while living in a student house. The worst one was the guy who was always creeping on the women. He would watch from his room to see if one of us had just gotten out of the shower and was heading back to our room.
Then suddenly he’d knock for some pointless reason before you had time to get dressed—and if you hadn’t rushed to lock the door, he’d open it himself. Of course, we quickly learned to keep our doors locked, but sometimes someone would forget, and he’d say, “But I knocked,” even though he opened the door immediately after, like that somehow made it okay.
He made so many of us feel unsafe. The worst part was that management wouldn’t do anything. Eventually, the other guys in the house started doing their best to make sure he was never alone with any of the women. We also regularly checked the bathrooms and showers for hidden cameras, because you never know how far someone like that might go.
Student housing had already been a disaster here for years, so it wasn’t as easy as just moving somewhere else. We should have reported him, I know, but when you’re 18 and people are making you question whether it’s really your fault, that clear perspective you get in hindsight just isn’t there yet.
41. Lifehack Gone Wrong
My roommate basically stopped doing laundry and started buying secondhand clothes instead. Dirty clothes were spilling out of his closet and stashed in shared spaces like the hall closet and under the couches. When we moved out, he had nine contractor bags full of clothes.
42. Let The Trash Take Itself Out
I had a roommate who was... honestly, maybe becoming a hoarder.
They never cleaned. The place was a disaster of old junk, trash, dirty dishes, and clothes everywhere. They owned so much stuff that there just wasn’t room for it all in the apartment. There were piles of unfolded clothes three feet high.
The shelves were crammed with books, movies, and CDs, and the extra was stacked on the floor in messy piles. There was random furniture with shaky legs that didn’t fit anywhere. And there was trash everywhere.
I was constantly stressed because my roommate never did anything to help with the mess. It felt like I was always the one cleaning. It got so bad that we ended up with roaches. One night, my roommate and their live-in boyfriend, who didn’t pay rent, were eating popcorn on the couch and found roaches in the popcorn.
They panicked and put the plastic bowl, still full of popcorn, into the oven. But that wasn’t the end of it. A few days later, they forgot it was in there and started an oven fire. It was a big fire, but thankfully we had a fire extinguisher, so it didn’t spread. Even then, my roommate never cleaned up, and the kitchen stayed a mess.
I was wiping up white extinguisher dust and burnt, exploded popcorn for weeks. And that was just one story from a full year of chaos. When they finally moved out, suddenly, they left the place trashed, abandoned a ton of stuff, and shut off the electricity without warning.
I’ve always been a pretty clean person, and that whole experience was incredibly stressful. I was anxious, depressed, and so angry. I’m very glad that person is no longer in my life.
43. The Spice Must Flow
I once had a roommate absolutely lose it on me for using their crushed red pepper on a pizza I made, like I’d done something unforgivable. They said they had bought it specially in New York—we lived several states south. It was just McCormick’s from a regular grocery store.
44. Frozen Out
I had a roommate who honestly seemed determined to break our AC unit. Thank goodness she only lived with me for a couple of months. Before she moved in, I told her I usually kept the thermostat on the warmer side because it’s hot here and the electric bill can get out of control. She said that was fine, and also told me she could only afford a certain amount total for rent and utilities.
I agreed because I was in a tough spot and she said she was too. But as soon as she moved in, she started blasting the AC. My room was freezing, and I’d come out and turn it up a little so I didn’t have to sit under blankets in the middle of summer in the Southwest.
She would immediately turn it back down and said she needed it that cold because of a medical condition. I had to keep asking her to stop, both because I was freezing and because I couldn’t afford the huge electric bill she was running up. Suddenly, she somehow had extra money to cover the AC, but that didn’t change the fact that I was still freezing.
45. Vindication Is Worth The Wait
The three of us shared a kitchen. We had a cleaning schedule, but the other two never followed it. They would just let everything pile up until it was my turn. After complaining multiple times that I was the only one cleaning, I finally stopped.
Three weeks later, the kitchen was covered in rotten food and mold, and we even had cockroaches. A cleaning company had to be brought in, and the cost was supposed to be divided among everyone living there. I objected, pointing to all the complaints I’d made before. No one argued, and I didn’t have to pay.
I even got reimbursed for having to eat out every night, and they were kicked out a week later. It worked out for me in the end, but living through it was awful.
46. Race To The Bottom
I had a roommate who built a dirt bike track in our overgrown backyard. We lived in a run-down house right next to the railroad tracks, so he figured the noise from a 125cc two-stroke wouldn’t lead to neighbor complaints or visits from the police. Unfortunately, he was right. It was awful and amazing at the same time.
47. He Forgot To Ask For ID
This was back before cell phones. My roommate was kind of sleazy and would hook up with just about any girl he could charm into it. One morning I woke up, went into the kitchen to make coffee, and got a shock. There was a girl sitting at the table talking to herself, and what she was saying was really disturbing.
She kept muttering things like, “My mom is going to kill me, my dad will kill him,” and so on. Then she noticed me and asked if I could drive her to her high school. She said she had to be there on time for sophomore orientation. Yep. She was 15. He definitely wasn’t. I moved out that weekend.
48. Thank You For Your Service
There were five of us living in the house, and each room was rented separately. One guy was especially terrible. He said he had been in the National Guard at some point, and he acted like that meant he deserved special treatment. He honestly believed he shouldn’t have to do shared chores or even clean up after himself because of it.
He was also one of the biggest complainers I’ve ever met. Nothing was ever his fault, and he would deny doing anything wrong even when the evidence was right in front of him. The whole time he lived there, he was supposedly job hunting, but all he really did was smoke, make instant ramen, leave the mess behind, and watch Netflix on his phone.
We’d hear him having loud arguments with his parents about why he still didn’t have a job, and every time it was some new excuse they clearly didn’t believe. Eventually he had to leave because his parents stopped paying his rent. The worst part was that he was 41 years old and had the maturity of a spoiled 10-year-old.
49. Not His Brother’s Keeper
I moved into a house with two brothers. One of them seemed to think he was perfect and could do no wrong. His brother and I kept the place clean while he did nothing. He left little black hairs on the toilet and in the shower, then denied they could possibly be his.
He would also go into my room to watch my TV and use my VHS player, then deny that too. On top of that, he complained to his parents that my room was messy—even though it was just clothes, books, and magazines on the floor, not food or dirty dishes. One night I woke up in the middle of the night, and what I saw was awful.
His father was standing over me, telling me that “he” wanted to move out because the place was never clean and “your room is a mess,” and so on. At the same time, his mother was downstairs giving his brother and his partner the same lecture. His brother and I moved out within two weeks after that. I never shared a home with anyone again.
50. No Escape
My freshman year was the worst. It was my first time living away from home and my family. I had gone through the roommate matching process, and it seemed like the three of us would get along well. Things were fine for the first month. But then the third person never moved in, and the other two picked someone else to take the spot, and I wasn’t thrilled about it.
After that, they started drinking, staying up late, blasting music, bringing people over, and leaving the main door unlocked so anyone could walk in. They refused to carry their keys and just kept the door open. A lot of nights, random people would wander in. That was especially scary because it was often men.
I don’t really mind if people stay up late, but I often asked if they could keep it down because I had morning classes and they didn’t. They ignored me and sometimes even turned the volume up. As for the drinking, the university had strict rules, and we only had one fridge.
I wasn’t going to risk getting in trouble for alcohol being in there, so I threw it out. Eventually I got my own mini fridge and kept all my food there, along with a basket for dry stuff. They also never cleaned the common area or the kitchen, and it smelled horrible. There was mold and flies.
Then there were the men. I was absolutely not okay with men being in our dorm all the time, especially because you had to leave your room to get to the bathroom. One particular guy harassed me, pounded on my door, and tried to get into my room.
He would follow me back from the dining hall at night and wait for me in the common area. The other three roommates thought it was funny and laughed at me for being uncomfortable. I stopped showering at night and would hide under my bed when I heard his voice. I also started pushing things against my door.
I asked the RAs for help over and over again. A lot of RAs are terrible. Wanting people to have a “fun” freshman year is no excuse for ignoring university rules. I used to cry myself to sleep. I was scared to even leave my room. I’d get up really early just to shower so I could avoid running into anyone.
I dealt with it for a full semester before finally filling out the paperwork and meeting with the housing coordinator to move. The weekend before I was supposed to leave, one of my roommates completely lost it on me and on two upperclassmen who had come to help me pack.
They had to physically restrain her. I had to file a report, and campus authorities moved me that same night to a new place. I have PTSD from that semester because of the stalking and harassment from that guy. People really do not take stalking seriously enough.
A year later, he ended up in one of my classes, and I was terrified to go. I’m still extremely alert around men. It took years before I could even feel comfortable having male professors again. I’m still very uneasy about men entering my living space.
