Living with someone can be difficult even when they're a saint, but having an unhinged roommate can turn your life into a downright horror story. These stories will make you think twice about sharing your precious space.
1. Gollum, Is That You?
I woke up around 5:30 am and made my way to the kitchen, groggy and barely awake. As I turned the corner, I stopped in my tracks.
My roommate of three months was crouched on the counter, wearing a speedo. In a Gollum voice, he said, "My precious!" He mimicked Gollum's weird movements. I refused to react to it and just made breakfast. It's been 10 years since that strange encounter and we're still great friends.
2. It’s Getting Hot In Here
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. This meant we had the landlord coming over 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 came home, got plastered, and grabbed a hammer. That's when he did the unthinkable.
He smashed the box to pieces and turned the temperature up to 28 degrees again. This alone was not amusing. But, he was also taking 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 with the cardboard still around it. I smelled something 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". No shame, no apology.
3. Troubled Times
I had a housemate who checked out fine—volunteer firefighter in a mining town, black belt in judo, really nice guy. Two weeks later, there was no rent, and he disappeared. He came around about once a week for the next few weeks. One night he came back at 2 AM to pick up a nightstick. When I found out why, I was horrified. Apparently, he had gotten on the wrong side of the local biker gang, and they had taken his girlfriend.
He was going to break her out of a clubhouse in a neighboring suburb. He was back the next day with his girlfriend and all of the rent he owed, plus an additional two weeks. He apologized for the trouble he caused and moved out that day.
4. Paranoia Will Destroy Ya
I moved into a house with a couple of other friends, but there were two rooms vacant, so they posted the vacancy online. One random guy took one of the rooms. He moved his stuff in one day at around 5 AM, which we thought was pretty strange.
He wasn't a student at our school; he moved to the city to be with his girlfriend, who was a student. Unfortunately for him, a couple of weeks after signing the lease, his girlfriend dumped him. He was the filthiest person I've ever met.
One time he came home from his factory job and proceeded to make and eat a sandwich with hands pure black from grease. It was pretty gross and odd, considering we had soap. Over time, he actually started becoming a lot more normal. Then, things started getting a little off.
He developed a rash of some sort, which I thought was probably because his room was disgusting and there may have been bugs living in it. However, that's not what he thought. He told my friend that he thought we had been putting chemicals in his laundry soap to give him a rash, which of course, we weren’t.
The paranoia continued with him misplacing his driver’s license, which he thought we had taken and hidden so that he couldn't come to the bar with us anymore. Again, that wasn't true. After a few weeks of paranoia, one morning, things hit the roof. I woke up one morning at around 6 AM to the sound of someone running up and down the stairs.
I was half asleep and didn't know what time it was, so I just assumed one of my roommates was late for class. Then I heard more frantic running, followed by my normal roommate screaming.
I jumped up and ran out to the kitchen and saw my normal roommate standing there. Then, I got around the corner and saw the paranoid one standing in front of my fridge in a bathrobe, sweatpants, and a baseball cap.
All of my and my other friends’ stuff had been torn out of the fridge and smashed on the ground. There were pickles, milk, chili, you name it, all over the ground. My normal roommate asked him what was going on, and he replied, "I took 11 Benadryl".
We didn't know what to do, so we took him into the living room, sat him on the couch, and tried to calm him down. The whole time he was shaking, shivering, sweating, and had one of the craziest looks on his face. After a little, out of nowhere, he jumped to his feet, let out a cry, and charged at my normal roommate, who tossed him right through one of our dining room chairs.
Then I jumped on his legs, and we held him down. He was thrashing and punching us, trying to get us off. He started yelling some crazy things, like, "The media always wins"! So, after holding him down for a while and making no progress on his mental state, we called for help and waited for officers and EMS to come and take him to the hospital.
After he was taken away, we were quite shocked and curious, so we went into his room to take a quick look to see what he'd been up to all night. In his room, we found a bunch of our food, a bottle of Tylenol, which was missing a substantial number of pills, and some Benadryl scattered around the floor.
We also found a box that had a photo album and some other things in it, which we think was all stuff from his relationship with the girl who dumped him. We figured he most likely tried to take his life, but instead, he just ended up tripping out. We only ever saw him once again when he came to pick up his stuff and move out.
5. The Real Hobbit
I’m pretty sure I used to live with a hobbit. He was a man about five feet tall with curly brown hair and a constantly cheerful demeanor. He never wore shoes, inside or outside. He literally slept on the floor in what can only be explained as a nest of blankets. He started a garden and encouraged me to eat his tomatoes all the time.
He would also bring home samosas and other goodies, always giving me half. He and his wife had a dream of living off the grid in a tiny home on a truck. I hope he’s doing well.
6. Good On Paper, Bad In Real Life
I own a house and rent out rooms in it. Right after I first got it, I was pretty strapped for cash and needed to rent out both of the rooms as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, it didn’t align with the usual lease start dates in town (January, May, and September are the usual in a university town). I had a lady come, mid-30s, who wanted the furnished room. But I felt it was a little off.
Why does this grown woman have no furniture? My friends basically scolded me for being judgemental. Maybe she just got out of a bad relationship, maybe she is new to the city, and so on. So, I rented to her. Turns out she had just gotten out of prison for dealing. And honestly? She was better than the other one.
She did her business away from my home, in hotel rooms. She paid cash on time. She wasn’t home a lot. One time she left her little scale in the living room, and it inspired me to get a food scale which was a game changer in my weight loss journey (a serving of spaghetti is pathetically small and I had no idea until I weighed it).
I ended up making up a lie to get her to leave when she brought a strung-out friend home in the middle of the night because that’s a little much for me. Meanwhile the other looked good on paper, she was an early childhood educator on the supply list. Except she was drinking heavily. She also never went to work because she never woke up on time.
As if that weren’t bad enough, she never paid rent on time, she brought home a random group from the bar in the middle of the night on a Wednesday, she would take three-hour long baths in my only bathroom, and was just not my type of roommate. I finally kicked her out when she started taking my personal drinks. I caught her and warned her.
She did it again a few days later. I called her out on it again, gave her a month’s notice to move out, and she had the nerve to ask for the rest of my drinks! So comparatively…the first tenant was better.
7. Lost In The Darkness
I had one roommate who did something truly bizarre. One day while I was at lunch with my girlfriend and her family, I got a text from him stating, "I owe you a new dresser". In my junior year, I lived with two friends in a two-bedroom apartment, and I shared a room with one of them, Jeff. One night, he and the other roommate, Eric, went out partying while I was off at my girlfriend’s place.
They came back pretty smashed, and Eric passed out on the couch while Jeff dragged himself back to our room and onto his bed. This would normally be the end of the story, but Jeff had a strange habit in that when he got really sloshed, he would sleepwalk. Jeff got up during the night, sleepwalked into our shared walk-in closet that had my dresser, and closed the door behind him before passing out on the floor.
A few hours later, he woke up to find himself in an absolutely pitch-black room with unfamiliar objects and no recollection of how he got there. To this day, he claims he thought he was abducted. Apparently, upon realizing he had been "abducted", he jumped up and started going bananas in an attempt to escape. He started banging on the walls and door and screaming for Eric, who was comfortably passed out on the couch.
Therefore, he began to tear his way out of the room. He punched a hole in one wall that led to the bathroom and then tore a torso-sized hole in the opposite wall with his bare hands. Upon reaching the vinyl siding that adorned the side of our building, he tore down the metal hanging rod, bent it Hulk-style, and tried to spear through the siding.
If we had had wood siding, he would have probably fallen to his demise. It was visibly dented from the outside for at least the rest of our time there. Eventually, he gave up. He really needed to pee and began to cry at the state of his hopelessness. Sitting in defeat on the floor of the closet, he saw light coming in from the bottom of the door. Spurred by this glorious light and the need to urinate, he finally managed to locate the door handle and stepped out into our room.
8. He Had To Face The Music
In my first year at Boston University, I applied for housing late and ended up in an apartment reserved for juniors and freshmen. I shared my place with three juniors, one of whom—Brad—was crazy. One day, I came home from class to find Brad super excited about a plan to throw a concert on the "BU Beach" and asked to borrow lots of CDs and stereo equipment.
I went about my business without thinking about it too much. Four hours later, the other two guys came in looking completely shocked and told me that at the end of his "concert", Brad decided he loved all the people so much that he gave away all of the music and equipment he had borrowed. He got so excited that he literally gave the shirt off his back, too.
Then he wandered into the Barnes & Noble on Kenmore Square and took a shirt, put it on, and headed back out, at which point the staff called the authorities on him. My other two roommates had bumped into him arguing with a pair of officers, trying to explain that the universe wanted him to have this shirt, so of course, Barnes & Noble needed to give it to him.
9. Bubbles Everywhere!
My college roommate didn't know how to do laundry before we started school. We had a community washer and dryer on our floor. During the third week of school, I went down to get a soda from the machine and I walked in and there were bubbles four inches deep on the floor. My roommate walks in behind me to check his laundry.
He had put three full scoops of Tide in the washer with his load. I had to take him to an off-campus laundromat to wash all of the excess soap out of his clothes.
10. The Chef And Dish Hoarder
This is my only roommate story. After this, I swore never again. My roommates were a childhood friend and her boyfriend. He was a "chef" (line cook at a chain restaurant) who would cook mediocre meals when the urge took him. They would take nearly every bowl and pan in the kitchen to make meals, and he would not clean up after himself.
He also had a cat, which he never bought food for, so I had to feed it because I'm not a monster. On the other hand, my childhood friend was an unemployed student, who would use the cups from my dinner set as ashtrays. She would load up a single plate of food, take it to her room, eat from it throughout the day, and keep it.
This would continue every day until we were out of plates. I said I'd clean them if she just brought them back to the kitchen, but nope. I'd have to wait until she was out, then go get them, complete with moldering food remnants. Eventually, my boyfriend joined our happy little household, and I started setting boundaries.
The setting of boundaries eventually led to an explosive screaming match, and resulted in me and him moving out. My only regret is that I didn't take the cat.
11. It Wasn’t All Sunshine And Rainbows
The person I lived with while in college was nuts. One night, he came into the apartment talking to himself. I heard him go into his room and make a bunch of noise. His door was open, so I looked in. What I saw made my blood run cold. He was trashing the room; nothing in the room was upright, and everything was on the floor. Without looking at me, he flung a record at the wall, and it shattered a few inches from my head.
At no point did he acknowledge me. I went into my room and shut the door. A little while later, he started taking a shower in my bathroom. While he was in there, our RA knocked on our door and asked us to quiet down. As I tried to explain to her that I wasn’t the one making noise, a huge noise came from the shower. The RA shrugged and left, and I went back to my room.
After about two hours, I wanted to go make dinner, but I still heard the shower running. I stepped out of my room and saw a watery trail of CDs and records leading into my bathroom. The door was wide open, so I clearly saw the guy in the buff—except for his rainbow hat—sitting on top of the backrest of a dining room chair in the shower.
The shower curtain was on the ground, and the comforter from his bed was draped over his feet. The tub underneath him was filled with broken CDs and records. There was an intense stream of water spraying everywhere from directly out of the wall since that loud noise earlier was apparently him ripping the shower head completely apart.
I walked to the kitchen and started cooking. He finally left the bathroom and walked right by me into his room without noticing me. Then, he came back out again, still without clothes, stopped in front of me, slowly turned his head, and looked at me for the first time. He said, "Oh," and then walked out the front door, wearing nothing but his rainbow hat.
12. Who’s Laughing Now?
An old girlfriend and a buddy of mine shared a room back in my college days. Once, they thought they would play a trick on me by switching beds. My buddy usually went home for the weekends, so I thought he wouldn't be there. I got home super late from a gig, and I was too tired to put on any pajamas. I took off all of my clothes and hopped in bed.
I began to snuggle, then I gently grabbed his rear and said, "Goodnight". He was up and out of the bed and down the hall screaming, while my girlfriend just laughed in the corner. I guess the joke was on him.
13. They’re Watching
I had a college roommate who was obsessed with CSI. She had a CSI pillow and blankets. She refused to turn on any lights and kept all blinds shut. She hated light and would sigh loudly if I would turn the lights on to do anything. She would tell me that Facebook is how they spy on you. She said she would never have a MySpace or anything of the like.
She would always say I was a sheep and that I would have my identity stolen by "them". My other roommate (we were four with two bedrooms) was extremely loud at all hours, and if you ever asked her to keep it down, even very politely, she would purposely start doing cartwheels and banging on things and singing. She claimed to be Jay Leno’s niece.
14. Deadly Cleaner
My roommate in college wanted to clean the silt stains out of our shared bathtub, so he poured bleach and vinegar for a "super potent cleaner". After using the restroom and getting lightheaded, I asked what was in the bathtub.
When he told me, I didn't think it sounded right, so I did a quick online search and my stomach dropped. The first result said it could be fatal. It produces chlorine gas which can kill in minutes.
15. Oh, Sister!
I had a roommate who asked if his sister could live in the third bedroom of my house. He was a solid guy, so I assumed his sister would be cool too. Wrong! She used to be so mean to my dog. I caught her once and had to hold back the urge to choke-slam her. She also dated these thug types and brought them back to our home quite regularly.
Then, I came home from work one day, and bounty hunters knocked on my door looking for her boyfriend. She showed up at the house with the guy, and he instantly saw one of the bounty hunters camped out in my yard, so he punched her in the face and took off with her car. She left not long after that.
16. He Rat-tled Our Cage
I moved into a new house with a few other people. My long-term flatmate was a professional university student, having completed degrees in law, medicine, and fine arts. I found out after about a week that he was an addict. After six months of long conversations, it became clear he was not a normal person. He told me how and where he had slain two people on different occasions.
He bit the head off his pet rat in the middle of an argument and threw the body across the room while smiling at us with the head in his mouth. Another friend and I moved out after it started to snowball even more.
17. Apartment Griller
I lived in southern California, where the weather is nice. We had a huge porch that was the size of our apartment. It was the roof of the unit below us, and we had a charcoal barbecue on it. I came home from practice one day and saw something that blew my mind.
My roommate was using our charcoal barbecue inside the apartment. I walked in, looked at him, looked at the barbecue, then back at him. It was surreal; who barbecues inside? I yelled at him, and I walked to my friend's house while I waited for the carbon monoxide to go away.
18. Not A Lightbulb In Sight
I had to work abroad for three months. I came home to discover the bathroom light bulb had blown just after I left. My roommate felt she couldn't change it herself, so she called an electrician. The electrician laughed at her and told her she could save a fortune and do it herself. She still hadn't done it by the time I got back.
Needless to say, I fixed it in about five minutes. It would have been quicker, but I couldn't stop chuckling at the thought of her using the toilet in the dark for months.
19. The Painted Volvo
My roommate decided to repaint her car in the garage one night. So, she proceeds to hand sand back the silver paint on her old Volvo and then whips out cans of red spray paint. She spent ages free-hand spraying that car with the garage door closed and without any ventilation.
After she’d moved out, I was visiting a friend in another city and I noticed a spray-painted red Volvo parked at the flat below. It turns out she’d ended up moving in with my completely unrelated friend for a while and managed to convince the old guy downstairs to buy the badly painted car. The same roommate worked shifts and would vacuum and stack dishes at 3:00 am.
20. Almost Burned The House Down
My roommate heated up frozen macaroni in a pan over our gas stove when he'd drank too much. He went to his room and passed out on his bed. I woke up around 4:00 am to the smell of smoke in my room.
I found the entire house filled with smoke. There was a pan of charred black, macaroni still on the stove (which, by the way, was stolen after I had put it outside on our doorstep for a few hours).
21. Bob The Bingeating Boozehound
I had a roommate, Bob, who moved in mid-semester because one of our old roommates moved out. He told us a story of how his old roommates were doing dope, and that's why he left. Then, things started getting progressively worse from there. The first was when I found a half-eaten package of grasshopper cookies gone. I, being too passive about the whole thing, was like, "Meh. Food gets eaten by roommates all the time".
Little did I know, Bob would turn into a Snorlax who would not only eat everything but pee all over the place when sloshed. One night, one of my roommates texted me to check on Bob, who went down into the basement where the hippies lived. She was worried because she had pulled out a huge tray of chicken nuggets—which were mine—that was burning and saw Bob go down into the basement.
One of the hippies who lived there, Sue, had come home, so we went down together and found Bob passed out on their couch. He had been drinking and went down there to get more booze from the hippie's mini-fridge. Sue and I helped Bob up the stairs and left him passed out on his bed. When we laid him down, he had a wet spot on his crotch area.
Another time, he came home propped up by two girls. I was in my room, jamming to some tunes while I studied, but Sue was in the kitchen. As soon as Bob came in, the two girls left, and Bob proceeded to empty his bladder onto the kitchen floor. Sue screamed at him, but Bob, being too trashed, passed out in his pee. Sue picked him up and dragged him to his room.
She left him on the floor there and cleaned up his mess. She then went downstairs to chill after all that and heard some fumbling. Apparently, Bob needed to pee again and was too trashed, so he went on his floor, and it dripped down into the basement. This continued. He was a raging drinker who would take all our food and pee all over the place. He was a jerk.
22. What The Hill?
One of my roommates in college sat bolt upright in his bed at about 2 AM and said, "This is the hill". I asked, "What hill"? His answer was seriously creepy. He said: "This is the hill we die on", and went back to sleep. He never did anything close to sleep-talking the rest of the year. He also had an enjoyment for the white powder. He walked in once while under the influence of a bunch of stuff and proceeded to try and snort the salt someone had spilled on the carpet.
One time, I walked in and found him throwing everything he could reach from the kitchen at the wall. I guess the goal was to see what would stick. He threw a few knives, a metal spatula, and something that went through the wall and left a hole. I decided it was a good time to start keeping my knives in my room.
23. Thirty Days And Thirty Nights
I had a roommate who made a really impressive bet that he could sleep with thirty different women in thirty days. They each paid me $25 bucks up front to be the impartial witness. This was not a friendly little bet. My roommate was ever so flexible in how he related to women. He lied and kept notes in a huge 8.5" x 11" binder. He made notes on their favorite flowers, colors, any significant dates or events, and every conversation.
He carried it everywhere and reviewed it when he called his "honeys". It was impressive but creepy. They were all pretty. The variety was amazing, everything from a bank teller to a pole dancer to the married woman next door whose husband found out. He came knocking one day, waking me up at 2 AM, saying he needed my help.
He then tried to pull his Makarov out of his jacket when I opened the door. He saw my .45, and I slammed the door. We had a polite but loud conversation through the door, and he went home. I accidentally broke my roommate's door and thoroughly scared the wife. She got a divorce, and I got a new roommate. And yes, he did win his bet.
24. Friend Of The Pigeons
A few years back, my former roommate and I let our downstairs neighbor move in with us because the guy he was living with had taken up a new habit. He’d befriended the pigeons that hung out on the rooftop outside his bedroom window and eventually started taking them inside and caring for them like pets. Things got real dirty really quickly.
25. Sleepwalking Psycho
I used to cook dinner and always made enough to offer to our roommate. He always paid his bills and rent, but sometimes he didn't have enough for food, so I would cook and ask, "Hey man, wanna have dinner with us?" He would usually say he didn't like whatever I was making. Fast forward to the morning...all the leftovers were gone.
His explanation? He must have been sleepwalking and ate it in his sleep. This happened 15 to 20 times over a year period…minimum. He would make these big songs and dances about how what I was making was gross, so I would put up enough leftovers for two (my boyfriend and I) then go to bed. What was to be lunches for work were gone and often dirty utensils were in the sink.
Fast forward another five years and he called me at 3:00 am after not talking to me or my partner for three years. He told me my now husband (aforementioned BF) was doing substances in front of our four-year-old child. I called my husband, who was asleep. Neither of us had talked to him in years...what was this? And then this horror story took an even darker turn.
Fast forward another five years and he's now behind bars for taking his roommate's life. His defense? He did it while sleepwalking.
26. Air Vent Escapee
My freshman-year college roommate was a random pairing. This kid partied all night and slept all day (he legit wouldn’t wake up until 5:00 PM). He went missing for like a week. I called my mom because I wasn’t sure he was even alive. She searched to see if he has been taken in by the authorities. Before she called me back, officers were knocking at our door and asking if we’d seen him.
Mom called me back a few minutes later. He had been booked for robbery at a convenience store which was in our dorm building! But that's not the craziest part.
He tried to hide in an air vent! He made the front page of the campus newspaper, was expelled, and I got the whole dorm to myself for the rest of the fall and spring semesters.
27. Lovesick Lunatic
When I was in college, I had an apartment with some guys, and we decided to get a house. The downside was that we needed an extra person as we had four people and the place was a five-bedroom. In my friend's most brilliant moment, he got his girlfriend of a year to join us. At first, the other two and I didn't think it was a great idea. Then, we saw that there were two separate leases for the house.
We figured the three of us could be downstairs, and the two of them could be upstairs. The summer came, and they broke up, as we expected. It was OK at first—but then he started to change. The guy started acting reclusive. He had an old Bowflex upstairs and would do some weightlifting and always let the weights slam down.
After his workouts, he would grunt a lot and walk past her door without any clothes on. He also had a massive pile of used tissues that just sat on his desk near his monitor. His floor was always covered in cans, clothes, books, and whatever else, to the point you couldn't see the floor. We weren’t sure if he showered more than once a month during that period either.
He also played World of Warcraft until about 4 AM every night with it blasting so loud we could hear voices throughout the entire house. We eventually fixed that by unhooking the cable modem, which was located in my other friend's bedroom. To this day, we aren't sure if he ever figured it out, considering we would hear him yelling, "Insight cable sucks so much; it always cuts out at night"!
As more and more time passed, his ex-girlfriend continued to ignore him—but she told us weird stories about him. About how he’d walk around in the buff, leave her notes, start up painfully awkward conversations with her, etc. He had written her poetry a few times that was incredibly awful and barely legible. We would throw quite a few parties, and he would come downstairs to the main floor halfway through the party, take a few swigs out of a bottle, then run back upstairs to play WoW.
We tried to take the party up there so he wouldn't feel left out, but he ended up just ignoring us. His ex-girlfriend started dating a new guy. One night she got home late with her new boyfriend. They tried to be quiet and get up to her room without making a sound, but they got back at the same time as her ex did. That wouldn't have been a problem—except that he was trashed.
He went into his room and started throwing things and making a ton of noise. The new boyfriend went in and said, "Hey man, we're tired and trying to sleep. Could you please be a little more quiet"? He freaked out, and sucker punched the new boyfriend. He wouldn’t calm down and continued to threaten the new boyfriend, so the new guy called the authorities.
Officers arrived, and the roommate started mouthing off to them nonstop, to the point that they warned him they would cuff him and pop him in the car. He went for it, and the next thing we knew, he was sitting in the back of the cruiser while the new boyfriend showed the officers his bloody face. Our roommate got carted off and put behind bars. In the summer, we had to go to court to testify about that night.
28. Weedhead Woes
I was roommates with my good friend and this other dude who was assigned to our room. The other dude, Fred, smoked reefer at all times, all the time, which bothered my friend, Pat. One day Fred was cleaning his bong in his shower, which he and Pat shared. He broke it and never told Pat. Naturally, Pat took a shower later and noticed his foot was hurting and bleeding from a large shard of glass. He went to Fred and asked him why there was glass in the shower. His only reply was, "Gotcha"!
29. Life Lessons
I had a roommate during my first year of college who had no interest in girls or guys, and he also had no interest in showering. He had a MacBook, and he played WoW and Second Life constantly at the same time; he ALT-tabbed between them. He also wrote a book in DBZ-style with dragons like Tiamat and TIME DRAGONS yelling in all caps. Omega and Ultima were the names of his main characters. He started with number four in his series.
He had over 100,000 words when last I checked, and it involved dragon-vampire intercourse. He drew the symbol for his book on a whiteboard at our front door. When asked why he started with number four instead of number one, he explained that it would be more like Star Wars that way. But that wasn’t the worst part.
At one point, his power adapter for his MacBook broke, and he switched his and mine while we were sleeping. In class the next day, I noticed my laptop wouldn't charge and that the plug had scorch marks covering it. He had complained the night before that his laptop wouldn't charge, and when I went to look at his laptop and the power cord, I noticed they were both covered in the same dirt that covered all his stuff and that the scorch marks on the plug aligned exactly with the marks on his computer.
He denied it, but the campus authorities intimidated him into admitting it and giving mine back. He was extremely conservative, constantly slacked off in school, bragged about the Samurai Island server he purchased from Second Life, and generally made my first year of college awkward and miserable. When we noticed he played a female character in Second Life, one of my friends asked him, "Do you tell the people you're playing with that you're a girl"? He replied, "We don't talk about first life".
30. Mafia Business
My roommate in college claimed he was involved with the mafia. He was constantly sweaty, was very jumpy, and always had a lot of cash in his car. He was never around on the weekends, and I never saw him drink. Strangest of all is that he never once slept in his room. He was always on the couch by the door. He eventually told me why.
It was because if someone ever broke in looking for him, he wanted "them" to find him right away, so no one else would get hurt. I still don't know if he was telling the truth but nonetheless, I always locked my bedroom door at night.
31. No Boundaries
In my freshman year of college, I got a roommate who had absolutely no boundaries. The night before classes started, she asked if she could have one of my granola bars and a K-Cup for coffee the next morning and I said yes. BIG MISTAKE.
After that, she just kept eating my snacks without asking. I didn't realize until I got really shaky from not eating and went to get a granola bar and noticed they were all gone. She constantly went through my stuff and would stalk what I did, so she could talk to me about absolutely everything I do.
Eventually, she told me she would only stay in the room overnight on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday so her boyfriend could give her a ride to class. But, she would randomly barge into the room unannounced.
In December of that year, I went to the ER because I sprained my knee falling off a skateboard and I left the paperwork on my desk when I left for winter break. I got a call from her that night and she basically told me she read the papers and she read everything they prescribed me for my knee. I put in a room change request form right after that.
Then the week before we got back, she called me and told me she dropped out, or in her words "taking a semester off" cause she missed so many classes that she received a warning from financial aid. I had the room to myself for the rest of the year.
32. If It Looks Like Roast Beef...
I was roommates with a buddy and had flown home for a couple weeks. When I got back, he drove my car to the airport to pick me up and we are just chatting about things we did over the past couple of weeks. He said, "I hope you don't mind, but I ate all of the roast beef that you had in the fridge". I look at him, horrified.
I told him that I have not once in my life bought roast beef for lunch meat. He had eaten ham that was well past expired before I left and had gotten so bad that it resembled roast beef apparently. Thankfully, it didn't make him sick, but it was pretty funny.
33. A Bizarre Bunkmate
I have only had two roommates, and one was later diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She once brought home a bottle of cholesterol that she had extracted from a cow's heart in class and stored it under her bed for months. She asked me to examine her menstrual blood to see if it looked weird, to which I flat-out refused. She tried to take her life on a regular basis, about once a month.
She faked grand mal seizures for attention for a period of several months and had serious conversion symptoms that often forced midnight ER visits. So many strange things happened while I was living with her that I have a hard time remembering which ones were truly odd. After I moved out, her family came to visit. Her mother wanted her to move back home, and when she refused. She tied her to a chair in her apartment and held her there until her siblings untied her and helped her to run away.
34. Act Like An Adult!
I had one flatmate who apparently was mad about what I was or wasn't doing around the place but was too passive-aggressive to say anything. This was despite the fact that I almost always kept to myself, baked stuff regularly for both of us, and did all the cleaning. It got to the point where she wasn't there for three months. She faked getting engaged to her boyfriend to move out shortly after posting pictures on Facebook of her hanging out with her "cool new roomies".
35. Leaving The Nest
In the mid-2000s, I moved out, went to college, and started my life living outside the nest. I moved into the dorms with a few roommates and had to get used to a number of things, like cooking with others, waiting in line, taking turns in the shower, rationing food, etc. I had two official roommates who were both older. One was a weedhead, and the other was a cool, laid-back guy.
Things were going smoothly for the first month or so, and I was getting used to things. Then, things started getting weird. More and more, my burnout roommate started bringing over a girlfriend of sorts. I would go off to visit friends back home every weekend, and when I'd come back, something would be off. The girl was always there, but I never saw her sleep with the guy.
One day, when they had class, I did a little exploring. I looked into his room, found nothing, and was about to leave when I saw a little bit of cloth sticking out of the closet. I opened the closet, and there was a bunch of blankets with a pillow. The girl had made a nest in her boyfriend's closet, hiding it from our fellow roommate and me.
After finding out about the bird girl, I tried to mind my own business. I'd say hello to my burnout roommate, close my door, and try to ignore the fact that I had roommates. One night, I came home after class and walked in on weedie staring at the wall, which stood firmly two inches from his face. He was doing this on the stairwell, and my room was up those stairs.
I stood at the bottom of the steps for a moment, planning my next move, when I saw Bird Lady from atop the staircase. She informed me he was on Dramamine, and I nodded, making my move up the stairs. He didn’t notice me move past him, and I promptly shut my door and tried to get some sleep. I was suddenly awoken by flashlights two inches from my face.
I shielded my eyes and looked at the clock. It was 2 AM, and there were two officers insisting I get out of bed and come talk with them. Shocked, I got out of bed and threw some pants on, following them downstairs. I got downstairs, and the officers were asking me if I realized I nearly hit an officer, ran a red light, rode a curb, and parked at my dorm sideways, half on the grass.
I told them I had no idea what they were talking about. Bird Girl, my laid-back roommate, and Burnout Boy were all sitting with their backs against the wall, as I was. Bird Girl informed the officer that I had nothing to do with it, looked at me, and said she was really sorry. Burnout Boy spoke up and apologized as well, and the laid-back roommate just nodded. The officer told me that they picked up my name because Burnout Boy swiped my car and did those things that were previously mentioned. I moved out the next week.
36. The Moth Whisperer
My roommate painted his room completely black. He left the window fully open all year round with a bunch of different containers filled with a homemade paste to attract moths. He would walk out of the house barefoot, in a black hoodie, and not come back for days. He wrote a 500+ page manuscript about a guy that started a cult and asked me to proofread it.
One day, I came home to a bunch of kitchen blades left on the counter and I thought it was weird but just washed them and put them away. Turns out he had used them that morning to hold up a store at the end of our street. The camera footage showed him walking back to the house and he was taken in the next day and put behind bars.
37. The Oddball
The university cycling team had its own floor in a dorm during my freshman year. Cyclists can be strange and my roommate ("John") was no exception. He grew up Quaker. His parents had recently divorced and his mom was in the process of building a house in the immediate D.C. area next door to her ex-husband, and the houses were identical.
They were filthy rich and he got whatever he wanted. I should mention, he specifically came to this school to race mountain bikes, but he'd never raced bicycles at all, or even owned a mountain bike. He showed up to school on the first day with a $5,000 road bike and a $7,000 mountain bike. Anytime he went shopping, he almost always used cash.
He had the largest jar of change I'd ever seen. When I say he was odd, he was just not quite there. He was taking 70mg of Vyvanse, but he couldn't pay attention to anything for an extended period of time. So, he'd always interrupt conversations with some out-of-this-world thought and he frequently left the room having forgotten to wear something (like socks or a shirt).
It’s kind of hard to explain because there wasn't really anything wrong with him; he was just never quite there. As an example, on a team trip one time we went to Cracker Barrell. He was very quiet for 45 minutes or so as everyone else was talking. All of a sudden, in a manner that everyone in the building can hear, he articulates the most random thought that has occurred to him".
Everyone here is old except for us". Certainly true, just no need to say it out loud. While writing this, it has occurred to me that the amphetamines he'd been prescribed since childhood probably took a toll on his brain. Anyways, he was honestly pretty fun to have around because you never quite knew what was going to happen.
We roomed together off campus again sophomore year with two other guys on the cycling team. The summer between sophomore and junior year, he was supposed to study abroad in Austria for two weeks. The other roommates and I joked, somewhat seriously, that it very well could be the last time we see John. If anyone was capable of getting lost abroad, it was him.
A few weeks before the trip, he confided with us that he met an Italian girl online and he was hoping to meet her while abroad. As he was beginning to pack, he showed us a selfie she just sent him. She appeared to be a passenger in a car and wearing a seatbelt. Showing us this, he was terrified.
He was certain that, because she was looking out the window, it was a desperate plea for help and he needed to save her. On his second day abroad, I received a call from his mother. I knew exactly what was on the other line. I put the phone call on speaker so the roommates could receive the same information that was certain to follow.
She asked, "Have you heard from John?" "Uhhh, no. He's in Austria," I replied. She said, "The school called and he's gone missing. They can't find him". So we told his mom about the girl.
The mom ended up hiring a PI who was able to track him down five days later roaming the streets of some small town on the Italian border. He was expelled from the university and I never saw him again. They hired movers to get his stuff from our apartment. He had totally ruined the study abroad trip for everyone.
We asked him what happened, but we never got a meaningful response. He's sent me a couple of incredibly random Facebook messages over the years. Once, he messaged me, "What degrees did you achieved?" I responded and he messaged me back six months later, "That's really cool that you are successful, who else do I know that is successful?"
38. Marilyn Manson Fan
I had a roommate during my technical schooling for the Navy. He was quiet, worked the night shift, and was always just a little odd. He was super nice, though, so we didn't have many problems. One day on my lunch break, I went into our room to grab something and I heard music.
I was curious as to why Marilyn Manson was blasting at full volume at a time he was usually sleeping. I stepped inside the door and saw him laying on top of his blankets with his arms folded over his chest Nosferatu style. After taking a moment to register just how weird this was, I stepped over by his speaker and turned the volume down a tad.
That’s when his eyes shot open and without turning his head, he just asked, "What are you doing?" I meekly responded, "Oh sorry, I thought you were asleep. Was just turning it down". He paused a moment and just replied, "Oh... sorry," and shut his eyes again.
The dude was an oddball, but over time, he opened up to me a little bit and we started gaming together. Wherever you are man, I hope the Navy worked out for you.
39. Her Nonsense Was Of Biblical Proportions
I had a roommate who was an idiot. When she moved into the room, I knew her boyfriend lived upstairs, and I told her to just send me a text or something if they ever needed the room. She replied, "Oh no! I'm too Christian-ish for that"! I proceeded to walk in on them getting it on probably every other week for the rest of the school year.
Once I had even texted her saying I'd be back in 15 minutes, and she texted back, "Okie Dokes, see you soon". When I got to the room, they were going at it. So, I hung out with some friends in the lounge until about 3:30 AM, and when I eventually texted, knocked, and cautiously entered, she giggled and asked what took me so long and said, "We were only watching a movie".
40. Dozing Deceiver
I had a roommate who would sleep all the time. Every time I would walk into the room, he would be napping. If I ever woke him up in the middle of his nap, he would sit up and introduce himself as Bob, which wasn’t his real name, then resume sleeping. The first time it happened, I thought he was joking around. When I questioned him about it later, he couldn't remember anything that happened.
So, the next time he was asleep, I tried it again, and he was "Bob" once again. I didn't tell him about it to see if he would mention it because I was still convinced he was messing with me. He never said a word about it. I continued waking him up and even had a few conversations with him. Over the course of the next four years, a couple of guys and I would do that to him every now and then, and we’d learn a little bit more about my roommate’s alternate personality.
A few years later, I bumped into him again. I decided it wouldn't hurt to tell him about his "Bob" personality. I told him about how I would wake him up, and "Bob" would answer back. After I was done explaining this weird phenomenon to him, I learned the bizarre truth.
He answered by saying, "Oh yeah, it was me that whole time. I was just messing with you guys". My roommate kept this epic joke up for four long years, and never once did he slip up.
41. My Roomie Was A Total Meathead
One time my roommate in college left a 50-quart ice chest with about 20 lbs of meat in it in our living room for a few months. I went to move the ice chest one day and heard it slosh and was like, "What is in here"? There were 20 lbs of rotten meat and a few bags of melted ice. I told him to get rid of it, so he opened the front door and dumped it on our porch.
42. Missing Roommate
When I was a college freshman, I had a random roommate. She was hardly around, usually out partying and staying in friends' rooms. One Monday morning, I think around Halloween, she left a confidential report lying in the middle of the floor.
It detailed her underage disorderly behavior. With it, was a letter from the school. The letter mandated that she attend Responsibility Classes and write an essay on why what she did was bad. She was gone that whole day, but showed up around 11:00 pm.
She threw some stuff in a duffel, said I could take anything of hers if I wanted it, and left. At the end of the week, someone from the school called me to ask if I had seen her. I detailed the last time I saw her. He asked why I didn't report her missing and that was the end of the convo. I didn’t report her because she left on her own accord.
I eventually found out through the grapevine that she had run away to California (school was in PA) to stay with her brother, and neither she nor her brother told their parents she was out there. I had the room to myself for the rest of the year.
I piled all of her stuff in a corner, enjoyed the extra space, and sat through a very awkward, completely silent 15 minutes when she and her mother showed up on move-out day to collect her belongings.
43. The Man Child
I had a 'friend' who turned out to be a man-child. Not just immature, but at 32 years of age, he would not do basic things for himself. Things like brushing his teeth, cutting his nails, cooking, cleaning, showering, etc. He tried to cook once, which involved him dumping three boxes of pasta into one bowl and tossing in ground beef and shredded cheese.
He smacked his food, his hair was matted because he wouldn't take care of it. He moved in with my partner and I because he wanted to find opportunities for education and a better job. He was with us for eight months and in that time, maybe sent out two job applications. I told him to stick to community colleges, but he insisted on some overpriced proprietary school.
He asked if he could stay with us for the year and a half it would take to finish the program. I said absolutely not. He was also incredibly immature. He definitely peaked in high school for a reason. And if you look up "incompetence," I'm pretty sure his photo is next to it. Every time my partner or I cooked, he'd stare until we offered him some of it.
He ate our food and never replaced it, wandered around in his boxers, and never left the apartment. If you tried to show him simple things like how the coffee maker worked, he'd freak out and say he couldn't do it. When he moved out, and back in with his mom, we celebrated.
44. Hole In The Wall
One time, my roommate and I went to a party. He got plastered, saw some people he didn't want to be around, and walked home. About an hour later, my other roommate and I headed home, too. When we pulled into the driveway, we saw lights on in the living room, which quickly went off. When we got inside, we couldn't believe our eyes.
There was a massive hole in the hallway wall. Our roommate was pretending to sleep and when we asked him what happened. He said someone "broke in," didn't try to take anything, but just busted a hole in our wall (from inside of the bathroom), then slipped out the locked back door. They didn't see him laying on the couch at all either, apparently. Dude was a compulsive liar.
45. Foreign Freak
In freshman year, I had a roommate who barely spoke with me and soiled herself in the room while I was in class. I came back to quite the smell. She also would smoke in the room after constantly letting her know that it was not okay to do in the dorms. She was an international student who barely spoke any English and would spend all day on WoW.
She would also Skype her internet boyfriend from New Zealand until the wee hours of the morning. I tried to get along with her as much as possible, but there were far too many weird occurrences, and seeing her pleasure herself every morning made it almost impossible.
46. Happy Landings
One of my three roommates came home one night with one of her coworkers who was really trashed. The way our apartment was laid out was that there were two bedrooms upstairs and something of a loft/hallway in between the two bedrooms that overlooked our living room; we had a couch up there. The coworker passed out on the couch.
I was downstairs watching TV with my girlfriend, and the next thing I heard was, "Ohhhh", really softly. My girlfriend didn't hear it, so I brushed it off. About a minute later, I heard a bit more moaning, and it was louder. This time my girlfriend heard it too. We turned down the TV, and it just started getting louder. At that point, we didn’t know if the two girls upstairs were going to town on each other or what.
That seemed unlikely since my other roommate had a perfectly good bedroom if that's what they wanted to do. We decided to tiptoe up the stairs and peek over. What we saw was seriously disturbing. The girl was going to town on herself with her pants around her ankles. She either didn't hear us or didn't care and just continued on. We went back downstairs and tried to figure out what to do.
We were debating on calling the other roommate when after a minute or two, it stopped. My girlfriend went back upstairs and found the woman passed out with her pants still around her ankles. My girlfriend just put a blanket over her, and my roommate claimed she didn’t hear a thing.
47. A Cheesy Scenario
I came home late from work one night, and my roommate was crying in the bathtub, drinking Malibu coconut out of the bottle, dressed in some men’s swim trunks I had never seen before, with Seal's "Kiss from a Rose" playing in the background. I then looked to the left and realized she had stapled cheese slices to the wall.
48. The Hypocrite
I had a clean freak roommate who was crazy. She'd literally scream and clean up after you while you were cooking. I'd cut vegetables and be putting the first part into a pan, and she'd walk over furious that I'd left the cutting board out and messy for her to clean up (while I'm literally still using it). But that was only the beginning of the nightmare.
She only ate two things—chicken nuggets and popcorn. She cooked the chicken nuggets on the same baking sheet every day. And when it was caked in nugget residue, she'd put a layer of tin foil over it and cook on that. And then when that layer was gross, instead of removing the tin foil layer, she'd add more tin foil over the top!
When she moved out, she left the pan in the drawer under the stove covered in six layers of greasy burnt crumbed chicken nuggets. She couldn't stand me not cleaning a cutting board halfway through cooking, but apparently, a baking sheet covered in three months of chicken grease and crumbs can go back in the drawer.
She also made herself popcorn every night and then left the uncleaned bowl on the stove all the time. That bowl was never cleaned. She did all of this before she'd go to bed at 7:00 pm. She's had the same bedtime since she was a child. She never went to bed after 8:00 pm. She was a sound sleeper and noise wouldn't wake her.
She would also invite her nieces over with no warning. So, I was working retail at the time and had just worked an inventory until 4:00 am. I got home and at 6:00 am, she and her nieces (aged six and nine) started playing games that involved shrieking.
We'd never have any idea children were even in the apartment until the morning activities and she would get furious at us for implying we'd like them to keep it down until 8:00 am or 9:00 am. However, if we had anyone stay for more than two hours, she'd ask us to pay a higher share of the rent because they now counted as an additional resident.
She'd watch TV in her room with the door open, and get mad if you made too much noise in the living room on the other end of the house while she was watching. But, she would never change the volume or close the door. If she couldn't hear, she'd lecture you about respect.
She also made a big deal about how the cleanliness of the kitchen was of the utmost importance. I got off work two hours early one day, walked in, and almost screamed.
I found her cutting someone's hair in the kitchen! There was hair all over the stove, counter, and floor. Vegetables are a kitchen abomination, but she cuts people's hair in there twice a week and doesn't think it's a big deal at all. Finally, she was moving out. She let us know about a month ahead of time that she'd be leaving.
Her last and greatest smack in the face was that she charged us for the last month's internet service....and the first thing she moved out was the router, which was hers. She refused to reimburse us for the month's internet, and hadn't let us know ahead of time she'd be taking the router. Then, when she was upset, we asked for our money back, she exacted revenge.
The table and chairs we ate at were hers, because she insisted they be the common furniture since it was the only furniture she trusted. We couldn't fit our table and chairs in until she moved them out and she knew it. So, she left the table, our only place to eat, and she left the chairs, but she took the cushions off the chairs!
She had her brothers unscrew the cushions on all the chairs and take them, but left the unusable chairs and table for 29 more days, out of spite. We tried to move her chairs to put our usable chairs down, and she hid all of ours in a closet in her room and set the chairs with no seat back at the table. I still hate her guts.
49. It’s All Downhill From Here
My first-ever roommate in my freshman year of college was one of the most impressive people I had ever met. He had a great job that covered his cost of living and tuition, had his own place, was getting great grades in a tough program, and was with an amazing woman. I was super stoked when he offered to let me rent the second room.
Over the next year, I watched all of that fall apart due to a sudden and overwhelming World of Warcraft addiction. I can still remember the time when I was trying to get him to log off because he was about to miss this long-standing, fancy night out with his girlfriend. He looked at me with genuine remorse and said, "I can’t".
50. Bro, What Are You Doing?
I had an insane roommate in college. I yelled at him during high-pressure finals week to stop partying and turn down the music finally at 4 AM. I woke up an hour later with him standing on the table between our beds, urinating on my bed and me.
Unfortunately, that idiotic roommate was my brother.
51. I Had To See It To Believe It
A friend and I had shared an apartment suite on campus for a school year. We had our own rooms but shared a kitchen and a bathroom. I moved out during the summer and back to my parents' house, but he stayed. For most of the summer, my side of the apartment was left vacant. That is until a guy moved in. This guy had never been to America before that time.
For whatever reason, he had his grandma living in the small apartment with him. He was a bit odd, but it was to be expected from a newcomer. One day, my friends and I were hanging out in my old suitemate's side of the apartment. After a few hours, we all left. As soon as I got home, my friend started messaging me frantically.
My friend got ready for bed and was actually in bed when his door to the bathroom opened up just a crack, and he heard the foreigner say, "Hey, Buddy". So my friend walked over, opened the door, and saw the roommate squatting on the floor in a yellow raincoat, facing away from him. My friend had no idea what was going on, so he closed the door and went back to bed.
A bit later, his door opened again, and again the guy said, "Hey, Buddy, come here". So my friend got up again, walked over to the stall, and saw the dude sitting on the toilet without any clothes, playing with himself. My friend backed up and said, "Uh, I don't want to have any part in this", and quickly left the bathroom, locked the door, and went back to bed.
The next time I was over there, we stayed really quiet for a while. We finally heard a knock on that same door, and the door opened a crack again. I went over to investigate, and sure enough, crouching down on the floor in a yellow raincoat was this guy, whacking off furiously. Even though I'd been warned, I never expected it to actually happen.
52. Laptop Larry
My roommate used to go to parties with his laptop. The only reason I knew this was that he came home late at night with it. However, I realized he never left with his laptop. Then, he started coming home with multiple laptops. One night, he had a stack of four of them. Sometimes he couldn't pay utilities, so I had to cover him for a week or two. Then more laptops would show up, then disappear, then he'd pay me.
53. A Gem Of A Roommate
I once had a roommate for about five years who was literally a genius and also an insanely good person. She built a 3D printer from scratch in our living room before 3D printers were a thing anyone could purchase, and she did it just for fun. She also built a "Hackintosh" for me because I needed more bandwidth and space than what other computers offered at the time.
She also made traditional bagels from scratch at least once per quarter in our kitchen, and the best cheesecake I have ever tasted in my whole entire life. She is a unicorn, and we are still the best of friends, though we no longer live together. I have absolutely no regrets. If people still exchanged friendship bracelets or rings, the gems I would put on hers would be huge.
This Earth, universe etc. doesn’t deserve her. Not sure what dimension does, honestly. I am just proud to call her a friend. What do I bring to our friendship? Not enough. That’s for sure. First and foremost, upon our first meeting, I was honest and kind. It is amazing how often people discount and write off people because they don’t fit an archetype.
My dearest friend, the genius who is also an amazing baker, is one of the kindest people I have ever met. We are both word game nuts and I demolish her in word games quite often. I have also helped her via my areas of expertise and we make each other laugh uproariously. We’ve been friends for about 15 years.
54. A Happy Ending
I had a roommate for several years who was a decent guy. He was quiet, cleaned up after himself and was respectful. But the poor guy's life was terrible. He dropped out of high school at age 17. Then he started selling substances, which he got caught for by an undercover officer. Being uneducated, he ended up with a permanent record.
On top of that, he had a child and things did not work out with his baby’s mother, so he owed child support. This guy was working as a dishwasher at restaurants for $10 an hour (probably less). He had no car, and the closest bus route to where we lived was a mile walk (uphill) from our apartment. He did this every day.
One day, I was talking to my dad, who loves to ride bicycles and has many. I asked him if one could be offered to my friend. He put some new pedals on a road bike of his and I gave it to my friend. On the third day after he had been given the bike, I was awoken randomly to knocks on my bedroom door and some mumbled speech.
I open my door and there's my roommate, with his hand up to his face, covered in blood and maybe a tooth in there. He had placed his bag of clothes on the handlebar, and the drag from the front tire pulled the bag in and caused him to faceplant on concrete. I remember taking him to the hospital, and he asked me to look at his mouth.
Believe it or not, this has a happy ending. After this injury, he'd had enough of walking to the bus, so he got a second job, and began saving up to buy a car. For the first few weeks though, this guy was walking to the bus, and then working a 16+ hour day. There was a gap between jobs, where he couldn't rest much, so was probably getting four hours of sleep a night.
He was saving funds and due to his child support, he could only eat Banquet $1 frozen dinners…all day. That's all he had was one of those. He eventually got the car and his quality of life got marginally better before we parted ways. He ended up moving in with family and closer to bus lines.
It may not be the most extraordinarily interesting story ever, but what that guy went through, I can't imagine. He used to tell me when he was walking home at night, he often contemplated stepping into oncoming traffic. Thankfully, he never did. After we both left the apartment and went our separate ways, we kept in touch.
However, he frequently had phone issues when we lived together. I reached out to him to check in five years ago and never heard back. I hope he's ok.
55. The Not-So-Great Trumpet Player
I lived with a guy who drank like water and played the trumpet. But, that's just the beginning. He couldn't really play the trumpet. He would play the theme to "The Flintstones" but always got stuck on one note. I wanted to take a shovel to the trumpet right at the moment he would mess it up, to put us both out of our misery.
In addition, he had a saltwater fish tank. No fish could live in it because it was a green algae cesspool of filth. The smell was that of a soggy swamp sneaker in a hot gym locker. He would stand and stare at it and chuckle to himself. He also cooked pounds and pounds of kale then would try and get the stalks down the garbage disposal, which always broke it.
On top of that, he would wear a purple robe with no clothes on under it. Granted, the guy meant no harm, he was just so annoying to live with. I still wonder to this day where he is. He went by a name other than his original, so I don't know how to find him.
56. Blocked By My Bestie
I lived in an apartment with three of my sorority sisters my senior year. We were all best friends, and things were perfect until we came back from winter break. One of the girls was suddenly acting really shady to us. She was fine with all the other sisters, and she started trying to turn them against us after a while. It was just weird stuff like she’d walk into the room, and I’d say, "Hey! How’s it going"? and she’d flat-out ignore me.
She started leaving us passive-aggressive notes about little things that were angering her that were all, apparently, our fault. One day, we all sat her down and asked her, "Why are you mad at us? Seriously, did we do something"? She replied, "No, how have I been acting mad toward you"? Like we were crazy. So, we asked if something was going on with her personal life and if she wanted to talk about it.
She just started yelling at us and stormed up to her room. For the rest of the spring semester, we just coexisted. After graduation, she unfriended and blocked us all and completely disconnected from our lives. We still have no idea what caused all this.
57. All Drama, No Dignity
I lived with my sister and her friend from high school. Her friend would go into crazy screaming rages about minor things, like our printer not working, and accused my sister of "cleaning the house too much". She would eat our food but complain if we so much as touched even a packet of ramen that she had. She would host crazy parties, let people get busy on my bed and blankets, then do nothing to clean the mess. But that wasn’t the most miserable part.
The worst was when a guy came into the picture, and he liked my sister, but the roommate liked him too. She became unbearable, calling my sister names, flipping out at her, etc. She was inconsiderate, rude, dramatic, and just an unpleasant person to be around. Nothing could happen without her turning into this huge deal and situation; if we were so much as out of toilet paper, it was the end of the world.
58. Pee Pods
My roommate living on the floor above me stored urine in open cans. They were not even labeled, organized, or even cleaned out. She was an engineering student. Nothing in her curriculum would require this as an experiment. I only found out about it because I had to fix the house's router, which was kept in her room. I was so confused.
59. Soothing StarCraft
My South Korean roommate in college played StarCraft well into the night. We're talking like I'd be getting up to go to class and he'd be logging off. It cured my insomnia. Listening to a game in a language I didn't understand was very soothing, apparently. I went from taking three to four hours a night to fall asleep (if I would at all) to falling asleep within 30 seconds of laying my head down.
60. Sleeping Shakespeare
There are plenty, but one of my roommates used to sleepwalk and sleep-talk almost every night. I was the only one who'd be awake whenever it would happen. I'd witness her cleaning our fridge, sealing our opened bag of chips, and I'd hear her quote Shakespeare in her sleep. What made her go back to bed was my asking her to sleep.
She'd look at me and close her eyes. Whenever I ask her if she recalled any of it, the answer was always no.
61. Quirky Roommate
When I lived in a dorm, I had this roommate who was a mostly normal and nice guy, but he had a few quirks for sure.
He would frequently pace back and forth while making gestures with his hands and would whisper and laugh to himself. It was a little creepy because I’d be playing video games or watching a movie at around midnight on the weekend and I’d see him out of the corner of my eye, just pacing back and forth in the dark.
I never had a "bad" experience with him though and he was alright to live with for the half year or so that I did. I’m relatively sure he had some undiagnosed condition.
62. Cool It, Cat Lady!
My first ever roommate in my second year of college was a 30-something-year-old cat lady who looked like the love child of Chris Farley and Mario Batali. I would go upstairs every night and shut off the lights and would wake up with them all on, and come home after classes with all the lights on and the heat BUMPING to 75°F.
Heating and electricity were not included in the rent. After getting two bills that were astronomically high, I confronted her about the lights and the electricity. She burst into tears about how her one cat had severe anxiety, and the bright lights and heat were essential in keeping her comfortable and calm. She moved out two months later because I wouldn't accommodate her cat.
63. The Matturbator
I had a roommate freshman year who would chronically pleasure himself. In fact, his name was Matt, so we called him the Matturbator. I'd always walk in on him going at it, even when I would jiggle the doorknob for like 30 straight seconds. In addition, my schedule was clearly posted on the wall, and he knew exactly what time I'd be walking in each day. Yet there he was, with his dirty rag on his knee. Another year, I had a roommate who would try to spoon me—not cool.
64. He Was A Real Piece Of Work
I had a college roommate who was the absolute worst at sharing, especially with toilet paper. I would frequently buy a six-pack, only to be staring at six empty rolls by the week's end. After an entire semester's worth of this, I had had it. I began hiding my own personal toilet paper as a social experiment. A month or so passed, and the paper was never replaced—not once.
Later on, I overheard my roommate in the middle of an angry, whiny call to his mother about his allowance and maintaining his lifestyle. That’s when I learned the nasty truth about what he’d been doing.
By the end of the conversation, he was fuming, and before he hung up on his mom, he yelled, "I've been wiping my [rear] with printer paper for a week"! I had lent him printer paper.
65. Too Quick To Call The Authorities
My roommate called an ambulance on our other roommate in the middle of the night because she thought our roommate was cutting. Her evidence was that there were red spots on a towel. What actually happened was that our roommate dyed her hair red, which she showed off the day before to everyone. She didn’t even tell anyone what she found; she just assumed the worst.
66. Moldy Beans
My roommate once created a whole new lifeform by leaving beans in the fridge until they molded so bad that they became pure white. Then, she got mad when I threw it away because she was going to use it later.
67. Friends Forever
We met when we showed up for dorm room assignments during our freshman year of college. Almost 50 years later, we're still the closest of friends. I recently attended his daughter's wedding. A grand affair, because he happens to be uber-wealthy. At one point, I found myself choking up, and it wasn't for the bride and groom, it was for him and me…how far we've come.
68. Holy Hippy, He Was Nuts!
After my girlfriend and I broke up, I moved in with this really strange hippy. Life was grand, and the rent was cheap. He sold weed and smoked it all day; I woke up EVERY MORNING for seven months with a blunt in my mouth. The dude was creepy and stank, but he loved to buy my acid or trade it for rent and whatnot. We decided to drive from Ohio to Wyoming for a festival, so we loaded the car with insane amounts of dope, and off we went.
We were taken into custody two miles from said festival. After he got out of the pokey, we went back to Ohio to pack up our stuff and go back to Wyoming for court. On the first day back, we went to our campsite at 10 AM and started drinking. At around 5 PM, the dude started crawling around on the ground, growling at me. I sat him down to have a talk with him, but he was out of his mind, saying weird things.
I started freaking out because he was rubbing my leg, holding my ankle, and saying, "WITH THIS ANKLE! YOU WILL LISTEN"! He then hit the ground really hard. I left him there to go back to drinking, and a few minutes later, he ran out of the camp. He ended up at another campsite face first in the mud, in front of three kids and a mother. The mom was cool and told me to collect my friend. I wish I’d never tried.
I went up to him, and he bit my leg, tearing a piece of flesh out and knocking me to the ground. I told the mom to call the authorities while I was wrestling the guy. I broke his nose and dislocated his jaw, but not before he took another chunk out of my side with his teeth.
69. She Was Off Her Noodle
During freshman year, I lived with ten girls in two triple rooms and four single rooms. I had a roommate who lived in one of the triple rooms. She seemed shy at first, so the nine of us tried to show her around campus, introduce her to friends, etc. When she didn't warm up to any of us after a few weeks, we pretty much gave up and just said "hello" whenever we saw her, which was practically never.
She was usually asleep from 8 AM–8 PM. She never went to class and would ask for our notes when she woke up. It got annoying after a while, but we figured she was homesick, so we obliged. We were never mean to her, just not overly friendly since she never seemed to make the effort. About a month into the quarter, she started to get really snarky with the two girls who lived in her room.
She would yell at them if they talked during the day when she was trying to sleep. She would sit in the living room and watch TV at 3 AM, which bothered the rest of us. She started eating ramen and chicken—nothing else—and when she was done, she would just leave her stuff on her desk. Over the course of two months, all the empty ramen cups and dirty plates—with chicken bones still on them—began to pile up.
Eventually, you could no longer see out the window. At some point, we realized that we had never seen her take a shower. After observing her for a week, we found no shampoo or conditioner, no pants aside from the pair she always wore, and no underwear. When we asked her about the lack of shampoo, she said she used mayonnaise in her hair to make it shiny.
Finally, she snapped. She started stomping around the living room and crying at all hours of the night. Whenever we tried to comfort her, she would yell at us and say we were horrible people. The RAs eventually stopped coming because she would call them every single night. She stepped out onto the balcony one night and threatened to jump off the six-story building.
We called the RAs, but when they arrived, she locked herself in her room—locking her two roommates out—insisted that we were all lying and that she wasn't going to take her life. Sadly enough, we weren't able to get her tossed out until she smacked one of us across the face.
The residential dean said that our roommate was a "fire hazard" due to all the stuff piled up in front of the window.
She was told to leave our apartment within 24 hours. As she was cleaning everything out of her room, cockroaches started skittering all over the place. She proceeded to move out of two more on-campus apartments that year. Then, we never heard from her again. She was a mess.
70. Trying To Keep Abreast Of The Craziness
I had a roommate who had a mild breakdown when I lived with her. A friend of mine suggested a person he knew in high school to be her replacement. He told me this new girl was really straight-laced, very religious, and quiet. While I was none of those things, I thought it might make her a good, unobtrusive roommate. It turned out that while she may have been those things around her parents, she was none of those things in college.
She was a slob who smoked and drank every day, then shut herself in her room eating any food in the house, mine included. She was also bizarrely frisky, having constant loud nookie with her gross boyfriend and letting us know how "wet" she was at a restaurant. She wasn't so much crazy as gross. But one incident was so much worse than the others.
One day I was in my room, sitting up on my bed studying. I must have been very engrossed in whatever I was reading because I noticed she had come into my room, but I didn't pay much attention to what she was doing. Seconds later, she had pulled her enormous bosom out of her shirt and laid it on my face. Then, she just giggled and left my room.
71. Pumpkin Permit
My roommate wanted to buy a giant pumpkin for Halloween. I convinced him that he needed to go to city hall and apply for a pumpkin permit. But here's the kicker. He actually went and tried to apply.
72. Disney Dreams
I had a roommate in college who could only fall asleep if he watched Disney movies at night. I had to listen to them every night for hours while trying to sleep. I now hate The Lion King with the passion of a thousand burning suns.
73. Recharging
My old roommate (who is also my best friend) would put out crystals or rocks on the fence outside during full moons to get recharged. This is insanely out of character for him. I thought it was hilarious, but I never made fun of it or questioned it.
74. No Money Back Guarantee
I once had a roommate who almost burnt the whole house down because he used a paper towel to hold his food in the toaster oven. He claimed the oven rack was dirty, so he put paper instead. I'm sure it also didn't help that he put a thin plastic dish on top of the oven while it was heating up his food. The dish melted while the rest of the toaster oven caught on fire.
Then, he wanted me to refund him for the cost of his sandwich because I had gotten fire extinguisher residue on his food. I punched him in the nose, real hard. He moved out two days later.
75. A Sick Joke
In college, I lived on the same floor as a girl named LeeAnn. Another person and I on our floor had cars. One day, LeeAnn had a cold. She went to ask another floormate where either of us was, so we could take her to Walgreens. Both of us car owners were in class—so she got "revenge" on us.
She went around and coughed on our door knobs.
76. Firestarter
I had a flatmate who set the couch in the house on fire to clean off the germs. She thought my female friend and I were lesbians who got busy on it because she heard grunting one night coming from the room. The remote went under the couch, and the grunting was us lifting the four-seater. The sound only lasted 10 seconds, so only God knows how she thought we had done the deed that quickly.
77. The Forger
My roommate forged a work check for a restaurant I was running while I was away. He used the proceeds to buy airfare to the Caribbean. This was in the fall of 1999. Nobody has seen or heard from him since.
78. The Everlasting Turkey
My former roommate cooked a turkey on Thanksgiving and left it there for a month, picking and eating at it. I threw it away and she took it out of the trash and told me she’d sue me if I touched her stuff anymore. She continued to eat the turkey after getting it out of trash (and yes, it was uncovered just sitting on the stove this whole time).
79. Can’t Boil Water
I taught a roommate how to boil water. Iced tea was the first thing that she had ever made, other than sandwiches and salads.
80. From Friends To Enemies
My sophomore and junior years of college I spent living with two friends. One is still a good friend and current roomie, the other is now a sworn enemy. Moving in, all was well. Everyone had their own bed/bath area and a nice big common room that made our apartment a major meeting place among our friends. The roommate in question was an awkward dude but seemed alright at first.
A couple of months after we moved in, he started drinking tea a lot, leaving the dripping tea ball and leaves on the counter. We talked to him several times about this, and eventually hid his tea ball when he left home. We thought that things were good after that, but he decided to start cooking more, and it was some of the foulest stuff ever.
The smell, along with the massive amounts he'd eat, was disgusting. The worst part, though, was his room. It was an absolute hole. There were dirty clothes lying around everywhere, empty food wrappers, half-eaten plates festering for days on end, and a mountain of empty soda cans and bottles. His room was closest to the front door, and he ALWAYS left his door open, so the stench permeated the apartment.
I took to closing it every time I saw it open, whether he was there or not, and spraying Febreze through the vent above his door, just to keep the place livable. He also took terrible care of his gaming systems. He offered to let us use his PS2 to watch a movie one evening. Ten minutes into the film, it stopped reading the disc. We opened it up and found melted chocolate all over the lens and lens track.
As if the filth itself wasn’t bad enough, his personality was what really pushed me over the edge. He was a hanger-on, pure and simple, and had no sense of personal responsibility. He was so messy and socially inept that our upstairs friends took to the practice of "Anne Franking" if they got a knock on the door. They would sit in total silence and darkness the second they heard a knock.
Then, they would quietly sneak to see who it was, and if it was anyone but him, they were welcome. When I left town for a week to go home, I found the apartment in total disarray, and he told one of my friends that it was nice to go a week without MY mess. I nearly snapped. His walls, all the way to his bed, had black stains and streaks from mold. We had management bleach his walls and bathroom for the health of everyone who came over.
81. Out The Window
In my freshman year of college, I lived on the first floor of a dorm that had a window looking out into a gated courtyard. My roommate and his friends would come in and out of the window instead of using the door, tracking in dirt while using our coffee table as a stepping stool. It wasn't a nice coffee table, but it got the job done, and having to constantly clean dirt off of it was no fun.
Not being able to lock the window was also not comforting. One day, my roommate's friends wanted to come over to our place and hang out, but he wasn't answering his phone. So, as brilliant as they were, they decided to hop the fence into the courtyard and come over to the window and let themselves in. One of the campus officers had watched them hop the gate and go into a room through a window, so he thought they were breaking into someone's room.
He came over to the window and started banging on it and yelling at the guys to get out and had them "assume the position" outside until he could verify my roommate did actually live there and these guys were his friends. He would also call me at three or four in the morning to let him in after he had forgotten his key, left dirty underwear all over the place, and left brew cans lying around. I am so glad I do not have to see this person again.
82. What A Cry Baby!
My friends had a roommate, Dan. Dan's girlfriend went streaking with a friend of hers—a tradition at our school—and Dan was not very happy. In fact, his response was chilling. He spent the next three nights in his room blasting "Ave Maria" and crying his eyes out. It was pitiful. To top it all off, we'd assumed it was because he'd gotten dumped by this chick who was way out of his league, but it wasn’t.
It was just because she had gone streaking. He also had a penchant for breaking window screens and doors—about three doors per year. One time he keyed a random chick's Audi just because he was sloshed and felt like it. He also destroyed a 5-foot-tall aluminum suit of armor one of our friends had. He’d regularly pick arguments, then run away crying the instant someone laid a hand on him.
83. Burnt Beans
I roomed with a platonic female friend in the early 2000s. One day, she took it upon herself to microwave a burrito. Unfortunately, for some reason, she set the time to the conventional oven time. Which meant 40 minutes instead of three. The place smelled like burnt beans for days.
84. The Ghost Did It
My roommate went into my room while I was out, and left her curling iron on my laptop which melted the top through to the screen. The screen was totally ruined. I got home and noticed, and asked her if she had done it since I don't even own a curling iron. She denied it, and said that it must have been "a ghost or a burglar".
85. These Books Don’t Belong
I had a roommate who yelled at me for reading my own books because it messed up the decor. The books were sorted by color and not subject, but reading them apparently made them look not as new. Yeah...my own books.
86. Who Ate My Food?
I had roommates who were Seventh-Day Adventists. They would always eat my food. They said they were not allowed to eat pork, so I started buying only lunch meats that obviously contained pork, but they still ate it anyway.
87. Pimple Popper
My dormmate freshman year, seemed like a nice guy at first. Then, one rainy day I picked up a sandwich and was eating on my bed while he was using his computer at the foot of my bed. This dude was pretty sweaty all the time and was, in turn, pretty greasy and pretty pimply. I had pretty bad skin too, so I didn't really think anything of it until the event that is now seared into my mind forever.
The kid had a giant pimple/boil/God knows what on the inner elbow of his arm. He was watching TV and slowly squeezed it until his arm was covered in blood and pus. This all happened while I was eating my sandwich. I was staring in morbid curiosity when he quickly ripped off the sock he was wearing and wiped his arm until it was clean. Then, he put the sock back on and wore it all day.
Days later, I still couldn't get over it, so while he was gone, I peeked in his closet and found bloody-stained white tees, socks, and shorts everywhere in there. From that point on, I never touched anything he had.
88. He Needed A Code Of Silence
For a year, my buddies and I lived with a Bible-thumping Catholic. He believed every word in the Bible was literal. What made matters worse was that this was when The Da Vinci Code was enjoying a great deal of success and media attention. He claimed he wasn't the preachy type, but when anything about The Da Vinci Code came up, he went bananas and told us we were all going to burn with the devil.
89. Beam Me Up Please!
One day, upon coming home and finding my roommate watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, as he did all day, every day, I told him, "Star Trek sucks". In the midst of his screaming, crying rampage, he smashed several things and repeatedly threatened to "punch me right in the nose". Then, he went to his room, slammed the door, and cried himself to sleep.
90. Seldomly Showers
I had a random roommate that showered once a week. Yes, you read that correctly. Thankfully, he was too lazy to go to class as well, and lasted only two semesters.
91. Clowning Around
I lived with two clowns. I woke up to them practicing their routines on many occasions. It ranged from them laying on a bed of nails while chainsawing a watermelon to sword swallowing. It was great.
92. Some Things Never Change
I had a roommate who was not really good at keeping his stuff clean. He had a white bedsheet. Three months later, I noticed his bed sheet was different because it was brown this time. I told him, "Wow, you finally changed your bed sheets!" His response sent a shiver down my spine.
He replied, "What are you talking about? I haven't changed it". I cringed. The worst part? It's been eight years and he's still like this.
93. TV Junkie
My first roommate in college used to watch nothing but judge shows—Judge Judy, Judge Alex, Judge Mathis, Judge Joe Brown, People's Court, and Divorce Court. Occasionally he'd mix in a little Charmed or that card cartoon show. He never left the room. His classes were later than mine and finished earlier. If he went out to eat, he'd get it to go and bring it back, so he was there every day watching these stupid shows.
A week or two in, I learned the bizarre truth. He had actually been RECORDING these shows and was watching them on replay. He had seen most of them so many times he was able to say the punchlines with the character, and he'd still laugh! I wanted to burn the dorm down. If he was watching live TV, he would call one of his two friends, and they'd watch the same show at the same time and talk about it over the phone. I suggested that maybe he go over to their place and watch it together, but he didn’t like that.
94. The Odd Gal Out
In college, my girlfriend lived with three other girls in an apartment. Despite having bad roommates before, my girlfriend had grown to like the girls for being such an eclectic mix. There was the "country girl" who was somewhat of a Southern belle but carried a snub-nosed pistol for safety; the "shy girl" who was a naive, book-smart introvert who seemed a bit too young for college; and the third was the "crazy girl" who, at first, was your typical extrovert with aspirations of sorority life.
Typical to most random roommate living situations, each person had their own set of dishes, while some of the items in the apartment were communal. The couch and dining table in the great room were both my girlfriend’s, left over from her previous bad apartment experience.
My girlfriend first started having issues with her things going missing.
It started with glasses and dishes, and eventually, all the table chairs were gone. While Crazy was out in class, the girls would occasionally check her room if the door was unlocked. Sure enough, they'd find their dishes and glasses piled on top of the dining table chairs, which were being used as dinner trays so Crazy could watch TV and eat her food in bed.
The conflicting schedules and combined passive-aggressive nature of the other girls left them with the only option of leaving Crazy, carefully worded notes with friendly and casual tones. Crazy, of course, and flipped out every time she got a note. She would go into her room and scream about how she lived with a bunch of whiners. It was at about that time that my girlfriend opted to start living in my apartment rather than her own.
She would only stay at her apartment two or three nights a week to make sure her things were okay, and that Country and Shy were okay. It seemed each time she stayed there, Shy and Country would come out of their rooms with horror stories of how things were getting worse. They would joke and laugh about it, but as soon as Crazy got home, they went back into their rooms and locked their doors.
Things escalated around the time of Mardi Gras. Crazy went to New Orleans with a bunch of friends. She got so trashed that she literally lost her car. She ended up hitching a ride home, and to this day, we don't know what happened to that car. Without personal transportation, Crazy did a 180 and tried to be nice to the other girls in order to bum rides everywhere.
Then, she found an over-middle-aged man who drove a piece of junk. She allowed this 40+-year-old man to stay in the apartment, even while she was gone at classes. This, much to Crazy's surprise, didn't sit well with Shy and Country, who escalated the situation to the property managers. The property managers forced Crazy to evict the love of her life, which is when she went super-Saiyan crazy.
She started coming home from sorority events and would throw things at the barricaded doors of Country and Shy. She would leave notes telling them that she was going to off them in their sleep or start a fire and burn the apartment down. On more than one occasion, they would wake to find burnt matches under their doors.
After a few days of that, they went to the authorities to investigate their options. By then, my girlfriend refused to go back to the apartment. Crazy ultimately vanished, but not before smashing all the girl’s dishes, including two crystal glasses my girlfriend had inherited. My girlfriend graduated, and I transferred out.
We found out later that Crazy, while still driving her soul partner's junk mobile, came across Shy, who was walking across a crosswalk on campus, and tried to run her over. Luckily, Shy was only slightly hurt, and Crazy was definitely taken into custody.
95. Dirty Deeds
In college, I lived with some truly disgusting boys. They had no dishes of their own, so they would always borrow mine. Instead of washing and returning what they took, they stored everything in the dirty dish cupboard. If I wanted them back I had to wash them myself after they sat in the cupboard for a while, molding. Later, I got ringworm from sitting on their couch. They also had a "pee couch". At one point, it got moved outside below the balcony so they could literally all pee on it together.
96. The Exorcist
I had a very religious roommate once named Mike, who thought I was religious, too. He would often exclaim things like, "Oh my gosh! There are so many people outside! We should be evangelizing!" He would never read any books except the Bible, literally, and he would often pray right in the middle of the common space on his hands and knees.
He was a weird guy, but he always paid his rent on time, kept his dishes clean, and it's hard to find roommates. Anyway, one day while I was reading a book in the living room, Mike came out looking very concerned and asked to talk. The first thing out of his mouth made by blood run cold".
I think there's a demon living in this house," he said. I'm the kind of person who likes to ask for detail, so I asked him to tell me more. "Well," he started, "Last night I had a dream…no, not a dream, a nightmare. A snake was choking me, and I was fighting with it".
He exaggerated hand movements a little aggressively to demonstrate his wrestling. "Finally, I threw it off of me, but then I realized I was awake, so I sat up". He continued, "I looked over at your side of the bed, and that's when I saw it". I asked him what he saw, and I became more excited.
He said, "The demon. The dark cloud man was just standing next to your bed, watching you sleep. He was like a cloudy shadow with white eyes. I think it's possessing the house". Amazed by what he was saying, I asked what we should do about it. "Have an exorcism," he responded. I almost spat out my drink".
Well, I've never done that before," I told him. "I have," he interrupted. So, I agreed to it. Anyway, basically, he had blessed holy water (from the tap) and was walking around the room tossing it here and there yelling, "IN THE NAME OF JESUS CHRIST, I COMMAND YOU TO LEAVE, DEMON!"
Meanwhile, I was trying not to laugh for the whole 30 minutes until he finished. He was literally sweating in prayer, and finally stood up to say, "It is done," and walked to his room. We never talked about it ever again.
97. Opposites Don’t Attract
In my freshman year of college, I was randomly assigned a roommate to share a tiny room. I was a quiet computer science student from the San Francisco area, who liked video games and D&D. My assigned roommate was a huge Mechanical Engineering major from the South who liked his lifted truck and getting plastered as often as possible.
Needless to say, the next six months were not fun. He constantly left his garbage everywhere, played loud country music, and messed around with my stuff (including scratching a nasty slur into my good stapler). As the year went on, he seemed to get worse, probably due to finding a group of like-minded people in the dorms.
Long story short, he was kicked out of the dorms about two weeks before spring break. He and another guy went on a rampage through the dorm with Airsoft guns, nailing the little whiteboard on everyone's door. For some reason, though, he was allowed to stay until the break. I stupidly left for home before he did, and when I got back my very nice gaming PC was missing.
I reported it missing, and told the authorities exactly where I thought it was (at his new place). They apparently searched it, and though they didn't find my computer, they found enough other stolen goods to get him expelled from school. Thankfully, my replacement roommate was a very nice, quiet guy, and the rest of the year went well.
98. Foreign Behavior
I lost the random roommate lottery freshman year of college. My roommate was a foreign exchange student from China, and we had nothing in common. There are a few odd things she did. For example, she would wash her clothes in the sink, not the washing machine. She would hang the clothes up to dry, even on my side of the room.
I finally convinced her that she couldn't hang her wet clothes on my TV. I came home one afternoon and she had hung a wet dress over my closet door. It was soaking and had ruined all my pictures from home. She came back to me crying on the floor and she patted my shoulder and said, "It’s okay. It’s only photos". Oh, but that's not all.
On top of that, she liked the room hot. Not warm, hot. She would turn the thermostat up to 85 degrees. I tried to talk to her over and over about a compromise, but finally, I got fed up. I ended up opening the window when it was 15 degrees outside. We both got sick, but at least I wasn't so hot. She also told me I had to take my room decorations down.
She also hated my boyfriend. He would come over, and we'd sit on my bed and play X-Box. When she would come back from class and see him there, she'd take all her clothes off, turn the lights off, and go to bed. Didn't matter if it was 3:00 pm or 9:00 pm. Then she hit a new low.
Instead of talking to me about my boyfriend, she told the RA I was bullying her. She would also dry her hair while I was doing homework in the room. Furthermore, she refused to take medicine for things. I get that it was her culture, but she would lie on the bed and scream from menstrual cramps while chewing on a ginger root. In short, she was evil.
99. Feel The Heat
My freshman year roommate was an Army ROTC cadet with no survival instinct who constantly talked about inane drivel while continually engaging in self-destructive behavior for attention. One day, I was on my computer when he said to me, "Wanna see me light myself on fire"? I told him no, then he replied, "OK! Check this out".
Apparently, there's a trick where you can dip your hand in some water, then in alcohol really quickly, and light your hand on fire without it burning yourself. However, my roommate wasn't the sort of person to get the details all worked out before trying that sort of thing. He gave it a try, and the next thing I knew, he was cursing up a storm. His response was, "I DIDN'T EXPECT IT TO BE SO HOT"!
100. Baby, Please Don’t Go…
I was sharing a house with a middle-aged woman on a month-to-month lease. I had a friend who was moving out of the country and needed someone to finish out her lease, so I told her I would. I told my roommate that I was giving my 30-day notice, and she seemed fine—for a few days, at least. Later, I found out how she really felt.
I came home to an eight-page—front and back—handwritten manifesto nailed to my door stating how I was tearing a hole in her soul that could never be repaired. I had only lived there for three months.
101. Spooky
There was this one night my roommate had gone home because he was sick, so I was pretty excited to have the room to myself.
Later that night, I was woken up by the door to our room being opened. I thought nothing of it because I thought my roommate had probably just decided to come back. I then hear him walk across the floor and jump into his bed. I thought it was a little weird for him to be coming back this quick, but whatever.
When I woke up in the morning, his bed was still perfectly made and he had never actually come back that night. I have never been more scared in my entire life.
102. 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 awful 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.
103. ReCraigslisted
I sublet a room from the craziest woman on the planet. One week after moving in, I’m looking on Craigslist and I happen to see my own room back up for rent. I came home to confront her about my discovery and she was setting up a showing: of my own room! I confronted her about it, and it turns out, she wasn't kicking me out.
She wanted me to move all of my stuff to her room for one month because she wants to go to Europe. Oh, and that I need to pay $200 more during that month. So basically, I couldn't keep my room; I would have to move all of my belongings to her room while someone else occupies the room I'm renting, and then move all my stuff back to my room. It made no sense.
104. 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 snatch 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.
105. Cam Girl
Prior to moving in, she called me to ask if she could draw pictures of bunnies on our wall. I said no. But alas, I moved into a room with bunnies drawn on the wall. After a few weeks of living together, I discovered she was doing a webcam show while I was in the background doing my chemistry homework! I ended up moving out shortly after because she was up all night on her webcam, and I couldn't sleep. But that wasn't even the worst of it.
I also once came home to her playing Twister in the living room with strangers...without he clothes on. She also left used tampons around the apartment. That was the final straw for me.
106. When Parents Don’t Know Best
I walked into the room for the first time freshman year, and was greeted by a chilling sight. My future roommate was standing in the middle of the room and screaming at his dad. He was yelling about not wanting to go, and how he blamed his mom for writing his college essay and filling out the application. The dad kept calling my roommate, who I shall name Eduardo, an "ungrateful piece of poop". Except he didn’t say poop.
The dad then started threatening to beat the heck out of him if he tried to leave. It was right after he finished speaking that they realized I was in the room. They both pretended nothing had happened, shook my hand, and introduced themselves. Luckily, my parents had not walked in with me, so they didn't have to see that and be worried.
Eventually, my parents met his parents as they helped me set up the room, and they all talked about how proud of us they were. Eduardo's dad kept saying things like "It's either college or the street, cause I'm not paying to support a failure". My parents, of course, thought he was joking. Every day, this kid told me how much he hated school.
He would never go to class. He would drink in the room all day with the door wide open, despite the fact that we were a dry campus and drinking was strictly prohibited. He would scream at everyone, party all night, and generally just be a jerk. He used to watch VH1 every night until close to 4:00 in the morning, with the volume cranked up so loud you couldn't hear anything else.
When I asked him to turn it down because I couldn't hear anything else, he said he would do so on the condition that I wrestled him. Turns out he was serious. He wanted to wrestle me, because of me asking him to turn down that Bret Michaels Rock of Love show. I declined and went to bed. The next day, he called his mom and asked her to come get him.
She agreed to do so and said she was getting in the car. I thought my nightmare was over—but I was so wrong. She never came. He LOST HIS MIND. He broke everything he owned. Punched a hole through his TV, slammed his Guitar Hero controllers on the ground repeatedly, threw his Xbox out the window, cracked his cell phone in half, ripped his bedsheets, you name it. He basically totaled his side of the room.
I left the room during all this, assuming he was just blowing off steam. I had no idea he was actually breaking his stuff. I walked back into an absolute warzone. He was standing in the middle of the room, crying, drinking laundry detergent, and yelling about how he didn’t want to live. He claimed he had taken a whole bottle of Advil after he broke his stuff.
I ran to get the RA. Meanwhile, he ran and took the broken glass and plastic shards from his computer monitor and started cutting his wrists. The RA and I re-entered the room to see this kid throwing up detergent and bleeding. The authorities were called. They fed him charcoal to prevent him from dying due to the detergent and pills.
Apparently, they do this instead of ipecac syrup. He left that night. Woke me up to say goodbye on his way out. Last thing he said to me? "Goodbye buddy, sorry about ruining your birthday!" I have no idea what he was referring to there. I swear on my life, this story is 100% true. And so is the part where he tried to sneak back in and kill me a few months later.
