Getting a roommate can be a great opportunity to save money, split up responsibilities, and get know a lifelong friend. But sometimes, a bad roommate can spell complete and utter disaster. Whether these people were rude, dishonest, or just plain disgusting, these Redditors shared stories of roommates who made them want to never live with anyone else again.
1. Sweating It Out
I let my boss crash at my second apartment about 15 years ago. It was a terrible timeshare call center where everyone were pretty everyman types, so he and I were more friends than coworkers. Anyway, he loses his apartment and asks to stay with me for a couple of months while he gets back on his feet and I agree—but there was dark side to it.
He's a great dude. Kind, smart, funny, confident. Around a month into staying with us, he decides to get clean from his crippling addiction. He's decided to cold-turkey, which is pretty intense. I advised rehab, but he elected to lie on the couch in my living room for weeks, costing him his job, sweating like crazy and shaking under a blanket.
He sweats a lot already, and had to take pains to mitigate his body odor on normal, but with the withdrawals and being mostly sedentary on that textile couch for weeks, the apartment started to smell like a hot sweat-forest. It used to be a party-house with a revolving door, and people just kind of stopped coming during his tenure there. Even with my bedroom door closed, the stench was pervasive.
It wasn't his fault, I liked the man, and he was trying to better himself and his life, so I put up with it. And he succeeded. He got himself a new place in the agreed time frame, stayed clean and everything was hunky-dory. After he moved out, my actual roommate and I carried the couch to the parking lot dumpster and it took several days to air out the smell. We even did a thermal fog with an oil-based cherry-scented counteractant, and it still didn't help.
2. The Burgeoning Demon
I shared a quad in college with a girl named Monica. She was fine in the beginning, but then began doing things like hiding the toilet paper, trying to limit how much time we spent in the shared living room, allowed a homeless man to sleep on the sofa, and hoarded cutlery. She decided she wanted to be a vampire and had her teeth filed into points at the end of the year. We started referring to her as “Demonica “.
3. Meeting The Family
On the first night in the new shared apartment I was renting, my landlord slept on the floor in my living room on a rug. I thought that was weird, but I was not in a position to argue, as I really needed a place to live. Then, over the next couple of months, my landlord moved in and brought over eight family members from Turkmenistan, including a newborn baby, and they all lived in two bedrooms. When I complained, his reaction was twisted.
He locked me out of the apartment. I called the authorities, who let me in and scolded the family. It was a nightmare. I finally got out of there and never looked back.
4. Winning The Game
My roommate played League of Legends all night. If the game didn't go his way, he would scream in frustration and beat his fists on his desk, no matter what time of the night it was. It was difficult to get a full night's sleep with him roaring and pounding every few hours. He would also eat at his desk and broke several of the dishes I had bought for the apartment during his little tantrums.
Eventually, he decided that he needed to be more alert during his marathon gaming sessions. Most people would invest in coffee or energy drinks, but no, he decided he needed to buy other things. He told us he was "too smart to get addicted", but at that point I decided I'd had enough and noped out. I took what remained of my dishes with me.
5. Plants In Peril
Dude told me my majesty palm tree was fine in the apartment common area after I asked him if it was cool. I was rinsing my dishes in the sink later that same night, and he barreled out of his room in full, unhinged temper tantrum mode, screaming “I want all your plants out of here tomorrow!” He started kicking my plants and threatening to throw them off the balcony.
I was legit worried he’d try to throw me off the balcony next. This was a grown man in his 30s. Yeah, I was outta there after that night. I live alone in peace with my plants now, where they don’t get kicked.
6. More Than Food
My roommate started out with "harmless" pranks like putting salt in my Jello before it set. It was kind of funny—but then she took it to a new disturbing level. She put bleach in my pasta water like I somehow wouldn't smell bleach noodles. She would take my underwear, wear them during her time of the month, and put them back in my underwear drawer unwashed.
I spent years messed up. Being afraid of food and people. I already had a bad relationship with food because of my mom. This made it so I wouldn't eat at restaurants, or my friends' food they cooked to share, or eat anything that wasn't in a tightly sealed package.
7. Stay… Calm…
My roommate was the most aggressive "zen" hippy you ever met. She was all sunshine and flowers until you dared to, I dunno, asked her to do her dishes or pay rent on time. Then, she would be screaming in your face. And it was never her fault, oh no; her energy was too good, it was your negative energy making her act this way, how dare you do this to her.
We were all relieved when she lost her job and announced she was moving back home…but apparently, she didn't understand how a lease works until the landlord let her know she was still on the hook for rent if we couldn't find a replacement. So, she started inviting creepy random guys into our home without letting the rest of us know what was going on or who they were. She was apoplectic when we put a stop to that plan.
8. Best Night Ever
My best friend decided he wanted to invite some folks over and have some fun for the first time. I wasn't a fan of a lot of people over, but it was four ladies, and I wasn't about to ruin a fun night for him. I was already with someone, so I planned on just staying in my room and checking in on everyone from time to time.
Well at some point, I started hearing some wild sounds. I go into the living room, and I couldn’t believe my etes. They had taken everything that was a circle and tossed it into a pile. Everything. I'm talking round fruits, pots and pans, lids to Tupperware, all 100+ DVDs I had, you name it. The amount of stuff that was broken sent me into one of those rages where you go from red to just gray. I went and stayed at my girlfriend’s place. The next day, I get home and they were all fully asleep on the kitchen floor.
He still apologizes to this day, and it cracks me up because it's always the same line. "I still feel terrible but man…to this day that was the best night of my life".
9. Under The Couch
My roommate was a total slob, and I am not saying this lightly. He would eat dinner on the couch, then put his dirty plate with scraps and bones under the couch. I would have to check constantly for that, or else we would get some foul smells. One time, he had pancakes and put the plate under the chair, and due to the large amount of leftover maple syrup, we got ants. He would just trash everything and made the house disgusting.
Finally, I had enough, and I stopped cleaning up after him. I just let the house fall into total ruin. He then started staying at his parents’ house, telling them and our friends that I was a slob, and he couldn't handle it anymore. He eventually moved out and lives with his girlfriend now. She complains constantly that he is a slob.
10. Bye-Bye Deposit
She had the landlord return the security deposit in her name, even though I'd paid it in full. It was $1,800. When I asked the landlord for the deposit back, he said he already gave it to her, and I had to work it out with her. I was 19 and didn't know any better. Needless to say, she never paid me back. I’m still bitter 20 years later. I worked full time in college, and her parents paid her way. $1,800 was a lot of money back then.
11. Escalating Situations
We already weren’t getting along, but it never escalated beyond minor spats. That is, until he went way too far. He put nail polish remover into my facial moisturizer. He denied it when I confronted him, of course; I was even accused by my other roommates of putting it there myself.
Obviously, I moved out like 2 weeks later, because the landlord refused to let me put a lock on my bedroom door. My new place was furnished, and I moved out ASAP, so it took me a couple extra days after I moved to get all my furniture out, including my bed. When I arrived to get my bed, there were fresh bodily fluids on my sheets and pillowcase.
12. Sleeping Buddies
One of my first flatmates in London was weirdly into me. One time I took a friend home because she was too slammed to take the tube by herself. My flatmate saw us getting home, asked me if she was my girlfriend, and I said yes hoping he'd leave me alone after this...big mistake. He asked if he could sleep with us in my bed and said he "wouldn't do anything, just wanted some human contact".
It was creepy as heck, and I moved out shortly after that.
13. Turn Up The Heat
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 basically every day for a month. Finally, he turned the temperature to a very generous 22 Celsius and set up a lock box to cover the thermostat. My roommate’s reaction was shocking. He took a hammer, smashed the box to pieces, and turned the temperature up to 28 degrees again.
This by itself was just mainly amusing, but he 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 together with the cardboard. I smelled burning and raced downstairs to remove smouldering 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.
14. Sour Smells
I had a roommate that suffered from an eating disorder which was awful for her, but what was awful for me was she would leave plates, cups, and bowls of chewed up food and/or vomit all over the house. Sometimes she would try and hide it, so I’d find a plate of puke hidden under the couch because it stunk so bad. Wasn’t uncommon to find puke in the sinks either.
I’m not judging her, eating disorders are no joke and I felt really bad for her, but it wasn’t fun living amongst chewed up food and vomit either.
15. Sleeping It Away
My first college roommate was on the "One Semester Plan". Basically, he just messed around until the wee hours of night and never went to classes. The big issue was that he tried to go to classes. He'd set his alarm for 6am...and hit snooze. When it went off again...he'd hit snooze. Over and over and over and over. Dude, just shut the thing off!
I kid you not, I once came home after a full day of classes, and he was still hitting the snooze.
Once finals came around, he was panicking. I could only laugh.
16. A Sticky Situation
My cousin and her family were DIRTY! You couldn’t walk in your socks on the carpet because your feet would stick to the carpet from all the spilled soda and drinks that she never cleaned up. But that’s not the worst part. Her kids had lice so bad that one day, I looked at the oldest girl’s hair and you could see the lice running around in her hair. I lived with them for three months, but moved out immediately after I saw those lice.
17. Not The Wife
I had a coworker who was living at my home for some weeks. Wasn't especially clean, and sometimes he drank my drinks, but overall, it was an okay situation. One day, he told me he was moving back with his wife, and I said it was cool, he could take his things out whenever he needed, not a rush. Almost immediately I found someone else who was looking for a room and I told him yeah you can move in on Monday.
Monday morning, I wake up and there is a bicycle on my living room. "Weird. How did he get in here?" I thought. I went to the kitchen—yes, the kitchen—and found my ex-roomie making out with a woman there. Someone who wasn’t his wife.
I threw his stuff outside and asked for the keys. It was a little awkward afterward at work.
18. Way Too Many Legs
We had a horrible centipede problem at one of the apartments I lived in that came about suddenly. They were in every single room, including the bathroom and my bedroom. I would wake up to find multiple right above my head or next to the light switch in the bathroom. My fear of centipedes was already one step away from being a full-blown phobia before this.
Neither of my roommates cared even in the slightest bit because they were both disgusting human beings; so, one day, I told the one whose father was the landlord that I was calling an exterminator and billing her dad if she didn't take care of the issue by the end of the day.
Within an hour, I got a call from her saying that she found the centipedes' food source. I wish I’d never found out. It a build-up of maggots in, around, and under her cats' food dishes. She took just as bad a care of her cats as she did herself, and this was the result.
She did not euthanize her cats, thank God; but they had been really sick for weeks, and she refused to take them to the vet until she found the maggots.
19. The Third Roommate
He allowed his homeless friend to move in without my permission and didn’t tell me. After several weeks, it became clear that he wasn’t going anywhere. This man would be super loud on Xbox Live playing video games until 4am. He would leave awful messes in the common area. I assumed that my roommate didn’t want to tell me he was gay, and I felt uncomfortable confronting the 6’ tall, 300-pound man in my apartment sleeping over every night.
Eventually, I said something to my roommate, and he said, “What do you mean, he does pay rent!” Apparently, he thought it was fine to let his friend move in and split their part of the rent 50/50 without even talking to me about it.
Then, I overheard them talking, and after finding out I was trying to get this guy kicked out, he said that he was going to take care of me by “putting something in the jug of sweet tea I had in the fridge”. I moved out the same day and filed a report.
20. I’m Supposed To Be Here!
I was in a student apartment where one of my random roommates had his girlfriend living in his room with him for about two months. I did something to make the girlfriend mad, who tried to get me thrown out by lying to the Resident Advisor about some random thing. But I got my revenge.
After I was confronted by the RA, they and the higher-ups find out the girlfriend was living there without permission, and both were evicted.
21. A Downward Spiral
My ex-best friend got fired from her job for falling asleep on the clock. She was my bestie, so I covered rent, groceries, gas, even paid her club cover and tab several times so she could hang with the rest of our friends and not feel left out. No biggie. Until almost four months later, and she'd gotten not one, not two, but three different jobs and quit them all within a week because she didn't like them.
I still had to pay her half of rent, but I stopped buying food to put in the kitchen for her and her unemployed boyfriend to eat, giving her gas money, coins for laundry, etc. I told her to find a job within two weeks or she had to go. She didn't get a job or even look for one, and then she refused to move out. I stopped talking to her and her boyfriend broke up with her soon after. She got depressed, holed up in her room and maxed out all her credit cards. She just left her trash all over her room, for weeks.
We had a roach infestation because of her, which took weeks to clear up. I was falling behind on bills because I also helped my mom with money; she had a fixed income and a lot of health problems with expensive medications. I ran out of savings and needed a real roommate, the paying kind. So, I hired the cheapest U-Haul I could, called my guy friends, and started moving her stuff into it.
I told her she could either follow me to her mom's and leave it all there or I was taking it to the dump. Once I left her and her stuff with her mother, it took me four additional days of cleaning her filth up before I could even make it presentable to a future roommate. A whole mess.
22. The Delinquent
I was in college. I was sleeping and heard a banging on the door. I had just woken up and hadn't heard anything being said, just heard the banging and figured my idiot roommate locked himself out or something. I got up, unlocked the door, and opened it a bit before walking away without looking at all. I was groggy and young, and had it in my head that it was just him. I was in for an unpleasant surprise. Suddenly, there's a flashlight on me and I put my hands up. It was the authorities.
Apparently, my roommate was blasting bottle rockets at the neighbor's house with his friends, and came back into the apartment to hide in his room while I was sleeping. Idiot. At some point later on after we weren't roommates anymore, I found out he had been charged. Not sure the specifics, but he was that kind of guy. I spent most of my time out of the apartment when possible.
23. The Revolving Door
My roommate would constantly bring strange men over. Like strangers or literally strange men. Weekly to almost daily. I asked her to either stop or at least vet a few of them beforehand because I didn't like all these weirdos parading through our house past our expensive electronics. I recall an argument I had with her about not being selective with the company she kept, and I screamed at her "Do you want me to have to call your mother to tell her you were done in by some psycho?!" She calmed down a little after that, and soon after I moved out, she did finally find a nice man to settle down with.
Oh, and on top of that, for some reason whenever she did the dishes, they always felt greasy afterwards?!
24. Making The Sale
In my early 20s, I lived in a two-bedroom place with four roommates. Some of us shared rooms and another slept on the couch. The landlord was trying to sell the place, and he knew that it would look bad to have so many people living in such a small place—so he came up with a plan that was destined to fail. He asked us to make it look like only two people lived there. One day, while two of the roommates and I were at work, the real estate agent showed up unannounced with a prospective buyer.
One roommate played casual and just read a book on the couch. The other roommate, thinking he wasn't supposed to be there, decided to hide in a closet. You can guess what happened next: The prospective buyer found him and experienced quite the scare.
They did not buy the property.
25. The Boyfriend
My sophomore year of college, my roommate invited her boyfriend from New Zealand to come live with us. These were dorm rooms, so it’s not like she had a private space. This guy was living rent free in our room all the time. He was nice enough, but it was impossible to get anything done, including studying during finals week, because when he had nothing else to do so he just watched TV constantly.
When I brought this up to my roommate, and said that I would appreciate it if he did not stay for the next semester, she got extremely huffy and moved out. Thankfully, they didn’t charge me for her half of the room, so I ended up with a single for the cost I had been paying for a double, so I guess it all evened out.
There was also the time that she, an art major, decided her final project would be to leave a plate of food in the room and let it rot and take photos as some sort of a statement on the breakdown of society? Didn’t really understand that one, but that didn’t help for sure.
26. The Sedentary Swimmer
I woke up every day to my roommate’s alarm at 4 AM for swim practice. Except he’d keep hitting snooze, so I’d hear it two to five times in a row. And he’d be late so his teammates would start banging on the door. I was a double science major working multiple jobs. I went to bed at two, coming home from the library. So, no sleep for me, I guess. And that’s not the worst part. I would have to wake up at that time on weekends for my landscaping job and he would complain endlessly about it.
The guy never left the room, even when I would bring a girl back, and would just sit there and watch Netflix on my TV. I can’t smell, so it didn’t bother me, but all my guests said it reeked in there since he never showered. Second semester, I moved out and lived in the chem library. Instant improvement. Never had a roommate since.
27. He Has A Reputation
I was placed in the barracks with a dude nicknamed “Pigpen”. Dude was on the boxing team, and while he worked out hard, he was asleep when I left for work, after PT, and was out on the town when I got home. I would come back to sweat-soaked gear on the floor of the bathroom, toiletries on the sink area, and no TP, because he would use an entire roll of TP in one sitting.
I asked him multiple times to clean up after himself, because if one of the barracks people walked by and saw the mess that he left, it would be me that gets in trouble because I outranked him. I told him I would throw away his toiletries if he didn't pick them up. So, I did. I put a new bag in the trash can, gently placed all of his toiletries in the can.
When he came home and questioned where his stuff was, he proceeded to thrash the trash bag around, breaking all his own stuff. I would put his sweaty gear on his pillow. I also got to locking up my TP, because he wouldn't buy any of his own.
28. The Most Complicated Solution
My roommate got slammed and threw my PS4 controller at my TV, which shattered the screen. Instead of admitting this, he came up with a ridiculous lie. He staged a situation in which people ransacked my place and took all of my expensive stuff. Every piece of furniture was overturned, smashed, and broken. I found out it was him when I discovered he threw everything I owned of value into the dumpsters outside to make it look like they had been taken.
The authorities were also apparently called on him by a neighbor who heard the commotion, and they found him in his room crying his eyes out. I went and spoke to the authorities after dumpster diving for my personal belongings. They asked if I wanted to press charges. I said no, but told his parents he needed some help. I never spoke to him again after quite a long friendship.
29. The Wedge
Before my husband and I were married, we had an awful roommate. He would do weird things like eat a whole package of hotdog buns and throw the wrapping back in the pantry. The one time he did dishes, he got extremely mad for the rest of the day. He tried to come between my husband and I as a couple many, many times.
He proudly claimed that once my husband had passed out, and that he, said roommate, had slept with him. It’s not true but he said it for years anyway. He hated our cat and then wondered why the cat didn't like him. He was a bad roommate but even more than that, a bad friend.
30. Suspiciously Gone
I caught my boyfriend cheating and promptly kicked him out. Since he didn't have key to the apartment, I left my place unlocked while I was at work so that he could get his stuff out. Which, he didn't do. I ended up dropping his things off at his mom's house.
What he did do instead was take my pet snake. I don't know what he did to him. Like if he just let him go outside, or if he took him with him. I know he's not in my apartment. It's really not that big of a place, and I tore it up every single day for nearly a month straight trying to find him. He had escaped once before when his old enclosure broke, but I found him within a few hours. The enclosure I had for him after that incident was escape proof. And there's absolutely no trace of him anywhere.
I have two cats, both of which would have torn him to pieces had they had the chance. But again, there's no sign of anything. He was just gone. The awful thing is, I didn't notice until a few days after the fact. If you know snakes, they spend a lot of time hiding. So, during those few days between me booting him out and me realizing he was gone, I figure my snake was curled up inside his little cave. But then feeding day came, and I flipped up the cave and saw he wasn't there. Frantically searched the whole enclosure, and he was nowhere.
So yeah, he did something to my snake.
31. Just Dreaming
A friend of mine had a good stereo and a tremendous record collection. His roommate never showered, never changed his sheets. Didn't go to class. Talked about his dream of going to Nepal and scoring. At the same time, he spent his time playing ping pong in the student center. He flunked out, as a freshman. A taxi arrived, he took the stereo and the record collection, and left.
32. It’s All Mine
My college roommate would lay on our couch all day and night, shirtless, playing online poker and watching sports on the shared TV. He mooched everything. Took my food, drinks, etc. He didn't work, he was just always there. I would hang out at the neighbor's house mostly because it was so annoying—but then he took it to an even more obnoxious level.
He'd wander over late at night and try to trade my food and personal items for things at my friend's house right in front of me...
33. A Free Ride
My roommate wrecked my collection of Japanese kitchen knives. She ate the lunch I had prepared for my child for school. She prepped an entire Costco pack of chicken that I had purchased and claimed them all as hers. She also left a bottle of hair dye on the floor after dying her hair and ruined the hardwood and carpet. The list goes on and on.
She was a classmate of my wife’s who was down on her luck, and we let her rent a room off of us for a few months to help her out. At the end of four months, she packed her stuff up and said that she didn’t think she owed us anything as she is a single woman, and we were a family of three. She did not pay a single bill or for any groceries for the entire four months she stayed at our place.
34. My Dishes Are Done
Every time she cooked with her boyfriend, which was almost nightly, she left a pile of dishes in the sink. So, naturally, within two days, the sink was overflowing and there were no dishes or utensils to eat with. We had a dishwasher, which made this even more infuriating.
Anyway, one day I completely had it when I saw little bugs flying around the kitchen. I told her she needed to do the dishes immediately and left for work. When I came back, the dishes were in fact done—but there was a petty twist. She had left behind the one single utensil I had used that morning, dirty in the sink. Even after I had washed and cleaned up after her for months.
The level of petty was astounding to me, and honestly, I think about that incident often.
W.carter, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
35. Getting The Boot
I shared a single bedroom flat with a junior when I was a senior in college. Her sister moved to town and was staying in a rented room a floor down in the same building. She wanted her sister to move in with her, and instead of asking me to take the rented room, she told the building landlord I was pinching her stuff and I got kicked out of the flat.
Mind you, I had a fractured left toe and a cast up to my shin at the time, but that didn't stop them from throwing a full tantrum till the landlord convinced me he would help me move and I could still pay the same rent for the room that I was paying for the flat. The same weekend, three of my friends from college helped me pack up my four-years-worth of stuff and helped me hobble back and forth, up and down a floor to move into my new room while my (ex) roommate and her sister sat on her bed and scrolled through Instagram.
What's worse is the sisters found a flat in the opposite building that was bigger than the one I stayed in, and moved out 8 weeks later. Really ticked me off when the landlord told me that. But I was glad not to have to face them in the same building at frequent intervals.
36. The Swordsman
Coming home from a long day of school and work, I found my roommate regularly using one of my curtains as a cloak and swinging around a sword. That wasn't enough to put me off despite him bringing the sword around town with him all the time.
What really got bad is that his first three months of rent were paid upfront by his church, the month four payment never happened, month five he finally got a job, yet month six payments were still not made, and my refrigerator was filled up with all of the excess baked potatoes from the local steakhouse where he now worked.
The church that paid for his initial rent wasn't responding, and I was able to get him out a couple of weeks later—but I paid a brutal price.
I ended up super behind on my own rent and needed to forfeit the rest of my lease and live out of my car for a while.
37. Fun With The Family
In the early years of my marriage, before we had kids, my wife and I had two extra bedrooms. I had a co-worker going through a divorce and offered him a room. After a couple of weeks and things going pretty well, especially since he was working a lot, we offered he could stay longer-term and start paying rent and bills. After about two months, he gets a new girlfriend. It wasn’t that big of a deal; she was around mostly on a weekend here or there.
Fast forward another month or so, and he has her bring her four kids to stay the entire weekend with us! There are all these children that we don't even know taking over our place and we felt like prisoners in our own bedroom. By the end of that weekend, we requested that he find somewhere else to go.
38. For Some Extra Cash
My roommate broke into my room and pawned off a bunch of my possessions—sunglasses, bags, clothing, and more. At the time, I was working for a fashion house as their in-house IT developer, and it was kind of important to dress well. My roommate took it as a sign that I had a lot of money and took stuff from me to sell on eBay, Craigslist, Marketplace, etc. I get a $2,500 quarterly stipend from the company to buy other luxury goods to make myself look presentable for fashion shows and whatnot, but…
I finally caught him in the act and got the authorities involved. He moved back to China where the law couldn't get to him. It must've been about $20,000 worth of product. He was also extremely unhygienic. He used the same bath towel all year long, unwashed…and you could smell that towel from a mile away.
His room was across from mine, and I could smell that nasty towel from my room with both our doors closed. It was like a mixture of sweat and pool water. His body always smelled that way too, so I could smell it all the time when he was home. Haven't had a roommate since.
39. The Smell Of Sweat
I had a roommate who was really into jiu-jitsu and went multiple times a week, but he wouldn't wash his gi after class and would throw his sweaty gi directly into the dryer. The consequences were nasty. You'd open the dryer to the worst spicy BO imaginable. His hygiene in general was just terrible, and his bedroom was really close to the front door, so you'd smell his stink as soon as you came in the house. We'd try talking to him, but he just never got the hint.
I moved out, and six or so months later all the roommates decided to also move. I had to go back and scrub his room top to bottom because he just packed up and left and didn't clean a thing, and I felt responsible because our landlord was a family friend. I scrubbed his absolutely repulsive room and paid hundreds to get a junk pickup for the stuff they left behind.
Also, he'd wheel his motorcycle inside and park it on the new basement carpets. This only started after I left, and when I found out, I tried to tell him how stupid that is when he had a covered carpark to keep it, but he just didn't get it. Why does your Harley need to be kept inside? The result was the carpet got trashed in those few months.
40. Stagnant Air
My roommate hated spiders and bugs, so I was never allowed to open the window. She also couldn't sleep without the night light on, but refused to have the bedroom door left open. She hoarded too. Together this meant that in heatwaves and the peak of summer, I had no fresh air from outside, no air circulating from the rest of the house, and a stuffy lit-up room to try and sleep in...and I wasn't allowed to complain about it because you'd never win an argument with her.
41. Our Family Friend
My roommate was a very friendly guy, but kind of selfish and messy. He never paid rent after the first month, but he was a friend of my wife, so I didn't let it bother me too much. Big mistake. It was too late by the time I realized that he was inviting people over without us knowing and had done several thousand dollars of damage to our house in his room. I never had an inkling, and kicked him out after finding out. All he had to say was, "I'm just surprised you didn't kick me out before".
42. The Animal Hoarder
My roommate got a cat from a friend, but never spayed the cat. Cat got pregnant and had two kittens. Then, he got a big dog but still hadn’t gotten the cat spayed. The cat had three more kittens. When the kittens were still nursing, he packed up his stuff to move up north and left all seven animals behind.
43. Fulfilling Your Role
I had a roommate who expected me to read her mind whenever she was bothered about something. She mostly had expectations about me as a roommate that I obviously did not know about until she ‘burst’ and became bothered or angry about me not meeting those expectations.
She expected me to do as much cleaning in the apartment as she did. We obviously had some tasks to share between us and the third roommate, who was male. Twice we had altercations about this, and twice I told her I don’t do well with mere expectations, but much better with a schedule of tasks and writing down who does what, especially with me being quite busy. Twice, she didn’t want to take that route.
And the crazy thing was that she never asked or expected our third roommate to do anything! Even though he was at home 24/7! I still don’t know if it was gender-related but it was nonetheless weird.
44. My Maybe-Schoolmate
Once at a summer camp, a guy asked me if I wanted to share a room with him and I said yes. He asked me several times where I came from, and even asked which school I went to. The last day, we needed to clean our room and pack our things—and I made a bizarre discovery.
I saw that he had a bag in his hand from the same school where I've been my whole life! This guy just knew the whole time that we came from the same high school and didn't tell me! The next year I saw him several times at school, but never talked to him.
45. Just A Train Wreck
I lived with a girl in college who let her dad pay for everything. He was putting thousands down on her tuition and she never went to class, was failing, and had to change her major like four times, and to this day I don’t really think she managed to graduate.
So, she decided to get a puppy without asking, didn’t train him, and had her boyfriend and dad send her money for him. The dog ruined so much furniture and was just a general nuisance. I liked going for walks, so I took him out more than she did.
She eventually got engaged to her boyfriend, who was in the process of becoming a Marine and on the other side of the country. When we turned 21, we’d go to drink, and she’d ask me to hold her engagement ring so she could try and get free drinks or because she “didn’t want to lose it”. Sometimes, I put it on hoping men would avoid me.
I ended up in a huge fight between her, our other roommate, and myself over petty drama. Last I heard, her wedding was cancelled because she cheated on her marine boyfriend and got pregnant with a guy who already had a kid.
46. The Dropout
My third year of university, I was living with a friend from residential college. He had dropped out of university because he was struggling with a nursing degree. He would go out most nights to play poker, come home at any hour, and play Xbox super loud until any hour. Often, I'd go tell him to quiet it down, but he'd still play it and yell at it, he was fairly hyperactive, so he would forget in like five minutes. Often this would happen when I'd have work at 4-5am.
When his mum had enough of supporting him to do nothing, she packed him up and moved him home, but they sold the fridge on me without actually telling me they were going to. I got home that day to no fridge and all my stuff on the bench. That was a pretty angry phone call, as I would have bought it from them and had said as much.
47. The Sleepwalker
My latest roommate took Ambien to sleep. It caused him to sleepwalk—and things got weird. He regularly cooked eggs in the middle of the night and blamed me for taking his eggs and not cleaning up the pans and dishes. The worst part came when we came into my bedroom in the middle of the night when I was asleep, and started peeing on the floor because he thought it was the bathroom. Nobody wants to be awoken in the night to the sound of someone having leak in their bedroom.
48. Absolute Refusal
My roommate left unwashed dishes in the kitchen. I asked her to clean them, and she said they were mine. They weren’t, because at that point I was keeping my own stash in my room, so I knew they were clean. When I told her this, she took a big empty computer monitor box and threw all the dirty dishes in there, including cookware. Filled the whole box. She just left it in the middle of the kitchen. Eventually I dragged the box out to the curb on trash day and there were no dishes left in the kitchen. She started using paper plates after that.
49. I Collect Things!
I had a couch-dweller who would break into our college facilities at night, take stuff, and bring it back to our apartment. He also was pilfering things from us. He took some cash from my room, and took a bunch of autographed CDs from my other roommate. He also kept a disturbing collection.
It was a folder that was literally cut-out underwear models from a catalog. I eventually told him to hit the road.
50. A Total Slob
I lived in a five-bedroom room rental for a few years. There was this kid named Josh who kept using and hoarding our dishes in his room. He ate our food, made messes all over the toilet, used my dishes then never cleaned them, piled dishes up in the sink so that they grew maggots, left rotting food in the fridge, used my towels, scratched the bottoms of my pots, and overflowed our shared bathroom trash can onto the floor which I eventually threw away.
He never cleaned anything ever. I literally couldn't leave anything out or he'd use or take it. I had to keep ALL my things locked in my room including dishes, food, deodorant, towels, literally everything. Thank God we all had separate lockable rooms.
Ingrid Balabanova, Shutterstock
Sources: Reddit,
