College is an interesting time in many people’s lives.
On the one hand, it’s the point where we are supposed to be at the peak of our intellectual curiosity and academic pursuits. On the other hand, it’s a time when many people react to their first taste of adult freedom by going absolutely nutty.
While the latter can seem like a lot of fun in the movies, its effects are often very different in real life. Many people who go in expecting endless parties, friendship, and hilarity instead end up with endless danger, weirdness, and all around grossness.
Here are 42 stories of the worst college dorm horror stories that school residents ever experienced.
42. Family Tradition
The worst thing I ever experienced was these two cousins who roomed together.
They never showered or did laundry. They'd clean themselves a bit in the sink once a week or so. The smell coming from their room, even with the door closed, was horrendous. And when the door was open, you could smell it anywhere on the floor.
Watching my worthless RA ask them to practice better hygiene was entertaining.
41. That Can’t Be Good for Business...
Near the end of my first semester, there was a tour group walking past our dorm. Naturally, my roommate grabs a road cone—which he had for some reason—flips it around, and starts holding it like a megaphone.
He leans out the window and yells, "SEND US YOUR VIRGIN DAUGHTERS!"
40. Subtlety is an Art
14 male students marched into the dorm huddled around a girl while "sneaking" her in through the fire escape stairwell chanting "We’re gonna have a good time." They got caught…
39. Must’ve Forgotten Her Umbrella
I saw a girl in my dorm dress up as Mary Poppins, jump off a balcony, and break her back.
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38. Civil War 2: Dorm Edition
I'm half black. A guy in the room diagonal to mine, with whom I shared a bathroom, hung a full wall sized Confederate flag in his room and made it public that he had some pretty racist beliefs.
I just avoided him as best I could but boy was that semester uncomfortable to go through.
37. Saving Future Victims
I’m pretty sure my floor prevented many a would-be roommate from having to experience the horrors of living in our dorm like we did. Whenever a tour of high school seniors and their parents would come through the dorms, we'd make sure to keep all our doors open, play dirty movies out loud on our TVs, and sit around in boxer shorts.
36. Conjugal Visit Gone Wrong
A girlfriend got snuck into the dorms by her boyfriend. They then had some kind of fight which resulted in her chasing the boyfriend down the hall and then violently beating him with the phone from the front desk. She hit him in the face with it repeatedly. A restraining order was soon to come...
35. Let There Be Darkness
My current roommate is a nightmare.
She sleeps with a light on all night long. I had to buy a mask just so I could get some decent sleep.
She told me she doesn’t smoke cigarettes. Lo and behold, she does, and now our whole room smells like them.
She shaved her head using my mirror. She put it back on my desk covered in hair and didn’t bother to clean it.
She is currently away for the weekend, so I need to utilize my time wisely and leave the lights off as long as I can.
34. That Sounds Horrifying
My college dorm horror story? One time, we ran out of pizza rolls!!
33. Hurricane You
I was in my brother's dorm and had to go to the bathroom. There was only one stall open. I go in and immediately discover the largest turd I've ever seen and tons of toilet paper.
I'm obviously grossed out, but figure I'll be a good Samaritan and flush that abomination. It doesn't go down after the first flush, so I figure we should be good with another one. Wrong. I flush it and immediately know there is going to be an overflow.
I start running and look back to see a tsunami coming out of there. The entire bathroom was covered. The worst part was that the guy in the stall right next to it got trapped in there while this was happening.
32. Goo Goo Ga ...Nah
My roommate would Skype her boyfriend while I would try to sleep, and they would talk to each other in baby voices... for hours... every night.
31. Do You Want Fries With That?
Someone left an old 2-pound package of hamburger meat in a room and forgot about it for so long that by the time it was found, it smelled disastrous and was solid white.
30. When a Portable Bathroom Stays Put
There was a kid who had a phobia of public bathrooms and refused to use the shared bathroom in the dorm. He would instead pee and poop in a large cooler that he kept in his room. At the end of the semester, he packed up all his stuff except the cooler, which was left behind for the RAs to find.
29. The Fountain Was Crying With the Rest of You
A buddy got drunk on homemade "wine"—yeast, sugar, and apple juice, all stolen from the cafeteria.
He proceeded to get really angry and took his rage out on a water fountain, by ripping it off the wall and threatening to throw it down the hallway. He was a big guy, so he probably could have done some damage.
We managed to talk him out of it after a while—at which point he dropped the water fountain, sat down sobbing, and apologized to everyone for scaring them. He said that he loved us all and would never hurt us. Meanwhile, the connection where the water fountain came from was spewing water all over the hall the whole time.
All's well that ends well.
28. Out of Order
Someone in my dorm took a dump in a washing machine once. That was pretty disgusting. Even after it was cleaned I avoided using that machine.
27. No Bloody Way!
I once had to do first aid on a guy's arm so he literally didn't bleed to death in the study lounge. The pool of blood was about 2.5 feet in diameter.
He had just fled from a frat party, where he punched a window out with his arm. It made quite an ugly scene but could have been much worse if I hadn’t known how to take care of it.
26. Umm...Why Did No One Report This Guy?
A guy in our dorm was a total creep. Confirmed by his friends.
He roofied my friend, but she was thankfully rescued in time.
He made a list of every girl on the floor, ranking us by appearance and would message us with "advice" for how we could "be prettier."
He took pictures of women's behinds when they would bend over or walk by without their knowledge.
Eventually, he dropped out, but it was a long year.
25. Don’t Cry Over Spilled Milk
Came back from dinner one evening and a friend of mine was out in the hallway in his boxers with two girls who were also in their underwear. Each of the girls had a gallon of milk, which they were pouring on him intermittently.
He had a paper cup which the girls would sometimes pour milk into so he could then pour the milk on himself. I approached, and he greeted me by saying "Hey, check this out." He had one of his lady friends pour milk into his cup, took his genitals out of the fly of his boxers, and proceeded to dunk himself into the cup of milk.
He let out a very relieved sigh and assured me that "dipping your you-know-what in milk is the greatest feeling in the world, man." I thanked him for his advice and continued to my room.
The hall stank of rotten milk for weeks. I still don't know what it feels like to do that, and I don’t plan on finding out any time soon.
24. Sounds Like a Blast
My school legitimately had a kid who was making napalm and explosives in his room. If that’s not a horrifying story I don’t know what is…
23. Horror in a Serious Sense
A student was murdered in the dorms by her stalker, who had somehow snuck in and kidnapped her. It took days for them to find her body. The school covered everything up and told her family it was an accidental death.
Needless to say, more than one administrator was eventually fired.
22. World Record
We once had nine ambulances show up in one night to my residence area. Honestly, you see a lot as an RA.
21. Taking Responsibility for His Mistakes
A dude I lived with used to indulge in DIY projects in the middle of the night when he was hammered.
He broke the lock off my door once while he was drunkenly play fighting with another friend, then I awoke the next night to find him in the corner of my room, torch-in-mouth, fixing it.
20. I Have Nothing to Say But EW!!!
One of the nastiest things I’ve ever seen was a condom filled with vomit and a 3-month old curdled milk being thrown on a guy. He subsequently vomited on himself.
19. Water, Water, Everywhere
We had the kind of showers with a tile platform encased in a Plexiglas box with a Plexiglas door. Your usual non-tub shower.
We had a kid that shot a video project in his bathroom for a class. He sealed himself inside the shower with the camera running. Caulked all cracks in the shower shut. Turned on the water.
Downstairs neighbors soon came to me hollering about water running down their wall. I went upstairs and found water pouring out of this kid's unit into the hallway. We had a loft-style building with concrete floors, so it was running everywhere.
Entered the unit and found the kid in swim trunks standing in front of a pile of Plexiglas with water flooding the entire unit. He had managed to fill the shower about waist deep until the Plexiglas popped out of the frame and flooded everything.
Water leaked between the walls and the floors down 3 stories of the building. He was asked to move off-campus.
The video was amazing.
18. Next Time Try a Knock Knock Joke Instead...
A dude in my freshman hall thought that lighting his pubic hair on fire when he was drunk was a really cool party trick.
It was not. Burning pubic hair creates an indescribable smell—and one that stayed in our hallway for hours.
17. Don’t Make a Federal Case Out of It!
My drunk roommate discharged a fire extinguisher in the elevator late one night. This being 2001, early the next morning a paranoid newspaper delivery boy thought the yellow foam was somehow anthrax and called the cops.
At 7:00 am, the entire dorm was evacuated by firemen in HAZMAT suits, put onto buses, and quarantined in a university cafeteria by order of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Nobody knew what was going on at that point.
Only when I heard rumors about a mysterious whitish powder in the elevator did I remember my roommate holding a fire extinguisher as he came back the night before, and it clicked. The cops were painstakingly interrogating all 400 residents one by one, so I rushed to tell them it was just a huge misunderstanding.
I told them to check our room, which they did, and they found my still passed-out roommate lying in bed, cuddling an empty fire extinguisher. They were able to let everyone go and cancel the Army biological warfare response team that was on its way.
The weirdest part was having to explain to my sociology professor that I missed the midterm that day because I was quarantined by the RCMP.
16. Coming to the Aid of a Stranger
We found a 50+-year-old man in diabetic shock in the basement once and had to help rescue him. He didn't live here. We had no idea who he was or why he was even in the building, let alone the basement.
15. Every School Had One of These
We had someone called the "Poop Bandit" during my freshman year. Every weekend, without fail, somebody would poop in the middle of the floor of the bathroom. So on Saturday or Sunday, you'd walk in and have to deal with the fact that there was a giant turd in the middle of the path to the showers.
He was never caught and his true identity was never revealed. I have my suspicions, though.
14. Sounds Like a You Problem
One of my roommates would shave his pubic area in a communal sink and leave the hair all over the place for the rest of us to deal with.
13. Chemistry Was Not Their Major
My friend got kicked off campus when he and his roommate decided that the best way to clean their suite's bathroom was to pour bleach all over the surfaces, block up the sink drain, pour some in the basin, and then add a second layer of ammonia to help the process.
About an hour later, they're at dinner and look outside to see the campus fire department evacuating the dorm. Eventually, they were identified as the owners of the bathroom that had started leaking poisonous gas and got a crash course in chemistry from the fire chief.
12. I Think It’s More Likely That He Was Just Some Nut
I had a resident with a penchant for stealing police parking boots. Not just campus police ones, but from the city as well. We went into his room to do winter closing, and found 20 or 25 of them in there.
I never learned why. I like to think that he was some sort of parking boot Robin Hood. Definitely one of the strangest things I’ve seen as a resident advisor.
11. Monkey See, Monkey Do
I was a resident advisor for one year.
I walked outside on a nice September night. A lot of people were outside with open alcohol. As I am walking around, I begin to notice one of the trees is swaying back and forth.
Upon closer inspection, it turns out a drunk kid has climbed about halfway up a tree. The tree was about 20 feet tall. So he was close to about 10 feet off the ground.
I yelled up to him to "Get the hell out of the tree". He drunkenly responded that he would come down soon. He proceeded to fall his way out of the tree onto his back.
10. If You Love Buildings, This One Will Hurt
My first year I was lucky enough to score a room in one of the newest dorms on campus. It was primarily all first-year students and I guess their newfound freedom went to their heads. The amount of destruction to the building over the two semesters I was there for was unbelievable.
At first, it was just nasty but not unexpected—things like people getting drunk and urinating in the stairwell. But it kept escalating to outright vandalism—where I would wake up in the morning and the bathroom doors would be torn off their hinges, or the vending machines in the main lobby would be pulled off the walls, smashed open, and looted. Couches were frequently stolen from the lounges as well.
Honestly, I’m a little surprised nobody tried to take the TVs. Or maybe they did try and failed!
The worst of it was when me and a friend were going to the lounge one evening to watch TV, only to find that someone had smashed a hole through the wall into the lounge—large enough that anyone could easily duck down and enter the room without needing to use the door.
After that year, the building was made into a dedicated academic-themed dorm with strict quiet hours.
9. 20-Meter Dash
There was a guy who somehow left a 20-meter trail of puke in the hallway one time when he wasn’t feeling well.
8. Smile for the Camera!
Whenever my friend would get drunk—which was every night—he would talk about how he was going to poop in the elevator. One day, his roommate mocked him for never following through on this threat, so he finally decided to actually do it. Needless to say, the elevator smelled for the rest of the semester.
But here is the worst part. A week later, he was summoned to the Dean’s office. Now, I go to a pretty big school, so this was a huge deal and we knew he must have been caught. And as it turns out, he was forced to sit and watch a video recording of the incident with the Dean of the university—in all its gory detail.
Needless to say, he was kicked out of the dorm.
7. Oily to Bed, Oily to Rise
Some idiots poured three gallons of vegetable oil, all up and down the tile hallway. We had a few unfortunate guys who ended up unwillingly playing Slip ‘N Slide.
We were all collectively punished with a two-hour cleanup event.
6. Strrriiike!!
We decided that our dorm hallway was long enough to be a bowling alley. Except no one had a bowling ball or bowling pins. We improvised with empty soda bottles and a sprocket from a motorcycle. Did you know that if you roll a sprocket fast enough, it sparks when it hits a metal door frame?
5. Pop Goes the Tart
My roommate came back to his dorm drunk one night and threw a Pop-Tart into the microwave, foil and all. He put it on for an hour and passed out, believing he had put it in for 60 seconds, not 60 minutes.
He woke up a few minutes later to a fire consuming the wall. That school then banned microwaves in dorms and kicked him out.
4. 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.
3. Caught Between a Fire Extinguisher and a Hard Place
Last day of finals.
2 am.
Some dummy decides to drop a fire extinguisher from the fifth floor to the bottom floor in the fire escape. The fire alarm goes off, and everyone on my floor goes out the fire escape like we're supposed to, right? Well, the door locks behind you so you have to exit at the bottom. We couldn't breathe because the extinguisher dust vaporized below us. It took quite a while for everyone to stop coughing. Some people even went to the hospital.
2. That Was a Close One
The most traumatic dorm story I know was when a girl in the room next door overdosed on prescription pills. It was early on a Sunday morning.
As my roommate and I were heading to breakfast, this girl comes out and explains what she just did, in tears, because she was now regretting it. I grabbed a half-gallon of milk from our fridge, took the girl to the bathroom, and made her chug it all until she puked. My roommate went back to her room, found the bottle of pills, and then we counted them in this girl's puke to make sure they all came back up. Or most of them, anyway. Then we brought the girl directly to the residence director.
1. Unwanted Roommates
In my freshman year, I was in an all-girls dorm. I kept waking up with little red bites on my arms and chest, then started noticing little insects on my sheets and desk here and there.
I caught one, borrowed a magnifying glass, and spent the next hour Googling various household pests.
They were not bed bugs. They were baby cockroaches.
COCKROACHES WERE EATING MY SKIN. WHILE I SLEPT.
Got some glue traps, set them around, and the next day took them to my RA. She was mad at me for going and buying traps first, but horrified when I said that they’d been set out less than 24 hours.
Long story short, at the end of the school year, that entire floor of that dorm was closed off for a year while they bug-bombed the heck out of it.
A few years later, I heard some younger students there were telling horror stories about it.
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