Roommates are a part of life. Whether is is urban life, college life, or family life, many people will have the distinct pleasure of living in close quarters with someone else. Roommates can be a great thing, leading to great friendships and memories that will last a lifetime, but they can also be awful experiences. Sometimes roommate relationships turn sour and can cause a great deal of stress. Sadly, some people never really learn exactly how to be respectful of other people, whether in the simple humanity of other people, or their possessions. Here is a collection of some of the worst stories the users of Reddit have shared about their roommate experiences that took a turn for the worse. So take a seat, saddle in for the crazy ride, and feel the luck of never having gone through a nightmare like these people.
42. There Are So Many Things Wrong With This
My roommate freshman year in college bought a safe and would always put his laptop and wallet in it at night. I later found out he originally got the safe because he thought I was Indian and was going to steal his stuff. He got this impression because when we became Facebook friends I had pictures from my high school graduation and I looked nothing like my parents cause I was very tan. Anyway, I am white and have never stolen anything before.
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41. Wrenches at Your Head
I lived with a very large bodybuilder who was in the closet and would talk constantly about all the girls he wanted to bang. He turned the heat up in the apartment so he could walk around in his underpants, he set his alarm clock to go off every few hours so he could "carboload," which consisted of cooking an entire carton of eggs and eating them (leaving the shells in the sink) or a rack of lamb (leaving the bones in the sink). This went on every few hours, every night. Oftentimes the smoke detector would go off. Eventually the steroids got the better of him and one night, because I opened a window to air out the place, he threw a bundle of wrenches at me while I was sleeping.
40. A Real-Life Vampire
When I was 18, my bf and I lived with my 18yr old best friend and her 27 yr old bf. The 27 yr old dude was INSANE! As soon as you meet him he tells you he is psychic, sees ghosts, reads tarot cards & has past lives, blah, blah, blah. He also has a drinking/pot problem so as he gets more inebriated over the course of the day/evening he sinks lower and lower into supernatural delusion mode. He had my best friend convinced he was a real "live" vampire! So drunk roomie over the period of six months would regale us with stories from our past lives and how we were all destined to be "made" by him. He was a pretty famous vamp too! Does the name Armand ring a bell? He actually bit my friend on the neck, swelled up like a baseball under her skin. He also told us when we were gone he would fly around the apartment...good times.
39. Shoe Thief
My college roommate loved to steal a shoe. A SHOE! Not even a pair! She'd ransack other people's rooms and hoard single shoe in her closet.
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38. She’s Back
I had been divorced from my wife for about a year when I moved in with a friend. A few months into our lease, I started noticing her (my ex) hanging around a lot. I was suspicious but didn't say anything. It became glaringly obvious that they were together when I started hearing them have sex in the room next to mine every day.
I don't think I would have cared as much if he had started seeing an ex-girlfriend of mine, but my ex-wife? Heck no. Not only did I get to hear their sex, she was in my home all the time. When I got up, she was there. When I got home, she was there. It was just too much.
37. Worship Me, Or Else You Get Sprayed With Lysol
Sprayed me with lysol? And had a huge framed picture of her face on the wall that I woke up to every morning. I'm all for loving thyself but come on, that’s what mirrors are for.
36. Daily Measurements
I had a summer internship and roomed with 4 random girls this one time. One of the girls was paranoid that people were stealing her food from our fridge, so paranoid that she began counting her eggs and measuring her milk daily. She would post notes on our doors if she found something to complain about instead of confronting us in person.
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35. The Third Wheel
I'm going through it right now. My boyfriend and I own a home and his friend lives with us and any time we go out on a date, we get the third degree about why we didn't wake him up to go. He eats anything we make without asking, talks loudly to himself when I'm watching a show, and basically hates on anything and everything I enjoy. Sports teams, food, TV shows, movies, it doesn't matter, he has to completely tear it to pieces. I've become skilled at ignoring his constant annoying quirks and general negativity but sometimes I consider buying him a prostitute to make him experience another form of human contact besides us.
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34. That’s Not The Way to Treat an Expensive Margarita Glass
My roommate, who I had never done anything wrong to, pooped into one of my expensive margarita glasses and threw it off our balcony.
33. Pet Me!
A roommate that would meow at me and ask me to pet her.
32. Varied Living
I lived with 8-9 other people (it varied depending on the month) for 8 months. That alone was horrible. I knew 2 of them before I moved in.
I lived with 3 other girls for a summer (didn't know them before either) and they were ridiculous. One girl let her boyfriend live at our place and he would use up the internet, eat all of our food without repaying the other roommates or replacing what he ate, he'd leave his nasty boxers everywhere and would invite his friends over while his girlfriend was at work, etc. and both of them had a habit of leaving dishes with leftover food still on it in her room for weeks at a time. We had a fly problem.
31. Captain Morgan
My friend's roommate (we live in the same hallway) has a particularly strange way of drying his nether region after showering. He walks up to his fan while wearing only a towel around his waist and puts one foot up on a chair, thus lifting the towel and letting the fan effectively blow-dry his parts. This is why he's known as "Captain Morgan" by our entire floor.
30. JJ’s Car Troubles
I think I just had the worst roommate in general. JJ was an alcoholic and would throw up in the bathroom sink and just leave it there, but he once topped himself to an extreme. My brother and I lived with JJ, and one day the two of us got home to find my brother's car missing. JJ had gotten drunk and taken the car. When he was out he got a flat tire from driving like an idiot, forgot where he lived and drove to his previous apartment, and left my brother's car running in a parking lot on the side of the road with the doors open. We found him sitting in front of some random house.
29. Pee Pee Monster
I moved in with a friend and we had to share a common bathroom. Knowing him for quite a while, I was sure he would have been fine, but he would pee literally everywhere except the toilet. It was on the ground, on the sink, on the ceiling, etc., and he refused to clean the bathroom even though I tried to get him to clean every other week and I would clean it on the odd weekends. Money and alcohol would go missing from my room so I put a lock on the door. A few weeks later, my door was kicked in, but luckily my money wasn't found. I was sad that the lease was for a year, but I got through it, and decided not to get another roommate again, if I could avoid it.
28. His Thing Was Burnt Popcorn
My freshman year of college was...interesting. And smelly.
One time my roommate burned two bags of popcorn in one night. That is, he burned one bag and then burned the next one. And it's not like they were "sorta burned." No: these were thoroughly burned, like 3rd degree burns over 95% of the body type stuff.
I got back from my friend's dorm later that night and the entire hall smelled like burnt popcorn. The kids down the hall started laughing right when they saw me. I immediately knew where the smell was coming from.
Everything smelled like burnt popcorn, including all of the clothes that were in my closet. I doused them with Febreeze and cologne, but the next day, the cute girl in my history class interrupts our RSD session and says "um, okay, is it just me, or does it smell like burnt popcorn in here?"
I had to explain why I smelled that way, but I'm sure most of them thought it was me who burned the popcorn.
27. The Rumble Begins
I am currently living the nightmare of the cliche horrible roommate. She has all of the classic "bad roommate" traits. Leaving hair in/on/around the shower, not replacing the toilet paper, TAKING ALL OF THE TOILET PAPER WHEN SHE LEAVES ON BREAKS, letting dirty dishes pile up for weeks around our only sink in the bathroom, bringing over a guy multiple nights a week (we both share one room), being generally stupid, the list goes on.
So instead of getting upset with her, I calmly doused some of her things in deer urine and do so many times a week. Let the games begin.
26. I AM THE DISH CAPTAIN NOW
Knew him. Same university. Ad on Facebook.
Day he moved in he nailed a sign above the sink that in 6 sentences described the dishwashing rules of the house. It only got worse from there.
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25. Was It You?
Moved in with a law student thinking that all he would do is study. Quite the opposite: total sloth/stoner/drunk. Woke up early one morning, walked into a puddle of water, and while walking past his room, I notice his lights are on, door wide open, shoes/jacket/hat on, pants around his ankles, passed out cold. All I saw was hair and flesh. Then he had the nerve to text me "did you spill something?"
24. Freshman Crazies
Random roommate freshman year of college. In chronological order over the course of a semester:
- I caught her spread eagle on my bed shaving her pubic region. When I questioned her about it, she simply said "you have a bigger window so I get more natural light here" like it was the most normal thing in the world.
- Her girlfriend stole my jewelry. She would wear my stuff in front of me. When I questioned them about it, they told me to prove it was mine by showing them a receipt.
- She met a guy online, and when she went over her bandwidth limit from webcamming with him, she unplugged my computer from my ethernet line and plugged hers in. Went over bandwidth rather quickly so I couldn't use the internet for a week.
- Put a line of masking tape down the middle of our room. Said I was only allowed to cross the line to enter and leave the room. As I was walking back to the dorm from class, I noticed my stuff in the middle of the quad. I go to my room to confront her and I see a sock taped to my door with a note saying "does THIS look familiar?" Turns out, when I took my laundry down to the laundry room, a sock fell out of my basket and landed on her side of the room. Apparently the appropriate reaction was to move all of my belongings outside where they could be stolen/ransacked.
I moved into an off-campus apartment after winter break.
23. Get Your Game up
An old housemate of mine stabbed me for telling them they were bad at GTA.
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22. Never Again
Witchy McWitcherson strikes again. My first (and only) college roommate not only stole jewellery from me, but also clothes and shoes and other objects. She would take them from my closet or drawers, wash them with her detergent, and claim they were hers. When I left the school later, I unpacked to find that I was missing one shoe from about 8 pairs. The other objects were shower-related and blank CDs. I knew she was taking my CDs because I marked the cover before I went to class one day and when I came back, there were 10 missing. I gave her a couple of chances to come clean, she didn't, so I mixed super glue with her toenail polish while she was at class. She freaked out when she couldn't get her socks off three days later.
21. The Upside of Eviction
My current story, where I'm being evicted in about two weeks because I no longer have the money to pay bills for the whole house. One of them blew me off several times when I had to come to him asking for bill money because he was busy getting it on with the third (different) girl that week. Another had been asked to call the landlady and let her know our rent would be late since I had been the only one willing to call in the past. Didn't happen, she got pissed when no check showed up. Same guy also leaves his cat outside of his room with no litter box when he has people over so his cat pisses in my hallway. Whatever happens from here on out and whatever hardships I face, at least I won't have to live with these chuckleducks.
20. Crossing the Line
It was my last semester of college and I was living 2 hours from campus. I made an arrangement to pay some rent and share a room with a friend (bunk beds) two days a week.
We went to a party and I spoke to a guy she had liked for a year. I literally spoke to him.... just hello, nice to meet you type business, while other people were around. She was furious and decided not to speak to me ever again in her life.
She had borrowed money from me to make ends meet. She would not pay me the money she owed me. And, again, she stopped speaking to me. This was the beginning of the semester, so it was incredibly uncomfortable for me at her house (although I had paid to live there and let her borrow money).
So, I ran up the phone bill (this was some years ago) on her land line for a few hundred dollars (300 maybe) the last month I was there. She owed me much more than that.
19. Welcome to the Jungle
Had a sublet last summer who sounded like Axl Rose when she was having sex, which she did on an almost nightly basis between 3-4 AM.
18. Caught in the Tornado
I didn't know my roommate before. I had never had a roommate before so I didn't know what to expect. Might not be as bad as others.
She would skype really loudly or study and keep all the lights on (instead of just the one near her bedside) while I slept. I didn't have a problem with her studying with the lights on despite the fact that we had a library in our dorms. I spoke to her about the skyping but that wouldn't stop. I bought a night eye-mask to deal with the light but no ear buds would block the noise that was caused by her skyping.
Additionally, she refused to lock or close our door so I would end up having to use the toilets to change my clothes. This also meant that some of my things got stolen because our room was almost never locked.
Our room was a COMPLETE nightmare. It was like a tornado passed through it. I wouldn't have minded this so much but it was not just messy but also unsanitary. There was mold growing in things.
The only time the room was locked was while she had sex in there. I was locked out of my own room several times because of this. This was after I came back from nights out and had nowhere to sleep. I would sometimes wait for one of my friends to come back from their night out so I could crash on their floor or else I'd just lie outside our room.
17. Rooming With The Business
My sophomore year of college, two of my suitemates were Craigslist prostitutes. They brought their "business" back to the dorm frequently. It was so gross.
16. Don’t Mess With The Cake
Freshman year in college my roommate was an absolute slob. I am not super neat, but you could see a clear divide between our sides of the room. He never picked up any clothes, left food wrappers/crumbs everywhere, and just plain didn't clean up to the point where RAs would avoid coming down the hall because of the smell (despite my yelling at him and multiple warnings). Thank God he kept himself relatively clean. Anyways, it was my birthday and I got a cake in the mail from my mom. I left it (wrapped in plastic wrap) on my bed to go to class for the day, and when I got back it was partially unwrapped and had several fist-fulls taken out of it and a trail of crumbs leading to his computer desk chair. He clearly dropped a sizeable chunk on the floor and did not clean it up.
I'm not an angry person, but in my cake fury I hit him pretty darn hard in the face and left the room to go fume. He never went on my side of the room again, and when I came back from winter break he was moved out (his mess too!) without saying anything to me.
Sure, I feel kind of bad.... but... cake! APPLE cake!
15. Meet The Parents
My roommate was a girl I sort of knew from briefly being involved with Greek Life with her. Her first roommate bailed and she was desperate and asked me. I liked her okay, but things went sour fast.
First, she came from a traditional Indian Family and her parents insisted I travel 100+ miles to meet them before they okayed the arrangement. I had to hide my tattoos and piercings the whole time, but I understood...whatever.
Then roommate and I move in. Said roommate acquires a boyfriend who is also her TA for a biology class...sketchy, as he grades her papers. One day she comes out of her bedroom and goes "UHHHH, he wants to go down on me...what do I do?" I reply that she should do whatever she wants and she returns to her room. I almost immediately hear pleasure shrieks. This heralds the first of an unending series of extremely disruptive and loud sexual experiences. I could hear their thighs slapping together as they had sex. The downstairs neighbor even wrote us a nasty note about it.
I also had put the electricity in my name and she refused to pay her half. Luckily the circuit breaker box was in my room...muahaha. I moved out (continued to pay rent) and she didn't notice until right before the lease was up when she left me the whole kitchen to clean up the day of the walk through. Lovely girl, really.
14. Man Children
Some old roommates of mine turned out to be rally-attending Catholic nutjobs and also man-children.
I think the worst was when I woke up to hear a vacuum running, which had never happened before. Upon investigation, my roommate's mother was cleaning our apartment. I frantically put away anything I could find and washed all the dishes before hiding in my room out of shame. A few hours later, my roommate and his dad showed up, wasted, having been at a sports bar the entire time.
He also used wet wipes instead of toilet paper. Weird.
13. “Best Friends”
I had a roommate who got mad every time I asked him to pay his share of the bills. He took stuff to his girlfriend's place and acted dumb when I asked for it back. The jerk spent most of the time at his girlfriend's place, and would leave dirty dishes for me to deal with. He called me a liar when I told him to clean his stuff (claimed they weren't his). He also let random people crash on the couch without informing me or even being there. He moved out, stole a hookah, a bunch of my dishes, didn't pay the rest of his bills, and I never saw him again.
So much for living with my "best friend." I still get angry thinking about it.
12. Skipping Rent, Among Other Things
After my experience with this roommate I am out $4,000+. He didn't pay rent, stole and forged my checks, took off with 4 months left on the lease. Before all this happened we were friends for two years. Here's some other highlights:
- Came home so drunk he thought I was his ex-gf
- Kicked a hole in the wall and shattered my hookah.
- Ordered tons of adult video on the cable account under my name without telling me.
- Left his room for me to clean on move-out, complete with rotting chicken wing bones in his dresser and a towel you could use to break a window.
- Stopped paying water bill but continued to poo in toilet that wouldn't flush.
The guy was a pathological liar. I haven't spoke to him since he took off six years ago. I'm still going strong, but I can't imagine how he is functioning.
11. Junkie Roommates
Some of my fun roommates!
1 - Addict, claimed to be clean when I met him through a friend... after living with us for less than two months, he robbed my best friend and then broke into my (our) house by smashing a window with a rock and tried to steal my brand new laptop, but fortunately got arrested in the living room. He stole and sold my iPod, etc. Oh, and my (then) boyfriend and I had to pay to have the door he busted through repaired.
2 - Met a girl on Craigslist. She seemed normal... another addict, who was also a HOARDER. She called her hoard stash "antiques" but it was seriously just straight-up hoarding. She brought a cat with her. One day she disappeared after living with us for less than a month. She ignored our phone calls and texts, and when we occasionally reached her, she'd tell us some really obvious lie about being in the hospital, being out of state, etc. The poor cat was left in her room for days until, finally, we liberated it. It was sick, and in heat, so I adopted her out to one of my close friends who got her UTI treated and had her spayed. The cat is now a normal, healthy, happy cat. ALSO, she caused multiple damages that we had to fix: painting the walls to look bad, ripping a sealed crawl space open, etc. It was a nightmare.
Those two did plenty of other dumb stuff too, but those two things stand out to me the most.
10. Not Out Yet
I still live with my unemployed ex-wife.
9. Studying How to Get Over on You
A woman in her early 20s claimed to be studying when I met her, but after never seeing her leave the house I'm fairly sure she's just on welfare. Spends all day high in her room, drinking and blasting music like Nickelback. Attracts a lot of deadbeat guys to the house who she proceeds to have loud sex with until she steals from them, resulting in half-hour long screaming matches in the front yard. This happens more than once per week. Standard douchebag housemate stuff like stealing food, being a disgusting pig etc etc.
8. Passive Aggressive Pentagram
I had roommates who never wanted to clean anything. I finally got tired of being the only one clean the white tile floor in the kitchen, so I let it go for about 8 months. The tiles turned a filthy gray & black. After the 8 months, I made a giant pentagram on the floor with Windex & a sponge.
7. Stun Gun Fun
So, freshman year I was a shy homebody and so I elected to be in the honors dorm to try and stay out of trouble. Well, it turns out I ended up on the floor with a hardcore drug dealer and two huge stoners who used to hotbox it all the time. I was known on the floor as the guy with the best food: my parents had a membership to Sam’s Club, and they usually took me there when I went home. So... One day I'm sitting at my desk playing a video game, and I feel this terrible blunt pain in my kidneys. In shock, I scream and look at my door... There's my floor mate with a stun gun. He says, "Dude, you got any Easy Mac?"
So I gave the guy some Easy Mac and went back to playing.
But wait, there's more. I'm at some work party 5 years later 1,000 miles away from home and I randomly meet this girl who ends up being my wife. So I go to her class one day (she's going for a PhD) and this guy is in her class. Apparently he cleaned himself up and he became a model student. 5 years after he hit me with a stun gun to get some Easy Mac.
6. Husky Sales
My very first roommate sold my husky for drug money.
5. Demon Troubles
My roommate believes she's watched by demons. She also believes I'm possessed by them.
4. Chatting Away
I was on a sports team freshman year and rooming with another guy on the team. Random meetup as I moved from out of town to go to school.
On the weekends I was gone a lot visiting my girlfriend during a particular month. At the end of the month the roommate is suspiciously not around much but I don't pay too much attention. His parents lived nearby so he would often go stay there for the free food.
The phone bill comes (yes, this is before cell phones were super common) and it turns out on the weekends I would leave he would call up phone sex lines and ran up a bill equal to a month's rent. Not his half of the rent but the entire rent. From the call logs it looked like he would be on the phone most of the weekend!
He had "moved out" without telling me when he knew the bill was coming soon, so that was why I hadn't seen him.
He refused to admit to doing it, just completely flat out refused. I was on him for a long time about the money and he eventually quit the team, and dropped out of school.
3. You Never Really Know Someone
I rented a room to a guy who spent two years compiling, in what was later described to me by an ICE agent who was investigating him, as the largest and most disturbing collection of inappropriate child photos he had ever seen. All on the internet that was in my name.
I knew him for a few years prior to renting the room to him. Was my best friend.
He has since disappeared.
2. Grounds for Divorce
I rented to a guy who liked to party with high school girls (he was 21), practiced fake martial arts, left swords all over the house, had house parties every weekend, a few of which ended up in front yard brawls that I and police had to break up, etc. The tenancy ended when I gave him notice. In response, he tried to push me down a flight of stairs, so I hip tossed him in the opposite direction. He burst into tears and told me my sifu would be very disappointed in me. Oh yeah, the reason I gave him notice was at one of his parties, HIS FRIEND POOED ON MY CARPET.
1. Scabies. Enough Said.
~300lb girl with a trailer trash dialect. This was winter in Michigan, so she kept the place at about 90F. This grown adult human being had photos of 14-year-old pop stars from Tiger Beat taped to her door. She never cleaned. Anything.
She and her friend would sit around eating fast food. They started talking about having a three-way with the friend's boyfriend and I had to go sleep somewhere else.
It was one of those college apartments where you sign a lease for just your room and share a common area with three other people. She'd make a tanning appointment once a day, just so she could cancel it in person, hoping to see the conventionally attractive leasing agent she had a crush on. Eventually the girls in the office took pity on me and forced her into an apartment where they pooled the rejects.
Toward the end, she was becoming a Mormon. I'd come home every once in a while and they'd be on our porch talking about God's misplaced flatware and how Native Americans came over from Israel.
Before that, there was actually another 300lb girl, who also had poor hygiene, disturbing friends, and was allergic to tidiness. We bemoaned at her about never washing dishes, so eventually she just started piling them up in her room. Suddenly there were no dishes.
She violated her lease by keeping a cat. She used that cheap clay litter that doesn't absorb the smell, so whenever I would walk by her open door the smell would hit me. It didn't help that she turned the thermostat all the way up in the winter and all the way down in the summer. I'd wake up shivering and sweating from one extreme or the other.
One time her friend shared a blanket with her while watching The Sweetest Thing on our couch twice in a row. Turns out he had scabies, and she got them too. They were all uninsured, so they just lived with it for about three weeks. Another one of my roommates in the same situation got it, and kept going to work. SHE WAS A WAITRESS. The scabies kept coming back because the fat one never did laundry. I would hold my breath walking from the front door to my room. I didn't prepare a meal at home for a month, I lived on takeout pad thai. The entire time, every time I felt a flake of dry skin, I would panic, convinced that they were all over me. I took three showers a day and shaved my head.
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