Whether they're your best friend or a complete stranger, there's no bigger dice roll than getting a new roommate. People let their true selves come out at home, for better or for worse—and in the case of these stories, it's all worse. These Redditors came together to share their experiences with terrible roommates, and they're so upsetting, they'll make you thank your lucky stars you never had to live with these absolute horror shows.
1. Bottled Up Rage
I once had a roommate who didn't have any furniture except a mattress. Over time, he realized that he needed a chair, desk, nightstand, etc. So what did this guy do? He decided to try and build those items himself. He started with trying to build a chair, and he used old cases of empty bottles in order to do that. Not the sturdiest structure in the world, but for a 19-year-old, it wasn’t that bad.
After a while, his chair really, really started to stink. It had this awful, musty, moldy scent emanating from the boxes it was made of. So, us both being adults, I asked him what the deal was. When he told me the truth, I was absolutely disgusted. It turned out that he didn't like to get up to go to the bathroom, so he had just been peeing inside all the empty bottles that the chair was made of. That's how he lived for a year.
2. When One Isn’t Enough
My old roommate started out as just an ordinary messy person. Then, I came to find out that she not only did not ever change her underpants, but she also liked to take them off and air dry them in the middle of the room from time to time. I tried to look away.
3. The Adventures of Alan
I once had this roommate who I’ll call Alan. Alan was very reclusive and quiet. Now, this in and of itself isn't that odd, as in my experience lots of students tend to keep to themselves and don't necessarily mix with the general population as much as others. The one unique characteristic of Alan is that he used to always order Chinese takeaway…for every single meal.
He would order it frequently, and he would order a lot of it each time. Like boxes stacked on boxes. It was a truckload of food for one person to be eating alone, and Alan was extremely skinny. This made me start to wonder what the heck was going on. This was pretty much the only time you would ever see him, and he would take his food straight back to his room and that was that.
Now, this pattern continued for the first couple of months, but then we stopped seeing Alan altogether. No more takeaway, nothing. This didn't raise much suspicion, as he was always an enigma. But coming up to the end of the semester, a really rancid smell started to engulf the flat hallway. Like this putrid, overwhelming smell. The kind that made you gag just getting a whiff of it.
It was really unbearable. And, surprise surprise, the smell was coming from Alan's room. We hoped that the smell would eventually clear up, but it just got worse. At first, me and my buddies were hesitant to knock on his door as it would be pretty awkward to say, "Hey Alan, you room stinks, please stop whatever you’re doing."
But after a while, it got to the point when it was unbearable to even walk into our flat. So, we tried knocking a number of times, but never got any reply. Eventually, we called campus security and complained. They came with us to open up his door and see what the heck was going on. Now, some of you might be thinking poor Alan had taken his own life and his body was rotting away right next to us all this time.
But the reality was far more messed up than that. Campus security opened his door, and Alan was nowhere to be found. No belongings, laptop, or anything. However, the room was not exactly empty either. There were boxes and boxes of old, rotting Chinese takeaway stacked up in the room. That explained the smell.
However, in addition to these boxes, there were also multiple pairs of women’s tights lying on the ground, every pair completely stuffed with noodles for some reason. They were rotting away with flies all over them. Why on earth was Alan stuffing his leftovers into pairs of women’s tights? But believe it or not, that still isn’t the craziest part…
We were still trying to find out where Alan had disappeared to. The university searched for him on their student database, but they couldn’t find any record of him. We only knew his first name, so we couldn't help much. They then searched for him by his flat room number, and they realized that his room should not have been occupied at all!
Apparently, some other student had been assigned that room, but they turned it down at the last minute and the room was now listed as vacant for the present semester. In other words, Alan was never actually supposed to be living there and we have no idea who the heck he was, how he had ended up moving into our vacant room, or where he had disappeared to.
After this complete disaster, the university moved all of my flatmates and myself out to a hotel for a week whilst they got some people in to cleanse the whole place.
4. Shipwreck
My hallmate bought a boat alarm, which I had never heard of, but apparently, sailors use it. It is the most ungodly loud sound I've ever heard inside of a building. I swear, it somehow had what sounded like a subwoofer jammed inside of it, and to make matters worse, it legitimately sounded like a boat horn when it went off.
He bought it because he was on a sports team and had to wake up at five in the morning every day. Nevertheless, at five in the morning, every single day, he snoozed until 5:30. That meant I always had to hear the darn alarm a second time. Soon, he was kicked off of the crew team for always being late. Our entire hall sighed in collective relief, until we learned that he still wanted to "wake up" at five anyway to get his day started early.
I'll never forget that boat alarm for as long as I live.
5. The Blogger
I found out I had the worst roommate ever after he had already moved out. A couple of weeks after he left, a friend of mine alerted me to an online blog my ex-roommate had. In this blog, he had logged every activity of mine, including going to the bathroom, sleeping, watching a movie, leaving the apartment, etc. He also explained in detail different ways he would kill my cat if given the opportunity.
He even went as far as to lie about certain activities I was doing, like saying I was sleeping with someone when I wasn't, blasted me with horrible names, and described how he wanted to hurt me physically.
6. What A Pill
There was a guy in the house I was living in that would get high all the time. One night he took something he described as a "yellow pill." He didn't even know what it was. I returned after having been away to find the kitchen floor covered in glass, poop, and toilet paper. He got so wasted that he crapped himself in our kitchen and smashed a bunch of glass into it.
He then tried to clean it up using toilet paper, which he left on the floor and in the kitchen bin. None of us could go into the kitchen to cook or even get food out of the fridge until he finally cleaned it up two days later. But it didn't end there. He also managed to forget about a tap long enough to flood the entire kitchen and leave the water running long enough for it to make a pool in the corridor outside.
It completely soaked the carpet in another housemate's room. The guy whose room it was was away for five days and he had locked his door, so the room stank like a swamp.
7. You Can’t Take It With You
My roommate in freshman year was a total jerk. From the moment we first met, I knew I was doomed. On move-in day, as she berated her doctor father, she accused the help of swiping her jewelry. "You don't take other people’s things, do you?" was her first greeting to me. After our families left, she quickly responded to her psychiatrist's email.
She asked me when I planned on dropping out so that she could use my bed as a couch. She was rude and was always loudly talking on the phone with her boyfriend. I woke up one night and they were having phone sex. Her side of the room was also disgusting, and she told everyone on my floor that I was crazy and jealous of her because I was poor.
My first few weeks of college were tough enough in and of themselves, and having to deal with her on top of all that was wearing me down. I coped the only way I knew how. I wrote about my troubles in what I thought to be an anonymous online journal. I wrote about the phone stuff, the entitlement she had, and how miserable it all was making me.
Somehow, she found the journal and used an out-of-school email address to threaten me with bodily harm as payback for it. I brought it to the resident director and she asked to see what I had written as well. At the end of the day, I was told that I had a problem with depression and anger and needed to get mandatory counseling.
I then had to sign a "safety contract," promising that I would not hurt myself or others. But there was an unexpected bright side. It was all worth it because I was finally allowed to move into a single room. The idiot ended up going completely crazy by the end of that year. She locked herself in her room and never went to classes. She soon dropped out and had a kid.
I graduated, so I guess I win.
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8. Unwanted And Uninvited
Summer of my freshman year, my roommate was randomly matched to me. He moved in and I thought he was okay. But then he started messing with the girl who lived next door in a truly disturbing way. He'd use the app Yik Yak to pretend to be her, and getting random other guys on campus to come to her room saying they had been offered various intimate acts by her.
He got three guys to do it before he finally stopped. After the rest of the floor found out how messed up this was, everyone ostracized him and made fun of him continuously. He quickly grew tired of this, and one day there was a party in that same girl's room that he was not invited to. The people who were in the party were sending him pictures and videos of them having fun.
This irritated him more up to the point where he left our room and started banging on their door to confront the people teasing him. One of the girls at the party opened the door, but wouldn't let him in to fight the other kids. He proceeded to punch her in the face and yell at the others, then came back to the room and went to bed.
About 10 minutes later, there was a knock at the door and I answered it. It was two campus officers, so I immediately woke him up and said "it's for you." and went back to bed. The next morning he was moving his stuff out and I never saw him again. On the bright side: since he left so early in the semester, I had a room to myself for most of the semester. Pushed the beds together to make myself one huge one and had a king-style suite.
9. 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.
10. Bed and Breakfast
My old college roommate was always leaving dirty plates on his bed after meals and covering them up with his sheets. Think that’s weird? It gets worse. When it was time for him to go to sleep, he would just kick the plates onto the ground and never bothered to clean them up. As you can imagine, living with him was an absolute delight…
11. This One’s Pant Were On Fire
There were three of us living in this three-bedroom apartment. Janice, Rita and me. Last month, when rent was due, Janice didn't pay. (Rent is ~10% of her monthly income.) After the rent was late a few days, she offered the excuse that someone had stolen her debit card and cleared out her account, and that she was working with the authorities and her bank for a refund.
Around the same time, Rita received a Snapchat of Janice wearing one of Rita's shirts. She had taken it out of Rita's room. I advised Rita to check her room for more missing things. She quickly made a chilling discovery. She realized that $200 was missing from the opaque black jar she kept her tips in (it was hidden in an inconspicuous place; someone would have had to really search for it).
Of course, we immediately suspected Janice and decided to catch her in the act. We set up Rita's camera to record video while Rita was at work. I work from home and was there when Janice came home and took $20 from a jar Rita had set up in the room. Unfortunately, the camera overheated and didn't catch Janice in the act.
Janice was again confronted about her late rent and missed repeated scheduled meetings with rental managers because "her mother was in the hospital." This was weird because Janice had told me her mom had tried to kill herself. To the rental managers, her mother had breast cancer. She also told a friend her mother wasn't in the hospital at all.
Another lie from Janice was that money had been stolen from her room and that she had set up a camera to catch the thief in the act. Which was what we had done to her! This was too much so Rita hid her tip jar in a dirty laundry basket in her closet until she could get to the bank. When she took it out, $300 more dollars were missing.
We called the authorities and they said they couldn't do much. They told us to confront Janice and get her to confess. This girl was crazy and we terrified of calling her out. Our first choice was to just wait her out (I know, we’re cowards). Janice was eventually evicted for late rent and given a three-day notice to exit the premises. We thought the nightmare had ended. But it wasn’t over yet.
Janice agreed to meet with Rita and me to discuss the stolen money, but didn't arrive when she'd said she would (as we expected). She snuck into the house later that day; I happened to hear her and cornered her, calling the rental managers and Rita. We confronted Janice and she confessed to stealing over $650 from Rita and agreed to pay the amount back the next day.
The next day Janice texts Rita and says she can’t pay her the full amount, only $100. So now Rita is pressing charges and Janice has been officially banned from our property. It's been a wild few weeks. The worst part of the whole ordeal was how Janice acted. She told lie after lie after lie (each one more unbelievable than the last).
She showed absolutely no remorse and kept talking about the situation as if it had been caused by someone else, i.e., "I'm sorry this happened to you." Talking to her, I got the sinking feeling that she didn't have a conscience and that she felt she had a right to the money. It didn't feel like I was talking to an actual person.
I honestly feel bad for the girl. She has effectively ruined her life and needs serious help.
12. Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde
My roommate seemed like a normal, nice dude. He was a student at the local university. I had no problems with him until one day, law enforcement busted in and apprehended him while he was sleeping. The reason was utterly horrifying. I had no idea he had taken two guys and held them for ransom. One was set free weeks later, while the other wasn't so lucky.
The body was eventually found in a basement buried in the ground. I quickly moved out of there.
13. That’s Life
I go to a school where the general population is a bit...weirder than the rest of the country. And within this weird and eccentric community, there are still those kids that we find weird. And even those kids did not like to hang out with my horrible freshman roommate. As best as I can describe, my roommate was like a child, in a bigger child's body (he was a grimy little thing), but technically the age of someone in college.
Don't get me wrong, the kid is brilliant. But he was terrible at life. I'll start the description with the first thing that I noticed about him when we met. He scratched. A LOT. Noisily and mainly his face. He also talked to himself. And I don’t mean the “muttering and confirming things I need to do” kind of talking to himself. I mean the Gollum to Smeagol kind of talking to himself.
We had these public bathrooms and showers for our entire hall to share. He was caught pleasuring himself in them on multiple occasions. How? Let's just say he was very vocal about it. He also developed a horrendous snoring problem the week of finals. On top of that, he was an incredibly intolerant person, and also hated women.
He frequently alluded to inappropriate topics in conversation. In general, I would describe him as creepy with a side of grime.
14. Don’t Get Your Panties In A Pile
My roommate was a bit of a nightmare. She was the kind of person who would come home at three am on a weeknight, bringing half the pub in tow. She was perpetually late on bills and useless at keeping the kitchen clean. She also had a bad habit when she went to take a shower. She would just drop/step out of her clothes, leaving them in a fabric pile on the floor in the bathroom, and not collect them for days.
One day when I got home from work, I went to take a shower. I encountered her usual filth pile, but something seemed off. I recoiled in horror when I realized that MY underpants were in her pile. The fabric was unique, and they were now beyond ruined, caked with poo and blood. I confronted her. It turned out she was not good at remembering to do her laundry, so would regularly take my clean underwear out of the drier then eventually sneak them back into my laundry basket.
I went to get a health screening after that.
15. Candle In The Wind
I once accidentally walked in on my college roommate to find the room full of lit candles. What I saw still haunts my dreams to this very day. He was pleasuring himself furiously on a bed covered in rose petals. Apparently, some girl was supposed to come over and she did not show, so he resorted to this instead. It was the most awkward moment of my life.
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16. She’s Not Neat, But She’s A Freak
I was looking for a roommate when I was starting graduate school. I'm a guy, but I enjoy living in a clean apartment. I'm not a neat freak or anything, but I like things to be presentable. Most of my college guy friends were pretty gross, so I thought, "Girls are clean! I'll live with one of my female friends!" As it so happened, one of my friends was also looking for a place.
She told me that she was a neat freak, and loved to clean. I thought, "Great! This will work out well." Nothing could have been further from the truth...She turned out to be the most disgusting human being I have ever encountered in my life, and also a pathological liar. When she ate a banana, she would peel the banana and just drop the peel on the floor. When she used eggs to cook, she would put the broken eggshells back in the fridge.
Every day I would ask her to do her dishes, and four days later the same dishes were in the sink building up a nice layer of mold. The worst part of it all is that WE HAD A DISHWASHER! She didn't even have to DO anything! Just put them in the dishwasher! She also took two to three hour-long showers every day and would run through half a roll of toilet paper every day.
She would proceed to fill up our trash can with the thirty cans of Coke Zero that she drank every day, then make me take out the trash. Every day when she got home from classes, she would take an hour-long shower, put on a bathrobe, sit on the floor, and eat junk food in front of the TV. The bottom half of her robe was all grimy, and the spot where she sat on the floor got grimy too. There was a massive, circular stain left on the carpet.
17. We Are The Champions
I got along pretty well with my freshman roommate, but we were both really competitive and had a long-standing rivalry over who was the "champion of the room." Fast forward to the end of the year. I decided I needed to prove that I was the champion once and for all, so I went online and bought a trophy declaring myself champion of the room.
I told my roommate that I was definitively the champion, and he would soon find out why. He didn't believe me at first, but I could tell he was getting nervous. The day the trophy came, I quietly picked it up from the mailroom and left it on his desk while he was at class. I thought he’d find it funny. I was dead wrong. He didn't talk to me for about three days. A week or so later, he got annoyed at me for something.
I can't even remember what it was. But he decided he had to get back at me for it. Since he was a buffoon, he did what he knew best, and took a dump in my trophy. I could not believe my eyes when I saw that. I flipped my lid and made him wash it out with his bare hands. I still have the trophy to this day, and I am still the champion of the room.
18. Even The Garbage Collector Won’t Touch It
Our garbage wasn't getting picked up. In the first week, I figured garbage collection had just missed us. In the second week, our can was full, so we left a bunch of bags next to it. They took the bags but didn't empty the can. When the third week came around, I chased the collectors down the street to see what was going on.
The guy told me that they won't empty the cans because they are full of two-liter bottles of urine, and they won't take the risk of one breaking and squirting on them. One of my roommates had been peeing in two-liter bottles because he was too lazy to walk to the bathroom, which was right next to his room. I had to pull them all out to get the trash people to finally empty our can.
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19. He Believed He Could Fly
My roommate Darren was 19 when we met him, and in terms of intelligence was roughly on par with a Labrador retriever, or possibly an above-average houseplant. He became infamous for doing really stupid things. Darren wanted to learn how to fly. He wanted to join the AirForce, but they wouldn't take him, so he joined the Civil Air Patrol instead.
For those not in the know, the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) is an auxiliary to the USAF, largely doing things like search and rescue and giving high school students an opportunity to fly. Darren was never, as far as I know, permitted to touch the controls of an aircraft, for which we should all be thankful. I came home one day to find that Darren, in his eminent wisdom, had built himself a "hang glider."
This consisted of a triangular frame made of PVC pipe (not glued together), layers and layers of duct tape, and a bedsheet stretched over the whole thing. He was extremely excited about his invention, and invited me down to the local park to watch him test it. Note that Darren was an adult with no mental illness or handicap. He was just an idiot.
After about 45 minutes of watching Darren spring back and forth, dragging his unwieldy hang glider behind him in a vain attempt to somehow lift off from the ground, I suggested that he should try to gain a little elevation and jump off (because I was then, and am now, a terrible person). I intended him to jump off the wall around our home, which was roughly 6 feet. He took this to mean "jump off the curb and into the moderately trafficked street, causing cars to slam on their brakes to avoid hitting you."
After several close encounters with moving vehicles and their irate drivers, he had the idea to move somewhere safer for his flight tests. This was, of course, the roof of our home. I wish this tale ended with Darren soaring triumphantly into the sunset, but instead, it ends with him sobbing like a small child in an emergency room with a broken arm.
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20. We Do Not Seek Your Confession, Only The Rent Money
We had a guy who was your typical bad roommate. He didn't do anything around the house, and his room smelled, quite inexplicably, of salami. He set up his PC in the living room one day, essentially taking over our social space without asking anyone. He would sit there for days on end playing video games. Then he disappeared.
We realized that he had skipped out without having paid his rent for a few weeks. He owed us a few hundred dollars. Good thing for us, he inadvertently left his Warhammer figurine collection behind. It was quite a collection, all hand-painted. A friend of ours who knew about Warhammer stuff said this collection was easily worth three or four times more than what he owed us.
We started looking into selling it to cover rent, maybe fund a weekend of partying, and move on with our lives. One day about a week later, he showed up. He was blatantly looking behind couches and things trying to look for his collection while trying to act cool and pretend he didn’t owe us any money. We had a few minutes of awkward small talk before he asked if we had seen his black Warhammer chest.
My roomie who handled the bills said, “Nah man sorry. We've had a few pretty epic parties since you moved out. Hopefully, no one took it or something. Oh and hey man some of your rent didn't go through can we grab that off you when it's convenient?” The guy turned white as a sheet and gave us a line about paying us tomorrow, then left.
About an hour later, we finally got our revenge. We sent him a text saying, “General Anatole. Your army is in our clutches. Honor your agreement and we will be lenient and grant their freedom. Should you choose not to pay the reparations owed to us, we will slaughter them to a man. You have until nightfall, three days hence to meet our ultimatum. For good or for ill."
He paid us the next day and we gave him back his stuff.
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21. The Never Ending Story
During my freshman year of college, I had a roommate that had to listen to the first Harry Potter book on tape every single night to fall asleep. I bought her headphones, but she refused to wear them because they "hurt her ears." So, she would play the book on this portable speaker she had. It was loud enough to keep me awake all night.
But that's not even the worst part. She wouldn't even start the tape where she left off the previous night. She would play the tape from the beginning every night, over and over again. "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of number four Privet drive..." And somehow, it gets worse. Well, it turns out the roommate wasn't even a fan of the series.
She had never watched any of the movies or read the other books, didn't know any characters, and as far as I know she never even finished the first book...because she'd fall asleep every time she started it.
22. She Spewed On My Suitcase
My freshman college roommate. One night, during finals period, she had one of her high school friends come to visit. They went out drinking and came back at 2:00 am or so. We had just been trying out this new bunk bed idea, and I was on the top bunk. She stumbled into her bottom bunk and tossed around a little. I thought she was asleep.
I heard her get out of bed and assumed she was going to the bathroom to puke or something. Instead, I saw her stumble over to my closet and sit down inside. I realized the horror that what was about to happen. I tried to jump down from my bed, but she began to projectile vomit. She puked all over my stuff: my suitcase, my shoes, and all my clothes.
Then, she promptly went back to her bed, passed out, and ignored me the rest of the night. Anyway, I was seething mad, so I got the resident assistant so that I could handle it reasonably. I took all the quarters she had for laundry and started to do my laundry at three am. By the time I finished, it was around five am, so I went to bed.
I woke up two hours later to go to my 8:30 am class. I got back after my classes at 11:00 am, and promptly went back to sleep. I left a note telling her not to wake me up under any circumstances, and that we were going to have to have a real talk about the situation later. At around 1:00 pm, she woke me up and started apologizing.
I told her that if she wanted to apologize, then she should clean out my suitcase because it was covered in her vomit. She damp-sponged it once and said she was done. It still had puke in all the crevices and stuff, so I told her to actually clean it because I don't want her puke on my suitcase, to which she replied, "Ugh, I made one mistake, stop punishing me for it.”
I suggested she buy me another suitcase if she didn't want to clean this one, and she refused to do that either. On top of everything, she also told me that I had no right to take her laundry quarters without asking her the night before. We still don't talk, and that suitcase sits, puke stained and all, in my closet.
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23. You Want It Which Way?
A very sheltered roommate I had living downstairs was very open about her singing. She had no shame and talent to match. Singing Cher's "Believe" was one of her Saturday morning favorites. Hey it could be worse right? Well maybe. 5 am is just too early for Cher. But what was most disturbing was her Backstreet Boys rendition of "I Want It That Way."
This is when things get...odd. Maybe she was just pulling my chain, but she would belt out this tune when she got ready for bed after an evening shift. The odd thing about it was how long she would sing it for. There were nights where I would wake up at 4am and she was still singing. Just as bad and just as passionate. I had enough. I went downstairs to ask her to wait until morning.
But it was totally dark. No lights on at all. Even in her room, it was dark. Four AM and she’s singing her heart out in bed in the dark. So I creep slowly downstairs and stand outside her door. I can hear her singing full on. I knock and the singing stops. She opens the door all confused and she barely has a voice left.
The next morning I apologized for surprising her but I couldn’t sleep with all her Backstreet Boys singing. She doesn’t understand what I'm talking about but it suddenly occurred to me that she was singing in her sleep. Every night. So how could I expect her to just not sing in her sleep? Maybe she was kidding me, but for eight months this little woman with no friends and no family close by, sang Backstreet Boys in her sleep.
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24. Music to His Ears
My old college roommate brought a keyboard with him when he moved into our dorm. Unfortunately, he only knew how to play the first 50 seconds or so of the Star Wars theme song, and nothing else. Nevertheless, he made sure to practice those same fifty seconds over and over again as loudly as humanly possible for hours at a time, almost every single day.
25. Things Are Piling Up
I was living with three other girls. I know most people like to say that they're the one who does the dishes the most, but generally, it was me who took care of it. I did them about twice a week because they just piled up every couple of days and nobody would touch them. No big deal, I figured that everybody has different rates for when they want to do dishes.
If my roommates only wanted them washed once a week or so, then I was the odd man out for wanting them cleaned twice a week. So I usually just ended up doing it myself, I didn't mind. We had a lot of other little conflicts over the semester but I always kind of prided ourselves on the fact that we never had a quarrel about dishes.
Anyway, fast-forward a year, I'm living with some new roommates who were friends with the old ones. I'm telling them about the dishes, and how I felt that if somebody in the apartment wants a certain chore to be done a certain way, they should do it themselves and not expect everyone else to cater to their needs if nobody else cares about it.
One of them gets a weird look on their face and I ask what's up. She says, "Those girls said you never did the dishes. They said you let them sit in the sink for three days without cleaning them." Turns out that the girls in the apartment really wanted the dishes done every day, but they were too passive-aggressive to actually talk to each other about it. So, they just let them sit in the sink for three days until somebody cracked and did them as "punishment."
It was absurd. You're a 20-year-old woman and you can't talk to your roommates about some dishes?
26. Crossing Into Enemy Territory
My old roommate was disgusting and a total slob. She also wouldn't let me clean her side of the room. It was always super cluttered with garbage everywhere. Our room had a gross smell all the time because of her, so I finally broke down and decided to let her be mad at me. I cleaned everything when she wasn’t home. What I found was absolutely revolting.
There were at least five or six cups of spoiled, rotten, partially-consumed, curdled chocolate milk. I also found plates of moldy and partially eaten food. It was horrible. She got so mad when she discovered that I’d cleaned it that she ended up moving out and going to live with some other friend of hers. I wasn't upset about it.
27. Gym Bunny, Hopping Mad
Had a roommate freshman year in a shared room who was training for a competition. He would wake up at 5, make a ton of noise, go for a run, come back at 6, go to the gym, come back and pose in front of the mirror (sometimes with no clothes on) all while I was clearly awake. He would also go to bed at 8 pm and get super angry if any noise was made. Seriously, the clicking of the keys on my phone once set him off because he needed "beauty rest."
28. No Regrets
Back in college, I once walked into my dorm room to find my roommate and her parents looking through my underwear drawer. They didn't even act apologetic about it when they realized I had caught them red-handed. Her mother just commented on how cute she thought my dinosaur underwear were. Such a weird experience…
29. Teeming with Teams
My roommate landed a job out of town for the summer and found a girl named Jane to take over her lease for three months. Jane had two jobs (seemed responsible) and for the first month or so we all liked her. She was nice, social, did some weird things like use toilet paper bizarrely quickly but otherwise, she seemed fine.
Roommate Rachel, who shares the basement with Jane, threw a small birthday party for a friend one night. Jane proceeded to invite the entire college basketball and football teams to our small house. Approximately 50 strangers showed up inebriated and screaming all over the neighborhood. The rental manager was called and the uninvited football giants were kicked out. Jane never apologized and after that, we avoided her as much as possible, just waiting for her to move out.
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30. A Match Made in Heck
I once lived with a girl who was absolutely convinced that she was in a relationship with the lead singer of the band Tokio Hotel, and that she had been for several years. To the rest of us, it was obviously some catfisher on the internet. Nevertheless, they would regularly Skype in ways where only he could see her.
His video would be blank for “security reasons” and he told her they could never meet in person because of the media. And since he was always “on tour,” she would Skype with him at all hours of the night to make up for the ‘time zone differences.’ It was actually kinda sad and scary. Several people I know tried to explain to her that she was being taken advantage of, but she would not listen. I’m pretty sure she sent him a bunch of money.
31. No Dogs On Deck
Let me start by saying I am handicapped and when I am not in my wheelchair I get myself around by scooting/crawling. I should also mention that the roommates in this story were my best friends for over 10 years. Before we moved in together my roommates were talking about wanting to get a dog. No problem! I love animals.
I did however request that they do not get a large dog because I feared it knocking me down/over while I am out of my wheelchair. I also lived in the basement of the house and worried that the dog may knock me down the steps when I would scoot up to the kitchen. They ended up getting a pitbull. I have nothing but good things to say about the breed.
However, it was a young dog that had not been spayed. She was hyper constantly and they had to keep her from jumping on me all the time. They would barely take the dog out for walks because they're terrible, lazy, pet owners. We had a deck that I kept my wheelchair under because I was unable to store it in my home. They would let the dog out on the deck where she would use the bathroom.
One day I was heading off to class when I found a disgusting sight. My chair was saturated in dog urine. After I explained what happened they still continued to let the dog do her business on the deck because they're the most ignorant people I know. Another time I came home late and there was trash juice all over the steps and down the hallway.
That's already awful, but here's what made it so much worse. I had to scoot through that hallway to get to my room. I wanted to cry. That night my boyfriend at the time left a note in big bold letters on the fridge that read, "CLEAN UP THE TRASH JUICE IN THE HALL." They started an argument saying, "You didn't have to put it that way and write in all caps." That's literally what they wanted to argue about.
32. May I Have Your Attention Please?
My old roommate was sweet as a peach to your face, but beneath that veneer she had a terrifying dark side. She secretly couldn't stand not being the center of attention at all times. She lied to her teachers about having insomnia because she stayed up late playing video games, laughing super loudly, and calling her friends. She claimed to have started “hallucinating” and “needing my help” as soon as I started to spend more time with my boyfriend than I did with her.
She also tried to, against campus policy, rewrite our “roommate contract” with our sketchy RA so that she could claim I was breaking our agreement and get me kicked out. This was all just because she wanted me to pay more attention to her.
33. Don’t Bug Me
I had a roommate that once took a bed off of some Facebook stranger (that's right, took. He was giving it away for free). A few weeks after this, I was in the living room and saw a familiar-looking insect. With her permission, I went into her room and lifted the baseboard of the bed to confirm my suspicion: it was teeming with bed bugs. Teeming. Cue panic attack.
34. Out to Lunch
My roommate was not terrible by any means, but he did have this one really bizarre quirk that still confuses me to this day. Whenever he got something to eat, no matter what it was, he would put it into the room's mini fridge to chill before he would eat it. Hamburgers, fries, pizza, you name it. It all went into the fridge before he ate it.
After his food was sufficiently chilled to his liking, he would take out a head of iceberg lettuce and some ranch dressing to eat as a side dish. Sometimes, he would rip off a leaf and dip it in a ranch bowl, but more often than not he would drizzle the ranch on the head of lettuce itself and just eat the whole thing like an apple. This was possibly the oddest eating habit I've ever seen in my life.
35. Did You Say The Washroom Was On The Left?
It was my freshman year in college and a bunch of us lived together in the dorm. One of the guys, Mike, liked to drink—a lot. More than just usual college drinking. Then there was Rob who didn’t drink at all. It was kind of strange living with the two of them because they were different in so many ways. But mostly we all got along. That is, until the following happened.
One night I came home at like 3 in the morning to find our intoxicated roommate just standing over Rob’s bed, staring at him awkwardly in this odd stupor. I could tell he was plastered because he was kinda rocking around in silence in the dark. Honestly, it was a bit creepy, so I called out to him in a whisper. "Hey, Mike..."
So Mike was standing over Rob and he turned his head towards me relatively quickly, head bobbing all around, and slowly raised his finger in front of his mouth, and quietly shh'd me like Elmer Fudd hunting rabbits. Now, Mike must have already had it out without me noticing because he was primed and ready to fire without me even realizing what was going on.
All I heard was the sound of water hitting cloth, and that's when I saw it. He had started to pee on Rob, who up until that moment was fast asleep. Rob, waking up to what he thought was just warm water, quickly realized what was happening and proceeded to jump out of bed and grabbed Mike (who was still peeing on him up until this point) and threw him across the room, off the far wall.
Mike looked like a rag doll bouncing off the wall, hitting the desk below, and then onto the ground. Mike didn't say a word. He stood up, quietly tucked himself in, and proceeded to walk right past Rob, and climb back into his bed.
36. The Golden Girl
During my sophomore year, I lived in an apartment style-dorm with three other roommates, one of whom was more than 60 years old. Let's call her Mary. Mary apparently couldn't live on her own because she suffered from PTSD from a car accident. Her daughter lived near our campus, but Mary didn't want to live with her daughter because that would be "imposing."
Mary freaked out over every single thing you can possibly imagine. She would freak out and run to the RA any time some minor thing caught her attention. We were playing video games after class? That's not normal college behavior! We must be using dangerous substances! We had a guy stay overnight? How dare our parents raise us like that!
We would have a drink before we went out? We are in serious need of rehab! Doing laundry at 8 in the evening? When that happened she actually took our clothes out of the machine and threw them on the ground. Our RA and hall association were all completely fed up with her, but refused to do anything about it because of her age.
We got law enforcement involved on a few occasions because of harassment issues, but they basically told us to suck it up and respect our elders. On our last night in the dorms, she walked around the halls with a wooden cross reciting scriptures at us and telling us that our souls were all doomed. After a year living with her, that sounds like a step up!
37. What Goes Around Comes Around, or Not...
My old college roommate got the swine flu and was laid up in bed for days, during which time she would constantly ask me to get her food from the dining hall. Obviously, I would always say yes. After all, she was sick and I'm not some heartless jerk! The last thing on my mind was the possible spreading of germs...
Inevitably, I caught the virus from her and had my turn as the bed-ridden one. It hit me hard after she had already recovered and had her boyfriend visiting. I asked her if she could please get me anything to eat, because I was starving. She told me to go get it myself, because "I really think you could use the fresh air."
Forget you, Hilary! You knew darn well that I couldn't get out of bed. You just didn't want to take five minutes away from your time with your boyfriend to help me live through the flu that you yourself gave me! I ended up having to get my parents to take me home until I recovered. I definitely do not miss living with that girl!
38. Making an Entrance
I once had a roommate who came back to our dorm room late one night after a frat party, took off all his clothes, and cut the cheese with his butt less than two inches away from my face. He then proceeded to pee in the trash can right beside my bed. When he was finished with that, he collapsed onto his bed and was out cold for the next day or so.
The next morning, I woke up, grabbed a bottle of Febreze, and sprayed the heck out of my trash can and rug. I then realized why he had peed in my trash can. It's because he had already thrown up into his own! So, just because I’m such a nice guy, I sprayed his trash can too. Then, for good measure and because I was angry, I spent about 30 seconds spraying his bare body with Febreze while he obliviously snored and drooled. Yeah, I hated that guy...
39. A Stranger Among Us
At my old school, three of us had to live together in a small dorm room. That was bad enough as it was, because it was really cramped. But it got so much worse. One of the guys who shared the room with me seemed totally fine when I first met him. But I quickly realized that all he did was stay out partying really late every night. Then he'd sleep in. Every. Single. Day.
We never even got a chance to talk to this guy or get to know him at all, because he'd come back every night after we had all gone to sleep and he would never wake up until we were long gone attending our classes for the day. Even then, I wouldn't have cared much, except I don't think the kid ever took a shower! He made our whole dorm room smell like some kind of sour, tangy B.O. It was awful.
If I remember right, this situation continued until Thanksgiving break. When we came back from break, all of his things were gone. We never saw or heard from him again.
40. Out In The Cold
My significant other and I lived with his brother and another guy—but we had no idea just how horrible our roommate truly was. I'll never forget when the three of us left the apartment for a week, only to return to a total nightmare. While we were away, the city endured an extreme cold weather warning. When we got home, the house reeked of left-out food, and it was FREEZING.
The furnace broke right after we left, and our roommate let it go for two weeks. When it got cold, he just left and went to his friend’s. Our pipes froze then burst. We walked into a lovely situation.
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41. Resale Racket
I had flown home to Texas to go to a family funeral. Two days into my trip, I had FBI Special Agents call my phone, and tell me they had confiscated all the computers in my house. Apparently, my roommate ran an eBay theft and resale ring out of my apartment. The agents said it was clear I had no idea what was going on, hence, I was cleared of all wrongdoing.
Lesson learned. If your roommate is cagey with you about how they pay rent, it's probably not good.
42. Gaming The System
My roommate was very competitive but in completely uncool ways. For example, this roommate was the absolute best player at games like Farmville, Bejeweled, and Family Feud. That guy would spend hours sitting at his desk playing these games. Usually, he was under the influence of some kind of substance while doing so.
He didn't always smoke, but man when he joined that frat it was all downhill from there. Eventually, he got himself a medical use permission card and started distributing to his bros. He later got caught and charged with being a minor who was drinking in public. He had to go to 30 AA meetings. He ended up skipping a lot of those.
Plus, he was completely rocky with this girl he was into. The situation ended up really messing with him when they broke up, and he turned even more to weed. He was also really hateful when he was high. This one time, he ate an edible and got the munchies, so he decided he'd eat another edible to fix it. He passed out and, the next morning, woke up and looked at the juice next to my bed.
He literally blurted out: "That's expired. Oh yeah, and screw anyone who isn’t white." I was shocked. Then, he went back to sleep, leaving my other roommate and me speechless. He would also go on and on about how AIDS was a good thing because it affected people that he didn’t like. It was pretty infuriating to listen to. I don’t know what his problem was.
Last I heard, in his second year, he got into a bunch of fights with his bros and missed a couple of his finals. As a result, his parents pulled him from school for a quarter. I’ve always felt pretty sorry for him. The whole situation is very tragic really, when you think about it. The kid was pretty smart, just socially awkward and ignorant beyond all normal levels.
43. That Girl Is Crazy
It started with the four of us rooming together. My one roommate developed a weird clinginess to one of my other roommates. She would shut herself in her room and spew details of her personal hygiene at random while crying for no reason. She then obsessed over the guy living below us. She referred to him as her husband and would get very defensively jealous if I or any other female talked to him. Then things got worse.
She started vacuuming maniacally at 4:00 am, but she called law enforcement on me and another roommate at 11:30 pm for being too loud. Officers showed up and she lied, accusing of taking drugs. The officers found the whole thing crazy and left after we offered to let them search our apartment. Then the knives disappeared.
Weird noises began emanating from her room. On one of the most harrowing nights, she showed up naked in a towel at my door, screaming at me because she didn’t wear makeup and her breasts were real. She then pledged that she was going to off one of our other roommates. I started recording our interactions and my roommates filed a report. After showing the Dean the recordings, she got moved out.
It was by far the scariest and most bizarre interaction I’ve ever had with a person.
44. Not What You Were Expecting
My orientation and summer semester roommate was an anime fan and mild video game nerd. She played World of Warcraft, but that was the only game she was into. She told me from day one that she wasn't too big on drama or "fake hanging out group time." She also made clear that she liked to veg out on her own for most of her spare time.
Cool, I thought. We're going to get along great. Since our program had us placed with identical schedules, studying was going to be a breeze. The program was five weeks long. The first week went great. We hung out, shared notes, and studied together. We cracked geeky jokes, commented on the vanity of some of our classmates, and watched bad ghost-hunting TV shows.
All was well. But after a week and a half, I began to realize that our personalities were a little too well matched. You see, my roommate never left the room. Ever. We went out to dinner one night and lingered for half an hour every few days to get coffee on campus. But beyond that, she was pretty much a potted plant in the dorm room.
No amount of coaxing or invitation from myself or our friends could get her to go out. After a while, I began to feel the frustration of pent-up adult energy. She was a light sleeper, and even stealthy self-pleasuring was usually enough to wake her up. I tried in the shower, but being a not-so-crafty female, that usually didn't lead to much success.
Doing it in the dorm showers was not exactly my idea of a private setting. My only hope was to get this girl out of the room for any amount of time, but it was as if the girl was a sadist. Showers? Five minutes, like lightning. Bathroom trips? Usually three minutes. Food? Only went when I went. Otherwise, she ate from the boxes of food she'd brought with her.
Studying sessions? Again, only went out when I did. Otherwise, she studied alone or with me in the room. Finally, a friend and I plotted a master conspiracy to get her out. He was going to drag her to sushi for dinner, even if it involved her kicking and screaming, and I was going to pretend to have a study session with one of my friends in the room.
She did not like this person who we claimed was coming over. Everything was set until the morning of the day we'd planned to get her out. In one of our classes, we watched a video on sex assault and sociology. Our teacher made it very clear to us, in an almost uncomfortable way, that students who were bothered by the content in the video were free to walk out to take a minute and that there were on-campus support groups.
Sure enough, during a five-minute mid-class break, she turns to my friend and me and admits that she almost started crying. She then nonchalantly comments to me that she "wonder[s] if there are any support groups on campus." She then gets up to quietly speak with our professor. That’s when I made a chilling realization. In other words, she'd just informed me all but explicitly that she was a victim of the very thing we were learning about.
This whole time, I'd thought my roommate was sadistic and I didn't understand her blatant hints about needing "personal time." It turned out that I was with a traumatized victim who was terrified of being around people she didn't intimately trust. Needless to say, I wound up going the entire semester without a single successful moment alone, and my morality guilt-tripped me the entire time about being bitter to her about it.
45. Strange Bedfellows
I lived in a studio apartment with three other people. One of my roommates would bring guys home from the bar, start getting intimate with them, then, midway through, freak out and start screaming, cussing, and beating them up. The poor guys would usually end up in the hallway still trying to pull their underpants on and frequently didn't get all their clothes.
46. Free Bleedin’
I shared a 12x12 dorm room with a girl who would free bleed and leave trails of her period blood from our room to the bathroom and not clean it up. She would leave crusty underwear on the floor on my side of the room, next to my bed, while at the same time she insisted we divide the room with tape, and freaked out if anything of mine crossed that border. But that was only the beginning of the nightmare.
She was 18 and had a creepy 31-year-old fiance that she had been with for six years that would stay over every weekend, and watch her sleep over Skype every weeknight, while I was in view of the camera. She smelled so bad that other students in our hall started lodging complaints about the horrible stench coming from our room.
And to top it off, she had a bunch of plants in the room that I was allergic to that were making me miserable, and she refused to get rid of them.
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47. Poking The Bear
My roommate during freshman year got completely hammered one night, then came back to the room at around 1:00 in the morning and accused me of swiping the pudding in her fridge. In reality, she had eaten that pudding an hour before she went out. She waited until I fell asleep and then jabbed me in the arm with one of those clicky pencils.
I had to go to the hospital to get it cleaned and stitched. She got kicked out of the room.
48. Smell Ya Later
Not my roommate, but a guy we shared a hall with. Moving in, I did the standard get-to-know-yous around the hall. Everyone seemed cool, except for this one guy. Very anti-social, greasy everything, and smelled awful. Since he was in a wheelchair, he had his own bathroom. So we didn't see much of him. After the first couple of weeks living in the dorm, everything is hunky-dory.
That's when the odor started. It quite literally smelled like poop. After some sniff searching, we came to the conclusion that it was coming from Smelly Wheelchair Guy's (SWG) room. We complained to the RA about the smell, and they installed an air freshener in the hallway. Naturally, it thinly masked the odor and changed it from poop to poop with flowers.
It got so bad that girls would refuse to come to our room because of the smell. That was the last straw and we demanded he be moved. Thankfully, after the winter break, SWG was gone and we finally found out about the source of the smell. It turns out the guy wore adult diapers. So he's got bowel issues. Not a big deal. Unless you do what he did.
Whereas a normal person would dispose of a soiled diaper, this kid put them in a duffle bag underneath the bed and kept them there. He accumulated quite a collection of these disgusting used diapers. Enough to fill multiple duffle bags by the time we found them. Once he moved out, they tore up the carpet, stripped and repainted the walls, and fumigated the room.
49. Stop Following Me!
One of my roommates in college insulted me daily, threw stuff at me from across the room, wrote mildly insulting music regarding me, and sang it poorly. However, what was even worse was his borderline stalking behavior. If I went to the library, so did he. If I left to go somewhere, he would hunt me down. He was good at figuring out where I was going.
He eventually stopped when he landed a girlfriend. I was about a day away from going to the room advisory office and demanding one of us be moved to a different room.
50. Notification Nightmare
Back during my dorm days, I had an apartment-style setup, so we all had our own rooms. One of my roommates had large speakers that he liked to use every morning at 3:00 am. However, he didn't use them for music. Instead, he used them for the notification sound Facebook gives you when you get a message, so there was a constant popping sound.
He also didn't like to do dishes or clean his room, so he didn't. We all had our own rooms, so it didn't seem like a huge deal, and it wasn't at first. However, his room soon started to smell really bad, as if something had expired in there.
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51. Evil Twins
This was not my own freshman roommate, but my wife's. She was just my girlfriend at the time, but she's leveled up a few times since then. Anyway, the girl she lived with that year had no social life of her own outside of one friend who would corner you as soon as she saw you and would Never. Shut. Up. Having no social lives or dating lives of their own, they took it upon themselves to start stalking me online.
Suddenly, I was getting tons of hits on sites I'd put together from their dorm network. They didn't realize I could track that. And they were showing up and signing guest books on old Geocities sites I'd done in high school and other random stuff like that. One time, I forgot my laptop in their room. The roommate in question decided it would be hilarious to turn it on, go through my stuff, and then download a bunch of inappropriate content and set some of it as the background on my desktop.
Did I mention that this was all in the ten minutes it took me to get to my car, realize I didn't have my computer and walk back up to their room? She ended up downloading a vile cocktail of viruses along with all that inappropriate content, and I had to nuke the hard drive from orbit. As bad as this already is, there is still so much more.
Most roommates have the courtesy to knock on the door if it's late at night on a weekend and they know their roomie is in there with their significant other, but not these two. They would unlock the door as quickly as possible, burst in, and turn on the lights with smarmy grins on their faces like they were hoping to find us going at it. We never were, because we knew they were going to pull that kind of stuff.
The roommate would sit on my wife's bed eating food and watching TV, but not on her own bed. Her roommate would go through my wife's stuff when she didn't think she'd be around. One day, my wife came home to find that her hairbrush had been picked clean. Her roommate's friend had decided to clean it for her "to be nice." We never found out what happened to the hair, but I pray to whoever is out there that it just went into the trash and not into a hairdoll.
Now that I read back over all of this, I realize just how truly creepy those two actually were.
52. An All-Around Dirtbag
I had a roommate that ate all of my groceries ($60 worth) the day I got them while I was gone. He made a very nice meal for his girlfriend, and her friend as well, and claimed he didn’t have the cash and didn’t want to go to the store. He also drank all my beer, didn’t clean or do the dishes, and slept with my girlfriend when I was out of town.
53. The Imaginary Friend
There was one guy who had a rather interesting routine. He would begin by closing the door to his room and address some imaginary woman who had snuck inside when he wasn't looking. He would say, "Well, what are you doing here? Uh-huh. Oh, really? Well, I guess I'd better take my pants off, then." A few seconds would pass, after which he would speak again. "So, how about you get naked, too? I'll just lay here and wait for you to be ready.”
“Oh, you're ready now? Well, go ahead and climb on top of me, then." Several minutes would pass before anything else would become audible again, and then the next part of his messed-up routine would begin. He would open, then slam his bedroom door, then sprint down the hallway to the bathroom and slam that door. He'd be in there for a few minutes, flush the toilet, slam the door again, run down the hall, then lock himself in his bedroom.
He would do this every night!
54. We’re Just Here To Bother You
I had roommates who stopped going to classes almost immediately, so they would just stay in the dorm all day and loudly watch TV. At 3:00 AM, they'd be laughing and yelling and watching "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" again and again. And they’d treat me like a jerk when I was like "Hey, can you guys calm it down so I can get some sleep?"
Like I was the one doing something messed up. One of their girlfriends also basically moved in with us, so it was like having an extra roommate who was also terrible.
55. Out In The Open
One roommate frequently took out her tampons right in front of us, because she was "afraid of toxic shock syndrome” and “in a hurry." So she just took them out in our room. Leaving them on the floor. When I freaked out after it had happened three times, she did not seem to understand why I was upset. I don't miss her.
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56. Living In Oblivion
I was living with someone when I came home from vacation and found thousands of dead fruit flies throughout our refrigerator and kitchen. There were roach carcasses in the bathroom, and my roommate's cat had either vomited or marked its territory in a number of other ways in every room of the house. She said she hadn’t noticed any problems.
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57. Paranoia Will Destroya
One of my roommates and his girlfriend wouldn't leave the bedroom for weeks because they thought my other roommate and I had it out for them. As a result, they would go to the bathroom in empty paint cans, which they left in the closet. They were served an eviction notice due to non-payment of rent and nailed their bedroom door shut to keep us out because they were paranoid after the eviction notice.
They left two weeks later in the middle of the night. When they left, they locked the front door, then broke it down because they forgot something. I had to replace everything in the bedroom including the carpet and door, the walls needed to be repainted, and in some places re-drywalled, and a new front door had to be installed. I was out $2500 for rent plus another $3000 for repairs.
58. Two For The Price Of One
Let’s see, I had a few. One roommate, who was trying to be a rebel, took some caffeine that he had purified from an organic chemistry lab and asked me if they added anything to it...because, apparently, he wanted to snort it. This same guy thought it would be funny to burn a smiley face into his arm with sulfuric acid. I’m told that he still has the scar to this day.
Another roommate, who was quite odd, used to play the video game Street Fighter well into the wee hours of the night. No big deal, right? Well, the later it got, the more violent he got towards the game. At one point, he woke me up at about 3:30 in the morning on a Tuesday shouting, "NO! NO! SCREW YOU!!!" I then heard a loud crash, as he proceeded to throw his controller out the window.
59. Planning For The Future
I noticed there was something off about my freshman roommate right at the beginning of the year. He would always tell me things like, "I have three AK-47s back at my house. If I fail a test, I'm going to bring them here and teach my professors a lesson." He would then just laugh it off and say he is kidding. Nevertheless, it always sounded serious when he said it.
He also once said, "If I were to try and end your life, I would do it with a knife because no one would ever be able to find out about it that way." Just a lot of really freaky stuff like that, which I would usually just laugh off. But then, one night, he decided to take down a cocktail of pills while crying and saying “Screw this place!” I ran out of the room and immediately went to the RA.
But when we got back to the room, he was gone. He ran off to a different friend's dorm room, and eventually went to the hospital. When he was at the hospital, the authorities searched the room and found three months’ worth of unconsumed medication for bipolar disorder, three dozen knives stashed around the room, and a diary that stated, "If my roommate wasn't such a nice kid, he would be coming down with me tonight." But the nightmare didn’t stop there.
Then, when he got out of the hospital, he started texting me things like, "Hello roommate, how are things at (insert home address here).” Another time, he texted, “I haven't heard from you in a long time. I think I'm going to have to come and pay you and your parents a visit at (insert home address here)." I was in a very messed up place mentally for about three months after this happened.
60. The Day The Xbox Died
I had a friend of mine move in with me. He was a cool guy, I even introduced him to my friends. He was working for his uncle, until he got hit by a car, broke his arm, and ended up moving back home, about seven hours away. After a few months at home, he came back to visit. He was spending more and more time at my place and wanted to move back.
His uncle wouldn't hire him back, so he needed a job. About two months before he moved back, he came to visit and spent a week handing out resumes so he would have a job when he moved in. He told me he had six interviews lined up for the week after he got back. I was working 50+ hours a week at the time, so I didn't know what he was doing with his time, which was nothing. Letting him move in with me was a huge mistake.
I would get home from my shift at 4:00 am and he would be awake playing games on my Xbox. He played non-stop for most of the time he lived with me. I noticed he hadn't played my Xbox for about a week, which was unusual for him. I went to play it, and sure enough, it didn’t work. When I confronted him about it, he got angry and defensive, saying he didn't know what had happened.
He would routinely light up in the apartment when I wasn't home thinking I wouldn't find out. All the furniture was mine and I was not okay with this. Even though he was home all day, he never did dishes or cleaned, and denied making any mess, even if it was made when I was at work or asleep. Towards the end, he even stopped bathing and all my furniture smelled like garbage and smoke.
When he didn't pay rent and started treating my friends poorly, I convinced him to move back with his mom.
61. A Holiday Surprise
My roommate lost his job due to his drinking. I gave him the rent and bills before I left the state for Christmas. Looking back, I should've seen it coming...I came home to find I had no electricity, no gas, and notices of late rent. He spent all of the money on booze and had no money left to pay anything. I had to pay to get everything turned back on. But that was just the beginning.
He would regularly come home wasted and proceed to relieve himself in the kitchen, laundry, on the couch, and/or the bathroom floor. Finally, when I came to get my belongings to move out I found that he had pawned all my kitchen appliances.
62. Devoutly Annoying
During my freshman year, I lived with this very extremely religious girl who thought that everything I did or listened to was “demonic.” She would tell my other roommates about this too. She would also lock our door every evening so she could change her clothes in private. But at least once a week or more, she would "forget" to unlock it afterward and I'd have to sleep on the couch with none of my stuff.
Each of the four of us had a shelf in the pantry for our food. On her shelf was a series of pills and protein shake mixes. I never once saw her eat anything all year long. She would also walk around the house and talk in a creepy childish voice. On more than one occasion, she would awkwardly rub her belly and say "My baby is pregnant, y'all!"
I hated that nut.
63. Party Poopers
I used to work the afternoon shift, which meant that I'd usually get home around 1:00 am. My new roommate had just moved in a few days prior. One night I got home and walked in the door to find 50 odd people in our tiny apartment—and it was pure chaos. There were people punching holes in the walls, my TV was smashed on the ground, and a few people getting wasted on my couch.
The place was completely trashed. Not really knowing how to handle the situation, I went into my room to try to think. When I opened the door, I got hit with a stink that would outlast anything. My new roommate was getting busy with another guy in some rather messy way on my bed. There was poop all over my bed. So I went outside, called law enforcement, and watched the show unfold.
64. Window Shopping
Me and my six housemates moved into an old house in a pretty empty and secluded area. On Google Maps, the address is still labeled as a mental health institution. Crazy, right? Anyway, it was Christmas and all but one of the housemates were gone. I had just arrived back myself, so there was only one other person in the house with me during this time.
When I returned, I had walked to my room and the housemate intercepted me. He asked me if I knew if anyone else was back. He said he’d heard sounds coming from the room downstairs. I laughed and said, "Nah man, must be the birds or something..." Then, we both went silent as we heard running in my room on the other side of the door, then running on the rooftops.
I walked in and the window was wide open. We both just looked at each other and said "Nope!" We slept in the living room with the lights on for three whole nights before realizing that one of our other roommates may have snuck into his own house without wanting us to know.
65. Cat Got Your Tongue
Did I have a freshman roommate horror story? Well, aside from them letting their cats and ferret poop on the floor, not cleaning it up for months, leaving crusty pots and pans on the stove a week after cooking with them, and letting one of them vomit in their bed without cleaning it up for three days...hmm, yes, I do. And yes, they did sleep in the cat vomit like that for those three nights.
This is by far my worst memory of her. At one point, I was sitting in the living area trying to get some studying done, when this girl comes out from her room and burps directly in my face. To make matters worse, she had just been intimate with her boyfriend and her breath had his horrible stench on it. I think that was the cherry on top of every other awful thing she’s ever done around me.
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66. Something’s Not Right
We found him on Craigslist to fill a room. He moved in and seemed a little weird for the first couple of days as he was getting settled. Soon, a smell started developing, and we slowly realized it was him. We never once saw him go to a laundromat. Occasionally, he would camp out in the bathroom for over an hour, and we'd hear these wet slapping sounds from inside.
We figured he's probably washing his clothes in the bathtub. We thought he was a little different, but we were all pretty laid back and thought we could make it work. Then it got worse. First, he tried making us dinner. He placed frozen chicken on a cookie sheet to bake. When we got back, not only had he eaten all of it, but the bones were in the trash, red like cherries because he'd basically eaten it all raw.
Next, he told us that every Monday he MUST watch RAW wrestling. We couldn’t help but make some snide comments, to which he exploded, screamed in a rage, and demanded that we take back everything we said about pro wrestling being scripted. He absolutely, 100% believed pro wrestling was candid and real. We found it sad, but we lost any pity for him quickly thereafter.
He would stay up chatting online all night until sunrise. We asked him to stop, but he didn’t. It turned out, he was voice chatting with high school girls from his hometown. We were all in our 20s. Soon thereafter, he started getting packages from these girls, which were full of food and money, because they were his girlfriends. Our annoyance quickly turned to full-blown repulsion.
One day he told us that his 16-year-old girlfriend was going to move into his room. We put our foot down. That was it for us. He was STILL voice chatting all night, so we started to remove the splitter that allowed him to have an internet connection in his room whenever we went to sleep. It only took two nights before he started screaming at one of our female roommates.
This dude was over six feet, the roomie he was yelling at was only five feet. Inappropriate to the extreme. Then my girlfriend got into the mix. I intervened and reminded him that he was merely subletting, and had signed a document saying he has no right to any notice. We called him a cab and told him to get out. He was gone within the hour.
67. Keeping Track
My college roommate freshman year secretly kept an Excel spreadsheet monitoring my study habits. She would count the number of hours she saw my nose in a book. Later in the semester, after I had returned from a party, she attempted an intervention. I couldn't believe what I was hearing and was thoroughly creeped out.
She said, “I'm concerned about your study habits," and brought out a spreadsheet from the entire semester, comparing my total number of hours studying to the number of hours that were "recommended by my advisor” for the number of credits I was taking.
68. The Song That Never Ends
The first place I lived on campus was in a suite with three other girls. My actual roommate was nice enough, but she constantly listened to this one playlist with about 20 awful country songs. Over and over and over again. Even while she slept. Also, if she ever listened to other music, she would flip out and run over to turn off the volume if a song with a "bad word" came on.
Then, she and the other two girls got angry with me because I wouldn't go to church or non-drinking parties with them. I had to move to the honors dorm where things were slightly more normal.
69. Slam Bunk
My roommate was incredibly overweight. She had the top bunk and I had the bottom bunk. Sometimes, her boyfriend would come over and they would have loud, nasty intercourse right above me. I always imagined that the bed would break, and that I would be impaled by slivers of the bunk bed and die because my obese roommate was romping around too much above me.
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70. “V” For Vendetta
I had a bad roommate once. Let’s call her “V.” I knew we might have some issues the day after I started talking to her online. She made a joke about me fixing her computer when she found out I was a Computer Science major, and she seemed incapable of writing a full sentence. Her emails were in text speak and hard to follow.
We moved in and it was clear she had overpacked. Her mom also decorated our room and put away my roommate's stuff. V had so many shoes she had to take half of my closet space. She never asked and, by the time it became a problem, I was unable to do much about it. V and I were very different people. She was conservative and I don't think ever read in her life.
I was socialist, loved reading the news, and a huge bookworm. I'm not really sure how V even got into college because she seemed like a terrible student. She hated school and complained about it all the time. V hated feminists because they “messed up the world,” so she “has to go to school.” V felt that women should never be forced to work and that was a man's role.
She was very clear that she thought women should just cook and clean. Please remember this. It only took a month at most before V and I stopped talking. I tried to at least stay friendly to her, but I eventually just gave up. There is only so many times you can say hi to someone and have them not respond until you just stop caring.
I was also the only person on the floor who V didn't talk to. That was kind of rude. V loved to stay up late and talk to her boyfriend. I had 8:00 AM classes and she knew this. If her late had been midnight, I would have been fine with that. But her late was 2:00 to 4:00 AM every freaking night. Also, all her talking was in a non-conversational tone.
It was often shouting, screaming, general whiny noises, slamming books shut, microwave use, and banging on her desk. She also didn't use headphones, ever. I don't even think she owned a pair. Her boyfriend would whistle loudly to see if I woke up. V cleaned the dorm very rarely. If it had just been her side that was messy, I would not have cared.
But she had so much stuff, the only space I had in the room was my desk and lofted bed. There were weeks I couldn't sit on the futon because there was too much stuff on it. I was the only one who ever cleaned the bathroom too. I stopped cleaning it during the last semester and I often heard her complain about how dirty it was.
She cleaned it once instead of studying for her exams. End of the year, she left me a little note that said I needed to clean the room because her dad took down my loft. V liked to have people over. I would have been fine with that if I had gotten a heads up. I never did. I had 30 people stay the night over the course of the year.
Once, there were four guests who stayed the night in my room the night before an exam. They all got hammered and came home around 3:00 AM. Wasted morons are not quiet, particularly when they order McDonalds and watch a movie. There was also the week V's boyfriend stayed the night. This was the same week I only got four hours of sleep a night because I was working on a huge CS project and a huge research paper.
V was also fond of really late night action movies. If I asked them to turn the movie down, I either got no response or they turned up the volume. The one time I tried to watch a TV show, V attempted to force me to turn it off and was super furious at me. I was watching Frontline when she came home. Not wanting to annoy her but really wanting to finish the show, I turned the volume down kind of quiet.
She wanted to talk to her boyfriend. She didn't ask or anything, just turned on Skype and started crying about how she was failing three of her classes. I turned up the TV and she yelled at me to turn it down. I watched TV for another hour and just got into a volume war with her. She liked to complain about how poor she was.
Yet she went on two vacations to Florida that year. She was really poor. Luckily, V was rarely around during the last two months of school. Unluckily, she lived out of suitcases that she left in the middle of our walkway. Asking her to pick them up never did anything. She also brought back about ten new shirts every time she came back to the dorm.
If I ever see her again, I might have to punch her in the face.
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71. There Are No Flowers In This Attic
I lived in a house with the girl who owned the house, my boyfriend, our six-month-old, and another friend. The owner didn't have a job and asked us all to move in to help pay the bills, so her parents, who bought her the house, wouldn't default on their loan. We had been there about a month when we noticed that the owner rarely left her bedroom in the attic.
The only time she left was to sneak down to eat my food. She never got a job, or contributed in any way, except to ask when we were paying her. She also owned three cats that she couldn't afford. I had to buy them food or they would have starved. She never even cleaned their litter box. It reeked of ammonia. I finally got sick of cleaning up her mess and told her that when I got back from work, that she had better clean the litter box.
I had a baby living there and didn’t like for her to be out of our room because it smelled. I went to work and my boyfriend took our baby in the stroller to the store a block away. He forgot to take his keys and that crazy woman locked them out and refused to let them in. The baby was screaming for a bottle so he broke a window to try to crawl in to get her formula, which she refused to give us.
He called me at work, told me what happened and that officers could only make her give us our baby things back. She swore we had NOTHING else there and that we were trying to steal from her. I managed to get some of my things back after paying her rent for all the time our stuff sat there while she was holding it hostage. However, she kept all my cool stuff.
72. Divided Lines
She was a nightmare. Her side of the room looked like a catastrophe, while my side was clearly divisible by this line of cleanliness beginning halfway between the beds. I was trying to get some alone time when she decided to watch a movie with four of her friends on her bed. Two of whom were proudly emitting the most noxious gas, and she had the volume on her bass-heavy speakers so loud that a neighbor came round to complain.
She also drank constantly and claimed a guy friend violated her when he hadn’t. She put the house through interviews and law enforcement went through my bedroom to collect evidence, only to break down and admit that it didn't happen. She vanished for four days, then moved out without a word. Good riddance.
73. All About Herself
Ohhhh, the joy of freshman roommates. We shall call her Sally. I met Sally on a class of 2014 Facebook site, and we messaged back and forth. She seemed cool. We agreed to be roommates. I didn't really know her, or anyone else for that matter. I just wanted to make sure they were normal, and she seemed normal. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Cue to a few weeks before school started. All summer long she posted on my Facebook wall, blew my phone up, and just kept writing stuff like "herpdy-derp, soooo excited for school!!!!!!" It was obvious that she had decided that we were to be best friends. Okay. I can handle that. Now, it is time for her description: short, maybe 5'1/5'2, curvy, crazy curly black hair, and a Cleveland accent.
It was moving in day. I had arrived before her, and when she walked through the door I approached her, saying something like, "Yay, we've finally met!" I go in for a hug. Instead of reciprocating, she looks at my fingernail polish, which was burgundy, and my toenail polish, which was pink, and she says, "Ew. Your fingernail and toenail polish don't match. I don't like that." THE HECK?
That entire first week, she dominated every darn conversation had with anyone in the dorm, telling them how she modeled for a hair magazine. Of course, she brought copies of it to school and displayed them on her desk. She told everyone how she's allergic to apples, how she never works out but has the “perfect” body, and every other boring, uninteresting fact about herself.
Within the first two days, she spied a boy down the hall and was all over him. Dear Lord! They started dating. She then only ever hung out with him, for hours every day. Just sitting on her bed, or his bed, or just together. And I was friends with him and his roomie, so it was chill. Until one night, when he stayed over in her room.
First of all, his room was right down the hall, so...really? And they decided to loudly sleep together while I was there. Our beds were set up so that they touched. MY BED WAS MOVING. I promptly got up at 3:30 AM and crashed on one of my other friend's futons. She absolutely dropped everyone else who she had tried to force a friendship on.
Then, she would get emotional when she was excluded from things. She was a little fun sucker with everything we did. She didn't drink, which is totally cool, I respect that. But she would join the people on the floor who went out plastered, and become distant and angry with everyone, especially her boyfriend. With whom she fell "in love" within the first few weeks of dating.
Oh, and she cried. Constantly. About her boyfriend, about me, about anything at all. She cried about three times a week, at least. Her boyfriend and her began to fight; SCREAMING, crying, angry fights all IN MY ROOM. Now, I'm very involved at my school. I also studied a lot at the library, had a job, and had a lot of friends in the same dorm, so I rarely was in my room at all.
But it realllly gets annoying when at least two times a week for a few hours at a time, you have to stay away from your own room. But, I understood, couples fight, and they're in a dorm, where else are they supposed to do that? Throughout the entire year, I don't think she studied at all. The TV that she brought was. Never. Off. She watched TV constantly.
As soon as she woke up, the TV was on. If I returned after she had fallen asleep, the TV was still on. All day, every day. And it wasn't even good channels. It was a very diverse mixture of ET, MTV, or BRAVO. And if she had already seen the episode, she WOULD STILL WATCH IT AGAIN. It honestly was appalling seeing that much blatant inactivity.
I mean, sometimes she would go outside the dorm. She had a job that she worked about ten to fifteen hours a week, an understandable amount as a college student. You don't want to become overwhelmed. But then she quit because she didn't like working on Sundays, since that was the day her boyfriend got brunch with his friends, and she didn't want to miss out on spending time with him. LIKE, WHAT??
This summer, they—as you probably guessed—broke up. She went into crazy depressive mode and BLEW EVERYONE'S PHONES UP. She apologized to me about how she should have known that boys would leave before friends. Like, yeah, everyone knows that. She is now on everyone's back trying to repair the friendships that she actually never cultivated. So there's nothing there to repair.
Our circle of friends, by which I mean her ex-boyfriend's and my friends, absolutely despise her. And I just sit back and chuckle to myself. I'm excited for this year to start.
74. Pretty In Pink
My roommate was up all night, every night. Until two in the morning at least. Having full-on sobbing fights with her fiancé, all for the stupidest reason. It was about hypothetical pink vests that he said he wouldn't wear for the wedding. Even though she didn't actually want pink vests in the wedding. It was just: "Why wouldn't you wear the pink vests if I wanted you to?! No, I don't want pink vests, but if I did, why wouldn't you wear them for me?!?!?!"
75. Finder’s Fantasy
Overall he wasn't the worst roommate ever (I've had plenty worse) but what really rubbed me the wrong way was when I was alone one night there was a blackout in our dorm. I was hanging out in the hall talking to the freshman (I was a junior at the time) and we were all shooting the breeze. One guy pipes up and says "You're Brian’s roommate, right? You like Final Fantasy 7? I love it." That comment seemed odd, so I asked him how he knew I loved Final Fantasy 7.
"Oh, your roommate almost sold me your copy you had on your shelf for $10." This was a mint condition black label copy of the game, which I thankfully still have. It's a rare edition, and I spent good money on it. The dude was really cool about it though, figured out that my roommate hadn't cleared it with me to sell the game and declined. The guy knew this inherently too, because my roommate had built up a less than charming reputation with the girls on campus and he was known as a sneaky jerk to the guys.
76. Dog Gone Shame
So, I needed a place to live and a friend of mine offered to let me stay at her house. Very cheap rent and cool! Seemed like a no-brainer so I moved in. Now I had already known she was a messy person and had accepted that fact and I'd do my best to keep my space and the common space clean. Well, it was just a disaster from start to finish.
My new roommate has three dogs, which are great animals, but with the amount of hair and dirt they produce, you had to sweep and vacuum once a week (which meant that I swept and vacuumed). She didn't work at all, I worked as a full-time server. She never cleaned, once. I did the dishes, I mopped the floors, I took care of the dogs.
She kept the dogs in crates all the time for no reason. She was always home when I'd get home and it wouldn't be up to me to let them out. Remember these weren't even my dogs. And I didn’t even want them. I just felt so bad for them. I would come home 10 pm from working all day, make dinner, clean the kitchen and go to bed.
Sometimes, I’d wake up to her having had people over that night, probably drinking. The next morning the kitchen is trashed with fast food and dishes. So I'd get to clean again just so I could make breakfast. Oh yeah, her friends, really nice people all around, but they would come over ALL THE TIME. They would come over unannounced and walk right in. No knocking, nothing.
I once was doing laundry and had bras and underwear all over the living room. They just showed up with no warning and sat on my clean laundry. (I was in the shower). Eventually, I just gave up, other than taking care of the dogs. I kept my room and bathroom clean and just stayed out of the house as much as possible. Really horrible.
77. Guilty by Association
I met my nightmare roommate on the internet. Since my school didn't have dorms and her very religious dad did not want her to be partying in some college dorm, we both ended up on this roommate-finding website. This was back in 2001. Our parents spoke to each other on the phone before I flew out, to make sure everything seemed legit. I had just turned 18, and she was 17.
By early 2002, she had begun to use our apartment to sleep with a whole string of random guys that she had met on various dating sites. Most of them were complete strangers. Frequently, I'd leave for a short shift at work and, by the time I came back, there was some new person hanging out in our room and planning to spend the night.
I never really got time to relax as a result of this, but whatever. I figured it was college and she was probably just acting this way because she had grown up in a very conservative environment and wanted to rebel a little bit. The last guy she brought back had two kids from a previous relationship. He got her into dangerous substances and basically took over our apartment. He was there all the time, just doing whatever sketchy stuff he felt like doing.
At this point, I was becoming very uncomfortable and began to stay away from the apartment as often as I could. Meanwhile, the guy just kept getting weirder and weirder. He once duct-taped himself to a chair in his parents’ home and then tried to blame it on some random other guy who wasn’t even there.
Apparently, he even tried setting the room on fire. The truth came out within days of his accusations. It turned out he staged the whole thing because he felt threatened due to some past shady dealings with Russian mobsters. He thought that law enforcement would protect him if they felt that someone was out to get him.
At this point, I had my mom call my roommate’s dad and he agreed to take over the lease. I went to sign the paperwork and found out that she was refusing to move into the one-bedroom place that her dad had arranged for her and was insisting on staying in our previous place. When I last looked her up, she had apparently cleaned herself up quite a bit after having a kid. She moved home, got married, and even had another kid since then.
78. Without a Cure
This is actually really sad. My roommate had epilepsy, and her mom was part of a religious sect that doesn’t believe in medicine. Therefore, she was un-medicated and had seizures all the time. They would happen in the room, on the street, even in class. She was always in danger and had serious brain damage because of this. I would have to stand there and watch while she seized and peed herself, because I had no idea how to help her.
79. A Fiery Exchange
Back in college, I was randomly assigned to be roommates with this kid who seemed kind of weird. Basically, he'd do a whole bunch of weird little things but I didn’t really care. I just thought whatever. People all have their own unique quirks and qualities, right? No big deal. Or at least so I thought. Everything changed one fateful morning…
I was fast asleep after a long night of studying, when I suddenly woke up to the sensation of my leg burning. Turns out this freakin’ weirdo lit my leg hair on fire! Yes, you read that right. He really did that to me. Now, I like to think of myself as a generally calm person, but if you light my leg hair on fire, I'm gonna throw punches.
We duked it out for about five to 10 minutes. There was a lot of name calling, and even some blood. I decided that it would be best to change rooms, but I wasn’t allowed to until the end of the semester. So, from late September until early December, I had to sit ten feet away from this super weird kid who lit my leg on fire. I also never got an explanation as to why he did it.
80. Cable Watching Cousin
I shared a house with two other guys, and we all shared the bills three ways. One day, one of the guys asked if his cousin who was backpacking around Europe could crash with us for a couple of weeks. My other roommate and I agreed, as we had met his cousin before and he seemed pretty cool. Oh, how wrong we were. After the two weeks were up, the cousin went on his adventures and a week later the dreaded cable bill arrived.
The cousin had sat on the couch and watched racy pay-per-view movies all day, every day. According to the bill, he would watch between 10 to 45 minutes of a movie before getting bored and starting a new one. The code for the PPV was the default 0000 as we all had agreed that we would never use it unless the three of us were there.
The cable bill was an extra $300 as a result of the cousin’s PPV habit. Our roommate refused to chip in extra to cover it. His argument was that we always split the bill three ways and we had all agreed that his cousin could stay. The bill was invoiced to me and I wasn't going to get a bad credit report as a result of movies I didn't watch.
After shouting and fussing, we paid the bill—but it ruined everything. After a few months, we all went our separate ways. Things were never quite the same after.
81. Breakup Breakdown
I made the mistake of signing a lease with two good friends that were dating at the time. I had gotten to know them my first year of college and they were both pretty good people. They ended up breaking up before we even moved in. I had to live through nine months of fighting, doors being broken, and holes being punched in the walls.
The neighbors filed noise complaints often, and law enforcement was called three times. To top it off, they didn’t pay their share of the last electric bill, and I ended up losing my security deposit of $250. But guess what? The joke's on me...They’re married now.
82. Roomie, Can You Spare A Dime?
The guy I lived with would play his music on full blast in the restroom, which was right next to my room. He refused to park in the street when the driveway was full, blocking the rest of us in. Even though he had a bedroom, he lived and slept in the living room and left his TV on all night. He would go around and ask each roommate to help pay his portion of the rent, and tell them to not tell the others. He still owes me $200.
83. Hey, Those Are My Clothes!
She started pilfering my clothes and went walking around in them to school. She seemed to be convinced they belonged to her until the day she left to move back home. She sent me the most infuriating text: "I found some stuff in my wardrobe that I think you might want. Bye." Sure enough, in her wardrobe, were my clothes, my socks, and even my bath towels.
I took one towel out and a vibrator fell out of it and onto my bare foot.
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84. Craigslist Cash Cow
My roomie had given out the landline phone number, which was mine, for callbacks regarding stuff he was selling on Craigslist. I was taking a message for him and asked what it was about when the caller described wanting to buy "the bedazzled sidekick." I started looking through my things and figured it out. He had thieved my old phone and some other electronics to sell for rent money.
85. Let Them Not Eat Cake
It was my birthday a few days ago and my friend got a cake from my favorite bakery which is like 30 mins from my place. She called all my roommates and I cut the cake and everyone had a bite. Everyone was kind of full so we put it in the fridge. This one roommate who was sleeping at the time comes after half an hour takes a nice slice of the cake and eats it.
Mind you, my roommates did not bother to get me a cake at all. My friend was being nice by calling all of them to celebrate. Next day I go to the kitchen to have a slice and I was surprised to see that only one slice was left so I took it and then I couldn’t finish it so I put the bowl with the cake and spoon in the fridge so I can have it later. I go back in the evening and it’s gone.
When I asked my roommates, it was the same one who had it earlier and I freaking lost it. How petty can people be? If you like cake so much, get one for yourself!!!!
86. Philled With Disgust
It was my first year of college and I was living in an old Hungarian widow's house where she rented out three pretty decent rooms to mostly college students. It was a good quiet place to study and not get distracted. So one of my fellow renters was a quiet nerdy girl who lived in the basement, she was no problem... then there was Phil.
Phil was a 500lb. bachelor somewhere in his 40s who, among other things, claimed to be a professional pilot and millionaire (all while renting a room for $400). This guy would cook huge steaks that, I swear, were the size of my head and then blame his dishes on me to the old landlady who had no idea what to do about it. Oh, and this guy would eat all my food.
But here's the absolute worst part: if my girlfriend was over he'd touch himself. How do I know this? Because he was shameless. He'd wheeze so loudly we could hear every grunt. It was so gross. He couldn't fit on the toilet in our tiny shared bathroom so he would use the shower and waffle stomp it down the drain leaving a horrible smell and brown stains in the shower. Needless to say: I hated Phil.
87. He Shopped Till He Dropped
One of my former roommates in college bought a $700 TV, a $200 Bluray player, $120 speakers, and a metric ton of snacks for his side of the dorm. He bought all of this with the inheritance money he received from his grandfather's passing. Now, you're probably thinking that that's a bit excessive to buy all that, but it's his money and he can do what he wants with it.
Okay. But he bought all this within the first two weeks of living there. Long story short, he had to sell/return the TV, speakers, Bluray player, and most of his belongings to support his tuition, and so that he wouldn't starve once his "endless" food supply ran out.
88. Like Mother, Like Daughter
I had a roommate whose mother was staying with us COMPLETELY FREE for the last four months I lived there. She slept in the guest bedroom where I had a spare single bed. The day I packed up to move my stuff, her and her mother said that I was a terrible person because I was, "taking a place to sleep right out from underneath" of the mom.
They were talking about my own extra bed. Like I wasn't going to take all of my things when I moved? When I tried to discuss it reasonably like an adult they would childishly ignore me or walk away. So I packed everything and got out. They never paid their share of the security deposit and I never got it back because they wrecked the house by being general slobs and letting their dog ruin the apartment.
89. Tell Us What You Really Think
While living with my former roommate, I once accidentally stumbled upon his blog on the internet. What I found made my blood run cold. It was full of posts about how every time he sees me, he wants to slap me in the face. There was also a post claiming that my best friend was made of antimatter, whatever that is supposed to mean.
I didn't report him or anything, because I knew he was just venting and was too much of a wuss to actually try and hit me. I like to live dangerously.
90. Thanks, But No Thanks
On our first day of college, my roommate announced that he had cooked a spaghetti bolognese dish for everyone on our floor to enjoy. After serving it to a whole bunch of people, he then showed me that he had used a can of dog food as one of the ingredients. I could tell right then and there that I was in for one heck of a year living with this guy…
91. Hail Mary
My old roommate was a 6'7” tall mountain man offensive lineman. All of the other football players refused to room with him, and I got stuck with him because I was one of the last to enroll for housing. As soon as we moved in, he immediately plastered his half of the room, floor to ceiling, with inappropriate photos of women…pregnant women.
He also blasted country music every night in order to make himself fall asleep. He did this despite our numerous fights about it, and me always getting up to turn it off if I were awake enough. Even in spite of all that, though, he still wasn't a bad guy. He just wasn’t someone that I, nor anyone else, wanted to share a tiny freshman dorm room with.
92. Going Out With A Bang
I lived in a dorm setting for my first year of graduate school. One night, we heard a loud BANG from down the hall. It kind of sounded like someone blew up a brown bag and popped it. In the minutes that followed, a foul, rotten odor ran up and down the hallways. Really awful. Like if you didn't cover your mouth and nose, you'd vomit awful.
A bunch of people walked out into the hallway looking around. The scene looked like a warzone with everyone covering their breathing. Then we found out the disgusting story behind it. It turned out that a guy living on the floor had filled his thermos with hot chocolate about a month beforehand, drank about 3/4ths of it, forgot about it, somehow knocked it behind his nightstand, thus further forgetting about it.
The resultant fermenting concoction inside had essentially created a pressure bomb. The elevators carried the stench to all the floors, and everyone had to evacuate while it was cleaned.
93. Sugar Mountain
In my first year of university, I was paired with a roommate who was a large idiot. He lived solely on pizza and anything else that could be delivered to our apartment. He had the single room while the other four of us were two to a room. He would order takeout, waddle out of his room to the door, grab the entire pizza, walk back past us, and just go back into his room.
And not come back out. Neither would the pizza boxes, or chicken bones, or...well, who knows what else. Over time, his room started to stink! Bugs would crawl out from under the door. Eventually, he went home for a weekend and one of my other roommates decided to report the guy to our advisor. She opened the door, and an actual avalanche of garbage spilled out into the hall.
It smelt even worse inside. It is the most disgusting thing I can ever remember seeing, smelling, or tasting. Yes, the smell was actually bad enough to taste in the air. Idiot.
94. Odd Man Out
When I first moved in, I was sharing the apartment with three other people. We will call them Bob, Steve, and Slagathor. We each had our own rooms, complete with a bathroom on each side of the apartment for every two rooms to share. Bob and Steve were really cool. I still keep in touch with both of them. Slagathor, however, was the most stereotypical horrible roommate that you can possibly imagine.
He would nonchalantly walk in at three in the morning when we all had classes early the next day. He would then turn on his stereo, pull out his guitar, and start playing along with the bass line to this one very specific and random song that he liked. And he would play it over and over again. Literally hundreds of times. He would restart the song every single time he messed up a single note or any other little detail.
Aside from his lousy guitar playing abilities and terrible practice schedule, he would also never buy food. Instead, he would just eat whatever the rest of us had brought in for ourselves. At one point, Bob, Steve, and I went grocery shopping together and filled our entire kitchen up with food right before we went on a weekend trip. When we got back, the entire kitchen was empty. Close to $300 worth of food had disappeared without a trace. And any time someone tried to call the guy out on his bad behavior, he would just respond with a "Huh? Oh no, that wasn't me."
On top of all that, he was incredibly disgusting. The guy would take a shower like once a week and, when he did, he would brush his hair, pull the hair out of the brush, and slap it on the shower wall. Bob and I started letting Steve use our bathroom since the one he had to share was so horrible. Slagathor took this as a hint that it was okay for him to start using that one, too.
This happened like twice before all three of us sat him down and told him that if he ever stepped foot in that bathroom again, we would collectively kick the heck out of him. I could go on for hours and hours about how awful Slagathor was, but eventually Bob, Steve, and I came up with a devious plan. We went on an aggressive campaign of subtly messing with him so much that he finally moved out.
We would do all kinds of little things to get under his skin, like take a button off of one of his shirts, or loosen his shoelaces so that he couldn’t just slip his shoes on when he was leaving, or make a bicycle chain mysteriously start rusting over in just a few days. When he finally moved out, we threw a party to celebrate—a party that he actually showed up to. He was not very happy when he found out the reason why we were having the party...
95. Room Service
For a full year, my college roommate secretly slept with my boyfriend while I was at class. I routinely took more than a full course load and was in math and science classes or study groups every morning. One day, I walked in to see a horrifying sight. They were just fully in the act after I came back early from a canceled class.
I moved out. I was angrier at her than heartbroken. I also lost most of my friends through the breakup, and they stuck together for a good while. Fast forward five years later. Those two throw a crazy expensive engagement party at the guy's parents' beach house, which was attended by some still-mutual friends who told me everything.
At the party, she caught him sleeping with one of the waitresses from the catering company in a bathroom. They still got married. I feel a little bad for her despite the karma balance. She feels like she can't do better than being with a cheater.
Unsplash
96. 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 steal 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.
97. 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.
98. Beware The Waffle Stomper
My girlfriend and I were renting a house with a female friend who liked to play fast and loose with the term "hygiene." From this point on, she'll be known as "the Barista." We were fairly accustomed to the less-than-ideal odors that would waft gently around the Barista. The house we were sharing was built in the 1960s, and we had separate bathrooms.
So, the Barista's bathroom was generally heinous in both smell and appearance, with used tampons and other feminine detritus scattered around. As a result, it took us a while to realize that the smell of raw sewage belching forth from her side of the house was not, in fact, her fault. Which surprised us because she was so completely unhygienic.
You see, one day, my girlfriend and I were watching TV while the Barista was at work, and we heard an ominous gurgling noise from her bathroom. Shortly thereafter, we were overwhelmed by the smell of raw sewage that was so strong it caused my girlfriend (who was an autopsy technician at the time) to literally dry heave.
Clearly, an investigation had to be mounted, so we made the perilous journey into the Barista's bathroom, stepping cautiously to avoid the many disgusting keepsakes in her biohazard collection. When we arrived in her bathroom, we were horrified to discover that raw, chunky sewage was liberally bubbling up from the drain in the Barista's shower.
The shower itself was so coated in hair, mold, and stains it looked like a modern art masterpiece. Of course, the smell was horrific, and so got out of there as fast as we could. The next thing we did was to immediately call the landlady. This wasn’t just a problem of a messy roommate. There was clearly something bigger going on here.
When the Barista returned home from her shift, she was horrified that the lawn had been torn up to expose the Orangeburg sewer pipes that had been nearly entirely blocked by tree roots. Since the Barista's bathroom was the closest to the sewer main, the backups had been bubbling up in her bathroom for months without the rest of the house being aware.
We asked her if she had noticed the issue, and she mentioned that sewage regularly bubbled up from the drain while she was showering (biweekly). Her response was so absolutely repulsive, that I'll never be able to forget it. She just said, like it was as normal as could be, "I just squish it back down with my feet." That was when she got a new nickname: Waffle Stomp.
99. A Different Type Of Clogging
My roommate had a room with her own bathroom. She would constantly clog her toilet by using napkins as toilet paper since she didn't want to buy toilet paper. After she clogged it, she would resort to using everyone else's bathroom in the hallway with no intention of fixing her own. One day she clogged the toilet my other roommates and I used as well.
While she was out, my roommates and I went into her room to see what was up with her bathroom. When I opened the door, my jaw dropped. There was month-old poop still in the toilet, along with piles of clothes all over the floor. She also had two dogs that she had neglected and she always tried to take our community recycling so she could keep the money for herself.
100. Leaving A Memorable Impression
I once walked in on my roommate getting spanked on his bare butt by his parents. Yes folks, you read that right. I walked in on my college-age roommate getting spanked on his bare butt by his parents for not having his stuff packed up on move-out day. Here’s the full story: It was move-out day and my roommate was working on a paper last minute.
I was packing my stuff. His parents walked in and were absolutely enraged that he wasn't packed yet. They immediately started scolding him while I was still in the room, but thankfully I had a final to go to and figured I'd dodge the storm. I said my goodbyes, assuming they'd be gone by the time I got back from my two-hour final and went on my way.
As it happened, my final only took 20 minutes, so I got back much sooner than they'd have expected. I opened the door and saw my roommate bent over his bed with his bare behind showing, just as his mom wound up for a spank. I slammed the door shut as quickly as I possibly could. I went over to a friend's dorm and helped her pack for a while until I felt safe enough to return. I never brought it up to him after that.
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101. Hitting Back Where It Hurts
I had two freshman roommates that kept eating all of my food. Within the first week, when classes hadn't even started yet, I went to make myself a peanut butter sandwich. My first peanut butter sandwich in this dorm. A special moment. But when I arrived at the kitchen to prepare it, the entire tub of peanut butter was completely gone. They also left the empty tub in my cupboard.
Anyway, I flipped the heck out, because who on earth eats a whole tub of someone else’s peanut butter by themselves, without even bothering to introduce themselves first? These girls would literally scarf down all my food, yet complain if they thought anyone was touching theirs. So I came up with a plan for revenge.
I started buying really fattening food, lots of chips and doughnuts, etc. I was trying to teach them self-restraint, but these idiots would go through these bags and boxes within two days. So I kept buying doughnuts. And then, one day, they started complaining about how they couldn't fit into their jeans anymore. Success.
I also put laxatives in my peanut butter. That’ll teach ‘em to mess with me and my food!
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