Isn’t it true that everyone seems normal until you end up under the same roof? Why is it that living in the same home with someone brings out their most disgusting behavior? Food nightmares, crazy sleepers, and washroom disasters are just some of the nightmares you’ll find in these sometimes terrifying tales of the worst roommates ever.
1. 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.
2. 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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3. 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?
4. 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."
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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 engaging in casual conversation. 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 idiot to the guys.
10. 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.
11. How Did That Get There?
Three of us were living together and one of us was a real pig. One day, when untidy Sam was out, my other roommate came up to me and said something I’ll never forget: "Is that a raw chicken chest on the tap in the bathroom?" Sure enough, there was a raw chicken chest left on the bathroom tap by my other roommate. We never found out how it got there. We were too afraid to ask.
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12. I Need A Second Opinion
I once had a roommate with terrible OCD. One day I had just taken out the trash and shortly after thrown out some scrap paper in the bin next to our sink. Roomie went to brush her teeth and accidentally knocked her toothbrush into said bin. Roomie proceeds to call her mother to ask whether she should wash off her toothbrush and use it or throw it away and buy a new one.
She and her mother discuss the topic for about 10 minutes, with roomie describing the contents of the bin and exactly how long the toothbrush spent in there. Mom apparently then transfers the call to roomie's dad, and the conversation repeats. After discussing the matter at length, it was decided that Roomie should buy a new toothbrush.
13. She Can Dish It Out…
When I moved in with my roommate, she specifically told me she wasn't a neat freak and even mentioned that often the dishes would pile up for a couple of days, but it wasn't a big deal. So, here I am cruising through and assuming washing my dishes is the thing to do. Every now and then I'd let something sit for a couple of days...just like she did.
Then, it got weird. I'd come home to her slamming things around in the kitchen as she washed dishes. Then, she'd start leaving me a note asking me to do the dishes (which were mostly hers.) It was really bizarre. Turns out, it was a passive-aggressive game. It always bothered her that there were dishes in the sink, but she left hers there to force me to wash them all?
I soon realized that when I didn't care enough to do her dishes as well as mine, she'd get angry and wash them all. I thought we were doing fine getting them done a couple of times a week and it wasn't a big deal. Apparently, it was a HUGE deal. I stopped eating at home once I realized what was happening. It became too stressful to deal with.
14. Dog’s Breakfast
My old roommate was dating a good friend of mine. One day, after her spending the night, they went out for lunch. His dog came out of his room with a tissue in her mouth, I stopped her, grabbed it, and went to throw it out when my hand felt really wet. It was a rubber, fully loaded, and when I grabbed it I guess I squeezed it and emptied its contents into my hand. It's been years and I still haven't told him about it.
15. Mommy Issues
Freshman year of college. I got stuck with a smelly, anti-social dude who would call his mom on the landline (this was on the cusp of the cell phone explosion) in our room and complain about his classes and professors in the whiniest tone for about two hours every single night. He never once hung out with us despite our encouragement and by the second month in, we stopped talking completely. I wonder how he's doing.
16. 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 take 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.
17. Dog Got Your Tongue?
I had a roommate that would play video games on his laptop all day in the same seat. He was clean and out of the way, but my dog didn't like him. One day, I got home and there was blood on the walls close to the door and the window. I also saw that my dog had pooped and peed in the room (which was the first time). Something was clearly very wrong, so I took her to the vet.
It turned out that my poor dog was missing a little bit of her tongue. When I got back home, I asked my roommate what happened and he said nothing happened. The dog refused to come out of the room. Later on, I discovered the disturbing truth. I caught him tossing the dog off the couch and laughing. Well, I kicked him out and made his parents pay all the rent money he owed. My dog immediately was happier.
18. I Sink He’s Crazy
I stored my shoes under the sink at a small studio space that I shared with my friend. One day, they had this yellowish tinge and they smelled bad. I quickly realized that there was pee on them. I figured a dog had somehow got me while I was out walking and I ... didn't notice? The whole thing was very confusing.
Oh, but I got answers fast. And they were not pretty. A few days later, I woke up in the middle of the night and caught my adult roommate peeing in the sink. That's when I realized that it was human pee stains on my brand new white shoes. As a solution, we moved to a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment so we don't have to share a bathroom with each other.
At night, when he goes to the bathroom I can hear the sink running and no flush. It also looks like there are down-there-hairs in the bathroom sink. He is sort of an angry person sometimes. How do I get my roommate to stop peeing in the sink? I think he knows it is gross. He just doesn't care.
19. Discord Over Discord
We've known each other probably over 20 years and moved in together nearly two years ago. They haven't worked since March last year due to lockdown and so had plenty of spare time in which they got invested in a Discord gaming server. We used to hang out, play video games, watch movies all the time but in the last six months we've hung out probably three times total.
The last time I bought a co-op game for us to play which they seemed interested in at first, but then kept chatting to their Discord friends on the phone. After an hour they said they had to do something important, and played video games with online people instead. Whenever I suggest we do something together they say they have other stuff to do and I can hear them laughing and playing games online.
I once tried to join in with this Discord server but they all bad-mouthed me for having a console as they're PC elitists and my roommate hasn't involved me in that since. I should also stress they do this nearly 24/7, I can hear them laughing really loudly at 3 am when I have to be up for work the next day. Is it weird that your roommate never wants to hang out but is obsessed with friends they've never met IRL?
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20. Burning Down The House
Our rental house came with a lousy propane grill in the backyard. I fixed it up, and cookouts became a regular event at our place, with me serving as grillmaster and my stupid roommate Doug trying to stick his finger in the burner to see how hot it was (hot enough to cook a burger apparently wasn't enough information).
Doug had always been enthralled by fire, so it wasn't a surprise when I came home and discovered him using the grill to cook some hot dogs. The problem was, Doug didn't understand the difference between propane and charcoal grills. Even though he had seen me fire the grill up dozens of times, he never made the connection between the propane cylinder and the total lack of charcoal in our house. This had horrific consequences.
When faced with what was (I guess to him) an inoperable grill, he went into full problem solving mode. One trip to Walmart later and he had a bag of instant light charcoal, a box of matches, and a soon-to-be empty bottle of lighter fluid. I came home from class to the overpowering stench of lighter fluid and bratwurst.
When I went into the backyard, I found Doug and his sister gleefully scorching the heck out of a helpless pack of bratwurst. Doug had filled the flimsy, sheet metal grill with most of a bag of charcoal, dumped an entire bottle of lighter fluid on it, and threw a match into it. The bottom of the grill was visibly glowing red, and the propane hose had begun to melt (because Doug didn't even try to remove the mostly full tank from the grill).
He had also neglected to move the grill away from the house, which resulted in an interesting pattern of scorching to the stucco where the metal had contacted it. Fortunately for us, he didn't burn down the entire house, but from then on he was not allowed near anything heat-producing in our home, including the toaster.
21. 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!!!!
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. Sketchy Sally
I had a terrible roommate once. It started with small things...making me pay for pizza she ordered and then not letting me eat any, stealing my stuff and giving it to her friends as "presents," eating all my food when she broke up with her boyfriend, and crying about how sad she was because he was well endowed, taking my cell phone and racking up a $200 long-distance bill, attempting to flush my fish down the toilet, and trying to break my computer.
Then one day, it got even weirder. One afternoon she brought some girl into our room that can only be described as super sketchy. Let’s call her Sally. My roommate told me they were going out and she'd be back late. Whatever. I do my work, and I go to bed. I wake up the next morning and this Sally girl is asleep on the floor, in my clothes, with my blankets from my bed that I had been using.
Dumbfounded, I look at Julie and say, "What’s going on?!" She tells me to be quiet or I'll wake Sally. I start to get angry and tell her I don't care. That's my stuff that I was using and she has no right to just take it off of me and give it to some stranger, not to mention we're not allowed to have overnight guests in our rooms. She she bursts into tears. Sally wakes up and starts yelling at me. In some scary spastic speech. They leave and I'm left with blankets that smell like booze and who knows what else, and one less outfit.
26. Compulsive Fryer
My roommate considered herself a good cook, even though she didn't know basic cooking skills. She would turn the oven on to the highest setting she could think of, put meat in, and leave it to cook for god knows how long. Or, she would turn the stove on the highest setting, then put something on the pan, and then go back to her room to watch TV until the entire place started billowing smoke. It became a daily occurrence.
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27. Exorcism Anyone?
I'm actually the horrible and horrifying roommate. I didn't do any of this awful stuff on purpose, but you can't actually help what you do when you're asleep, can you? First, I snore. My roommate and I shared the same room and she eventually got used to it. It wasn't bad, but going from sleeping alone to sharing a room with someone who snores sucks.
Second, I talk in my sleep. Not full sentences or anything but enough for my roommate to hear a word or two every hour or so that she was still awake in our room. Third, I move around A LOT. A lot of the time in the beginning of us sharing a room she thought I was waking up when really I was still asleep. This brings us to the actual horror part though.
I don’t know how many times this happened but it was often enough to freak my roommate out. You see, I would sit up in bed. But how is this horrifying you ask? I would sit up in bed, turn my head, stare at her with my eyes so dilated that they looked black, and growl and make scary noises and sleep talk. THAT'S how I was the horrifying roommate.
28. House Warmer
At university one winter, one of my housemates decided to get out his reusable hand warmer. The kind where all you need to do is to immerse it in boiling water until the stuff inside it melts. He, however, decides to put it in a saucepan on the stove then go out for hours. With my room being the closest to the kitchen I start to smell burning first; but not until the entire living room and kitchen had filled with a blueish smoke with no windows or doors open.
So I had to be the one to hold my breath, run in, open all the windows and doors to the outside and make sure nothing was on fire. Thankfully, there was so much smoke the fire on the stove had been put out. I should also point out I am asthmatic and had to go for a checkup and a chest X-ray following this as whatever was in the handwarmer had aggravated my lungs.
29. Dog Or Koala?
My terrible roommate never took care of his dog. I went out to dinner with the roommate and came back to a house smelling to high heavens of a mixture of eucalyptus and vomit. Turns out the dog had chewed off the cap of a bottle of eucalyptus balm, eaten half its contents, and then proceeded to poop and vomit in 30 different places in the living room. We spent half the night at the vet's and the other half cleaning up the mess.
30. He Views, I Pay
My roommate's boyfriend moved in with us to "get back on his feet," which was supposed to be a couple of weeks at the most. He kept ordering dirty movies on our cable box and when I told her he had to go, he refused to leave. We called the authorities and they made us allow him 30 days to vacate! It was the most awkward situation.
Pair this with the fact that I had to hide my food in my bedroom because my roommate would get up in the middle of the night and eat my Pop-Tarts. This wasn't the only reason he was an awful roomie, I failed to mention he would not pay for said movies. I really don't care what you wanna watch, but pay for it. He also wore his welcome out, he had already been there two months when all this went down.
31. Smell Her!
I had a horrible, nightmare roommate who had no sense of smell. Her boyfriend was a creep who lived with us without my permission and they each paid one-quarter of the rent while I paid half (he also loved to leave hair in the bathroom sink!). She got pet rats that stank, and they escaped and ate and pooped on a bunch of my stuff when I was out of the apartment on winter break.
32. I Can Take A Hint, I Just Don't Want To
My first semester in college I had a roommate who was a spoiled brat. She didn't know how to use a washing machine. She had so much stuff that my stuff was just this little blob of blue in a sea of pink. She was always cold so kept the temperature up really high. She would always bring guys back to the dorm room and I'd have to hang out in the common room.
I finally got fed up with that. She brought a guy back and tried to get up to something. She kept giving me looks and I just ignored her. He finally left and she was like, "Why didn't you leave!?!" I told her to get lost because it was my room too. Though, she once left a guy in our dorm to go run off and do something. He was pretty cool and we watched a football game together.
33. Knives Out
One day I came home to find my roommate, let’s call him Donny, in my backyard. He had taken it upon himself to learn how to throw knives. His target was a large chunk of plywood, and his chosen missiles were, of course, our kitchen knives, several of which lay broken in the grass. One of the knives, I later found out, flew over the wall and into the neighbor's yard— while they were grilling!!!
34. Using His Head
My college roommate tried to annoy the girls living in the dorm room next to us by banging his head on the wall constantly to anger them with the noise. I still don’t even know why he hated them so much, he just did.
35. Dancing On The Ceiling
I used to live in a two story rental with a bunch of other, rather strange, people. One night, as some of us sat downstairs we heard a bang above us from the ceiling. We all looked up and saw a foot coming out of a hole in the ceiling. We thought we were having some kind of shared hallucination or something. Then something even weirder happened.
Our roommate’s face appeared in the hole. He cursed, then another room mate's face appeared, and he cheered. It turned out they had argued over which downstairs room a bedroom was above, so they ripped up a floorboard and kicked the ceiling through. Roomie thought his bedroom was above the kitchen. To prove it, he kicked a hole in his own floor, and through the ceiling below. He was wrong. His room was above the living room.
36. Boozed And Baked
Maybe I’m the worst roommate ever because of my weird habit: I love getting boozed up and then baking. My proudest accomplishment was the time I got rather loaded and perfectly cut up a pineapple. Furthermore, I decided it needed to look like canned pineapple, so I made perfect rings. I pan fried them with cinnamon and brown sugar. Delicious!
Unfortunately my roomies had to face a kitchen that looked like a pineapple destruction scene the next morning.
37. Does He Come In Unscented?
I had a roommate once that was the dude that never showered. For weeks on end! When he did shower, I doubt he used enough soap to actually get clean. And get this: because of the stench that was embedded in his room, we actually lost the security deposit. One of the local game stores put "NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SHOWER, NO SERVICE" on their door because of him.
38. A River Runs Through… My Dorm Room!
It's midterms and I have a huge project due in the morning. It's close to about 1 AM and I'm up working on the project, just the final details and feeling pretty proud of myself. I get my stuff ready to take a quick shower before going to bed and put everything in the bathroom before going back to my laptop to check render progress.
That's when my roommate Julie stumbles in, and she is completely boozed up. She climbs into her bed and exclaims she doesn't feel well. I knew she was like two minutes from throwing up so I decided to wait on my shower. Lo and behold, you can guess who comes stumbling out of bed, runs to the bathroom and slams the door.
I hear her heaving away, followed by the flush of the toilet. Then I hear her cursing and screaming. I look over to the bathroom and notice there is water coming out from under the door. Before I even connect the dots, the door opens and I see the most disgusting thing I hope I ever see in my life: a tidal wave of toilet water and vomit comes flooding out of the bathroom into our room.
Julie storms out, screaming at me, and kicks the vomit water at me, getting it everywhere. She then screams, "This is all your fault and you'd better fix it!" before storming out of the room and slamming the door. I sat there for a moment as one does when they're in complete shock staring at the floor as water and vomit continued to pour out of the bathroom.
Then I got up, walked over to her dresser and pulled out all of her clothes and threw them to the floor to sop up the mess she made. These were not cheap clothes either. We’re talking Gucci, Vince, D&G. I took the rest and built a little barrier wall between her side of the room and mine to keep her nastiness from spilling over into my area.
Next, I went to go get my RD (resident director). That's when I remembered that my ID was in the bathroom. I went to retrieve it to find that she had thrown up all over my clothes, ID included. I fished it out, washed it off, and went to file a report. The RD put me up in a new room for the night while they brought out a cleaning crew.
The room reeked of booze when they arrived. I made sure they knew it was her and not me, and that she had a history of drunken outbursts. I had reported her a number of times before, but this time they saw it was serious. Julie came back the next morning and screamed at me about how she now had to attend AA meetings because I reported her.
She was only 18, and it was a dry campus. They had sort of a twisted sense of humor about the whole thing and I love it.
39. Dog Outhouse
A few years ago, I made the mistake of moving into an apartment with a colleague-turned-friend. Turns out she was immature, naive and had the worst judgment. A week after we moved in together she announced she wanted to adopt a dog, I have a cat. I'd had a cat for two years at this point. She definitely knew I had a cat.
So my stupid roommate adopted said dog anyway, much to my annoyance. She then proceeded to only partake in the fun stuff associated with owning a pet. You know what I’m talking about: pet naps and cute photographs on Facebook. I worked from home at the time, so it fell to me to feed, entertain and walk the dog. Yippee.
To make matters worse, my roommate designated the bathroom off the living room as the dog's bathroom. Why I allowed this, I really have no idea. You see, this was also the bathroom into which the water from the washing machine would empty. This was a terrible apartment with an even worse landlord and so everything was kind of not done properly.
If the output pipe of the washing machine wasn't placed properly (which it often wasn't) and the dog's doodoos hadn't been cleaned up immediately (which they often weren't), I'd be treated to the sight of doggy poo nuggets happily bobbing about in a flooded bathroom. Once was enough for me. After that I forbade the use of the bathroom as a doggy outhouse.
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40. Do You Smell Pizza?
I came home after work one morning to smoke barreling out of my oven. My roommate left a pizza cooking all night while passed out from drinking. He lived through the smoke but everything I owned including all my furniture and property reeked of putrid pizza smoke for three long excruciating weeks.
41. Roommate Dumb, Guest Dumber
This story is about both my roommate and her “guest” who are both stupid a far as I’m concerned. I’m guessing that my roommate didn’t feel like coming down from the third floor to lock the door behind her friend and gave her a key. I left this morning, turned around to lock the door, to see one single key sticking out of the lock. Since it wasn’t on a keychain, that’s what makes me think, “guest.”
How daft do you have to be to lock the door and not take the key out? I could have left the key on the table in the foyer, but I took it with me. Let them freak out about where the key may be. And if they’re stupid enough to make a group text about it, they’ll be admitting that they made an extra key and that the friend was stupid enough to leave it in the lock.
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42. Proposal By Committee
Four of us lived in a four bedroom house. My roommate had a pretty serious girlfriend who was over all the time. One day she came up to me and asked if I was alright with splitting rent five ways instead of four. Of course I am. She then asked the other two roommates the same thing. Yes answers all around. Finally she approached her boyfriend to ask if she could move in with us since all of his roommates already said it was alright.
Wait, what was that? She hadn't asked him about it yet.
43. At Least She Greased
One time, my roommate decided to make brownies from a box. The box instructions say “grease the bottom of an 8x8 pan before pouring in the brownie batter.” I couldn't believe what she did. She picked up the 8x8 pan, flipped it over, greased the BOTTOM of it, and then flipped it back over and poured in the brownie batter.
44. Eco-Unfriendly
I once had a roommate who was excessively "green." Meaning he would sort through our recycling and trash and then hold house meetings to explain why certain types of things were going in the wrong container. I learned a lot about recycling, but it kind of got to be too much.
45. Stuck On You
My ex-roomie (and ex-best friend) had super long hair and it was EVERYWHERE in the bathroom. I asked her repeatedly to clean the hair out of the tub every time she showered. I had to explain to her that because I use a wheelchair, "I DO NOT HAVE A SHOWER CHAIR AND I DO NOT STAND IN THE SHOWER SO IF YOU DON'T CLEAN IT YOUR HAIR STICKS TO ME."
46. 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, pulling 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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47. This One’s Pants 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 take her own life. To the rental managers, her mother had chest 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.
48. Midnight Snackin’
My roomie used to cook at 2 AM after getting home from the bars. He had to stop when we woke him up one morning under the kitchen table cuddling an open bag of rice.
49. 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.
50. 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 brawl 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.
51. 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.
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