People Are Sharing Their Worst Roommate Experiences, And They Range From "Unhinged" To "Bestie, You Better Move Out"
Roommates are rough, y'all. Whether you're living with your BFF or a total stranger, it a weird experience to have another human up in your space and business alllll the time.
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TBH, it seems as if just about everyone has some kind of roommate horror story. So redditor u/_propernoun_ asked, "Reddit, what are your worst roommate stories?" Here are 28 of the very best (or, perhaps, worst) ones:
Note: Responses have also been sourced from r/BadRoommates, this similar thread, and this one.
1."My first college roommate hated doing laundry, so he wore my underwear (without asking) when his were dirty. It never felt like my underwear again after he'd been in it."
2."I had a roommate in college who used to play 'Bitter Sweet Symphony' on repeat all day, every day, from the minute I moved in to even after I moved out. (I moved down the hall to another kid's room because this is just one of the super-weird things he used to do, and I still used to hear it constantly playing whenever I'd walk by.) I really used to like that song too, but it's ruined for me now."
In case you want to experience the horror for yourself, here's the song they played again...and again...and again:
3. This scary roommate who is celebrating Halloween year-round, I guess:
4."I had a roommate who absolutely refused to buy toilet paper. After weeks of her stealing ours, the three of us started hiding it so she would be forced to buy her own. Instead, she started taking heaps of napkins from restaurants and stealing rolls of our paper towels. One night we all went out to dinner, came home, and the entire basement was flooded because she backed up the toilet with god only knows how much shit that shouldn't ever be flushed."
5. This person, who decided that if they don't want to use the Wi-Fi, nobody can:
In case you're having trouble reading it, it says, "Hey I've been shutting off wifi [because] it turns out its [sic] really bad for your health! Sorry about [the] incovenience [sic]. [I] was trying to only do it after you fell asleep. Theres [sic] info on the web about how it can cause cancer, infertility headaches, and disrupt cell repair while you sleep. (if you're interested)"
6."I had a roommate who would (attempt to) leave unjustified scathing, passive-aggressive notes for just everyone — our apartment neighbors, the owners of cars parked outside, and even our landlady. The kind of notes with overly polite language, underlines, and randomly capitalized words. Always written in red marker. Always rude enough to get the shit beaten out of her. Always signed from both of us. I spent that year following her around and removing the notes as quickly and quietly as possible."
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7."First year of college, my friend's roommate came stumbling into their dorm room one night. It was blatantly obvious that she was drunk beyond reason. She started shouting, 'I NEED TO GO TO THE BATHROOM,' which woke up my friend. She saw her roommate staggering back and forth through the doorway, but stayed in bed because she really didn't know how to react. Before the roommate left to go to the party, she'd placed her white Mac laptop on her chair by her desk. So, what we think happened was that the white from the laptop on the seat made the chair look like a toilet in the mind of the drunken roommate. She approached the chair, pulled down her pants, and sat on her laptop. There was only one way this could go. Although her laptop was covered in piss and shit, she denied that this ever happened."
8. This person, who treats their spatulas like a cast-iron pan and does not wash them:
I'm sorry, in what world is that even kinda clean?
9."I lived with three of the worst girls I’ve ever met when I was in college. I signed a yearlong lease with them and lasted two months before I noped out and found some poor soul to take over my lease. They ignored me 98% of the time, except for when they ate my food in the fridge before going downtown (which they did every week from Thursday through Sunday), and when they locked themselves out (which also happened Thursday through Sunday when they were coming home from the bar). They also stood outside my door and loudly made fun of me or mocked my appearance. I’m a pretty chill person, so usually I would just hang out with other friends and just come home to sleep. But one day, a friend accidentally let it slip to one of the girls that I’m allergic to avocado."
"The next day, I opened the fridge and saw that they'd cut all their avocados in half and piled them on and around my food in the fridge. They didn’t know that I only get sick when I eat avocado, not from being around it, so they just went and wasted time and money...in the hopes of what? Poisoning me? Making me sick? Giving me an allergic reaction? Come on."
10. This roommate, who found "Don't destroy your roommate's belongings" to be an unreasonable request:
Here's a close-up of what that pot now looks like:
11."My old 'roommate' (he was technically the homeowner but lived in a shack in the backyard) would come into my room early in the morning and watch me sleep. I was a bartender at the time, so I would get home about an hour or so before he would be leaving for work. I was always thoroughly passed out when he'd leave and I'm a heavy sleeper, so I did not notice this was happening for MONTHS until a guy I was seeing stayed up and caught him opening my door. There was also a second door to my room that I could not open (it was locked from the other side). I don't know what was going on in there, but I'm fairly certain he was spying on me from that room as well."
12. This roommate, who really embodied the "gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss" energy:
13."We had a ton of food going missing, and we all knew who it was, but my best bud (landlord) discreetly set up a webcam in the kitchen. Within a couple of days, we caught the guy eating a stick of butter straight from the wrapper, and then he went in the pantry, grabbed a bag of sugar, and just started chugging it. Motherfucker was making cookies in his mouth."
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14."She had this cup full of 'liquid' by her bed. There's no better way to describe it, really. She kept her toothbrush in it — bristles down in the liquid — and when it came to brushing time, she'd basically just take the toothbrush out, brush her teeth, spit into the cup, and shove her toothbrush back into her cup."
15. The unhinged roommate who has stuck the GUNK FROM INSIDE HER PIMPLES on the mirror not once, not twice, not three times, but FOUR TIMES:
Like...what? That's so much!
16."My roommate thought they could 'clean' the shower by leaving it running with super-hot water and closing the door. They turned the water on and merrily left for work. It was my day off, and I realized something was amiss when I realized how many hours the water had been running. I knocked, but of course there was no answer. I panicked and tried to open the door, but it was locked. So, naturally, I thought one of my roommates had locked themselves in there and, I dunno, died or something. I went completely hysterical and called the housing office so they could break down the door. Turns out, the wood had swelled so much from all the moisture, they had to pry the door open. There was no one in there. After that I was just confused, until the roommate in question got home and explained."
"When we got the bill for the door they had to replace, the roommate tried to weasel their way out of paying for it. They fully intended to make all four of us split the cost, and there was NO WAY that was happening. They did eventually pay up, thank goodness."
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17."In college, my roommate pretended he had a girlfriend who lived in England (we're in the US). He used to talk to her on the phone and everything while we were both in the dorm. My roommate was Facebook friends with her, of course, and a few of her friends whom he had 'met while visiting her.' He used to talk about how much he missed her, especially having sex with her. After I moved, I found out she never existed. Fake profile, fake name, fake pics...he was talking to no one (except himself) on the phone. I have no idea why he'd go to such lengths for this lie, but I felt really weird about the whole thing once I found out."
18. This roommate who has no sense of boundaries or responsibility:
19."I lived with a roommate who was a complete and total narcissist. It was a $1,500-per-month apartment (three-bedroom in a nice part of town) that should have been $500 a person, but he was lazy and maybe contributed ~$150 of that. His girlfriend wasn't much better, contributing about the same amount per month, but she was at least more pleasant to talk to. I lived with them for about six months and paid the $1,200 to cover the rent because I didn't want my credit to take the hit that would result from an eviction. The whole time, they were going out to eat and wining and dining each other; meanwhile, I never could do anything because I was burning up all my cash just trying to cover the rent. Of course, I talked to him to say it stressed me out and I couldn't afford food most of the time. But since he was a piece-of-shit narcissist, he would turn the argument around to somehow make it about how ungrateful I was."
"The end finally came when I spoke with the leasing-office people and explained that while I loved the apartment, I was the only one who was really giving the property managers any money, and the situation was untenable. I also said I would love to continue doing business with them (possibly with a smaller apartment), but I was locked into my lease and couldn't afford to pay an early-termination fee because these assholes I lived with were sucking me dry.
"They looked up the paperwork and said, 'Well, it looks like only [my asshole roommate] filled out lease paperwork, so you have no legal obligation to pay the rent.' I thought for a few moments and then said to the agent, 'You should probably get eviction paperwork ready for next month. I have no intention of continuing to fund their lavish lifestyle. What other units do you have?'
"I went back to the apartment and began packing. One day, they came home to see that my bedroom was empty and my car was gone. They started packing like crazy for three days, having to throw away a lot of their stuff because they were going to get locked out before they could get to it all. On the second day, the power was turned off because it was in my name at the old apartment, and now I had my own place. Fuck those people."
20. This (thankfully) ex-roommate who decided to leave with one final "fuck you":
21."A friend of mine had a pretty rough time during her first week of living in a new place with a bunch of guys. She originally wanted to rent with her friend, but they unfortunately pulled out of the university, so she ended up having to find somewhere to rent alone. She ended up renting a room in a house share with four other students. After the first week, she informed them she was going to the store, and they asked her to pick up some toilet tissue for the house. She accidentally forgot, and they were pretty upset about it. So the next day, she came home to find her bedroom walls and bedsheets smeared in shit. It was their idea of teaching her a lesson about forgetting to get toilet tissue."
22. This person, who can't understand why her roommate is taking a $700 bill so personally:
23."I used to live with who I've decided were one of the most disgusting couples ever. We lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment. They would use my dishes and leave them in their room, unwashed, usually with food in them. They didn't want to buy a litter box for their cat, so they took a plastic gallon tub and just dumped litter in it. Their cat constantly peed on their shoes in their closet, and they'd just continue wearing them as if nothing had happened. But the worst: When we moved out, I had to clean everything or I knew we wouldn't get our deposit back. They had cleaned out most of their things, and I let them know I was going to clean their room. They said 'cool' (they were never going to do it), so I went in, armed with gloves, a scarf covering my mouth, and a bottle of bleach. Boy, was I unprepared."
"I walked in, and this stench just hit me. Their bedroom door was always closed. and they always had incense burning, so I never smelled it. They had a couple of cardboard boxes filled with poop and toilet paper. I ran out of there so fast and called them, screaming and demanding to know what was going on. They said that sometimes I would be in the bathroom, and instead of knocking or holding their urine, they would crap in boxes. They tried to play it off as 'We take it out once a week,' like they were changing the litter box."
24. This bold roommate who — frankly — has bad taste:
25."I lived with a magician. Of many odd moments, the one I remember vividly was when he was about to leave the country for nearly two months. Before he left (hours before going to the airport), he filled the freezer with whole chickens. Then he got really upset when we ate them to free up space."
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26."My girlfriend's brother lived in a quad with three other dudes. They all met through Facebook before moving in. Everyone was pretty normal until about a month in. This one guy would never leave his bed and would only eat pizza. He would leave the empty pizza boxes in his bed and either sleep with them on top of or under him. He never threw them out. The real nail in the coffin was when he apparently clogged the toilet. The plunger wasn't getting the job done, and after 15 minutes, he panicked. He walked out of the bathroom, took a wire hanger out of his closet, fashioned it into a stick, and went back in. The toilet flushed. He came back out, fashioned the hanger back into a hanger shape, rinsed it off, and PUT HIS SHIRT BACK ON THE HANGER AND IN THE CLOSET."
27. This roommate, who made things personal:
28."I am a girl and I lived with a girl, so you'd think our apartment would be fairly clean, right? Nope. My roommate was a huge slob. Not just 'clothes on the floor'–type stuff, but legitimately gross and disgusting messiness. Like, she left her menstruating dog's bloody panty liners on the coffee table in the living room. She cracked open eggs to use the whites, then left the shells and yolks in the sink to fester. She left half-eaten trays of sushi on top of our bookcase so her dog wouldn't get them, then I'd find them days later when the smell betrayed their location. Other than the slovenly lifestyle, she was a fairly good roommate, so this was a pretty significant flaw that I'd been meaning to talk to her about for a while."
"A couple of weeks later, she went on a three-week vacation with her family. She made a minimal attempt at cleaning up some of her stuff, which I appreciated. However, Thursday night, I got home from work to a horrible smell lingering in the house — kind of like vanilla/beer/mold — and I couldn't tell where it was coming from. I went through the fridge and threw out all her old food. I took out every garbage in the house...and the smell was still there. I scanned the tops of all the furniture to make sure there wasn't a sushi tray I had missed, but nothing. Defeated, I went to bed.
"The next morning, the smell was worse than ever. I walked past the door to her room (which had been shut since she left), and the smell seemed worse there, so I ventured inside. The putrid stench hung thickly in the air. I immediately noticed my large, Pyrex lasagna dish in the corner, covered in tinfoil. Unthinkingly, I removed the tinfoil cover, and a CLOUD of these tiny, brown, gnatlike insects swarmed out from underneath. I gasped, coughed, and choked as one of the insects flew up my nose and became attached to the back wall of my nasopharynx. You know, that spot where sometimes loogies get stuck, where you can neither blow them out nor cough them out? That spot. I could feel it wriggling, but it was pasted to my nasal passages with no way out. At that moment, I was so disgusted and blind with fury that I paid it no mind. I looked down at the pan of what had formerly been banana bread to see a chunky, gelatinous substance that was now wriggling with maggots and covered with a filamentous black fungus. It was too much.
"I grabbed the dish and stormed out into the parking lot, then chucked the whole thing into the dumpster while cursing my roommate loudly. When I got back inside, I got in the shower and — becoming more aware of the sensation of an insect so deep up my nose, it felt as if it was touching my brain — began to vomit for the next half hour. I puked so hard, it came out my nose, and though it burned like a motherfucker, I think it finally dislodged the fly, because I couldn't feel anything after that. This was one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen in my life, and I work in a hospital."
Now it's your turn! Do you have a bad- or strange-roommate story like these? If so, tell us about your roommate — including images or text receipts, if you want! — in the comments below or via this anonymous form.
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.