People Are Sharing Their "Roommate From Hell" Horror Stories, And Some Of Them Made Me Audibly Gasp
Note: This post contains mentions of animal abuse.
If you've ever lived with roommates before, you may understand how difficult it can be to mesh two or three different personalities in a living space.
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But even when you try to communicate boundaries or set ground rules, sometimes a roommate will continue to do their own thing.
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And since this happens quite often for people, Reddit user u/00Dylan asked, "What did your roommate from hell do to earn their title?" So we gathered some of their stories for you to read below.
1."My roommate yelled at me for reading my own books because it messed up the decor. Books were sorted by color and not subject, and reading them made them look not as new. Yeah...my own books."
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2."My college roommate ran out of pot, so he tried to boil down his bong water to 'hash' in my microwave using my Tupperware. The residue ended up fusing with the plastic at the bottom of the container, so he scraped it out with a razor blade and smoked a big bowl of plastic and bong water concentrate with the windows closed."
3."Every time my roommate cooked with her boyfriend, which was almost nightly, she left a pile of dishes in the sink. So, naturally, within two days, the sink was overflowing and there were no dishes or utensils to eat with. We had a dishwasher, which made this way more infuriating. Anyway, one day, I had completely had it when I saw little bugs flying around the kitchen. I told her she needed to do the dishes immediately, and I left for work. When I came back, the dishes were, in fact, done. However, she had left behind the one single knife I had used that morning, dirty in the sink. Even after I had washed and cleaned up after her for months. The level of petty was astounding to me — and, honestly, I think about that incident often."
4."She had the landlord return the security deposit in her name, even though I'd paid it in full. It was $1,800. When I asked the landlord for the deposit back, he said he already gave it to her, and I had to work it out with her. I was 19 and didn't know any better. Needless to say, she never paid me back. I'm still bitter about it 20 years later. I worked full time in college, and her parents paid her way. $1,800 was a lot of money back then."
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5.My roommate was a total slob, and I am not saying this lightly. He would eat dinner on the couch, then put his dirty plate (with scraps and bones) under the couch. I would have to check constantly for that, or we would get some foul smells. One time, he had pancakes and put the plate under the chair, and due to the large amount of leftover maple syrup, we got ants. He would just trash everything and made the house disgusting. Finally, I had enough and I stopped cleaning up after him. I just let the house fall into total ruin.
"He then started staying at his parents' house, telling them and our friends that I was a slob and he couldn't handle it anymore. He eventually moved out and lives with his girlfriend now. She complains constantly that he is a slob, too."
6."I saw him with a Capri Sun and a pair of scissors with a glass. He proceeds to cut the top of the Capri Sun, going through the straw and pours the juice into the glass."
7."My sophomore year of college, my roommate invited her boyfriend from New Zealand to come live with us. These were dorm rooms, so it’s not like she had a private space. This guy was living rent free in our room all the time. He was nice enough, but it was impossible to get anything done, including studying during finals week when he had nothing else to do, so he just watched TV constantly. When I brought this up to my roommate, and said that I would appreciate it if he did not stay for the next semester, she got extremely huffy and moved out.
"Thankfully, they didn’t charge me for her half of the room, so I ended up with a single for the cost I had been paying for a double, so I guess it all evened out."
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8."She stole my underwear, wore them, then reported me to our boarding school for having personal 'inappropriate' underwear when I confronted her for stealing them. She got in trouble for theft, but I still got in trouble for having clothes outside the dress code even though I threw them out after I saw them in her dirty laundry hamper."
9."He would always leave his dog for too long, and she would shit on the floor. It was an old dog, and I'm sure at one point it wasn't an issue. The problem was this guy didn't even try to do anything to fix the issue. I'd get home from work every day and walk into a house that punched me in the face with shit smell when I opened the door. We talked to him about it over and over again, and he'd just blow it off. What did he finally do when he got fed up with us complaining? He put the dog down. We just wanted him to maybe come walk her while on his break from work. His job was five minutes down the road. I can still feel the tension in the room when we found out she was gone."
10."He would come into the kitchen, pour a glass of water, and would sip/'aah' the whole glass."
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11."I once had a roommate who kept cranking the temperature way up. I'm talking like 28 degrees Celsius or 85 degrees Fahrenheit. The landlord kept coming over to turn it way down as he was paying the bill. This meant we had the landlord coming over basically every day for a month. Finally, he turned the temperature to a very generous 22 Celsius and set up a lock box to cover the thermostat. My roommate came home, got wasted, took a hammer, and smashed the box to pieces and turned the temperature up to 28 degrees again."
12."My roommate masturbated on the only dry towel in the bathroom, so when I took a shower, I wiped his jizz all over myself while I was drying off."
13."I had three randomly assigned roommates for my college dorm. They stole my food, had sex against our shared wall, had a TON of people over at all hours, had the TV on max volume 'til 4 a.m. and did not quiet down when I asked. In fact, they banged on my door/wall at random intervals to make sure I wasn't getting any sleep. They called me names and spread rumors to turn the whole dorm floor against me."
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14."We already weren’t getting along, but it never escalated beyond minor spats. That is until he put nail polish remover into my facial moisturizer. He denied it when I confronted him, of course; I was even accused by my other roommates of putting it in there myself. Obviously, I moved out, like, two weeks later, because the landlord refused to let me put a lock on my bedroom door. My new place was furnished, and I moved out ASAP, so it took me a couple extra days after I moved to get all my furniture out, including my bed. When I arrived to get my bed, there were fresh bodily fluids on my sheets and pillow case. That’s right — he jacked off onto my pillow."
15."An entire toilet paper roll in one sitting? Dude made nuclear shits."
16."We had a horrible centipede problem at one of the apartments I lived in that came about suddenly. They were in every single room, including the bathroom and my bedroom. I would wake up to find multiple right above my head or next to the light switch in the bathroom. My fear of centipedes was already one step away from being a full-blown phobia before this. Neither of my roommates cared even in the slightest bit because they were both disgusting human beings. So one day, I told the one whose father was the landlord that I was calling an exterminator and billing her dad if she didn't take care of the issue by the end of the day. Within an hour, I got a call from her saying that she found the centipedes' food source: a build-up of maggots in, around, and under her cats' food dishes."
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17."They bought a baby puppy German Shepherd on a whim. Didn't tell us. Didn't have any experience with pets. Did not have any talent for keeping pets. There was no garden or balcony. And the third roommate was allergic to dogs."
18."One of my first flatmates in London was weirdly into me. One time, I took a friend home cause she was too drunk to take the tube by herself. My flatmate saw us getting home, asked me if she was my girlfriend, and I said yes, hoping he'd leave me alone after this — big mistake. He asked if he could sleep with us in my bed (my friend was passed out at this point), said he 'wouldn't do anything, just wanted some human contact.'"
19."There were three of us and one shower, which wasn’t terrible — until he’d saved his chewed gum by sticking it to the wall in the shower and forgetting to put it back in his mouth when he was done. That was only one of the many things that drove me and our other roommate mad."
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20."She wrecked my collection of Japanese kitchen knives. She ate the lunch I had prepared for my child for school. She prepped an entire Costco pack of chicken breasts that I had purchased and claimed them all as hers. She left a bottle of hair dye on the floor after dying her hair and ruined the hardwood and carpet. The list goes on and on. She was a classmate of my wife who was down on her luck, and we let her rent a room from us for a few months to help her out. At the end of four months, she packed her stuff up and said that she didn’t think she owed us anything as she is a single woman and we were a family of three. She did not pay a single bill or for any groceries for the entire four months she stayed at our place. I hope she is doing well."
21."My roommate burned holes through the bottom of my pots while making instant ramen in maple syrup instead of water. She forgot it on the stove while playing bongos in the living room at 2 a.m. with some dude she’d brought home off the street."
22."Not super terrible, but we went to a party; he got drunk super quick and saw some people he didn't want to be around and walked home. About an hour later, me and my other roommate headed home, too. When we pulled into the driveway, we saw lights on in the living room, which quickly went off. When we got inside, we saw a massive person sized-hole in the hallway wall into the bathroom. Our roommate was pretending to sleep, and when we asked him what the fuck happened, he said someone 'broke in' but didn't try to steal anything. They just busted a hole in our wall (from inside of the bathroom into the hall I should add), then they slipped out the still-locked back door (they didn't see him laying on the couch at all either, apparently)."
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23."In the early years of my marriage, before we had kids, my wife and I had two extra bedrooms. I had a co-worker going through a divorce and offered him a room temporarily. After a couple of weeks, and things going pretty well, especially since he was working a lot, we offered for him to stay longer-term and start paying rent and bills. After about two months, he gets a new girlfriend, which wasn't that big of a deal — she was mostly around during the weekends. Fast forward another month or so, and he has her bring her four kids to stay the entire weekend with us! Keep in mind, this was before we had kids, so there is all these children that we don't even know taking over our place, and we felt like prisoners in our own bedroom. By the end of that weekend, we requested that he find somewhere else to go."
Did you ever have a roommate from hell? If so, tell us what happened in the comments below.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-888-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
