Recently, we asked the BuzzFeed Community to tell us their worst roommate horror story. And, well, they shared some stories that will make you appreciate only having to deal with a roommate who forgets to change the toilet paper roll:
1. The roommate with the sketch boyfriend:
"I had a roommate who dated a guy who stole our (landlord-provided, aka free) flatscreen TV and sold it for an ounce of weed. When my other roomie and I found out, we asked our landlord to terminate her lease immediately. She ended up coming back with her boyfriend and a gang of people and burglarized the entire building (three apartments). Fun times."
2. The feuding roommates:
"In my junior year of college, I moved into an off-campus apartment with two other girls who were far-closer friends with each other than me, well, at least until the summer before we moved. They apparently got into a huge fight about a guy that led to physical blows and never told me, but still had to be roommates because of the lease we signed.
They would torture each other throughout the year and I was the unfortunate bystander caught in the crossfire. I remember driving home one day, noticing a very nice-looking bed in the dumpster I pass each day, and wondering, Who would throw out such a nice bed? I get into my apartment and notice that the walls were all scuffed up and one of my roommates was missing her bed. Yup, the other roommate got some of her friends and tossed her bed into the dumpster. Looking back on it, I don't know how I made it through the year."
3. The cliché bad roommate:
"A couple years after college, I lived in a house with two other girls. One I had known from high school, the other was 10 years younger than us. The younger roommate must've not known how to live with others cause she had the standard 'bad roommate' etiquette of stealing our food (specifically my cookie dough) and not helping with the trash, recycling, or lawn mowing. She also initially put her dirty dishes outside her bedroom door as if she wanted us to clean them. When we told her to clean them, she hid them in the oven."
4. The roommate who has ~fun~ with pepper spray:
"Once after coming back from class, I opened the door and immediately started tearing up and coughing. Turns out, she and her friend were drinking and thought it would be funny to pepper spray the entire room. All the sheets had to be changed because they sprayed it directly on my bed for some reason. I had to camp out in my friend's room until the next day. She ended up cleaning everything but still, who does that?"
5. The nudist roommate:
"It started with the superlong hair extensions that shed all over our shared bedroom and clogged our shower drain. She refused to clean it because there 'was no way of knowing whose hair it was,' other than the fact that our hair were different colors and lengths. Then came the naked yoga in our bedroom and naked cooking. It was horrible. But the thing that ultimately got me to fight my housing contract and move out? I came back from a short holiday to find her in bed, eating my cookie butter from the jar with a FORK. Don’t know why her using a fork over a spoon makes it worse, but it does!"
6. The roommate who was malicious for the sake of being malicious:
"Too many to count! A few of the best include:
- Used my salad bowl and ladle to mix concrete.
- Broke every single piece of glassware I own.
- Threw out an unopened Amazon box that contained my Christmas present from my brother.
- Let my indoor cat out on purpose multiple times.
- Dented my car bumper.
- Dropped a pizza box so the pizza landed face down on the ground and then left it there for two days.
- Never apologized for any of the mentioned incidents."
7. The roommate who decided to do some demo:
"I once had a roommate who moved into a townhouse (condo association) with me that I had already been living in for about a year. My other roommates had graduated and moved out. I came home one day to find that he had ripped his ENTIRE bedroom window out (it was on the front of the building so everyone could see) so that he could fit an air conditioner in and filled the rest of the opening with plywood. The condo association called to complain faster than I could say, 'What the fuck?'"
8. The roommate who used an epilator:
"I had moved to a big city and had a friend say she wanted to move there too. I told her to do so and that she could stay with me until she found her own place (big mistake). Anyway, I use an epilator to get rid of my leg hair. I usually lay a towel down on the bathroom floor and when I'm done, I shake the towel out the window (it's only leg hair).
"She decided she wanted to try to epilate instead of shave. I told her the machines can be pricey so she's welcome to use mine to see if it's something she'd like to invest in. I come home and go to the kitchen. There's pubes, everywhere. Stuck to the wall, on the floor, everywhere. I told her to clean it up ASAP as it's where we eat our food and I was having people over for my birthday. She 'cleaned' it up by sweeping the floor only. When my friends put my birthday cake on the table, you could see the pubes merely inches away, stuck to the wall and lying on the table. Oh and after all that, I found out she broke the epilator."
9. The roommate who committed identity fraud:
"Stole another housemate's ID, opened a bank account in their name, stole a check (it was the '90s) from a housemate, and wrote it out to himself using the name on his fake account so he could pin it on someone else. Thankfully his plan didn't work because we were already getting suspicious of him. Our house was a lot happier after we kicked him out."
10. The roommate who was a really light sleeper:
"Where do I start? First, she went to bed at 7 p.m. every night and insisted on complete darkness and minimal noise — so she’d complain that the TV was too loud (it was on 12 out of 100). I basically didn’t get to stay in my own room if I wasn’t sleeping too. Second, she rode horses and brought her disgusting riding boots inside the room rather than keeping them in her trunk. It smelled like a barn the whole year. Third, she’d hide Cheerios and peanut butter under her bed so I’d wake up to the sounds of munching."
11. The roommate who needed to be potty trained:
"An old roommate of mine would not flush the toilet. It’s like he didn’t know that it was possible to dispose of poop and pee by pulling a handle. Oh, and he would bomb it almost every day and NEVER once clean the poop stains he left on the toilet."
12. The roommate with boundary issues:
"My roommate from a few years back started off being the kindest, sweetest girl but it turns out she had a lot of issues with boundaries. She would eat my food, wear my clothes, and borrow my stuff without my permission. She even took some of my clothes and my hair straightener to Europe with her for a month. But the final straw was when she drank two bottles of wine by herself and I woke up at 3 a.m. to find her puking in my bed."
13. The roommate with serious boundary issues:
"My college roommate my freshman year would go through my drawers and steal my clothes without asking, including underwear, and would cry and say I was attacking her when I asked for my clothes back. She also required me to have my Snapchat and my iPhone location on and would spam call me freaking out if I went somewhere without telling her or if my location was off. I ended up moving out after one semester because I couldn’t handle her anymore."
14. The roommate who couldn't be bothered anymore:
"Worst roommate I had. God, I’ve had a few. I think the one that takes the biscuit is this girl I shared a house with in my second year of uni. She was hardly ever home but insisted she needed the bigger room despite her parents living round the corner (and the fact she stayed with them 3/4 of the week). She told my partner I was seriously ill and was going to be hospitalized, which was a complete lie. Later, she forbid my partner from coming round to the house at all.
But the killer was when she smuggled sleeping pills into me against my will because she 'couldn’t be bothered with me anymore.' Safe to say I did not live with her for very long at all!"
15. The roommate who caused an allergic reaction:
"I knew my college roommate from high school and felt more comfortable living with someone I knew beforehand. She went wild and started partying and sleeping around with a bunch of guys. Once, I woke up with her and some random guy in the bed next to me (luckily clothed at that moment).
The bit that takes the cake, however, is when she put candy wrappers in my pillow of a candy I was allergic to (I have a pretty severe allergy). I woke up for a full week with a swollen face and couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Finally, I washed my sheets and the wrappers came flying out. I never saw her do it and can’t prove it, but it was definitely her. I found a new roommate for sophomore year 😂."
16. The roommate with a secret:
"Oh god, how long have you got? The worst one (of many) was probably the girl who it turned out was a hoarder. Rest of the house was fairly tidy, except she'd leave washing up in the sink for days. OK, annoying, but could be worse.
Then, a horrible smell started coming from her room so my other housemate tried to go in while she was at work and oh. My. God. You couldn't open the door more than an inch because it was piled up with literal garbage and it turned out she'd been eating and just leaving half-empty takeout containers in her room for months. They'd rotted and that was the smell — it was covered in flies, it was horrific. No idea how she managed to keep it secret so long and I hope she got the help she needed, but I was out of there by the weekend."
17. And lastly, the roommate who was basically like Ctrl+C:
"I once had a roommate who went all 'single white female' on me. We started out having completely different looks, hobbies, beliefs, etc., but as time went by, she started to sort of morph into a version of me — and I’m not that interesting, really. Fun fact: She’s now married to a guy I used to date!"
Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.