Recently, we asked college resident advisers of the BuzzFeed Community to tell us some of their worst horror stories. Here's what they had to say!
1. "We had a ‘serial shitter’ who would poop on the tables in the common area. It went on for months and no one ever caught them."
2. "A coworker told me about a previous student who’d lugged a casket upstairs to her room on move-in day. She dressed like a pop-culture vampire, only took night classes, and wouldn’t leave the building during the day."
3. "My best friend was an RA. He got called away one night. ... Apparently, a resident was feeling a smidge under the weather. His mom previously told him, 'If you get sick, take a hot bath.' Well, there were only showers in the dorms. So he flipped his refrigerator on the side and poured in hot water so he could take a bath. Flooded all of the rooms below him."
4. "The best story from being an RA is the time a kid took acid and walked, naked, down to the lobby and lay on the floor by the door. We had no idea what was going on and he wasn't responsive so we called for med support. He was taken in an ambulance and got kicked out of school."
"A few weeks later, our DA told us the boy's parent complained about our mistreatment of their son."
5. "It was the end of the year and we were doing room inspections to check people out of their dorm rooms. In one room, my co-RA and I found MUSHROOMS growing out of the carpet. Like, full-on toadstools with caps."
"When we asked the guys who lived in the room about it, they told us that they had noticed them the previous semester but had just pushed a table over them to cover them up. P.S.: Guess which lucky RA had the job of getting rid of the mushrooms. 🙄"
6. "Room inspections turned up a pet scorpion in a terrarium (the owner was a petite, bespectacled blonde girl)."
7. "Once in the middle of the night the dorm was evacuated for a fire alarm. ... The RAs have to check every single room still to allow students back in. ... The kicker is that of course it's some kid passed out drunk who tried to make mashed potatoes...and who is dead to the world in the kitchen after all the alarms."
8. "I was not an RA, but my best friend was. We’ll call her A. So A worked/lived in the dorm full of gamers (yes it was stinky and unhygienic) even though she herself was not a gamer."
"When RAs are on duty, they have to do a final round of the building inside and out at midnight. Part of this is checking every bathroom. A had worked her way up to the third floor men’s bathroom, and she stepped inside to find literal shit everywhere. It was all in the floor of the stall, all the way to the shower, and smeared across the shower walls. The best part of all of this, was that this guy did this multiple times throughout the rest of the semester. He was notorious around campus. You’d wake up one morning and hear, 'the shower shitter struck again.'”
9. "A kid got kicked out of his previous college for getting a DUI and transferred to mine but was on academic probation. He proceeded to spend his time partying and unsurprisingly was kicked out after the first semester. He had gone home for Christmas and didn't come back to clean out his room."
"Instead, a frat brother was stuck with the job. it had tons of trash, including half filled booze bottles. Frat brother was carrying out a bunch of these bottles to trash them and found out it wasn't booze in the bottles...but pee."
10. "One my favorite interactions in my two years of being a RA: While doing a safety check, [a] student proudly showed me his townhome walk-in closet. There were condoms PINNED on the walls next to a tapestry and those Christmas lights. Blankets and pillows on the floor. He smiled and said he got a lot of action. Planned a sex ed event right after that."
11. "Nearly every night I had to knock on a resident's door to inform him it was quiet hours and he could no longer play his didgeridoo."
"He would just get stoned and lose track of time."
12. "Somebody came back from the bars high AF. They went to the downstairs kitchen, took a shit in a bowl, and microwaved it for quite a long time. The kitchen was rendered unusable for months thereafter, and let's not discuss the smell..."
13. "I served as an RA for three years at my university and this story still makes me laugh at the absurdity: I once had to sit in a mediated conversation between a pair of roommates. Roommate A was accusing Roommate B of pooping on the carpet every time they happened to be high."
"Apparently Roommate B would get high and roll out of bed and just poop on the carpet because 'the bathroom was too far away.'"
14. "I had to start a conversation with a resident with 'not to kink-shame but…' because he repeatedly was having sex with his curtains open. He’s on the first floor and faces the quad."
15. "I had a resident who pooped in tissue boxes and sent them down the trash chute."
"Another resident would have bonkers loud sex; she lived right off the elevator area so everyone heard it all the time. As a grad, came back to see the state police and FBI lugging full-sized marijuana plants out of a student room. So many stories of intoxicated students, including one who told the police that 'the RA threw up on me.' Good times."
16. And finally..."[I] walked in on one of my residents and a student from upstairs getting it on in the common room. All I saw was my resident bent over and I was like, 'OKAY, I'M LEAVING.'"
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.