10 Roommate Horror Stories You Won’t Believe Actually Happened

Living under the same roof with close, loved ones can be challenging. Let alone with roommates. Sometimes they turn out to be so unbearable that they’re remembered as a nightmare, sending shivers down your spine.

• I was a barely 23-year-old woman who just moved into the area for a new job. My friend recommended I stay with this guy she knew, since he had a cheap room in his apartment available. Initially, he seems nice enough, but I notice the lock on my door is broken-like someone ripped it out. I say, “Hey, so is this gonna get fixed?” He assures me it will, and explains a “crazy ex roommate” did that. Hmm.
  Throughout the day, as I’m unpacking, he repeatedly barges in without knocking to ask me something stupid. After the third or fourth time, I say, “Hey, would you mind knocking before you walk in?” He apologizes and says he’s just not “used to living with women.”
  He asks me out the next morning, and I politely decline, saying that I don’t want our living situation to get complicated. I’m now officially weirded out, but I have nowhere else to go. That night, around 2am, I wake up to him in my room telling me he made me a sandwich. I tell him thanks but no, thanks, I’m sleeping. Shortly after that, I purchased a cheap converted van and traveled the country solo. © Addwon / Reddit

• Gotta be up for work at 5am, and they’d regularly roll in at 12-3am and put fucking pounding house music on full blast. Moving out was the best thing I ever did. I was so depressed I didn’t have the energy to look for somewhere else until it was forced. Looking back, I can’t believe I put up with it so long. Never again. Sleep deprivation really catches up with you over time. © ArgentStar / Reddit

• He had severe, undiagnosed OCD. He had a laundry list of rituals that would consume his entire day and annoy me.
  One of his rituals was to play a movie and music at the same time on his laptop and then go take a two-hour shower. We shared a room, so I would close his laptop when he left, and after his shower, he’d come out and ask me, “Why did you touch my laptop?”
  I would tell him that the noise was really distracting, and he would tell me to just use headphones. This happened every Tuesday and Thursday night. © Burrito_Loyalist / Reddit

• She would brush her long hair and clean out the brush. Then, to dispose of the hair, she would stuff it in the sink drain.
  Normal people throw it in the trash. She clogged the sink constantly. © blackday44 / Reddit

• She would come home, fill the fridge with a ton of food, then leave a couple of days later for months on end to stay with her 50-year-old boyfriend. Her food would sit in the fridge and rot, so I would have to toss it all out. She would complain that we ate her food when she would randomly show back up.
  When she left to go to her boyfriend’s, she would hand me anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 for her portion of rent for the coming months. I’d have to babysit her money, which made me paranoid. © Sirduckerton / Reddit

• When she would “wash” our dishes, she would run everything under cold water with no soap and place them on the drying rack. I got tired of reminding her that utensils and food-caked plates needed to be scrubbed with hot, soapy water, so I would just rewash them after she was done.
  To make things worse, she also never washed her hands after using the bathroom and claimed to be a germaphobe (i.e., she wouldn’t let people sit on her bed with outside clothes). Oh, and she wants to be a pediatrician... © f**nissjuverdeen / Reddit

• My older brother lived with me for a while when he was getting back on his feet. He had a pet snake, which he lost in my apartment several times. © Amy_G***linger / Reddit

• He had a window AC unit instead of a fan like a normal person because he wanted his room to be an icebox. Even during the winter, he would run it in complete opposition to our furnace, so we were just running up the electric bill. He didn’t care, though, since his rich dad would just pay his portion at the end of the month. © Nickelas / Reddit

• I once scrubbed down the whole apartment because the landlady was coming by. It took literally all night. He didn’t help at all. I scrubbed pots that had more culture than a classical concert.
  Five minutes after the landlady left, he went into the kitchen, created lots of noise, and when I awoke from my coma and went in there, it looked exactly the same minus the mold. © cyberpudel / Reddit

• I had a roommate who refused to wear deodorant. He also worked in a labor-intensive job and went to the gym, so basically, he stunk a lot. He’d swear he showered twice a day, but no one ever witnessed that.
  He then started scamming our other roommates (in a 4-bedroom apartment) by borrowing money and never, ever paying it back. Then he started skipping out on his share of the bills, and then the rent. Eventually, he got kicked out.
  While he was there, we had this running joke that the safest place to hide our money from Mark (his name) was under the soap. © Overall_Draft_9416 / Reddit

• I had nice porcelain dishes for fancy dinners that were left to me as an inheritance, along with everyday dishes. She went out of her way to reach for the porcelain dishes and then literally threw them into the sink, shattering them.
  I spoke to her several times about it, and she would say, “It’s your fault for owning nice things.” She was a weird hippie type of person. So I packed them into a box and kept them in my room until the lease was up. © mencryforme5 / Reddit

• She would decide something was dirty and throw it away along with everything else it was touching.
  Then she would demand that I buy replacements for everything (both hers and mine) that she trashed without advising me beforehand. © KiddPresident / Reddit

• My sophomore year of college, my roommate and I had bunk beds. I had the top bunk, and he had the bottom bunk. If I was in bed, I could tell when he took his shoes off by the smell. He hardly showered, so he was a smelly dude.
  He also had raging mental health issues that he refused to get help for. I’m talking: narcissist (nothing was ever his fault), manipulative, and a pathological liar. He moved out partway through the year, thankfully. And he was going into education. © celloman78 / Reddit

• My roommate for one semester in college was the smelliest person I’ve ever met. His day would consist of drinking half a gallon of milk, then sitting in his room, whispering to himself in the dark while playing video games. He showered about twice a month if we were lucky, and every time I walked past his room to get to mine, I would gag from the smell.
  It was the worst semester of my life, especially since I was dealing with that plus pneumonia during my winter abroad in Canada. © Toronto_Phil / Reddit

• He borrowed money from me, refused to pay me back, and then asked his dad for money to go snowboarding. Before he went on his trip, he LITERALLY waved his money in my face and said I wasn’t getting any. The moment he left the building, I called his dad and explained what happened. His dad sent me a check, punished his kid, and made him cut his trip short. © TekJansen69 / Reddit

And here’s a collection of even more outrageous stories about unbearable ex-roommates.