People Fork Over Their Noteworthy Roomie Experiences
15. She Was Unclean And Lacked Serious Hygiene
Give this girl a bar of soap and some cleaning supplies, pronto!
“I lived with my friend (Katie) and her younger sister (Sarah; ~18 months younger) for a year at uni. At the start of the year, we had all agreed that the communal areas were to be kept clean and clutter-free since it was a small flat and had a weekly cleaning roster. We also agreed that if we were going to bring any guys back to the flat, to warn the others just so we know who is coming and going for security reasons since the student area we lived in was notorious for break-ins.
Sarah became the biggest most disrespectful pain in the butt. She started off cleaning and helping out around the flat and telling us when she had guys over (there were a lot of guys she brought over), then as the months passed she stopped telling us she was bringing guys over altogether. Katie and I would wake up in the morning to random mostly strangers in the kitchen eating our food, using our shower, or just dashing out of the flat holding their belongings.
Sarah stopped cleaning (argued she was cleaning when confronted), left a huge mess in the kitchen after cooking and never cleaned up, and there was a horrible odor coming from her bedroom because she never opened her window or cleaned out her personal trash (used sanitary pads and tampons would sit in her bin for a week or more).
She was really unhygienic, had halitosis but never kept up oral hygiene, and rarely took showers.
This next bit is when I got beyond angry with her. One weekend Katie was out of town, and their parents rang Sarah for a catch-up around 4 pm one Friday afternoon. Sarah tells them she can’t talk and that she’s got a 20% assignment due a few days later which she had to work on. 20 mins later one of her many guys comes over (she didn’t tell me prior) and she didn’t resurface while I was up – I went to bed around 10 pm.
I had a 35% assignment due the week following, so the next few days I’d planned to dedicate to this assignment.
That night I woke at about midnight to Sarah and her man crashing around in the kitchen. Lots of laughing, screeching, pots and pans crashing about, TV blasting in the lounge. I was livid but didn’t get up to tell them to shut up (I should have in hindsight).
I fell back asleep and woke again at about 3 am to them going through all the drawers in the bathroom and slamming them shut. Sarah and her dude went through my personal drawer and Katie’s. They crashed about and slammed the bedroom door and then proceeded to hook up the rest of the night. I had to sleep with a movie playing through headphones for the rest of the night just so I couldn’t hear them.
I got up at 6 am with next to no sleep, to a filthy kitchen with food smeared on the bench, tv still on, some of my personal food missing, pots and pans left on the stove with food in them, and my belongings from my drawer in the bathroom on the floor.
Oh, and the front door was unlocked. I left her a nasty note outside her door calling her a rude and disrespectful witch and that she’s not the only one who lives in the flat.
I went to the library for the day and Katie said she had a good cry to her and their parents after reading my note but they didn’t care what she had to say after I’d already told them.
That night was my last straw with Sarah after months of her being a disrespectful jerk. She never apologized for that night and didn’t even clean up the tornado mess in the kitchen and lounge.
Every time Katie or I would confront her, she’d cry and say she didn’t mean it and she’s trying to be better, but nothing ever changed.
Since Sarah’s room was a pigsty (actually that’s insulting to pigs since pigs are cleaner than she is) and had a feral odor coming from her room, I went to the store and brought sardines and broccoli. I got the liquid the sardines were in (it absolutely reeked) and poured it along with blended day-old cooked broccoli (and the reeky water) into a spray bottle.
While Sarah was out, I went into her room and sprayed that feral concoction on her clothes that were on the floor, the ‘clean’ clothes in the closet, in her shoes, and in her bed. I tipped the remaining offensive-smelling concoction into her shampoo. I removed all evidence of the sardine concoction from the flat. Once rubbish day had been, I was in the clear. Sarah never took the flat rubbish out, so how would she know what was in the bin? Since she emptied her bin once in a blue moon, I put a sardine in her bin wrapped in some tissues and left it.
Well, the fish started rotting, and the clothes and shoes reeked. Sarah being the moron that she is, didn’t empty her bin until a week after I put the sardine in there. Honestly, I can’t even describe how bad it smelled. I came back from uni one day to Sarah crying to Katie because she couldn’t get rid of the smell. Katie got so mad and yelled at her for not cleaning and being unhygienic for literally months.
Sarah had cleaned her room from top to bottom and aired it out for weeks but the smell never left her room completely and was still in her bedsheets that she didn’t wash.
When their parents came for a visit, they yelled at Sarah for smelling, her mum screamed that they didn’t raise Sarah to be so disgusting, that was music to my ears. Her (super annoying) friends stopped turning up unannounced (and at all), and guys stopped coming over too.
I never expected my reeky concoction to work such wonders.
My room and the rest of the flat smelt fine, the lingering smell was just in Sarah’s own room. I was astounded that it took that sardine concoction to get Sarah to clean and air out her room, was the smell of rotting tampons not offensive enough to her?! Sarah failed her assignment and I got 91% in mine, which made me so happy. That’s the only evil thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve not told anyone what I did, but personal revenge never felt (and smelled) so good.”
14. I Still Don't Know What Put Her Over The Edge
“Let me preface this by saying I’ve had more bad roommate experiences than the average person, but this was the WORST.
My second year of college, I got assigned a random roommate. Our schedules really clashed — I was on a competitive collegiate dance team and our practices would start at 8 p.m. and go until 3-4 a.m. I tried to be considerate and would always tiptoe into the room after practice and use my flashlight to get around the room, but I could tell she was annoyed.
To this day, I’m honestly not sure what went wrong, but my roommate started to leave passive-aggressive notes and ultimately created a toxic environment. I asked one of my best friends to help confront my roommate.
A few days after the confrontation, my friend caught my roommate giving him dirty looks at the school dining hall, so he decided to go talk to her. The talk quickly developed into a yelling fight, and my friend was escorted out of the dining hall.
Then, my friend and I were confronted by the POLICE. My roommate had called the campus police and claimed a case of harassment. Luckily, my friend and I were able to explain our situation and were let off the hook.
After harassing housing services for months, my roommate was finally relocated to a new dorm room. The day she moved out, I was taking a nap in our room when I heard her walk in to pack her stuff. Not wanting to face her, I hid under my covers and tried to go to sleep. My roommate started making insulting comments about me while packing, clearly knowing that I was in the room. She was literally leaning over my bed, talking trash about me. To this day, I still don’t know what pushed her over the edge.”
13. Barely 21 And Already Needing Rehab
“I lived in a large house and had a housemate who was barely 21 and a full-blown substance abuser. He was a nice enough guy when he was sober, but he was really mean when he drank. He’d destroy stuff, pick fights, stuff like that. He did stuff that he otherwise would have been arrested for, but his family was a prominent group of lawyers in the area, so he got away with the stuff he did, and to some degree, his parents were enabling his behavior.
Eventually, he caused too much destruction, and my housemates and I voted to evict him.
There was also suspicion that he was getting into harder substances. When he was told to leave, he did as much destruction as he could to my housemates’ property. He never targeted me because there was no conflict between him and me, but like I said, he was mean to the more assertive housemates. Eventually, he got arrested and his parents had to come to the house to collect his stuff and apologize. I think he was actually left alone to cool his heels in jail. I just hope he got the help he needed.”
12. He Thought We Could Read His Mind, So He Dropped Out
Trust me, kid. We don’t want to read your mind.
“One of my roommates freshman year of college was a REALLY sheltered kid, and I could tell that he was gonna have a hard time getting adjusted. I, my other roommate, and the rest of our suite were really accommodating and tried to talk to him, but he was kinda weird and extremely shy. For a while, it seemed that he was a nice kid, albeit a bit awkward and strange.
A few weeks into the quarter, while I was in the room he would start asking me really weird questions. He once asked me if I thought vampires existed, to which I responded that they didn’t. He said, “Are you sure? because I’m pretty sure I saw one the other day.” Then, this other time, he was looking at a list of students in his discussion section, and one of them had the same name as someone in our suite.
No big deal, right? Well, my roommate thought it was the funniest freaking thing in the world. He actually brought the other dude over and pointed it out to him while laughing his butt off. “You guys… have the same name!” He kept on pointing at the screen and his face was turning red because of how hard he was laughing. At that point, I and my other suitemates realized he was definitely very strange.
He also asked me once about mind-reading and whether or not I could read his mind. I’m a pretty tolerant person, so I shrugged most of it off and I figured he was just a really weird kid.
Fast forward towards the end of the quarter, about a week before finals. I come into my suite and I see him, his mom, and the dean of my college.
Apparently, I find out that he’s moving out and he’s going to take his final exams next quarter. I didn’t want to pry so I refrained from asking any questions, I just said goodbye and wished him the best. He took most of his stuff, but a good portion of his things was still there, enough for me to think that he would eventually come back.
A week later, after all of our finals are done, I walk into my room and ALL of his stuff is gone; apparently, he moved out for good. I didn’t really know what to think of it, and since it was the last day of finals, I was going home that afternoon for Christmas break. I kinda just shrugged it off since we could all tell that he wasn’t really adjusted to college life and he was just way too sheltered to fit in.
On the way home, I get a call from him. He had this weird habit of asking my name in the form of a question before he asked me anything as if he had to make sure it was really me. (James and Kevin are the names of people in my suite.)
“… OP?”
“…yeah?”
“Can you tell James to stop reading my mind? I know he’s doing it, so can you please just tell him to stop?”
“…uh…
alright.”
“And can you tell Kevin to stop too? I’m not sure if he’s doing it also but just tell him too. Alright, bye.”
He ended up coming back a few quarters later. He looked really different because he had gained a bunch of weight, but we suspected that it might have to do with the medication he was put on. Whenever I saw him, I always said hi to him and asked him how he was doing.
He’s doing well now. I even had lunch with him and a few of my other suitemates. He’s still sort of weird, but he is genuinely a nice guy so I don’t have any problems with him.
But man… those few months were confusing as heck.”
Another User Comments:
“Sounds like another schizophrenia story.
I felt like I missed out by not going off to a university and living on campus. Then I read stories about all the awful roomies, especially the ones with schizophrenia, and feel like I didn’t miss out on too much.” pirate_doug
11. He'd Yell And Search Around For A Non-Existent Girl
“My worst roommate wasn’t a bad guy until Halloween. We were both freshmen, living on campus in the dorms trying to make friends and do well in school. We hung out a decent amount of time as we had some things in common, (I actually played high school baseball against him).
Well, Halloween rolls around and he asks me how small they can make cameras. I think it’s a normal question, nothing too suspicious, and as a computer engineering major, he figures it’s something I’d have some knowledge on.
Naturally, I tell him how small they can make cameras, on the button of a shirt, the eyes of a teddy bear. He thanks me and then a little later he starts complaining about being able to hear our neighbors. It’s 2 am and it’s dead silent, I had just gone to bed and he’s sitting at his desk browsing the internet. I tell him I don’t hear anything, he insists he has better ears than I do, so I tell him to put his headphones on.
He refuses and informs me that he wants to hear what they’re talking about. So I get our other roommate (I and this guy share a room, the other roommate has his own room and we all share a bathroom). The other roommate comes in and says there is nothing but silence. Of course, this isn’t good enough for my roommate – whatever, I’m going to bed.
I come home from class one day and this kid is pacing back and forth across our room and he’s kind of sweaty and he’s holding his hands/rubbing them. I’m no genius when it comes to reading body language, but something is obviously awry. I ask him what’s up; did he fail a test or miss a big assignment? No, of course, it can’t be something innocent.
He informs me that the roommates next to us (not the one from last night, but the other 4 guys that share a bathroom next to us) have footage of him walking around the dorm room without clothes. I ask him if he’s walked around the dorm room without clothes and he says “No… but I probably have at some point!” He tells me that there are cameras in the room and that the kids next door are blackmailing him.
I ask him what they want and he says they haven’t told him, just to torture him perhaps? I offer to help him look for cameras (knowing that there aren’t any, at least pretty sure…there are no cameras, right?), but he declines, saying that he’s searched everywhere already.
Whatever, I’m home from class and I’ve got some video games to play (Enemy Territory, the free Wolfenstein mod).
This odd behavior starts escalating over the next few days, he’s talking about what he’s going to do to the guys who are blackmailing him, trying to figure out how he can get the tape, stop the cameras, and all that nonsense. Well, I’m on TeamSpeak with some clanmates and I open the mic up for them to hear his latest craze. I’m a deep sleeper, but this kid woke me up with incessant yelling at 9 am.
This time he’s yelling for this girl Amanda. Mind you, this kid has not had a girl the entire semester, so I have no idea who Amanda is. Our building was co-ed, guys on one side of the floor, ladies on the other half, maybe she was on our floor? At this point he’s pacing up and down the room, whispering about how he’s sorry, he’s not sure what she’s mad at him about, but he’s sorry for whatever it is.
He decides he’s going to go out into the hallway and yell for Amanda at the top of his lungs. This kid screams ridiculously loud! He actually started waking people up and they’re instant messaging me asking what the heck my crazy roommate is yelling about. After a good 30 minutes and many laughs by clanmates, he comes back into the room. Now he’s mad because he has no voice from yelling and she won’t come out after 30 minutes of him pleading.
Cue time for me to leave the room and do something besides be around this kid.
I come back later in the early morning hours, maybe 2 or 3 am and he’s still in the room, still awake. I’ve got my wallet and phone in my front pockets, I’m exhausted and climb into my bed ready to sleep. Now Captain Crazy wants to question me on what’s in my pockets.
Knowing that I’m dealing with a crazy person, I show him that it’s just my phone and wallet, little does he know I have my baseball bat and metal cleats already on the side of my bed in case that steak knife he has comes anywhere near me while I’m sleeping.
As aforementioned, I’m a deep sleeper and Captain Crazy is yelling again, so loud this time he wakes me up in the middle of the night and he’s sitting on the edge of his bed facing mine looking at the wall that is shared by our neighbors.
Now, being as I have just been awakened by someone crazy yelling and facing me, I think he’s yelling at me so I book it out of the room with my cellphone. I go to the RA (Residency Assistant) and am pounding on her door at 4 am to open the damn door and let me the heck in. I tell her what happened and what has been going on, she calls her boss, who calls his boss, who informs the RA to call the campus police (large university our cops are real cops, not just security guards).
The cops come, question him, and tell me that it’s my word against his and that nothing can be done. If he is harmful to himself or anyone else, then I can call the police and they will Baker Act him. My response: Great, I’ll give you a call when he stabs me in my sleep.
One of the cops fetches my pillow and I spend the night sleeping on the couch in the study room for our floor with the door locked (around a wall so he can’t see me).
He has class when I wake up, but he hasn’t been going, I chance it since I have nothing on me but my phone, pajamas, and a pillow. I called my parents after the cops came and my mom freaked about this whole story. When I return to the room Capt. Crazy is still there, and still awake. He informs me to just tell him to stop yelling next time and he’ll stop, he was yelling at our neighbors.
Later, he tells me, the guy we share the bathroom with, and a friend of his about this awesome movie he was watching. However, he was never watching a movie, he was sitting on his bed with the remote, facing the TV, but the darn TV wasn’t even on!
So I’m starting the process to move out of the dorm room because I don’t want to get killed.
Well, today is my lucky day! Capt. Crazy started banging on every single floormates’ door, forcing his way into the room as soon as they opened the door. If you didn’t open the door, he’d stand out there yelling for Amanda for 30 minutes. According to floormates, he was checking in the weirdest of places, garbage cans, the cracks between the cabinets and the floor, etc.
Well, he’s now forced entry into over 40 rooms, here comes my lucky break. The guys he thinks have been spying on him refuse to open the door and had already been in a fight with a floormate earlier that day that involved the cops. Well, start fight number two, because Capt. Crazy wants to find Amanda AND he wants to find that footage. The cops come and FINALLY Baker Act this guy.
He was never violent towards me, nor expected that I was part of the group spying on him. Thank God!
I ended up getting a massive dorm room all to myself for the rest of the semester and the spring semester. The guy I had shared the bathroom with hadn’t had a roommate the entire semester and moved out because of the crazy guy, so when the university filled the room, it was only with one person! So the two of us had massive rooms all to ourselves and I pushed the beds together for a king-size bed. Worked out well for me in the end, but Capt. Crazy was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia which I feel bad for him about. Crazy how it all went down.”
10. I Was Basically A Third Wheel Of Their Toxic Relationship
“Alright, 1st apartment, and I’m pumped. I meet this girl through a mutual friend. She’s nice, not my type though, but says she needs a roommate. I find the apartment, get the place, she moves in. Here’s the first problem.
She brings her man and freaking cat. I’m pretty passive though. It’s whatever as long as he pays rent and the cat doesn’t poop on my bed.
I make that pretty clear. Other than that, we don’t have any problem. I have my own bedroom, bathroom, and even door to the apartment.
So I’m working at a pizza place, college town, we don’t get done till 2. I get home, walk in, get ready to just plop down…Cat poop on my bed. I’m still pretty collected at this point. I walk in, I say hey, your cat pooped on my bed, you mind cleaning it up? This chick tells me, you left your door open, you should’ve closed it, you can take care of it.
I let that sink in real well. I attempt to wrap my head around her logic. I try to see it from her perspective. SCREW THAT. This is the logic of a crazy person.
I tell her she needs to clean it up or I’m chucking the cat out of the window (For the record, I’d never toss a cat out of a window). The man stands up and is like hey, don’t yell.
I’m not yelling, but you know, the tension is getting higher. I state, not yelling, this is just unacceptable. He tells me to get screwed. Clearly, they don’t understand the situation so I tell her, I am going out, she better freaking clean it up, or I will be dealing with this in an aggressive fashion.
I come home at 4. Cat poop’s gone. Thank christ. Still change my sheets, but I’m happy.
The next morning, her man comes down and apologizes. No prob bro, we play Xbox until the night. She comes home from “work” and starts flipping out that neither of us did anything. Alright, understandable that you want your man to be somebody, no one wants to be with a deadbeat, but one day of video games/bonding with your roommate isn’t a big deal. But then, why the heck is she yelling at me? Also, I later find out, she didn’t actually have a job, she was out talking to this other guy.
A few months go by, it’s Halloween, I come home trashed, but I’m a pretty happy intoxicated person. I quietly walk into my room, lay down, and start to go to sleep. All of a sudden, she comes bursting through the door screaming, it’s 3 A.M. Why didn’t I call, who do I think I am? But a well-placed grunt and growl chase her away.
The next night, I bring my current partner home.
The freedom of adulthood/own apartment hooking up is in view. Until the roommate again comes storming in. “Who’s this witch?” “We didn’t talk about this?” LIKE WE TALKED ABOUT YOU BRINGING A LIVE-IN PARTNER?! OH AND WHEN IS THIS ANY OF YOUR BUSINESS!? So clearly, I state all of this. She leaves. Girl feels awkward, we go to her place. I spend a week there. Every night I was gone, I get a phone call, voicemail, and text.
A month goes by, I walk early from work, I hear people hooking up. I go about my business. Guy walks downstairs, wait a minute, who the heck is this? Not her man. Well, I keep my mouth shut, I lose him, then I lose rent, an Xbox, and a friend, right? But the roommate calls the man’s sister and tells her how she screwed some guy.
WHAT?!
He finds out, he moves out, emotional leave. I’m crushed. He was cool. We got wasted, played Xbox, made hand turkeys. Stuff like that.
2 months go by, the final battle occurs. She comes walking in, stares me in the face, and says, you haven’t paid your half of the rent. I say screw you; I haven’t. Rent was 900 with the man. 300 each. She says I haven’t paid all 600.
Whoa. What? When was this established? I tell her she will be paying all 900, I packed my things, got the heck out of there. NOT BEFORE SHE TEARS MY SURFER ROSA PIXIES POSTER INTO 3 PIECES AND RUNS SCREAMING THROUGH THE FREAKING STREETS.
Almost a year later, I walk into a club. GUESS WHO IS DANCING NEXT! Beelined it the heck outta there. She shows up in the worst places too.
I see her around campus. She doesn’t go to school, just lives off one of the guys who is totally wrapped around her weird, deformed, little finger. This witch was the Joker of roommates. Total Nightmare.”
Another User Comments:
“I can identify with you on the cat poop incident. I had a roommate who lived with me with his girl. They had a cat which I absolutely hated.
Its main purpose in life was to destroy my stuff. I had a little hallway that led to my bathroom, bedroom, and attic. I always kept the door shut to it.
One day, I get home and the door is open and there is cat poop in the middle of the hallway. I figure, okay, they must have not seen it, I’ll just leave the hallway door open so they can see it and clean it up.
I proceed to do this for a week getting madder and madder.
Finally, one day, I see them in the kitchen where they both have a plain view of the hallway. I got out the carpet cleaner and paper towels and cleaned it up in front of them. She walks away and her man stays behind in the kitchen.
When I walk past him to get to the trash, he looks at me and says, “Ohh, good, (girl) was getting really upset about you not cleaning up that cat poop in your hallway.” I looked at him in disbelief and pointed out that it was his cat that pooped in my hallway. His response was, “Well, it was in YOUR hallway; that’s not our responsibility.”
I somehow resisted the urge to cram the cat poop still in my hand down HIS throat and then take a poop on THEIR bed.” devpsaux
9. She Went Crazy On Me After I Was No Longer A Source Of Validation For Her
“I had already committed to living with a roommate in college for a second year before she started acting up. It started simply enough – she began acting strangely with a new friend of mine I’d invited to sit with us and a couple of my roommate’s friends. We were in the hallway’s lounge one night when she came in and asked everyone in the lounge if they agreed with her – that criminals didn’t deserve humane treatment because what they did wasn’t humane.
When no one agreed with her, she got angry, slammed the door behind her, and shunned everyone in that room for days. She finally started talking again when someone else that was in the room begged her to because it was contributing to their anxiety, so my roommate relented.
Most infractions between then and a year later were in that vein, typical shunning then yielding, when she couldn’t go without validation any longer.
There reached a point when I grew tired of placating her: I wouldn’t allow her to drag me to events, so she wouldn’t have to go alone anymore, I took out our recycling a little less frequently.
Once she asked, “What do you do for me?” when all she ever did was do her laundry (and leave it all over our floor after) and occasionally take out her trash, while I dutifully turned off our light every night (she’s afraid of the dark) and tried to keep things passably clean (see: she never cleaned – aside from one time she vacuumed her half of the room because her partner was coming over; she also threw up in our sink, then acted like she didn’t know why there was moldy food trapped in it).
I’m not sure what the final straw was for her, but it all went to trash a few months before the school year ended.
She stopped talking to me and turned her attention to finding little ways to spite me. I lived in the library – coming back around 1 AM to sleep and typically leaving for my early morning classes before she got up. I found leaves torn off my plants and left in my trash can.
One night, she called her partner and talked to him until well after 2 AM – he tried to end the call several times, but she kept him talking until his phone actually died (at one point, she actually insisted he tell her she’s “prettier than Beyonce”).
A couple of days later, she invited him over, and he was in our room until after 2 AM (previously, he’d always left by 10 PM) because she sat on his lap to prevent him from leaving.
She’d leave the lights on and the curtain open when she left in the morning the one time a week I had class after her.
When finals arrived, she really had it out for me. My school email started getting bombarded with emails – she signed me up for car insurance quotes, tire quotes, house quotes, two prepaid debit cards were sent to me in the mail (usernames for the accounts? Witch0 and Witch07 – classic right?).
I got a total of 50 of these emails, most during finals, but they went on into the summer, even one last Friday – almost a year later. One time, she came back early on a weekend (the only time I’d spend some time in the room I was paying for), got into my space, and cussed me out. She called me some choice words and said that “it’s no wonder no one’s living with you next year” because I’m such a terrible person (I opted to live alone this year – wonder why).
She blamed everything on me, tried to gaslight me saying all along she’d tried to be my friend, she’d never said anything behind my back (a lie – a friend she still ate with would catch me up on the goings-on where I was concerned), how she’d once defended me when a friend accused me of being cold or something. My only words to her were a calm “sure” and “I actually think we’re both in the wrong here.” No tears.
Nothing. It was a mess. I went back to my room even later despite it being finals. One time, she purposely set her alarm to wake me up after she’d left for a final – but she was always so loud, it wasn’t like I was sleeping anyway.
Here’s the kicker: when I was moving out, I found hummus on one of my towels, and I found hummus on my comforter (on the inside – who does that?). I found dried salsa on another towel and my suitcase in my closet. While taking apart my bed, I found crushed tortilla chips between my sheets and comforter. Who thinks of these things?”
8. They Refused To Pay Their Portion Of The Rent
“Buckle up, kiddos, this one’s a doozy.
In 2013, one of my best friends from college starts talking about moving to the city where I lived. I was looking for a new place to live as well, so we decided it would be cool to get a place together.
Then all of a sudden, she got a partner and wanted her to come too. Sure, ok, no problem.
We agreed and had written out a contract that I would find an apartment and pay the deposit, then when they arrived, they would pay me back 2/3 of the deposit, and all rent and household bills would be split three ways.
So, they get there and move in. And are incredibly lazy and leave pizza boxes on the floor for days at a time, which at one point, causes an ant infestation.
I send them an email two weeks before rent and utilities are due saying here’s the bill, and here’s how much you owe. They miss the first months’ rent. And then the next four months’ rent after that. I had to enroll in grad school to stop my student loans from billing because I couldn’t afford to keep paying the rent and all the utilities on my own and pay the student loans.
Not paying their portion wasn’t an option either, because where I live, you’re all jointly responsible.
If I don’t pay their portion, we all get evicted.
Eventually, I’m struggling and have to use the $5k I inherited from my grandfather when he died to prevent us from being homeless. I even buy their food because I’m a sucker, and they were too lazy to go to the food bank.
As previously mentioned, this went on for several months.
Every month, I would send them an email saying this is how much you already owe, and here’s the new total with this month’s bills added.
They would acknowledge that they owed me and promised to pay. That never happened, and then one day, they emailed me back stating that me telling them they owed me and that they agreed to pay was impacting their mental health.
By that point, I was pretty fed up and about to become homeless myself, so I was like, “Your mental health is not my responsibility. You agreed to this. Now, you need to pay me what you owe me or get out.”
Their response was to tell me that if I wanted to be paid, I’d have to sue them.
So I did. I went to the courthouse and filed paperwork for small claims court.
I had them served properly to give them notification of the lawsuit and when the court date was, etc. They moved out a few days later. I notified the landlord that they had abandoned the apartment but left a bunch of stuff behind. She advised me to close the door to their room and not touch it for some months, at which point she’d certify they abandoned the stuff, and I could dispose of it.
The court date came, and I showed up, but they did not. The judge wanted to hear the case anyway, so I presented a stack of papers about an inch and a half thick of printouts of all our emails, chats, and texts regarding getting and paying for the apartment as well as receipts for everything I paid and all the emails with bills due, etc.
He read through all of it, and by the time he got done, he was SUPER livid at them and even more so that they didn’t show up at court.
So, he sided in my favor and awarded me not only everything they owed me but 12% compounding interest until it was paid off. They have never once tried to pay… It’s been now 5 years since the court date.
I am getting ready to sell their debt to a debt collection agency who will give me 70% of what they owe me. Normally, I’d be bummed about that, but it’s been so long that with the compounding interest, I’ll end up getting more than what they owed me to begin with.
Oh, and after however many months went by, and the landlord came to unseal their bedroom door and certify they had abandoned their stuff, she and the maintenance worker she brought with her found poop in the closet. So, yeah. They were great roommates.”
7. They Were Always Feuding
“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.”
6. There's A Reason Nobody Could Stand Living With Them
“Many, many years ago, I lived with a few people who well… Let me get into my story that is going to be rather long.
Back in 2003, the place I was living at asked me to move out. Long story short, my friend who owned the place needed a place for his brother and gave me my 30 days. I was upset, but I understood why.
So with the help of my dad who was getting remarried, I started looking for a new place.
Now my pop found a place that was looking for someone to move in and take a room. And picked me up to take a look at the place.
Now the owner of the place, I’ll call him “The Captain,” was an older guy in his late 50’s. I called him the Captain as the whole place had one of those nautical themes to it.
He had a bar that had all kinds of nautical stuff on it, pictures of old sailing ships, and whatnot.
The odd thing was, he let us in via the sliding door on the side. Part of this was the front door, and the hallway had another door to the rest of the house, so he felt it was another “room” and was renting that out.
So the guy had his bedroom, 4 other bedrooms, and lastly, that hallway, so he wanted to get six people in the place.
I was replacing a couple who moved out overnight, and I’d find out why later on.
My pop wasn’t too hot on me moving into this place; however, I felt I really had no other place to go. So we cut this guy a check, and I’d move in on my birthday. I’ll admit I wasn’t hot about moving in myself; however, I felt it was that or being homeless.
Only fun note, the day I hand this guy the check for a deposit and first month’s rent? A buddy of mine calls me up.
He and his lady are breaking up, and he needs a roommate more – so a friend to move in with him. I’d have to spend a month at this place before moving in with him. Still, I tell him to give me a day or two at this place to get a feel, and I’d let him know.
So, I end up moving in, my best friend helps me out with the move, and he already hates the place and is telling me to take the offer.
I tell him I’m thinking about it. After my first day and a half there and dealing with my other roommates? I took it.
So, let me get into my other roommates as some of them were okay. But the rest? Good Lord…
I’ll start with the Captain.
See, his plan was to fill all of those rooms, so he’d be able to live rent-free for the most part. I have no idea what this guy did for a job but I’ll leave that for later.
He had this ugly little dog that he carried around with him all the time. It was healthy; it’s just he tried grooming and cutting its hair, so you had this dog with bald patches on him/her/it.
Add in, he loved telling me he’d do things that he never did. Before I moved in, he told me he’d put a lock on my door, so I could lock it when I go out. Never happened. He said in the room I’d have a phone line, so I could get online, no high-speed internet in this place, so I was using a Juno account.
That never happened, so I was using a super long cord to the living room. Oh, and he drank.
We then had a guy my age who was moving out in a week. Nice guy and who told me upfront the day I moved in. “Dude, get out of here ASAP.” Also told me the couple I replaced had been dealing substances out of the place, and the cops may have caught on as they started seeing cars parked outside.
And note I’d end up talking to two of those cops! There was also a hippie guy who was wanting to get out of there too. And another guy who moved in the week I moved out who was just in a bad place; his lady kicked him out, and he needed a place to move into ASAP.
Then we get to the people who are the worst…
The first was a couple: the guy looked like an older, more weathered David Lee Roth, and he had his girl living with him.
Both had been odd, came in and out at weird hours. A few days before I was going to move out of there, he just was gone.
Then we have Dawn…
Now let me start with this: Dawn is a case of how substances can ruin someone’s life. The day I met him, he invited me into his room, he was kinda intoxicated, and he had framed blueprints and the like on his wall.
Dawn, before he got into smoking illegal stuff, had been working at JPL.
Long story short, he got fired, lost his woman, lost everything really, and his parents didn’t want him in their place, so they put him in here. Oh boy, this man is why I ended up lying my butt off and moving out early.
First off, we both shared a birthday, and my mother, to make me feel a bit better about life, baked a really nice cake and sent some food home with me.
Note that she decided to label everything with my name, that way my roommates would know it was my food.
The next day, I go to have some of it for lunch, and Dawn had ignored the labels and decided to eat everything. I’m livid; however, I’m new to the place and don’t want to make any issues.
That day also, Dawn decided he was hot and turned the AC on and turned it so it was just super low in the house.
The Captain is screaming at him about it, with Dawn yelling back that he’s hot.
At this point? I decide my buddy’s offer to move in with him is good and let him know.
Oh, but it gets worse with Dawn. I start noticing things are missing from my room. I was a smoker at the time and packs of smokes start to get stolen. Dawn would decide at 3 am when people are trying to sleep to start blasting music in his room.
And note this is in the first week…
Also, remember I said I ended up talking to the cops? One day, I head out to get some smokes and soda, and a car pulls up, and I get badges flashed at me. They ask if I just moved in, I tell them yep, and I’m planning on moving out. Talked to them again after old David Lee Roth ran out of town and told them the truth that he had asked me about Hawaii.
Even got a card and gave them my cell number.
Ended up moving out of there two weeks before the end of the month. My soon-to-be roommate came over one night to pick me up for a LAN party we both went to. He notices I’m taking just about everything with me and ends up talking to The Captain and after that tells me if I want to move in sooner, it’s cool.
Only one little thing… See, the Captain starts to bring up some nonsense when I tell him I’m thinking about moving out.
Thus, I decided to do some nonsense off my own back. I was out of work at the time, and one day, tell the Captain I got an email about a job offer and had a phone interview. Later on that day, I do a wonderful job of talking in case the Captain or Dawn overheard me, making it sound like I’m doing said interview.
Two days later after a buddy of mine calls me up, I go to the Captain and tell him that I’ve got a job! But…I’m going to have to move out as it’s up in Colorado. And fed him some lies that I have a friend who I emailed and emailed me back saying he’s got a place I can move into. I just have to move out right away.
So, to start to end this… My best friend comes over, and we start loading everything onto his truck. We get all of my boxes in the first load, come back to get my bed, and right as we go into my now former room? There’s Dawn looking into my desk.
At this point, I tell him to just get out of here as I’m getting the rest of my stuff and getting out.
The Captain stops me to tell me he doesn’t have my deposit. I’m angry, but I tell him I’ll call him up about it. He also gives me the line of, “Oh, hey, if things don’t work out for you, I’ll let ya move back in!” Note: I did get some of my deposit back; I told him over the phone to send the check to my mother.
After a month, I told him I was coming down for a few days, and I’d swing by and get it, and he gave me the same line about how he didn’t have all of it; I told him to just give me half, and I’ll call it even.
Now to really end this story on a fun note? So a couple of months go by, and I’m at a coffee shop I enjoy going to with a friend.
And I end up running into the hippie guy who lived there. And note “lived,” he ends up telling me about two weeks after I showed up to get my deposit, he had already made plans to move out. He comes home from work one day to find squad cars and both Dawn and The Captain in handcuffs. Ends up that Dawn had started breaking into places and cars a few blocks away, and someone got a picture of him.
The cops told him they got a warrant and found some of the stolen items in Dawn’s room and a lot of them in The Captain’s room. Ends up, Dawn was stealing stuff, then giving it to the Captain to sell off, so he could make rent. And that the Captain did know; he just didn’t give a smack.
Really the worst roommates I ever had. Sure, it was only for two weeks, but that was something I’m glad I didn’t have to put up with ever again.”
5. You Can Just Sense Their Dark Energy
“I decided to take on a roommate a few years ago in this duplex my man and I were renting. We had a spare room, and an acquaintance had found out he needed a place to stay. We had him over for dinner to discuss details and get to know him. I felt kind of weird about him after the meetup and my partner said, “Oh, it’ll be fine.
It’s going to be a huge help anyway.”
Months went by, and we didn’t hear from him, so I felt pretty relieved.
Then about 2.5 months later, I get a call from him. He’s ready to move in. Once again, I’m pretty hesitant, but my partner kept saying the same old, “It’s going to help us out a lot with the rent.” So, he moves in.
Huge boxes stayed in the living room for the majority of the time he lived there.
He had his own bedroom and separate bathroom but still had stuff in the living room and in the storage space in the carport. Every time he wanted to tell us about something, he’d drag it out into the living room and then just leave it. Eventually, I would just preemptively say, “That’s not staying out here.”
I’d have company over, and he would engage with them, which was ok at first, but then he’d get super combative or start bringing up politics which no one asked for.
I wish this was the worst of it.
There were times when my man was sick or I was asleep, and he’d come to our room. I don’t feel comfortable sleeping with the door closed, and our dog wouldn’t have it any other way, but our room was also on the complete opposite side of the duplex.
He would start drinking from 4 am until 7:30, going out to the fridge every half hour.
One night, he decided to start practicing music at 3 am, blasting the music. There were nights he was so intoxicated, he’d stumble through the living room to the kitchen mumbling to himself and didn’t even see me.
One time, he came out of his room (which led right into the living room), and his pants fell down. That was fun.
He washed his clothes in his bathroom.
I lost tons of silverware because he decided to combine all of our stuff when he moved in. He would eat in his room and then all would be lost to the abyss of whatever was in there.
He smoked so much that the whole house smelled of it. I don’t mind smoking. Just don’t saturate my house with it. My man suspected he was selling hard substances out of our house.
I’m sure I’m missing stuff. But combined with all this and … you can just feel dark energy around a person even if you don’t full-on subscribe to that, and something instinctual kicks in and you start feeling uneasy. I kept telling my partner that I didn’t feel safe with him in the house.
One day, I asked my roommate to receive a really important and expensive package, insisting that if he couldn’t or wasn’t going to be there, I’ll just reroute it.
He reassured me he would.
A notification came that the package was missed. The whole ordeal, but basically, he was too intoxicated in the middle of the day to make this happen. He tried to call FedEx, but …yeah he was incoherent. I was furious, but I didn’t want to talk to him anymore about it. He followed me outside. I told him, “I don’t want to talk about it” and went inside to another bedroom that was designated as mine and shut the door.
He opens the door and keeps trying to talk to me! That totally freaked me out. Yet still… not creepy enough for my partner.
What was? The day roommate thought we weren’t home, went into our bedroom, and helped himself to our water dispenser. That. That was it.
I promptly wrote a formal letter of eviction, citing his invasion of our privacy, although he told everyone it was because I and my partner were getting separated. He was out in 30 days.
Roommate? Never again. Partner? Ex (though still friends).”
4. She Screamed "Danger" Big Time
“My partner and I were planning to move from an apartment into a house. We would have more space for ourselves and a backyard for the dog. Her friend (we will call her Betsy) also needed a place to move to. I always found her to be kind of annoying and self-centered. I didn’t really enjoy talking to her. But recently, I had gotten intoxicated and had a pretty good conversation with her, and I figured she wasn’t too bad.
Fast forward, things went well enough. She was quiet and mostly stayed in her room. She rarely had people over and was out and about with work and school. Normal roommate vibes.
I saw her feeding my dog scraps one day and asked her not to do that since it teaches the dog bad manners, and there are certain things they can’t safely eat that some people may not be aware of.
She went quiet and didn’t really say anything. I had to say it again in a serious tone, like seriously, please don’t feed my dog. She agreed not to.
Cut forward to some future point. It’s all blurry, but I’ll hit the key moments here. My dog started pooping blood and acting like they were sick. One morning, we woke up, and the entire living room floor was COVERED in blood.
It looked like a murder scene. My dog was pouring blood from her anus like a spigot.
Please try to imagine how freaked out this made us.
We took the dog to the vet, and after several tests and an $800 bill, they basically said, “I don’t know” and suggested we feed her some special kind of food. The dog would get better for weeks and then suddenly she’d be pooping blood again.
It really worried us. We chalked it up to possible anxiety issues. Now I know better.
One day we woke up, and the thermostat was set as high as possible, somewhere in the 80s. The house was extremely hot. Later we asked Betsy about it, and she played stupid, saying she didn’t even know how to work the thermostat and had never touched it.
Weeks went on. Who knows what kind of bizarre things she was doing that I didn’t even notice.
She seemed to enjoy doing strange things to inconvenience us and then pretend to be naive and normal like nothing happened.
Eventually, she got really into the self-help book The Secret. Now, I’m not going to slam on this book, but it’s had its fair share of criticism from materialists and spiritual people alike. The book teaches some metaphysical ideas that you can make changes in your external reality using your mind.
She became so obsessed with this book and began seeking out groups and seminars with like-minded people who were into the same subject. She would come into the living room and emphatically rant about how she is communicating with angels. She would show us screenshots on her phone at various times in the day that she noticed the numbers were the same, like 3:33, 2:22, 1:11, etc.
She had dozens of pictures like this. She acted as if this were proof that supernatural beings were reaching out to her.
She started seeing a guy she met on an app. He was in school and seemed to be a well-rounded guy. She’d go to his place or occasionally have him over. One day, she just didn’t come home. The next day came and went, no Betsy.
The next day came and went. We theorized that she’s staying with her man, or (and I stressed this as a strong possibility) she’s locked up. Her behavior had been becoming more and more erratic, and I had begun to suspect mental illness.
My partner called around and eventually figured out that she had been committed to a psychiatric hospital. She had been downtown and flagged down a police officer.
She told him about how a homeless man was stalking her and doing voodoo on her. The officer had the good sense to place her in custody.
We picked her up a couple of weeks later from the hospital. She had been prescribed medication. She didn’t know how much detail I knew and pretended that she was arrested for something else entirely.
I enjoyed several days of “I told you so” to my partner who had been pretty oblivious to her old friend’s departure from consensus reality.
She went on, allegedly taking her medicine, going to work, and school. She got wrapped up in some new-age Christian get-rich-quick scheme that never panned out. The dog continued to have intermittent issues. Occasionally, the thermostat would do weird stuff, and we thought it was possessed or was malfunctioning. She was pretty talented at lying to our faces.
At one point, my partner confronted her about lying, and she said she developed a habit of lying as a child to get out of trouble.
I even think that was a lie. She’s just a compulsive liar who gets a kick out of it.
There were several blurry, unsober episodes where I became angry at her and shouted at her. I was becoming really paranoid, stressed out, and anxious. I was very wary of her. My partner wanted to act like Betsy was doing her best and just got dealt a bad hand.
I felt that she was more sinister than that. I did not trust her at all, and I found her extremely difficult to get along with. I began completely ignoring her. When she asked if she could watch TV with me, I told her no thanks; I don’t like you. She became more withdrawn and spent most of her time in her room.
Halloween night, my partner and I are hanging out with a friend and drinking at our house.
Betsy says she was invited to a party by a coworker. She invites us to go. We are bored, so we get excited and put on costumes. We go to this party. Everything seems fine. Normal Halloween party. Betsy approaches the host of the party and says, “Hey, what’s up, Robert from work.”
Robert says, “Yeah, from work, wink wink. Like I didn’t meet you on an app, and you asked me to lie and say you were my coworker to trick your roommates.”
Betsy was completely still.
She was in shock that someone had so bluntly foiled her scheme. She walked out of the house and took a rideshare home.
Myself, my partner, and my friend all stayed at the party for another hour, drinking and chatting with the host. He said, “Lying hurts people every day.” I was so taken aback and rapt with admiration for what he had done. Truly, you should have been there to see it.
It was incredible.
We came home, unlocked the door to let Betsy in (she had been waiting in the yard, locked out) she went to her room and we didn’t speak of it. For me, it was just more of the same. Nothing surprised me with her at this point.
Weeks go by. She has become more and more obsessed with this other guy she had been seeing.
She thinks they’re going to get married and have kids. When she was locked up the first time, we went through her room and found a binder full of paper that had “X name and I are going to get married and have kids,” printed on it hundreds of times.
And just a note, we went through her room to make sure she didn’t have anything dangerous like poison or weapons.
It was at that point that my partner began to listen to me a little bit and consider that she was a danger to herself or others.
He actually had pumped the brakes on their relationship. He seemed to want out completely, but she could not let go. Anyway, she had become so obsessed with this guy.
At like 10 PM one night, she came out of her room and said, “So and so needs my help.
He murdered someone and he’s hiding from the cops. I need to let him know that I can help him.”
“How do you know he murdered someone?”
“I googled it. I found it on Google.”
“If you could Google it, why couldn’t the cops? How have they not found him yet?”
She didn’t really have a response to that totally sound questioning.
“I need to go tell him I can help him.”
“What if he thinks you’re a scary stalker, and he calls the cops on you?”
“He won’t call the cops on me.
He’s running from the cops.”
So, despite my best effort to talk sense into her, she left the house. She did not return that night or the next night. Turns out, this was round 2 of her lock up.
We later found out she went to his house and knocked on the door. He did not let her in. She explained that he murdered someone and is running from cops and needs her help.
He said no, that didn’t happen, and in fact, you are the one who needs help. She refused to leave. He called the police. The police put her back in the psychiatric hospital. He got a restraining order on her.
When she came out, it was more of the same. She might have actually started taking her medicine this time. I got a chance to check the bottles once.
She was prescribed medicine that is given to bipolar and schizophrenic patients.
More of the same. She stayed in her room. She annoyed me any time she came out or spoke. I was still extremely paranoid and uncomfortable in my home. My dog continued to have health problems.
I was reaching a breaking point. I finally convinced my partner to ask her to leave. She asked her to leave.
Betsy agreed to leave. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. She was going to go back to stay with her mother. I think I had successfully made the atmosphere in the home so uncomfortable for her that she did not require any convincing. She was ready to go.
She moved out shortly after. My good shoes smelled like pee for months after she left. I suspect she put pee in them.
Our dog ceased having stomach issues as soon as she left. She’s had perfectly healthy bowel movements and has been very happy. She definitely doesn’t have anxiety and is very chill. I think it’s obvious now that she was being poisoned.
Also, the thermostat hasn’t done any more weird stuff.
Betsy sent a text to my partner a month or two after moving out. It read “Is your dog still pooping blood?”
….
No, she’s not.
My household has had a calm, peaceful, loving energy since then. I was a bit traumatized by the experience but I’m better now.
The dog is doing fantastic. My partner no longer speaks to Betsy. I think that one day she may end up in jail for a serious crime.”
Another User Comments:
“I feel bad for every party involved, dog included. Betsy had a mental illness, so at least there is a bit of an “excuse.” I don’t understand why you didn’t contact her family the very first time she got committed into hospital? That binder full of notes about marrying that dude is probably based on The Secret, visualization, and acting as if.
Also, sage the freaking place.” Reddit user
3. He Was The Biggest Walking Nightmare Alive
How do you even feel safe going home to someone like this?
“So, just for a bit of backstory: I was 20 years old at the time in 2012, and I was tasked with helping this guy who had bought a small mansion in Fairfield, CA.
His mental and physical health was deteriorating, and I was supposed to assist him with fixing up this dilapidated yet expansive 7 bedroom, 4 bathroom mansionette that the previous owners had absolutely destroyed because it was being foreclosed on.
Now I had a part-time job at the time at a now-defunct record company and was planning on going back to junior college.
This guy I was helping was in his mid 60’s at the time and had once owned a non-profit company for people with Autism in an effort to both house and employ them within the same operation I believe.
He had gotten a good settlement out of an unlawful termination case because he had been let go by his own board of directors.
Since the housing market was so low at the time, we were able to buy this massive 4,200 square-foot house that I helped him shop for and purchase. Almost immediately, I took pride in the house because I had grown up in abject poverty my entire life unable to afford wheels for my used car should they fall off.
The house was devoid of even the most basic and rudimentary plumbing, electricity, and amenities.
I mean, there were NO sinks or electrical sockets, lights, or anything in the house. Even the coax cable that we connected the TV to caused it to literally burst into flames. This house was a disaster. I spent the better part of 4 years putting my professional and educational life aside to make this house livable and eventually a nice place to live.
The older guy that I fixed the house with happened to have a brief history in the substance cultivation industry and suggested that we grow a small crop to sell legally to a collective as a side hustle, and of course, to cultivate a little for ourselves, and me being in my early 20’s, I obliged.
For several years, I was in charge of filling our 7 bedroom house with nice roommates, raising and walking animals such as dogs and guinea pigs, fixing up the house with countless trips to Home Depot, cultivating plants, and chauffering this guy around town because he didn’t have a license at the time.
Now mind you, we don’t live in the best of cities, and our house kind of stands out conspicuously on a nice street in the middle of a very low-class neighborhood.
We would recruit roommates on Craigslist because I was in my very early 20’s at the time and had no idea really how else to do this… especially being from out of town. There were several instances where we had to kick out a bad roommate because we found out they were substance addicts or straight-up thieves stealing right from out of our rooms.
We wouldn’t even sign formal rental agreements because the Landlord (we’ll call him Rick) was such a trusting and nice guy.
4 years had gone by, and times were good. The house finally came together, and I was tasked with finding a new roommate for one of our 7 bedrooms, and we were renting from downstairs. Sounds fun! I’ll start looking right away. Posted an ad on craigslist.
Not 3 days later, I get an inquiry from this 29-year-old guy who wants to see the house. (Let’s call him Slithers.) So, Slithers comes by, and he’s like this super quiet and chill seeming dude, and he’s even shier than I was at the time (I had a hard time getting out of this place at this age because I was new to town, and there’s nowhere to go.) He says that he has 1 kid and I’m like heck yeah.
Let’s go; this is great! This guy was the most silent, no eye contact, no impact roommate I had ever had live in this place for the duration of me being there.
I’m thinking I scored a slam dunk.
Then 2 months later, this guy brings in another kid and his baby-mama to come live with him without any warning. Then my landlord’s pills go missing. He knows I don’t take his stuff so it’s a mystery.
He gets a replacement, and they go missing again. We’re thinking he’s just misplacing them because he’s a forgetful guy sometimes.
But then we start seeing shady characters show up to the house to hang out with our new roommates which was kinda fine at the time.
We playfully thought that he and his baby-mama were Airbnbing or subletting the empty bedroom aside from their place. Well, turns out that the guy had actually fully annexed the bedroom aside from him again without warning, and we just happened upon all of his stuff occupying this room.
He talks to Rick the landlord who is apparently okay with it…big house, big family! Totally understandable, extra rent to pay? Fogetaaboutitt!
About 5 or 6 months in, this is when things really start to get weird.
The landlord, Rick, almost has a heart attack when my new best friend and I take him and his dogs out for a walk. He is hospitalized for weeks getting a triple bi-pass surgery.
Meanwhile, remember that small special plant crop in our back yard? All of the sudden, it is garnishing attention from the city. I had only had a couple of issues with people trying something funny to get to it and steal it in years past.
Suddenly, we were getting several anonymous complaints from people and the city for our 8-foot fence being “too high” in our relatively spacious backyard (95% of it not visible to the street).
This roommate takes it upon himself without much, if any deliberation about the subject, to take a circular saw, and start frantically cutting down the fence that I had spent countless thousands of dollars and hours building. He seemed mad about it for whatever reason for doing this on the day of my 24th birthday.
The day after that, we had found one of our favorite pet white guinea pigs impaled by the rectum on one of the spikes of the fence that was left there from the awful job he did.
There was just no way that anyone else besides a human had done this, but there was no way to prove anything.
Rick had gotten back from the hospital back from a successful surgery. Thank God. And much to my surprise, this Slithers guy comes OPENLY into our living room and offers us to smoke hard substances with him.
Much to my surprise, the landlord says it’s okay!! I guess going through a life-altering and saving experience in life gives you a new perspective and new things in life you want to try before you die, but this one kind of took me aback.
In all honestly, I tried it with them and never came back to it.
Then things started going missing. Anything that was worth more than $10 on the first floor of the house turned up gone. I’m talking sunglasses, cuts of steak in the refrigerator, musical instruments, electronics, wallets, things that Rick would smoke out of. Everything went missing. Then, what used to be a beautiful side and backyard turned into a scrapyard.
Slithers would bring or have brought giant hunks of metal which he would try to break down, have hauled off, and sell, to which he would mostly give up and leave in our area as garbage.
Then the backyard raiders showed up in droves. Where there weren’t many if any people before trying to break in. Now there was a serious incident almost every night of someone trying to break in and steal these plants.
The year went on, and I diligently protected this crop from an ONSLAUGHT of would-be thieves and bandits and brought in 100% of it into the house. I was so proud of myself.
It didn’t even take until Christmas time until someone had mysteriously broken into the secret room where this stuff was being held and had it ALL STOLEN. There were only a couple of people in the entire world who would have known where it was located.
It was about $15,000 or more of substances and it was painfully obvious who was involved. The landlord would not prohibit locked doors throughout the house at the time.
Throughout the year, I had installed some security cameras throughout the backyard and the back area, only to have every single one of them mysteriously tampered with and broken. I know who is doing it, but I can’t impart or threaten physical harm to this person because I will look like the crazy one at fault, and this person is known to be an unashamed cop caller.
The following year 2017, this roommate Slithers is still living with us, and by the end of the month, loses his job for whatever reason. I am working full-time as a delivery person at this point to pay the bills.
For 3 months, Slithers disappears, apparently running away from his family that he hates being around, coming to the house only to give the 2 kids and baby mama groceries and to pay some rent.
He claims he never went on unemployment and had all of this cash due to a whopping tax return. He comes back in the month of May. He fails to pay a month of rent entirely and promises Rick to pay him back next month to which he obliges.
We go to the local U-Haul because there is apparently some cargo he needs to be lifted from his room elsewhere.
All 3 of us go to pick up a truck. They won’t rent to him due to a past history he had with them. He’s on some kind of special life-long banned list. They see my past, see that I have rented several times despite being under the age of 25 (yes, you can do that), and rent to me.
So, anyway, he gets his job back at some family-owned small restaurant only to lose it again the coming July.
He proceeds to go 9 months without paying rent. Nobody knows why he’s not getting unemployment. It would have to suggest that he’s being paid under the table, in which case, there would be no federal tax return in his name while working for this Asian restaurant the year prior.
During this year, I heavily suspected that he is somehow monitoring or listening to my phone calls and text messages, not only that but also my emails, my work communications, my school work at Solano Community College.
It started with me having a private phone conversation with someone talking about something very specific or unrelated to anything else. I would be talking to a distant and old friend about investment opportunities in New Zealand and the Island of Fiji. Slithers would greet me from work and drop something like, “Hey, can I get in on that investment in Fiji or what?” or when I would have a private conversation on social media about something that had nothing to do with him, like how I used to go to a Breyers in Arkansas and get a banana split with my now-dead grandpa, he would be trying to sympathize with me talking about banana splits and how he never knew his grandpa.
AND IT WAS OUT OF THE BLUE WITHOUT PROVOCATION.
Then it turned into something even more strange. If I was at home, whenever I would get a PM from a crush or find out that I got a B+ on a really hard online test, there would always be a boom on the walls coming from the rooms across or below me in real-time. It’s NOT like, ‘Oh! I got a text from Monica!’ or ‘I totally aced that midterm!’ and hear like a boom or a crash 5 minutes later, it would always be in real-time the moment I found it out through my phone.
Christmas 2017 – The day after Christmas, he and I are just chilling watching late-night movies in the living room by ourselves. The fireplace is on. We know not to put anything large or funny in there because it is known to light like the upper hearth on fire. (I should know, it happened to me before we knew about it, and I put it out.) Anyways, I go upstairs to go to sleep at around 1:30 am, and I’m woken up to the entirety of the upstairs people screaming that there is a FIRE! The whole living room was on fire.
I got on a ladder and sprayed the living room that I had worked so hard on with a hose while the fire department arrived, and just by the grace of God, saved the house. Meanwhile, Rick and Slithers are in the front just kind of laughing it off. Mind you, the HOUSE DID NOT HAVE INSURANCE AT THE TIME. AND THIS ROOMMATE WAS UNEMPLOYED. We had to spend 2 months re-wiring the electricity again from the fire, so we could have power.
So, here comes 2018, and this guy is still living with us on his 7th month of being unable to pay rent. He hides behind his kids and his situation to the sympathetic ear of the landlord, despite being 32 years of age at this point. The landlord Rick thinks this is the best situation for the kids. Mind you, I was supposed to be the one in control of the house and the situation at this point, and now I am having to suffer through all of this.
What you may not realize is that once you have a landlord in the hole like $4,000 for you just waiting on you to pay rent or move out you kind of have him by the neck, and this game that this tweaker is playing he is now winning at.
This guy finally finds a job at Wal-Mart around February or March and works there and pays rent for the first time since anyone can remember, and since no one has kept records at this point in time, it is believed that his outstanding rent is about $3,200 despite having his rent be $600 a month for 2 rooms.
Oh, and he’s annexed an entire walk-in closet and a hallway for his 4 family members at this point. The math doesn’t add up at all, but for the most point, I am still keeping kinda quiet and to myself about it even though I know perfectly well what’s transpiring. Slithers works at Walmart for about 7 months before being fired.
Not a month goes by, and he conspires to steal my old Mustang that I bought in high school right out of the side driveway using his female accomplice as a distraction.
I was never keen on selling it and kind of got the vibes from him that he was planning on stealing it. (Quite correctly.) This girl says she REALLY wants it, has always loved Mustangs, and asks to test drive it. I say okay, and she proceeds to be gone for several hours.
I call the police, go out looking in the local neighborhood just to see if she’s around close to no avail.
Rick is finally upset at the dude and apparently yelled at him and told him he’s out if it doesn’t come back. At first, Slithers is like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know who the girl is. I don’t even know where she lives or what her number is’ but then changes his mind about the lie and calls her on the phone.
She brings the Mustang back 3 days later with 3 bridge toll evasions on it amounting to $350 when I find out about it.
I just happened to be in a financial bind when this happened and ended up selling the Mustang to her and a friend who I found out bought it through proxy for her. This was before I found out about the toll evasions.
During this year, I find out from the police that this guy and his baby-mama are running a hard substance mecca from out of their area of the house.
She (we will call her Vickson) is apparently a VERY WELL KNOWN dealer throughout our town. The only reason the police have not brought them down is they lack any true physical evidence. I was told inside a police station that the only reason they don’t post officers next to their domicile is that they lack the resources. What’s more is, that children are exposed and may even be involved on some level.
These children scream, yell, shout, and carry on all throughout the day and night. Their mother calls them stupid, idiots, bad kids, and that’s just what I hear on the daily.
So, Slithers loses his job for the first time at Wal-Mart, and it’s announced that a former employee from Rick’s past would be coming to live with us upstairs where this IT guy used to live with us.
It was convenient timing because we were about to take a vacation to Nevada for Burning Man for about 2 weeks, and I wouldn’t have had time to look for one in such a pinch. She (Diana) comes and moves her stuff in with her 6-year-old daughter (Misty). She seems nice enough. I played Basketball with Diana. She’s actually a young woman about 43, and I am 27, I believe, at the time, and we really hit it off.
Rick and I head off to Burning Man and come back after having a blast 2 weeks later. One of the first conversations that we have is me having to defend myself against a plethora of misconceptions and untruths that Diana had somehow come up with about me. Everything under the sun from how I was a gold digger, to how I fake conversations with Rick, to how I treat children.
Every little thing that wasn’t me at all had to be addressed and scrutinized one by one because I was completely innocent of all of this.
At first, Rick told me that this was a potential possibility all along and that Diana was known for having “multiples” when she worked for him. I later had to ask him what that meant.
It was not until later that it even dawned on me that Slithers had force-fed all of these lies and false information about me to her while we were gone.
The funniest part is that she later told me that he knew I studied politics on my smartphone for hours at night, so I would have something to talk to Rick about! First of all, I am a decent conversationalist. If you ever took 2 seconds to talk to me, I am interested in a lot of things, and I can go on about pretty much anything from makeup to import cars to the idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare.
Second of all… How would you know what I’m doing on my smartphone when I’m by myself in my room!?
Anywho, 2018 was coming to a close, and it just so happens that my ex from my senior year of high school is looking for a roommate and a place to live. I was so elated. She was actually separated, and I was excited at the possibilities of what could happen! She took up the room adjacent to mine, and the freaking antics from Slithers started immediately.
The first interaction of his towards her was a lame joke in an attempt to hit on her, followed by several attempts to walk all the way upstairs as we are talking to each other and catching up, and try to gift her with random things from his room with that dirty bad karma smile of his. Every time we laughed or got high energy, he would always try to barge in on us, and we eventually had to lock the door and giggle which just angered him to no end.
This girl was one of my firsts, and we got along famously, and she knew what was up the entire time which was just amazing.
That year in 2019, we had to install a state-of-the-art 16 wireless camera security suite to prevent all of the little things that went missing and document all of the little suspicious things going on in the house. This girl that moved in had been the target of several little things gone missing and was as fed up with it as I was.
I really wanted to move out, but I wasn’t going to give this garden of Eden that I built to the snake who had just lost his job again at Wal-Mart. He’s getting so lazy with his lies that he doesn’t even really try anymore. It just so happens that I was going to strike an agreement with Rick to go to UTI as my last remaining part of my education last semester, and also, this girl just signed an 8-month rental agreement.
Rick was literally at the fringe of kicking Slithers out until the renters’ relief program was put in place. Now renters are allowed to skip out on as much rent as they want for a few more months here in California, and we are stuck for the duration with this dude. He is still living here.
This has all been really the tip of the iceberg of what has transpired.
It’s really a lesson to do thorough background checks and really figure out who you are letting in your house.”
2. Joanne Is A Freaking Psycho
“So my roommate is very rich and very spoiled and also very scary. She started off fine, but now she is harassing me and another roommate. All names have been changed. Joanne is absurd; Helen and Callie are normal.
We all knew she was absurd, but we never did anything about it because she got a good cable package and she kept buying food. (Yeah I know we are not the brightest bunch.)
Started off when it began to get cold.
It was 50ish degrees, so we started to turn the heat on just a little bit to keep warm air circulating, especially since Helen and I have fish. She freaks out – turns on the A/C and sends Helen these nasty messages like, “I know why all your friends hate you now,” “You’re ugly and fat, and this is why you’re single,” “You’re a wuss for not answering me,” and she just keeps repeating them over and over.
Helen is super passive and lets it go.
Then my friends come over for 2 nights. We aren’t super loud and it’s the weekend. Joanne and I go to buy two bottles of booze. (Didn’t think anything of it, we were all just like, “Let’s crack these babies open!”) There were about 6 shots taken from her bottle, so I expected her to take some from mine to make it even.
No. She took the whole entire bottle. She left maybe 3 shots in it and then filled the rest with water. She drank two 90 proof handles of booze by herself in 1 night. Then when I asked for it, she starts telling me that I am a jerk and I am being mean to her when she has given me “everything” (I have known her maybe 3 months and I barely talk to her???) and so I go upstairs, knock on her door, and say “Joanne.
I want to talk about this. I am not trying to fight. I just want my booze back or for you to replace it.”
She cracks the door and says, “I am scared of you. You will yell at me.” And slams it in my face and then proceeds to start WAILING. It was so bizarre. Didn’t talk to her for about 2 weeks but constantly heard her saying how she was afraid to live in this house….even though everyone sleeps with their doors locked because she’s absurd.
Then I noticed Helen getting very distant from her and hiding in her room. Strange. I then get a text from Joanne, “I miss you so much. I hate pretending like we’re strangers. You are my best friend.” WHAT?! I barely know this girl. Then she asks me if I want steak or if I want to hang out.
She tells me how Helen was really angry at me the day she stole the booze and made her text me those mean things.
She claims Helen wanted me to leave the house and that we should turn on her. I am definitely one to hold grudges, so I just said, “Yeah, okay, Joanne. Sorry, I’m really busy; gotta go.” She got really weird and was like you’re just going to disrespect me like that? I apologized to you.
So I just left.
My partner comes to visit, we go inside after getting dinner for 15 ish minutes to go to the bathroom before we go drive somewhere else.
I hear Joanne running down the stairs (she always runs in a weird pattern) and go outside. I hear her run in while I’m still in the bathroom and then slam her door. No big deal, she must have ordered delivery.
We start driving and my partner’s car starts pulling more and more to one side and it starts shaking. We get out and see AN ENTIRE HOLE IN THE SIDE.
No nail, just a freaking gauged hole. We were just driving for 20 minutes!!! How!!! We think it was Joanne.
Then it’s Thanksgiving break, and I text Helen and say, “Please, let’s talk.” (I wanted to smooth things over and say there is no bad blood, and I wanted to say I’d appreciate it if my problems with Joanne stay between me and Joanne because I had no issues with her.) She didn’t want to talk in person, so I just texted her and she responds apologizing for something I’m not even talking about.
I just told her, “Listen, we really need to talk.” She comes downstairs, and I’m like, “Joanne told me you were trying to get me kicked out,” and she just shouts, “JOANNE KEEPS HARASSING ME, AND SHE TELLS ME YOU THINK I’M FAT AND YOU HATE ME.” I’m like, “What? Girl, I don’t even talk to Joanne.” So we both let loose and tell each other what Joanne has been doing.
She put sticky notes ALL OVER the bathroom saying that Helen was a fat jerk and how everyone hated her. What. I say, “I’m sorry. I’d never do that,” and she says, “Yeah, I didn’t even talk to her during the booze stealing night.”
That same night, it was time for Helen to ask for people to pay for the electric bill. Joanne responds and says, “Screw you, Helen.
I’m not paying anything.”
So I responded and said, “I’m going to take it up with the landlord if you do not comply.”
She says, “Go ahead; they won’t believe you.” I tell her I have screenshots and she says, “Good. I mean what I said.” Then starts sending more harassing messages to Helen. She enjoys picking on the weakest one, and Helen is very insecure and lets her in on all her weaknesses.
I finally told her I would call the police if she didn’t stop.
Then she started doing the wailing thing again and her partner came. She screamed, “I’M NEVER LEAVING. I’LL POOP OUTSIDE THIS WINDOW IF I HAVE TO.” He just books it and runs out the front door leaving it wide open. Not sure what happened with that.
Anyway, this isn’t even half the crazy stuff she has done, and I don’t know what to do. Helen is a mess. I am not much better and this environment is toxic. She keeps leaving bloody napkins and tampons everywhere, and she won’t clean up the trash all over the bathroom.”
1. You Can't Treat Your Roommate Like They Don't Exist...
“So I moved into a space when the previous roommate decided to move in with her partner. I found this post on Craigslist and the price + location makes it an unreal steal. The place is huge with bedrooms and living, dining, and kitchen areas plus a spare room for storage. There is a back porch that connects to the posted room with a clear amazing view of the city skyline.
It was posted for an October move in during the end of August, so a full month before they had to make a decision. I interviewed with the one I’d be living with and the girl moving out. They were both very nice and the conversation was easy. I let them know right away I’d love to move in if they thought we’d be a good fit.
That week I was told I’d gotten the spot and could not have been happier.
Then I move in and the things I thought you normally talk about in a shared living situation turned out to be a real struggle for conversation engagement. Like where appliances should go or where my common area furniture should be. Which items I had that were ok for community use (electric kitchen equipment, tech entertainment, etc.), and if there was anything I shouldn’t use.
The entire time I was moving in, my new roommate would not come out of her room. I had to go to her door to talk to her. My previous roommate (and now friend) was helping me move in. He admitted that it was awkward and she seemed really antisocial. That’s when I started to get worried and knew I wasn’t crazy.
For the first months now, I have noticed that my roommate does everything in her room: watches shows (which is weird to me since we have a tv in the living room that is hers) and eats there too.
Like she will make her meals in the kitchen and take them to her room even though we have a dining room. Anytime I talk to her, she has a look on her face like she’s in pain. I say hi and goodbye on arrival or departure and she does not even respond. When I text her, it’s about a 50% chance she will respond at all.
At one point, I asked her what her previous roommate situation was like, and she said she generally liked people that keep to themselves. I get that (or I can respect it), but is it really too much to ask someone to just be polite in a very basic way if we live together?
At first, I thought she was just an introverted person but I have since seen her with 2 friends she’s had over (without asking – but I don’t care about that), and they introduced themselves because she pretended I didn’t exist while they were there.
It disturbs me that they were more polite to me than she’s been the entire time I’ve lived there. It also made me genuinely hurt to also see she was fully involved in a conversation with them and smiling without that look of pure disdain she reserves for me when I talk to her.
This has manifested in me trying extra hard to get her to be nice – I regularly do all the dishes/put them away, buy supplies for the place, clean common areas.
It’s like I’m trying to figure out why she doesn’t like me and trying to do everything I can to get her to.
I think this would be less strange to me if it weren’t for the fact that my previous roommate and I had been complete strangers when I moved in as well and became fast friends. We got along great and would have meals together or just hang out in the common areas.
I was really sad to move, but my room there was tiny and had no closet, so most of my stuff was in storage which was a real pain.
I don’t necessarily expect the same thing or need to hang out with her, but I am seriously starting to feel like a leper in my own home. I feel like she deliberately avoids me and is trying to distance herself by being unfriendly.
I try to engage her in conversation once in a while (taking full note that she probably doesn’t want me to be a friend, so I’m just trying to be polite like I would with a coworker or acquaintance), and she will flat out not respond or give one-word answers. I might be sensitive, but I feel like it shows a real lack of respect when someone can’t give you the courtesy of a simple hello.
We live together, we aren’t strangers on the street.
I know I will need to address this cause it is slowly chipping away at my emotional state, but I don’t know how to ask her. I know it could be much much worse, but I also don’t see why this can’t be better. I don’t think I’m asking for much and it especially hurts that I’ve seen that she is capable of being friendly with others; she just chooses to treat me like this.
I just don’t want to make it worse.”
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