16 Times Roommate Situations Took an Unexpected Turn

People move in with roommates to save money. What they sometimes get instead is unpaid rent, passive-aggressive notes, food thieves, secret partners, and situations no lease agreement could ever prepare them for. Online, thousands of users have shared how their normal living arrangements slowly turned into chaos. These are some of the wildest ones.

“My roommate threw away a tub of my ice cream because there was mold on it. This is the picture he sent me.”

• She had a room with her own bathroom, but she constantly clogged the toilet by using napkins as toilet paper because she didn’t want to buy any. After clogging it, she would use everyone else’s bathroom in the hallway, showing no intention of fixing her own.
  One day, she clogged our toilet as well. While she was out, my roommates and I went into her room to check out her bathroom. Her toilet was completely dirty and clogged, and piles of clothes were scattered across the floor.
  She always tried to take our community recycling and keep the money for herself. She was the absolute worst, so we turned her last name into something you don’t want to be. Don’t be a Koob. © snowlin / Reddit
• We complained that she was leaving dirty dishes in the sink, so instead of cleaning them, she piled them in her bedroom for a month. She would rather live in a moldy environment than clean up after herself. Disgusting! © s**rockandroll / Reddit
• My worst roommate was a 56-year-old woman who let me stay in her house for free. She’s somewhat of a family friend. I’m a 20-year-old female who keeps things clean, never gets too loud, and tries to be considerate.
  But this crazy woman told me that my boyfriend at the time needed to leave before midnight. Disgruntled, I agreed to the rule. Then, she told me that I could no longer keep my bedroom door closed for any reason. Even more disgruntled, I complied and tried to hang out elsewhere.
  When I came back a week later, she had placed all my things on the curb, saying that I was acting inappropriately and irresponsibly. She gave me a lecture about how my boyfriend was no good, a stupid failure who would never amount to anything. (My boyfriend had sustained brain damage in a car accident.)
  Needless to say, I grabbed my things, and we never spoke again. Not until she asked for custody of my siblings in case my parents died. © JoyousMango / Reddit

“My roommate crashed my car while borrowing it to go to work, and now she refuses to pay anything unless I let her continue to drive it.”

• I have seen some crazy things, but one of the most memorable was this. It started with an itch on my back that wouldn’t go away. When I checked in the mirror, I saw what looked like mosquito bites, but there weren’t any mosquitoes around.
  My roommate noticed tiny ants crawling across the floor and trailing toward another room. We knew that food wasn’t allowed in the dorms for this exact reason, so we asked around. No one had left any snacks out.
  But what we discovered next was beyond bizarre. A girl in our dorm had eczema, and the ants had been harvesting flakes of her skin to build their nests. We found two nests: one the size of a fist under the bed and another just a little smaller in the closet.
  It turns out the ants were looking for more sources of skin and realized I had some dead skin on my back, so I was their next victim. © EuroBIan / Reddit
• My roommate once tried to “un-cook” his pasta. He had made too much, so he spread it out on a towel on the kitchen counter, thinking that it would dry out and fit back into the box. We had a fruit fly infestation for a month. We don’t talk anymore. © InteractionCareful41 / Reddit
• I lived in a dorm for the first year of graduate school. One night, we heard a loud bang from down the hall. It sounded like someone had blown up and popped a brown paper bag. In the minutes that followed, a foul odor ran up and down the hallways.
  It was really awful; if you didn’t cover your mouth and nose, you’d vomit. A bunch of people walked out into the hallway, looking around. The scene looked like a disaster, with everyone covering their mouths and noses.
  It turned out that a guy who lived on our floor had filled his thermos with hot chocolate about a month earlier. He drank about three-quarters of it and forgot about the rest. He knocked the thermos behind his nightstand and forgot about it.
  The fermenting concoction inside essentially resulted in a pressure bomb. The elevators carried the stench to all the floors, and everyone had to evacuate while it was cleaned up. © Talisker12 / Reddit

“I hate my roommate.”

• He hid the fact that he had lost his job. He would leave in his work uniform every morning at the same time as everyone else, pretend to walk to work (or sometimes even ask for a ride), then walk back to the apartment and sneak in through his open bedroom window.
  He would play video games all day, then sneak back out the window and walk back in the front door as if he had been at work all day. We didn’t find out until the third month, when he said, “Yeah, I don’t have my portion of the rent.” It blew our minds. © Serirseth / Reddit
• One day, I received a text from her saying that there were ants on the floor because of some Doritos or something she had eaten. I texted back, “Okay,” and moved on, thinking that was the end of it. Well.
  A couple of months later, it was time to move out of our dorm room. She had already left, so I was stuck cleaning up so that I wouldn’t get charged.
  I found a wet sock covering crushed Doritos and a whole colony of ants. Clearly, it was too much to expect her to pick up her Doritos. Her way of dealing with the situation was to cover them with a wet sock. © DeckTheHalls_WithMe / Reddit
• He borrowed money from me and refused to pay me back. Then he asked his dad for money to go snowboarding. Before leaving on his trip, he literally waved his money in my face and said that I wouldn’t be getting any of it.
  The moment he left the building, I called his dad and explained what had happened. His dad sent me a check, punished his son, and made him cut his trip short. © TekJansen** / Reddit

“My roommate moved out five months ago, and we only discovered his ’surprise’ today.”

• I’ve always slept without clothes; my roommate knew and never complained. Then his girlfriend stayed over and opened my door by accident. Now they both want me to change how I sleep. I refused. It’s my room.
  Yesterday I felt my blood boil when he said if I don’t change, he’ll tell the landlord I’m “running inappropriate activities.” I thought he was bluffing. He wasn’t. He sent a dramatic message to our group chat about “decency” and “shared morals.”
  This morning, my key didn’t work. He changed the lock “until I learn to be respectful.” So now I’m at a friend’s place, locked out of my own apartment, because a grown man forgot how to knock.
• My roommate’s girlfriend, who lived there but never paid rent, would always ask me what time I was going to shower in the morning so that she could shower 30 minutes earlier. This always resulted in a cold shower for me. One time, I got in the shower before her, and she got upset about it. You don’t even pay the electric bill! © stone500 / Reddit
• This was a small thing, but it had a big impact on our dynamic. We lived together for about four years and agreed to furnish the house together. Once we went our separate ways, we could take what we owned.
  One of our nightly rituals was to chill out and watch TV together. Granted, my roommate bought the TV, but one day I came home and it was gone. When I asked him about it, he said he had let a friend “borrow it.” Being the understanding person that I am, I just went along with it.
  After about two weeks, I asked him if we were ever going to see the TV again, and he said, “Yeah, I’ll get it back soon.” After about two months, I finally bought a new TV, and that’s when he came clean. He said he had sold it.
  I wouldn’t have cared; selling the TV wasn’t the point. The point was that this guy was a habitual liar who would lie about anything and everything. That’s when our friendship started going downhill. Who in the world borrows a TV? LMAO! © Lonely_Subject_9737 / Reddit

Some roommates become lifelong friends. Others become stories that sound fake but sadly aren’t. If these situations felt familiar or a little too real, there are many more unbelievable confessions like this waiting to be discovered in another roundup we put together.