Living with a roommate can be a great experience. You can split the rent, share chores, and have someone to hang out with. But sometimes, things don’t go quite as planned. In some cases, you might start to realize that your roommate is not quite as normal as you thought.
In this collection of stories, people share the moment they realized their roommate was a complete psycho. From creepy behavior to downright dangerous situations, these tales of roommate horror will make you think twice about who you choose to live with.
So sit back, and read on to discover the warning signs of a crazy roommate. Who knows – you might even recognize a few of these stories from your own experiences.
All content has been edited for clarity.
I’m Glad He Got The Help He Needed
“Living in a college student-only apartment building, I requested to move to a new room because of party animal roommates. Rooms are all five-bedroom suites with shared bathrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. As it’s summer, three of the bedrooms in the new room are rented but empty by students not there for the summer, and only one roommate is actually present.
Met the new roommate, seems normal, and chill, talks about video games and music a lot. Honestly seemed like he could be a great friend at first.
One day a few weeks later, I started hearing random screaming and crashing coming from his room. At one point he knocks on my door, asking for a broom, as he’s broken a few things. I give him a dustpan and broom and ask if he’s okay, he mumbles something to himself as he walks back to his room and slams the door.
A few hours later, more screaming, more crashing, and again he knocks on the door, this time asking for some tape. I give him some and again ask if he’s okay, and he replies he might need to go to the mental hospital but I don’t need to do anything.
I go to bed with some earplugs in (a habit I’d formed because of previous party animal roommates), and the next morning our shared kitchen and living room are TRASHED. Broken furniture, drawers, and cabinets torn off the wall, a knife sticking out of the wall, the TV cratered in as if it was punched, the whole nine.
Luckily for me, I’m leaving for a family event that weekend, so I decided to head out early and leave right that second (after taking pictures of the damage.)
On my way out of the building, I stop at the building manager’s office to tell her everything. She already knew something was up, as apparently a window from his room was smashed and objects were thrown onto the sidewalk below.
She asks me to write up an email detailing what I’d seen and provide her with the pictures I took. I do so and bail.
A few hours later, I got a text from a friend who works near my building saying, ‘LOL bro there’s a ton of cops surrounding your building, did you kill someone or something?’
I emailed the building manager to ask what happened, and she tells me the police were inside our suite, but she can’t detail what happened to him due to privacy concerns.
A few days later, going back to the building, I pop into her office to ask the building manager for details or warnings before I go up. She’s not there, but her assistant is. I ask the assistant, whose only reply to my concerns is ‘You know, the eviction process takes a really long time.’
I go up to the room, shi*ting myself, expecting the worst, but luckily he’s not around at the moment. I didn’t see him again for a couple of days, and once I did, he acted completely casually and as if nothing had happened. Casually asking about video games and random shit standing in an apartment with completely torn-apart cabinets and furniture.
A week or so later, he’s gone without a trace. Apparently, his family forced him to move back home and defer going to college so he could get better.
Apparently when I’d left for that weekend, why the police showed up, and the building manager contacted the roommate’s father, but when the father showed up, the roommate threatened and/or attempted suicide and possibly threatened to kill someone (people who were nearby/present differ in stories) so the police had to show up and break into the room. He seemed to have a history of mental illness and had a few events in his life that caused this breakdown.
Good news, a year and a half later I see on social media he ended up finishing college, has a full-time job, and seems to be functioning very well.”
At Least She Hid Them
“I was cooking dinner one night, and I just couldn’t find the kitchen knives. Like, the whole block was missing from its usual spot on the countertop.
Figured my roommate had moved them for some reason, but it took me forever to find them–tucked far back in the cabinet above the refrigerator.
When my roommate got home, I asked her about it. She told me, ‘Oh, I had this horrible thought that I might stab you to death in your sleep, so I hid them up there.'”
Well, That’s Terrifying
“One time I saw some scratches on the hallway wall. For a couple of days I kept thinking, what could we have carried down the hallway that made those scratches? One night when everybody else was out, I heard a weird metal scraping noise. I peeked out of my room and saw him walking up and down that hallway, holding a big kitchen knife, dragging the point along the wall, and talking to himself. I couldn’t hear what he was saying.”
Money Doesn’t Translate To Hygiene
“This one roommate I had never washed her clothes. She just wore a new outfit every single day. I assumed she was rich and decided not to engage with her since she never said hi to me when we saw each other.
At the end of the semester, I smelled something so awful that I can’t really describe it with the words available to me in the English language. I guess I’ll say this to give you an idea. If it were a scent for a candle, I would call it something like: ‘Hormones and Bad Decisions.’
I took a look outside my door, and I saw she left a luggage trolley meant for helping people carry large amounts of stuff, that was full of dirty clothes. I gagged when I saw some old panties at the top of the large pile.
We had laundry machines. She had money. They sold detergent and drier sheets downstairs. I have no idea why she did this, but I assumed she was probably the one who was behind the mystery of how ‘nobody flushed the toilet’ even though we all swore we did.”
Lack Of Self Awareness Or Just Lying?
“Her Craigslist ad for a roommate said, ‘I’m quiet and mostly spend time in my room gaming and hanging out with my cats.’ I’m pretty introverted, and the rent was cheap, so it sounded perfect.
I moved in and she proved herself to be the polar opposite of her Craigslist ad – loud, extroverted, in my room and in my business 24/7, and a raging alcoholic. She’d regularly have random people over getting blackout drunk until 4 am when I’d have to be up for work at 8 or earlier. She left nasty food messes everywhere that led to a cockroach problem (which she didn’t believe when I showed her) and got mad when I didn’t want to help clean up after her. She didn’t have a job, lived off of inheritance, and spent it all on alcohol. I later learned she had a shoplifting problem as well when she kept getting court summons in the mail that she wore like a badge of honor.
The last straw was when she invited the guy she was seeing over and they proceeded to get f*cked up on benzos and a half gallon of rum, threatened each other with steak knives in the kitchen at 5 am, and pounded on my door screaming at me to call the cops on one another. I told them it wasn’t my problem and promptly moved my stuff out while she was out of the house the following day (I thankfully had a place lined up already). F*ck. That.”
How Else Was He Supposed To Power Up?
“Ate two slices of bread while going ‘Super Saiyan.’ Making direct eye contact. Taking a bite in between power-ups. I should add that he was completely naked. I woke up the next morning and he and everything he owned was just gone.”
A Blessing In Disguise
“She called the police because she was convinced someone wiped poop on her towel and wanted them to do a DNA test so she could find the culprit. She was very mad when they told her they don’t provide those services and so then she called our utility provider and had water and electricity turned off. She left for two nights, and came back, during which I transferred the utilities in my name and got them turned back on. She then screamed at me that she didn’t want to pay for the two days she was cooling off somewhere else bc of the poop towel and that she was going to take me to small claims court. I said all right sounds good. Then she threw a flip-flop at me. I almost started laughing really hard but called her dad instead. He picked her up and she was gone for the rest of the lease until move-out day she came for her things. I was so happy she left though, her dad still kept paying her rent.
Thank you poop towel.”
Yeah You Were In Danger
“My (female) roommate was romantically interested in the same person as me. He was more interested in pursuing me but thought it would be appropriate to talk with her and make it clear that he liked her as a friend. He invited her to go on a walk with him.
She peed her pants while on this walk.
She returned home in a state of complete disarray. I woke up that night to her hovering over me. I asked if she was okay, and she just said, ‘The talk with ___ didn’t go well.’
Over the next several weeks, I found her on more than one occasion with a knife in her hand, staring off into space. I would ask if she was okay, and she would ‘snap out of it’ and look at the knife and ask how it got there.
Needless to say, I wasn’t sleeping very well. Luckily she was only subletting for a month and left shortly thereafter.”
Regardless Of The Motive She Helped Her
“I was a bartender where she was waitressing and she needed a place to stay. I had nothing fancy, a 2 bed lower, that cost me $400 a month at the time (early 2000s). Her half of the rent was 200. And there was off-street parking.
She was crushing up pills and snorting it because apparently pill form wasn’t good enough.
Her mood swings between her and her boyfriend were ridiculous. Throwing my stuff at each other, breaking crap. I found she had stolen a few hundred dollars from me.
At the time I had about $50k worth of music equipment and instruments at the house. I had enough and threw her out.
I ended up getting a call from her mother about a month later. She was calling to thank me. Apparently, the previous roommate had checked herself into rehab after I kicked her out and she was 30 days sober. She had found religion and was trying to get into something called the WorkCorp.
She also apparently ditched the boyfriend, who I learned was on again and off again for years and the source of the habit.
She actually personally stopped by a year later and thanked me for kicking her out because she got her life on track.
Hopefully, she stayed sober. I hate to admit, I was being selfish because I didn’t want my music stuff to disappear.”
She Was Asking For It
“Her mom, the master electrician (she was an HR rep), told her that every piece of electronics that was plugged in cost at least a dollar a day.
So every f*cking day when I went to class I came home to all my sh*t unplugged. I tried reasoning with her. With just the standard house appliances we’d be sitting on a 300-dollar electric bill. But no. Months and months this went on.
I worked off campus and stayed for spring break while she went home. At that point I had basically moved in with my girlfriend anyways so I unplugged everything. Every appliance in the house that needed electricity got unplugged. The fridge was left with the door cracked open.
The next week she threw an absolute sh*t fit at me. I just said, ‘Hey, I wasn’t gonna be here so I was just trying to save us money.’ She wasn’t a fan of that.”
