It’s 2am, and you’re fast asleep. Dreaming about the amazing pizza you had for dinner and the leftovers you’re going to have for lunch tomorrow. You’re curled up in bed snug as a bug in a rug, and your phone is playing meditation music to help you stay relaxed all night during your slumber. Then BOOM. The front door slams shut, and suddenly you’re awake. You hear the stomping of footsteps echoing through the apartment, and the glass jars in the fridge clang against one another as the door is opened swiftly and then slammed shut. What in the world could that be? You muster up the strength to step out of your bed, slip on your robe and walk to the kitchen to find your roommate, drunkenly devouring your leftover pizza, along with a trail of muddy footprints leading from the front door to the fridge… “Good morning!”
If you attended university or you live in a city where rent prices are ridiculously high, chances are you have experience living with roommates. They might have started off as strangers and quickly become your best friends, or started as your best friends and quickly transformed into your arch enemies. You never know exactly what you’re going to get from a roommate, because you never truly know a person until you live with them.
One curious Reddit user recently asked others to share their most interesting roommate stories, and boy, did they deliver. We’ve gathered some of the wildest, funniest and most disturbing experiences people have had with roommates down below, so you can either relate to the pain of being stuck in an awful living situation or be thankful that you no longer have to deal with roommates. Be sure to upvote the stories that resonate with you, whether they’re the most wholesome or most terrifying, and let us know in the comments below if you have ever lived with a fascinating person. Then if you’re interested in even more strange roommate stories, be sure to check out this Bored Panda article next.
#21
Freshman year of college, I was randomly assigned a roommate to share a tiny room (11' x 15', I think?). I was a quiet comp sci student from the San Francisco area who liked video games and D&D. My assigned roommate was a huge Mechanical Engineering major from the South who liked his lifted truck, dip tobacco, and getting drunk as often as possible.
Needless to say, the next 6 months were not fun. He left his spit cups everywhere, constantly played loud country music, and messed around with my stuff (including scratching a nasty slur into my Office Space-esque stapler). As the year went on he seemed to get worse, probably due to finding a group of like-minded people in the dorms.
Long story short, he was kicked out of the dorms about 2 weeks before the spring break - he and another guy went on a rampage through the dorm with Airsoft guns shooting the little whiteboard on everyone's door. For some reason, though, he was allowed to stay until the break. I stupidly left for home before he did, and when I got back my very nice gaming PC was missing. I reported it missing, and told the police exactly where I thought it was (at his new place). They apparently searched it, and though they didn't find my computer, they found enough other stolen goods to get him expelled from school.
Thankfully, my replacement roommate was a very nice, quiet guy,. and the rest of the year went well.
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104points
When it comes to the benefits of living with others, aside from the decrease in your price of rent, it can also help us maintain our social lives without very much effort and allow us to enjoy the gap between being a child and being at the point in our lives where we want to settle down or start a family. "If I lived just with my boyfriend, I would feel too grown-up and married," one 25-year-old, who lives with both her partner and a roommate, told Mic. "I like sort of feeling like I'm still in college and having random people in and out of the house, because I am very extroverted and like having lots of friends around."
#22
I had a roommate for several years who was a decent guy, quiet, cleaned up after himself, respectful. The poor guy's life was terrible. He dropped out of high school at age 17. Then he started selling weed, which he was arrested for by an undercover cop. Being uneducated, he ended up with a felony on his record, permanently.
Throw on top of that, having a child and things not working out with his baby momma, so he owed child support. This guy was working as a dishwasher at restaurants for $10 an hour (probably less, this was from 2010-2015 when we were roommates). He had no car, and the closest bus rout to where we lived was a mile walk (uphill) from our apartment. He did this every day. One day I was talking to my dad, who loves to ride bicycles and has many, if one could be offered to my friend. He put some new pedals on a road bike of his (that's all he had), and I gave it to my friend.
On the third day after he had been given the bike, I was awoken randomly to knocks on my bedroom door and some mumbled speech. I open my door and there's my roommate, with his hand up to his face, covered in blood and maybe a tooth in there. He had placed his bag of clothes on the handlebar, and the drag from the front tire pulled the bag in and caused him to faceplant on concrete.
I remember taking him to the hospital, and he asked me to look at his mouth...good god.
This has a happy ending (or something like it). After this injury, he had enough with walking to the bus, so he got a second job, and began saving up to buy a car. For the first few weeks though, this guy was walking to the bus, and then working a 16+ hour day. There was a gap between jobs, where he couldn't rest much, so was probably getting 4 hours of sleep a night. He was saving funds and due to his child support, he could only eat Banquet $1 frozen dinners. All day. That's all he had was one of those. He eventually got the car and his quality of life got marginally better before he parted ways.
He ended up moving in with family and closer to bus lines. Maybe not the most extraordinarily interesting story ever, but nonetheless, what that guy went through, I can't imagine. He used to tell me when he was walking home at night, he often contemplated stepping into oncoming traffic. Thankfully he never did.
After we both left the apartment and went our separate ways, we kept in touch. However, he frequently had phone issues when we lived together, and had several different #s in 5 years. I reached out to him to check in 5 years ago and never heard back. I hope he's ok.
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101points
#23
First college roommate rarely did laundry and would "borrow" my underwear - especially for dates - and return them dirty (unwashed).
I told him in unequivocal terms to keep his hands off my junk, but he'd borrow whatever he needed anyway.
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99points
#24
I taught a roommate how to boil water. Iced tea was the first thing, other than sandwiches and salads, that she had ever made.
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99points
Having a roommate can also be beneficial for those of us who need a reminder not to close up or cut ourselves off from others. "There was something kind of nice about having to come home without being able to retreat to my bedroom," one 26-year-old, who now lives with her significant other, told Mic. "I would have to sit on the couch with my roommate so we could talk about our days for, like, 10 minutes every night. Having someone there doesn't let you isolate yourself as much as you would otherwise." Especially during times of forced isolation, like being in lockdown during the beginning of the pandemic, it can be so helpful to have someone under the same roof who you can open up to.
#25
He started watching me from dark corners of the house at night if I was in the common areas. Super f*****g creepy
98points
#26
A few years back my former roommate and I let our downstairs neighbour move in with us because the guy he was living with had taken up a new habit.. he’d befriended the pigeons that hung out on the rooftop outside his bedroom window and eventually started taking them inside and caring for them like pets. S**t got real dirty real quick.
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95points
#27
In my freshman year of college, I got a roommate who had absolutely no boundaries. The night before classes started she asked if she could have one of my granola bars and a kcup for coffee the next morning and I said yes. After that she just kept eating my snacks and using my kcups without asking and I didn't realize until I got really shaky from not eating and went to get a granola bar and noticed they were all gone. She constantly went through my stuff and would stalk what I did so she could talk to me about absolutely everything I do. Eventually she told me she would only stay in the room over night on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday so her boyfriend could give her a ride to class, but she would randomly barge into the room unannounced. In December that year I went to the ER cause I sprained my knee falling off a skateboard and I left the paperwork on my desk when I left for winter break. I got a call from her that night and she basically told me she read the papers and she read everything they prescribed me for my knee. I put in a room change request form right after that. Then the week before we got back she called me and told me she dropped out, or in her words "taking a semester off" cause she missed so many classes that she was on warning from financial aid. I had the room to myself for the rest of the year.
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90points
I hope your personal experiences with roommates have been on the positive end of the spectrum and that none of them are currently sitting in prison convicted of murder, but if you can relate to the more horrific stories on this list, at least you know you’re not alone. We would love to hear about your wildest roommate stories in the comments below, and don’t forget to keep upvoting the responses you find most fascinating. Then if you haven’t had enough of these juicy roommate anecdotes, you can find another Bored Panda article sharing weird and embarrassing roommate stories right here.
#28
I spent over a year falling asleep to the angry, muffled, whisper-but-not-really arguments between my roomie and his girlfriend. Just muffled enough that I couldn't understand what the problem was, but they were clearly not happy together.
So I'd just lie in bed wondering, *what's my duty of care here?* Like they weren't violent with each other, and it wasn't like one person was terrorizing the other, it was just two young people in a consensual and mutual spiral of despair.
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84points
#29
If I had the screenwriting skills, I was, at one point, ready to write a pilot about a former roommate of mine. Things he decided as a 38 year old man after getting fired from his job for repeated sexual harassment: He would join the NFL and be the next jerry Rice! He would become a rockstar like Motley Crue and dyed his hair blond! He would become the next martial arts cinema star like Bruce Lee! He was going to be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger and began drinking Protein Shakes!
In his defense, he was physically ripped, but he was half Taiwanese, half Chinese and was 5'7" 110 pounds. He got up to 140 during his 'Arnold phase', then while trying to get his yellow belt at a local TKD studio, he told the instructor that he needs personal attention because of who he is going to be, and the master should give him private lessons for free. After the guy laughed in his face, he tried to pick a fight with him. When he decided to become a rock star, he decided he wanted to be a guitarist because they get chicks, but guitars are expensive, so he bought 2 drumsticks instead.
I couldn't make up this s**t if I tried. Dude was absolutely not connected to reality and would get downright indignant if you tried to tell him his dream was not possible. Mix this personality in with attractive women and you have a recipe for disastrous sexual harassment claims. In the time I knew him, he was fired from 3 different jobs for sexual harassment and that was only about 2 years. For reference, his father was in prison for raping his 12 year old stepdaughter... at gun point.
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83points
#30
My college roommate didn't know how to do laundry before we started school. We had a community washer and dryer on our floor. Probably the third week of school, I went down to get a soda from the machine and I walk in and there are bubbles four inches deep on the floor. My roommate walks in behind me to check his laundry. He had put 3 full scoops of Tide in the washer with his load. I had to take him to an off campus laundromat to wash all of the excess soap out of his clothes.
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69points