Having good, reliable, and responsible roommates is crucial since we see their faces every single day. But not everyone gets that lucky. In the stories we’ve gathered for you today, people share their absolute worst roommate and flatmate experiences. These are tales of living with people so chaotic, unbearable, unhygienic, or downright unsettling that home stopped feeling like a safe place and started feeling like the setting of a horror story.

**1.**
One day, I came home late and saw my roommate quickly entering her room, wrapped in a wet towel. I said hi, but she ignored me completely and avoided eye contact, almost like she didn’t recognize me. I shrugged it off, thinking maybe she was embarrassed or just too distracted to respond. But five minutes later, I heard the front door open again. She was walking in from outside.

My stomach dropped.

Completely confused, I asked, “Weren’t you just inside in your bedroom?” The color drained from her face. She froze for half a second, then told me in a shaky voice to run immediately to the car, lock the doors, and call 911.

That day, I was horrified to discover that my roommate was schizophrenic. Sometimes she skipped her medication, and when that happened, she could dissociate and become deeply paranoid. In that state, she had apparently left the house without realizing it and then come back in, convinced there was an intruder inside. That explained why she had ignored me earlier and why she suddenly thought we were both in danger—because, in her mind, someone else had been in the apartment when it had actually been her all along.

I had been living with her for two months and had no idea. I still cared about her and considered her a friend, but after that night, every strange sound in the house made my heart race. Needless to say, I moved out quickly. I just couldn’t feel safe there anymore.

**2.**
We had a shared kitchen, the three of us. We even made cleaning schedules to keep things fair, but they never followed them. Instead, they’d let everything pile up until it was my turn and then act like the disaster was somehow my responsibility.

After weeks of complaining that I was the only one actually cleaning, I finally stopped. I wanted to see how bad it would get if I didn’t save them from their own filth.

Three weeks later, the kitchen looked like a biological hazard. There was rotten food liquefying in containers, fungi spreading across forgotten plates, and a full-blown cockroach infestation. Opening the fridge felt like opening a cursed tomb.

Eventually, a professional cleaning company had to be hired, and the bill was divided among everyone living there. I objected immediately and pointed to all my earlier complaints and messages. Thankfully, management agreed. Not only did I not have to pay, but I was also compensated for having to eat out every night because the kitchen had become unusable.

They got kicked out a week later. In the end, I won—but living through it felt disgusting, stressful, and honestly surreal.

**3.**
I once scrubbed down the entire apartment because the landlady was coming by for an inspection. It took literally all night. I’m not exaggerating. I cleaned every surface, every corner, every sticky mystery stain I could find. He didn’t help at all.

I scrubbed pots that had more culture growing inside them than a science lab. I wiped walls, mopped floors, and even cleaned grime off places I didn’t know could get dirty. By the time I was done, I was running on fumes.

The landlady came the next morning, looked around, and left satisfied.

Five minutes after she walked out the door, he went into the kitchen. I heard cabinets slamming, dishes clattering, and that particular kind of reckless noise that tells you someone is destroying your peace on purpose. When I finally dragged myself out of bed and stumbled in there, the kitchen looked almost exactly the same as it had before I cleaned it—except this time, the mold was gone.

It was like the apartment had reset itself out of spite.

**4.**
She would brush her long hair and clean out the brush afterward. So far, normal. The horrifying part was what she did next.

Instead of throwing the hair in the trash like every sane person on Earth, she would stuff it directly into the sink drain.

Not near the sink. Not beside it. Into it.

At first, I thought maybe it was a one-time absentminded thing. It wasn’t. She did it constantly, like she had decided plumbing was optional. The sink kept clogging over and over again, and every time I had to pull out a wet, disgusting wad of hair, I felt my soul leave my body a little more.

I will never understand the logic. There wasn’t any.

**5.**
I had a roommate who absolutely refused to wear deodorant. On top of that, he worked a physically demanding job and also went to the gym regularly, so he constantly smelled like a locker room that had been sealed shut for a week. He insisted he showered twice a day, but somehow, no one ever witnessed this mythical event.

Then things got worse.

He started scamming our other roommates in our four-bedroom apartment by borrowing money and never, ever paying it back. At first, it was small amounts—just enough to make people hesitate before calling him out. Then he started skipping his share of the utility bills. Then the rent.

Eventually, everyone realized he wasn’t forgetful or struggling—he was just a mooch with a talent for making excuses.

He finally got kicked out, but while he was there, we had this running joke that the safest place to hide our money from Mark was under the soap. It was funny because it was probably true.

**6.**
He had severe, undiagnosed OCD, and it controlled nearly every part of his day. He had a whole list of rituals that he absolutely had to perform, and if anything interrupted them, he’d spiral—and usually take my sanity down with him.

One of his rituals was especially maddening. He would start playing a movie and music at the same time on his laptop, creating this awful, chaotic wall of noise, and then he’d leave the room to go take a two-hour shower.

We shared a room.

At first, I tried to be patient, but after enough nights of lying there listening to dialogue, explosions, and overlapping songs all blaring together while he wasn’t even present, I’d just close his laptop once he left.

Every single time, after his shower, he’d come out and ask in this tense voice, “Why did you touch my laptop?”

I’d explain—again—that the noise was unbelievably distracting and that I needed sleep or quiet or both. And every time, without fail, he’d tell me I should “just use headphones.”

This happened every Tuesday and Thursday night like some kind of cursed ritual I couldn’t escape.

**7.**
I had nice porcelain dishes that had been left to me as an inheritance, along with a regular set of everyday dishes for normal use. I kept them carefully stored because they meant something to me.

For reasons I still can’t explain, she went out of her way to use the porcelain ones instead of the regular dishes. And when she was done, she wouldn’t place them in the sink or wash them—she would literally throw them in.

One by one, they shattered.

I spoke to her several times, trying to be calm, trying to explain that these weren’t just “plates” to me. Her response? “It’s your fault for owning nice things.”

That sentence still makes me angry.

She was one of those weird pseudo-spiritual, aggressively careless people who acted like destroying other people’s belongings was some kind of philosophical statement. After that, I packed every remaining piece into a box and kept it in my room until the lease was up. I shouldn’t have had to hide my own inheritance inside my own home, but that’s what living with her came to.

**8.**
She had a bizarre cycle. She’d come home, fill the fridge with a ridiculous amount of food, and then disappear a couple of days later for months at a time to stay with her 50-year-old boyfriend.

And she wouldn’t take the food with her.

So all of it would sit there and rot. Milk would expire. Produce would liquefy. Containers would swell ominously in the back of the fridge like tiny science experiments waiting to burst. Eventually, I’d have to throw it all away just to stop the apartment from smelling like decay.

Then, whenever she randomly reappeared, she’d accuse us of eating her food.

As if that wasn’t stressful enough, every time she left, she’d hand me anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 in cash for her share of rent for the coming months. No warning, no envelope, no real conversation—just “hold onto this for me.”

So not only did I have to deal with her rotting groceries and weird accusations, but I also had to babysit huge amounts of someone else’s money in my apartment. It made me deeply paranoid. I was constantly worried something would happen to it and I’d somehow be blamed.

She was chaos in human form.

**9.**
She had this deeply unsettling habit where she would suddenly decide that something was “dirty” and then throw it away immediately—along with anything else it happened to be touching.

And I mean anything.

A towel on the floor? Gone. A container touching the “dirty” towel? Gone too. A bag sitting next to the container? Also gone. It was like living with someone who conducted surprise purges based on vibes instead of reason.

The worst part was that she never told me beforehand. I’d just come home and realize random belongings had vanished.

Then she would turn around and demand that I replace everything—both hers and mine—that she had thrown away without asking.

There’s something uniquely maddening about being expected to reimburse someone for the damage they caused to your own property.

**10.**
When she would “wash” our dishes, she would just run everything under cold water for a few seconds—no soap, no scrubbing, no effort whatsoever—and then place it all neatly on the drying rack like she had accomplished something.

Utensils still had grease on them. Plates still had dried food stuck to the surface. Bowls came back with mystery residue.

At first, I kept reminding her that dishes actually needed to be washed with hot, soapy water and scrubbed properly. Eventually, I gave up and just rewrote my own reality by rewashing everything after she was done.

But somehow, that wasn’t even the grossest part.

She also never washed her hands after using the bathroom. Ever. And despite this, she insisted she was a germaphobe. Her version of “germs” was refusing to let people sit on her bed in outside clothes while she casually touched everything in the apartment with unwashed bathroom hands.

Oh, and she wanted to be a pediatrician.

That information has haunted me ever since.

**11.**
My sophomore year of college, my roommate and I had bunk beds. I had the top bunk, and he had the bottom. That meant I had a front-row seat to one of the most unpleasant sensory experiences of my life.

I could tell exactly when he took his shoes off by the smell alone.

It would rise up like a warning signal. He hardly showered, barely changed clothes, and seemed almost immune to his own stench. Living in that room felt like being trapped inside a sealed gym bag.

But the smell wasn’t even the hardest part.

He also had serious mental health issues that he absolutely refused to get help for. He was manipulative, narcissistic, and a pathological liar. Nothing was ever his fault. If he upset someone, somehow they had “misunderstood” him. If he got caught in a lie, he’d tell three more to cover it. If there was conflict, he would twist it until you started doubting your own memory.

The atmosphere in that room became exhausting. I never knew whether I was dealing with a roommate, a victim, or a performance.

Thankfully, he moved out partway through the year.

And somehow, he was going into education.

**12.**
My older brother lived with me for a while when he was trying to get back on his feet. On paper, that sounded manageable.

What made it significantly less manageable was the fact that he had a pet snake.

And he lost it in my apartment several times.

Not once. Several times.

There is no specific kind of stress quite like waking up in the middle of the night and remembering there may or may not be a snake somewhere under your furniture. Every pile of clothes became suspicious. Every shadow near the wall looked alive. I checked my shoes before putting them on like I was in a survival documentary.

Each time he’d say something casual like, “He’s probably just hiding.”

That did not help.

**13.**
My roommate for one semester in college was the smelliest person I have ever met, and I truly do not say that lightly.

His average day looked like this: he would drink half a gallon of milk, then go sit alone in his dark room, whispering to himself while playing video games for hours. No lights on. No music. Just whispering and clicking in the dark.

He showered maybe twice a month if we were lucky.

Every time I walked past his room to get to mine, the smell would hit me so hard I’d physically gag. It wasn’t just body odor—it was like stale air, spoiled dairy, sweat, and despair had all fused together into something sentient.

That semester was already brutal because I was studying abroad in Canada during winter and dealing with pneumonia on top of everything else. But somehow, having to recover while sharing a space with that human biohazard made it all feel ten times worse.

To this day, I can’t smell spoiled milk without getting flashbacks.

**14.**
He had a window AC unit in his room instead of a fan like a normal person because he wanted his room to feel like an industrial freezer. He didn’t just like it cold—he wanted it arctic.

Even during the dead of winter, he would run the AC full blast while the furnace was on for the rest of the apartment. So while we were all trying to keep the place reasonably warm, he was basically fighting the heating system like it was a personal enemy.

The electric bill was absurd.

We tried explaining that he was literally cooling the outdoors and burning through money, but he didn’t care. Why would he? His rich dad would just cover his share at the end of the month, so none of it felt real to him.

Meanwhile, the rest of us were stuck paying for the privilege of living inside a climate war.

**15.**
She took a fork with her lunch to work every day.

At first, nobody noticed. Then we started realizing our forks were disappearing at a weird rate. It had never been an issue before she moved in, so eventually we brought it up casually. She denied knowing anything about it.

We bought a whole new box of forks—just forks—to solve the problem.

Those started disappearing too.

At that point, it stopped being funny and started feeling strangely sinister. Like, how many forks can one person possibly need? Were they in her car? Her desk? A drawer somewhere? Was there a secret fork graveyard?

She kept denying it until one day we caught her on her way out with lunch in hand and asked to see inside her bag.

Sure enough: fork.

She apologized and, in what I can only describe as the least helpful apology gift imaginable, bought us a box of plastic forks. We asked her to move out shortly after because, honestly, the fork thing was just the tip of the weird iceberg and she clearly wasn’t a good match for the house.

Strangely enough, after she left, we never had the fork problem again.