In many places of the world, we are increasingly living with one another. In the United States, for example, 31.9% of households are “doubled up,” meaning people share them with at least one adult who isn’t a spouse, romantic partner, or college student (in 2004, the figure was 27.4%).
Sometimes, these arrangements cause all sorts of awkward situations. So when last week Reddit user EnchantedSophia asked others on the platform “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve caught your roommate doing when they thought no one was watching?” many submitted their juicy stories.
I woke up to find my room-mate at his drawing desk wearing boxer shorts on his head. I didn’t broach the matter at first.
The landlord was due to arrive shortly for the cheques, and so I put it to him at last “Dave – you’ve got boxer shorts on your head.”
To this day I still remember him languidly turning around, boxer shorts and all, asking what I’d just said. When I repeated myself he suddenly went “oh, s**t, s**t!” and tore them off his head, blushing.
When I asked why he’d been wearing them in the first place he said that since he’d started growing his hair out it had started to get into his eyes while he was drawing at his desk, and it was the only thing he had to hand right then to solve the problem.
Dave could be a pain in the a*s a lot of the time, but he had these moments that reminded me that – yes, he was human after all.
My roommate eats dinner in the dark. Scares the hell out of me when I go into the kitchen and flip the lights on and reveal someone already there.
We call it dark dinner.
Hit on my girlfriend. He thought I was out having a smoke, but I decided to grab a drink first and heard him say, “he’ll never know.”
Luckily I also heard her say, “yes, but I would, and I could not say I love him and do something like that.”
She then tried to find me to tell me something. I played dumb, and got to hear her say that she doesn’t like my room mate, and that he had hit on her when I left.
We started spending more time at her place after that.
I walked in on my roommate sitting on my bed, taking pictures of my things. We later found out she had a blog about us (my other roommate and I). She gave us nicknames, made fun of us and posted pictures of our things. It was super mean and really weird.
My first college roommate came back from the bathroom with a huge roll of toilet paper. Walks to the mini-fridge, gets a can of spray cheese. He breaks off like 4 squares of TP at a time, folding into a single square. Then sprays cheese into the middle, folds it like a pierogi and eats it in a single bite.
I really wish I was making this up. Dude was f*****g weird.
One time I came home from work to find my roommates car parked diagonally, still running on the driveway. The front door was wide open (it’s the dead of winter in canada) and his jacket laying there a few feet away from the door, his shoes kicked off, one a few feet from the jacket, and the other a few feet from the first. I called out to see if he was okay, and as it turned out, he had gone out for teppanyaki and had very narrowly avoided s******g his pants in the worst way. Very very funny moment.
One of my good buds roomed with me right before covid. I’m not an emotional roller-coaster, but when we lived together I was going through some relationship drama and I did cry with him a few times. He’s one of the guys that feels that men shouldn’t have feelings, especially express them. I got home a lot earlier than I usually do one night, and before I got to the door I heard him crying. I peeked in a window and he was holding a stuffed animal his mom gave him, just rocking back and forth crying. I never told him I saw him, I waited in my car for a half hour and came in and he was watching TV. It was nice to see he had a heart and needed to cry sometimes too.
Lived with this one girl who “communed with demons.” Late one night I woke up outta no where & heard her outside my door speakng in a deep gutteral voice, scratching my door.
Just went back to sleep cause nah.
Didn’t happen to me but a friend of mine was renting the main floor of a two story house in college. There was an odd cat lady renting the upstairs floor who had a separate entrance. She must’ve had agoraphobia because he never saw her leave her place. Her odd behavior was actually hilarious. She would lower her cat inside of a basket out of her window to the ground in the back yard. The cat would sniff around the yard, go to the bathroom, then get back into the basket and she would reel it back up to the second floor. None of us believed him till we saw it ourselves. He just got used to it lol.
I caught my roommate serenading our houseplants with love ballads, convinced it would help them grow… but sadly, they’re still leafing us hanging.
I made cookies and had them out on a cooling rack. The kitchen area was completely open to the living room, where I was sitting on the couch. My roommate stacked about six of the cookies on her hand and then “hid them” behind her arm and casually walked past me. She could have just asked for cookies.
Not the super weirdest thing ever but weirdest I’ve seen in a share house. A housemate had just gotten his harnesses from working at heights training, so he was swinging back and forth out the back patio when I got home, he was having the best time. I laughed, grabbed some beers and gave him a few pushes.
Idk about walking in one someone else BUT,
I thought my Roomate was gone for the week on a trip since they left to the airport a couple hours before. I had a date that night with this really cute gal, and I was getting ready.
Got the point when I got out the shower, Give Me Everything by Pitbull and NeYo was playing (lol) and I was singing and dancing all over the house in my underwear.
With my brush in hand, pretending it was a microphone, I was shaking my hips like Shakira getting hot, and my Roomate walked in. He missed his flight and rescheduled for the next day, and I missed his calls since I had my phone faced down.
He told me he would pretend he didn’t see anything. Good guy lmao.
He was listening to classical music very loudly and pretending to conduct the orchestra. I’m sure he would have been famous had it been a real orchestra! .
I once walked in the house after work to find my former roommate perched on the arm of the couch, screeching like a pterodactyl. He didn’t hear me come in so I hid in the kitchen and observed as he occasionally would hop from chair to chair, screeching. Eventually I couldn’t hold the laughter in. I guess he forgot to take his meds for a few days and had a flare up but we still laugh about that to this day.
Caught a roommate trying to sneak all her stuff out one gym bag at a time in order to move out and not pay all the back rent she owed. Her mom ended up paying after we threatened a court filing.
Her room which we hadn’t seen the inside of for a year, was the most disgusting s**t I have ever seen in my life.
EDIT: Since I was asked for more details, the room was like a hoarders episode. All our missing dishes, cookware, and cutlery were found all over the room and under the bed with dried or moldy food. Used tampons were found in various places including stuck to the wall. Used condoms as well. Trash everywhere. Moldy coffee cups. Stains of all sorts, on the walls and carpet. The original colors of both were impossible to discern. Also tons of liquor bottles due to her drinking problem. Her desk and bed (she left all her furniture) were so covered in garbage in filth you couldn’t even tell there was a bed or desk underneath. I’m pretty sure she was also wiping boogers on the wall beside her bed.
She would also have guys she met online come over for hookups which is insane to me. If some girl invited me in to a room like that I would be out the door so f*****g fast.
I caught my piece of s**t roommate trying to drag a girl into his room by her arm. It was around 3am and I was the only sober one. His cousin, the third roommate, was a cop and didn’t even try to stop it. She was yelling at him to stop and that’s what got me out of my room. I just separated them and walked her and her friend to the door.
Moved out quickly after that, and my old roommate emailed my dad talking s**t about me, called me a cockblock, and I got to explain to my 72 year old father what exactly that was.
I was the roommate in this case. I was living with my now ex and another guy at the time and my old roommate walked out of his room to go to work and found me in a black and red corset and pirate hat listening to sea shanties while I did the dishes. He said at first his reaction was just wtf but then he thought about it and was like damn I need to find a woman like that.
I had a roommate who would wake up at 5 am everyday and go to the bathroom for at least an hour, which was connected to my room.
He would blow his nose, hack, and flush the toilet about 500 times while in there. One day I went into the bathroom and the toilet was FULL of toilet paper. Wtf was he doing?! We never had any left, so I started hiding it.
Whenever I had guys over they were like who tf is this dude. Lol.
My college room mates gf was in our room waiting for him. She was sitting on his bed snacking on something. I just ignored her for the most part. Eventually we had some interaction and she got up and I saw what she was snacking on, a giant jar of fruit flavored TUMS. She’d eaten all of them.
I asked if she had and she denied it then admitted it. I said you know that’s going to mess up your stomach right? She looked confused. I said that’s not candy it’s for stomach issues…..dull stare….”I know…but they’re good.”
Ok. Enjoy s******g out that calcium brick in a few days.
In freshman year I had a suite situation where me and my roommate shared a bathroom with another room next door. One of the guys in that room was this dude who just had the most questionable hygiene practices. He’d dye his hair black every other day, seemingly never took showers, and was usually just a menace with other people’s things.
One day though, me and my other roommates noticed that all our toilet paper was going missing, which was odd since it was being provided in frankly ridiculous amounts by my super generous roommate, like more toilet paper than 4 people could conceivably use over the course of one year was just gone.
Eventually, we figured out this dude was going into the bathroom, soaping up, and toilet papering himself till he was dry. A set of circumstances we only figured out due to a number of unfortunate walk-ins mid act.
Dude also stored a jar of white liquid in the freezer next to food, that he only described as ‘human juices’.
My housemate at university woke up one morning and our other housemate was watching him sleep through the crack between the door and doorframe on the hinge side. The guy watching just said “alright” and walked away.
It’s me. I’m the roommate. I thought I was at the house by myself. That key and peele skit “east vs west bowl” had just come out and the names were hilariously catchy. Davoin Showerhandle was stuck in my head, I couldn’t get it out, and I just started shouting it out loudly again and again and again. That was until I heard my roommate burst out laughing in the living room. He had been quietly reading a book for like two hours. Thought I was alone…… **DAVOIN SHOWERHANDLE**.
Once had a roommate who saved every dirty utensil that she’d used for her food, in a plastic baggie under her bed.
The rest of us discovered this months after switching to plastic utensils as we were sure the original utensils would show up somehow. Oh, they showed up…and that’s a whole story too.
Straining a pot of boiled noodles just straight on to the kitchen floor and then sopping up the water with the hot pad. He was on crutches at the time. He was also a major idiot.
My first roommate in college rolled out of the top bunk, opened the small fridge we had, and pissed directly into it. Then went back to bed. Fearing I might be next I walked out and slept in the lounge. The next day was…awkward.
Not my roommate, but my friend’s. We found boxes and boxes of used tampons in the bathroom cupboard. It was pretty stinky and pretty disturbing. Still not sure why but, yeah. That’s it.
It wasn’t uncommon for my roommate and I to walk into each others rooms unannounced (as long as we didn’t have a guest over, etc) but one day, middle of the afternoon I walked in on him laying on the floor, in the “happy baby” pose sunning his b-hole.
I’ve been an adamant knocker ever since.
Note: this post originally had 52 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.