In Netflix’s new black comedy, Roommates, we follow 18-year-old loner Devon Weisz (Sadie Sandler) as she starts college. She’s desperate for the friends she struggled to make in high school, and wants – as we all do– love, connection and someone she can rely on. At freshman orientation, she finds what she’s been looking for: Celeste (Chloe East). She’s everything Devon thinks she’s not: confident, outgoing and beautiful – and she genuinely wants to be her friend. They decide that they’re going to be roommates in college, and everything starts out amazing, until they really get to know each other. What follows is a story of betrayal, privacy invasion, robbery and arson – in other words, just another day in the rental market.

Many of us have had similar past experiences with a nightmare flatmate. You move in with someone who you thought you knew, or, as is often the case in big cities, people you don’t know at all, and it becomes one of the worst mistakes of your life. So below, we’ve asked Dazed readers to share their housemate horror stories, which range from comical to deeply terrifying. We hope these tales don’t put you off of housesharing entirely – it can be a wonderful and generative experience learning to live with and love other people. But we hope it encourages you to search for house shares with discernment. Stay safe out there! 

HE WAS A SK8ER BOI

“A couple of years ago, I woke up to poo splattered across my kitchen floor. Multiple pools of puréed poo. While one of my housemates began brainstorming all the people that might want to poo-bomb his house (shockingly, that number wasn’t zero), I went upstairs to wake up my two other housemates. One of them told me that the other had gotten too drunk the night before and was kicked out of a house party for being inappropriate; the other denied it but eventually admitted to shitting themselves in the kitchen after everyone else had gone to bed. The worst part was that all of my housemates claimed to be too hungover to deal with it, so I had to strip to my boxers, bust out the marigolds and mop (not pick) the poo up myself. Moral of the story: never move in with boys you met at the Level Skatepark in Brighton.”

LANDLORD COSPLAYING AS ROOMMATE 

“In my last sublet, everything was broken, and I kept asking my housemate to tell the landlord to fix it. It turned out this particular housemate was secretly the landlord, charging us insane prices. She had secretly broken the oven, toaster and microwave on purpose because she didn’t want to pay the energy bills. She kept trying to turn the subletters against each other, saying other roommates had broken these things, so we didn’t unionise against her.” 

ROOMMATE COSPLAYING AS LANDLORD 

“My flatmates and I realised that we were subsidising one of my other flatmates’ rent (she had been there longer than the rest of us), and when we confronted her, she had served us eviction letters under our doors, even though she was not our landlord. She also sent us really botched legal letters, and her rich dad got involved. For three months, she was trying to evict us for exposing the fact that we were paying the wrong rent.” 

THE COMPULSIVE LIAR

“One of my old housemates basically moved his girlfriend in, and she was fully just a compulsive liar. Everything from her birthday, where she was born, her job (she would put on a paramedic uniform and leave every day, come back, tell us stories about patients, but she was unemployed), all her life stories, etc. She also used a different phone to cyberbully herself and then pinned it on another girl we lived with (using the phone location as evidence) and said she was gonna call the police on all of us if she didn’t own up. We all believed her, and the girl moved out, and we never spoke to her again because we thought she was a bully.” 

THE DISAPPEARING ACT 

“At uni, a girl flooded our entire house from the top floor, then left in the middle of the night. She never came back.” 

THE BAD TRIP 

“One day, I was working from home in my bedroom, and I could hear my flatmate saying, ‘If you want to reach nirvana and you don’t mind dying,’ over and over again. I was confused but didn’t think much of it. Then she started running up and down the stairs, chanting, ‘This will go down in history, this is nirvana’. I was about to open the door to check when I heard my name and my other flatmate’s – she was shouting out for us to come out of our rooms. Absolutely not! She ran up and down the stairs a few more times, then left the house. I opened my bedroom door, and there was toothpaste and makeup smeared on the walls of the bannister, and she’d drawn a smiley face in toothpaste on the balcony window. She had taken 10 grams of mushrooms and went missing for six hours.”

THE PISSMASTER 

“One time, I went into my friend’s room, and as I entered, I knocked over a cup on the floor, and hot liquid went all over my foot. It was basically her piss because she used to get so stoned and pee in a cup. Her room was filled with cups.”

THE SNOOPER 

“My old roommate read my diary and confronted me about it”.

THE HANNAH HORVATH TYPE 

“I decided to move in with a friend I had known for two weeks when I was 20. In my defence, I had some good references. It was one of those ‘wait, you’re my soulmate after three weeks’ type of friendships, and we immediately went on holiday together. Soon after, we moved in with one of my best friends and one of her ‘best friends’ She quickly became very jealous of my friendship with my best friend and tried to replicate it with the other girl, who we eventually found out had only met her a couple of times before moving in and wasn’t her ‘best friend’, as she had claimed. This started a year-long war where she opposed absolutely everything we suggested and turned it into an attack against her. When we wanted to get a TV, she framed it as an attack on her passion for reading. When we asked her to clean up after herself, she said we weren’t considerate of how busy she was and were trying to get in the way of her success.”

THE POTENTIAL MURDERER

“I was living with five strangers at the time, and we were all scared of one of our housemates. We would catch her looking through our windows and joke about her killing us in our sleep. Ten months later, she was forcefully removed by the police for not paying rent for over a year. When they searched her room, they found an arsenal of hidden weapons, including several knives.”

THE SHOWER CHANTEUSE 

“I used to live with this guy who would regularly take showers that lasted as long as an hour (I know this because, instead of banging on the door like a normal person, I started setting out a timer, as if I was collecting evidence for a criminal trial.) To make matters worse, he would be singing along to music playing from his phone - some pretty good stuff to be fair, mostly early 00s R&B – and let’s just say he was not overly blessed with vocal talent. We only had one toilet in the flat, so I spent a lot of time that year dying for a piss, becoming increasingly irate at how cheerful he sounded. Like, bro, I’m on the verge of being hospitalised with a bladder infection, but I’m glad you're having so much fun with Aaliyah...

He also took a lot of meth. No judgment to anyone struggling with addiction, but it was kind of bad vibes to be around. One time after a night out, I peer-pressured him into letting me hit the pipe (a truly unpleasant experience which felt like smoking petrol), so maybe I was really the nightmare roommate all along.”