Last week, we asked you for your best terrible roommate stories, and we were not disappointed. In fact, after reading through all of the submissions, I have learned a very valuable lesson: having a bad roommate is completely different than having an insane one.

For example, I had a bad freshman year roommate. She was inconsiderate and rude, but did she pee on the floor or attack me while in a drunken stupor? Did she steal my things or have sex while I was still in the room? No. She was just your run-of-the-mill bad roommate and for that, after reading through your terrifying and disconcerting submissions, I am now extremely grateful.

So let us all join together and pity these unlucky Penn Staters, while we reflect on our own experiences and remind ourselves that it could have been a whole lot worse.

(Key: Graduation year, Living area)

Your Bedroom Is Not A Bathroom

2016, Curtin Hall

“He had (literally) two beers, peed all over his bed, put down a single paper towel, got back in bed, and went to sleep.”

2017, Thompson

“Last year, on one of the first nights we were even roommates, she put a tampon in, in front me after she came back from the shower.”

2013, Bigler

“My freshman year roommate had a boyfriend at a branch campus who would come up to party with her on the weekends. On the first weekend he visited, she was putting a tarp down on her bed before he got in to town. I asked her what the tarp was for and she said that when her boyfriend gets drunk he sometimes wets the bed.”

2015, Off-Campus Apartments

“My roommate from two semesters ago used to take a shit in a bucket because we had classes at 8 a.m. and I would get up before him and he would leave the bucket outside the bathroom door for me to dispose of. This happened several times during the semester and he just would not stop. Thank God I moved out from there.”

Respectful Roommate Sex Is The Best Sex

2016, Geary Hall

“I woke up to my roommate and her boyfriend having sex in our closet. Our East Halls closet. Both of their underwear was on the ground outside the closet doors.”

2016, Atherton Hall

“My freshman roommate frequently had her boyfriend over to spend the night, without asking/telling me. As she had a lofted bed, I sometimes literally wouldn’t know he was there, which made for some very close calls while changing clothes in the morning… Except for when they (not quietly) engaged in sexual activities during the night.”

2007, Curtin Hall

“So freshman year, I lived with this bro who was a CL&J major who would, incidentally, send all of his homework home to his parents to complete. I’m pretty sure he’s a lawyer now, solving the world’s big problems with his parents’ help. Anyway, I came home from my friend’s place late one night and went to bed in our empty dorm-box. I awoke an hour later to the some interesting sounds and my roommate getting serviced, by a bird of a girl with an unfortunate haircut, about a foot from my head. I possumed and played dead. There was nothing else I could do at the time. I recognized the girl because about a week earlier I saw her devouring some poor guy’s head in the hall of Fischer Hall. I’m pretty sure my roommate told his parents about it the next day.”

If You Don’t Have Anything Nice To Say…

2016, Geary Hall

“The first thing my roommate said when we met each other, for the first time, in her deep low voice and pressuring six-foot height, was, ‘Just so you know…when I get tipsy, I get cuddly.'”

2017, South Halls

“The first night in the dorms, he told me that if he ever came back drunk not to look him in the eyes, because he was an angry paranoid drunk and could ‘accidentally’ attack me. After that, I tried to avoid him as much as possible. Occasionally, I’d come back and he would accidentally leave his large pocket knife on my bed. I rarely talked to him, mostly because I was scared about what he would say.”

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

2016, Geary Hall

“Two months into spring semester, my roommate tells me the reason her last roommate left was because she was afraid of my roommate’s stalker. She then proceeded to show me notes and share stories of her stalker, followed by the fact that she had lost her key to our dorm last month and the stalker was probably watching us sleeping. I slept for a total of 10 hours for the remaining semester.”

2013, West Halls

“I had a roommate who up and left college to meet the love of her life, whom she met on Plenty of Fish. She didn’t tell her parents/friends/family where she was going and her family filed a missing person report and I got interrogated by the police because I was the last person to see her. Turns out she was in Canada and needless to say she dropped out a few days later.”

1999, Leete Hall

“My first semester on campus, I was paired up with a girl that was a film major (or something like that…I don’t really remember). Anyway, in one of her classes she had to analyze a movie and write a paper on it, so for (I shit you not) nearly an entire semester I was forced to fall asleep listening to scenes from Braveheart. EVERY. SINGLE. NIGHT. To this day I refuse to watch a single minute of that movie, and I started hating Mel Gibson long before the rest of the world did.”

Just Don’t Be That Guy

2016, East Halls

“I was taking pain medication, and my roommate stole it, the whole pill bottle. I called her on it, and she filed a complaint to academic affairs, stating I was stealing her pain medication… the kicker… she tried to use my pill bottle as evidence! Let’s just say she lost, and we definitely will never live together!”

2013, West Beaver Apartment Complex

“We roomed together for two years. As time passed and went on, the other roommates and I started to notice the carpets we had laid down in the bathrooms had become a tad… crusty. Flash forward to a month or two after we all graduate — turns out he was jizzing on the carpets, rubbing it in with his feet, and letting it dry, allowing the rest of us to quite literally step all over his jizz for months. I can laugh about it now, but still get a little pissed off whenever I think about it for too long. Just, why?”

2015, Apartment

“She rarely showered, so you could smell her when you sat by her. One time she sat next to me and I could smell her body odor. I’m not lying. Our apartment started to smell of dirty body because her clothing started to pile up and she’d wear the same thing day after day. No matter how much I took out the garbage or cleaned the living areas, it smelled. During the beginning of spring semester, I also had to clean her phlegm, yes PHLEGM, out of the bathroom sink because she would use a nose cleaner and spit her phlegm into the sink and not clean it up. It was disgusting.”

2014, Sproul Hall

“First night of freshman fall semester, my big, hairy, roommate (from Pittsburgh) sleepwalked and crashed into my lofted bed at 4 a.m. When I asked what he was doing, he proceeded to urinate all over my brand new futon. In his sleepwalk stupor, he stumbled out of the room and disappeared. Since I was a sleepwalker in my past, I called the one person who I knew could help — my mom. She told me not to wake him. Searching for him while on the phone with my mom, I found him crosseyed on the floor in the stairwell. Naturally, I assisted him back into our room and onto his bed. Then things got uglier. He began speaking complete jibberish, I mean random-ass weird shit. Something about ‘a week’ or something.

When I tried having him clarify what he was saying, he became aggravated. My mom, listening through the phone, told me to get the hell out of the room because sleepwalkers can get violent. When I stood up to leave, my roommate finally uttered something that made some sense: ‘Where the fuck are you going?!’ This is when I decided to start running. He chased me down the hallway, screaming, ‘Get the fuck back here! I’ll fucking kill you!’ Keep in mind, he’s a massive testosterone raging yinzer with palms bigger than my face.

Half naked, I escaped up the stairwell a few floors, where I hid in one of those cutaways in a hallway. If you know my mom, clearly she was having an absolute fit, screaming, ‘What’s going on?! Talk to me! Talk to me!’ I replied in a whisper, ‘Shh…he might hear you.’ After a few minutes, I crept back downstairs and knocked on my RA’s door — he told me to go up six floors because that RA is the one on duty, and shut his door on my face. So I spent the night in some random RA’s room and when I came back to my room, my roommate had zero recollection that anything happened. This terrifying experience is 100 percent truth, ask my mom.”