Roommates from Hell?: Students Share Bad Roommate Experiences

Students have heard the horror stories of college roommates that steal, stalk, and just plain suck. Some are rumors that might be told to scare freshman, but some Shepherd students have true stories of the unruly roommate.

Vertigo Entertainment’s thriller “The Roommate” hit theaters in 2011, sparking interest with college-aged audiences. The storyline follows two freshman girls, Sara and Rebecca, who are placed in the same room together. Rebecca becomes obsessed with Sara, doing anything and everything to get her attention, even through violent means.

Although the cinematographic example is rather extreme, rumors on campus about terrible roommates that steal food items and boyfriends, watch TV all night long, or bring various “friends” back to their rooms are in existence. Such rumors seem to have been around for as long as the existence of Residence Life.

Kaitlyn White, a junior social work major, is thankful that her former roommate from her freshman year no longer goes to Shepherd.

White said, “I lived with a girl who didn’t like the guy I was dating, so when she went to move out, she trashed my room while I wasn’t there.”

White was helping her boyfriend study in her room when her roommate at the time, Katie, came back and got upset that he was there. She stormed around the room before leaving and barely spoke to White for two weeks.

White said, “I came back to my room one day to find her packing all her things. I thought that was the end of it.”

The roommate, however, still had access to White’s room until Monday, although she had finished moving out Friday. White returned to her dorm around 2 a.m. Friday night to find her door open.

“Anyone could’ve walked in,” White said. “My window was open and my air conditioning was on even though it was freezing outside. I also saw that she had opened up her vacuum and dumped all the dirt in my closet.”

White thought the behavior was horrible and rude, but the roommate had still left another unwanted surprise for her.

White said, “What I didn’t know is that when she took her fridge, I had milk in it. Two weeks after she moved out, I was packing up some things for my dad to take back home when I found two full milk cartons open and rotting in the back of my closet. It was disgusting. The milk was gray and black and it smelled awful.”

White is not the only student with bad roommate experiences, however.

One junior social work major, who prefers to remain anonymous, said, “My first year roommate was crazy. She was one of those popular girls that had it all in high school and kept telling me about how she had it all and how she liked to party.”

The social work major said that the first week of classes, her roommate went to a party, got caught by the police, and was required to take alcohol awareness classes.

The anonymous junior added, “It was also annoying that she kept bringing home boys, especially when I asked if she could stop bringing them at all hours of the night.”

She said that her roommate reported her to the RA after making the request and said that she was “racist against Hispanics, as well as homophobic.” She said that although the roommate never did anything negative to her, the roommate was eventually kicked out, probably for the best.

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