The Worst Roommate Horror Stories, From Those Charged With Playing Peacemaker

If the fraught politics of sharing space is a tightrope, residence-life officials are there to make sure students keep their balance. But still, there are always missteps.

One such misstep made the rounds on social media this month, when a freshman at the University of California in Los Angeles received a rather forward list of demands from her roommate-to-be and decided to share it with the world. The story inspired us to ask the people whose job it is to untangle those situations about the worst roommate spat they’ve ever had to sort out.

From simmering feuds that finally boiled over to instances of missing boundaries, the tales rolled in. Some were just cases of poor personality matches, while others stemmed from an unwillingness to compromise and a failure to communicate.

Here are a few of the best (or worst) stories we heard:

The Incredibly Detailed Roommate Agreement

Two of Kim Hardaway’s students just couldn’t get along.

Outside of their dormitory room, the girls were perfectly friendly, eating dinner together and sharing the same friend group. But inside, their bickering spilled out into adjoining rooms at Georgia Southwestern State University, where Ms. Hardaway was a resident assistant.

Everything was an argument, and many of the spats revolved around noise. The roommates would accuse each other of having the TV or the stereo turned up too high, and even typing too loudly. The fighting only compounded the noise, so much so that neighbors began to complain.

The simple solution would have been to assign new roommates, but the girls demanded that they stay together.

“I couldn’t get it,” says Ms. Hardaway, who now works in the housing office at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. “I didn’t understand it.”

What followed was the most detailed roommate agreement of Ms. Hardaway’s career. More than 15 years later, she says, it still hasn’t been topped.

“It just got to the point where we were like, ‘OK,’” says Ms. Hardaway, “‘I’m going to go through everything in this room that makes noise, and we’re going to figure out when and where is it going to stop.’”

She turned the TV volume up, point by point, until they reached a number both girls agreed was neither too loud nor too soft. A note stuck to the TV reminded the girls of the exact number they were not to pass. The stereo was similarly marked, as well as any other noisemaking device in the room. She also had the roommates practice typing quietly.

Did that approach succeed in keeping the noise down?

“For the most part, yeah.”

The Chart

Luke Krueger’s friend, a fellow resident assistant at Miami University of Ohio, had a problem. One of his residents was having trouble with his roommate, who was a compulsive masturbator.

“One roommate would just freely masturbate with the other one present in the room,” Mr. Krueger says. “On his roommate’s computer.”

The student who complained didn’t want to change rooms. He didn’t even mind if his roommate wanted to use his computer, as long as it was when he wasn’t home.

So Mr. Krueger and his colleagues came up with one of the oddest fixes of their career: a chart that detailed exactly when the aggrieved roommate would be out and when he would be home, and an agreement from the other roommate to keep his private time, well, private.

“When roommate No. 1 leaves, roommate No. 2 is allowed to begin whatever he wants to begin,” Mr. Krueger says. “He could not start until 15 minutes after his roommate left.” He also had to be finished 15 minutes before his roommate was due back. If for some reason he returned early, the first roommate was supposed to knock on the door three times and take a lap around the floor.

The chart worked, and the roommates went on to live together peacefully for another year.

“It was weird,” Mr. Krueger says. “I don’t think I’ve ever had another situation like that.”

The Whiteboard Fighting Match

The students were the victims of a roommate lottery. Jeff Girton, then a residence-hall director at Xavier University, in Cincinnati, says that was essentially the source of their problems.

One student was an organized, imposing member of ROTC often mistaken for a basketball player. Her roommate was a bubbly partyer barely five feet tall. They just didn’t get along. He tried to have them discuss where their problems came from, but it never seemed to work.

When their disagreements finally exploded one day, the petite student emailed Mr. Girton to say her roommate had screamed at her. But her responses to his questions were strange, so Mr. Girton pressed for more details.

“She yelled at her by writing in all capitals on the back of this door on this whiteboard,” he says.

Mr. Girton discovered that the students didn’t speak to each other at all, a relationship that made the whiteboard outburst all the more jarring.

Things came to a head when the petite student contracted scabies, Mr. Girton said. Both students wanted new roommates, but neither was willing to move. The decision came down to a coin toss.

“I still can’t believe that this was how it had to happen,” Mr. Girton says. “I still don’t know how I could have handled that situation differently.”

The Cereal Hostage Situation

David Hill was at dinner with his wife when he received a phone call.

The call, at the small state college where Mr. Hill was director of residence life, was from one of his students.

“From what little I’d heard, I thought, ‘I’ve got to step outside to hear all of this,’” Mr. Hill says.

A student had locked the door of her dorm room and announced that none of her three roommates could leave until the person who “stole her cereal” confessed to the crime.

“When they finished telling me all this, it was a sign I had done this for too long. Because my first thought was not, ‘I must have misheard this, they’re not really holding their roommates until someone confesses,’” Mr. Hill says. “My first thought was, ‘Man, what kind of cereal is this?’”

The irate roommate even refused to open the door at the request of residence assistants. It wasn’t until the campus police arrived that she let the three suspects walk free.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. The cereal-less student now had three very angry roommates who didn’t want to share an apartment with her anymore. Mr. Hill decided she would be housed somewhere else, until a new assignment could be made.

“Because it’s not messed up enough, the student calls home,” Mr. Hill says. “And instead of saying, ‘I have to move somewhere tonight,’ tells them, ‘I’m being kicked off campus right now.’”

The parents arrived on the campus, and the student’s father cursed at “anyone who will stand still long enough,” Mr. Hill says. The father caused such a scene that the police removed him and banned him from the campus. He wasn’t even allowed to attend his daughter’s graduation later that year.

To his dismay, Mr. Hill never discovered what type of cereal it was.