The summer after my friend’s daughter came home from college, she brought a girl with her. They’d been in classes together all year, and the friend had managed to land an internship in our area. It seemed natural to offer her a room for the summer, since they’d both be working. We’d never met her before, and for the first three days, she was absolutely delightful.
Then things started to shift. Our housekeeper came to me looking frazzled, which was unusual. She only comes in during the day to feed and walk our dogs, do light laundry, and pick up groceries for my husband and me. But this girl, our guest, had decided she needed to give the housekeeper very specific instructions.
She wanted her bed made a certain way. Her laundry handled separately. Rules about when the housekeeper was allowed into the guest room. The housekeeper tried to explain that she wasn’t there to clean up after the kids—they manage their own laundry and rooms when they’re home.
But the girl wasn’t having any of it. Then came the internship. Apparently, the low-pay or no-pay situation didn’t suit her, and she decided she’d rather just enjoy her summer vacation. I found out by coming home early one day because I wasn’t feeling well.
I walked into the backyard and found her in our hot tub, completely naked, with two guys, also naked. I waited until she got out and pulled on a robe. I reminded her of the rules we’d laid out on day one: work five hours a day, three days a week, and follow basic house norms. She looked me dead in the eye and told me she was a grown damn woman and she would do whatever she wanted with whoever she wanted, wherever she pleased.
I didn’t argue. I just turned around, walked into the house, and locked the doors behind me. She was still outside, wearing nothing but a towel. I grabbed one of the black contractor bags we keep in the garage, scooped up every single thing she owned, and threw it onto the front porch.
Then I took our daughter’s car keys—our other daughter, who was away at school—and locked those up too. The girl had to get dressed behind a bush and carry her garbage bag down the driveway by herself. My daughter was horrified when she found out. She said she’d never seen this girl act anywhere near that level of disrespect, and I believe her.
She was just trying to help out another broke college kid, same as we were. But the girl had been handed a cushy setup—free room, food, a car, just about anything she needed, in exchange for five hours of work three days a week. She couldn’t be bothered. People have asked me for footage from our security cameras.
I’m not sending that. Some folks need help, and I’m not licensed to provide it. The second story isn’t mine, but my wife’s. It happened years ago, before we were married, when she was in her twenties.
She was living alone in a small studio apartment, the kind of place she loved even though it was tiny. A friend from back home moved to the same city for university and didn’t plan her move very well, so she needed a place to stay for a few weeks until she found her own place. My wife wasn’t thrilled, but she said yes. The first couple of weeks were fine.
Then the nightmare started. The friend slept on a sofa bed a few feet away from my wife’s bed. And almost every night, when she thought my wife was asleep, she would masturbate. Loudly.
My wife pretended not to notice, because what else could she do. Then the dishes stopped getting washed. Every pot my wife owned ended up caked in burnt sauce, and she had to scrub them for ages. Then the friend started meal prepping, using every single pot and pan, and she made it clear she wasn’t sharing a bite.
My wife couldn’t cook her own food because all her cookware was full of her guest’s meals. One day, my wife came home from class way earlier than usual and caught the friend wearing her bathrobe, using her body lotion. The last straw came a few days later, when my wife and her boyfriend at the time had plans to go to a concert with some friends. The friend asked if she could use my wife’s phone while they were out.
My wife said sure. A little while later, she needed her phone for something, and she found a text the friend had sent to some guy. It said something like, “My stupid roommate just asked me out to a gig with her stupid friends. Obviously I said no, but she’ll be out tonight, so come over around 8 and we’ll get smashed.
”
My wife came home early, and there was the friend, in my wife’s bed, having sex with a guy who looked like a Russian bodyguard. She started screaming at them like a crazy person. The friend screamed right back, blaming her for being a bad host. My wife grabbed her things and threw them out the window.
They are not friends anymore. Now, my houseguest story starts in the winter. A few years ago, my mom and her husband needed a place to stay. They were homeless at the time, and they were heroin addicts.
I let them move into my apartment, and I gave them one simple rule: don’t bring that home. Don’t use in my place. I’m not saying you have to quit, just don’t do it here. For the first month, it was an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of thing.
Not ideal, but I didn’t want to abandon my family during a rough patch. Then they screwed it all up. Her husband had a warrant out for his arrest. I didn’t know that.
I found out at one in the morning when my mom burst into my bedroom and told me the cops were in my living room. I stumbled out there, groggy, and met the most irritable cop I’ve ever encountered. He demanded to know where the husband was. I told him I didn’t know, I was asleep.
They tore through the apartment, searched every corner, made a general mess, and left about an hour later. I had to be up at four for work, and I was too angry to even care. I just went back to bed. The police watched my apartment for a month after that.
Three or four days later, I was on my computer in the living room and noticed my mom had left her email open. I did some snooping, which maybe wasn’t my finest moment, but I came across a chain from earlier that day. She was arranging to score dope for later that night. I was livid.
She’d brought the cops into my home, and she couldn’t even honor the one thing I asked her to do. I didn’t ask them to get clean. I just said don’t bring it into my house. I saved some screenshots, called my work, and took the next day off.
When they came back, I told them they had to be gone by tomorrow, and they weren’t welcome back. I stayed home to make sure they didn’t steal anything and took their keys before they left. I wasn’t happy about it, but boundaries had to be set. I’d been dealing with their drug use for years, and it wasn’t going to keep dragging my life down.
My mom doesn’t know where I live now. I don’t plan on telling her. It’s not going to happen again. This next one belongs to a friend of mine, but I’ve heard it a hundred times.
An out-of-town family—a mom and her adult daughter—invited themselves to my parents’ home for the weekend. The mom was a former coworker of my mother. They weren’t well-off, and they treated the visit like a free vacation to our remote house, without any warning. They brought their two spoiled, aggressive poodles, even though they knew we had a dog.
We had to lock our dog in a bedroom the entire time they were there, because the other two would attack him. The poodles also peed and pooped everywhere inside the house. Their owners would point it out, then just sit there and watch my mom scrub the floor. At one point, I was outside, and the adult daughter walked over to tell me she wanted tea.
I pointed out that she knew where the kitchen was and she should feel at home and make herself a cup. She huffed, went back inside, and made a scene about how rude and terrible a host I was, how I had the audacity to suggest a guest make her own tea. She refused my mom’s offer to make one for her and kept complaining until I got dragged in and made tea. It was the first time in my life I’d made tea for anyone.
The whole thing was bizarre. My parents have hosted guests for decades—holidays, birthdays, sleepovers, all kinds of people—and that’s the only occasion that stands out like that. People are generally polite and decent. That family was never allowed back.
My own worst guest story happened right after I bought my first house. I invited a friend over for celebratory drinks. Things were going great, we were tipsy, having fun. My boyfriend was on his way home, so I made up the pull-out couch for her.
He got home and we all went to bed around two in the morning. He heard rustling a little while later and thought nothing of it. He assumed she was drunk and messing with the cats. I woke up around four with a bad feeling and got my boyfriend up.
We went upstairs and saw the bed hadn’t been touched. The sheets and blankets were still folded. I turned on the lights and saw that the front door was wide open, and all the cats were gone. Then we saw his wallet, open, with over a hundred dollars missing.
The change bowl was empty. His brand-new Xbox controller was gone. My laptop was gone. She’d taken his medicinal marijuana and broken some glasses, too.
I called her in a panic. She said she left because she didn’t want to hear us having sex—which we never did. She let my cat out because she didn’t like cats. Then she said my boyfriend was a piece of garbage who was cheating on me.
She’d never even met him until that night. I called the cops. She denied everything. Then I messaged her new boyfriend, telling him what she’d done and what she’d stolen.
He sent me screenshots of her texting him, asking how much she could get for the controller and the other stuff. I sent those to the police. They went to her house a few times and eventually found her hiding inside, refusing to answer the door. She got charged with petty theft.
Then they found out she’d also committed fraud against her boyfriend and her dad. It was a mess. Last summer, I was doing a clinic internship in another city, and a group of friends asked if they could crash at my apartment during a festival in my hometown. I said sure, of course.
I prepared everything for them—made the beds, cleaned the place spotless, stocked the fridge, even filled the minibar. I told them they could use whatever they wanted: the TV, the PlayStation, the sound system. The only thing I asked them not to touch was my record player. It was brand new and meant a lot to me.
I talked to my landlord, who’s also my neighbor and friend, and he was fine with it. They got there, and everything was good. I checked in with them daily. When they left, my friend told me he’d dropped the keys off with the landlord.
Then I came home one day to twenty missed calls. The keys had never been dropped off. My landlord let himself in, and almost had a heart attack. The place was trashed.
Garbage everywhere. Cigarette butts around. Wet towels bunched up in every corner. Some of my clothes had been thrown around.
Food was left out, rotting. And worst of all, they’d left the record player on, with a record spinning and garbage sitting on top of it. The landlord had to call in a cleaning service to sort out the mess. I contacted my friend immediately.
He claimed they’d left the place spotless and suggested the landlord had caused the mess. I told him he needed to reimburse me for the cleaning and hand over the key, which he’d kept. He rescheduled returning the key six times. At least he paid the cleaning fee eventually.
When I got home a few weeks later, I went to inspect my stuff. Sure enough, they’d broken the stylus cartridge and needle on the record player. It was an expensive model. I cried out of frustration.
That’s what I get for trusting people. We are not friends anymore. My wife and I have one that still makes us laugh, in a bitter way. An old friend of mine from years back came to visit for the weekend with his wife, whom I’d never met.
They’d been married for a while but had never made the trip. Our kids met theirs in the living room and ran off to play. The wife—let’s call her Alpha—followed them into the other room and started loudly scolding them for god knows what. My wife tried to say the kids were just having fun, they were fine.
Alpha wheeled around and barked, “Our rules apply here too. ”
She’d been in our house for ninety seconds. That set the tone for three days. They slept in our basement, a finished mini-apartment where we keep a lot of the kids’ toys.
Alpha went through every toy box and shelf and removed every battery from every toy, because her kids weren’t used to that kind of stimulation. She interrupted playtime at five forty-five in the evening—in the summer, when the grill was just heating up—to put her kids, ages eight and five, to bed. Then she complained our kids woke hers up before six in the morning. She judged us because ours went to bed later.
All those bedtimes were suspended. Our five-year-old was up until ten every night. I was furious. She yelled at my kid in a restaurant because my son passed a bowl of mac and cheese in front of one of her kids.
That kid has an egg allergy. No one knew. I apologized, and she made a scene about what would happen if he was exposed to eggs. About how he might get a rash in a few days.
In a restaurant. My wife tried to smooth things over. She figured if she had a few drinks, maybe the tyrant would calm down. We were a couple drinks in, and the two of them started making eyes at each other.
Then they disappeared for about fifteen minutes and came back looking flushed and rumpled. My friend had been with her in our guest bed. Soon after, Alpha noticed she’d been drinking a diet wine cooler. She started freaking out about artificial sweeteners, turned red, and made a scene right in the middle of the party, after all the drinks and the sex.
We were never so glad to see a family leave. We haven’t spoken to them since. Years later, I can be standing in the kitchen and say, “My god, what a disaster,” and my wife will reply, “Right. Can you believe she removed all those batteries?
”
Then there’s the New Year’s Eve party. My fiancée and I had just moved into our house a little over a week before, but some close friends were getting married nearby and needed a place to stay after the wedding. We figured it would be a good excuse to have everyone over. They were our friends, after all.
One friend—call her A—was always a snobby brat in college, but the rest of us tolerated her. She got married, seemed to mellow out. But “seemed” is the key word. So A and her husband stayed with us along with about ten other close friends.
I made a slow cooker full of meatballs and a bunch of appetizers for lunch and dinner. I’d spent two hundred dollars on champagne. We set up air mattresses and sleeping bags all over the house. Everyone was having a great time, except A.
She came up to me and asked if we had any food besides this super fattening stuff. I told her we’d just moved in, so no. She asked where the closest Whole Foods was so she could get something she could actually eat. I told her, five minutes down the road.
She came back about an hour later, walked into my kitchen, and started pulling out pots and pans without saying a word. She made herself chicken alfredo. At that point, I didn’t care what she did. I just found it hilarious that she’d made such a fuss about meatballs being fattening, then poured straight cheese over chicken.
She didn’t clean up after herself, of course. Later, we decided to pop some champagne a little early. I grabbed a bottle and started pouring her a glass. She took the bottle out of my hand and said, “This isn’t even real champagne.
It’s from California. Champagne is from Paris. You didn’t even buy real champagne. ”
I asked her, calmly, who exactly she thought she was.
I told her it wasn’t Parisian champagne, but it was delicious and reasonably priced, and I’d taken the recommendation of the guy at the wine store. She asked where the closest wine store was, left, and came back with ten bottles of some pretentious brand. The best part: she took eight of those bottles home with her, because everyone else preferred the cheap California champagne I’d bought. She is not invited to my house ever again.
And then there was my grandfather. He visited us for a day when I was about ten. I was sick with a fever and spent the afternoon resting in bed. After lunch, I crawled back into my room and lay down.
Five minutes later, he came in, kicked me out of my own bed, and took a nap. My mom found me lying on the floor next to the bed. She kicked him out of the bed and told him to leave. That’s the kind of man he was.
He believed men ran the world. He only had daughters, and he was bitter about it. My mom, the youngest, was brighter than her older sister, and that infuriated him. Then my mom had me—a daughter—and he was angry.
When my little brother was born, he was ecstatic. He tried to control my brother, but by then he was too old, and my parents and grandmother constantly interfered. I was an easier target. He did much worse than stealing my bed.
One time, he took me shopping. It was excruciatingly boring because he only bought things for himself, and he made me carry everything. When we got back to his car in the mall parking lot, I put it all in the trunk. As soon as I closed the lid, he drove away.
I stood there, confused. Then he came back, laughing, and said, “You didn’t really think I’d leave you, did you? ” I was upset but relieved, so I reached for the door. He pulled forward.
I reached again. He pulled forward again, laughing the whole time. Then he drove off for real. I was crying by then.
I spotted my little angel Polly Pocket on the ground—I must have dropped it while chasing the car—and I walked toward it. That’s when I saw him coming straight at me. He sped up and slammed the brakes, stopping right in front of me with a screech. He did it to scare me.
It worked. I thought he was going to run me over. I was crying uncontrollably. He told me to shut up and get in the car.
As we left the parking lot, he said, “You’re no fun. It was just a joke. ”
I sure had fun that day. My grandfather was an ass.
One good guest story, though. My mom once had a friend and her son over for lunch. I was about eight. The boy disappeared for ten minutes, and I thought he’d gone to the bathroom, so when he came back, I squeezed past him to get to the room with the fish tank.
The tank was cloudy and swirling. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at, until I noticed the smashed and ripped-apart pieces of little fish faces moving around in the water. He had reached into the tank and squeezed the life out of every single goldfish in it. I ran crying to my mom.
She dealt with me instead of the boy’s mother. When I brought it up years later, she had to call me back after thinking about it. She and my dad worked out the date from the remodel: it was 1985, and there were three large fancy goldfish in an eight-gallon tank. They remembered every detail.
My mom was a midwife then, and she’d had several women over for a birthing class. One of the women had an eleven-year-old son she kept losing track of. He was the culprit. He’d wandered off, just like he always did.
The boy wasn’t scolded. He was talked to, quietly, up close. My mom never found out what happened to him after that. She kept track of the families she helped deliver, up until she stopped midwifing in the late eighties, but that boy’s name was lost to time.
I’m still angry about the fish, years later. And then there was my little sister. She was twenty-three when she house-sat for us while my husband and I went to Europe for a month. She was supposed to take care of the place and watch our three dogs, one of which was an eight-week-old puppy that was actually hers—we’d adopted him after her breakup and move made it impossible for her to keep him.
Everything seemed fine. We FaceTimed, we texted nearly every day. She said the puppy was doing great. We came home to a disaster.
There was dog piss and shit everywhere. Under the kitchen table. All over the inside and outside of the puppy’s kennel. She’d run out of puppy pads and started lining the kennel with our bath towels.
When she ran out of towels, she threw them in a pile in the backyard, still soiled. Then she moved on to my husband’s shirts from the laundry. She’d also had a guy staying with her, and she’d let him smoke cigarettes in our house, including our bedroom. She locked herself out once and climbed through a window, breaking a lamp in the process.
She broke our vacuum trying to clean up before we got home. And on day four of our trip, a pipe broke underground in the backyard. The city left a notice on our door asking us to contact them urgently about it. She took the notice, set it on the table, and never mentioned it.
We came home to an eighteen-hundred-dollar water bill. We were furious. We made her pay to replace all the towels, pay for the carpets to be cleaned, and pay for the puppy’s food and pet insurance for a year. I didn’t talk to her for seven months.
Looking back, it all happened during a terrible breakup she’d had after seven years together, which had spun her into depression and self-worth issues, plus some heavy drinking. She wasn’t herself. She’s fine now. It’s been four years, and she’s back to being the responsible, tidy, respectful person she always was.
She apologized profusely, paid up, and we’ve been close ever since. At the end of the day, it’s just stuff. And I’ve learned, slowly, to keep the people I let in closer in more ways than one, and to keep a few doors permanently closed.