Landlords Share Outrageous Stories About Their Strangest Tenants

There are very good reasons why landlords are careful who they rent their property out to. It’s not always about making sure their prospective tenants have a steady source of income and good credit. Although these two criteria are important as they’re signs that their future tenants may be responsible enough to pay their rent in full before each due date, landlords are also concerned about how their tenants will behave and how they generally live. Do they have random angry outbursts? Are they packrats? Can they be trusted? After all, anyone can have a steady job, a phenomenal credit score, and seem like a decent person at first but end up being the exact person a landlord wouldn’t want to do business with.

Many landlords, for instance, don’t want tenants who are noisy and enjoy partying all night. Or a tenant who owns six large dogs. Or someone with a lengthy criminal history. Although landlords may not have a personal problem with some of these things, not only do they not want their precious property damaged, but they don’t want their other tenants to be bothered by one bad tenant. Both situations can leave a landlord out of money, and quite frankly, sometimes there’s not much that can be legally done.

Whether you’re a current landlord yourself or have heard stories about your landlord friend or family member’s tenants, you might know just how wacko some tenants can be. However, the stories below will make you NEVER want to become a landlord, and some of them are downright scary, weird, or just plain confusing. (I apologize in advance for any aspiring landlords.)
30. He Said He Needed Help Painting, But He Was Dancing Naked When I Walked In

I don’t want to know, and I don’t need to know.

“I own a two-family house, so I rent out the other unit. One of my first tenants, let’s call him Richard, was a young kid just out of college. He was a nice enough guy and we became friends. I have a decent-sized backyard with a grill and a pool.

We spent the entire summer drinking and hanging out in the backyard.

The fall comes. Richard gets it in his head that he wants to re-paint his living room. He asks me if that’s okay, and I say sure. He says he will paint it himself if I buy the paint. I buy the paint he picked out, which is a nice neutral color. I’m kind of impressed that he had such good taste. He starts painting.
About a week later, I get a call from Richard in the middle of the night. I was in bed with my wife and sleeping. He says he’s having problems with the paint and asked if I could come up to help. At that point, I thought he was done the painting.

It doesn’t take a week to paint a room. What the ***?* I begrudgingly agree to go upstairs and help.

I walk up the stairs in the middle of the night. I hear music blaring from the apartment. The door to his apartment is open and I walk in. There’s Richard. He’s completely naked with an erect weiner and a roller in hand, and dancing to ‘Goodbye Horses.’ I noped the **** out and told him to put some tarp down since he was getting paint on my hardwood floors.” TheNewGuyAgain
My brother was so pissed. He just put the house up for sale and sold it as is because he couldn’t afford to fix all the damage they’d done.” Koyoteelaughter

29. He Removed Every Piece Of Trim From The House

“This is nowhere near the worst thing that happened but definitely the farthest out left field.

One property I rented out at a discounted rate to a family for three years, and when they moved out after the first year, their cousin moved in and never told me. Rent checks and everything came from the same name, bank, etc. Then I got a complaint and had to show up one day and find a different person living in the house.
So I called the previous tenant, and they thought that their cousin could continue paying the discounted rent $800 from $1,350, and I told them this wasn’t going to happen, and they have to leave, or I will make things nasty. They were being very disrespectful about the whole situation. That’s where the threat came from.

Anyways, they left, and I came back a few days later to take a walk through the house and get it rented back out, and the guy that left removed every piece of trim from the house and left it lying in the middle of the living room.

I **** you not, there was a massive stack of trim from every floorboard, window, door, etc. in the middle of the living room. It was a three-day jigsaw puzzle figuring out where to put all the trim back…” stotts15
28. They Stored Used Kitty Litter Behind The Drywall

“My dad owns a lot of lower-income houses. Growing up, I was often his help in cleaning up after a tenant moved out. Most of them were pretty gross but not in a way that makes you question humanity, just generally dirtier than I would like to live.

But one stands out.

Summer in Indiana, not the hottest place, but generally in the low-90’s and high humidity. We go to clean up a house and the house is as dirty as every other house.

Except for the smell. After just a few minutes we left to get stupid paper masks in a futile effort to make it tolerable. We end up working for two full days cleaning up the house. Because of the smell, we immediately open all windows and doors and leave them open the whole time we’re there.
We have the house basically cleaned out…but the smell is still there. It’s clearly unlivable, and my dad is ready to call in a professional. We go to lock up because we had given up…and one of us finds the hole.

The hole was about 4′ off the ground and just looked like a 10″ x 10″ hole in the drywall directly behind the front door. A little more inspection reveals that it’s full of kitty litter.

We realize that the wall from stud-to-stud, about four feet deep, is full of kitty litter behind the drywall, and the drywall was replaced. We think that they just poked a hole initially a few inches off the ground and filled with kitty litter. When it was sufficiently sh*tted and p*ssed in, they ‘fixed’ the hole and made another one a little higher on the wall. The next stud-space over was entirely filled about four feet high and completely closed up.
That was a pretty bad experience. But also very innovative.” slitt_vicious

27. He Had A Psychotic Break

“I’ve had a LOT of crappy/weird/crazy/POS tenants. But the best was this one guy, ideal tenant. Friend of my dad’s, always paid on time, worked a regular schedule and wasn’t coming home all hours of the night, kept the yard spotless, helped us with handyman stuff, etc.

He painted the rooms, hung pictures, bought beautiful furniture. Like I said, ideal tenant. Anyways, one month he says he’s a little behind on rent, can he give us X amount in a few days? Sure, no problem. A few days later, he pays us the rest.
Next month, same thing (except now it’s HALF the rent), asks for a few days. Two weeks later, he finally pays. The month after that, we don’t hear anything. We figure since he pushed it back two weeks, he’s probably behind the whole amount, and we’ll give him a week or so. Still, we hear nothing at that time.

We eventually go over after not hearing from him or seeing him in almost two weeks. He doesn’t answer the door, so now we’re thinking he’s dead.

We grab the spare key and open the door…

The place is empty, including the washer/dryer/fridge that WE provided. We start walking through the house and hear mumbling from the master suite. We go in, and the only furniture in there (in the entire house, actually) was a mattress on the floor and a mirror propped up against the far wall. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the mirror sounding things out. ‘M..ma…mape… B-b-….bute.’ What the ***?
He* notices us and gets this crazy look in his eyes. Tell us to look closely at the mirror. ‘See those ‘scratches?’ (Yes, he actually did do air quotes.) ‘They’re not scratches! It’s the people on the other side of the mirror trying to communicate. I’ve spent the last two days trying to figure out what it says…’ He keeps going on and on and on, rambling about the ‘mirror people,’ and if only he could figure out their language, he would know what they want.

We slowly back out and try to decide what to do. We figure we’ll call his adult daughter.
Turns out, the guy had been on a drug binge for the last three months and basically had a psychotic break. His daughter took him to a mental institution and moved all his stuff into storage. I still see him around sometimes.” mcivxx

26. He Sawed A Hole Into His Neighbor’s Ceiling To Use Their Living Room As A Toilet

How do people even come up with ideas like this?

“In one of my buildings, there was this one guy who had a small family as a downstairs neighbor who were constantly complaining about him making excessive noise. Many noise complaints were filed, and the police were called multiple times. Neither we nor the police actually heard him making noise though, and he kept pleading that he always kept it quiet and that the noise wasn’t him.

The weeks went by, and they kept arguing, taking up most of our time with complaints and attempts to negotiate an agreement, so they would stop arguing.

We later got a phone call from the man’s downstairs neighbor. They were hysterical and told us to come over immediately. When we arrived, we found that he had sawed a hole in his floor and taken a giant **** down to the neighbor’s living room.” Pistolerodota

25. Their Entitlement Said It All

I just want to know why a tenant would feel the need to do anything on this level.

“Three soft-spoken foreign exchange students rented my three-bedroom house. At the time, I had a soft spot for helping exchange students. Turns out, they were some of the most entitled vile scum on the face of the earth.

They did every single thing prohibited in the lease (as if they were checking them off!), including not putting utilities in their name, making alterations (like changing ceiling fixtures), smoking in the house (making cigarette burns everywhere), having parties multiple times a week (including late-night barbecues with loud music), working on cars at all hours of the night (including revving them), inviting around 12 people to move in with them, parking about 15 cars all over the place, etc., etc….

I don’t know why, but I kept trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. I talked to them about this stuff a few different times, to no avail. I feel terrible for what my neighbors had to deal with. Some are still upset years later.

After just 45 days, the fire department had to come out and save the house because they burned down part of the deck (due to smoking). I finally evicted them at that point.

Of course, they refused to leave peacefully, expecting me to store their stuff while they went on vacation. So, I changed the locks. Unfortunately, they broke in causing more damage. I should’ve seen that coming from such entitled trash. The security deposit didn’t even come close to fixing everything or covering lost rent.

But what really ******* sucked was smelling their stink in the house afterward. It literally took 6 months, 50 pounds of baking soda, and three visits from professional cleaners to get their ******* body odor and cheap cologne out of our brand new carpet!” anticipate_me
24. She Accidentally Burned Down The House

“My parents were landlords, and they rent out the houses they own.

But anyway, they had rented out their old house we lived in for a few years that they had owned since 1992, and we had rented it to a lady and her boyfriend in 2004.

A few months later, she had accidentally burned it, and the whole entire floor was burned while the basement was fine, but the windows had busted out from the heat. She had all these crockpots and these flimsy extension cords, and it had started a fire. My mom wonders if she was making *****.
But anyway, she had no renters insurance, and she expected my parents to give her money for all the stuff she had lost. She even tried to guilt-trip them: ‘But my co-workers said you guys will give me money if you’re decent people.

I lost $30,000 of my stuff,’ and my mom said, ‘and I lost a $200,000 house.’

She was even mad when she came by the house and saw it had all been cleaned out. She had never came back for her stuff to see what she could salvage, so we had to clean it out and haul to the dump, and some stuff we kept like cookie jars we found, and we salvaged the toilets, but we had to clean the smoke off and replace the parts and the flusher. The clothes that were not melted and burned had smoke damage, so they had to be tossed. I also found a cassette tape that survived the fire.” diaperedwoman
23. Everything Was Gutted, And I Mean Everything

“My brother rented out one of his three houses.

It was a three-story house with a small single unattached garage. Well, we heard through the ********* that the police kicked in their door to arrest them over the weekend, but they weren’t home. After contacting the sheriff’s department, he learned that said tenants had skipped the state fleeing prosecution. My brother served an eviction notice to the residence and posted it on the door for thirty days.

He gets a call one week later from the tenants. They were asking him to put their stuff in storage. He went over to the house to check it out and discovered they’d gutted the house. They called back and said they’d send him a money gram to pay for the storage. He asked about the twenty thousand dollars worth the damage.

They argued back and forth, and the tenants said **** it. Keep the sh*t. Never heard from them again. He talked to the city, and they told him that he needed to wait one more month before he could set their **** out on the curb.
He and I go over there to clean it out. When I say they gutted it, I mean they literally gutted it. They’d knocked out interior walls on each floor except the top. They pulled all the copper wiring out of the walls to sell I guess. They had extension cords running up the stairs from the several outlets they’d wired into the breaker box. The ceiling fans were gone. I assume they sold them. The bathroom sink was gone. The copper water lines were gone.

Their furniture was O’Sullivan brand particle board furniture and was all bubbled and from spilling drinks on them. The mattress were all stained, no frames, and no sheets. They just had a blanket thrown over them.
The only thing we found that was halfway interesting was an old television the third-floor bedroom. When I picked it up to carry it out to the dumpster, it was super light and shouldn’t have been. I tapped the screen and discovered they slipped a curved piece of plastic in where the screen was supposed to be and removed the guts. After removing the back, we found their pharmacy and about a hundred dollars in singles. I pocketed the money and discarded the *****.

They even pulled down the kitchen cabinets that’d been newly installed before renting to them, and according to one of the guys across the street who came to pick through the trash we set out, they’d sold the kitchen cabinets three months after moving in.

Everyone on the block was told that they bought the house and was slowly remodeling.
22. They Killed A Rooster In Their Rental

What the…

“So we were renting out this extra house we own in the Houston, TX area. We got these new tenants who seemed nice enough and pretty normal, so we were happy. They had a two-year, no pets, a family of four lease on the place. Things seemed to be going well, but then we got a call from the neighbors.

‘We seem to be hearing a…uh, a rooster calling from next door.’

So, since we had known the neighbors for a while, and we lived pretty far away from the property, we asked them to try to talk to the tenants and report back with the 411 on the ornithological situation.

The next day, we get another call from the neighbors.
‘They said the rooster is no longer a problem because they killed it…’

So, of course, by now we’re freaking the **** out. Who KILLS A CHICKEN IN A D*MN RENTAL HOUSE?! So we call the tenant, and we tell them we will be making a surprise check-in visit the next day to see how the house is doing. They seem responsive and normal as ever. We start to doubt that there ever was any real trouble. Maybe the neighbor was just hearing things. Maybe they said they killed it out of sarcasm or for some weird joke. Maybe there never was a rooster at all…
But then we got to the property the next day.

The front yard was strewn with debris from what appeared to be a mass exodus late that night.

The door was unlocked. The house was gutted. The fridge, all the furniture, and anything that wasn’t bolted down (and some things that were) were totally gone. It was clear that MUCH more than a ‘four-person family with no pets’ had been living there. The carpet used to be light orange/yellow. In the six months they had lived there, it had become a spotty brown color. There were holes in the walls, stains everywhere and even trash piled in random corners and crevices. There was an ominous red ring around the tub in the disgusting bathroom.
In the garage, there was indeed a cage and bedding for some type of animal. But where was the rooster?

We open the door to the back porch, and there’s ***** EVERYWHERE.

The amount of *****, coupled with some stray feathers and some rather creepy markings around Rooster Ground Zero tells us that they must have sacrificed it in some type of weird ritual and maybe other animals before it. Despite an extensive search, we never found the body. We assume they probably ate it.

So yeah, that happened.” Musicality

21. He Had A Thing For Potted Plants… And Stole All Of Them

“Our first tenants ever were this old man and his mother. Super nice guy who said he just takes care of mom and just low key people. Sounded perfect!
First odd request we got was like a week before they were to move in they asked if it would be okay to store some of their potted plants on the front patio.

We obliged. The next day, we go by the house and there is literally 20-30 potted plants there, just figured it was odd and thought nothing else about it.

About a week into their lease, we get a call from the landscapers saying the police had just run them off the property, and something was going down. We get over to the rental, and this 90-year-old lady is very upset and says the police took her son, and she doesn’t know why. We help her get into contact with the family to come over from another state to help this woman.
Well, after speaking with detectives, we find out the truth. They’ve been going to every single Home Depot, Fry’s Marketplace, etc. and stealing tons of items. All those potted plants were just taken from the front of Home Depots and Fry’s! It ended up being this whole theft ring, and they’d stolen like $130,000 worth of goods and had it in our rental and storage facilities!” dubbedout

20. Breeding Huskies Was His Hobby

I don’t blame him for never wanting to be a landlord again.

“I managed a six-unit apartment building at one point, and the person who moved in on the third floor was an absolute nightmare. He stopped paying rent pretty quickly and knew the laws for eviction, so there were several months I couldn’t get access to, and none of the other residents ever saw the guy. They knew he was up there because of the noise, and more importantly, the smell. Eventually, I got him out.
When I went in there, the smell was almost overwhelming. Turns out, he was breeding huskies in the apartment. Five months, breeding huskies, never taking them out, never taking the garbage out. There wasn’t an inch of floor that wasn’t covered in ***.* When I moved the ***-covered* mattress, that was the only spot on the floor where I could see the actual carpet.

I ripped up the carpets, cut out the floor, bleached every surface and closed off that apartment.

When I took the ******* to court, he showed up and tried to press charges for defamation of character based on me referring to him as a scumbag. I told the judge that I stuck with that assessment and showed photos. The judge laughed at him. Never got a dime from that worthless ***.* I never took care of residential apartments again.” Disgruntled_Viking
19. Everything But Their Equipment Was Cleaned Up

If they had no problem leaving signs of their grow op, why were they acting so suspicious then? That is the question…

“My parent’s place, maybe 12 years ago:

They rented out the house to what seemed like a nice family. Both parents, kids, stable job.

They paid their rent on time and never caused any issues. After a year or so, my mom wanted to drop by to see how things were going. You need to give notice before an inspection, and we couldn’t get them on the phone, so we left a note on the door.
The next day, the guy shows up at our house and hands me a check for the next month’s rent. He told me they were leaving. So long, goodbye. Apparently they bought a new house in a much nicer neighborhood. My parents thought this was a little odd, so they went to see the rented house, thinking that there’s a lot of damage.

The place was empty and clean. The only sign that anything was wrong was that there were some weird 7″ wide circular burns on the carpet downstairs, some steel tubing left against the wall, and a teeny, little ‘special plant’ sapling, forgotten in the corner.” Squifferific
Another User Comments:

“A friend of my mother had a similar story.

Rent always paid on time, never any issues, except the “grower” didn’t clean up.

The guy is caught and now in jail. The house is marked as a grow op and plummeted in value as no one wanted to buy it or rent it. Basically a mess all around. No one walked out a winner, except maybe the grower’s customers.

He told me that if I ever consider renting out my house, always put in the contract for a mandatory annual or bi-annual inspection. Smart growers would just avoid this kind of lease in the first place and save everyone a lot of trouble.” StarchCraft
18. Living With Livestock

“About 10 years ago, my parents bought a lifestyle block and kicked out the tenants and got them to take all their livestock with them.

The tenants moved into town, and I started hearing stories that they had their cow living in their house, which I didn’t believe at the time.

When I started dating my current wife, who was a property manager at the time, she told me that she had a tenant that had been kicked off a farm for no apparent reason. Unfortunately for her, they had brought all their animals with them, and they made a right mess of the place. They had chickens and pigs destroying the gardens, two cows sleeping in the garage, and they had ripped up the floorboards for firewood.
She eventually got them out of the house, but they had left her a present. They had left one of the cows behind and locked it in the house.

Unfortunately, the cow had been sick with black mastitis and had died in the bathroom. It didn’t help that it was the height of summer, and with the animal already full of disease, the cow was rapidly decomposing.

I asked her what the tenants’ names were, and yup… they were the same people.” awesumnitz

17. He Had Zero Tolerance For His Girlfriend’s Baby’s Crying

“When I was a kid, we had a single mother living in our basement suite. Her baby was less than a year old. Soon after she moved in, she started dating one of her friends, and he would be around a lot, even babysitting for her, so she could have some alone time with her friends.
My mom mentioned that a couple of times a week, her baby would have these awful crying fits that went on for hours and hours.

She started to wonder if maybe there was some way she could help, so she talked to her about it. The woman said, ‘Oh, that’s when [boyfriend’s name] watches him, he doesn’t like to go to bed. He’ll come around.’

Well, a few weeks go by of this progressively getting worse. The tenant just kept insisting there was no problem and that her baby just wasn’t used to the guy yet. Then one night, my sister was in her room. The wall of her bedroom divided her room from the tenant’s bathroom. She heard the baby crying and eventually heard the boyfriend bring the baby into the bathroom. Suddenly there was a thud against the wall and an ear-piercing wail, and my sister screamed for me to come into the room.

Before I could get there, there was another thud and then silence.
Cue police, ambulance, and fire. The baby was alive but had some head injuries and I believe brain damage, but they don’t know the extent of it. Long story short, the boyfriend eventually admitted that the baby crying made him upset. In an effort to quiet him, he would hurt him to try to teach him who was boss. On this particular evening, he reached a breaking point and decided to try holding his head underwater. When that didn’t work, and the baby wound up kicking him, he threw him into the bathroom wall until he was quiet. Then he called 911 and said that the baby had started randomly having seizures.
He wound up in jail for eight years, and the mom and baby moved out.

We never had another tenant after that.” Reddit user

16. They Casually Built A Smokehouse In The Backyard

“My parents are currently renting their home after having a difficult time selling.

Recently, my dad got a call from his old neighbors saying he needed to come by and have a talk with the tenants. Apparently, late one night, our neighbor is outside for a smoke and sees a van drive up. The tenant comes out and meets a guy, and together, they drag a deer carcass to the backyard, leaving a trail of ***** up the driveway.
My dad shows up and sees they’ve built a smokehouse in the backyard. The lease specifically stated that no buildings or sheds shall be erected on the grassed backyard as they later may want to sell and don’t want any damage to the backyard.

So, he first tells them they need to remove it. Then he goes into the garage, and the dead deer is hanging from the ceiling and dripping ***** onto the concrete floors. Basically, the concrete floors in the garage are completely stained, and my dad is looking into trying to remove the *****stains and hopefully not having to replace the concrete floors. The house is located in the suburbs and is seriously not a place to be bringing a dead deer, gutting it, and smoking it in your backyard with neighbors less than 10 feet away.” androgynous_potato
15. She Was A Hoarder Times Ten

“There was an old lady tenant who sort of lost it after her spouse passed and began to accumulate piles and piles of garbage and other disgusting refuse in the apartment.

By the time she got evicted, the room became a small corridor surrounded by inner walls of stacked trash. A couple of doors were bursting under the pressure of garbage. The bathroom was covered with a foul black sludge.

Eventually, we tried to call in the cleanup company that was featured on those hoarding TV shows that were on at the time. Now get this: the company denied the job because it was just that bad to the point where it was unsafe. Eventually found guys who would do it, but they came in FULL HAZMAT GEAR and were still gagging underneath the masks.” TamerVirus
Another User Comments:

“I’m going to guess depression or some kind of anxiety (I am in no way, shape, or form a psychiatrist). Depression, you just can’t care enough to toss it– or you can, but you can’t work up the mental and physical energy to actually take care of it.

Anxiety… I’m not sure. Maybe some combination of, ‘But what would the trashmen think?’ and/or thinking they’re totally going to find some way to use all these, I don’t know, empty jam jars someday.

I also vaguely recall something where people will assign animistic traits to stuff? And consequently, feel guilty when tossing something because it’s not the pizza box’s fault and surely the cardboard would come in handy, and it would make the pizza box ‘sad’ to be thrown away.” birchpitch
14. They Grew “Special Plants” Directly On Their Carpet

That’s a new one.

“I’ve told this story on here before, but I had tweaker tenants dump dirt right down on the carpet (3rd-floor unit) and grow plants directly on top of the carpet, then sell out of their unit.

We found out when their downstairs neighbors started having lights flickering and water coming in through their chandeliers.

When we tried to evict them, they filed a Human Rights Commission claim, protesting that we were discriminating against their ‘disability’ of unspecified, undiagnosed chronic pain and anxiety because they had a medical plant card. After we evicted them, they sued me for $400k via a wrongful eviction lawsuit based on not giving reasonable accommodation for their disability. We settled in mediation for a low five-figure sum (basically their moving costs and first/last/sec at a new place).
My wrongful eviction insurance paid the settlement, and it was worth getting them the **** out of my place. It was a rent-controlled unit, too. so those idiots lost paying $650 on a unit that now rents for $3,550.” conjunctionjunction1

13. She Painted Everything Black

She must have listened to the Rolling Stones’s song, “Paint it Black,” one too many times.

Once you go black, you never go back…until the landlord has everything repainted.

“My parents are landlords to an apartment in my town. They had one resident a couple of years ago who never paid on time, sometimes tried to bounce checks, was rather rude to the other tenants, etc.

Finally, after her father paid her bill for her for like the 5th time, they evicted her. (Well, told her father that she needed to go, and he finally put his foot down.) By the way, this woman wasn’t handicapped or anything either; she was just some art major at the local college.
Annnnywaaaays, after she moved out and her dad dropped the keys off at our house, my parents went over to make sure everything was gone and tidied up, so they could show the apartment again.

She had painted everything black. No, not just the walls, everything. The ceiling and the hardwood floors included. They ended up explaining this to her father (she had managed to hide it from him by carrying all of her stuff to the porch to be loaded into his truck; he had no idea), and he had to pay up several thousand dollars to get it all fixed.” Reddit user
12. He Tried To Pay Rent With A Boat

Or you can possibly sell the boat, so you have money to pay your rent?

“My dad rented a house to a ‘hard luck’ couple. The wife was a nurse, and the husband was a bum who wouldn’t work. My dad found special plants growing on the property, plus they got behind on the rent, so dad told them they had to go.

So, the guy comes home with a boat and tries to talk my dad into taking the boat for rent. My dad said it was a nice boat, but by then, he was just over it and told them, ‘Nope, hit the road.’ A few days later, they pulled out with all their **** and were gone.
Literally less than an hour later, a guy came up and asked my dad if he had seen a boat at the renter’s house. It was his boat he’d loaned to the renter, and the guy never brought it back. My dad told him about the offer to pay rent with the boat and that he’d just left with it. The guy was some kind of upset but nothing my dad could do.” brutalethyl

11. He Thought People In The Sky Were After Him

“My parents were landlords for a little while and definitely struck out a few times.

New England house split into three units. My parents were living in one and had a good view of the driveway and could vaguely monitor the tenants.
So, this one guy was a middle-aged, single, white guy. He seemed a little neurotic but nice enough. He was bothered by a few minor dents and asked my parents if he could repair them, small holes in sheetrock, etc. (like when the doorknob slams into it). He did a good job, and my parents were happy. Then he disappeared out of nowhere for a while and was late on rent.

One day, my dad is home alone, and the guy knocks on the screen door. My dad answers and can immediately tell something is off with him. Guy proceeds to rant and rave to my father about how the people in the sky are after him, and he needs to leave town NOW.

He graciously invites my father to join him, all the while he’s pausing between words to make ‘BZZZT’ noises like a radio or something.
I don’t know if he paid his last month’s rent, but they were okay with him leaving.” anxi0usity

10. A Poopy Situation

“I had a whole house being rented and evicted the tenant.

I went to clean up after they left, and this was the basement. They had a dog that went in the basement to crap. Instead of cleaning it up, they poured latex paint on it to seal in the smell. The dog kept crapping, and they kept pouring. A latex-dog poo lasagna filling an entire room. The floor was a mound about 4-feet-high and 10-feet-wide, filling the entire basement of nothing but layers of latex paint and dog crap from several years of them living there.

It took air hammers and chisels and weeks of work to clean.
Once we got that done, we were able to get to the storage closet in the basement. It was jammed shut from this crap on the floor, but the door had a hole in the top. They used this closed-off room with the hole as a diaper disposal for their infant. A room about 4 foot by 4 foot filled to the top with years of dirty baby diapers.” muxman

9. He Set Up Fake Security Cameras

“I had a tenant tell me when they moved in that they worked for ‘THE Agency’ (meaning CIA I guess?) and make all these demands once they got their key, like that they wanted new security cameras only posted at one specific neighbor’s door (because that tenant was their ‘mark’), and when I refused, they hung up obviously fake ones (made out of soda cans, tinfoil & string spray painted silver) pointed at my door.

I lived on-site, and he started watching me whenever I left or even got the mail.
When I tried to take down his fake security cameras, he called CPS on me. I don’t even have kids.” Cheesejeeze_

8. She’d Constantly Call And Complain About Every Little Thing

By now, I’m sure the landlord has, “Stephen, it’s Janice…” permanently engrained into his auditory cortex.

“I have had the same old lady tenant since I bought the building. She chain-smokes, watches tv, and collects social security. That’s it.

Whenever there’s an issue, even if it doesn’t concern me, I get a phone call every 15 minutes with a 30-second voice mail each time until I call her.

The cable goes out? ‘Stephen, it’s Janice. [Complaint and threat about moving].’ It’s snowing? ‘Stephen, it’s Janice. [complaint and threat about moving].’ Other tenants making noise at 2 p.m.? ‘Stephen, it’s Janice.

[complaint and threat about moving].’ …over and over and over, in her raspy smoker voice.
She doesn’t understand the concept of, ‘I’m at ******* work, you idiot.’ It’s gotten to the point where I listen to the first 5 seconds of the first voice-mail and just delete the rest.” Galiphile

7. They Didn’t Know How To Use A Dishwasher

You’d think they’d learn by now.

“My partner is a landlord.

She once had a tenant constantly put in repair requests for the dishwasher. Every time, the only thing ‘wrong’ with it was that the filter needed to be cleaned. The repairman constantly showed the tenants how to clean the filter and constantly explained that food scraps don’t go in there with the plates. There was a chicken bone in the filter once, and a bottle cap another time.)But every month, there was a repair request.

After they left, they put a review up on Don’t Rent Me stating that the landlord refuses to replace broken appliances or reduce the rent as a result.

The current tenants have been there for 2 years, have the exact same dishwasher and have never had a problem with it.” samaki14

6. They Stole From Storage Then Tried To Play The Discrimination Card

I couldn’t help but laugh when reading the last few paragraphs.

“My dad had a tenant about a year ago that he had been dealing with for months. She had her son and a few other people living with her, which was technically not allowed, but my dad was being pretty lenient.
One day, he walks into the apartment to talk with her about it and finds a hole in their living room floor right above the storage in the basement.

Turns out, they had been stealing from the other tenants who kept their stuff locked up down there. The woman tried to blame the hole on her extremely obese son falling through the floor, even though it was obviously cut.

My dad obviously attempts to evict her at this point and goes through all the legal channels. But here’s the kicker- this crazy lady has the audacity to call the local news and tell them that my dad and grandpa were trying to evict them because her son was obese.
For privacy’s sake, I’m not going to mention the name of the news channel, but they took the story and ran with it. My dad was surprised by a news crew as he was walking into the building, and the first thing they asked him was, ‘Why are you evicting your tenant because he’s fat?’ He ended up looking like a fool on the local news.

I don’t know exactly how the legal proceedings went, but the news channel ended up raising a bunch of money to send this guy to a medical weight loss program for free. He never showed up, and I haven’t heard about him since.” JealousyGrey
5. They Suspected He Was Human Trafficking

“My dad rents commercial property in our hometown (a third world country). In the early 2000s, a Chinese man rented a supermarket-style property from him.

My dad went to collect rent every now and again and didn’t notice anything too strange at first, except for lots of customers, which from his perspective was great! But then he noticed some structures at the back of the building, and then these structures start moving to the front.

Upon closer inspection, he realizes that the tenant had vertically divided the supermarket into two floors using zinc panels.

Something dodgy was clearly going on. He asked him to leave, and when he wouldn’t, he threatened to call the police. By the time he came back with the police, they had left.
He climbed to the makeshift second floor to find dozens of towel ‘beds,’ clothes (including children’s), etc. The police presumed the landlord was trafficking Chinese people, and this is where they were living.” SuchStories

4. He Poured Concrete Down The Drains

“I had a tenant pour concrete down the drains. There was no repair possible. It was literally more cost-effective to demolish, salvage what we could, and rebuild. It even got into the septic system, and we had to settle with the city for damaging their infrastructure. Biggest nightmare ever. We sued the former tenants, but when you’re suing a scumbag, best-case scenario, you might get a 1990 Toyota Tercel.

Tenants are pretty decent as a whole, but if you have to evict, it’s worth it to just offer them a couple of hundred dollars cash to move out while you’re there and can watch the whole process.” Throwaway1242014

Another user Comments:

“This is what lawsuits are for. Judgments can usually be collected on for ten years in most states with the option to renew for another ten years. This is usually granted when damage or injury is both intentional and malicious. Any money they inherit, any property they purchase, any tax refunds, and one quarter or their current and future pay, that’s yours now. Or, even better, carry an insurance policy that covers malicious and intentional damage. Let the insurance company pursue the scumbag tenant.” Angelofpity
3. They Were Sacrificing Lambs In Their Apartment

“My parents rented out an apartment in the basement of our house to a couple in their late 20’s.

They were really nice people and all, but after a while, we realized something was off.

We heard odd chanting and stuff from their apartment in the middle of the night and the fire alarm going off by them burning incense. Nothing too weird until one of them rang the door one evening telling us there was a water leak and needed help stopping it. My dad and I came down and well…

On the coffee table, there was a lamb laying in the middle of a pentagram with candles around it, a huge pentagram is drawn with ***** on the wall, and ******* ***** splattered everywhere, and it just got more f*cked up. In the closet where the valve was, there was a dude suspended from the roof with hooks through the skin on his back.

In the cupboard in the kitchen, they had thrown another two lamb carcasses. We didn’t say anything out of shock, but they said they had been sacrificing live lambs to Satan.” laeven
2. They Barbecued A Goat

How did I not know people consume goat meat?

“For a while, my mom was the manager of a really nasty apartment complex. One day, she was on the property, and she heard what sounded like a goat! The next day, somebody was having a nice barbecue in their fenced patio. On the third day, they were tanning a goat hide.

Next community newsletter, she put in a line to the effect of, ‘While we welcome your cats and dogs with a pet deposit, no goats or chickens are allowed.’ She completed it with the international ‘no-no’ symbol around a chicken and a goat.

Her supervisor thought it was hilarious.” ShortWoman
1. He Threw His Appliances Off His Third Story Patio

“After managing apartments for six years, I’ve got a **** load of stories.

One community I managed, we had a guy who we suspected was a drug dealer. He wanted to install his own appliances he spent a lot of money on. We told him that he could if he stored the ones the apartment came within his garage, but it had to be in the garage on the property, not a storage facility off-site.

He lived on the third floor. He decided that he didn’t have room in his garage, so he dropped the dishwasher, stove, fridge, and microwave off the patio of his third floor. Luckily no one was walking the grounds below and was struck or killed.

That’s not so bad though.” xx_ClaireVoyant_xx
Reading these made me realize something: becoming a landlord in the future might just not be for me! While a majority of landlords have mostly great tenants, there’s always going to be those bad ones in the mix too. However, by providing thorough credit and background checks along with regular inspections, hopefully landlords can avoid the latter situations as much as possible!