Playing host is hard work – which is why I personally side-eye all of these people on HGTV who claim to “love having guests over” all the time – and sometimes you learn more about the people who stay with you than you wish you had.

Like these 15 willing hosts who got more than they bargained for after opening their homes.

#15. Thief!

“Stole my paprika :(“

#14. My pork chops.

“Says she was a vegan, so only brought with her some seeds, nuts, etc. but cooked and ate MY pork chops before I got home from work. She had no company over…. so it was HER!”

#13. We played it cool.

“We were hosting a group of teenage boys for a youth group convention. My mom served a family style breakfast, with bacon, hash browns, and eggs each piled high on seperate large plates. One of the two boys we were hosting sat down, and promptly finished the entire plate of eggs, meant for 6 people, by himself. We played it cool at the time, but we still joke about the kid that ate 12 eggs in one sitting.”

#12. My Littlest Pet Shop

“Oh boy, one night in elementary school I had two friends over, let’s call them Sara and Megan, they were my two best friends and everything was fine until I went to bed. Let me tell you, I’m a deep sleeper and I hadn’t woke up all night. It was morning a Megan had to leave early, but right before she left my Grandma handed her bag to her and noticed it was really heavy. She opened it and my little pet shop toys fell out along with some dress up clothes.

That wasn’t all, after Megan left Sara told me Megan would sit on me while I was sleeping and fart! Wtf! And when I was cleaning up where we slept I had found really mean notes about me. My Grandma had both Megan and Sara’s parents bring their agendas to compare the handwriting. Guess who it was… fucking Megan.

After that I stopped talking to her. She found a new friend who actually had the same name as me. Idk if it was a coincidence or not, but she was fucking weird. I tried to warn Same Name but she didn’t listen. Oh well.”

#11. The first time any of us had met him.

“When I was in middle school my parents and I watched the X-Files pretty religiously. The truth is out there! Anyways, my dad had a friend move back to town and he was dating a woman with a son my age. My dad tells the friend to bring the son over to hang out with me (without asking me of course). We were playing some computer games and the kid was a little weird but nothing too crazy.

In the evening the new episode of X-Files was airing so we all sit down to watch it. There was an intense shoot out scene in a forest and all of the sudden dude stands up and yells “I got your back Mulder!” He then proceeded to aim his ass at the TV and blast a huge fart. This was the first time any of us had met him… We really had no idea how to react. We laugh our asses off (no pun intended) talking about it these days, but in the moment all of us were like who the fuck is this kid?!”

10. Not cool.

“Relative of my husband stayed with us for a month while trying to get back on her feet, looking for a job and whatnot. She’s a strange person and did a few strange thing, but the thing that was the strangest (and rudest) was redecorate the guest room. Put up shelves, badly, by drilling huge screws into the wall. Took a painting off the wall and shoved it into the back of the closet and then took a metal art off the wall in the foyer and hung it in the guest room, crooked, with the same shoddy screws in the wall method. The wallpaper where she drilled got all torn and ruined. This was that nice fabric type wallpaper that looks like it has embroidered patterns. And then she had the nerve to be livid when she was told how not cool that was. I don’t get the logic in her thinking what she did was okay. After she (predictably) lost her (well paying) job after two days we kicked her out and I turned the guest room into an office. The walls looked like shit. I’ve never been in someone’s house and ever thought to mess with their stuff. Edit: a typo.”

#9. Details.

“Pulled me aside to ask for details about my parents sex life.”

#8. Just a preference.

“I used to have a friend who would always come over to take a dump. When I asked her about it, she told me she preferred my toilet over hers.”

#7. The weirdness

“My boyfriend had a friend of a friend, who we’d never met, come to a small party. He disappeared for awhile and then reappeared. I thought he looked different but couldnt put my finger on it. Turns out he had helped himself to the upstairs bathroom, to his roommates used razor, snd shaved his beard off. At a party. At a strangers house. Left beard hair everywhere.

To add to the weirdness we heard a few months later that he had died. He was drunkenly drag racing and crashed and killed himself in his early 20s.”

#6. Really alarming.

“Girlfriend and I hosted a guy from Couchsurfing at our place, put him in our guest bedroom. He originally requested to stay 35 days and my super generous girlfriend almost gave him the green light for that until I stepped in and told her that’s positively insane and he could stay for like 4 nights maximum.

He was a nice dude, really really awkward and spoke of his work in kind of a masturbatory manner, but very polite and respectful in our home. Well, the day before he’s going to leave he asks my girlfriend if he can make a copy of our key “for next time I’m in the area,” and without thinking she says sure. So the guy makes a fucking copy of our key and I only find out about it after he’s gone to sleep his last night there, and he’s planning to leave at like 4am.

So I set my alarm for 3:30am and hung out in the living room so I could intercept him and grab that new key. I did it by thanking him for making a copy of the key for our next guest. He seemed a bit hurt that I was asking for it back, which only made me happier I went through all the trouble of getting it back.

I don’t know what the fuck he was thinking asking to keep a copy of our key, but I found it really alarming. Of course he might have made two copies and hidden one of them, who knows. We’ve since moved so I’m not worried.”

#5. Two whole days.

“Had a long-lost cousin pass through my town years ago, offered him a place to stay. He was a really cool guy when I was growing up, I was really looking forward to spending some time with him. He arrived, I showed him to the spare room of the house which had my Sega Mega Drive (this was many years ago, when they were one of the gaming consoles you had to have) set up to a TV. His eyes lit up when he saw the Sega. He said he was going to lay down and have a bit of a rest, he had been travelling by road all day, so I understood and left him alone. He didn’t emerge for the rest of the day and well into the night so I thought I would check on him. I peeked into his room and he was just sitting on the floor playing Sega. He stayed there for two whole days, only coming out to go and get himself some takeaway (refused our offers of dinners we had prepared) or go to the toilet. From time to time I would go into his room and sit on the bed and try to make any kind of conversation but he would just grunt or give single-word responses while he played games. I eventually gave up and just left him to it for basically two days and nights. He would play well into the early hours of the morning (with the volume on low, which was considerate I suppose). The third day he packed up early and just left without saying goodbye. Haven’t seen or heard from him since.”

#4. I need to know why.

“There are about 84,573 posts on here about guests just shitting on the bathroom floor.

I literally don’t understand I just need to know why.”

#3. It’s cool.

“My brother’s friend came over once, took out a switchblade, and started stabbing our couch. When my brother yelled at him to stop, he just looked up and said “Its cool, I do it to my couch all the time!” and went back to stabbing the couch. My brother had to confiscate the switchblade.”

#2. All over the couch.

“Picked at his peeling sunburn and left copious flakes of skin all over the couch and in the bed. I think he was reptilian.”

#1. She handed it to me.

“Caught my mum’s friend sticking her used chewing gum under our bookshelf. When she saw me staring, she said “Oh, I was going to remove it later. I just needed a place to put it.” And then she handed it to me to throw away…”