I asked everyone to share their tales of their worst roommate. You surely delivered, and while many people just whined about messy slobs and standard issue annoyances, some people had some truly terrible tales.

But before we can get to the winner of the contest, here are the people who received honorable mention. This is what I was talking about when I said, "world's worst roommate." Here are people getting arrested, dealing with shit on the ceiling, and mice running out from piles of dirty laundry. These are way worse than "he didn't pay the bills and smelled a little." These commenters get a gold star (if they didn't have one already).

But of course there can only be one winner. She gets a $50 gift certificate to Bed Bath and Beyoncé (I told you the prize would be good). This story has a bit of everything: slovenliness, hoarding, fried chicken, threats of bodily harm. Congratulations, Iko Iko, you are our winner.

Here is her terrible tale.

My potluck roommate, freshman year: Francie.

I arrived in the room with my parents, and she was already settled. She was sharpening a massive knife. My dad joked and asked if she was preparing for a really bad roommate. She informed us it was a hunting knife and that she had gutted "tons of deer" with it.

Weeks passed and Francie began to skip all of her classes, leading to a lot of phone calls to the room. She ate fried chicken in her bed, leaving the greasy boxes in her bed, in a pile of dirty laundry, papers, and other random objects. She slept under this pile. It smelled. The pile was usually peaked by her television - all on her little twin bed.

She left her car in teacher's spots and acquired so many parking tickets that she got towed. She had all-day phone arguments with her parents, who at some point acquired my phone number and started calling me to make Francie do things. In the interests of them leaving me alone, I would deliver their messages with a little bit of teenage rebel voice, so she didn't think I was trying to be a narc, but I was fed up with her being in the room and never going anywhere also. I wanted her to go to class and leave me alone and eat fried chicken somewhere else.

One day, I finally said, "Look, I need your parents to stop calling me - why can't you just do what they say or at least not be an idiot and get a million parking tickets that they have to pay for, so they don't know you're being ridiculous?!" She said, "fine, be a bitch."

Later that day I came back from class or some activity and she had taken her hunting knife to my mattress, a lot of my clothes, our rug, our bean bag chair, and had killed a squirrel with it and left it in my bed. I called her parents and threatened to press charges. They wrote me a big old check and she got kicked out of school for failing everything, having that knife, smoking in the dorm room, and bringing an animal carcass inside. I didn't even have to tattle on her.

Congratulations. Email me to redeem your prize. Thanks for everyone for sharing their tales of woe.

[Photo illustration by Jim Cook. Images via Shutterstock]