The Thing That Would Not Leave

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We thought he was gone, but he's come back again Last week it was funny, but now the joke's wearing thin Cos everyone knows now that every night now Will be Stephen's last night in town. —Ben Folds Five, "Stephen's Last Night In Town"

It came seventeen years ago -- and to this day It has shown no intention of going away. —Edward Gorey, The Doubtful Guest

Everyone wants to be polite. Especially to a guest in your home. Unfortunately courtesy is not always reciprocated and to your horror you can find yourself trapped with The Thing That Wouldn't Leave.

Many a Dom Com has used the set-up of a house guest that simply will not leave. The put upon homeowners must find a way to remove this intruder without being rude. But no matter how many times they yawn, look at the clock or mention an early appointment for the next day, their guest remains an immovable fixture.

The most common way of getting caught in this trap is to take in a friend who's down on their luck. Supposedly the situation will be temporary until they get back on their feet. Invariably the friend will either be a complete eccentric or have absolutely no regard for the people whose home they're squatting in. After having their lives turned completely upside down by someone who appears to have no clue as to the harm they're doing the inevitable confrontation occurs.

Expect a tearful farewell from the guest as he disappears out into the cold, and a mountain of regret from the homeowners as they wonder whether there was a better way to handle the situation. Or, alternatively, an attempt for the guest to provoke a tearful farewell by acting wounded and bemoaning their hosts' ungraciousness - only for the hard-hearted host, who has gone way past any limits of tolerance they may have had with this annoying and inconsiderate leech, to push them out the door (perhaps while screaming, "Get Out!!"), slam it shut and lock it behind them.

Named for the Saturday Night Live sketch that presented this premise as a horror movie trailer. Compare with The Cat Came Back and Pretty Freeloaders

Examples of The Thing That Would Not Leave include:

Anime and Manga

• Ageha in They Are My Noble Masters. She kisses Ren and begins ignoring her own butler, makes him train, takes up all his time and attention, obstructs his duties and makes him cook dinner. While not quite to comedic lethal chef levels, he's never cooked before.
• Northern Italy from Axis Powers Hetalia is this to Germany initially, hanging around, irritating him and generally being useless. Despite Germany's attempts to throw him out, then give him away, he always returns. Eventually the two become close friends, however (if not more).
• In Black★Rock Shooter, Kagari calls Mato this and resorts to being completely goddamned scary to drive her away.

"Go away! Go away! Go away! Go away!"

• In Kannagi Jin suddenly sees his house shared with Nagi who doesn't have a hint of courtesy and gratitude in her. Though he does have some confrontations with her, he eventually sets that aside and learns to like her the way she is.
• Sakura from Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan suffers greatly from this trope, since Dokuro-chan decides to live with him. Oh, and did I mention she beats the living sh*t out of him to the point of killing him? That's fine, she just resurrects him, only to kill him again and again... And there's nothing he can do, she's come to stay.
• In Jungle wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu Hare suddenly has to live with Guu, since his mother decided to adopt her out of the blue. Guu also loves to torment the poor kid, and he can't do anything against it.
• The "Baka" prince from Level E made himself a guest in Tsutsui's house, much to his annoyance.
• In Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro, the thing that would not leave (Neuro) is not only in Yako's house, but anywhere she goes. He treats her like a dog, but somehow she gets used to his extravagances.

Comic Books

• A Silent Hill graphic novel puts a horror twist on this. A bum artist who went from friend to friend mooching this way sees a report on Silent Hill, an abandoned town that still has water and electricity and fully stocked markets. Never questioning his luck for a second, he moves there and starts painting... and seeing ungodly abominations who are always polite to him and pose for his portraits. He paints them, sends the portraits to his manager, becomes famous and rich... and realizes he's in a Closed Circle. The town is punishing his impoliteness. He tries to escape with the help of a bus full of cheerleaders, but that ends badly.
• Squirrel Girl kicked Deadpool out of the GLI clubhouse when he wouldn't leave. She was alerted in a Meanwhile in the Future situation: she had gone to the future, and the team leader (who is immortal) had waited 90 years to ask her to go back in time to kick Deadpool out.

Fan Works

• Arguably the Harry Potter fanfic On a Clear Day. Draco works for a charity organisation. When the organisation plans a gala to raise money for the children who lost their parents in the war against Voldemort, Draco's boss demands that he makes sure that the Great Harry Potter is in attendance. The problem is that since the war, Harry has turned agoraphobic and refuses to leave Grimmauld Place, which prompts Draco to intentionally invoke this trope. It's not that he never leaves, but he goes there every day, sits around for hours and tries to annoy Harry into agreeing to come to the gala. He succeeds.
• In the fancomic Girls Next Door, the Pale Man apparently followed Ofelia to the apartment building. He installed himself in Jareth's and Eric's kitchen, and to date has not left. They managed to get rid of him once "with the help" of the friendly Girl Scouts, but it came back and has a brownie slash since.
• In the Death Note Crack Fic All You Need Is Love (here) Naomi Misora feels so sorry for her stalker, Light Yagami/Kira, because he's being sexually harassed in the workplace that she invites him to stay at her place for a couple days... In the end Naomi ends up kidnapping Raye (her clueless fiancé) and fleeing the country to get away from Light. Meanwhile Light, who has to date not yet left her apartment, sends her a note informing her that the fridge is empty and now L and Matsuda (the stalker's stalkers) had followed him there and are in the process of "redecorating." The story then has a Time Skip-it's five years later and Light still hasn't left.

Film

• You, Me, and Dupree
• What About Bob?
• Madhouse
• Ed in Shaun of the Dead appears to have shown up at his friend Shaun's place one night five years before the events of the movie and not left since, having reduced his living room to a slovenly heap and not budged from the sofa since. Played with in that while Shaun's quite happy to have him around (although it's also made clear that Ed's really a bad influence on him), Shaun's roommate Pete makes it more than clear that for him Ed wore out his welcome a long time ago.
• The French 80s comedy Viens Chez Moi, J'habite Chez Une Copine ("Come to my place, I live at a friend's").
• The premise of Adam Sandler's Jack And Jill. As the trailer put it, "She isn't subtle. She isn't shy. She isn't leaving."
• In The Dictator the real Osama bin Laden (the one killed by Seal Team 6 was a Body Double) is mooching off General Aladeen. And he keeps messing up his bathroom.

Literature

• Older Than Feudalism: In The Odyssey by Homer, during Odysseus' 20-year absence, many young men, assuming that he must have died, take up residence in his mansion to court his wife, Penelope. Penelope believes that Odysseus is still alive and will not take a new husband. The suitors stick around and live off Odysseus' wealth for years, even when it becomes plain that Penelope does not want them around and has no interest in remarrying. When Odysseus finally comes back, he kills them all for violating the laws of hospitality as guests.
• The final chapter of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice indicates that Lydia and Wickham often imposed on Jane and Bingley in this way later in life, so much so that the perennially good-natured Bingley "came so close as to talk of giving them a hint to be gone." Lydia also occasionally did this to Darcy and Lizzy, but her husband was never allowed to accompany her - which, given the history between Wickham and Darcy, is entirely unsurprising.
• Bartleby, the Scrivener, by Herman Melville, is about a man who is hired by an office as a scrivener, becomes increasingly particular about the work he does (to the point where he "would rather not" do just about anything), and just won't leave, despite having been told to get out many times. Though Bartleby's employer puts up with him for a time because he's not harming anything or anyone by merely staying in the office, he ends up deciding to move his offices elsewhere to get rid of him (as he can't bring himself to forcibly throw Bartleby out). Even then, Bartleby still remains in the office building until he is arrested for trespassing because the new owner of the office doesn't want to put up with him.
• One of the many subplots of Anthony Trollope's Ayala's Angel involves the usually generous patriarch Sir Thomas Tringle being driven to exasperation by the failure of his new son-in-law, the Honourable Septimus Traffik, to remove himself and his new wife to an establishment of their own and quit mooching off her rich family, despite his continual hints, barbs, and even demands. Near the end of the book the Traffiks do finally move out, though.
• Gilbert's cousin does this to the Blythes in Anne of Ingleside, sticking around for almost two months past her original vacation. She only leaves after Anne, who's been driven to total distraction by her, decides to actually do something nice for her and winds up inadvertently offending her so much she leaves. She decides to throw a birthday party for the cousin, with all the (very few) things the cousin liked; it backfired horribly when said cousin turned out to be extremely sensitive about her age, and was convinced Anne had thrown the party to be nasty about it and rub it in.
• The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency: Mma Ramotswe's first case was a woman whose father (whom she hadn't seen since she was little) returned and was living off her. She wouldn't object to feeding and housing her father for the rest of his life, since that's what you do for family, but she'd started to suspect that this moocher wasn't actually her father. Mma Ramotswe came up with a way of getting rid of the impostor.
• Diana Wynne Jones's chapter books Chair Person, The Four Grannies and Who Got Rid Of Angus Flint? has been collected as a volume called Stopping For A Spell whose back cover describes all three stories in terms of this trope.
• As in the page quote - E. Gorey's short story The Doubtful Guest involves a highly annoying Penguin-like creature constantly angering a family.
• Ogden Nash wrote a poem about The Thing That Would Not Leave called Polterguest, My Polterguest.
• A children's book called The Trolls has a woman tell her nieces and nephews about growing up in Vancouver with her eccentric family. One of these family members was their great-uncle Louis, who came for two weeks and stayed for six years. He only left after he insisted he saved the narrator's younger brother from a pack of trolls and the narrator's mother ordered him out in disgust.
• In the story Superfudge, the Hatcher family is constantly annoyed by Fudge's friend Daniel. At one point, Daniel looks ready to invite himself to stay for dinner with them, but Mrs. Hatcher tricks him into leaving by pretending that they're having peas and onions with their dinner (two foods that he hates).
• In "Petronella", one of the stories in Jay Williams' The Practical Princess and Other Liberating Fairy Tales, Princess Petronella, the third offspring of a family which had always had three sons up until then, decided to defy her parents and brothers and go off in search of a prince to rescue. She found one, supposedly-captive, at the house of Albion the enchanter and rode off with him, only to be told by Albion later that "He came to visit me for a weekend. At the end of it, he said, 'It's so pleasant here, do you mind if I stay on for another day or two?' I'm very polite and I said, 'Of course.' He stayed on, and on, and on..."
• This happens in Jeeves and Wooster fairly often, as poor old Wooster is such an Extreme Doormat that it's impossible for him to turn away a houseguest. Fortunately, Jeeves is smart enough to cleverly get rid of such visitors with no hurt feelings.
• Kate in Meg Cabot's Boy Meets Girl becomes this to Jen and Craig, her friends who she's staying with. It's somewhat subverted in that they like her, don't mind her staying and are entirely sympathetic with her problem of not having enough to get her own place, but their place isn't that big and they kinda want their flat back (especially since Jen's trying to get pregnant).

Live Action TV

• Most of the subplot with Daphne's irritating mother in the later seasons of Frasier involved her greatly over-staying her welcome when staying with Niles and Daphne. Daphne's brothers also fell into this trope, but mostly because they really were ungrateful and obnoxious spongers who barged into Frasier's apartments and took unreasonable liberties whilst they were there.
• Spike does this to several different people in season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This becomes particularly apparent when Weetabix gets involved. According to Spike, it adds texture to blood.
• An episode of Father Ted had the priests dealing with Father Stone, the dullest man alive, who absolutely loves staying with Ted. According to the writer's commentary on the DVD he was based on a real person.
• The Trope Namer is an SNL horror film trailer parody. John Belushi was the thing in question.
• This is the premise for Two and A Half Men—Alan moves in with his bachelor brother Charlie for "a couple of days" when his wife divorces him, and then stays for about a decade.
• In Only Fools and Horses, when the actor playing Grandad died, they needed to find a way to replace him. Uncle Albert had been this to one of the branches of the family who attended Grandad's funeral, until they left him at the funeral with no way to contact them. He then became this to the Trotters, even provoking Del, pushed past his limits, to try to get him to leave. Del eventually relents and decides to let Albert stay because "He's fam'ly, in' he?" and Del cannot refuse to take his family in.
• Yes, Dear has Jimmy Hughes, his wife Christine and their two sons living in the guesthouse of Christine's sister, Kim Warner, her husband Greg and their son and later their daughter. While Kim has no problem with the Hugheses living with them, Greg certainly does and is always complaining about them, mostly/especially Jimmy, constantly mooching off of him. Eventually, the Hugheses do get their own place, but in the final scene of the Grand Finale, their house is destroyed by an earthquake, forcing them to move back into the Warners' guesthouse.
• One of the earliest examples is from I Love Lucy with guest-star Tennessee Ernie Ford as Lucy's "Cousin Ernie" who stays over for one episode and wears out his welcome by the next one.
• One episode of iCarly had two police officers use Carly and Spencer's apartment for a stakeout. They eat food out of their refrigerator, interrupt the webshow, one of them brings his bratty little kid over (who screams very loudly when he finds out they're out of soda) and one of the cops is a bully from Spencer's childhood.
• The Golden Girls had an episode named "The Stan Who Came to Dinner," in which Dorothy's ex-husband stays with the girls to recuperate from heart surgery, but overstays his welcome.
• Partial subversion in an episode of Being Human (UK): Tully is invited to stay over one housemate's objections, but by the end of the episode the positions regarding him have reversed, with the original naysayer defending Tully's continued presence against the others' complaints.
• Claire and Mitchell's mom from Modern Family. Interesting in that she becomes this from the moment she arrives.
• From The Wrong Door, The World's Most Annoying Creature is this in spades.
• An episode of Law and Order SVU opened with this situation, with the apartment tenant eventually growing so frustrated that he threatens his "roommate" with a meat cleaver. The problem solves itself when a bullet rips through a nearby wall and kills the moocher.
• Overton Jones becomes this for an episode of Living Single, Maxine is more like the thing that keeps returning.
• Though she willingly takes them in whenever they need it, Mary in In Plain Sight clearly feels this way about her mom and sister.
• In The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rob invites a temporarily-displaced Buddy to stay with him. It's a variant in that they both end up utterly miserable, but they're both too polite to admit that the other is driving them nuts.

Music

• Described in the song We Wish You Weren't Living With Us, by Bob Rivers. It goes to the tune of We Wish You a Merry Christmas.
• The topic of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones song You Gotta Go.
• And the Tim Wilson song Brother In Law.
• Jake Thackray's song Leopold Alcox is about a Walking Disaster Area relation who comes for a (long, long) visit.

Leopold Alcox, my distant relation has come to my flat for a brief visitation. He's been here since February, damn and blast him, my nerves and my furniture will not outlast him!

• There is a song about a cat that wouldn't be got rid of:

But the cat came back The very next day, The cat came back, Thought he was a goner - but The cat came back 'cause he couldn't stay away . . .

• • And every time someone tried to kill the cat, they got killed. With the exception of the meat grinder verse in which "the town's hamburger tasted furry for several weeks" but, with no attached human deaths, cue the chorus (quoted above).

Newspaper Comics

• One Far Side cartoon depicted: "The Arnolds feign death until the Wagners, sensing awkwardness, are compelled to leave."
• Used in Doonesbury, when Zonker moves in with Mike and J.J. to the point of seriously grating on their nerves. J.J. comments at one point that it's like having a teenage son (which was surprisingly appropriate, with Mike even giving him an allowance).
  • And then there are the times when Zonker's father moves in after bickering with his wife, much to Zonker's annoyance.
  • One story arc had Zonker moving in with an English nobleman when he was called in to vote a tiebreaker for the House of Lords (he bought an English title, long story). Long after the vote, he remains at the castle, oblivious to the clear exasperation the castle staff and his host feel towards him. He finally is booted forcibly by his host, who took the liberty of packing for him.
  • As of this writing, it appears another such scenario is in the works with Uncle Duke. One might expect Duke to be the unwanted guest, but in this case he's the host—the guest is Trff Bmzklfrpz, former President-for-Life of Greater Berzerkistan. Duke arranged an extraction to get him out of Berzerkistan just ahead of a revolution, but it turns out that Trff's Swiss bank accounts have been frozen, and he's penniless with nowhere to go.
• In For Better or For Worse, when Elly gives birth to April, a distant cousin of John's (whom Elly has never even met) invites herself to come and stay with the Pattersons to help out with the baby. She stays on and on, getting in the way, making messes, letting her cat run roughshod over everything, and totally freeloading. John eventually breaks down and puts a security deposit on an apartment for her just to get her out of the house.
• Robert Freeman's family from New Orleans come by after Hurricane Katrina in The Boondocks. One of them became a fan favorite and practically called the trope by name when the rest of them decided to finally leave. She was forcibly put out.

Podcast

• Tee Morris, a frequent guest on the Dragon Page and Farpoint Media podcasts, took pride in his moniker of "the Guest That Wouldn't Go Away". He even made his own audio bumper.

Theater

• The Man Who Came to Dinner is, if not the Trope Maker, the source of inspiration for a great many later examples of infuriating semi-permanent houseguests. In fact, for a time the play's title entered the vernacular as a shorthand term for anybody overstaying their welcome in this manner.
  • The play and movie were inspired by real life. It began when Algonquin Round Table member, theater critic, and all-around Jerkass Alexander Woollcott showed up unannounced and uninvited at playwright Moss Hart's country home in Pennsylvania. He completely reorganized the home, becoming so insufferable after only two days that Hart and his writing partner George S. Kaufman wondered what would have happened if Wolcott had broken his leg and wasn't able to leave...

Video Games

• In The Sims 3, you can control your Sims while they are in another household, so you can invoke this trope to a degree. You can eat your hosts' food, sleep in their beds, etc. If you keep it up, your hosts will become more and more annoyed with you and they'll eventually just throw you out.
• in The Sims 2, you might have a guest who stays until around three in the morning, playing with your video games or on your computer, or with the bubble-blower, and then, out of the blue, you get this dialogue that says "You invited me to spend the night, but then you didn't let me get any sleep! I'm leaving!" even when you never gave any such invitation - you were just too polite to ask the guest to leave!

Web Comics

• Used in Casey and Andy where one day, straight out of the blue (apparently while on the way to give Quantum Cop another Nobel Prize), the King Of Sweden (King Carl XVI Gustaf) decided to remain in Casey and Andy's couch and demand they bring him drinks. The only times they managed to get him out of the couch was when they bribed him with drinks to help with a crisis in a fantasy dimension and when he was briefly kidnapped by the Land Pirates (which he joined due to, you guessed it, Stockholm Syndrome). The strip's epilogue reveals he remained there for another 20 years before dying and being replaced by his daughter Victoria.
  • The League of Recurring Antagonists seem to have a similar problem with the Emperor of Japan.
  • Their next door neighbor Jenn has Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain on her sofa and scarfing all her lager.
• In Ensign Sue Must Die, the new ensign, Mary Sue, is so annoying that the entire senior crew of the Enterprise try to get rid of her. Making her fight a room full of Klingons? She kills every one of them. Transporting her off the ship? Scotty tried that twice and she inexplicably came back every time. Dumping her off on the mirror universe Enterprise? They want nothing to do with her. Heck, she is actually immune to phaser blasts.
• In Bruno the Bandit, Great-Uncle Lucius, who lied about being a member of Bruno's family, came for an afternoon visit over thirty years before the comic happens, and then fell sick and was, according to him and (after some threats from Lucius) his doctors, about to die, thus making the family have to take care of him. He's going to live until at least "some seventy years later". And he will still be about to die.
• Piro and Largo stay in the apartment of Piro's friend Tsubasa when they are stuck in Japan at first. While they genuinely mean to not impose, they are distracted by Tsubasa's vast video game collection and wind up staying until Tsubasa leaves for America and they are evicted from the apartment, along with Robot Girl Ping.
  • They leave after Tsubasa moves out first.
• Sluggy Freelance does a very strange version with Bert. At first, he's the main characters' roommate, so it's no problem that he's there. Then he says he's moving out because the others are too weird, though he's always most certainly been the weirdest one even in that bunch. The others don't necessarily want him to go, at least Torg, but all right. The problem is when he says he has moved out even while he's obviously still living in there. In the end, Torg gets fed up and calls the UN to send inspectors to find him, which they fail to do because [i]Bert was in a closet.[/i]
• Katia, the main character of Prequel. She meets Quill-Weave after breaking into her house on a drunken bender to have sex with a stranger in her own bed. Since Quill is one of the first people to genuinely treat her nicely (out of pity and later guilt), Katia latches onto her like an adorably pathetic, puppy-dog eyed lamprey.
• The basic plot of Batman and the Bat-Titans has a Jerkass version of Batman mooching off of the Teen Titans.
• For many people, 2016 is regarded as a pretty shitty year, and during late 2016 among those people there were some that felt it couldn't end soon enough. The Oatmeal Has a page that where 1 guy is trying to kick 2016 out 'early' because it's 9pm [1]. In the alternate version of the comic (found in the comments), 2016 flat out refuses to leave and becomes 2017 (of course implying the nightmare goes on for at least another full year).

Western Animation

• The Boondocks episode Invasion of the Katrinians. 'Nuff said.
• In one episode of The Simpsons, Otto moves in with the Simpsons after he loses his job. They'd kick him out, but he has nowhere to go.
  • The plot of taking a houseguest has been recycled several times: The Simpsons have taken in such Springfield regulars as Krusty ("Krusty Gets Kancelled" and "The Last Temptation of Krust"), Sideshow Bob ("The Great Louse Detective"), Apu ("Homer and Apu," and the season nine episode "Lisa's Sax" had Apu randomly appearing in the Simpson house during a parody of the All in the Family opening theme), Chester J. Lampwick ("The Day the Violence Died") and Gil (who stayed a whole year, according to "Kill Gil, vols. I & II). When Kent Brockman, this was subject of a Lampshade Hanging when Homer asks him for an 8"x10" for "the wall of casual acquaintances who came to stay for a while". The most recent example is Lurleen Lumpkin (the country singer whom Homer tried to promote, despite that Lurleen was seducing him) in "Papa Don't Leech."
• "Hi, I'm Dan from Grim Reaper Gutters, I won't leave until I make a sale."
• One episode of SpongeBob SquarePants takes this to absurd levels with Squidward as the unwanted guest. He takes advantage of Spongebob's natural friendliness, naïveté, and eagerness to help.
  • Even SpongeBob has limits, though. At first, it was like "You just live with me until you get back on your feet." After "So much later that the old narrator got tired of waiting and they had to hire a new one.", Squidward is now sleeping on SpongeBob's bed, forced him to dress as a French maid, and threw a major fit when there was an odd number of seeds in his lemonade. SpongeBob snaps a bit and drops some very obvious hints that he should find a job already. Because Squidward is in denial or maybe because he is just that stupid, he doesn't get the hint.
    • Either that or it's because Squidward's a Jerkass. It actually led to a Beware the Nice Ones moment when, after Mr. Krabs wouldn't hire Squidward again, Spongebob actually grabbed him around his neck and started to strangle him while screaming about how stupid the entire situation was.
  • Another episode has the Flying Dutchman stay at Spongebob's house "while his ship is being repaired". It's actually until 3 months after his ship is repaired.
• Casey Jones is a mild version of this in one episode of the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He doesn't stay that long, comparatively, but he does a fair amount of damage to the furnishings before he goes. The Turtles (especially Mikey) even make several "Thing That Would Not Leave" jokes.
• In The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, Vincent Van Ghoul was staying with the crew while his home was being fumigated, he was mostly staying in bed and made unreasonable demands. Daphne called him "The Thing That Wouldn't Leave", and after their trip through the funny papers, the gang groaned when they learned the fumigation was going to take longer.
• Nergal becomes one of these to Billy's family in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy after losing a board game.
• In an episode of The Angry Beavers titled "The Bing That Wouldn't Leave" involves Norbert and Dagget rescuing a chameleon named Bing who won't leave them alone. They try all sorts of schemes to get rid of him, and eventually try passing him along to one of their other friends, but they find out Bing's reputation for clinginess proceeds him.
• In Static Shock, Richie hangs out at the Hawkins household so often that Sharon says he ought to pay them rent. Virgil and his father don't seem to care too much, though.
  • Though it is later revealed Richie never invites Virgil over because his father is a racist.
• Keef on Invader Zim, though it was more that he just kept coming back so much he was calling Zim's house "home" by the end of the episode. Then Zim ripped his eyeballs out and made him think Zim was a squirrel.
• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends had the episode "Go Goo Go" when a very hyperactive Motor Mouth girl named Goo comes to Foster's. After she begins filling up the house with imaginary friends, Mac tries to get rid of her, but Goo doesn't take the hint. The other members of the main cast don't get the hint either, and think that the reason that Goo isn't leaving is because she's Mac's girlfriend and can't work up the nerve to ask her.
• In an episode of Garfield and Friends, Jon's annoying Uncle Ed moves in and stays for months because Jon is too nice to kick out a relative. Garfield comes up with several schemes to get rid of him which all fail. Finally he tries contacting his wife who shows up to drag him home. See the episode here.
• In The Looney Tunes Show, Yosemite Sam has to move in with Bugs and Daffy after he rigs his home to work on solar power and a big storm leaves him without power. He becomes more and more of a nuisance, and schemes to get him to leave on his own only backfire.
  • Daffy is also an example of this in the same show. He moved in until he got back on his feet and stayed for seven years, apparently without realizing at all that he is not really someone you would want to be around for that long.
  • This also turns up in some of the classic Looney Tunes shorts. For instance, Bugs intrudes on Elmer in this manner in "The Wabbit Who Came to Supper" and "Upswept Hare". Daffy also does this to Porky in several cartoons.
    • Not to mention every Charlie Dog cartoon, ever.
    • Bugs and Sam are court-ordered to share Sam's prairie home in Fair Haired Hare—Sam builds this home over Bugs' hole in the ground. Sam does more than try to get Bugs to leave...he tries to kill him.
    • From Hare To Heir has Bugs representing a firm awarding Duke Sam 1 million pounds under the provision he keeps his temper in check with Bugs deducting any amount he sees warrants whenever Sam blows up. Bugs spends the rest of the cartoon making Sam's life a living hell, just to see if and when he loses his temper.

Real Life

• In real life, Hans Christian Andersen paid a visit to Charles Dickens. Andersen was supposed to stay for a night, but he ended up mooching off of Dickens for over a month. Reportedly, Dickens made ever-increasingly obvious hints to the ever-oblivious Andersen to leave, and refused to answer Andersen's correspondence when he'd gone - much to Andersen's confusion. So enraged was Dickens that he wrote in the mirror in Andersen's room "Hans Christian Andersen slept in this bed for five weeks." The character of Uriah Heep in David Copperfield is said to have been based on him.
• Kirby Vacuum Cleaner salesmen. They barge into people's homes claiming they want to do a "quick" demonstration or that the owner has won a "free carpet cleaning", then turn the house upside-down with several hours of "demonstrations" (and sometimes outright theft), refusing to leave until either they get forcibly thrown out or someone agrees to buy the vacuum for a ridiculously overpriced cost.
• Used by Queen Elizabeth I as a tactic to financially bankrupt nobles with questionable loyalties at best. Since she was the Queen they had to put her up like a Queen. It was often a cover for her spies to dig through the nobles' dirty laundry while she and her very extensive entourage (sometimes literally) ate them out of house and home.
• According to Ben Franklin, "Visitors and fish smell in three days." Franklin probably had this problem himself at some point.
• In 1971, Chilean socialist President Salvador Allende extended an invitation to Fidel Castro to visit the country. He made a visit supposedly for just a week, but he ended up staying for a month. And to top it all, when he returned to Cuba, he declared that they had nothing to learn from Chile.
• Of course having guests in your house is terrible but there's nothing worse than when you're a guest in someone else's house. You've only been there for four weeks and they're dropping not so subtle hints that you should go. They should be happy to have you! You're a great guest! You're polite, considerate, you don't complain about how awful the food is or how little effort obviously goes into making it as though they don't care that you're there! That you have the courtesy to bestow your shining presence upon your hosts' puny, unworthy home in return for just a few weeks of doing absolutely nothing in the midst of your overwrought existence. You even have the kindness to stay up well into the evening with them, amusing them with your jokes, giving them advice on the best evening television. I mean really, if it weren't for you they'd be rotting their already atrophying minds with Coronation Street for God's sake! But after about a month of sheer, habitual rudeness on the part of your hosts, you decide to leave because you can't put up with it anymore. Some people just have no sense of social graces.
• When a roommate brings his 'Friend with Benefits' back to live in the apartment. And makes a mess of the bathroom and kitchen while leaving the front door unlocked.