If you’ve ever browsed Craigslist housing ads, you’ve invariably seen those bizarro room share ads – random, extremely cheap prices ($261/mo), strange symbols in the text (۞), questionable grammar and capitalization, and generic email addresses (usually the name of a European country followed by some numbers). The ads all sound about the same, the houses (or whatever they are) always seem to be in Silver Spring or upper 16th Street, and they offer a free couch to sleep on if you don’t have any money. And just in case they don’t already sound sketchy enough, the ads have recently been asking potential applicants/victims to send links to their Myspace or Friendster pages, but add “*FACEBOOK IS NOT ACCEPTABLE*”. Maybe they don’t like the Facebook Feed.

The ads are fascinating because they’re annoying clutter and are deleted pretty quickly, yet never fail to reappear. It seems Sisyphean, constantly reposting the same ads after they’ve been deleted, over and over, every day. Is there really money in this? Is there some sketchy housing concern whose sole business is to write weird housing ads? Or maybe it’s one very persistent person who thinks they’re helping out by offering people a spot on their couch?

Cheap, temporary places have a purpose — professionals who are in town for a month, newcomers who don’t have housing lined up and so on, but there are already ads for that sort of thing that don’t reek of robbery. We emailed a few of these places and got no response, not surprisingly.

So who applies to these crazy ads? Has anyone ever visited and lived to tell the tale? Is it some kind of squat? Is it run by the mafia? The possibilities seem endless.

Photo by Flickr user Allison DC