Moving to a new neighborhood is a risk due to the mere fact that you can't choose the people you live next to. Most of the time, they end up being kind, welcoming people who cause you no trouble. But sometimes, they end up being the worst of the worst—and you're left with no choice but to fight back against their ruthless antics.
1. My Childhood Nemesis
When I was growing up, the neighbor’s kid would taunt me like there was no tomorrow. It started when I was about two and she took my favorite dinosaur ball and popped it. Another time, I was invited over for a summer party, and she pushed me up against their shed and tossed a basketball at my head over and over. It wasn't just their daughter, though.
One time, they were backing their car out of their garage and ripped the passenger door off because it was left open. Their next move made my blood boil—they called the authorities and tried to blame my brother when he was about five or six, saying that he must've snuck over to their house, gone into their garage, and opened the car door when they weren't looking.
Several years later, they called the authorities on me because their inflatable snowman went missing from their front yard. At 10:30 pm, a state trooper was knocking on our door, and I had to wake my parents up to talk to him. As it turned out, one of their foster kids broke it and buried it behind their house in the woods.
2. What Kind Of Wizardry Is This?
We have a guy who was known as “The Wizard of Belgrave.” You would just see him walking around with his walking stick/staff. It doesn’t matter what time of day or night, it could be 7 AM or midnight, he was always walking. We would also see him in different suburbs, over 40 km (25 mi) apart. He would occasionally stop and cast spells on people.
3. Coming Out On Top
I have a huge hill right outside my backyard. A family has been sitting on top of the hill right in front of my backyard. I caught the husband staring into the window and the wife was filming/taking photos of my house the very next day when they came by again. This is stalking and creepy. There's a park right next to the neighborhood that they could sit and do whatever.
Why sit right in front of my backyard? The first time they came, I came out onto my deck with my dog. My dog was going crazy barking at them and as soon as I sat down, the husband jumped up and started to walk away. The wife was slower and laughing as the two kids and their dog were leaving. Next weekend if they come again, I plan to come out with a megaphone.
I’m going to ask them why have you been sitting right in front of my backyard looking into my window and taking photos the past few days? No one else in the entire two developments sit on top of the hill because everyone has the decency to know it’s rude to sit right in front of someone's backyard. Still, I don’t know if I’m overreacting with this situation.
4. You’re On Candid Camera
I do not get along with my neighbor, and put up cameras to record the goings-on. Well, today he went out on his porch with a clear jug, saw the camera, and immediately called someone to complain about me, bragging about how paranoid he has me, saying that I only put the camera up because I think he will get revenge on me for this time he thinks I hurt his plants. He didn’t stop there.
He called me a fat witch, said he hates me so much, I'm a joke, my camera is a joke, he's getting cameras to capture me going on his property at night and ruining plants, it's my fault that water backs up in his house every winter because I don't shovel the alley, he's gonna sue me, he's gonna call the authorities, it'll be me he goes after and not my husband, I'm a whackjob, and all this other crazy stuff.
He made one phone call after another and spewed all of it for each person and kept pointing his finger at the camera. But that wasn’t the most disturbing part. I'm pretty sure he was about to actually do something to our flowers because he never drank out of that clear container he had in his hands and he immediately jumped to "SHE KNOWS I WAS GONNA KILL HER PLANTS."
That was a small concern but we mostly got the cameras to capture the harassment. I didn't hurt any plants of his and I sure don't enter his property. I'm always asleep when he goes to work so his cameras won't capture anything. And nobody shovels the alley because it doesn't belong to anyone. I don't think I can be sued for something I wasn't notified about or given an opportunity to correct either.
We have had the cameras for less than 24 hours and we already have things we can use for a possible civil suit. It's funny that he thinks I'm the whackjob. He is the only one with a documented history of coming out of his house to scream at multiple people, including me and my guests. He’s also done things like leaving threatening letters and going up to a new neighbor at his house and screaming in his face about his car not being pulled in enough.
I'm the crazy one though.
5. The Very Last Time
The house next to mine became a rental property. The woman and her daughter who moved in seemed nice enough. Through getting to know her over the next few months, it became apparent that she was a little slow and not very together. One day, I was replacing the faucet in my kitchen and the shut off valve under the sink snapped off while I was trying to close it.
As you could imagine, water started getting out all over the new laminate floor. Knowing I had no exterior water shut off on my house, I quickly ran outside to shut off the water main to the house. My kitchen was quickly flooding, and I was desperate to close it ASAP. It was buried under a foot of sand, so I am frantically digging to access it and close it.
Anyone looking would see that I am panicking and very engaged. At this time, my neighbor comes out and stands next to me. She tried to start a conversation with me, but I ignored her as I had no time for that. She continues to talk to me, even though I do not talk back. She tells me how her daughter asks her to make some Chinese chicken.
She goes into detail of how she made it, how it tasted, and what else they ate with it. Needless to say, as I am soaking wet, dirty as heck, and finally got the valve closed, she continues to talk to me as I get up and go back into my house to clean up all that water. As I left, she just stood there and continued to talk as if she had an audience.
My wife and I refer to that as the “Chinese chicken incident.” We ended up moving a few months later, but that was the last time we spoke to our neighbor.
6. I've Got The Power
My upstairs neighbor was noisy late at night. At like 2 am, he'd blast music and walk around with heavy feet. We had repeated conversations about it, but he blew us off. He bought us earplugs and told us to simply "deal with it." Unfortunately for him, the breaker box for the building was in our unit. After conducting a few tests with his friendly roommates who hated him just as much as we did, we zeroed in on the breaker to his room and an unoccupied area.
Guess who had strange power issues at night while he was being disruptive? He wasn't the brightest bulb in the box and he never suspected us. The landlord was aware of his disruptiveness and he was already on thin ice, so we asked him not to follow up on the guy's complaints and he was on board. After he got aggressive toward one of his roommates over an unrelated incident, he was kicked to the street at the end of his lease.
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7. That Sinking Feeling
When the house next door was being built, the "new" owners told the builders to use my electricity to build their house. When I said heck no, they put a really big generator on the border of my house and placed boards along the side to force the noise in my direction. Well after three days of that nonsense, they all went home for the weekend.
I went out with my sprinklers from the front and back and I let them run over it until Sunday night. Needless to say, after they walked over to start it on Monday, it sank in about six inches. They tried to tow it out with their truck but it sank too, and they had to call a heavy wrecker to pull themselves out as the truck sank to the doors.
They threatened to sue for damages but couldn't prove anything and all the other neighbors sided with me.
8. Attention Seeker
When I was between 10-13 years old, there was a girl next door who was two years younger than me. Her parents were extremely strange. We hardly saw them. The girl was basically an only child, as her older sibling was about 20 years older than her. As a result, she constantly craved attention from all the kids around us.
There would be times we would all be playing together, and she would just act weird. For example, she would try to lick us or would brag about things regarding her parents. However, the weirdest encounter I ever had with her was when it was just me and her in her house. She asked if I wanted to see something cool, so obviously, I said yes. I’ll never forget what she did next.
She then brought me to her bathroom, where she grabbed a diaper and proceeded to undress her bottom half and put on the diaper. She then had me watch as she pooped herself in the diaper. She even took the diaper off and showed me the poop to prove she had just gone in the diaper in front of me. This may have been the weirdest encounter I have had with anyone, EVER.
9. We All Got Burned
I had a neighbor who lived across the street and would park his commercial van on the road, impeding traffic. His son, who was 40, also lived there. Although I was irked by the van, I hated them for something much worse. One day, the son decided to burn some leaves and some of the insulation from some wiring, which was not permitted, as we lived in the suburbs with closely-packed houses.
The fire jumped out of his control set his yard ablaze, along with his neighbor’s and five other lots. The fire burned three homes, lit up a car, and melted four fences. It nearly burnt down a deck and almost collapsed an above-ground pool. This all occurred mid-afternoon, around 3 pm, when everyone was still at work.
The only reason it didn’t burn the whole block down was that an officer saw the black smoke from the highway as he was passing through, turned back around, and came to the neighborhood. Once he quickly realized he needed more than his standard-issue fire extinguisher, he called in the fire department. They put out the fire, but when they shut off the hydrants, the water system broke.
A pipe up the hill ruptured and was forced out of the ground. The pipe at the front of the subdivision a quarter-mile away, uphill, ruptured as well. A pipe three blocks away in a cul-de-sac also broke and began bubbling up through the garden in the center. Needless to say, it was an absolute disaster. Our entire pipe network started to fail because of that idiot's wrongdoing. Plus, the temperature had recently risen above freezing, which made things worse.
For two months, the water company kept finding leaks and main breaks. As soon as they replaced a section, something somewhere else in the subdivision suddenly failed. We constantly had yards and streets being torn up because of it. What made it even worse was that the authorities couldn't even charge him with anything because nobody actually saw him being irresponsible.
10. Watch Your Back
So this was almost 10 years ago. My dad moved to another state for work the summer I graduated high school. My dad had to leave a few months early for his scheduled start date and to have time to look for a new house while our family was packing the old one. Being unable to afford taking care of my 18-year-old self, I was forced to move with them much to my disappointment.
Still, my dad managed to pull some strings so that I could start my first job under him over the summer and get a jump start on enrolling at the local college. After a couple months of hotel living (paid for by dad’s company stipend) we found a great house that was relatively new, being rented out by the original owners. They had just finished building their new house by the lake and obviously didn't need their first house, so they thought renting it out would be a good investment.
This house was everything we were looking for, exactly where we wanted it to be. Near the schools for my siblings, near my dad's work, and with a pool and a rec room for movie nights and video games. The area and time of year made house hunting pretty tight at the time so my dad basically jumped on it. The landlord got the lease typed up from a template and my dad reviewed the whole thing before signing it.
Now my dad is a very meticulous person and has always ingrained the idea of keeping an eye out for loopholes that could be used against you. Read every word of every contract you sign and if something doesn’t seem clear, ASK! He isn’t a lawyer by any means and has made false assumptions himself, but he knows how to search law books if he needs to.
This is important later. We move in and get all settled, but quickly start to learn the truth. The landlords didn’t really want to leave their old house, they just couldn’t afford to keep both without extra income. They essentially viewed my family not as tenants, but as groundskeepers that paid them for permission to maintain their house.
One of the landlords for the most part wasn’t actually that bad, but the woman clearly wore the pants in the relationship and the man was busy with his full-time job as the local postmaster (also important later), so the woman did most of the landlord-type things. It was very clear that she no longer had anything else to do now since she had been a stay-at-home mom and their youngest daughter had started school.
I will say that I did not like this woman from the start. There were disturbing signs. There was a comment she made when we toured the house. In a very thick southern accent, it was something along the lines of not needing to worry about her younger daughter (who was adopted) growing tall enough for sports because she’s Asian.
This woman was a cartoonish stereotype who gave off narcissistic, white savior vibes. The orphanage lady from Despicable Me crossed with Paula Dean comes to mind. She also definitely did not like my mom and siblings when she first met them, as she had only met my dad and I who are white as white bread, but my mom is Hispanic so her and some of my siblings are more on the toasted whole wheat side.
She acted like it was a privilege that she was letting us live in “her house”. This lady would nitpick everything that wasn’t perfect about the house and loved showing up unannounced. We would get notes on the door about needing to water the flowers more, or that the grass is supposed to be mowed every Saturday, or don’t cut the invasive vines she planted and that were growing up the backside of the house.
I got up early to mow the lawn the next Saturday after the note to get her off our backs, and halfway through, a truck showed up with a paid lawn crew. Obviously, she hadn’t said a word about this to my parents. She would come to the door when my parents were gone and say she left something in the garage (which they had, like paint and insulation and other remodeling supplies), but then went upstairs because she was “checking on something she talked to my dad about”.
My dad of course had not spoken to her at all, and this was obviously an issue for my parents. But she didn’t stop there. At one point she tried to get my five-year-old brother to let her in right after he got off the bus. This was at a time of day when both my parents were usually working and I had just gotten out of class, but our middle siblings would have been home already.
So he wasn’t by himself, just no adults yet. To her surprise though, my dad had stayed home that day and parked inside the garage for once. He was so angry. He immediately told her she needed to leave and typed up an email to the male landlord stating that if they tried to enter the property again he would be going to court about it. This included not being permitted to enter the backyard.
She had obviously done this on numerous occasions, but the lease stated they had to give 48-hours’ notice if they needed to enter the property for ANY reason. They did not take this well and things just kept escalating. She would schedule “maintenance” on days we had planned for parties or family events, and we still have no idea how she knew when they would be.
She even had a tree removal service show up on my brother’s birthday to remove all the trees along the back fence. Supposedly for safety reasons, but that was obviously a lie. It did however prevent us from using the pool at our pool party. She would also claim all sorts of things weren’t allowed on account of HOA violations that my parents knew were false because the HOA president was also my little brother’s Sunday school teacher and they had brought up the issues with her.
The HOA president told us that she was a nightmare when they had lived in the neighborhood, and still showed up to the monthly meetings because she was still technically an owner and was using the meetings as an excuse to check up on us every chance she got, even asking the neighbors about us. The HOA was actually very lax in its regulations and mostly dealt with just the shared spaces and garbage removal.
My parents of course started looking for a place to move near the end of the lease and managed to secure a place three months before the end, but didn’t say anything to the landlords. Well come 30 days to the day before the end of the lease, she shows up at the door for no apparent reason. As I was the only adult home, I answered the door.
Just as I opened the door to hear her excuse, the mail truck pulled up behind her. She starts walking away as if she changed her mind because she thought my dad was home to talk to her, and I step out to grab the mail since it’s here. The postman gets out of his truck and says he has some certified mail that needs to be signed for by an adult. I still get chills thinking of the next events.
First, she pipes up, pointing at me: “He’s an adult, he can take it”. It was an eviction notice indicating that our landlords (standing three feet from me) had decided we were not keeping up to the standards of our lease and would not be renewing it. As such we should be out within 30 days. Well knowing that we were already moving, I just accepted it and went back inside.
It was very clear that she was there specifically to make sure we got the notice, which was only valid from the day it was officially received. She of course also knew exactly when it would get there, and likely timed it as such (again so that my parents weren’t home) because her husband, remember, was the postmaster. I called my dad right away and he was fuming.
Luckily we had actually already gotten the keys for the new house as the previous tenants were out the week before, so we were totally moved within two weeks and my dad and I spent the last two weeks going over every inch of the house to make sure there wasn’t a chip of paint or carpet stain in sight. We even went as far as repainting a couple rooms using the leftover paint in the garage.
Out of spite, my dad decided not to pay the last month's rent because we had paid first and last month's rent and security deposit when we moved in. Well, a month later, the couple have been harassing my parents about the last month's rent, and then claimed that we owed further beyond the security deposit because of all the “repairs” they had to make after we left.
We knew that was total nonsense because we had honestly left the place better than we got it. So one day we went by (we still lived pretty close) and peeked in the windows. My dad was wild with fury when we looked. Turns out, they were doing a full remodel and probably trying to get us to pay for it. This set a fire under my dad they would regret.
In that state, landlords are required to set up a specific bank account for security deposits that both the landlord and renter have access to that is not to be touched during the term of the lease. My dad, a couple months earlier, had asked the husband for the account information, having just recently discovered that rule while looking into ways to fend off their constant harassment.
Dad had only asked a couple of times and kind of let it slide because he was pretty high up the regional totem pole at work and always busy, including a lot of traveling. Now, however, he was on a mission and started demanding the security deposit be returned. In one particular phone call with the husband that was getting very heated, dad started spouting off the specific reference that he was reading right off the state’s website.
He very clearly heard the woman from the background say to her husband, “Is that the money that’s in the safe”? CHECKMATE. My dad immediately chimed in on not only that they had failed to meet state requirements, but also that the MINIMUM penalty, as stated on the state’s website in front of him, was forfeiture of the security deposit, but also any other dues and fees paid before move-in.
So not only were we not behind on rent and owing cost of repairs, but they actually owed us the deposit AND two months’ rent. My dad immediately pointed that out to them and added just to rub in that they couldn’t get out of it because ALL of their conversations for the last few months had been recorded either through email or the recording app on his phone.
11. A Little Too Honest
I live alone with my five cats who are my babies. I'm gone daily from 7:30 am to at least 6:00 pm, if not longer. Four of my cats are seniors. Two came to me because their first “parents” were elderly and had to move to a nursing home. My cats only go out on the front steps for a little while and spend most of their time on the back deck, in a fenced yard.
So I get home last night and the first thing two of my seniors do is go out the front door to sit on the warm cement and wait for the neighbor kids to come give them pets. It’s their nightly ritual (the other three hate children).
After 15-20 minutes, I hear the bang on the screen door that means they want in and I go let them in. There are a couple of kids still there and the one little asks what my real name is. I tell her. She informs me her mom said my name is Crazy Cat Lady, but she didn’t think that was a real name. It’s always good to know what your neighbors think.
12. Cruella De Cars
We live in a courtyard of eight houses. One neighbor, let's call her Cruella, controls the parking spaces. Having moved in one year ago, she halved our parking allowance from two to one car for no reason. She, at 37 years old, bullied an 18-year-old who lives with his parents. Us other residents collectively responded. Now, she has two parking spaces, down from five, and hides when we're out front. She will never win.
13. What Could Have Been
My next-door neighbor when I was growing up was bipolar-schizophrenic. He was always doing bizarre and invasive things, like repainting our front door with this awful purple color when we were on vacation. After his wife left him, he parked his car under our balcony, doused it in gasoline, and set it on fire. Luckily, the fire department was quick to respond. But here's the creepiest part...
We later found out he had installed a deadbolt lock on our fire escape beforehand.
14. Cinderblock Surprise
The street I grew up on was paved to a certain point, and the rest was a dirt road that ran up through a farm. A family lived in a trailer on that dirt road and their son, Gary, would FLY down the road in his '84 Lincoln. We, as kids, were always riding bikes or playing hockey in the street, and pretty much every parent had complained about Gary to his parents.
They didn't care. We had county leaf pick-up, so we could blow all our leaves into a pile near the street and a truck would come by and suck them all up. This was Gary's favorite time of the year as he would drive his car through the leaves with multiple passes to hit both sides of the street. My neighbor across the street was fed up with him and decided to act.
He put cinder blocks in his leaf pile. It was 2 am and the neighborhood was awakened by a loud BOOM followed by people laughing on their front porches as Gary's '84 Lincoln had a cinder block through his grill.
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15. This Ain’t No Country Club
Some neighbors lived a block away, on the same block as a country club and golf course. Million-dollar riverfront homes would start about seven houses away from them. However, they wouldn’t ever cut their lawn, or clear their snow. They would keep a pile of old mattresses and garbage in their backyard/alley. They would also have 'meetups' in their front yard, complete with cars parked on the sidewalk and bonfires.
I even caught one of them going through my shed last summer at 2 AM.
16. He Was A Derelict Dr. Dolittle
My neighbor to the rear of my house had farm animals, including a couple of mini-horses, a donkey, and some other unidentified creatures. He kept them in pens that backed up directly onto the privacy fence, separating his property from mine. The fence was the farthest possible distance from his house and the closest possible distance to mine, about 15 feet from my kitchen window.
He didn’t tend to his animals' living conditions as he should have. The result of this was horrifying—I frequently stepped outside my house and smelled the sweet aromas of barnyard animal waste. I couldn’t open my windows because of the odor, which got worse in the summer. I had to call animal control on him, and they ended up taking two of his full-sized horses away because their hooves were rotting off.
We were zoned for residential and agricultural, so there were no grounds for him to get rid of the animals.
17. The Ballad Of Frank
Meet my neighbor, Frank. He’s been my neighbor since I moved to the neighborhood around 8-9 years ago. To give a bit of a description of Frank, he’s a middle-aged divorced man with several kids, a love for riding motorcycles in the middle of the night, has a knack for confrontation, and has some sort of a superiority complex. This already sounds like a troublemaker, but you better brace yourself.
Here is a highlight reel from Frank’s extensive catalog of things he’s done. When we (my family) first moved into the neighborhood, we heard Frank might stir some trouble, but we didn’t have a terrible experience with the guy until a couple years later. Around this time, he picked up the hobby of flying drones. Actually, it was more like flying drones over people’s houses and looking at them with the drone’s camera.
Specifically, he liked to fly them over houses with teenage girls living there. It actually got to the point where he was put on the news, and he defended his actions in a pretty idiotic way. One of these girls that had been spied on by him talked about his desire to peep on her when she was in her pool to the news as well. While it did attract attention from the news, he was never faced with charges.
He basically got off scot-free. You’ll notice that this becomes a theme as the story goes on. Even with this attention on him with his perverted tactics, he still flew his drone every day, though he seemingly quit flying it over houses. He had a much stupider idea. Instead, he tried following people with it. This failed on his very first attempt.
On this attempt, he was following my sister and her friend (who were about eight at the time) when the drone crashed into a tree they were under. The drone lost power and dropped right in front of them. The drone fell with some force to it, to the point where if it had hit one of the girls, it might’ve done some actual damage considering how young they were and all.
My father confronted him about this, but all Frank did was scream and curse at him for daring to talk to him in such a manner. Although my dad ended the confrontation quickly due to not wanting to waste his time with a screamer, Frank decided he needed payback. You know, for something that was his fault. Remember when I wrote that he loved riding his motorcycle in the middle of the night?
For the next few days, he would wait till 1 or 2 am to rev his engine in front of our driveway and screech past our house at crazy speeds. Because we never went up to him and got mad, he grew bored from not being confronted. Not much happened other than his occasional late-night motorbike rides until about a year after the drone incident.
Something I didn’t mention at the start was that he has a love for owning an excessive amount of cars, motorcycles, and boats. Obviously, this takes up a large amount of space, more than a usual driveway and garage can hold. So, he began parking all of his cars and boats along the street. It got to the point where despite his house being about four down from ours, the vehicles were just about blocking our driveway.
He had them parked overnight, which our HOA does not allow. He got several violations for this, and even to the point where he got into a trial for excessive problems. Now, this started in late 2018. To this day, this court battle continues. This is due to extreme luck on his part as well as delay tactics. These tactics are appalling. Basically, he keeps writing letters to switch judges.
He does this by saying that the current one assigned to his case will be biased toward him, even if he and the judge have never spoken. They keep allowing him new judges to gather more evidence on him, but for now, he believes he’s winning. Once again, he gets off without any immediate punishment. The boat/car situation has been the main problem with him for these past few years.
But he’s done one other thing very recently (two days ago) which inspired me to share the story of Frank. Basically, about a month ago, Frank decided instead of wasting his valuable time walking his dogs and allowing them to use the bathroom, he would instead open his door and allow them to run free around the neighborhood until he saw fit.
These dogs aren’t regular-sized dogs though. They’re big dogs, and while I don’t know the exact breeds, I can tell they have Rottweiler features. He did this a few times before my dad decided to record him doing this, as it’s against the law. Frank did not like this. So after having a raging tantrum at my father, he began parking his large car right in front of our driveway.
It’s actually OK for him to do this, as it doesn’t completely block us from backing out of the driveway. It’s still very annoying, but knowing how much he loves to be confronted, we have not said a word to him. In the end, we were the ones getting revenge. It’s almost comical when we’re outside and we watch him park his car right in front of our house, and then he proceeds to make the LONG walk to his house.
Since it’s the summer and very hot outside where we live, we thought he’d stop by now. However, he’s continued for weeks. About a week ago, he attached a trailer to the already large car, making it more difficult for us to exit our driveway. But still, above board. At least, until he used a piece of cardboard to replace his license plate on his trailer.
We sent an email to code enforcement, but we didn’t call in since we knew they were already dealing with other Frank-caused problems. Two days ago, code enforcement knocked on our door. He said someone called in the car with the trailer and assumed it was ours because it was obviously parked right in front of our house.
We told him it was not ours, and it was Frank’s instead, and that we had video proof to back that up. As soon as we told him that, he had a surprised look on his face. He then revealed that Frank was the one who had called the vehicle in. That’s right: he called in his own parked trailer to get us in trouble. My mother wanted to walk the code enforcer to Frank’s house to have him dealt with.
The man said he was told by the higher-ups not to have any contact with him. Apparently, no one can contact him directly, since they don’t want him to have a harsh reaction. So for now, he gets off without a hitch. His karma will come soon. Frank has claimed several times throughout the years that he will move, yet never has. My parents have told me that I cannot speak to him as long as he’s living here.
Ever since then, I’ve been waiting to tell him my thoughts on him right before he leaves his house for a new one. I was in second grade when we moved here, and in fifth grade when we started having problems with him. Now, as I begin to move into junior year of high school, I doubt I will still live in this house the day he finally leaves.
Though I plan to come back home to celebrate the day he leaves if I’m in college when that happens.
18. The Long Goodbye
Eight months ago, family of six moves in next door. Mom, dad, four young kids. I've known the dad for years, and the mother is a relative of a friend. Had my reservations, but was polite anyway. The trouble started quickly. The mom and dad have a volatile relationship. Mom drinks heavily every weekend, staggers home at midnight, has a screaming match with dad.
The kids are screamed at or ignored constantly. Unwashed, fed whatever they can find, which is often not much, as drink comes before food shopping. The kids are also expected to get themselves ready for school and nursery. The eldest, who is seven, is responsible for making sure the rest are ready to leave when the mom gets up. The inevitable happened.
They were reported to social services. The schools know about this and are "supporting the children". In April, the weather turned nice. The neighbors opened the door to let the kids out in the garden, and the smell made me close all our doors and windows. I’ve spoken to the landlord on multiple occasions, but her hands are tied due to the tight tenant laws here.
They are paying rent sporadically, so there's not much the landlord can do. Then, two weeks ago, I woke up to an envelope behind my door. It had keys and a note asking me to pass them on to the landlord as they'd moved. I called the landlord, who came round. Me and the landlord went in to check that they'd left. I couldn’t believe what I saw.
I've never seen a house look so bad. Dirty nappies everywhere—in kitchen cupboards, piled up in the corner of the living room. Poop wiped on the walls. Empty food tins all over the house. Writing on the walls. Broken bottles all over. The house was rented partly furnished, and all the furniture is broken and stained. The washing machine has a load of wet, moldy clothes inside.
There are letters from debt collectors piled up on the porch, and there is no electricity. There are holes in the internal doors, and two of the doors are missing. The landlord has spent the last two weeks documenting the mess, which has been sent on to social services and the school. She has had to empty everything out of the house.
She's basically had to rip it back to the brick in most of the rooms, and the floorboards will need to be replaced. As far as we can tell, the mom and dad have split up (again), and the mom’s disappeared with the kids, probably to avoid social services and the debt collectors. She'll turn up eventually, because she's not clever enough to manage to hide for long, but the landlord is out tens of thousands of dollars, and she's got no chance of getting anything back. I'm just glad they've gone, and I don't have to live next door to them anymore!
19. A Bad Situation All Around
My neighbor had two big dogs that barked a lot when she was gone from home. Polite requests to do something about it always resulted in, "It is not my dogs barking." Take note that this was often late at night when we're trying to sleep. Sometimes, she would leave them outside all night alone to bark while we tried to sleep closeby. In our county, barking for more than one hour is a unlawful.
We took her to a barking "court," actually a hearing, where parties present evidence in front of a "judge," We took her there four times and she always lost. She also never paid the fines. Finally, her soon to be ex-husband came over and took the dogs to the animal shelter. He was tired of all the neighbors calling him to complain even though he did not live with her.
She could not get them back from the county shelter without paying the fines. But this story has a tragic end. They were ultimately put down. She had never trained them and had no control over them at all. They were basically dangerous and un-adoptable. She eventually lost her house to foreclosure after her divorce. It was a bad situation for all concerned.
20. Full Stop
My old boss had a problem with tipsy kids taking his mother's mailbox. He got tired of replacing them, so he told me to go out there and make sure whatever hits it doesn't keep going. I bought a six-foot-long steel post with under three feet sticking out of the ground, then poured concrete around it and installed the mailbox.
The next tipsy kid that hit it never got a chance to take out the rest of the mailboxes on the street.
21. Crowdsourcing
I moved to a small rural town where everyone knows everyone. The townspeople love to inject the “will of the Lord” into everything. It’s quite annoying. I was just some random guy nobody knew. Last year was my first time having a garden and I was so proud of my tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. I told a trusted neighbor to help herself to some of my crops.
When the time came to pick a bunch of tomatoes and peppers, I went to the garden and found it absolutely picked clean from the day before. Knowing that the frail old lady didn’t do this, I set up cameras in the garden to catch the thieves in the act. Over the course of a week, I caught four different fully-grown adults on camera snooping and taking from my garden.
I did some research and found out that all but one of them worked full-time and they were in no need of food or financial assistance. I left the needy family out of this. I went to the community Facebook page with 5,000 members and posted pictures of them stealing from my garden with the caption: “God blessed me with this beautiful bounty and I’m so thankful he led the less fortunate and hungry to my garden to nourish their HONEST souls.”
I sat back, and watched the notifications and hate comments fly. Never again has a tomato been picked without someone asking.
22. Serial Mower
I lived next door to a guy who would mow his grass every single day. He was nice enough to start at 8 AM, although I think that was only because according to the law, that was the earliest he could do it. Same thing with the rain. As soon as it was over, out came the mower. At that time I would work until 2 AM or 4 AM, so sometimes I didn't get to bed till 6 AM. It sucked, and earplugs didn't seem to help much. I moved out ASAP.
23. Killing Them With Kindness
Believe it or not, my worst neighbors were awful because they were too nice. They pretty much lived in their driveway. Every day that it wasn't raining out, they would be out on their lawn or driveway, and they would hang out there all day long. They'd talk to all the neighbors, play with their kids, and generally be nice people.
They would BBQ on their driveway a couple of times a week and invite everyone in the cul de sac over when they did. Although it may sound pretty cool, it eventually became too much to handle. This went on every day and every week. Having someone knock on your door twice a week every week, especially after you have turned them down time and time again, was too much.
I couldn’t walk my dog or even just come out of my front door without being greeted and forced to make several minutes of small talk. It got to the point where coming out of my house gave me anxiety because I just wanted to be left alone. Even my kids were getting tired of their kids insisting they play with them every time they tried to go outside. They were just killing us with kindness, and it was driving my whole family nuts.
24. Just Play Nice
So one day I ran into a former co-worker and we went to get coffee and talk about what was going on since I left work. So his parents have a very large home and were talking about downsizing and getting a smaller home because all the kids are grown and gone. They were talking to some of their friends about it. Well, one friend piped up.
They said they knew about a friend of theirs that might be interested in selling their three-bedroom home and would set up a meeting with them. This couple was getting up in their years and couldn’t take care of their home anymore and were about to put their home on the market and move into a retirement home. The parents liked the home, so a deal was made and everything started falling into place.
The parents put their home up for sale and the elderly couple said that they would need two months before they could move into a retirement home. They said that would be no problem because they were in the process of selling their home and they had a few people interested and were waiting to see who would make an offer. Well, the offer was made and their home sold.
They had to put some of their stuff in storage, sold/donated the stuff they didn’t want, and moved into a hotel for about a month. The elderly couple got into a retirement home after a month and a half. The parents had a general contractor go in and make needed repairs and then moved in. Now, this home is on a corner lot. This corner lot is bigger than the rest of the lots in this housing tract.
It has a very large backyard and had a wooden gym set they had no use for. The parents said that this needed to go and called one of their friends and offered it to them since they have young kids. A few weeks later they come over and take the thing apart and loaded it on a trailer. Said thank you, and left. Now it’s the start of spring and it’s getting warm.
One day, the mom saw a strange sight. A few kids come running past their house and towards their backyard. She then hears a loud scream and these kids run back down the street. About 10 minutes later there is someone banging on the door and trying to hurt the doorbell. The mom opens the door and there are two mothers, with a bunch of kids behind them.
She asked what they needed and they said they wanted to talk to the elderly couple about what happened to the wooden gym set that was in the backyard. The mom said that she and her husband now own this home. Well, it went from 0 to 100. One of the mothers cut her off and said that she didn’t believe her and that she must be a caregiver or something.
She demanded to see the elderly couple. Again the mom said that they owned this home. The woman cut her off again and said whatever and that the wooden gym set belonged to the neighborhood and that they had no right to have it removed, and what are their kids are going to do now? The mother said that they didn’t want or need it, sorry.
Then the second mother cuts in and said that it needed to be replaced for the good of the neighborhood—and with a bigger one so the kids have something to play on during the summer. The owner said that is not going to happen and since they. were being rude/demanding, she just shut the door in their face. They scream that they were going to call the authorities for theft and sue them.
About an hour later, the inevitable happened. Officers knock on the door and want to know what is going on with a wooden gym set? So, she invited the officers in and explained to them that they now own this home and had the gym set taken out because they have other plans for the backyard and the gym set was in the way. She explained that she didn’t know what arrangements the previous owners had but that was not her concern.
Plus, the way the neighbors just came up to her door pounding and screaming at her was not how to make friends or be good neighbors. Also, there was nothing in the deed/title about the gym set belonging to the neighborhood. They talked some more and the officers thanked her for her time and said that if the two women come back to call and they will come and deal with them.
It seems these ladies have had run-ins before and are well known to them. So, now that the wooden gym set is out of the way, the parents can get some real improvements done. So what better way to deal with hot summers, you got it, put in an in-ground pool and hot tub, and what better time to do this than in the springtime. The digging begins.
Since the house is on a corner lot, all the work is on the side that cannot be seen by the entitled ladies. Besides, they are at the other end of the street screaming at those neighbors to set up their above-ground pools so the kids can go swimming when it starts to get hot. Now, the parents are friends with their next-door neighbors and the ones at the end of the street.
They told them that this goes on every summer and that the wooden gym set was a magnet for the kids and that they were very loud and demanding of the previous owners. This is when the whole story came out. That elderly couple hated the two ladies and their kids, but the women would just strong-arm them into doing stuff like letting the kids on the equipment, make them lunches, etc.
So the mom told the neighbors not to give in to their demands, and that they had a plan. The hole is dug (big hole) and all the workers are staying out of site so the bad moms don’t see what’s going on. A brick wall is also being put up along the back of the property, still leaving room to complete the pool/hot tub. This wall will be about 10 feet tall with a special topping.
If anyone tries to get over it, they won’t be able to get a grip. They also built a wall between their neighbors, including between the two houses. All the gates installed have spikes on top and have special locks. Now the pool is done and the progress on the wall is moving along. When it is done, it will be about three feet from the sidewalk. The water trucks have been and gone and the pool is full.
The pumps are running, lights are something else, and they can change colors! Great for night parties. Now, since the parents like camping, one of the things the wall will block is the spot for their camping trailer on the side of the house. There are two large gates that open so the dad can back the trailer in and lock the gates. There is also a wall between the pool and parking spot for the camper, also with a spiked gate.
For the first time this spring, the entitled moms take notice of some changes that have been made. At first, they are staying back because they are still trying to strong-arm the neighbors at the other end of the street, to get them to get their pools set up. You know summer is right around the corner, and that water needs to get warm, right???
The parents are just counting the days until they come knocking, asking about when they were going to put that wooden gym set back up. Well, are they in for a surprise. It’s the beginning of summer and getting warm. The women are angry that the neighbors at the other end of the street haven’t put up their pools and are making it known how mad they are and having a meltdown.
It’s going to get hot so what are they going to do, they need those pools up. The parents are having a housewarming and a neighborhood pool party and only invited those on the corners by them and those neighbors at the other end of the street. On the day of the pool party, everyone that’s invited is heading over in their swim gear and towels with food.
Everyone is having a good time, swimming, and the BBQ is in mass production with steaks, hotdogs, and hamburgers. Well, the entitled moms come out and go to the neighbors at the end of the street. Would you know it, they are not home, and no pool either. They are mad and then they smell the BBQ and start back up the street. The closer they get, the stronger the BBQ smell is, and the sound of people having fun.
The sound of kids playing and having fun can be heard. Now they think that the gym set is back and go around the side of the house…only to find that the wall goes all the way around, and they can’t see anything. The sound of people talking is being heard and it sounds like everyone is having a good time. Then comes the sound of kids splashing IN A POOL.
They quickly go up to the front door and start knocking and ringing the doorbell. Now the dad is no stranger to these women, so he opens the door and asks what they wanted. They first tried to demand to know why there was such a big wall, second was why they weren’t invited to the party. Third was they were going home to get their kids and come and use the pool. He had the perfect response.
He said, the wall is mandatory by city code when there is a pool. Second, you burned that bridge a long time ago. Third, NO YOU WON’T SHOW UP WITH YOUR KIDS AND EXPECT TO USE OUR POOL. At this point, they started to protest and he just shut the door. They said they were calling the authorities (again) So, about an hour and a half later officers show up.
The dad invites them in and can see the women and their kids across the street all dressed in swimsuits with towels. The officers were led to the backyard and were greeted by everyone, the mom said hello and asked if they liked what they had done to the backyard.
The officers said it was one heck of an improvement. The mom asked if they would like something to eat and have a sit while they talked about the women. Both officers said yes and thank-you and went off-duty for lunch and talked about the women. Other neighbors told the officers what the women had been doing and that this was the last time they would let them get away with it.
No more pools, no more feeding them. They were done with them and their kids. The officers said they understood and couldn’t give any details but they were well known for getting into trouble. They also said that a report would be made, so if need be, they could request a restraining order against them. After about 30 minutes, the officers said they had to get back on duty and said thank you again for lunch and to enjoy your pool.
The parents walked them to the door and bid them a good day. Then came the cherry on top. They stood in the doorway and could still see the moms and kids still waiting across the street. They waved to the officers and closed the door. The mom went back to the party while the dad was still watching from a window. The women ran up to the officers.
They talked for a few minutes, and the dad said he heard them start screaming, and the officers driving away with them just standing there, the kids crying and the moms just standing in the middle of the street trying to figure out what to do next. They had lost the gym set, and now, couldn’t force their neighbors into letting them use their pool and feeding them and their kids.
I think it just hit them that they would have to now deal with their own kids for the summer. The look on their faces was priceless. By the way, there is a spot set aside in the back corner away from the pool for a “wooden gym set” when the parents have grandkids. Now that’s Karma.
25. What’s Yours Is Mine
We have had issues with our neighbor since we moved in four years ago. Besides being an inconsiderate weirdo who spends a half-hour revving his motorcycle at 6 am, he also planted trees on our property. Fortunately, the neighbor recently fulfilled his life-long dream of becoming a Florida man and I have thoroughly enjoyed sleeping past 6 am for the past few months.
I was randomly scrolling through Zillow to see if the house sold yet and imagine my surprise when I saw my property listed as part of his land for sale, including the stake that shows where his property begins on the far right of the picture. I contacted his real estate agent and she came out one day when I was at work. My husband took her back to show her the property line.
She said the neighbor said that was his property. My husband had a printout from the GIS with my name listed as the owner and she agreed to contact the potential buyers to let them know. The trees he planted are ugly and falling apart but I figured I would ask the potential buyers if they wanted to move them before I get to work with a chainsaw but we haven't heard back from the real estate agent.
I went back there to determine the best way to remove the trees and discovered that before he left, he planted some kind of tree seedling, which turned into a tree with thorns all over it mixed in with the sick pine trees. It was a serious “what the heck” moment. One would think a real estate agent would spend five minutes verifying property lines before listing the house but what do I know.
26. It Won’t Be Long
We used to live next door to a horrible couple. They seemed nice at first, all smiles, but they soon dropped the façade. There are a bunch of stories that lead to us moving houses, to a much nicer place later on. We decided to get chickens, first checking with our closer neighbours if this was okay, to which they all agreed.
However, when we upgraded from three to six chickens, the couple to our right sent a complaint to the council, claiming we were keeping non-domestic animals. A quick phone call to the council confirmed we were fine to keep chickens, and our reply to the couple included the fact that the Latin name for a chicken is Gallus Gallus Domesticus.
Another time, we received a note saying that after we took our Caravan out for a holiday, they noticed how much light was blocking out, being in our front yard. They asked us to remove it, and also to kill three of our chickens. We obviously refused, so they told us we were going to pay for a fence, taller than the Caravan and blocking out even more light, to be built between our properties.
We also refused. One day, we came back to see builders erecting a fence and tearing up the picket fence on OUR property. Apparently, they had been told they could remove it by the meaner of the couple. My dad threatened to call law enforcement and the builders just left, causing the couple to confront my dad later that day.
After this incident, they started being vile. They would bang cupboard doors and literally laugh like cackling witches, all of which we could hear through the walls of our home. They would drive slowly alongside my mum walking my brother to school and glare at her for minutes at a time, and once, one of them yelled out the window at my dad, calling me and my siblings brats while we were there.
Soon after this, we moved out, but we have in on good authority that their new neighbors are extremely loud compared to us, so I don't think it'll be long before they start on their new neighbors.
27. A Horrible Trade-Off
I started mowing our lawn when I was 11 or 12. We only had a push mower and it sucked. Our next-door neighbor had a riding lawn mower and told me I could use it whenever I wanted; I just had to leave the gas tank full. I was ecstatic. Then my dad told me, in exchange for that favor, I should mow my neighbor's lawn too.
Well okay, I figured I could still do that in less time on a riding mower. But, then, my dad decided he didn't like it when the other next-door neighbor's yard wasn't even with ours, and he felt bad that I was mowing only one of our neighbors' lawns and not the others. Like, he didn't want to show partiality to one neighbor. Mighty big of him.
So at that point, I was mowing three lawns, over four acres, every Saturday. Luckily, a new neighbor moved into that third house within a couple of years and he wanted to mow his own lawn.
28. Not An Olive Branch
I have an old neighbor who represents maybe one of five white households in a mixed minority neighborhood. He likes to call code enforcement on everyone for every little thing. He did it once when my trash can lid didn’t close completely. It’s gotten to a point where the code enforcement guy just texts me directly because he’s obligated to respond to every complaint.
I get someone to do a massive trim of my three pecan trees every other spring. This past fall, after an incident in which he contacted the city over my just expired registration, I got a knock on my door from the power company. They were present “on behalf” of my neighbor. They had recently fixed the street lamp dividing our front property which had been out for two years, and a singular large pecan tree branch was preventing light from shining on his driveway.
They couldn’t do anything to force me to trim the branch, but they were still requesting I do so on behalf of my neighbor. So naturally, this year, when it was time to trim my pecan trees, can you guess which branch didn’t get cut?
Shutterstock
29. The RC Man
I'm in a new neighborhood and THAT guy, thus far, is this guy who is 50ish and has a ton of RC vehicles. He often sits on his porch and speeds them around. I've seen half a dozen different cars and a helicopter. The other day I saw two boys playing with their RC car. One ran over and knocked on the guy’s door. They talked for a minute, and the kid ran back over to his friend and they both brought their car to him. He began working on it, apparently fixing it.
Wikimedia Commons, Santeri Viinamäki
30. My Neighbor Was Pure Poison
My old neighbor would stay up until midnight on most nights, but once or twice a week, he would stay up until 2 am partying in his garage and blasting music. I was in school and had to wake up early to go to class and get homework done—I didn't want to hear it. I talked to him a couple of times, and he said he would cool it, but he didn't.
I finally got tired of it and called the authorities. I was shocked with what happened next—turns out, he was friends with them, so they didn't do anything, and he retaliated by putting sugar in my gas tank. The next night, I called the sheriff's office. Same story, except now they were getting mad at me for calling them because a guy was blasting his music in the morning.
So this time, he put anti-freeze on our patio while I was at school and poisoned my dog. She started having kidney problems and seizures. However, I couldn’t prove anything, so I bit my tongue until one day I spoke to the maintenance guy. He told me that the guy had lived there a long time and was good friends with the landlords.
He also told me that he had the authorities called on him numerous times. Apparently, he argued with his wife often, broke things in their house, and drank nonstop. We told him the story of our dog, and he said he wouldn't put it past him to do something like that. We got the vet to pull lab work to confirm anti-freeze in our dog's system. He got evicted shortly after that.
31. Call And Reply
A couple of years ago, a new family moved into a house across the street. My kid nephew quickly made friends with their son. Things seemed good…until it went downhill fast. One of the first incidents was with their dogs. They have two aggressive dogs who love to maim other people’s pets and jump on passerbys. They refuse to keep the dogs indoors or in a pen, so the dogs run the neighborhood.
The dogs destroyed all of our chickens (on camera) and are prone to lunging at any cat they see. The father complained to my mom about getting “thousands” in dog tickets, but he still refuses to control them. Their son and my nephew would get along at first, but then their son became violent and wanted to hurt my nephew because they both liked the same girl.
Then once, the kid told me he wanted to kick my dog in the face...“just because”. So he did. One day, my dog was in our side yard and this boy ran over and kicked her right in the face. He did this in front of my nephews and their friend. The dog nicked his leg. He cried and his parents called the authorities, who took my dog away to the pound despite their dog having bit many people in the past and not being taken away.
We later got her back after one of the officers agreed that our dog was defending herself on our property. Any possibly good relationship with these people was over then. Later on, their family was involved in a bad wreck. Feeling sorry for them, we bought balloons and candy for their kids. They were happy to get them and things seemed good again with our neighbor.
We had just lost my father to cancer that week and were desperate to spread any positivity around. The paradise didn’t last. That night, the neighbors had a large number of people over. Everyone was drinking and loud and my nephew had been over there playing with their boy, but we had him come home after the “party” started. Not long after he came home, their little boy showed up at our door.
He asked if my nephew could help him find his cellphone because my nephew was the last one to see him playing with it. Strange, okay, but we agreed—only after dinner was done. He came home and we were eating when the kid and an adult man showed up at the door. “Can he help us find his phone”? “We just made dinner”, I said. “Just ten minutes, please”.
I didn’t want to be rude and so I let him. Soon he came back. No, they didn’t find the kid’s phone. We’re eating again. It’s dark out. All of a sudden, someone’s at the door again. I open it to three adult women. They’ve been drinking and are about to beat down our door. They’re screaming and cussing, saying my young nephew must have taken their phone.
My mother tells them to leave and they won’t. They’re screaming and my mom yells back for them to leave. They keep it up. I try to calm it down by going outside with the women. They are too aggressive. They claim we have the “$1,000 phone” and they “tracked it to our house”. They’re cussing me out more and finally go back to their house.
Jeez. I sit down with my nephew. He’s never taken anything, but I give them the benefit of the doubt and look through his things. He swears on his grandfather that he did not take this phone. My nightmare gets deeper and darker. The doorbell rings again. I open the door to the father. He’s a huge man, probably over 300 lbs, and is so far in his cups that he’s falling on my porch.
He demands to speak to my nephew. I say no. I do not want this adult around my 10-year-old. As if he’s never heard no before, his sweet voice turns violent. He stands straight and begins screaming and cussing. He’s pushing in our door. My mom, me, my teenage nephew, and his teenage friend are holding this man back as he tries to push into our house.
He makes eye contact with our 14-year-old and tells him not to look at him. My nephew keeps staring. The dad shoves me and my mother and breaks in to try and hurt my nephew. We all shove him back outside. He’s cussing us the whole way as he walks into our front yard. In our yard, we see the entire party of people—they’re about to jump us. 20 people, maybe more.
My nephew calls emergency. I demand these people leave. The dad is trying to get my 14-year-old nephew to fight him. What the heck? My mom tells them to get off our property. The man begins to rant at her. He calls her several names, which she ignores. Then he keeps going. “Where’s your old man? Where’s your old man? Oh, that’s right. He’s dead!”
He goes, “I bet he died to get away from you”. They finally go back to their house while still cussing at us from afar. Finally, officers arrived. They weren’t any help. “You didn’t have it on video, so we can’t detain them”, they say. They write some city tickets and say we could go to court and state our case against them, that’s the best they could do.
Even though they broke into our house. Admitted to it. Put their hands on me and my mother. In front of several witnesses. Later on, they encourage us to drop the charges and get cameras for our property instead. Because if we don’t drop the charges, these people will retaliate against us. We dropped it. We were grieving and emotional. We couldn’t handle a court hearing.
Here and there they say something to us, or have their friends do it. Our mailbox was knocked over. Their friends stand in the street and flip us off. They kept making remarks loudly from their porch as we installed the outdoor cameras. After living here for 20 years, we are ready to move. Oh, by the way: Officers found the cellphone that very night. It was in the wife’s purse the whole time.
And no. They didn’t apologize.
32. Mind Your Business
I know this sounds ridiculous, but I’m getting fed up with my neighbors and I’d like to explain the situation here. I live in a small house in the country. I have a small farm with a vegetable garden, chickens, and goats, as well as a very surly old bulldog and a barn cat. There is only one house within viewing distance of my yard, which is next door to me, with a large field and a stone wall separating us.
The house was previously owned by an elderly couple, but when they passed a few years ago, the property was bought at a cheap place by a landlord and renovated to be rented out. I had no problem with the landlord or the reno. In fact, he never bothered us and did a beautiful job with the house. I know him personally and went to high school with his sons.
I do, however, have an issue with their current tenants. Now, to understand my issue with them, you should know that I do not like people and I live in the country for that reason. I want my privacy and quiet. As soon as these people moved in, my worst nightmare began. They put up at least 20 different flags relating to Christianity as well as multiple other flags.
It looks really tacky, but whatever, as long as they leave me alone I don’t really care. About a week after they moved in they (husband and wife in their 60s and their son who is in his 40s) show up while I’m outside tending to my animals with their loud, aggressive poodle.
I had never spoken to them before and was taken aback that they would feel okay just showing up on my property. I admit I wasn’t exactly warm and welcoming, as I got a creepy vibe from them. I curtly introduced myself and told them I was busy working, and asked them to kindly keep their dog away from my property since I have animals that would not take kindly to a strange dog.
They didn’t take the hint and continued to introduce themselves. Then it got weird. They told me all about their old town that was full of “Satanists”. Now, I was taken aback by this, as I am not religious or conservative, so I kind of just looked at them like they were crazy and said “Uh, okay. Hope no one bothers you around here. Have a good night. I have to go”.
I shut in my hens and goats for the night and turned to go inside, when I see them continue to walk around my yard like they were inspecting it. I casually just let my dog on the fenced-in patio, and she went crazy barking at them. This seemed to alarm them and they finally left. I thought they were weird and had no social skills, but were otherwise harmless and expected that they’d just keep to themselves.
Soon enough, I found out how wrong I was. In November, during the election, they showed up at my doorstep and had the nerve to “make sure I’m voting Republican”. I was appalled and told them it was none of their business who I vote for and to leave me alone. We didn’t have any interaction again until the pandemic hit in March. Then, woof.
At the beginning when people were panic buying and store shelves were empty, I wasn’t worried because I always keep a well-stocked pantry in case of storms. I had bought a 50lb bag of flour directly from the manufacturer to use for baking, and my neighbors had been in their driveway as I was hauling it inside. They soon after came to my doorstep, with their dog off-leash, and tried to convince me to give it to them so they could bake bread for church.
I said no, and the husband smirked and started coughing into my doorway, making no effort to cover it. I shut the door, locked it, and called up the son of the landlord since we used to be good friends. I asked him nicely to let him know that his tenants were acting threatening to me, and since I have asthma, I could be seriously ill. I told him about all the times they showed up on my property uninvited.
He said he would ask his dad to speak to them. I don’t know if he ever actually did. They still tried yelling things to me from across their property whenever they saw me outside, but I ignored them. Now we’re up to the present day, and a tropical storm hit our area this week. Most of the town was out of power for a few days. I have a big street lamp on my property, which comes on at 6 pm and shuts off at 7 am.
Obviously without power, this wouldn’t be lit up. I know the neighbors can see it from their house, and it’s a good indicator that shows if we have power in our neighborhood or not. This past Tuesday, we lost power around 6 pm due to the storm. At 7 pm, the neighbors show up at my house to ask if I have power. Obviously the answer is no. Somehow, it kept getting worse.
They show up again at 9 pm, it is now dark. Again, no. 11 pm rolls around and I was asleep. I hear banging on my door like officers trying to bust it down and my dog goes crazy. I’m scared. I don’t have a light outside obviously, so I can’t see who it is. I don’t answer. They shout “is your power back yet?” I had enough. I rip open the door and tell them to screw off and use their eyes.
We’re next-door neighbors, and obviously if they have no power, then I don’t either. I tell them to never contact me again, and I was sick of them being weirdos who think they can just waltz onto my property whenever the heck they want. They didn’t respond, and I slam the door shut, seething. I was tired and had to go to work at 5 am.
I’m now thinking about hanging upside-down crosses and other “satanic imagery” around my home and yard to scare them away. Even if they don’t move out, I’d be happy with them just leaving me alone.
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33. Not A Moment To Forget
One evening, while having some quiet time at home playing COD with my spouse, we heard a tentative knock on our door. Not expecting company, I hopped up to discover our neighbor's 14-year-old daughter peeking through our door and looking rather pained. I opened the door to greet her and she immediately started talking like crazy. Her story was probably the weirdest thing I've ever heard.
You see, her grandmother, who was staying with her for the night as her parents were at a wedding, was unclothed. And, she has just peed on the floor. Now, I am not unaccustomed to having very bizarre situations happen. For some reason, I tend to be a magnet for other people's problems that are, in a word, unique. But, I admit that this one had me more than a bit flummoxed.
I then asked 20 questions…"Has she hit her head? Has she taken any medications? Has she been drinking booze? Is she slurring her speech?" Debating between calling law enforcement and going over there to see what is going on, I against my better judgement, took the 14-year-old to go grab some clothes so she could just stay with us until her parents got back.
I also wanted to see if this was a stroke, drunken episode, or mental health crisis. So, yes, the grandmother was unclothed and did not care. There was a puddle of pee on the floor, which I tried to avoid but sadly no luck as it was everywhere. She offered me some pizza, which I declined. We finally got a hold of the parents, and mom was so angry.
She told the 14-year-old to go over there and tell the grandmother to go to sleep. So, as it turned out, the grandmother was a pill popper. I washed my shoes, and rested well in the knowledge that I helped a worried child. But, I will forever have that whole evening burned into my head.
34. Boombox Boomer
There was a fit guy who was about 55, who rode around on his bike in a 90s wind suit kind of getup and played a boombox. He used to have a set up where the music played from small speakers bungee-corded to the back shelf area of his bike, but then he upgraded it to a fully installed, encapsulated system that would light up. He would just ride, sit, and listen to old school Motown and early hip hop for hours.
35. Blades Of Glory
The woman who lived above our apartment was a psycho when it came to noise. I’m talking just regular, run-of-the-mill, everyday noise. My partner and I are very quiet. This woman could not stand the ceiling fan in our apartment. She said she heard it over her TV at all hours (even though we only ran it in the afternoon when we were in our living room).
Our landlords said she was a nuisance for years about the ceiling fan. They had technicians come in several times and they all said there was no real sound coming off it. Yet, the woman would be so upset over it that she'd throw tantrums, stomping her feet back and forth across her unit whenever it was on. We had no AC, so it was really our only source of air circulation when we used it.
The day we moved out, we knew the apartment wouldn’t be accessed for two weeks. We cranked that ceiling fan up to 11, closed the door, locked it, then dropped the key in the mail back to the landlord who was five states away.
36. Trail Of Destruction
My next-door neighbors had a daughter who was an addict. She would come around fairly often. She looked like Mickey Rourke in booty shorts and would wear an undersized tank top, and had a super bleached, teased mullet. She would usually help her elderly parents with yard work, etc., and was always nice to me. Her arrival, however, was usually accompanied by screaming matches with her friends.
Her little dog would be yapping and pooping everywhere too. There was even paraphernalia left in the yard, and sometimes she and her friends would appear to stash drugs/stolen goods in the shed that was out back. I've seen her mow the lawn in a negligee and nothing else. She would arrive with different people and cars nearly every time she showed up. The rest of my neighborhood was normal, but I swear sometimes looking out my back door was like going to the zoo.
37. It Was A Bad Feeling, She Was Banging On The Ceiling
I lived in the same apartment for 18 years without any issue. I also had the same neighbor beneath me for all that time and throughout my childhood. She never complained about anything until one day, I moved my office chair, and she started banging viciously at her ceiling so I could hear it. She then started calling us names, so I took my fancy office chair and threw it away just as a courtesy to her. But it didn't stop there.
She continued to bang for every little thing. If my phone would accidentally fall, she would bang on her ceiling. If I got out of bed, she would go banging. She finally got tired of banging and would just turn her TV on to the maximum volume. To make matters worse, one day, she walked upstairs to my apartment after texting both my parents, who no longer lived with me, saying that I was following her around her apartment, mimicking her moves from mine.
She came upstairs, knocked on my door, and asked me why I was following her, even though I wasn’t. I was sitting on my bed watching The Flash. She would also harass my parents by calling and texting them. The landlord had to take her to court for reasons I don't know. She just made living there a nightmare.
38. You’ll Pay Someday
So I have had a very tense relationship with my neighbor for years. 10 years ago, I moved into my current apartment in Paris, which belongs to my parents, when I got an entry-level job. I have since moved up in the world but not paying rent is frankly too good considering how costly it is here. When I moved in, I met my new neighbor. God was it a doozy.
He inherited the place from his mother a few years before. He was unemployed, hit his wife, had a party or a fight at his place pretty much every two nights between 2 am and 4 am, stocked building materials in the public areas of the building, had such a badly-taken-care-of place that once when I sent the authorities there, they came back a few days later because they were worried about his child's health.
For months he forced his door because he lost his key and couldn’t pay for a locksmith, he once tried to force my door open at 5 am because something he had left unattended in the public area disappeared and he thought I had taken it. Anyway, he disappeared a few years ago with his wife and daughter, and about a year ago, has come back alone.
Since then, I’ve been looking for a way to get rid of him for my peace of mind. Boy, did I find one. Note also that the day after his “friends” helped him move back in, someone tried to force my door open while I was at work. One day, while telling some of his friends that they couldn’t just keep forcing the door open instead of making new keys, one of them told me he wasn’t afraid of me since he had already gone behind bars.
So, this weekend, that genius called the authorities. When the officers arrived he explained to them that he wanted the people in his apartment out and they didn’t want to leave. Here is a summary of what the officers were told by both people during the discussion: First, my neighbor rented his place to a man but still lived in the place since he doesn’t have anywhere else to live.
The man had now arrived at the end of the rental agreement but didn’t want to leave. My neighbor failed to notify the authorities of the rental, meaning that he did not pay tax on it and didn’t have the proper authorization for rental, including things like the place having a fire escape. He readily admitted so. He also doesn’t have a document proving the place belongs to him.
See, his mother left it to him in her will. But in France, that’s not enough: Once you pay the taxes on the inheritance, a notary needs to write a new paper to say it actually belongs to you (which costs money). He doesn’t have such a paper and doesn’t even know what it is, which means it’s likely he never paid the taxes on the inheritance.
There is also a possibility he dodged local taxes on the apartment since it’s not in his name. Lastly, it just so happens that in France you can’t just throw someone out like that. See, if they’ve been in the place for more than 48 hours, officers can’t just evict them; they need a judge to order it. Furthermore, you can’t do that between November the 1st and March the 31st to prevent people from being out on the street during winter.
So my neighbor did all that for nothing. Officers couldn’t force the occupant out without a court order and even then couldn’t apply that court order before the last day of March. They growled a bit at everyone for the waste of time and asked the squatter to leave before Wednesday—which he agreed to, since he will have his own place on Wednesday.
All in all, it was a very, very fun evening and I feel like I will have a discussion with the fiscal administration to talk to them about those inheritance taxes.
39. Ghosting The Neighbors
I just got this text from my horrible next-door neighbors. One of the people in my building gave them my number. My apartment is pretty spooky—it’s my aesthetic—and I have some cute ghost decals on my window. They’re smiling cartoons, nothing scary or offensive. Anyway, when I got this text message, it immediately sent my blood boiling.
“Hi: We would really appreciate you taking the ghost stickers out of the window. We have spent, and are continuing to spend, thousands of dollars to improve our property. This includes negotiating with your landlord to remove the chain-link fence and rotting material that is on our property line. We are footing the bill for this improvement, which will benefit everyone, including you.
“I don’t think you understand that we literally have to look at the stuff in your windows from every living area in our home—our kitchen, den, and dining room. We have no choice but to look at it unless we keep our shades drawn at all times. We will ask your landlord to intervene if needed, but it would be great if we could avoid this.” Well, thanks.
40. Took It To Go
A new neighbor moved in. I go over to introduce myself, and he is friendly. Then, he introduces me to his three rottweilers. No big deal, I like dogs. A couple hours later, I see him pounding in three huge metal stakes in his yard and he chains up the rottweilers. They proceed to bark from about four in the morning until eight.
Within three days, there is no grass on his lawn and it's just a muddy mess. I ask him to do something about the barking nicely multiple times. He gives it a lame amount of effort, so I just kept calling animal control. Running out of options, I gave him $1,000 towards putting up a privacy fence. He did, I sold my house immediately and moved. I heard a short while later he moved and took the fence with him!
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41. Feline Vendetta
My neighbor was absolutely fine for about seven years. He was a nice old man who recently remarried to a woman who had a 20-year-old student. She partied from time to time, though she was mostly tame. But then, one day, out of nowhere, we found our one-year-old cat lifeless in their garden. We weren't sure if we could be mad since the cat could have passed of a heart attack or something, so my family shrugged it off as a coincidence.
Fast forward two months later—we had a new cat that was younger and cuter. I came home one day and my cat came crawling to me whilst giving the loudest meow of his life. I couldn't believe my eyes. Turns out, my cat was shot. SHOT. WITH A BULLET. Our gardener told us that he clearly saw the neighbor with a pistol, shooting pigeons or something, minutes before my cat was shot.
So yeah, as you can imagine, we haven't been close to our neighbors since that day...P.S our cat survived with surgery and is perfectly fine, but he only has eight lives left.
42. Strength In Numbers
I deliberately don’t mow my front lawn because it’s seeded with lots of native wildflowers, which makes it a magnet for bees, butterflies, hoverflies, etc. My neighbor complained about it, saying he thought it didn’t fit in with the other manicured lawns and green spaces of the area. Fair enough. But rather than give in to his demands and mow my lawn, I wrote to the local council and suggested a “help the pollinators” wildflower initiative.
The local council doesn’t mow the verges anymore in summer (about half the neighbors don’t either), so all of them resemble my mini “unsightly” wildflower meadow rather than the neighbor’s chemical patch of a lawn. It drives him mad every summer without fail.
43. These Teens Gave Me Angst
The two trashy, tough-guy teens who lived across the street were terrible. They had a punching bag hanging from a tree in their front yard that they liked to show off on while constantly blaring pseudo-metal music. They would enjoy shirtless wrestling with their friends on Tuesdays, which in practice, looked a lot less like Fight Club and a lot more like playground slapping. And that's not all, folks...
Some genius would supply them with cheap booze and smokes, the packaging of which they would donate to my yard as they traipsed through it on their way to mess around in the woods behind my house.
44. Green Acres Is The Place To Be
My 72-year-old neighbor is the best. He climbed up on my roof in the freezing rain to help me patch it without asking. He let me use his boat to take my son fishing. I came home one Sunday afternoon and he gave me three dozen brown eggs and six pounds of bacon. He has orange and grapefruit trees that he gives me fruit from.
I borrowed a five-gallon gas container from him one time to get gas for my lawnmower. I returned it full, even though I got it empty and he refused to take it back. I had to put the gas in my truck to empty it before he would take it back. I thought moving from the city to the country was going to be bad, but thanks to him it’s the best move I ever made.
45. Back Off, Get Your Own Husband
I’m a single 32-year-old female, and I bought my house in September 2020. It’s fully fenced but it’s a chain-link on my neighbors’ (they are in their late 60s) side. She thinks I’m after her husband because I’ve spoken to him three times. She even told me I’m disrespectful for talking to him about mulching the property line and apologizing for my dogs barking.
She has been stalking us, waiting for us to go outside, and then she goes on her back porch and cusses, threatening my dogs. This lady used to baby talk to my dogs and now she threatened to shoot my dog once. Then she waited for me to go outside at 5 am to walk my dog, and she threatened to shoot me if I ever walked onto her property.
At this point, I called the authorities. They agreed she is nuts, thinks everyone wants her husband, lied to them, and said she feels threatened for her life, and then they basically told me I should call them anytime she does something like that again and to put up security cameras. That evening , I came home to a cardboard sign on the tree facing my house that says “private property, keep off, this is from her husband”.
Then she just reported that my dogs are running at large and she feared for her life (they are always either leashed or in the backyard). Oh, those cameras I ordered? The irony! They were delivered today, but the delivery person delivered it to their house and she won’t give my package to me. What the heck? I put a letter in her mailbox, asking she give it back.
So tomorrow I may have to call the authorities to go over and ask for it. This is insane y’all. Why on Earth would I be after her old fat husband? Ugh.
46. It Wasn’t Me
My next-door neighbor is horrible. Yesterday, she came banging on my door. I’d seen her outside my house with her son for a few hours and they were gathered around the drain opening. Some dirty baby wipes were blocking the main pipe on the street and she thought it was us. I asked how come she thought it was us and she said because we have a baby and they’re baby wipes.
My partner chimed in, saying we don’t flush the baby wipes. But she didn’t believe us, she just repeated that we were the only ones with a baby. I explained they could be make-up wipes. This neighbor is always caked in make-up and dodgy fake tan so I assume she must go through a lot of make-up wipes. She then stormed off and said she’d send us the bill.
Today, someone came out to fix the drains. The guy spoke to my partner. Apparently, our neighbor asked them to bill us but they said they’d have to bill whoever’s calling them out and it’s up to our neighbor to get others to pay them back. My partner asked for details on where the block was. Surprise, surprise. The blockage is before our drains hit the mainline.
It must have come from our neighbor’s house or the house on the other side, which is currently empty as it’s being sold. We’ve emailed the company and they’ve sent out a small description of the blockage and where it was. This evening the neighbor came round to tell us how much we owed her. We told her to take us to small claims court if she wants us to pay.
47. Searching For Evidence
When I was in high school, our neighbor had a bunch of baby geese in her backyard. We never found out where she got them. They just showed up one day. Then, a few months later, they were gone. After that, she told everyone in the neighborhood that my dad had harmed her geese. According to her, my dad had scaled her massive privacy fence, fended off her two German shepherds, and used a length of fishing line to cut the heads off of all eight of her geese.
And then, he managed to clean up the murder scene and take all eight bodies back over the fence with him. Now, my dad was not Hugh Jackman. He was 65 and flabby. Obviously, after a few months, the geese just got old enough to fly away. So, we told everyone to just ignore the crazy nutbag. But, that's not where it ended.
The next morning, I went downstairs for breakfast and saw my dad staring out the window. "She's robbing our garbage," he said. Sure enough, our neighbor was taking our trash bags from the curb and dragging them back to her house. Apparently, she was going to search our garbage for evidence. She must not have found anything, because my dad never got incarcerated for goosicide.
To this day, I have no idea why she decided my dad of all people was a goose murderer.
48. Shut It Down
The rich brats next door were always throwing loud parties whenever my mom and dad went out of town for a few days, which was often. One Sunday morning, I did a quick inspection of the property and found a bunch of litter had been left in the street or thrown into the grass. The worst part is that there was a public bus stop at the corner of our street, so we started getting complaints.
That night around midnight I gloved up, collected a bunch of them, then snuck into the neighbors' yard and scattered them around the pool, the garage, and the back door where mom was sure to see them when she came home. There were no more parties.
49. Home Entertainment
Our neighbor hit our car and when we tried to work it out with her, she threatened to kill our cat. We set up cameras at our house and decided to let karma run its course. Sure enough, a few months later, her husband filed for a divorce and she began stalking him. She ended up getting apprehended by the authorities three times due to her unruly behavior.
Every time she had a tantrum, it happened in full glory right in front of our house, so we caught it all on camera. We'd set up chairs with snacks to enjoy the show of her getting placed in the wagon.
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50. This Old Man Needs To Go
Our boring suburbia has but one issue—this old man. He has knowingly loaded and pointed a weapon at kids playing at night, tried to poison his neighbor’s dog, and threw boards with nails pounded into them into the bottom of a neighbor's 3-foot pool. He also brings shady people around and was taken in for filming underage kids doing various things.
51. Property Busters
The house directly next to mine was full of people. There were so many people coming and going from the home that I was unsure how many actually lived there. They kept a dog in their yard, which was never walked or played with, and it would bark all the time. Their yard was also a junk heap, and how they dealt with this made me livid. They would just toss snack wrappers and bags into their yard, and the garbage would drift into mine every day.
They were inconsiderate, loud trash whose existence lowered the property values of every house around them.
52. Party Down
We have a main road behind our house and on the opposite side is a street identical to ours, kind of a mirror image estate layout with that street’s version of our house directly behind us but across the road. The set-up is two sets of semi-detached houses with gardens backing onto the road. Ours is the same, back of our house and garden facing their garden and rear house.
The people living there are in their early 50s with a daughter in her 20s. Next door to them, on one side, lives their sister and her family, and on the other side are their elderly parents. Their gardens have no dividing fence so it’s one big space with a pagoda-type thing and a hot tub. Plus a bloody big sub-woofer and professional DJ set up, complete with disco lights and microphones for karaoke.
They have parties literally three times a week. Not just people having a few drinks together but 20+ people screaming, dancing to trance music and singing bad karaoke until 3 and 4 am. I feel like I live in a bad Spanish holiday circa 1999. I'm all for people having fun and could put up with it within reason, like on a weekend or something, but these people are doing it on a Tuesday night.
I have work and a toddler and “Vengabus” being played on repeat at 2 am was frankly making me contemplate dark things. Complaints to the council were useless. In five years, they've not done anything other than send letters and interview their neighbors on either side, who are related to them. Their latest party was significantly bigger than usual.
53. Getting Catty
I noticed a cat started showing up on my street a few weeks ago. She's thin, dirty, and has scabs and ticks around her head, ears, neck, and tail. She is also incredibly friendly and has been begging neighbors for food and attention. She's been drinking the water coming from my neighbor's sump pump. Once I realized the cat was abandoned, I took it in.
It's cold and it was going to rain that night. I couldn't let her stay out there. So here's the thing... this isn't just the “normal” bad neighbor who moves and abandons their pet. They live across the street. Still. They abandoned this indoor cat, outside, after I guess they decided they didn't want it. They've been watching their own cat starve and suffer for almost two months while the surrounding neighbors tried to figure out who the cat belonged to.
I hate them. And the cat is heading to the vet tomorrow. Hoping to get her cleaned up and find her a good home.
54. They’d Been Warned
My old neighbors didn't have a fence, and we did. We had two dogs who remained fenced. They had one that was primarily an inside dog, but seemed pretty well-trained so they didn't leash him outside. One day, we noticed one of our fence boards had broken on the side of our fence facing the yard. We grabbed an extra board and went out to replace it, no big deal.
The wife came running and screaming up to us about how we need to get off her property and we don't have permission to be there. I told her we lived at that house since we had only been there a couple of months, and she told me she knew who I was and that I had better get off her land or else her dog might attack me. I should add I was around eight months pregnant at the time.
Apparently, this woman had no idea that property almost always goes past a fence line, and we had a survey done when we bought the house. I demonstrated to her where our property line was, which was a couple feet past the fence. I told her I was calling law enforcement if she crossed over that line. They built a fence a few weeks later and didn't get a permit. I knew because they didn't meet code and did everything themselves. You better believe I called the city. I hope they got fined.
55. Blood On Her Hands
Some 15 years ago, when my parents and I lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we ended up befriending one of the neighbors and her two kids. Well, one day, we were all hanging out together when I noticed her son had some pretty bad bruises and a nice size knot on his head. I just shrugged it off and we continued playing. Then, that night, the mother came over and made a shocking confession to my mom.
She said she ended the boy's life. She went into some pretty disturbing details, and she wasn't remorseful at all. When she left back to her house, my mom called the authorities immediately and she was taken to the station shortly after. The worst part is, she vowed that when she got out, she'd do the same thing to my mom. We noped the heck out of Indiana and moved to another state.
56. Salt On The Earth
I poured salt all over my neighbor's lawn after his kids threw bricks at my dogs. The best part is, he owned one of the largest lawn care companies in my hometown. He lost a tremendous amount of business after his prize-winning lawn turned into a barren wasteland.
57. He Restored My Faith
My neighbors restored all sorts of cars. It’s cool, but not what you want to hear at 4 AM. I went over once when they were working on a car in their driveway to tell them that I thought the car was awesome. I then asked if they could try and be a bit more mindful. I explained that I understood that it is almost impossible to not be loud in that car, but I would appreciate it if they could keep from any unneeded revving and loud music until they got it moving.
If not, I asked if I could trade them cupcakes for a chance to drive it. We had a good laugh and they apologized. They worked nights/early mornings so they were so used to that being their middle of the day. They hadn’t thought anything of it. They let me drive it up the road and back too which was awesome. I made them car-themed cupcakes, and I was finally able to get some sleep.
58. I Was Fighting A Losing Battle
I used to have neighbors who would constantly throw garbage over their back fence into my yard. They did it all the time. During the summer, I would go out to the shed in the back and find the most random stuff, like a ripped open stuffed animal, used diapers, etc. I started throwing the trash back over, but it kept coming back no matter how much I battled it. The teen son would also work on his car in the driveway and blast music all day long.
In addition, they had a basketball hoop in their driveway that they eventually took down. They discarded the hoop and backboard in our front yard, off to the side, as if we wouldn't notice. I kept pushing it back into their yard against the same fence they kept throwing trash over, but it somehow kept finding its way back into our yard. Eventually, my patience would pay off—they later moved away, and all the problems cleared up.
59. You Don’t Scare Me
My neighbor who has been after me because he's bored as heck had the Geek Squad install a Ring floodlight pointed directly at my house. It switches on every time a car goes by. Good thing Halloween is around the corner. I bought some of that stretchy cotton-like spider web and stretched it enough to block the camera. I also added some bird reflecting mirrors along with a long strip of reflective roll and bounced that light right back.
Talk about a waste of $200 dollars. However, there’s icing on the cake. I also added a banner that says “scary” that points in their direction since they will be looking in a mirror. Be right back, I'm gonna work on my evil laughter.
60. You Get What You Give
So last week at about 12:45 am, someone pulled into my complex. They parked near enough to my apartment that I could hear their bass. I was surprised how loud it was for nearly 1 am. I imagine it woke up everyone in the complex. At one point though, it got much louder. It stayed that loud for a while. Like...there is no reason to play music that loud outside at nearly 1 am.
I personally don’t get off work until midnight, and then I usually stay up reading or gaming until 4 am. So 1 am noise isn’t a huge deal for me. I’m not trying to go to sleep. Fast forward to the next day. I leave for work. My car is stored in a garage that is right around the corner of my staircase. Walking there, I pass like four cars and one of them was a Porsche SUV with...maybe ketchup all over the hood, windshield, and driver's side.
Maybe salsa. It was chunky and bright red. I didn’t even connect the dots there. Fast forward again to today and there is a note on the community chat room that says putting anything on someone else’s car is considered vandalism. I lost it. I assume someone got angry at that guy blasting music at 1 am and went out and covered his car in some condiment.
I so badly want to respond to that community post and say "whoever you are I want to buy you a drink”.
61. Just Like Their Own Daughter
I had neighbors who were a pair of 80-somethings and were sister and brother. They lived in the apartment below me in a duplex home, and the landlords despaired of what they were going to do when they finally passed, because their place was like a cave of old people stuff. The sister cooked in their dark kitchen with lots of oil that had been splattering everywhere for years.
So, it seemed like there was a fine, sticky, yellowish brown film of oil on everything, which then picked up all the dust. Basically, if you had allergies, it was the last place you wanted to be invited into. No matter what it was in their place, if it didn't smell of oil, it smelled like pipe smoke and other musty stuff. They decided I was going to be their replacement daughter.
This sounded nice when the brother said he would happily take out my garbage, but then I found out that they were also going through my garbage after I went to work, because they started commenting on what I was eating and drinking. Then, they got wildly offended when I started taking my garbage to work with me and accused me of not trusting them.
This was also somewhere around when I told them I didn't need them to make food and leave it outside my door. It wasn't that they weren't being nice, it was the way they would then make sure I told them for days how grateful I was and what a great cook she was. After we crossed that rubicon, they started complaining about everything from how late I stayed up to my company.
They whispered about my private life to the neighbors and generally made themselves a super PITA. I lasted 18 months there and realized why the landlords couldn't stand them. Apparently, they did this to every normal tenant who moved into the other unit, but because of their age and because they paid their rent, they couldn't be evicted. Really, they were the worst neighbors ever.
62. Your Term Is Up!
I had one neighbor who was the self-appointed mayor of the block. He would tell me all the time what I was doing wrong, from having my sprinklers on at the wrong time to not properly sorting my recyclables. I took his suggestions under advisement and even read the four-page typed note he wrote to me about the correct timing of the crabgrass preventer.
One evening, when I was cleaning off my deck, he walked up and began telling me about the latest landscaping issues. My niece, who was 13 at the time, was showering off after being in the pool. She walked out in a robe from the shower area and slung her suit over the fence to dry. I thanked him for his vast landscaping knowledge and told him we were off to dinner and shooed her inside.
I closed the slider and remembered I left the hose on, so I slipped the door back open and I saw her suit slid over the fence. I took two steps to the edge of the deck expecting to see her bathing suit on my grass. That’s when I spotted him—and it was the most disturbing sight of my entire life. The mayor was on his hands and knees in my grass, sniffing the suit crotch. We had a long talk about how he was going to come with me to the station.
63. Going Out With A Bang
Our neighbor was a pain in the butt. He would call the authorities on us even if we were just standing in our yard, minding our own business. He didn't have a mental problem; he was just a jerk who thought calling 9-1-1 would scare us. We would hear him on the phone saying, "They're standing in their yard, talking again."
The officers would often apologize for coming by, explaining that they had no choice but to respond to the complaints. Sometimes, they would just drive by and wave to us while shaking their heads. So one night, we had enough. We bought a thousand-count string of firecrackers, made a makeshift fuse, put it in his garage, and waited. Needless to say, it was super lit.
64. Tunes Of Torment
Before I moved, the people who lived next to me were just horrible. On multiple occasions, at around 3 am, I would wake up to a horrific sound—four-wheelers ripping around in my own yard with music blaring so loud I could hear it from everywhere in my house. Their music would literally wake me from a deep sleep. They even did this on weekdays when I needed to sleep. I'm glad I moved.
65. What A Treat
I used to live across the hall from a couple. The man worked for a major tech firm and the woman worked part-time, so they seemed pretty comfortable. I was living with two pretty much broke guys at the time, and I think they must have noticed our complete lack of housebroken-ness. Twice a week, we would get a knock on the door with a basket full of tasty treats. It had everything from tandoors full of delicious meat, to baskets of bread and pastries.
The woman was an absolute gem and was always there if we needed advice on something house-related. Without her, I would still be doing laundry once a day. Although the husband didn’t drink, now and then he would come over to hang out. They'd never take money, never ask for favors unless we offered, and they would always have a smile on their faces. They genuinely just seemed to enjoy being part of the community and helping out.
66. Keep It Down!
My neighbor cuts wood starting at 7:00 am every morning, including weekends. He stops for an hour or two and then is right back at it. His woodpile is right on our property line and about 20 feet from my office and bedroom. Due to the constant noise, I lost my job for not having a quiet work environment and I can’t get another until this is resolved.
We live in a development in a rural area. I called the township and they stated that they have no noise ordinances but they will discuss it next year. My husband works 12 hours, third shift, and can’t sleep, my son is meaner than the devil due to lack of sleep, and it’s driving us insane. We tried talking to him numerous times and he is apologetic (nice guy) but the next morning he’s on the chainsaw again.
I don’t know what to do at this point in time. Isn’t there some kind of universal rule for noise levels?
67. Talk About A Perfectionist
So, I hate it when people don't pick up after their dogs. It's a minuscule amount of effort and is kind of a jerk move when you don't care enough to do it. I just had an...interesting conversation with a neighbor I'd never seen or spoken with before. He lives a few houses down and has a wooded lot between his house and the next. A couple nights ago, my dog decided he NEEDED to poop in the woods next to this guy's house.
I don't know if the neighbor owns the lot or what, but after my pup had done his business I used my phone as a flashlight and bagged his poop for disposal at home. I had no idea how this would come back to haunt me. A couple of hours ago, I was throwing the ball for my dogs and minding my own business when someone walked up to my house with a manila envelope in his hand.
My who-the-fluff senses were tingling, and he actually looked MORE nervous realizing I was outside. He identified himself as the man who lived three houses down and started rambling. I won't give a play-by-play because there was a lot of backpedaling and stammering, but here's what this man actually thought was going to happen when he came over.
He says he knows my dog pooped on his property and he knows I cleaned most of it up. But I didn't clean up all of it and he would like $2,000 to cover the cost of the tiny turdling I left on his land. He actually had an entire presentation in the envelope, night-vision pictures of me walking my dog, my dog pooping, me bagging the poop walking away. He wasn’t done yet, either.
He also had a bunch of pictures of “the scene” complete with a little yellow number things they use on CSI to identify bits of evidence to show where the poop lay and the leaf my dog had kicked over top of it. It also contained an itemized receipt of all the money he spent on catching whoever wasn't scooping poop on his property. Like the night vision, motion-activated camera, the camera he purchased to play dog poop detective, the evidence thingies, and a bunch of other random stuff.
When he realized he was close to a nice round number with those things, he added in the remainder under the heading "emotional distress". I told the guy I'm really sorry I missed a little bit, but I am not paying you $2,000 because I missed a bit of poop smaller than an M&M. I'll make sure we walk on the other side of the street from now on.
He got a bit huffy but saw I wasn't going to give, and he goes on a rant about everyone’s dogs pooping on his lawn. When I remained unmoved by his passionate ranting, he said he'd see me in court. I waved bye. Maybe he'll have better luck with some other chump.
68. A Very Particular Lifestyle
My neighbor is a middle aged guy who doesn't work. He’s up at four and in bed by eight and expects everyone else living around him to be in bed too. There are a lot of young working professionals in a condo community, so in the summertime on a Friday and Saturday, people are at the pool or barbecuing until 11 in the night. He would constantly lose his mind demanding people around him cut it out at eight instead. One night, he got so mad he slammed his bedroom window so hard it shattered.
69. Stay In Your Lane
I lived in an apartment complex with assigned spots, and every day this person in a white Civic encroached into my parking spot. So every day I was parking closer and closer to her car. I was getting good at parking close enough to her, without hitting her. One day I was walking to my car to head out to work, and I saw her climbing through her passenger side door to get into her car, cursing up a storm.
She saw me, we locked eyes as she was climbing over her middle console. She started her car and drove away. Since that incident, she has stayed in between the lines of her own parking spot.
70. Brassy Revenge
When I was in middle school, our upstairs neighbor made a ton of noise every night around 9 pm. She'd be moving furniture, arguing with her partner at top volume, slamming doors, etc. So my mom always had me practice my tuba under her bedroom before school in the morning. A simple payback.
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71. She Was Looney Tunes
In my first apartment, I lived above an old crazy woman. Our apartment was the only one on the third floor, and hers was the only apartment on the second floor. What she did to us was nothing short of sadistic—she once poured vegetable oil on the staircase leading to our door and then sprinkled thumbtacks on top of the oil so that we would slip and fall onto the tracks, like in Looney Tunes.
She would also scream profanities at my roommates and me whenever she saw us. We called her "the crazy lady”—we were not wrong.
72. This Guy Blows Me Away
Growing up, I had a neighbor who would leaf-blow his yard EVERY SINGLE DAY. Without fail around 3 PM that annoying wail of the blower would start up and go for at least a half-hour. On weekends he would start at 9 in the morning. He would begin on his roof, then blow off his whole yard. One day he couldn't get it started.
He threw it in the garage, got into his car, and bought a new one an hour later. My neighbor's kids glued leaves on his driveway to mess with him. Rain would only postpone the annoyance. Once it had stopped raining for a few minutes, he would be out there. In the summer, when I would get home after a long day at work, I would just want to take a nap.
Without fail, as soon as my head hit the pillow, I would hear that dreaded whir.
73. Caught Red-Handed
This happened about 20 years ago, but it still makes me giggle a bit. We had just purchased a house out in the countryside. The nearest neighbors were 300+ feet away, quiet, clean air, etc. I loved this place. I went down to the local hardware store, bought myself a post and a mailbox then set about getting it installed. There are regulations about where a mailbox must be installed with respect to the hard surface of the road.
There are also some guidelines for how the post should be installed as a safety measure for motorists. Note that mailbox PLACEMENT is a requirement, but installation is guidelines. This is important later. My new mailbox was up for no more than two days. Then disaster struck. Someone came along and hit it with a baseball bat. The side of the box was caved in and my mail was all over the ditch.
I figured it was kids being kids and I'd just replace the box and that would be the end of it. Nope. The new mailbox was up for almost a week before someone homered it. The box was almost 100 feet away from the post and the post had been pushed over. Fine. I'll just build a stronger post. This time, instead of a 6-foot 4x4 post sunk 2 feet in the ground, it was an 8 foot post sunk 4 feet in the ground and set in 2 feet of concrete.
About a week goes by and my mailbox has been hit again and the post broken off. I didn't know who was doing it, but I intended to get revenge. I dug my concrete out of the hole and prepared my nuclear option. I rented a PO Box and forwarded all of my mail there. Using the same 4-foot deep hole, I cut an 8-foot length of 6-inch well casing (large-diameter thick-walled steel pipe used for water wells).
I set my well casing in the hold and filled the hole completely with concrete. Then I filled the pipe with concrete (all 8 feet of it) with concrete. I welded on a crossbar (2-inch square tube) to extend the mailbox to the required position relative to the road surface and mounted the cheapest plastic mailbox I could find on it. Then I really ensured my point was made.
I then got a bread bag and filled it with some old-school red barn paint that I had. That stuff doesn't come off. I tied the bag up really tightly and put it in the mailbox. Sure enough, a couple of days later I happened to be at home when I heard a relatively loud engine coming down the road towards my house.
There was an EXTREMELY loud metallic "CLANG!", and then some screaming, and, finally, the engine noises proceeding down the road and out of earshot. I went to look and found that, as expected, my mailbox had been demolished. There was a large splatter of red paint on the ground. When I looked at the post more closely, I noticed a shallow dent on one side as though the steel had been struck hard by something metal.
Perhaps an aluminum baseball bat? I never did find out who it was, but I did spot a black Toyota pickup truck several weeks later that had a bunch of red paint down the passenger side. I wonder how that got there?
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74. We’re Always Watching
My friend's sister has been working on the front lines as a nurse while her husband takes care of their four kids. A couple weeks ago, they finally had the finances to get their driveway repaved. I will mention they have lived in this neighborhood for six years and this is not a HOA. Anyway, yesterday they received this letter from some anonymous neighbors.
"Thank you for finally upgrading your driveway after years of significant deterioration. It's a significant improvement. We are all so happy to see that your family is in a financial position to do this improvement or maybe it took this long to receive enough donations to find this project. Regardless, it's been long overdue. It would also be appreciated if you would give attention to your front lawn.
“Many of us take pride in having weedless lawn and don't appreciate any residents who don't put any effort in keeping the dandelions down".
75. They Just Want To Be Involved
My neighbors would come outside every time I did. If I mow, my neighbors will mow at the same time, sometimes a bit after I finish. If I get a delivery, they come outside and say, "Wow, working on another project!" If I have company pull up, they come outside to let their dogs go to the washroom or "check the mail.” There are only five of us on a back road and they are all over 60. I am 27.
Although it's annoying, they are always pleasant and I'm sure they watch my house when I'm at work and would be quick to call the authorities if something happened when I wasn't home. I'll take the annoyance over having pesky young neighbors who party any day.
76. No Parking Zone
I lived in a duplex that shared one large driveway with another duplex. Parking could be tight, but all of us cooperated and made the best of it, except for one woman. She left a note on my car two days after my husband and I moved in, telling me not to park there because she didn’t like that I was "in front of her door."
I was at least 15 feet away from her house and that was the only spot I could park in without blocking anyone else. I left her a note back explaining this. She banged on my door at 11 PM and screamed at us, calling me the c-word, and demanding that I get rid of my car. We eventually shut the door on her. The nasty notes persisted and were ignored.
I confirmed with my landlord that this is where I should be parking and he said yes, ignore her. Then, she started barricading that part of the driveway, so that every day when I got home, I would have to get out of my car and move her stuff before I could park. This became a real pain in the neck when I broke my elbow.
She used her trash can, a pedestal with a birdcage on it, and a bench to block the driveway and I had to move all of them to park. I started just picking them up and gently moving them towards her porch. Then she came up with something else. She started putting Vaseline on them. I grabbed her trash can and got a gloppy handful of Vaseline. Sure enough, everything else was coated in it as well.
I decided to use my foot to push everything up against her house. Mind you, nothing was damaged or knocked over, just moved. She called law enforcement and reported that she saw me vandalizing her things by picking them up and throwing them into her house, kicking stuff over, and smashing them into the ground. The officer was angry.
He thought that I was the teenage girlfriend of the guy who lived there, not the adult leaseholder. So he pounded on the door yelling, "Sheriff's department! Come outside!" We went outside. He pointed to me and asked, "Are you the girlfriend!?" I resisted the urge to say something snarky in response to what I found to be a misogynistic and demeaning statement.
He went off on me saying, "Your behavior needs to stop right now, I don't know where you're from, but in [town] we do not tolerate this kind of disrespect blah blah blah!" Well, he didn’t know what he was in for. 15 minutes later, once we'd gotten a word in edgewise, he changed his tune pretty quick. He realized he'd been misled by our neighbor. We told him we were sorry he got dragged into a petty parking dispute.
He told us he's been dragged into stupider stuff and told us that if she puts up the barricades again, to call them instead of moving it ourselves, to protect ourselves from false allegations. In fact, he wanted us to call any time she does anything to harass us. She also received a mean letter from the landlord telling her to knock it off.
We got a mean note from her saying, "The reason I don't want you parking by my door is because you are trash! Your druggie psychopath girlfriend runs amok vandalizing! I want nothing to do with you," among other things. We called law enforcement and she got spoken to by them, and the landlord sent her another mean letter. Hopefully, that'll be the end of it.
77. A Taste Of Her Own Medicine
When my boyfriend was 14, he was living with his mom and sister on a housing estate. It was summer and he liked a bit of light in his upstairs bedroom, so he left the curtains open at all times. That included when he was getting dressed and after having a shower, so if you purposefully stared at his window, you could see him from his waist up (and only his waist up).
Well, their neighbor did not like that one bit. She went pounding on their door, yelling at my mother-in-law that her son was a disgrace, hanging around always naked and exposing himself to her daughter. My mother-in-law told her he had every right to do whatever he wanted in his bedroom, and that if they didn't want to see him all they needed to do was not to look.
A couple of days went by and lo and behold, the authorities showed up at the neighbor’s door. Turned out the neighbor had been filming and taking pictures of my boyfriend to show to the housing people as evidence of his wrongdoing to get them kicked out. Except that the housing office called the authorities on her for taking pictures and videos of an underage kid and kicked her and her family out.
Public Domain Pictures
78. The Phantom Neighbors
My story is a bit different—but still totally weird. I have lived two houses away from the same neighbors for 20 years and have never seen them. None of the other neighbors have seen them either, but they do exist. The light on their garage door turns on at night and off during the day. They drive their car into the garage, then close the door. When they leave, they open the garage door once they are already in their car and drive off.
The windows on the car are tinted, so you can't see in. They don't answer the door when you ring the doorbell and put a "no candy" sign on the door during Halloween. They have no mailbox by the curb, instead, you have to put it in the door mail slot, and they hire people to do yard work. I think they must be serial killers.
79. Anything But The Purr-fect Neighbors
My neighbor was the textbook definition of a hoarder. They had two trucks that were full of trash, a pop-up trailer that was full of trash, a pop-up tent that had trash all underneath it, and basically trash everywhere else. Their house reeked of cats from the sidewalk, and he would just let them breed and breed.
Those cats would come over to our yard and relieve themselves everywhere. And that's not even the most annoying thing he's done–he liked to park his cars in the alley behind our houses, and so did his son, even though the only access to the driveways on my street was through that alley. He and his son also liked to pretend they were the speed police and would scream at you if they thought you were going too fast.
80. Bad Habits
One of the residents at my apartment complex will point a high-lumen flashlight as they pass you or you pass them. He does this to vehicles too. My first encounter with him made me think it was a one-off incident. I got home from work around 10:30 pm with a friend (it's almost pitch black outside) and I noticed him walking his dogs because he had a strobing light.
I slowed down and got far over on the street. As I passed, however, he switched to a blinding light and pointed it directly into my car's cabin, blinding me and my occupant. As I mentioned, I thought this was a weird, one-off incident. Well, it soon turned much worse than that. Tonight I was walking my dog and saw him point his high-powered flashlight at other vehicles as they passed.
He was walking on the grass adjacent to the road. We walked past each other and in passing he would periodically point the flashlight directly at my face, going as far as to turn around and continue to do it. Definitely not a one-off thing. I eventually told our office about this and the main lady said, "Is he doing it again?!?" So they know about him from previous experience.
81. Excuses, Excuses
Long story short, my neighbor Greg was into me. We made small talk once in the elevator and a week later when he saw me walk outside, he chased me down the street and asked where I was going. When I told him I was going to get coffee he asked if he could come. But there was something huge he didn’t know. I’m not only in a relationship, I was also 15 weeks pregnant at the time but not showing at all.
I told him I was meeting a friend for coffee just so he would leave me alone. He then asked our doorman for my phone number, claiming I told him they could give it to him. I wish my door people would have asked me first, but they gave it to him. Ever since then, he has been non-stop texting me, asking me to do stuff. Well, enough was enough.
Finally today I replied and told him I’m moving into a house in October with my long-term partner, that I’m pregnant, and while I think he’s a nice person I’m not interested in spending time together. His reply stunned me. He said lol, you don’t have to make things up just to not hang out. I didn’t even want to sleep with you. I replied and said not making anything up, but ok.
You know, take care and best of luck to you, etc. Now I’ve had multiple people in my building tell me that Greg is running around telling everyone that I’m lying about being pregnant and being in a relationship because I don’t want to date him. I’m shocked that a 35-year-old man is acting this way. The good news is my other neighbors know he’s full of it.
Still, it’s going to be so uncomfortable now if I run into him in person. I feel like I’m in high school.
82. Just Trying To Keep Warm
During hurricane Sandy, my street was without power, heat or hot water for 14 days. It was unbearably cold in the house, and at night we could see our breath because it would get down in the 20s/30s Farenheit. I have the west wing of the house to myself. There is a family that lives in the house proper, and another tenant in the small studio in between us.
I come home from work one day to just swing by the house and get clothes so I can shower at a friend’s house, and my road is blocked off. There were fire engines and officers everywhere. My neighbor approaches me as I'm making my way up the street through the craziness and I ask whose house it was. He said, "Oh, it's yours."
Immediately, I run towards my house because all I care about is my cat. I arrive and find total chaos. Coming down the driveway, I see the people from the main house being carried away on stretchers. I don't see smoke or fire, but my front door is kicked in and my cat is roaming around outside. Basically everyone that lives on my street is congregating in my driveway/on my lawn.
One of the firemen came over to tell me the people in the main house were cold, so they brought their charcoal grill in the house and lit it to heat the house. It filled the house with carbon monoxide, the mom passed out, the daughter felt weak and called for help.
83. A Taste Of Her Own Medicine
When my boyfriend was 14, he was living with his mom and sister on a housing estate. It was summer and he liked a bit of light in his upstairs bedroom, so he left the curtains open at all times. That included when he was getting dressed and after having a shower, so if you purposefully stared at his window, you could see him from his waist up (and only his waist up).
Well, their neighbor did not like that one bit. She went pounding on their door, yelling at my mother-in-law that her son was a disgrace, hanging around always naked and exposing himself to her daughter. My mother-in-law told her he had every right to do whatever he wanted in his bedroom, and that if they didn't want to see him all they needed to do was not to look.
A couple of days went by and lo and behold, the authorities showed up at the neighbor’s door. Turned out the neighbor had been filming and taking pictures of my boyfriend to show to the housing people as evidence of his wrongdoing to get them kicked out. Except that the housing office called the authorities on her for taking pictures and videos of an underage kid and kicked her and her family out.
Public Domain Pictures
84. Can’t Get Better Than This
Our next-door neighbor was the nicest guy in the whole world. He's an old Vietnam Veteran who connected with my husband and me because he found out we're both Veterans, ourselves. Every week he brought home freshly baked bread rolls from work and would give us a big bag full. He would also invite us to bring our two-year-old son over to check out the latest model plane he built.
He would always offer to help me clean my car off after a snowstorm, and he is just generally the nicest guy ever. We would try to repay his kindness by bringing in his mail when he would go visit his daughter and by bringing over baked goods that I've made. He's just the kind of guy who brings out the best in anyone he meets.
85. Gas Guzzler
My friend John had a neighbor named David who would siphon gas out of everyone’s vehicles. Nearly all of John’s neighbors had cameras, so they knew who it was, but couldn’t get the guy to stop. John went to the store to purchase a locking gas cap and while he was there, he had a bit of a light bulb moment. He decided to buy one for David’s car instead. John waited until David was asleep that night to hatch his plan.
At around 9 pm, he installed the locking gas cap on David’s car. Apparently, David flipped out and went door-to-door asking all of the neighbors he knew had cameras to tell him who did it. Miraculously, everyone’s camera failed to work that day. John said the car sat up for about a week before David was able to remove it. After realizing how much his neighbors hated him, David decided to move.
86. He Pulled The Trigger
I lived in the countryside where houses were roughly 300 to 900 feet apart. My goofy chickens went onto my neighbor’s property once. He yelled at me to come over. He told me that he pays too much in taxes to let his yard get full of chicken mess. It happened once, so l put up a fence. A few weeks later, he told me that he didn’t like my barn cat hunting birds on my own property.
He told me that my cat was a nuisance animal. I ignored him and went out to a birthday dinner. When I returned home, I was in for the shock of my life—I called for my cat and...nothing. I had a bad feeling, so I hopped on my four-wheeler and drove through my fields. There, right on the end of my property, was my lifeless cat.
Before I left for dinner, I had seen my neighbor’s kid walking around with a .22. The same kid was firing at rabbits by his pond. A round had ricocheted off a stone and landed in the side of my house. I had called the Sheriff multiple times, but they couldn’t do anything without evidence. So, I had to install cameras all over my property.
87. Taking More Than His Share
Approximately four years ago, I finally convinced my husband to make the move to Florida. The kids are grown and on their own so we made the leap and bought a wonderful (little) house close to the beach. All is well and good. We meet the neighbors and get along with all of them. I’m very happy at this point. My backyard fence is vinyl on three sides and wooden between me and my neighbor on the left, Andrew.
We had planned on changing it to vinyl but hurricane Irma beat us to it. Knocked it down pretty as you please. It took me about three months to save up for the materials and labor costs of my new fence. I like to pay cash if I can. Anyway, Andrew and my husband are unloading my new fence and out of nowhere Andrew says, “I don’t know why you spent all this money on the fence, you can’t put it up”.
Wait, what? What do you mean I can’t put it up? He then proceeded to tell me that the property line between us ran right through the middle of my shed—which the fence had been attached to and where I planned on putting the new fence. He also said that the neighbor on the other side of him put up a new fence while he was away and when he got home, he made her take it down!
You have got to be kidding me. Insert eye roll. I, however, am not so easily intimidated. I was actually quite mad. Having so recently purchased the home, I called the surveyor and explained what was up. We set up an appointment for the following week. Immediately when they pulled up and got out of their vehicle, Andrew runs over talking about “Y’all can’t be on my land. This is private property”!
The boss man of the crew was very polite as he explained that they could and would be on his property to settle the dispute over property lines. If he didn’t agree with their findings then he was more than welcome to hire his own surveyor and proceed to take it to court. Boy howdy, he was angry. I found out that my property line was 22 inches past the shed, where the original fence had stood.
88. Just Deserts
My neighbor has been harassing me for nearly five years, though he's been mostly quiet for a few months. Today, I heard screaming and saw several of his siblings and their mother storm out of his house while he screamed at them to get out. He allegedly threatened to shove his 80-year-old mother down the stairs and his sister called him a lunatic.
Why? Heh. He committed bank fraud. He forged their mother's signature on a loan for 50k and they just found out about it. While shamelessly listening, I found out he lives in the house for free, his mother pays his electric bill, he claimed her on his taxes without her knowledge and took her stimulus check. His sister kept saying she is calling the authorities and that they're going to sell the house.
I'm not holding my breath on anything but I love that he was so stupid as to do this. He's probably over there panicking and I truly hope that he is no longer a thorn in my side someday soon. I'll be on the lookout for an outburst coming my way, anytime he’s angry about something he winds up screaming at me while I'm outside. Hopefully he doesn't go completely nuts.
89. All That Over A Snake
Our neighbor had a clump of banana "trees" at the corner of his lot. He thought he saw a snake crawling into the banana trees, and decided to smoke it out and get rid of it. This was a big mistake. Dry banana leaves burn like crazy. Whoosh! The whole patch went up in intensely hot flames. By the time the idiot had gotten a hose, his pine hedge was on fire as well as the neighbor’s wood fence. The joker had to save the neighbor's fence while his pine hedge burnt halfway across his yard. Suffice to say, we couldn't tell whether the snake survived.
90. The Grass Is Greener
In our first house, my wife and I had a neighbor who disliked us from the start. Apparently, the people who lived in the property before we did were his family friends—they went through a divorce and ended up selling the house to us. He was petty and mean to my wife, who doesn’t like confrontation, and he'd do annoying things to mess with her.
He'd park across our driveway before she left for work, throw pieces of wood over the fence, let his dog go all over our lawn and not pick any of it up, etc. I tried talking to him a couple of times, but he promptly told me to screw off. That was the last straw—I had to fight back. I knew he loved his lawn because he'd always brag about how it looked to everyone, so the next time it rained, I went out back and threw an entire box of oxo cubes into their backyard and let the rain melt them into the grass.
His dog absolutely destroyed his yard looking for the smell and I would make sure to comment on it every chance I got. We moved shortly after.
91. Window Watcher
There used to be an old lady who'd lean out her second-floor window every day, just watching the neighborhood. She would just stare at everyone for hours. Last summer she stopped and we assumed she'd passed away. Then a couple of months ago I saw her again. It turns out she and her housemate don't use the upper floor anymore.
I guess hanging out the lower windows is less appealing. I didn't realize how much I enjoyed seeing her being weird until she wasn't there anymore.
92. Rock On
My house is right on the corner of an area where the road turns into a T, and I had issues with people cutting the corner and driving through my yard. One time, someone even nearly hit my dog. So I bought a boulder that was probably 300 or 400 pounds and put it right on the corner. That winter, we had a bad snowstorm.
Someone was coming through in a lifted Dodge and he hit the boulder going about 20 mph. He totaled the truck. Since then, I’ve had zero issues with people.
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93. Karma Took Care Of His Complaining
My old neighbor was a grumpy old lush. He complained when we had our light on in our bedroom too late at night. He was also quite horrible to my girlfriend, even calling her names. Whenever I tried to talk to him, he wouldn't open the door or would run away. When I was at work, he would knock on the door to moan to my girlfriend. Naturally, my girlfriend started ignoring him when he did this—and karma would end up getting him BIG time.
Unfortunately, one day he started knocking, and she ignored it, not realizing he was having a stroke. He went to a nursing home after that.
94. Meet The Looneys
My boyfriend and I moved into a “nice and quiet” neighborhood about six months ago. We chat with a few of our neighbors here and there, especially while walking our dogs, and are friendly when we encounter anyone, but we mostly keep to ourselves. Showing up at someone’s door with a basket is just in the movies, right? Two weeks ago, I got out of the shower and heard my boyfriend talking to someone in the entryway.
I peeked out and saw him nervously talking to a woman. I had just taken my glasses off, so I was extra blind and didn’t recognize her. I assumed because she was standing inside our house that my boyfriend knew who she was and carried along getting dressed in our bedroom. I have never been more wrong in my life. A few moments later, my boyfriend shouts out to me and asks if I know what’s going on.
“No, I thought you were going to fill me in on what’s going on”. The woman is chiming in now with short cryptic phrases like “Oh really? You don’t know who I am? You should know exactly why I am here”. I have severe anxiety, so my mind was already starting to race and I was trying to place this woman’s face. She seemed vaguely familiar, but in the context and confusion, I couldn’t place her.
My boyfriend keeps asking her who she is and she gives no indication of who she is or why she is there, but keeps insisting that we know what’s going on. He finally asks that they step back outside to talk. I can’t believe the woman’s reaction. She reaches behind her and LOCKS THE DEADBOLT with a smirk on her face. I thought things were about to escalate, so I start looking around for something to grab.
When I see nothing, I just shout for my boyfriend to quickly open the door himself so she can just leave. He follows her out of the door while she is still rambling. As soon as they step outside, I realized who she was. She is a neighbor! Her backyard is diagonal to our backyard, and I see her from afar here and then while walking our dogs, but she never comes anywhere near, smiles, waves, or even makes eye contact.
Now I’m even more confused, wondering if our dog had dug a hole under the fence and she came to chastise us, or what? My boyfriend comes back in and I ask how the heck that all started. He said he didn’t have the slightest clue who she was, or why she was here. I said, “she must have given you some kind of reason for you to let her in the house”. His next words chilled me.
That’s when he said, “I didn’t let her in…she rang the doorbell, I started to answer the door and she pushed in and shut the door behind her”. I felt panic flooding my brain. What did we do? Did we offend her in some way? I decided to text my neighbor whose backyard directly faces ours and asked how well she knew her next-door neighbor, and gave them a brief summary of what had just happened.
She responded quickly that a few years prior, the woman fell and cracked her head open and had gone through multiple brain surgeries since. Good neighbor said loony neighbor was never the same since, but “friendly”. Not in the list of adjectives I would use to describe our interaction. She offers to give us looney’s husband’s phone number, or suggests that her husband could talk to looney’s husband in the morning.
I accepted both. I had never even seen her husband so didn’t want to call out of the blue with something like that, but figured it would be nice to have his number just on the off chance that anything else out of the ordinary ever happened. Boy, we had no idea what our future actually held. The next morning, Good Neighbor texts me that Looney Husband was extremely apologetic.
He explained she had a seizure earlier in the week and started new meds that caused confusion. He said he would take care of it, and that he was so glad we had informed him. I kept thinking that her behavior did not seem like someone who was disoriented, or confused…she seemed paranoid and hostile, but I still felt sympathetic towards their situation and decided to write it off as a weird evening.
Two days later, I get out of a meeting at work and saw someone ringing my doorbell three times. My doorbell records a short clip each time it’s rung. When I saw the footage, a shiver ran down me. It was her. In each clip, about 10 minutes apart, she would slam the doorbell, then huff and puff and pace around, visibly upset we had not answered the door.
She was peering in the windows near our door. In one clip, she glared directly into the camera for about 20 seconds before hitting the button. So creepy. I texted my boyfriend and sent him screenshots, but we were both working, and after all, she was just ringing the doorbell. Maybe she had come to apologize, but was just not a pleasant person?
Three hours later, my boyfriend was on the way home and I was still at work. She’s back at the door. Waiting, pacing, stomping her feet. (Have you never heard of a 9-5?!) I warned him in case he was close but she ended up leaving. She came back 10 minutes later, though. He was right around the corner, so he drove straight to THEIR house and her husband was outside.
My boyfriend told Looney Husband that this is getting a little weird and we would appreciate if she would stop patrolling our front porch. The husband said he’d take care of it and they had a doctor’s appointment coming up. 9 pm rolls around. I decided to take my dog out for a quick stroll. No more than two minutes after I leave, I see the notification that someone rang our doorbell.
No. Freaking. Way. Yep, it was her. So I started screen recording. I thought SURELY my boyfriend would not answer, but he did. It turned into chaos. She tried to rush towards the open door and he quickly stepped out on the porch and shut the door, which upset her. She said, “Don’t even TALK to me” (again, you rang OUR bell). She continues rambling that she knows everything that's going on.
She says she’s hearing all sorts of things from our house, and he needs to let her in so she can see everything we’re doing, and know everything that’s going on. He jests that he was just folding laundry, which really set her off. She started cursing him out, calling him a liar, and insisting she must come inside. She must know. My boyfriend tried to tell her that he understands her situation.
Still, he said, there’s no need to get hostile. This set her off even more. Looney took his sympathetic statement as an admission of guilt that we really were spying on her. He offers to walk her back to her house and she curses at him some more and then storms off. I had him text the husband the video. We wanted him to see that it was not just confusion.
There was something more serious going on. He said he was on his way home from work and would, you guessed it, “take care of it”. We never heard back from him. We were going out of town the next morning, so we had two days of peace. We came home and for a few days, a little more peace. Maybe we all just needed a few days of space for things to settle, right?
Wrong! The last incident had been nine days ago. Today, I’m at work and I see the doorbell alert. I knew in my gut what was happening. It was her again. I tried to open the video, but the signal in my office is atrocious. I was anxious, so I kept an eye on the activity log. All of a sudden I start seeing things pop up… “Front door open”….“Front door shut”….“back door open”….“back door shut”….”front door open”…“front door shut”…and so on.
I quickly called my boyfriend to see if he had come home from work early. My heart sank at his response. He said no. I told him that someone was in our house, and we needed to get home. I was mainly worried about our dogs. At one point, Looney had made a weird comment about our dog, and we had also just gotten a puppy.
Puppy was crated, but I was worried a door was open and our other dog would be wandering loose, or worse. I sped home and ran in the door. No dog running to greet me and no puppy in the crate. I start shouting for them and racing through the house, shouting all throughout. I felt like the house was spinning. I was sobbing uncontrollably when I thought I heard a faint jingle.
I sprinted for the backyard, and there they were. I have never been more relieved but was still terrified. It had to be her. Was she still there? What had happened? My boyfriend got home, and I tried to load some of the doorbell clips again. The first two were unavailable. But when the clips from about an hour later loaded, I gasped. We saw …paramedics.
Paramedics banging on our door and trying to get in, and at some point, they came inside. Who let the puppy out of the crate?! Could not tell you. Apparently, when the fire department comes to your home they don’t leave a notice or anything? One of the only things I could hear in any of the clips was, “She’s gonna flip again when we call her back”.
Who is SHE?!? You guessed it…Looney Neighbor. We called the fire department and they told us she had called to report someone inside of our address was collapsed from a seizure. I’m not sure if she’s just trying to make our life a nightmare at this point, or if she was just trying to find a way to get into our home. My boyfriend went to talk to her husband and he was still extremely short with responses.
He was also not taking it any more seriously. I called the non-emergency line and they sent an officer out. The officer was not remotely helpful. He had gone to talk to the Looneys first, and then gave us the same lines about “she’s trying new medication”. “He’s going to call her doctor”. I 100% understand how stressful that kind of stuff can be, and I truly do feel bad for them.
BUT, I am also scared for our safety. Every incident has escalated, and nothing has changed. I asked about filing a restraining order, but I knew this was a long shot since they live close. I asked if there was anything that could be mandated about her being supervised, or getting a caretaker. Her husband is a firefighter so she’s completely alone for long stretches of time and is always walking around the neighborhood alone.
The officer told me not to hesitate to call again if she comes back…that was it.
95. You Are What You Eat
I’ve only been living in this apartment for about two months. The first time I ordered DoorDash late at night, the delivery driver let me know they gave the order to “my girlfriend”. Just one problem. This was a clear indication my food was taken. I live alone, while my neighbor and his girlfriend live together. So, yeah, I knew for sure that it was them.
The second time this happened was yesterday. It was my fault for falling asleep and never going to the door for my food. I had a feeling my neighbor took it again but had no proof. This morning, though, I found a box of what I ordered half-eaten and thrown on the ground of the parking lot. I’m of course angry because it’s a respect thing.
Like, who proudly takes from their neighbor? On one hand, I’m ready to simply ask them did they take it and explain all this, letting them know I don’t appreciate it. However, I don’t feel this conversation will even matter. Any neighbor who brazenly takes from you is a shady person with NO SHAME. Instead, I’m thinking of the perfect revenge plan.
I want to order delivery again, then add something to induce diarrhea—no real poison or anything—and put it out for them to take the bait. They need to be taught a lesson. I’m a single mom and live alone. It’s pitiful to think a family with TWO HEADS sees no shame in taking from me. Whatever I end up doing, my next move will be cold and calculated.
96. Filled To The Brim
We lived next to this big guy in an apartment building, with our front doors inside a hallway. Now, he was a nice enough guy, but he was always cleaning a puddle up in front of his apartment every other day. We'd always ask him if everything was alright, and he'd talk some incoherent nonsense about how he hates management.
So, out of curiosity, I asked management when I happened to be in the rental office. The lady's response made me burst out laughing. She rolled her eyes and said, "This idiot fills up his tub to the brim, and sits his fat butt in the tub. The water, of course floods his entire apartment, and comes out into the hallway, and this idiot has the balls to blame us somehow!"
I pretty much said, "Geez, that sounds rough," and scurried back to my place. If the tub story is really the truth, this guy must be dumb as rocks.
97. The Golden Rule
A good friend of mine looked after an older lady. She was his neighbor and, as far as he knew, she had no family. So, he was at her place every day when he wasn't working. I met her a few times, she was a sweet old lady. She had three cats that were her babies, she spoiled them to no end. She even had a "cat room" for them.
Well, one day after my friend had been looking after her for a few years, she passed peacefully in her sleep. He found out that she named him in her will. He attended the reading and found three 20-something ladies there too. Turns out the lady had moved across the country unannounced a few years earlier, and had disappeared from the daughters’ lives.
The old woman left my buddy 19. Million. Dollars. She left the cats to a lifelong friend from her home state and donated all of her belongings to the Salvation Army. And her daughters? Each received, "A single litter box and all of its contents," along with one $20 bill each to "give them each a last taste of all she was to them." That sweet old lady is my hero.
98. Nosey Neighbor
We have a nice wooded area behind my parents' house where my brother and the other boys from the neighborhood would go play paintball. This one time when my brother was walking back home, a woman called law enforcement on him because he had his paintball gun out while he was walking back. Despite being covered in paint and having the gear on, she saw the weapon and freaked out. I get it, not a huge deal.
Officers came, asked my brother a couple of questions, and reassured the lady that it was just a 12-year-old with a toy. That should have been the end of it—but it wasn’t. This woman proceeded to tail us whenever she saw any of us leaving the development. The neighborhood is nice and full of families who walk around with their kids at night.
So, whenever my mom would go for a walk around the neighborhood to get some air, this lady would follow her. She would also stand on her porch to watch my dad every time he stepped outside to have a smoke. Once, we were pulling into our development at the same time and she pulled into our driveway after me to "introduce" herself and ask invasive questions. One was, "So how long do you guys plan on living here?"
99. Snitch To Win
I had a neighbor who won the lottery (about $800k USD after taxes) and he decided that made him God. He also had an addiction problem and would stay up late partying and playing music at all hours of the day and night. I live in a small mountain town and the sound echoes terribly. Well, this guy "Dear John'd" his husband of 8 years and at one point was making violent threats against him.
The authorities got involved and the neighbor got slapped with domestic charges. But that's just the beginning: AFTER the charges were filed, this neighbor decided he would buy a firearm, which was totally not allowed. He had to lie about the pending charges to get it, and then he told his ex that once he got it, he was going to end him. After that, he decided that partying out in Portland was more important than attending his court date, and he subsequently had a bench warrant issued to him.
On the Friday of a St. Patty's weekend, he was blasting his music again, so I called 9-1-1 to register a noise complaint. He likely had a scanner, because every single time, before they came, he turned down the music. They'd arrive not hearing any music, then let me know there was not much they could do. At that point, I let it slip that he had an active warrant. They ended up taking him in.
Because he blew all of his lottery money and alienated himself from every friend he used to have, he spent the whole long weekend behind bars with every other jerk who was there. About three weeks later, he put his house up for sale. A crowning achievement for me.
100. A Costly Error
A neighbor messed up when building a home and put his entire home well within my property. It’s a large piece of land with two huge clearings connected to two roads, but separated by a large isthmus of trees. I didn't notice because I had taken an eight month vacation right after he started building. It is a huge property, I didn't go around and inspect it often.
So, I got a real estate lawyer and surveyors to confirm it was on my property. I was going to sell him that clearing for a good price...until I went to talk to him and he was the biggest douche I had ever met. He essentially told me that he is going to sue me for "leading him on" despite the fact that I did not know him, nor had I met him before that day. His wife flipped off my girlfriend and I as we were pulling out of their driveway.
Well, he messed with the wrong guy. Four months later, I filed a lawsuit saying he must destroy the property or turn it over to me immediately. It would've cost him more to demolish it and return the site to original condition, so he signed the house over to me. He was still out for construction costs. I was living in a single house with my girlfriend, then I had a brand new, 2,600 square foot house with all the hookups for water, electricity, and cable for free.
I got the land for next to nothing, and sold it for almost 50 times the value.
101. Leave It Well Enough Alone
For the past few months, I've suspected that my upstairs neighbor has been taking some of my mail. I buy a lot of things online like books and craft supplies and every now and then there's been small things that were meant to arrive on a certain day that never did. One day, I caught her wandering around my front door. When I asked her what she was doing she said "Oh, I was looking for something I think I dropped into your yard”.
I got surveillance cameras installed a while ago, which were not noticeable to my neighbors. The camera that's pointed at my front door isn't visible from the driveway. So here comes the trap. I purchased a few postage boxes to set up for her. The first one was a glitter bomb. I set up the box to make sure she would get glitter to the face as soon as she opened it.
I packed it to make it look like a postage parcel, then sat it at my front door. 20 minutes later I saw her walking to my front door. She looked around then picked up the box and walked away. My only regret is that I didn't get to see her reaction when she got a face full of glitter. I haven't noticed any other mail going missing after that, but she will regret it if she does it again.
102. Oh Yeah, He’s A Character
This happened about four years ago now and still is one of the more ridiculous things to happen to me. I was living in San Diego at the time in a small apartment building with seven or eight units. I lived on the 2nd floor. Our building was right near the highway overpass on the outskirts of downtown. We were also very close to the airport flight path, which made our neighborhood pretty loud.
At this point, I had already lived in my apartment for just over three years. I decided to get a cat, got the permission from my landlord, and paid a pet deposit. When I got her through a shelter, she was probably about three months old. One night I was watching TV when there was a knock at my door. I answered, and couldn’t understand what I was seeing.
Standing on my porch were two officers, both with their hands on their holsters, both seemingly tense. They told me they had a noise complaint from my downstairs neighbor and that he thought I was on substances and rolling a bowling ball around. It took me a few seconds to understand what they were talking about. Then I burst out laughing.
"Oh haha, that's probably just my kitten running around". They were not amused. They told me if they had to come back they would have to do something—which is a pretty wild threat after finding out the noise was from a cat. I left a message with my landlord to let them know what had happened. The next day, my downstairs neighbor came to my door to apologize to me.
He said he thought I may have been into some shady stuff because his “army intelligence friends” told him that those noises he heard align with substance activity. That made zero sense to me, but I came to realize this guy wasn't all there. He said he was sorry and was happy I had a cat and that he even had a toy he would give me. Cool, problem solved, right? Oh, so very wrong.
About two weeks later I had officers at my door again. This time, they were aware of the situation and we all chuckled about how absurd it was. However, since they were called, they had to come. They just told me I'm doing nothing wrong, don't worry about a thing. Right around this time, my neighbor began hitting his ceiling anytime my cat ran around.
It got me anxious to the point of having my cat sleep in a separate smaller room so she couldn't run around. This only lasted a couple of nights since she would cry the whole time. I just thought, whatever, I'm doing nothing wrong, we live in a city in a loud area, it’s an apartment, etc. I'm not sure of the exact timeline, but about a week later, I had an officer at my door again.
This time, it was the San Diego County Sheriff. And that wasn’t all. He had a court summons. This neighbor was trying to get a restraining order against me! For what?? ELDER ABUSE. Yes. Because of the noise of a now six-month-old kitten! The court date comes around and I had printed up about 15-20 pictures of my cat to show the judge. I was furious.
My neighbor’s "evidence" was handed to me, which was basically a list of dates and times that he marked down when he heard noises from my apartment. It's legit insane, and five pages long and I still have it. The judge didn't want to hear any of it, just forced us to enter into court-appointed mediation. I'm fine with that, I just want things to improve.
I received a call a few weeks after our court date to let me know that the neighbor refused mediation and that we would have a second court date towards the end of the month. Throughout ALL this time, he was banging on the ceiling and scaring my cat. But then, things took an even darker turn. He started being malicious and would just whack the ceiling in the middle of the night, oftentimes waking me and causing my cat to go crazy and run around.
Finally, the second court date was here, and at this point, I had already decided I would be leaving San Diego. It had nothing to do with this ongoing situation, but it was a light at the end of the tunnel for sure. We're in court, and the judge starts yelling at my neighbor for refusing mediation and wasting the state’s money. I interrupted to say, "Just want to make sure everyone knows this is about the noise my six-month-old cat is making!"
I hear laughter from other people behind me in the courtroom. Neighbor pleads his case, says I am harassing him and making too much noise. I repeat, this is about the noise my six-month-old cat is making. The judge is clearly angry that this old man is wasting the court's time and said that we must enter mediation. I tell him—I'm sorry, we shouldn't even be here.
“I'm moving out of state in just a few weeks, and again, this is about the noise a CAT is making". Again, more chuckles from the courtroom. To this, the judge replies "Oh. Well, if you don't end up moving then you'll need to come back to court". I said ok, and was ready to be done with all this. My neighbor tried to have pleasantries with me at that point but I just ignored him and walked out.
I wish there was some sweet revenge at the end, but really, I never spoke to him again and my cat and I are living happily in an apartment where she can run around to her heart’s desire and no one can tell her otherwise! By the way, during this entire ordeal, my landlord did nothing to help me out. The most he did was just chuckle and say "Oh yeah he's a character".
103. First Time Buyer Beware
My wife and I were moving into our first house. Our new neighbors were on their front porch drinking, which was no big deal. While bringing the last load of boxes into the house, my neighbor came up, welcomed me to the neighborhood, and mentioned how nice my TV was. A week later, my wife and I were headed out to dinner, and he stopped us to ask how long we would be gone. Something felt really off about him at that moment.
I lied and told him I was just running to the gas station one block away and that I would be back immediately. Twenty minutes later, I got a phone call from the local authorities. This moron broke into my house in broad dayligh
t, while three other neighbors were watching. He cut his hand on the window as he attempted to climb through it and used his bleeding hand on every doorknob in my house. He is now a number in the US penal system.
104. They Say He’s A Real Blockhead
We grew up in one of the worst neighborhoods in my state. It was really rough. Anyway, 80s childhood being what it was, we used to ride our bikes everywhere, regardless of danger. Our home street was divided into three parts. The upper and middle parts were relatively okay in the daytime. The lower part was off limits no matter what, because that’s where the creeps and dealers lived.
We moved out finally and went somewhere a lot safer. Years pass. Our old neighborhood makes the news every so often for various outrages. One day, I saw in the newspaper that a woman had recently been found deceased in her house—she’d been sitting there for a month on her couch. It was already sad, but then things took a horrific turn.
When authorities showed up to deal with the situation, they discovered a big slab of cement in a strange place in the backyard. A neighbor told them that they’d frequently seen her at night sitting near and talking to the slab. If you knew how strange the people were in our neighborhood were, you’d have brushed this off as yet another weirdo.
Well, it turns out it was her husband. Only they weren’t officially married, so when he passed on—it was suspected to be natural causes, surprisingly—she couldn’t live without his Social Security check every month, so she buried him in the backyard and kept up the pretense that he was alive and living with his out-of-state relatives.
We used to ride by that house frequently when he was already buried in the yard. Oh, the 1980s.
105. Bringing The House Down
I had the neighbor's house condemned and torn down. It's kind of a long story, but it was so worth it. So, the property next to me had two houses on it. The owners decided to gut and remodel one of them, and they piled the demolition debris in the front yard...directly next to my house. That stuff stayed there for a full year, with the owners ignoring my every effort to get them to do something about it (they did not live on the property, they were renting it out).
So I eventually checked with the city about their remodel permits and found that not only did they not have permits, but as far as the city was concerned, the house didn't exist. It had been built with no plans or permits filed and tied into the other house utilities. So I talked to the city planner’s office and they came out to put a stop-work order on the house (which was not really necessary since no work had been done in a year).
They also condemned the house. They told the owners they wouldn't be fined or prosecuted if they demolished the property. That sounds drastic, but the house was already gutted with no windows or doors, and they weren't going to let them restore it. So that's how I got someone's house torn down.
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