So, you move into your new place and it's perfect—great light, amazing location—a real steal. Right? Wrong. Turns out, you have a neighbor straight out of your worst nightmare, and even worse? They're on a mission to ruin your life. Yep, here are some absolutely wild stories about the worst neighbors ever.
1. Slipper Sniffer
My across-the-hall apartment neighbor is so weird. Like, just overall off-putting. Anyway, I leave my sandals out next to my door every night since I don't wear shoes in the house. It so happens that one night, I had to meet my best friend, who came over in the dead of night at the front since she doesn’t know my place very well. As I opened the door, I caught my neighbor doing the most deranged thing imaginable.
He was caressing and smelling my sandals. I froze and mildly freaked out. He saw me staring, did a weird giggle, said something about his kids calling him back inside, and then yanked me into this weird side hug. Now I leave my shoes in a box inside my house. Ugh.
2. 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.
3. It Came From Above
I had an upstairs neighbor who let their dog do its business—number one AND number two—on their balcony. I'm guessing this was going on for a while, as I started to notice a brown viscous substance leaking on my potted plants on my balcony. It wasn't until it rained that I could smell that it was dog excrement and urine. I basically had dog sewage raining all over my balcony from that night it rained.
I spent a ton of effort making my balcony a nice little oasis with nice lighting, plants, outdoor carpet, and furniture. I eventually got him evicted because it kept happening.
4. Kooky? More Like Spooky
It started out that we just thought she was a free spirit; just your average hippie-dippie Scandinavian lady with alternative parenting ideas. But we gradually learned that she was just a horrible person. The first red flag was when she picked up my four-year-old son, claiming she wanted him over for a short visit. She said he was playing with her younger daughter and she said they were playing naked most of the time.
I told her he wasn't allowed to be undressed anymore but I wasn't mad because I knew things were less uptight in Norway where she was from. I later talked to my son about it. Her older daughter, on the other hand, was always misbehaving. Her first time over to our house, she smeared chapstick all over an entire wall. She was like six years old. Plenty old enough to know better.
Another time, she sneaked into our house while I was outside playing with my kids and started eating some brownies I had just made. I mean, she tore a hole right smack in the middle of the plastic wrap over the dish and scooped out handfuls of brownies. She would also "pole dance" on the tree out front, singing "Shake yo money maker." Six years old.
She had birthday parties for her children, to which we were invited and brought gifts. But then, we found out their REAL birthdays were later in the year. When we were invited again, we declined. The lady tried to explain that she celebrated half birthdays. I explained to her that we didn't. Soon, my children were not allowed to play at their house anymore.
Though, we still all ran into each other walking to school. She would tell me how she saw real demons walking around disguised as people, and how God told her that I was really close to seeing the light and becoming Christian. It was during this time that someone called CPS on her and she accused me of it. It wasn't me, but maybe it should have been.
We finally moved, but she caught up with me one day to give me a bag of used clothes for my daughter. But her intentions were utterly twisted: I sliced my finger on the razor blade that she put in the bag, luckily not very badly. That was the last I saw of her.
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5. A Near Fatal Mistake
My neighbor came home from the bar with his friend and they were both tipsy. At some point, they started screwing around with a pistol and accidentally shot through their floor—down into my apartment. The worst part? I actually got hit in the stomach. I called 9-1-1 and when the ambulance was taking me away, my panicked fiancé was getting ready to leave because the EMTs told her to follow.
My neighbor came down and was like "What happened? We heard a commotion!" The authorities were called and he got taken into custody.
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6. Sketchy Dealings
One year in university, I ended up finding a room in an apartment building. It was one of those apartments with five bedrooms on one floor with a shared kitchen and two bathrooms. The landlady ended up renting out each room individually, so I was living with four complete strangers. They were mostly decent guys and we got along okay, outside or normal roommate quarrels.
This was fine until it was time for the roomies to move out before the lease was up. They didn't want to get charged for the month of rent, so they found subletters. My one roommate gave his room to another total stranger. The new total stranger wasn't really vetted all that well. I bumped into him once when he moved in and he gave me a weird vibe.
He kind of seemed like a sketchy dude, but whatever; we were all poor university students, so I thought maybe I was reading him wrong. I didn't even really meet him long enough to really catch his name. Anyway, one night, a few days after he moved in, I was sitting in my room with my girlfriend and we were watching a movie. During the movie, I could have sworn that I was hearing radios going off.
I shrugged it off and figured it was a part of the movie. About twenty minutes later, however, there was a knock on our apartment door. None of my other four roommates was home, so I answered it and was greeted with not one, not two, but five officers. At least one of them was armed with an SMG. Officers: "Does this man live here?" Me: "Uh...Yeah, I think that's the new roommate..."
Officers: "Is he home?" Me: "Uh...I don't think so..." They came in and knocked on his bedroom door. No answer. Curious, I asked them what was happening. The officers all shared a meaningful look and one of them answered that he may have been involved in an incident and may be injured. About five minutes later, the apartment door opened and the sketchy roommate was standing there in the entrance hall to the apartment.
Our conversation went something like this—Me: "Are you okay? The authorities were here looking for you and said you were injured." His response was horrifying: "Oh, I was involved in a drive-by earlier today. It's okay though, I ran away." He then went into his room as if he didn't just drop that on us. Five minutes later my girlfriend and I were still sharing looks of astonishment.
Then, a knock on the door again! Surprise, surprise, it was the authorities. Now they had some reinforcements and even a few dogs with them. I just pointed to the guy's door. An officer unbuttoned his holster and I locked myself in my room. I emailed my landlady that night informing her of what had happened, saying that I would be moving out of my apartment early, and that I was expecting not to be billed for my last month of rent. She did not argue.
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7. Urine Trouble
I moved into a run-dwon apartment in a building that was occupied by basically the worst people in the area. It was a pretty rural small town—a lot of junkies and lowlifes, etc. I moved there because I don’t have a driver’s license and I needed to live close to my new job at a café as there are no buses in the area—except school buses—and it was relatively cheap. I quickly learned what a mistake I'd made.
One night when I came home from work, I met two of my neighbors by the entrance to the building. These two were living wall-to-wall with me, and I had listened to their drugged-up saturnalias more than once. They started following me up the stairs, not saying a single word, just following me. I rushed inside and locked the door, when they started hammering at it.
They were yelling, hammering their hands at the door so hard I thought they would break it. I yelled back at them: “What do you want?? Leave me alone!” Their answer stunned me. They stopped their hammering and the man said, with a fragile voice; “We were just wondering if we could borrow your pee for a drug test tomorrow.” I not-so politely declined and told them to get lost. I didn’t live there for much longer, I’ll tell you that.
8. Pot Calls Kettle Black
When I was living in a small apartment, my neighbors always cranked up their music to 11—like very, very loud—and left it there until something like 7 am. Maybe later, but that's when I would leave for work. It was so loud that I couldn't hear my own TV over it. My neighbors and I would bang on the door but they would never open the door.
It was like trying to sleep at a festival. Then at some point, I found out they often left for a bar across the street, but would just leave the music on. When I found this out, I started pulling the breaker for their apartment. It worked for a bit, but they would just come back at 5 am and turn it back on. It was reported by heaps of people, but nothing was ever done. Then I came up with a genius plan.
While they were gone out as usual one night, I jammed their lock so their keys wouldn't work anymore. When they couldn’t get in after coming back from the bar, they had to get the property manager and he heard the music blasting inside. After a couple of times of that happening, they were evicted. Hmmm...maybe I'm the bad neighbor in this story.
9. Nope, Nope, And Nope
My partner and I purchased the house next door to my best friend. I had lived with him for close to a decade when his kids were babies, so the children viewed my house as an extension of theirs, and were in and out all day, every day. I have a more flexible schedule than he and his wife, so I have them in the mornings, after school, and on days off of school.
I had a pool in my yard, and because my friend's kids were still little, I installed a retractable cover and made sure it was locked so they couldn't open it. My friend's yard had one of those wood fort/climbing wall/swing set deals and a large sandbox. Throughout the year, we spent most evenings outside, grilling, drinking, and watching the kids play/swim/whatever.
One summer day, I came home from work a little earlier than normal, and started to prep for dinner. I heard a knock at my back door, which was odd, since my buddy's kids never knocked. I went to see who it was and discovered a mom and two kids who looked to be maybe 5-7 years old. As I opened the door, she informed me that her kids needed to use the bathroom and that I needed to come out and get the cover off my pool.
I was confused and asked her to repeat herself, and she said that her kids needed to pee and that they were hot and bored with playing in the sandbox, so I needed to open up my pool. I asked her why the heck she was in my friend's yard and what made her think her kids were welcome to swim in my pool, or use my bathroom for that matter.
She got really witchy and told me that she had moved into the house behind us and that she had watched my buddy's kids come over all the time and watched as I opened the pool for them. She insisted that since I was willing to open my pool for the kids next door, I should also open it for the children who lived behind me. I tried explaining the relationship between my best friend's family and mine.
She claimed it didn't matter that I had known them since birth and pretty much had helped raise them, I just needed to get to know her kids too and it would be OK. I told her no and closed the door on her. She spent a while knocking and fussing at me through the window, and then had her kids pee in a planter on the side of the patio.
When I still didn't react, she took her kids back into my friend's yard to play on the swings. I texted him to let him know what was going on, right at the moment he was letting his 300+ pounds worth of Newfie dogs out into the yard without noticing the unwelcome visitors. The mom starts shrieking and climbs up into the fort, leaving both kids on the swings.
She starts demanding that we put the dogs inside and how dare my friend let his dogs out into his own yard when her kids are clearly playing there. He tells her to get the heck out and calls the authorities. When the officers arrived, she put on the whole waterworks about how her kids are just looking for friends, and my buddy's kids are somehow mistreating her kids, even though they'd never met.
She said that he invited her over just to let his dogs attack her children, blah blah blah. They eventually move her back onto her own property, then come back later to tell us they warned her about coming back. She lived in that house for almost a year before she and her husband divorced. But even then, she still managed to be a nightmare neighbor.
During that year, I had to replace the lock over the pool cover controls three times, have a fencing company remove a gate at the back of my property that was meant to let the lawnmower through, and eventually payed a security company to come to check on the yard any time we were going to be away for more than a few hours.
We found her and her kids in our yards repeatedly, but she'd leave when we got home. What finally resolved the issue was my partner catching her in the pool. She told him she knew the man that owned the house and that he had told her it was OK to swim. He told her he was married to the man that owned the pool and that it's not OK to swim.
She apparently had a bad reaction to realizing she was immersing her sons in gay water. We didn't see her again after that.
10. 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.
11. The Good Prevails
I'm a surveyor. This woman called us with a complaint about her neighbor's garden growing into her property. She was upset at her neighbor and told us all about how nasty she was. We eventually met the neighbor and she ended up being the nicest person ever. She told us she would be willing to move her garden, but only once the survey was completed.
We staked out the line and it went right through the other woman's shed. That's when the horror was unleashed: She screamed at us, pulled our stakes out, and tried to hit us with them. Her neighbor, the one with the garden, was so happy that she was right, she was almost in tears. She made the woman move her shed and then installed a large fence. I love it when the good guy wins.
12. White Flag
I moved into a brand new house. I noticed an old toilet, garbage, and a broken-down hot tub in the neighbors front yard. Nothing special about that. I made cookies and we went over to introduce ourselves. He laughed and slammed the door in our faces. Little did we know, this was the beginning of our worst nightmare. A few days later, I was out landscaping our new yard with my husband, and we just laid some bricks.
He was on his knees, making sure they were level, while I stood beside him and handed over the bricks. Our neighbor then walked by and yelled, “Well, I can see who wears the pants!” My husband and I looked at each other, totally perplexed. Then, a few months later, we got a puppy. Our other neighbor let us know she witnessed the guy's son throwing lit-up matches over the fence at our puppy when he was in the backyard.
We found about 50 matches in our yard. Then she also had to call the authorities because his other son broke the lights on her garage and defecated on her welcome mat (all captured on her home video system). About six months later, I got a complaint about our dog's barking and ended up with a $500 fine. It was ridiculous. Our dog never barked, unless someone walked by or came to the door.
We had letters from all 16 surrounding neighbors attesting that our dog never barked, but the letters were not admissible. We sold the house and moved shortly afterward.
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13. Adventures In Babysitting
Years ago, this new neighbor of mine kept trying for the better part of a summer to use me as a free babysitter. It started when her kid, who was really a cute, well-behaved kid about seven years old, showed up at my door at 7:15 in the morning. We were all just waking up and getting around so I told him that my boys weren't ready to play yet and to come back in a few hours.
That is when the kid told me his mom had gone to work. This seemed a bit odd to me so I brought him in and tried to call his mom. Sure enough, she was gone. So I brought him in and fed him breakfast. He stayed with us the rest of the day and he got along well with my two boys who were five and 10. I had only talked to his mom about two times, so I had no idea why she would think this was a good idea.
When his mom came home, I walked him over so I could talk to her. I told her not to do that again, though I did say that I would be willing to watch him on occasion if asked first, but not every day. Her response was: "Well, what else do you have to do all day?" This kind of took me by surprise. I tried to tell her that I work at home on commissions.
She rolled her eyes and told me that being an artist isn't a “real job,” and besides I was married so I didn't need to work. I should have pointed out to her that she was married and working, but I felt myself getting angry and I didn't want to argue with her. "Just don't do that again." I said to her. "You have teenage kids home for the summer, have them babysit."
She frowned at me and said, "They work." I said, "So do I!" Then I went home. The next morning at 7:15 the kid sheepishly shows up again. Once again I bring him in and feed him breakfast and later lunch. Once again I took him to his home and once again told his mother to please not do that again. She actually tried to tell me that it was my neighborly duty to watch him and I told her that if she sent him tomorrow I wouldn't be there because of a doctor’s appointment. Her reply blew my mind.
She said that as a babysitter I should have given her several day’s notice about this. I angrily told her I was NOT a babysitter and then went home. The next morning I made my 7 am appointment. I did some grocery shopping afterward and it was about 10 am when I got home. The poor kid was waiting for me on my porch. He had been there for nearly three hours and the little guy was scared and hungry.
That night when I took the kid home, I was angry. I told her how the kid was scared and alone. She actually said that she had told me I hadn't given her enough time to find anyone else and that his being alone was my fault. I pointed at her and said: "I am NOT a babysitter! Don't send him over again!" That night, this woman had her adult nephew call me to scream at me for not being home when his poor aunt dropped her son off.
How dare I leave a small child alone like that? I told the nephew that his aunt KNEW I wasn't home so it was HER that left a child all alone. I said that I had repeatedly asked his aunt NOT to send the kid over anymore and I was NOT a babysitter. This nephew freaked out at me when I said that. I hung up on him while he was still screaming at me.
This worked for two wonderful, quiet days. Then right back to it. I tried everything, but this woman insisted that it was my neighborly duty to babysit and would tell me as much. Finally, I decided that to solve this problem I would just get a job outside of my home, and that way she would have to stop. (I was too much of a pacifist back then. I no longer am). I landed an interview for a position at the local library and I was ecstatic.
I told the woman to keep her son home because I had arranged for my kids to stay with their grandmother while I went to this interview. The next morning, I drove to my mother-in-law's house and took my kids inside. When I went to leave, I found this woman's kid waiting for me in my car! She had actually followed me there and put her son in my unlocked car and then zoomed off while I was dropping off my boys.
My mother-in-law wasn't the most flexible person in the world and she adamantly refused to watch an extra kid. I had to cancel my interview. I was livid. I toyed with several ideas at this moment. I could take the kid to her job and leave him with her...or I could call CPS. I really wasn't sure how stable this woman's job was and I didn't want her to get fired, and when I went to go call the CPS I chickened out because it really wouldn't be fair to the little boy.
Besides, I had heard really scary stories about CPS. In the end, I just waited for her to come home. I left the boy at my house with my husband (I planned on doing a lot of cussing) and I stomped over to her house and met her before she even got out of her car. I shouted at her. I told her she was dense, stupid, moronic, and crazy. I told her that she had lost me my job interview and if she sent her kid over to be watched again I was going to call CPS.
I told her that she was violating my space and if it took going to court to get her to knock it off, then so be it. She then put her hand on her hip and in her most snotty tone she said: "Well if you didn't want to sit with him, all you had to do was tell me." I really do not know how I kept from punching her right then and there, this comment was so asinine.
I turned on my heels to start stomping home when I saw her husband pulling up. Now, this was the first time I had ever met her husband. He worked at a job that only allowed him to be home on weekends. (I can't blame him, I wouldn't want to be around her either), but when she saw him she turned tail and RAN into her house. He saw that I was upset and asked me what had happened.
I told him. Told him all of it, especially the incident at my mother-in-law's. The poor man was shocked. He had been told that I was being paid and he had been giving her money to pay me! He had no idea all this had been going on and he was very, very apologetic over the whole thing. In fact, he apologized again to my husband when he came over to pick up his little boy.
Finally, FINALLY, she stopped sending her kid over! Later I heard from others that she was badmouthing me and warning folks about what a horrid babysitter I was, but I took that as a favor. I didn't want to babysit any kids other than my own and I still hate doing so. I don't hate the kids, I love kids. It's dealing with the parents that I don't like.
The kid came over only once in a while after that to play with my kids, after he called first to get permission, exactly the way it should be done. I'm sure his dad had something to do with that because the kid only came over on weekends. This is one of a few stories I have involving this crazy lady. Her only entertainment in life seems to be seeing how bizarre she can act in this neighborhood.
I'm luckier than my other neighbors in the fact that she leaves me alone now, and I'm very happy with that.
14. Karmic Justice
This happened to my parents before they had me and my siblings. When buying their first house, which is our current family home, they arrived on their motorbikes to view the house. After deciding on wanting to buy it, they greeted the neighbors. The neighbors expressed how thankful they were that the "biker couple" didn't buy the house, then proceeded to rant about their dislike towards bikers...not knowing my parents were the biker couple.
As you can imagine, it didn't go down too well when the pricks noticed the bikes. But it gets even more interesting—a few months after their initial chat with the neighbors, my parents were sitting in the living room minding their own business when they heard an explosion. They ran outside to find both of their bikes engulfed with flames.
They called the fire brigade who put out the fire. One of the firefighters approached my mom and pointed out that there were matches laying around and that it was more than likely an arson attack. My mom didn't pursue it with the authorities for God knows what reason, but while in her fit of rage, she told my dad: "Whoever did this is going to break their right leg."
Coincidence or not, a week later, one of the neighbors came home with his right leg in a cast.
15. Mr. De Vil
I was 13 at the time. My neighbor tried to take my dog and her puppies. He literally broke into our house one day to do it. Luckily, my mom and I were there at the time—when he realized we had caught him in the act, he dropped the dogs, but also told us that he could break our necks whenever he wanted. Quite a nice guy. We obviously called the authorities after that.
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16. Living Your Best Life
I lived in Melbourne, Australia for about a year. While there, I met a gorgeous gay couple, Brian and Derek (names changed). They were both bisexual, and they lived in the same building as me on the floor directly above mine. I soon entered into an intimate relationship with both of them. We would have threesomes, and sometimes more.
Besides the awesome bedroom stuff, I also became really good friends with them and we're still in touch. It was tons of fun for all involved. Among my neighbors was a middle-aged couple with two children. They lived right across the hallway from me and were quick to judge us after seeing Brian and Derek exiting my apartment early in the morning on more than one occasion.
The woman, Karen, asked me in the elevator what I was doing with "those two gays." I politely told her it was none of her business. When she kept on pestering me, I told her "If you must know, I'm friends with benefits with them, now leave me alone." I still remember the look of shock on her face. I don't think she expected me to reply so brazenly.
When I told Brian and Derek about this, they shared their own experience in dealing with them. This couple had tried to talk to the property manager about "gays moving into a building with families and children." They were told to screw off but any time either or both of these guys were in the elevator with them or ran into them in the parking lot, the husband (Let's call him Todd) would stand between them and his kids while giving Brian and/or Derek angry looks.
They must've been trying to prevent their kids from catching "the gay." HA. In the weeks that followed, the entitled couple continued to give me the stink eye any time they saw me. I just smiled back at them sweetly, which annoyed them even more. On one occasion, their teenage daughter said "good morning" to me and tried to make small talk, before her mother dragged her away by the arm while berating her for talking to "that woman."
Interestingly, their kids seemed very well behaved and nice and I truly felt sorry for them. My next-door neighbors (another couple with kids with whom I got along very well) later told me that Karen had tried to get them to file a noise complaint against me. According to Karen’s logic, since I shared a wall with that family, they could probably hear all the "ungodly" noises coming from my apartment and they should complain in order to protect their children.
The nice couple told them they would do no such thing as I had never bothered them and they had never heard any such noises coming out of my apartment. One night, Brian, Derek, and I decided to have a foursome that would involve the three of us and Brian and Derek's friend Dean. The next morning, Dean asked if he could come back to my place with me.
As it was a Sunday morning and Dean was hotter than Hades, I agreed. As he and I were walking down the hallway to my place, Karen was just getting out of hers. She saw Dean and I smiling and talking with his arm around my waist. She approached me, asking angrily if I was “selling my body." I told her she was insane and asked her to kindly screw off.
Later that day, I received a terrifying call from the property manager. She wanted to let me know that Karen and Todd had complained that I was "a prostitute" and that it was dangerous for their children to be in the same building as me. They told her in great detail about how I was bringing home different men. The property manager had gotten to know Brian and Derek quite well and had an inkling that I was “friends” with them.
So she contacted them and they told her all about Karen’s crazy behavior and accusations. They said that the man they had seen me with was a mutual friend. The property manager dissuaded the family from filing any sort of false complaint against me as it could cause a world of trouble for them. I thanked that kind lady and later had a good chuckle over it all with Brian and Derek.
The blatant harassment from Karen and Todd had stopped, but of course, the hateful looks continued. On one occasion, when we were in the elevator together, Karen made a pathetic attempt at shaming me by condescendingly asking if I was going to have any men over that night. What she didn't realize is that shame about my promiscuity is something I'm entirely incapable of feeling.
I proceeded to tell her in great detail about all the acts I was going to engage in that evening. I mean, she's the one who asked, right? After this fun little interaction, she and her husband avoided me completely. Good times.
17. An Act Of Hate
I was in a car accident when I was young, maybe eight years old. I had my two sisters—one younger and one older in the back seat with me, and in the front were our babysitters who were very close family friends. We went off a curb on our very own road that was notorious for accidents and the car flipped several times. It was the middle of winter in Northern Vermont.
We had tons of snow and it was cold out. We were all okay as it was a low-speed accident, but the Jetta doors had crunched in and the only way we could get out was by kicking the cracked windshield out. While our babysitters did their best, we couldn't get out. By that time, the person whose lawn we had rolled onto came down. He was very nice, but he couldn't get to us either. He told us he would go get his parents who lived just up the road to help.
He returned with his parents and my babysitters' faces were a mixture of disbelief and concern. You see, my babysitters are Black, and the guy's parents were their next-door neighbors who were EXTREMELY supremacist. They would shoot in the air and in the general direction of the family's home, shouting "American and proud!" on basically every even remotely patriotic holiday.
It came to a head one year when they shot through two layers of the fence that our babysitters' father had installed out of worry for his many kids. Now, while analyzing our situation, the faces on the parents of the guy were a mixture of disgust and amusement. I'll never forget what they said: "We aren't lifting a dang finger for these losers," and how they turned away, chuckling to themselves.
The guy was embarrassed and apologized on behalf of his parents. A few minutes later, a fire truck arrived and they broke open the doors to help us out. I was freezing and confused as were my sisters. That act of hate has always stuck with me. I sincerely hope those two jerks met a painful end.
18. Real Peaches
My neighbor sprayed our hedge between our houses with something that destroyed it. Initially, we planted it there next to her cyclone fence so we wouldn’t have to look at her. Everything we’ve planted there dies, and they always start dying from her side. She’s super nosy and is always watching out the window, which is why we plant things there!
She also moved her in-ground sprinklers onto what I think is our property. They are touching our driveway, and she sets them to go off in the middle of the night when our cars are parked there. She refuses to set them for when we’re at work because it “interrupts her yard work time.” The water spots on our cars are from the irrigation water, and they leave huge, white, amoeba-shaped marks down one side of our car!
I paid someone $250 last year to use acid to remove them and they were still faintly there. She actually had the nerve to suggest our son park his car there because the color of his car won’t show the water spots as bad! Her husband walks up and down the backyard fence and whistles at our dog to make her bark, then the wife complains to us about our dog barking.
They're real peaches.
19. The No-Gooder
We were trying to sell our house and the neighbors' nephew was sabotaging it. When we’d leave so people could look at it, he would sneak around creepily which turned off a lot of buyers. He even went into my house during an open house and told people not to buy it. He lived like 100 yards away from us and to this day, we still don’t know what his deal was.
Once he started threatening my sister who tried to help him after he passed out on my driveway, we called the authorities and made him sign a paper that said if he was caught on the property again, he’d be put behind bars. Luckily, we were able to sell it after that.
20. The Family That Fights Together…
I just recently had a new family move into my neighborhood. The neighborhood is relatively small and close-knit; it’s the kind of neighborhood where everyone knows each other and we generally all get along well. We have big block parties and shoot off fireworks together on holidays. The new family is a middle-aged couple with their four children.
The kids’ ages range from around 14 to two, and this incident is just the first of several problems that I have had with this family since they moved in. So I was hanging out in the living room just relaxing and watching TV. From the couch, I have a clear view of my backyard. That’s when I noticed the retractable cover of my swimming pool begin to roll up.
I was home alone and no one else has access to my backyard. For insurance reasons, I have a lock on my back gate because of the pool. The gate always remains locked as we would be liable if anything was to happen in the yard. I rush outside and see what was going on. That’s when I see this Entitled Mother standing next to my pool with her four children.
They are dressed in their swimsuits and the mom is rolling up the cover of my pool. Me: Excuse me, what do you think you’re doing in my backyard? Her response shocked me to the core...EM: My kids have been well behaved today and they want to go for a swim. I saw that you have a pool so we are going for a dip. Me: This is not a public pool and you are on my private property. I need you to get out of my backyard now. I never told you that you are allowed on my property without permission.
EM: WHO THE HECK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? IT IS A VERY HOT DAY AND MY KIDS WANT TO GO FOR A SWIM AND THEY WILL. Me: Not in my private pool they will not. How did you even get in my yard anyway? The gate is locked. EM: SCREW OFF! IN MY OLD NEIGHBORHOOD WE DID THIS ALL THE TIME. MY KIDS ARE GOING FOR A SWIM NOW AND YOU WILL NOT EVEN KNOW WE ARE HERE. YOU ARE JUST BEING SELFISH AND I WILL NOT ALLOW MY BABIES TO SUFFER BECAUSE OF YOUR BAD MOOD.
Me (Now angry): I will not ask again. You either get off my property now or I will call the authorities. You are not using my pool and that is final. EM (finally gets the cover off): Okay kids jump on in. Don’t listen to this stupid witch. Kid: Yeah you stupid witch. We are going for a swim now and you can’t stop us. Me: THAT’S IT! I AM CALLING THE AUTHORITIES.
EM now sees that I am serious and tries to the “reason” with me. EM: You would really not allow four kids to go for a swim on a hot day. What kind of heartless person are you? Just let us go swimming for an hour and we will leave. Don’t you want to be a good neighbor to us? Me: No I do not. You just broke into my backyard without permission? Please get off my property now.
She starts to mumble something to her kids and then she grabs her two youngest and starts to walk out of my yard. I then turn around and see her two oldest boys still standing by the pool. I start to walk over to tell them to go with their mother, and that’s when I see what they are doing. Her two oldest spawns are PEEING into my pool.
Kid: MAYBE THAT WILL TEACH YOU TO BE A BETTER NEIGHBOR, YOU STUPID WITCH. Me (grabs the arms of the two oldest and pushes them out of the gate): GET OFF MY PROPERTY YOU DISGUSTING LITTLE BRATS. EM: DON’T YOU DARE LAY A HAND ON MY BABIES OR I WILL CALL THE POLICE ON YOU. WHO DO YOU THINK THEY WILL BELIEVE? A GOOD MOMMY OR A PATHETIC LITTLE WITCH LIKE YOU? YOU JUST GOT WHAT YOU DESERVE. ENJOY SWIMMING IN YOUR PEE POOL.
They then all walk off laughing as they went back to their house. I was in complete shock and I didn’t know what to do. I now wish I called the authorities after this first incident, but I sadly did not and things have since escalated with this family. Remember how I said that I had a lock on the gate? I later found it broken on the ground. I have no idea what they used to smash it, but they were successful. I have since purchased a much more heavy-duty lock.
21. Crossing A Line
This is about my neighbor two houses over. We were good acquaintances, probably almost friends; but everything changed in a single moment. I worked for the guy for a little bit—he was actually my boss at the time this happened. I noticed that he's really big on using people's stuff when they aren't around—like one time, he used a guy's woodworking tools while he was gone.
I told him multiple times, "Hey, I'm cool with you borrowing my stuff but just make sure you ask. I also don't like unscheduled visits, so call or text if you want to stop over." I just wanted to let him know where I stood if he wanted to borrow some more tools from me or whatever. I had let him borrow a 17 mm impact socket from me once.
Then, two weeks went by and I assumed the jerk probably lost it. Whatever...I just told myself never to lend out stuff to him again. Well, after another few days, he said, "Hey, you weren't home so I returned the socket and borrowed another." Yes, he hopped over my fence mid-day while I was gone, opened my garage door, returned the socket he borrowed, very scratched and marred up, and helped himself to some of my other tools.
He told me this a week after he did it, out of the blue, as if it was no big deal. That was the breaking point for me. I told him to stay the heck away from me, my house, my family, and my property.
22. Driveway Dispute
We moved into an apartment and our neighbor informed us that she owned half of the driveway. Cool, whatever; it was a huge driveway and it had more than enough room for all of us. After a month or so of living there, she divided the driveway in half with a bunch of rocks. Still fine, as we had plenty of room. But over the course of two months, she slowly moved the rocks closer and closer to our apartment.
It got to a point where we would have to physically move them out of the way to get in and out of our driveway. The landlord finally got a survey done and found out a shocking truth—she didn’t own ANY part of the driveway! From that point on, she was forced to park her car on the road. Serves her right for lying to us and taking advantage of our kindness.
23. It’s Raining What?
This was in an apartment building. The upstairs neighbor’s dog peed on their patio and it dripped down onto me while I was sitting outside reading. I yelled and ran to shower, and when I texted them to ask them to take their dog out to pee in future, their response made my blood boil with rage. They said it wasn’t their dog and it must have blown over from somewhere else. Blown over? From where?
24. Bird Calls
I'm probably someone's bad experience, although they don't know it's me yet. The malfunctioning smoke alarm in my apartment complex hallway has almost become a sort of a bitter joke among my neighbors—it's been chirping multiple times a day for the past two months; but no matter what, maintenance just can't seem to make it stop.
What my neighbors don't know is that the smoke alarm only chirped consistently for about three days. Everything since then has been my parrot, who liked the sound so much that she's been mimicking it as often as she likes. They don't know I have a parrot. The woman immediately next door does think I have a dog, though, because the feathery little witch also likes to bark and then scold herself for it.
25. Up In Smoke
I came home to a smoke-filled apartment and I called 9-1-1 right away since I couldn't find the cause myself. Turns out, our downstairs neighbors put a charcoal grill on their stove so they could barbecue indoors. Brilliant. My only relief was that a friend had walked my dog earlier that day so I know he wasn't in a smoke-filled apartment all afternoon.
26. Grand Theft Auto Neighbor
When I started my first job post-college, I was thrilled to live by myself for the first time in my life. I had this beautiful one-bedroom apartment in a solid part of town. Everything was great until six months later, when new tenants moved in next to my unit. I had a package go missing (a phone case). Amazon had posted a photo of it at my door, so I thought that it was just a fluke.
Then it happened again, and again, and again. The office wouldn’t accept packages, so I had to get my items delivered to friends’ places instead, which was wildly inconvenient. The local authorities didn’t care in the slightest when I reported it, so I just figured I’d deal with it. Fast forward a few weeks, and the situation escalated.
I come home after being gone for less than an hour, to see that my doorknob and front door were scrapped up and the knob was barely hanging on. Long story short, I had been parking in plain view of this guy’s window, so he was able to tell when I was home. I am 100% convinced he tried to break into my place, and that me coming home early interrupted him.
I googled his name after I moved—got it off a package at his door—and found that he was a convicted felon with charges that include grand theft auto, domestic assault, drug dealing, and an attempted break-in.
27. Public Pool
They insisted that we pay to have a gate installed between our backyard fences so that they may use our above-ground pool as they please, preferably when they invite friends over. When we denied it, they threw a hissy fit and found an excuse to "punish" us. You see, the pool was going through some expensive issues with leakage into the yard.
They threatened to call the fine-happy HOA because the water was leaking into the yard they rarely used and their dog was allegedly getting sick from drinking the water. Not wanting to deal with that nonsense (and also wanting to clean our own backyard of the pond that began housing frogs), my father spent his birthday day off from work in the Texas heat digging a trench and installing a pipe so that the water could drain.
The neighbors came outside and harassed dad the entire time he was digging the trench, telling him it would've just been easier to install the gate. Would've been easier to install a shovel into their frontal lobes, those freaking profligates.
28. Grandma Girlfriend
I used to live in a horrible apartment with paper-thin walls. The people next door were a woman who looked like she was in her 70s and what I thought was her 30-something grandson. They would yell at each other all day, constantly blast their TV, and the smell of their smoke would waft through into my apartment and make the place absolutely reek.
The worst was at night when the two of them would, well...be very loud in bed. So this was the first clue that they were not grandma and grandson like I’d assumed—at least I really hope not. Every night for an hour I heard their creaking bed banging against my bedroom wall and the old woman moaning like a stuck pig. Nightmarish.
I also think the guy kept track of my schedule and watched for me because whenever I came home or went out, even when I took out the garbage, he would be there outside his place, trying to chit chat with me while staring at my body and being completely gross. I lived there a year, but it felt like ten.
29. This Trash Didn’t Fall Far From The Tree
I had some neighbors below me years ago. It was a mother and her son, plus sometimes his ex, and sometimes their kids. I feel terrible for the kids, because the adults were the trashiest people. The place reeked of pot 24/7, they would park their vehicle on the grass as they were at the back of the building, and they drove everybody nuts with how loud they were.
I once recorded audio of the mom and son fighting where he was screaming and very graphically describing how he was going to kill her. I saw a guy in the building across from us also on his balcony subtly recording in case it escalated. The fight ended when his ex showed up either with or for the kids, and they started arguing instead. At one point she screamed that she had crabs and then drove off. It was absolutely wild.
30. Don's A Dog
My old neighbor used to walk his dog on a leash to let it take a dump in my yard. My mom had me throw the mess back into his yard once and he called the authorities on us. A few months later, my family and I were going out of town and after we left our house, my mom had realized she had forgotten something. We turned around—and what we witnessed made our blood boil.
There's our awful neighbor, standing in the middle of our yard with his dog on a leash dropping a nice present in our front yard. All I remember is my mom winding down her window and yelling, “Screw you, Don!”
31. Black Tie Event
My next-door neighbor growing up had someone in the family pass. On the day of the funeral, he came to our door and asked my dad if he could borrow a tie. My father complied and gave him a nice black silk tie, suitably appropriate for the occasion. He felt bad for the guy and thought it was an easy way for him to help the guy out during his time of sorrow.
We showed up at the funeral and saw the neighbor, strangely not wearing the tie he borrowed. Then we looked at the casket and my dad's tie was being worn by the corpse. Not wanting to be rude, none of us said anything, and as a result, the tie was buried with the corpse, never to be seen again.
32. Garbage Battle
We had some neighbors that used to leave their garbage out in plastic bags the night before garbage day—instead of putting it in a bin. Around here, that's just ringing the dinner bell for raccoons and other critters. Sure enough, come morning there's garbage strewn all over the neighborhood. What the raccoons and skunks didn't spread around, the wind picked up the slack.
Some of the people on the street kindly approached the guy and asked him to put his garbage in a bin. He told them to get lost. Thus began the Battle of the Garbage. It was so, so satisfying. Every morning of garbage day some people on my street would collect all the half-eaten and rotten trash from their lawns and toss it back into the dude's backyard.
Next, he would collect it, then dump it back on their lawns. Or cram it into their bushes. People started finding half-eaten burritos and candy wrappers in their mailboxes. The street started to look like a slum. The authorities were called. Health inspectors. City by-law enforcement. Each side was calling in whatever authority they could muster to get their enemy in trouble.
The dude and his family—amazingly his wife seemed perfectly pleasant—lasted about eight months then moved. Every once in a while I find a random margarine lid or piece of styrofoam in my hedge, and my mind goes back to those dark days of the garbage battle.
33. Stop Moving The Invisible Furniture
This horrid individual lived in the apartment right below my husband and me. It went from constant complaints, to him calling law enforcement on us multiple times to him leaving threatening messages on our car and front door. When we first moved in he was upset with the landlord for renting above him—left plenty of unpleasant notes and interrupted quite a few times when we were talking to the landlord.
When we moved in we only had a mattress and no other furniture, but he kept calling the landlord and saying that we were moving furniture around at 2 am and had our TV at full blast. After the eighth complaint in two months of us still moving around furniture and TV being too loud, we finally showed our apartment to the landlord. It revealed the truth.
We literally didn't have a TV and still only had our mattress. Then the neighbor started leaving notes on our car telling us to keep it down and he even put in writing, "There needs to be NO noise after 10 pm or else I'll call the authorities." We usually didn't even get home until after 11 pm and we were respectful to make sure we kept things down because we knew that not everyone had our work schedule.
So, we tried keeping it down even more and there were so many instances when we'd be eating dinner or cuddling quietly, or even sleeping and he'd be banging on his ceiling/our floor. After a few months, he started calling law enforcement and it got to the point where even they told him to stop calling about a noise complaint because it's a landlord issue and every time they came they never hear anything.
The last time they showed up, I was asleep and my husband ended up talking to them and explaining everything. They suggested that we file a harassment complaint. Then he started leaving threatening notes on our car and front door, and we kept hearing our doorknob jiggle. This is where it turned terrifying. He claimed that he and a friend had sat outside our apartment for two hours and listened to all the noise we were making.
He then said that he knows where we park our car so we’d better start parking it somewhere else if we didn't want it to get damaged etc. We kept the notes and made copies for the landlord and let him know that this was what we were dealing with. We were just keeping him in the loop before it got even worse. The last complaint was when he ran outside to the landlord.
He was screaming that something needed to be done about us because he heard our bed squeak the night before and how dare he rent to some crazy college kids who are partying and doing it all night. The landlord finally told him to stop being a bitter old man. Then this crazy neighbor of ours—who’d made our lives so miserable—took a total 180 turn and we found out that he had decided to sue the landlord and was moving.
Suddenly the neighbor kept offering us rides when one of us was walking. He stopped complaining and leaving notes. Our doorknob did, however, keep jiggling and turning at around midnight. Whenever we would check on our door we'd hear someone running down the hall as we'd approach our door. He eventually moved away and shockingly we haven't gotten a complaint from any other neighbor in the last three years we've lived here.
34. You Think You Know Someone
I lived behind Bob Berdella, the notorious figure from Kansas City. I lived there for five years and I talked to him daily, as he was the head of the neighborhood watch. Little did I know that he had also been living a secret life, kidnapping people and sending them without remorse. The day he was caught, it was because one of the young gay men he captured escaped and ran down the street wearing nothing but a dog collar.
Because I listened to tapes and CDs at the time, I had not heard anything about it on the radio. I drove home that night to a neighborhood full of officers, and it took me by complete surprise. When I found out the truth, I sounded just like every other neighbor in that type of situation: "But he was such a quiet and nice guy..."
They used excavators and backhoes to dig up his yard, and they tore down my fence as well. Eventually, he was given life in prison, where he eventually passed. His house was later sold and demolished. It was very weird. He had a store in a flea market, plus four skulls in the window with a sign that read "Final Four." One was from a victim.
35. The Psycho Next Door
My aunt, who was a single mother at the time and ran a daycare service in her house, lived next to a psychopath. After a bad ice storm one day, my aunt had a bunch of tree limbs fall into her backyard. Her neighbor's husband came over and cleaned it up for her; you know, just being a good neighbor. In turn, my aunt thanked him with a case of drinks; you know, just being a good neighbor.
Well, his wife took that as flirting, and so began a one-sided feud against my aunt. It was a while ago, so I don't remember everything. What I do remember, though, was horrifying. She tried to run over my aunt's dog once. Another time, she called child protective services and told them my aunt was a night worker and working at her house during the daycare hours.
Probably the worst one though was when my aunt found a bit of grass near the house burnt. She's old high school friends with the fire inspector, so he came and confirmed a fire was started using a propellant. My aunt took her to court over these things, but I don't remember what came of it. I'm pretty sure she at least got a restraining order.
36. Here Today
I lived in an apartment with a lot of rotating tenants. An elderly lady moved in across the hall from me and promptly started hoarding. I started to figure it out when her porch started to fill up with odds and ends furniture including, but not limited to, a roll-top desk. She also yelled at me once for taking her key out of the front door and putting it in the mail slot.
Anyway, after a couple of weeks, I started to realize I hadn’t seen her in a while and started to smell something real weird. Then I found out the dark truth. Turns out, she had passed and no one knew about it for a week—hence the smell. Her family came and cleared out all her stuff about a week after that.
37. Deadbeat Daddy
I rented a flat with an ex and the upstairs neighbor was an absolute nightmare. This was a deadbeat dad who had his kids every weekend and left them screaming all the time. He'd blast music until sunrise every day even when he had his kids. I got the council involved, nothing happened. I got child services involved, nothing happened.
He used to argue every Sunday with his ex about how he wasn't paying child support. They'd argue right outside our door—we were on the ground floor. The guy was unemployed, owed the landlord a lot of money, and only left his flat to get groceries or drugs. He then had the nerve to get angry at me when my cat meowed loudly...once.
38. A Huge Disturbance
Our neighbor burned something in his oven. Rather than open his windows to get the smoke out, he opened his door to the hall and set off the building's alarms. We all had to stand out in the cold and wait for the fire department while he watched from his apartment. The fire department opened his windows and told him he was an idiot.
We still had to wait outside for them to do mandatory checks of everything to make sure it really was just him being stupid. It was January. In New England. During a cold snap.
39. When Greed Takes Over
I live in Puerto Rico, where most of the island has been without power for the past two months following Hurricane María. Due to our government's power authority being quite slow in the recuperation process, a lot of neighborhoods in my area have been hiring private contractors to bring the electricity back. In my case, I found a contractor willing to bring our neighborhood's power grid back on, but I needed unanimous support from the neighbors to pay and authorize the process.
Most were on board for this, but two of my next-doors opposed it for some reason. When we asked them why they were, their response floored us. They said that they wanted the neighborhood without power so the rest of us would eventually leave and they'd never have to see our "annoying and pathetic" faces again. So it was pretty much a no-go on the contractor.
Fast forward a week and we found out that these next-doors had a friend in the power authority who asked them to keep away private contractors from the neighborhood so the authority could take credit when the power is eventually restored.
40. Kids Running Wild
I had some really crazy neighbors once. The matriarch nailed all of the windows shut in their house, then removed the doorknobs and installed several deadbolts. This was to keep her grandkids home and everyone else out while she was at work. Child welfare stopped by and somehow they were okay with this—which really floored me.
While she was at work, the kids were able to get one window open without her knowing, and they would usually leave during the day and make it back before she got off work. This went on for quite a while and eventually, there were maybe a dozen young adults living there too, and they all used the window as the main entrance.
The window, unfortunately, bordered on my driveway, and was mere feet from my house. All hours of the day, people would be out there, wiggling in and out of the window. People got tired of being cooped up and major fights broke out. I regularly heard bodies hitting walls or furniture or fists. I heard yells of "well, stop threatening and get your pistol already!"
I have PTSD, and it was just day after day of trying to keep myself calm. The kids had a pneumatic BB revolver, a lookalike handgun, and one morning shot up my neighbor's car. She left to work at a hospital early in the morning, before first light, and didn't notice. When she shut her car door, all the glass fell out the windows.
Later in the morning, the same kid shot out a window in the school across the street. But what happened next was even worse still. My husband and I were outside planting flowers and my husband felt a sudden pain in his shoulder. Sure enough, the kid had shot him. The authorities arrived and the kid just kept on shooting. They called the mother, who had to unlock all the deadbolts.
The officers took away the kids' rifles, and dragged them outside so they could be cuffed and taken away. The youngest was maybe nine. Since no one confessed or ratted, and the officers weren't sure which of the three did it, they were released and not charged. Thankfully this act of physical aggression against my husband got them evicted.
But the eviction just started another wave of bizarre behavior. After tearing up the house, including breaking all the windows and ripping out the electrical boxes and punching random holes in the walls, the kids went to the landlord's house with their lookalike handguns and shot up the windows in her house. Again they were taken away, but being juveniles, no repercussions.
A couple of weeks later, her vehicle and garage were firebombed, but no one was charged with that. I'm so glad they are gone. I live in a wonderful neighborhood—not rich by any means, but the most awesome people—but it's hard to enjoy the community with that going on next door. I hope they somehow find some peace with this life.
41. Dog Gone Shame
The neighbor’s dogs got into my backyard and attacked my dog. My dog ended up okay, but it was a long recovery and he still doesn’t walk right. He was and is the happiest dog ever, so to see him on the ground covered in blood was the worst thing ever. The dogs were able to get through because their kids had taken a plank out of my fence—they didn’t have a fence.
I left a letter on their door explaining the situation. They showed up at my door to tell me that it was my fault for not having a stronger fence and that they wouldn’t be paying any medical bills. After a lot of them yelling and me calmly explaining why they actually would be paying, they eventually complied. They did build a fence, backwards, with the flat side facing them.
They are also extremely loud, have chickens that escape on a regular basis in our suburban neighborhood, and are overall scummy people.
42. Ulterior Motives
My next-door neighbor was always creepy. He always asked us to come inside and play with his cats. Then, when he was moving out, he offered me an Air Force One jacket. I was about 10 at the time. He said that if I wanted to get the jacket, I had to come with him to get it from some guy's house. After I told him I needed to ask my mom, he disappeared.
To this day, I think he wanted to abduct me.
43. Caught In The Middle
My neighbors had...problems. They had constant, nightly blowouts and physical fights. They were together but not married, so they were constantly on and off. The dad was an avid drinker and the officers knew him by name. Once, when we were sleeping, we heard the screaming and cries of their son (who was my little sister's best friend). A minute later, the boy was knocking on the door for my mom to help.
She pulled him inside and a few minutes later the mom showed up, bloody and beaten up. She asked my mom to lock the door and held onto her son. She wouldn't call the authorities out of fear they'd take the son, so my mom pulled the couch out and made them a makeshift bed. She locked the door and made the mom food while my sister and the son slept. But that wasn't the end of it.
About an hour after they'd showed up, the dad started kicking our door and screaming. My mom fought with him through the door for over an hour, and he eventually left. My mom then arranged for a place for them to stay in a women's shelter an hour or so away and brought them there the next night after he thought they'd already left.
She spent two weeks sneaking as much as she could to them until she found an apartment back locally and felt it was safe for them to come back.
44. Leave Well Enough Alone
A guy in my neighborhood owned six cars and kept them all parked on the street in a very congested block of apartments. He spent hours tending to them, and they somehow always looked rustier when he was done. If a leaf landed on one of his cars, he would accuse the neighborhood of intentionally placing leaves on his car to annoy him.
45. Battle Of The TVs
I once lived in an apartment building with little better than paper for walls. You could clearly hear the next-door neighbors' conversations, them doing it in bed, walking up the stairs, etc. For some reason, they thought it would be totally awesome to install a surround sound system and affix the speakers to our shared wall. It was not awesome.
The TV was so loud that it literally shook the wall, and we couldn’t hear our own television unless we turned it up ridiculously loud in return. The neighbors did not respond kindly to our request that they place the speakers elsewhere (or at least turn the bass down)—it ultimately ended with authorities being called on them.
We called them after the guy got super angry at being asked again to turn it down and started pounding on the wall and screaming about how he was going to mess us up. They finally got evicted when he threatened someone at the management office on some other matter.
46. The Dog Days
My current neighbors are the worst. I'm in the Navy and so I'm often away, leaving my wife to deal with things alone. Our neighbors recently got a Staffordshire Bullterrier and rather than walk it, they would just throw it into their yard to do its business. After a while, it ran out of places to go in its own garden, so it started to jump into ours to take a dump.
My son is also scared of dogs, so he feels unsafe about going into our own yard to play. Since I'm at sea most of the time, there isn't a great deal I can do apart from telling my wife that I'll deal with it when I get home. But now the dog is growling at my wife in our own yard as it spends so much time there that it probably thinks it's his. I told my wife to leave the gate open and if the dog jumps over, it can go outside to do its thing.
The next day, my wife opened the door to a man screaming at her and calling her a witch because his dogs ran away and might have been run over. He then threatened my wife and son over the issue and left. So my wife called the authorities and to her astonishment, the jerks next door said we were being unreasonable by not letting their dog do its business in our garden; our property.
Anyway, he got a warning from the officers and an order to control his dog by building a fence or risk having it taken away by the dog warden.
47. The Pesky Beggar
I once had a neighbor in college who would knock on my door and ask me for money. I would just say that I was a broke student who couldn’t spare anything. It was weird as heck because it was a weekly occurrence at the least. She was in her 50s and working, so I didn't understand why she would do that. One day, I got fed up, so when she knocked on my door, I said, "Yeah, I got some money for you."
I asked her to hold out her hands and gave her like, two dollars worth of nickels that I had in a change jar. Surprisingly, she never bothered me again after that.
48. No Remorse
I live in a rural area and my neighbor was a real jerk. The dude was on drugs, cheating on his heavily pregnant wife with another addict, just completely out of his mind. It ended in unimaginable horror. My husband had a dog and this guy set out cat food (he doesn’t have cats) just so Scrappy would go to his porch. The guy then chased our dog into our front yard and shot him in the ribs.
Sadly, the dog didn’t pass immediately—he suffered. I could’ve strangled the neighbor right then and there, even as a little 110-pound female. It still infuriates me. He didn’t even show a bit of remorse.
49. A Curse On You And Your Cars
On our street, there really is only parking on one side of the street—the garages and driveways for most of the houses weren't meant for cars, but this is another rant. The parking is on our side. The people across the street from us at one point had a car for each member of the household. To make matters worse, the daughter was a terrible driver so she needed at least two parking spaces.
This means that one family requires seven parking spaces! The best space to park is in front of my parents' house especially in winter as my parents would shovel it all out for easy access—this family never helped to shovel even though they would complain if we didn't shovel out enough. So, if my parents were out, this family would fight to claim my parents' place.
This family calls us the evil neighbors now, because one day my parents were away and the daughter and son-in-law were visiting in their brand new SUV. Of course, they parked in my parents' spot. Cue freak windstorm which destroyed their car and the mom's. Apparently, it was my parents' fault as we had obviously cursed them!
50. The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far
My neighbors have three boys all under the age of seven. In my first encounter with the mom, she promptly tells me (not asks) that her kids wander. I naïvely thought that meant there might be the odd rogue ball episode or something so don't protest at the time. Our yards are unfenced, and we share a driveway. Oh boy, was I wrong.
My yard, back deck, front garden, and even the inside of my house were seen as an extension of their space. The boys would even have sword fight tournaments on my back deck, off my kitchen. The parents would literally do nothing. I was put in a position many times to ask for more privacy as it was affecting my work and a general sense of well-being as I am a very private person.
It took some pushing, but finally, things got a bit better. They still "wander," however to a level I am not willing to cause drama over. This past early winter, I decided to put in security cameras. I live alone in a not-so-great area and I wanted some peace of mind. I also wanted to document encroachment in case it got bad again. In that time, the cameras have picked up a lot of encroachment from kids, but I did not raise the issue.
The relationship with the parents is peaceful, and I wanted to keep it that way. Fast forward to yesterday, my camera picks up a clip of the middle kid peering into my window with a pair of binoculars. I send the clip to the parents, explaining one of my cameras picked it up and that I am not comfortable with this behavior. It is inappropriate and an invasion of my privacy. Their reply blew my mind.
They send a note back saying he was only trying to see if I was home so he could say hello. Then they insisted on knowing more about my security cameras, what they can see, and if they pick up the kids playing in their yard. I explained that they don't...as they only pick up motion in my yard. But, if the kids are in my yard, which they are...a lot…they are recorded.
The parents are now insisting I take the cameras down. The lesson is, entitled parents raise entitled children. I am frightened to see what kind of adults these kids will turn into. Who knows if I will be here long enough to find out.
51. Problem After Problem
I lived on the top floor of a sketchy house in college because it was the only place that would let seven of us rent together. The first week we were there, the SWAT team did a raid on one of the units below us. They busted in the door and used flashbang grenades on them. One of the other units smelled like urine and constantly had people coming in and out buying illicit substances.
Our keys barely fit in the lock because people had tried to pick them so much. Our cable and internet stopped working, so we called the cable company to check it. The guy took us over to the box outside and showed us nine different lines that were ripping our internet. I could go on and on. On the plus side, we could shoot bottle rockets in our hallway because it wasn't like anyone was going to call the authorities on us.
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52. Doorbell Bandit
We had a neighbor of ours—a retired officer in his 50s—doorbell ditch us for around a month. The crazy thing is we never knew it was him. Apparently, he was mad at us because we had a dog that would bark and disturb him. He never told us about this, so I didn’t feel too bad about his little prank. But we did want to catch him in the act at least once, just to spook him a little.
Finally, one day before we were moving out, he doorbell-ditched us. My wife and I looked at each other dead in the eyes, and without a word, I sprinted out the front door. She, on the other hand, went out the back door. We had this unspoken thing where we were like, “Let’s trap this jerk!” I was so impressed that we did this without needing to say anything to one another.
I caught up with our shirtless neighbor and he put his hands up, saying, “Okay, you got me.” I said, “Dude, what the heck? Why are you doing this?” He was tipsy as heck, and he proceeded to tell me about my barking dog. He apologized and said he should’ve told us about it.
53. We Saw Eye To Eye
We lived next door to this old man who sat in his front yard blatantly just staring at us with binoculars. He only did it when my parents weren't home. When my mom confronted him he claimed we were lying. We weren't. So one night we hear a noise outside, and my mom pulls up the blind to find herself eye to eye with this old man trying to look into our window.
54. Ding Dong Neighbor
A bunch of things happened with my ding-dong neighbor. She had a large dog that hated my older, smaller dog. One day her dog ran into my yard and bit my dog. She did apologize for this one, and it didn’t happen again. The same neighbor dumped her lawn clippings into my backyard, and I had to ask her to stop and clean up her mess.
She decided to build a fence. Of course, she didn’t get a survey, so I paid for a survey of my property. She’d started building her fence three feet over on my property. I had her stop and remove the fence. She was angry and never rebuilt it. I painted my house. She painted her house, same color. I bought a new car. She bought a new car—same color, same configuration.
There's other minor stuff, but that's enough. Odd person. Very odd.
55. Downstairs Disturbance
I rented a house that had a rental basement suite. It was a one-bedroom, but an adult mom and her two adult sons all moved in there. They would fight, burn their food, and it would stink up our house. But the worst part? The mom had the yappiest dog ever. At the time, my five-year-old son had seen something on TV and told the mom that he heard that yappy dogs have short lives. She got offended and from that moment, she stopped talking to us.
They all eventually moved out, thankfully.
56. Right Back Atcha
I had this one downstairs neighbor who lacked any respect for the fact that our building wasn't sound-insulated. He would listen to loud music mostly through the day and sometimes late at night. This lasted for months, but nothing had yet been done by the landlord. One day, though, I think he discovered that he really, REALLY loved Gnarles Barkley's "Crazy."
He decided it was appropriate to play it half a dozen times in the course of an hour, and I just had it. So, being a karaoke jockey and having my equipment on hand, I decided to show him what "loud" was. I connected my speakers to my computer through my console, then I went hunting for the absolute worst "karaoke cover" of that same song.
I remember vividly it was a cover by this creepy fat basement dweller in his late 40s and it was horribly off-tune. I played it with the speakers flat on the floor so he'd get the full brunt of it. I played it three times in a row, loud enough that he would definitely suffer the consequence of his lack of respect. And, wouldn't you know it, he never played that song again.
He started being much more conservative in his volume levels. He left that summer and I never heard "Crazy" again from his collection. I wonder why.
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57. Not Avon Calling
I had a neighbor a few houses down who kept to himself. One day he was turning onto our road and I happened to be behind him. Some kids were cutting across his yard so he stopped to yell at them and I couldn’t go around so I was stuck. He then started backing up, but I had only a little room before backing into a very busy road. He then hit the front of my car.
He started yelling at me. I was maybe 18 at the time and was legitimately terrified. I was able to make it down the block to my house, called my mom and she encouraged me to make a report. The officer came, was super kind and offered to go to the house of the man who hit me to get his insurance information. The man refused to answer and the officer made a report and called to check in later in the afternoon. I thought it was over, but it only turned more horrific.
That night the neighbor ended up taking a firearm and pounded on a few neighbors' doors, presumably looking for me. The officers were called and quite a few of them responded. They could not find the man so they had everyone on our street shelter in place until they could find him. Officers ended up finding him under a boat in his backyard.
I don’t know if he was committed or what, but he never was back at his house and his family sold it a few months later.
58. Neighbor Flung Cat
I had a 17-year-old cat, which I loved so much. She was my mother's cat and I got her when my mom passed. So anyways, one day the cat disappears. After a few days of not seeing her, I posted on Facebook about it and it was shared a lot. One day, I was getting into my vehicle to go to work and my young neighbor—about six or seven years old—shyly came up to tell me something.
She said that she saw my other neighbor throw my cat over her fence into the kindergarten playground. We live very near the elementary school. I spoke to the head custodian and he said there was indeed a dead cat on the playground. So my neighbor is so far off her rocker that she'd rather throw a dead cat into an area where young children play than dig a hole or do the noble thing of telling me what happened.
59. Exam Stress
My upstairs neighbor, who was quiet and respectful for the entire year, decided to crank his music during finals week in my senior year. I knocked on the door twice and asked him to turn it down, only to have him crank it up minutes later. It was so loud that my windows were shaking from the bass. Finally, on the third try, I called the authorities who issued him a citation.
After the officers left, he decided to bring three or four friends over to knock down my apartment door. It took pointing a pistol at them through the window to make them go away. I was happy to be done with college.
60. Heavy Footed
I live in Brooklyn, NY. I recently got my own apartment in Greenpoint. I have a pretty great job in midtown Manhattan that offers a lot of overtime, so I have crazy hours and I commute to work. So, when I leave work late (usually around 11:45 pm every night), I catch the late trains and it takes me anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to get home.
When I get home around 12:30 am, I’m exhausted—I just kick my shoes off and just throw them and my duffle bag wherever they land (usually on the floor right by my apartment entrance). When I first moved into my apartment, I always heard banging from the neighbor downstairs. I never thought anything of it, and I was always like, “Is this person serious? They’re working on their apartment at 1 am in the morning?!”
It wasn’t until maybe three weeks ago that I realized that he was getting upset about the banging that I was doing over their heads. I guess our apartments are set up differently and their bedroom is directly under my living room? I’ve since become more conscious of the noise I make when I get home—I started gracefully taking my shoes off and placing my belongings on the couch.
Regardless, the person who lives down there has never actually come up to my apartment to address the issue, but I find it hilarious because I just picture them laying in bed cuddled up with a broomstick or something similar and just waiting for the slightest pin drop to jump on top of their bed and start stabbing their ceiling.
61. Snack Attack
Some just straight-up rednecks move into my neighborhood. They turned the shared side yard, which was legally ours but shared because we weren't necessarily using it, into a lumber yard/playground where they dug a massive pit for mud wrestling. No kidding—mud wrestling! The youngest kid got stuck in the mud pit up to his head and they couldn't get him out for hours.
They also just wanted the full neighbor experience without putting in any effort themselves. It was like they'd moved from some hillbilly commune where you could just demand things of your neighbors. Every day when I got home from school, the three youngest kids would bang on our door until we gave them snacks. One of them, when denied snacks, came back and broke our glass door with a hammer. But that was just the beginning.
The second oldest kid (there were six in total) had an old A/C air handling unit in the backyard that he was allowed to hit with a sledge hammer when he got angry. He got angry often and at some pretty irregular hours. I ran into him at a bowling alley years after they moved away/got kicked out/went bankrupt. He had giant scars all over his back, chest, and arms—he said he woke up in the middle of the highway on Halloween night, all cut up.
62. Hose Was Neighbor’s Breaking Point
My mom, dad, and I moved into a condominium when I was about 14. When we first moved in, we met Trina, our downstairs neighbor. Trina was an older woman (60s) taking care of her mentally challenged grandson who was my same age but mentally a six-year-old with minimal language development. Trina seemed sweet and welcomed us to the building.
We had a few small issues with Trina, but we decided to keep them to ourselves. You see, she smoked A LOT, like three to four packs a day, and the smell would overtake our house. Also, the grandson would scream a lot in the early morning but nothing serious and we never said a word. We were all friendly enough and life was fine.
About two years after moving in, my mom bought a portable hose to water her outdoor plants and clean the balcony off. This is when the trouble started. Trina lost it when my mom washed the patio for the first time: just water, no chemicals, just rinsing the dirt off. Trina promptly started threatening my mom’s life for doing this.
She then complained to the condo association every single day for years. She started to burn small fires in a coffee can under our windows in an attempt to smoke us out. She once saw my bedroom window was left open and literally flooded my room with her hose. She would call the authorities on every single noise we ever made. Eventually they fined her $50 for wasting their time.
A couple of years later I became pregnant. Yeah, I was very young, just 18 at the time. So my boyfriend moved in and we had the baby and decided to raise it together. The neighbor told my boyfriend that I had a revolving line of men, and I was unsure who the father was, but chose him because he was nice. This was, of course, completely fabricated.
She continued with her nonsense for years and years. Once she was driving down the driveway while I was getting my then two kids into the car. She literally tried to hit my oldest son with her car. I had to physically pick him up and throw him out of the way. When the authorities came she denied everything so nothing happened.
She harassed my family for years to the point where the condo association had to have private meetings with her and my dad, which nothing ever came of. The condo association was just as fed up as we were. Three years ago my mom passed suddenly. When the neighbor realized my mom was no longer around, her response made my blood boil.
She laughed and told my dad and my kids that my mom deserved to die. She was an awful, awful woman. She recently had a stroke. We don't know if she is still alive or in a home but my dad, who still lives there, says it's nice to be free of the constant harassment.
63. Driveways And Fences
My current neighbor wants us to tear out our driveway because she doesn't like the fact that it's on a slant and lets water roll downhill. She’s a loon. When the driveway was put in 25 years ago, it was all done by contractors and it is up to code. She’s threatened to sue us because her yard is at the bottom of the hill. We’re in Georgia and last year we had a BUNCH of rain—like, more than normal.
So of course, she had three inches of standing water. She said she talked to a lawyer and apparently, he said her case was solid. Then, later, she corroborated everything with our builder neighbor across the street. When intimidation didn’t work, we came home to a fence separating our properties. I guess it was supposed to offend us? Anyway, that was the best fence ever!
Guess what they say is true... great fences make great neighbors. She hasn't bothered us since then and we're both pretty civil nowadays.
64. Open Fire
Just three days ago, the neighbor's dog attacked my dog in the street. My dog was on a leash, while the other dog wasn't—it just came charging at us. Being that the dog looked like a pitbull and was about 60 lbs, and I didn't know if it had diseases. Not wanting to risk getting bitten, I tried to shoot it. Just one shot and it ran away.
The shot woke up the entire neighborhood and the owner came out yelling at me as if allowing my dog, or myself, to be ripped open would have been the better choice. Three officers showed up and it created quite the show. Now I have to go to court for discharging a firearm within city limits. I can't wait to go actually.
65. What Can I Say: He’s A Swinger
I lived in a three-story apartment building on the middle floor. The bottom floor was basement apartments. It was a very quiet building and a lot of people were older and lived there 10 years or more. Then this weird creepy jerk moved in below us. He would play music loud all night and I had to be up for work at 5:00 am.
I wanted to complain, but he wouldn't answer the door so we could ask him to turn it down. So I had to jump up and down until he heard it. He also had angry girls banging on his door screaming for hours. He was home but just wouldn't answer. One of the girls ran out and poured nail polish all over his car. That was actually a good day.
His apartment was in the basement, but he had a huge window that was right next to the stairs to get in. The guy never closed the curtains and you could see directly down into his living room. There he had built a swing with bondage stuff hanging on it. I had to explain what it was to everyone that came over—even my mom.
Then one day an officer knocked on my door. He looked kind of embarrassed because he was holding about 20 pairs of women's underwear. He asked me to pick out mine. Three of them were mine and the nice officer told me to throw them away because the downstairs neighbor had been wearing them. Turns out he’d taken them from the laundry room
I guess the upstairs neighbor was walking in the building and saw her underwear hanging on the swing and called it in. So they took him away for taking our underwear. The landlord evicted him while he was behind bars. He was so angry that he was getting evicted, he went and bought a bunch of sand and covered the whole apartment in sand.
He then turned the air conditioning all the way up and left it. Of course, this was after he’d switched the electric back into the landlord's name. He was a nightmare neighbor.
66. Kid Caught In Crossfire
One of my neighbors almost shot me when I was a little kid. I was playing in front of my apartment building when my neighbor got into an argument with one of these other guys from down the street. I wasn’t sure what exactly the problem was, but my neighbor didn't like it, so he pulled out a pistol from his front pocket and fired a couple of bullets.
A stray bullet flew right past my face, and it came really close to hitting me. My mom’s friend from the next floor down grabbed me and pulled me inside to safety.
67. The Worst of The Worst
I saw my neighbors hang their pet dog on its hind legs to “train” it. It was at 5 pm and my sister and I were chilling at home, watching some Doctor Who. We then heard this really loud yelping outside our house and my sister and I decided to walk outside and peer through a bush and see what the heck was going on in our neighbor’s backyard. When we saw it, our blood ran cold.
We decided to call 9-1-1 and get the authorities over to apprehend the jerk. By the way, it turns out that they have mistreated animals before, but it was only when we caught them that they were taken in.
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68. Floridian Feud
We moved to Florida and our neighbors there were the most messed up people I've ever met. There's almost too much to get into, but here are some highlights: They threatened to poison our dog, they threw stuff in our yard all the time just to try to get a reaction out of us, and they set up two webcams in a window to watch our house. It goes on and on.
One day, a shoe landed in my pool while I was swimming, so I, being a 13-year-old kid, picked it up and threw it back over the fence. I kid you not, they called the authorities and told a total lie—they said I threw a shoe and it hit their grandma in the head while she was watering her plants. It almost got me in serious trouble.
To this day, I swear we didn't do anything to provoke their horrible behavior. We were friendly with them until they started acting out.
69. Dog Owner Acts Like A Dog
My current neighbor, let’s call her Kitty, is a woman I‘ve known vaguely on social media for a while. But now that she’s my neighbor, I’m seeing a different side to her. For example, last month, she fostered a dog. She saw me cleaning my porch and asked to come over with her dog, and—wanting to be friendly—I said sure. So she comes over and puts her dog in the backyard.
So, I made a couple of drinks even though she was already half hammered. I finished making the drinks and went to let the dogs inside—her foster Husky and my lab mix. Unfortunately, her dog climbed my five-foot fence and ran into the street and got hit by a car. Luckily he was ok. I offered to pay whatever she needed and drove her to the vet.
She proceeded to scream profanities at the vet. I then took her home while the pup was getting stitches. She promptly walked into my house, drank every ounce of booze left in the entire kitchen, and rolled around on the floor with her crotch exposed to my husband. She then asked him to drive her to the store for more booze. Now I avoid her like the plague.
70. Surrounded By Sound
My partner and I shared a split house with a couple; they were upstairs and we were downstairs. They said they knew that the noise insulation was low and asked us to let them know if it was ever too loud. We texted maybe 10 times in two years to turn down their TV at 3:00. Their TV was directly over our bedroom. On the final time we texted them, they snapped back HARD.
They talked about how awful it was for them and how much they tried to please us with the situation. They went on to complain about how they even stopped using their surround sound system. I mean, who needs a surround sound system in a less than 500 square foot uni? At 3:00 am no less. On top of this they constantly moved and, on one occasion, broke our stuff in the basement storage to the point we eventually stopped using it.
They frequently put shoes in the new dryer to the point it melted rubber on the back. They then broke said dryer by overstuffing it and leaning heavy equipment against the door so it'd stop popping open. They also "accidentally” took our packages from us on several occasions and filled up the other shared space we had with their own stuff so we couldn't use it.
71. No Consideration
I can tell so many stories about my current next-door neighbor. One time, she decided she didn’t like the bush that was next to my mailbox, so she tore it out. She also has four dogs and none of them are EVER on leashes. They always run over to everyone else’s yards to do their business, and she doesn’t bother to pick it up. She also allows them to run in the streets, and gives people dirty looks when they need to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the dogs.
I myself recently got a puppy. When I take him outside, I have him on a leash in my front yard. If her dogs are outside, they’ll come charging over, scaring my dog, and he’ll run up the steps to go back inside. I have asked her to put her dogs on a leash so that they don’t come into my yard. Her response? “They don’t like being on a leash,” and “Your dog needs to get used to other dogs.”
Yeah, screw you and your poor dog ownership.
72. Neighborhood Karen
When I was around 10 years old, my neighbor would occasionally watch me open my mailbox to see if my GameStop magazine had arrived. She would threaten me each time, saying that she would call the authorities on me since it was unlawful for me to check my parents' mail. I actually believed this until I was 15 years old.
73. The Best Revenge
We lived next to a family when I was younger and they were the worst people. They were loud and obnoxious, always playing their music loudly and throwing trash on our lawn. They also had a Great Dane who would always run into our lawn and take huge dumps, sometimes on our porch. My dad talked to them a couple of times and they said there was nothing they could do.
My dad took matters into his own hands one day and started picking the mess up with a shovel to catapult it back into their yard. But that's not even the best part—they had kids our age who were not very nice. One day, they were playing in a blow-up pool that was placed on the hill. We were watching them play when all of a sudden, the best thing happened...
The whole pool tipped over, and those little jerks went sliding down the hill. They stood up, covered completely in their dog's mess. Best day ever.
74. About The Garbage
A retired woman on my street follows the garbage truck and moves the garbage cans off the street while the rest of us are at work (because they are an eyesore). This would be fine, except she leaves them in the middle of the driveway, and that's a problem because there is no stopping on our street during rush hour. You either need to park a block away to move the garbage can, then go back to get the car, or risk getting a ticket while you move it.
Since the houses are quite close together, we found out what she was doing for the first time when we turned and hit the garbage can. It was just far enough back that you couldn't see it until you turned.
75. Sweet Mustang Revenge
My neighbor poisoned my dog—sadly, it didn’t survive—so the night after we moved out of that neighborhood, I went back and took my revenge. The guy who’d done it was restoring a Mustang and I thought that was the perfect way to get back at him. I spray painted the car, super glued the wipers to the windshield, poured a gallon of bleach in the gas tank, and super glued the gas cap and door shut.
76. Door Opener Opens Man Eyes
The first apartment I lived in, I had a neighbor that would try opening the door. I didn't hear it myself because I worked nights. I came home early one night—around 2 am—and he was trying to get in through the apartment door. We had a huge argument and he stopped doing it after that. I'm guessing he thought it was just my two female roommates living there, because he never tried anything after he knew I was there as well.
It kinda opened my eyes, at the time, to the sort of nasty stuff that women have to deal with.
77. Family Feud
One got the authorities called on them because their eldest son was under the influence of something and got into a huge fight with the mom on the front lawn. Turns out, he was also wanted for a number of federal offenses. The officers got to the wrong house and started banging on our house at 1 am in the morning until my very irritated father pointed them to the real home.
78. Case Of The Ex
I heard a really loud banging one evening and walked outside to see a fire extinguisher on the floor and a woman on her phone. I was puzzled, but I put the extinguisher back and went back inside. A few minutes later, I heard the banging again and opened up the door to see the woman trying to beat down the door across from mine with the fire extinguisher.
Apparently, she was the ex-girlfriend of one of my neighbor’s friends and she was trying to find him even though he was quite clearly not there. I called the authorities, and interestingly enough, my neighbor told me she got charged for driving under the influence that night in an unrelated incident.
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79. It’s A Chicago Thing
One time, I came in to visit my Gramma in Chicago for Christmas. I was looking for a parking spot near their house but the only one available had a lawn chair right in the center of it. I moved the lawn chair to park a little down from her house. I mean, who leaves a lawn chair in the street in wintertime, right? So I just put it on the sidewalk so someone could pick it up if they wanted it.
When my uncle saw what I’d done, he hustled out in just his socks to tell me to park way down the street in front of an empty lot, and then he very carefully put the chair back exactly where it had been. I had no idea (at the time) just how close I’d come to getting shot that day. You do not mess with the winter lawn chair in Chicago.
80. Said Hi To Wrong Neighbor
After the polar vortex a few years ago, the mail finally came—the sub zero temperatures froze the snow in a way that mail couldn't be delivered. So, I was basically in my house for a week and just so delighted about the mail and seeing another person outside that I said "Hello" to a neighbor I know better than to talk to. I got way more than I bargained for.
She immediately burst into tears and started telling me about how she found out something horrible about her boyfriend. I should mention that she is around 50 years old and dates the kind of guys who use her for a place to live. Anyway, she’d just found out that her boyfriend ejaculated into her coffee every morning. Um, but really.
She found out because she was spying on his phone and he texted a friend saying he did it. Right around this time, her big dog burst through the front door and before she could finish saying, "He won't hurt you" the dog bit me in the stomach—luckily it didn't draw blood. I kindly excused myself and went back into my home to regret ever leaving in the first place.
81. 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.
82. NOT Welcome
When I moved into my house, I made an effort to meet all of my neighbors. Instead of being a creep and knocking on doors, over a few months, I just waited until I saw someone outside and casually walked over to introduce myself. Well, one night, a Black neighbor of mine was having a big loud party, and I walked over to say hi around 8 pm.
It was a birthday party for one of his grandkids, but there were folks all out in the yard, so I thought it was okay to say hi. I said "Hey, I moved into this street a few doors down a couple of months ago. I was just stopping over to introduce myself." He said, "Do you look like the color that's supposed to be in this yard?" I apologized and went home.
He passed of a heart attack a couple of years later; probably from being such a hateful jerk.
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83. Ask Me No More Questions
I have these neighbors who are always asking for things. Like for my wifi password. Or asking us to buy more security cameras to point at his house. They also ask if I would watch out for their chickens—including roosters that are not allowed. They just keep asking for everything. The only thing he didn't ask for was permission to put an animal trap in our backyard. That he just did.
84. I Guess We Were The Bad Neighbors
I used to live in a bad part of Queens, NY until about 2004. The house that we owned there had been owned by my family since the early 1900s. It was known throughout the surrounding area as my family’s house—kind of famous I guess. Unfortunately, not everyone in my family were good people. Some of them were involved in gang life.
My siblings and I weren’t allowed to play by the windows, so we wouldn’t end up in the crossfire of a gang battle. The deciding factor of us leaving that area was when someone broke into our neighbor’s house, mistakenly choosing the wrong house and asking where OUR family was, looking to settle some issue. My parents decided it was time to leave.
85. 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.
86. Here's Your Proof
When I first moved into my house, I didn’t know my exact property line yet, so I put a marker by a tree I thought was mine. My neighbor came over and said I had to remove the marker since the tree was on his property. So I went ahead and got a survey done to settle any troubles. His face when I showed him the surveyor's findings was priceless—turns out, I actually owned the tree, plus the 10 feet beyond it. Problem solved!
87. Sleepless In The Suburbs
I was living in the burbs, and there was a house that let their dog bark all day. Another house would party until 3 am and the people living behind us would throw their dirty diapers into our backyard. The party house and the dog barking house made me miss so much work. Nothing like calling your boss and saying "I can't drive to work because in the last three days I have had four hours of sleep".
88. I’ve Been Watching You
This was almost 10 years ago when my husband and I were still dating and we moved into our first apartment together. There were four buildings of apartments within walking distance of each other and my run-in was with someone in a neighboring building. We had a dog and I was the regular dog walker, because my husband worked all different shifts and I didn’t.
So, one day, I was coming back from a walk with her when this guy comes out of one of the other buildings. He starts walking towards me very directly, pitching a fit about the fact that I’m walking my dog. He says he’s seen me just leave her poop on the grass and just walk away. I can assure you this was an absolute lie, 100%.
He says he sees her squat all the time and I just keep walking. I was dumbfounded. I said, “My dog is a female, that’s how she pees.” He then just continues going on and on and on and at one point says, “I’ve been watching you...” And again, I’m dumbfounded and I just go, “You’ve been WATCHING me?” I remember going back to my apartment and calling my husband at work and just crying because I felt so scared and alone.
We had been at that new place for only one month so we had 11 more to go at that point. We talked to the managers and they were absolutely no help. They said yeah, they knew who we were talking about, he’s had multiple complaints against him and they think he sells drugs. Oh, and if he does that again, call the authorities.
89. Mind Your Own Business
My current neighbor runs a small business practice out of her home. She had her customers park on my yard—easement, technically—despite the town telling her she couldn’t. And despite all the times I told her to stop. She never stopped until one person parked facing my house, two feet from my “no trespassing” signs. I called the authorities.
I filed a complaint against the customer and never saw that car again. But she didn't stop, she only got more bizarre. Then she tried to lease my front yard. When that didn’t work, she tried to buy my house while we still lived in it. She told the contractors that they could access her yard through ours, so they dumped loads of gravel and sand in my front yard as their storage area, and a cement truck tore 18-inch ruts in my yard.
A tree on the property line was infested with termites and a huge branch fell on a mutually owned fence. She demanded we pay to have the limb removed because it was damaging the fence, which was actually quite horribly dilapidated. She didn’t want us to cut down the tree because of the shade it provided her back patio, which was installed at the expense of my yard.
90. Noise Complaint
I lived above a guy in a really old fourplex and I guess the wood floors squeaked really loudly whenever I walked around. It wasn't like I was stomping around or anything, but the dude would constantly come upstairs and bang on my door to yell at me about the noise. I felt bad for him in the beginning because he seemed genuinely frustrated, but he didn't seem to understand or believe that I wasn't intentionally causing a ruckus.
I called my landlord several times asking him for a solution. I couldn't move out because I was locked into my lease, but my landlord was just like, "Buy a lot of rugs." It got to the point that I couldn't take the constant yelling and I was literally either tiptoeing around or hopping from my couch to my chair in order to get out of my living room.
Finally, I went downstairs one day and asked if we could talk about the situation. I felt that maybe if I looked him in the eye when he was calm and explained that I wasn't doing it on purpose, he would maybe understand. After I gave him my spiel, he had a chilling response: "I'm about at the point where if it happens again, I'm going to show up at your door with a really big knife." And then he just stared at me.
I basically ran out of there, called my landlord, and said that I had just been threatened by my downstairs neighbor. A month later the guy moved out, and then as soon as I could, I did too.
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91. Double Eviction
My first apartment had a creepy old man who lived on the basement floor and this equally creepy kid in his early thirties on the top floor. Both of them regularly sat out on the porch entrance at varying times of the day and would catch me whenever I came home. I lied to the old man, (we’ll call him George) about my name in a moment of panic.
When he found out that wasn’t my name, he started getting more aggressive in greeting me with my real name to show me how I’d done him wrong. He would circle the building when he realized I started using the back exit, and he'd even sit on the back steps to wait for me to pass by. I told my landlord twice about it and all he did was tell him not to talk to me, which made matters worse because just continued to harass me but with more of a vengeance.
He ended up stealing the wreath that was on my door because nobody else had one on their door and threw it in the trash. At that point, I no longer cared about causing my landlord grief and asked him to pull up video footage. Turns out, he’d been coming upstairs several times to see when I left for work and would stand in front of my door. He ended up getting evicted. But the nightmare didn't end there.
This was all happening while the kid on the top floor was still there. He was weird, but I didn't pay him much mind. After the whole George thing, I wanted to be on good terms with the other tenants, so I started saying hello when I came through the entrance or in the hallways. Bad call. Such a bad call. He started going around telling the other dudes that lived upstairs that he was sleeping with me and how I wouldn’t waste time jumping his bones.
Whatever, I stopped saying hi to him. About two days later, however, I went to take my trash out and I passed my window that was facing the alleyway. This dude was pressed up against it, sliding his face around the glass trying to see me. He saw me and tried to play it off, but the situation was already screwed for him. I called the authorities and it turns out he’d been pegged for"peeing" before on two other charges. He was also evicted.
92. Screams Heard Through Concrete
We lived next door to a group of sex workers and shared a bedroom wall with one of their bedrooms—this was in a condo building. We would be woken up at regular intervals each night by obnoxious, dirty movie-worthy screaming. It even came through our concrete walls. Forget leaving a window open in the summer. It was too noisy,
Apparently, the building was known for it, but we had no idea before moving in. The neighbors had a whole system in place. Their pimps would wait down on the street and flag the next gentleman caller to enter after receiving payment from the satisfied customer. They had at least five units rented in the building for this purpose.
The authorities knew about the setup but preferred them in a building rather than on the street so they wouldn't do anything about it. The condo board and building manager also knew but never brought it up during official meetings so it wouldn't be recorded in the minutes and tank the property values. Really wish WE had known about it.
93. Bad Neighbor Begets Worse
Our first apartment together we lived in an upper of a house. The lower had a family with a few kids in it. “Great,” we thought. “No crazy parties or anything like that.” A few weeks after we moved in, the flies started showing up. Our apartment was full of gnats and flies by the end of the first month. We had just scoured the whole place, weren’t leaving food out, could not figure out for the life of us where they came from—until we saw them coming out of the vents.
The family got evicted a few months later. The landlord showed us the unit, and we all beheld the horror. There was dog poop and rotten food covering the floor. Piles of garbage everywhere. The place was a total gut. They ended up listing the unit at a higher price to make up for refinishing. “We should get some better people in now. The place looks nice,” we thought. Our apartment was finally bug free.
We didn’t actually see the next family that moved in. They arrived while we were gone on a weekend trip and they immediately covered every window with sheets. Then a weird smell started filling our apartment. It was acrid and off. We closed the vents (again) and figured they were probably still cleaning as they settled in.
Then the garbage started piling up outside and the overnight noise began. It sounded like they were bowling in the basement. Plus, there were so many plastic jugs overflowing the recycling. There were no sounds during the day, at all. My husband worked night shift at the time and the nights were long and full of weird sounds shaking the whole house. Like at 4 am: “let’s build a pyramid” noise.
After a week or so of this, my husband politely knocked on their door on his way home from work, hoping to introduce himself and ask them to keep the noise down. No answer. He tried for a few days and even on the weekend and at different times. No one ever opened the door. A few days later a note was taped to our door. Its contents chilled me to the bone.
The note said: “People upstairs, don’t bother us and we won’t bother you. If you ever step on our porch again, I’ll call the authorities. Mind your own business. Don’t mess with me. GAZ Chicago” We almost immediately started looking for a new place to live, luckily moving pretty quickly after.
94. Ambulance Visit Is Just The Beginning
The very first night my wife and I moved into this townhouse, an ambulance was called to the house. It turns out that our neighbor had pushed his girlfriend down the stairs. We heard the fight and saw the ambulance come. After that, every night at around three in the morning he’d start banging on our walls waking us up, yelling at us to be quiet. We were always asleep.
I confronted him when I finally saw him, and things got heated. He was actually quite crazy. Later he threatened to hurt my wife. We moved out after this threat on my wife’s life. The authorities wouldn’t do anything about it.
95. Neighbor Under Surveillance
My wife and I were happy to move into our new house in the summer of 2019. The neighborhood seemed really nice and we were excited to meet the neighbors. The first two families we met—neighbors on either side of us—warned us about the people renting the house directly behind ours. Apparently, they had been known to cause trouble and blow things way out of proportion, bordering on paranoia of everyone around them.
We kept this in mind but had no issues for the first six months or so after moving in. Their house sits on a hill behind ours, and so overlooks the majority of our backyard due to the elevation change. Well, one night (morning, technically) at about 3 am we wake up to ring notifications from our phones showing video from our front doorbell. When we realize what it is, our blood runs cold.
There’s a man standing barefoot in a sleeveless shirt on our porch POUNDING on our front door. We give it two or three minutes just watching him on the app, thinking maybe he’s intoxicated and has the wrong house—essentially giving him the benefit of the doubt. But then we start to hear him say “come out you two, I’m gonna mess you up” etc. and he leaves the porch and starts to head around the side of the house towards our backyard.
Considering we had no idea who this was, my wife now immediately calls the local detachment for officers to come by, as I move out of our bedroom towards the external doors to look and listen for any attempt of a home invasion. At this point, our neighbors directly behind us throw a HUGE spotlight into our backyard from theirs.
We’re thinking, okay cool they know something’s up and they’re trying to help us out by shedding light on our backyard. Officers arrive several long minutes later and knock.We explain the situation and they head out back to look around and get the scoop from the neighbors with the spotlight. Well, the officer comes back with the news that really shocked us.
It turns out that the spotlight neighbor was the one on our porch, and he had jumped our fence into our backyard and then went up into his yard and then threw the light on. He told the officers that several nights prior, I had let my puppy out into MY OWN backyard in the middle of the night and, because I was in my boxers, he said that I was “trying to expose myself to his family.”
He then followed this up to the officers with “evidence.” This was the most chilling part of all. This evidence consisted of videos he had taken THROUGH OUR WINDOWS of my wife and me inside of our own home doing totally normal things like chores, watching TV, etc. Nothing inappropriate or scandalous—not that it would have mattered anyway, since we were in our OWN HOME.
Because of the elevation difference, if they went out of their way they could technically slightly see through our closed blinds due to the angle…so they had been filming us for no reason at all and expected the officers to see this as reasonable? The constable came back in and my wife was devastated. It was a huge breach of our privacy of course and totally unfounded accusations as we had never done anything to anger these people, we hadn’t even met them.
The officer told us “just don’t worry about it, if he tries something again just give us a call,” which wasn’t the most comforting at the time. They moved out a few months later without any additional issues, and my wife and I celebrated like it was a holiday when we saw the moving van in their driveway.
96. 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.
97. 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.
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98. 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.
99. The Missing Spark
I started getting random power cuts multiple times a day, and had the landlord call the electrician out a few times before we realized that someone was turning off my main electricity switch by hand. The switch is in a room accessible by everyone in my building. When I told my landlord it had to be someone in the building turning it off, he said he had a thought.
I got a call back 10 minutes later. My downstairs neighbor had just then made multiple noise complaints about me. I guess the landlord had called and asked if he'd been switching off my electricity, and the neighbor chose then to actually complain. This is when I realized that all the power cuts happened when I was in my kitchen, right above my neighbor's bedroom/where he spends most of his day.
I had thought my appliances were causing the power cuts before. It turns out he thought that turning off my electricity frequently would magically make me understand that I was being too loud when I used the kitchen late at night. When I didn't receive the telepathic message that he was trying to send me via power cuts, I guess he got angry and did it even more!
Somehow, it got even worse from there. Every time I went into the kitchen, any time of the day, he would turn my electricity off. I had to leave my apartment, go to the other side of the building and turn it back on every single time. It happened 2-3 times a day usually, but at worst it happened 5 times in a day. I started tiptoeing and being as quiet as possible.
However, he listened for me and turned off the power to punish me for using my kitchen at any time. By the way, as soon as he actually complained, I started being as quiet as possible late at night, because I do stay up late and hadn't taken care to be quiet before. But by now, he had decided I should be punished any time I use my kitchen.
The letting agents were unable to do anything without any proof, and installing CCTV wasn't an option for some reason. So, one day a lady from the office offered to help me catch him. I met her in the street, she waited near the electricity box, and I went to my kitchen and started making myself a drink. The power went off.
I get a text from her saying that she had caught him, and the sting operation was a success. Right then, I hear an unholy tantrum begin below me. For the rest of that day he bangs, screams, puts on his vacuum cleaner for 20 minutes straight. Anything to get revenge, I guess. After this, the landlord locked my electricity switch away so only I could access it.
In between the guy being served an eviction notice and him leaving, he decided to just scream at me through the floor when I was in the kitchen, and go outside and throw stones at my window. I installed my own CCTV camera and the stone-throwing stopped. I was so intimidated by the thought of using my kitchen I actually lost weight before he left.
100. One In A Million
A neighbor just regaled me with this heartbreaker. His sister, her husband, and two kids went up to Washington to camp every year. So, they were up there in May, early June, sometime during 2002-2003, and the son went to use a rope swing to jump into the lake. The whole family was watching, fun times. But then everything took an incredibly dark turn.
The boy botched the jump and ended up with the rope around his ankle, fell badly, broke a bone, and was just dragging underwater, flailing. The dad immediately springs into action to save his son and dove in—into shallow water. He smashed his skull open, was instantly paralyzed, and drowned. The mother obviously tried to save them both, dove into the water, and suffered a fatal heart attack.
The son stopped flailing and was just hanging there, head underwater. The daughter, 10 years old, had no idea two minutes prior that she would be sitting safely on shore, watching her whole family die. So incredibly heartbreaking. She was raised by my neighbor as a daughter. I just can’t even imagine what that would be like. Just normal, mundane risks proving lethal in less than 200 heartbeats.
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