Sadly, not everyone is blessed with having good neighbors. Some of us end up living next to our worst nightmares. And guess what? Bad neighbors inspire the worst kind of petty behavior.
1. Comparing Sound
My neighbor would crank his house music up as high as it could go and then leave for the night. It was mildly annoying in certain parts of my home. So, I decided on some petty revenge. I bought some huge speakers of my own and played the same song back. Literally the same song, over and over and over while I went on vacation for four days.
I'm not sure who was the pettier neighbor, but we both stopped doing it after that. Funny thing is, sometime later when he was throwing a party, he asked if he could use my speakers cause of how nice and loud they were.
2. Garbage Fight!
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—but he gave them all the nastiest response. He told them in no kind words to shut it. Thus began the Garbage Wars. 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.
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. People were called. Health inspectors. City by-law enforcement. Each side was calling in whatever authority they could muster to get their enemy.
The dude and his family lasted about eight months, and 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 garbage.
3. Littering Kittens
We rented a house that had another apartment in the basement. The lady who lived below us kept to herself for the most part, so we didn't see her much. Part of our rental was a detached garage and she asked if she could put a small deep freezer in our garage. We were using it for storage, so we were fine with it. After a couple of weeks of having her freezer in there, it somehow got unplugged. Her reaction was deranged.
She came unglued on us and wanted us to pay to replace everything. I understood her frustration, but we hardly ever went into the garage since it was only for storage. In other words, we definitely didn't unplug it and our landlord agreed. But she was SO mad. The lady also had a son in college who came home for the summer. During that summer he found a cat and brought it home.
His mom said no cats inside, so he would feed the kitten outside. She was pretty wild. He left for school again in the fall and we noticed that the cat was getting very thin. We started feeding her outside in her usual spot. Around Christmas, we bought a bag of cat food, and I made a plate of cookies and left them both at our neighbor's front door.
The next day they were both back on our porch. Rude, but whatever. We continued to feed the cat because she obviously wasn't feeding her. A few weeks later the cat came to our door crying. She was trying to come inside. Super weird considering she was pretty wild, and we had never let her inside before. I let the cat in and noticed she was pregnant and about to have kittens.
I made her a little corner and she had babies the next day. We let her stay in the house with us, but we knew we couldn't keep her. I went downstairs to talk to our neighbor. She said that her son's cat was a boy so the cat we had obviously wasn't his. I posted on Facebook to see if anyone was interested in fostering a cat and her kittens because we couldn't keep her.
Her son saw my post on Facebook and got super mad at his mom. Oh, and this is the most infuriating part of all. THAT'S when reported me, said that I took her cat, and lied to me when she confronted me about having the cat in my possession. It was the stupidest, most frustrating thing that had ever happened to me as far as neighbors go.
4. Serves You Right!
Last November, my brother passed unexpectedly. We upheld covid restrictions, and the officers who had helped us told us that on the day of his funeral we could still have up to 10 people in the yard, just not in the house. After the funeral, around six people came by, and we sat around the fire pit talking and crying. No partying, no one in the house. And yet, our neighbor went the extra mile to make our lives even more of a nightmare.
Our neighbor called law enforcement to report that we were breaking restrictions and then she stood in the window waiting for them to arrive. The same officers who were with us before showed up and decided to sit with us in the yard and chat with us, see how everyone was doing. She flew into a rage and came into her backyard yelling at us—but she didn't stop there.
She screamed that she was contacting her lawyer, saying that my brother was a loser, and no one cares he's gone, just really nasty things. Two of the officers went over and tried talking to her to help her calm down. Instead, she threw a Walmart bag full of stuff at one of the officers and tried to spit on them. The highlight of one of the worst days of my life was watching her stuffed into a patrol car and taken away for assaulting an officer. My brother would have loved it.
5. Time To Get Good
There were some 19-year-olds that lived next door to me—and they were literal nightmares. They'd scream at their Call of Duty games at the top of their lungs when they lost. Our walls were paper-thin so it was obnoxious 24/7. Oh, but that wasn't all. They also threw a pumpkin on the roof of my car, causing $3k worth of damage. I finally got them to confess and basically gave him a "stern talking to” and told him I wasn't going to press charges as long as his insurance paid for it.
Later that year, someone next door was flipping out about a video game and yelled something along the lines of "GODDANGIT HACKERS, EVERYONE IS CHEATING, WHAT THE HECK IS THIS, I HATE THIS GAME, BUNCH OF LOSERS AND CHEATERS", which was very clear through my bedroom wall while I was studying, so I had a quick idea.
After he got done with his tantrum, I said, "Sounds like you just suck at games, bro". I heard a crash of what sounded like a controller being banished to the shadow realm and then didn't hear anything from him for a month. It was glorious.
6. Encounter At The Rose Bushes
Two years ago, my husband and I had just bought our first house. I was so excited to finally have flower beds, so I bought five purple tiger rose bushes and went out every day to tend to them. Our next-door neighbor came over one day while I was watering my roses and decided to be a creeper. He asked if he could give me his number, started asking probing questions about my schedule like how long I was home alone, and kept hitting on me.
I turned off the water and went inside, locked the door, and called my husband, because now there's a strange man walking through my yard that knows I'm home alone and won't accept my boundaries. My husband came home and met the neighbor's wife in the driveway to explain what happened and how the guy was out of line for treating me like that.
I didn't see the guy again, but that's when it all began. Within days, my roses started to shrivel up and die. I tried everything, but I'm pretty sure he sprayed them with plant killer. But karma came for him in the end. He got fired for harassing a customer, and shortly after, his wife booted him out of the house.
7. The Fender Bender
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 and 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. Little did I know, it was about to get a lot more serious.
The man refused to answer, and the officer made a report and called to check in later in the afternoon. That night, the neighbor ended up pounding violently on a few neighbors’ doors, presumably looking for me. Authorities were called and quite a few officers responded. They could not find the man, so they had everyone on our street shelter in one place until they could find him.
Officers ended up finding him hiding under a boat in his backyard. I don’t know if he was taken away or committed, but he never was back at his house and his family sold the house a few months later.
8. Crotchety Complaints
When we bought our place, my husband went next door to introduce himself to the new neighbor. Mr C, the old neighbor, led with "I don't like dogs or children, y'all better be quiet!" and it didn't get better from there. The pettiest thing he did was probably the day he cut our cable because he thought the provider didn't bury it quickly enough. Mind you, it was entirely on our land.
Or maybe the day he had a fit because the movers took down a fence post to get their truck in, and inadvertently left it on Mr C's lawn until they got the truck back out. Or perhaps it was the morning that he came banging on the door at 7:30 am, like there was some emergency, and had the gall to yell at my husband because he answered the door shirtless.
The "emergency" was that the children walked to the bus stop on the right of way in front of his house. It's a dirt road, no sidewalk, and the other side of the road has a ditch and woods—not suitable for pedestrians. Mr C made threatening noises about "teaching the girls a lesson" about staying out of his yard and my husband flipped. His. Lid.
He informed the old guy that the right of way extends 40 feet from the center of the road, per Georgia law, and that the old man better NEVER, EVER, EVER mess with his children. The only other time he ever spoke to me was to complain about the noise from a cookout we'd had. I told him that if he continued, I would have my timber cut, but only that between his house and the highway. Then we'd talk about noise...
9. Someone Shut That Down!
A roommate did this during midterms in college with an annoying video clip. She set it to loop for 14 hours at max volume on her laptop and hooked up speakers before leaving for the day. She'd locked it so I couldn't turn the noise off. She'd even thought to do something to disable the power button. So...I pulled the battery out, waited 10 seconds, and put it back in. Blissful silence.
Unfortunately, there was a lot of unsaved work on that laptop. I'm still stunned someone would plan to leave their work unsaved for hours but would think to change the power key to make it harder to stop the noise. She was randomly assigned and the only person I've ever known who has had their coworkers stage a surprise intervention at their home.
They all asked her why she was such a jerk and how this could change. It was seriously fifteen people all trying to figure out how to get her to stop being so indiscriminately nasty.
10. Put A Ribbon On It
My college roommate and I had an ant problem. They got all over the trash bin, so we moved it from the garage to the yard in front of the house. Our neighbor left us a note saying it was unsightly and to please remove it. I handled the situation by putting a sticky Christmas bow on top of it to make it look nicer. My roommate was horrified by the bow and took it off.
She then explained to the neighbor why we had it outside. I'm not sure which one of us was pettiest—me or the neighbor.
11. Leftover Clippings
My son had just come home from the hospital after an emergency appendectomy and another surgery after that to remove abscesses that had formed. He had a line in his neck and needed medicine through it every so often. I could hook the medicine up and leave it, and it usually took 30 minutes or so. So, one morning, I hooked a dose of medicine up and went to mow the front yard.
While mowing, some grass got on my neighbor's driveway, but as it was time to take the medicine off my son's line, I went inside to take care of that first. When I came back out to finish the grass and sweep the grass off of his driveway, my neighbor was already outside and upset that I had left grass on his driveway. I braced myself for the worst.
No matter how much I tried to explain what happened or the fact that I literally had a broom in my hand to sweep everything when I was done, he didn’t want to listen, and he kept talking over me. Here comes the petty part. He took a hose and hosed off the grass back into my yard. I watched the whole thing go down and then he looked all proud of himself afterward.
I said out loud, “Well, now I can’t even finish my yard because it’s wet”. He got so mad and said he was going to call the authorities, and I just went inside. Nothing ever came of it. He tries to be super friendly now, four-ish years later. His grandson and my son are friends, but I still will never forget what a jerk he was that one time.
12. Timber!
Our neighbors CONSTANTLY complained for like two years about a tree in the back yard that looked like it was going to fall. They threatened to sue us if it did. Thing is, the tree was clearly on their property by about five feet. Then one day during a strong storm, a huge, seemingly strong and healthy tree, smack dab in the middle of their front yard blows over onto their house.
We went over the next day and helped them cut it up and remove it. They could barely make eye contact with us and never said thank you. They did shut up about the other tree though, and that one is still standing to this day.
13. Swabbing The Deck
I bought and moved into a condo and the previous owners apparently did not like cleaning. My third-floor deck was green and growing things, so I went to my downstairs neighbors to let them know I wanted to power wash. The first neighbor says, of course, do whatever I need. But the other neighbor below me pitches a royal fit: How dare I inconvenience her? She’d have to move her furniture inside! Decks get dirty, that’s just how it goes.
So, I talk to the office, as does she, and she whines enough to get them to say no power washing but I can use a garden hose with a scrub brush and soap. Well, what would’ve been a 15-minute power wash becomes an all-day cleaning extravaganza of green soapy grossness going down to her deck. But is the neighbor satisfied? Oh no.
She did not realize SOAP would be part of the deal. Come Monday morning, she is complaining to the office again. Thankfully, they told her to shove it.
14. Permitted Permits
I'm currently in a battle with my neighbor because he cut a bunch of old-growth trees down and moved into an absolutely hideous house, which is a huge issue because while we're not an HOA, we are a "community character" neighborhood and there is an expectation that new builds at least attempt to look like existing homes in the neighborhood.
It turns out that he had no permit to remove the trees and that the building permit he had was invalid. There was a zoning hearing and the city council asked me to testify at it. I testified with facts, that he didn't have a valid permit and that while there needs to be a 6' encroachment between houses, right now there's only a 4.5' encroachment.
If he adds a porch like he wanted to, his new house will actually encroach onto our property line and, basically, be up against my kitchen window. When they opened it up to public comment, almost fifty of my neighbors testified that the house doesn't meet standards. In the end, the council moved to immediately revoke his dodgy building permit, which is something that hasn't been done in 45 years.
He's now left with a little under a week to move that house back to its original lot or submit major design changes. In addition to threatening to sue everyone who spoke out against him, he now posted on social media that he's asking the public for "dirt" on me and my husband. Thank God that his post has only had five comments and they're all telling him to either stop or that we're decent people.
I'm still half-expecting to wake up on Monday and find my tires slashed.
15. I’m The Whole Council
Lived in a neighborhood for about a year that was also home to one of the city council members. This lady would send notices to everyone for anything she didn't like, and she'd try and sway the council to crack down on those she deemed the "worst" offenders. We earned a spot at the top of her list because we put our garbage cans at the curb in the afternoon rather than the evening.
None of us were going out after dark and dealing with rats springing out of the cans like tiny, flea-ridden missiles. We didn't stop because, legally, we weren't doing anything wrong. She was a stickler for making the neighborhood look fabulous even though most of the houses were in terrible condition and as mentioned earlier, the entire city had a really bad rat problem.
So, every week, we'd get a new notice from her, though she always tried to say it was from the council as a collective. Yes, she hand-delivered that letter.
16. Caught On Camera
I had a neighbor who literally thought she owned the actual street and had some big beef with my landlord. She had sued him several times for things that never made any sense. My landlord installed cameras because she took him to court so often, and he needed proof that she was making stuff up. She would mark down the time that I or any friends of mine arrived at or left my house and would sit in her driveway watching us.
Once, my landlord was going out of town and told me I was welcome to use his grill and have friends over. I did so, inviting five friends max, and we had a nice, mellow cookout. No loud music, no stupid debauchery or anything like that. True to form, the nosy neighbor called my landlord and told him that she was calling her lawyer and threatening action over our small party.
Thankfully, my landlord had footage of our gathering and deemed it all totally fine and completely within the bounds of what he'd invited me to do.
17. Give Me A Break!
My neighbor called CPS on my family because we took a family vacation with our two older kids and let our youngest with special behavioral needs and violent outbursts spend the week with my mom. They did movies, swimming pools, children's museums, a food truck festival, and saw a fireworks show together in that time. He had a blast, and the rest of us got some badly needed respite. Neighbor thought it was blatant favoritism and reported us.
18. The Spaces Are Filled
I used to live in a townhouse community. We had assigned parking—two parking spaces per unit. I only had one vehicle, so I only needed one space and didn't care if people parked in the extra spot I wasn't using. But then the neighbor across the street started using their two spots, and both of MY parking spots when they had guests over.
I'd be at the grocery store, come back, and this guy has his buddies in my parking spots, leaving me nowhere to park. I'd have to go over there and knock on the door and tell them to move, and, of course, they always took their good old sweet time going to move their cars. So finally I got sick of it. I came home and their guests had parked in both my spots again.
I just pulled my car horizontally right on up behind them so there was no way they could get out. I made it so they had to come knock on my door for a change when they were ready to leave, and I took my time getting out there to move my car. They didn't use my parking spots again after that.
19. From One To Another
I lived in an apartment building with little better than paper for walls. You could clearly hear the next-door neighbors' conversations, walking up the stairs, etcetera. 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.
It 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. It ultimately ended with law enforcement being called on them after the neighbor got mad at being asked again to turn it down and started pounding on the wall, 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. Before he got evicted, though, we begged the office to let us move to a different apartment and they let us move to another building. BIG MISTAKE. Our new neighbors had a parrot that never shut up, and a child who would literally spend hours banging on their piano screaming and singing "My name is Amanda!"
What can one do in that situation except grin and bear it, I guess?
20. I Thought I Was A Clean Freak
In college, I lived in a single dorm room that shared a Jack-and-Jill bathroom with another single. After a happy year together, my suitemate went on a foreign exchange and her replacement had some bizarre ideas about minimally shared space. For context, I myself am a deeply quiet, clean, persnickety kind of person who no one wants to share with because I go to bed at 10 pm.
That's me. And this girl thought I was a party animal slob. She left me a ranting post: it's constantly about the "noise," watching TV at a normal volume in the afternoon, and the "mess" I left in the bathroom (a towel hanging on my rack and the toothbrush in a cup on the counter). She repeatedly threw my bathroom stuff into my room and tried to complain to the RA if I talked on the phone, in my own private room, during daylight hours. Oh, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.
She banged on the wall for me to quiet down when I was sleeping. The kicker was when she lost it at me for being disgusting and breaking the bed with an overnight visitor, again, in my own private room. There were no rules about visitors, overnight or otherwise, and it wasn't even those kinds of noises. The male visiting my room was my brother.
21. Sprint To The Finish
I was at this neighborhood treasure hunt when I was around eleven years old. It was in a big park with a lot of trees and rocks. There was also a parking lot and a community center next to it. Me and my neighbor’s kid both figured out the final clue and sprinted towards the finish, only for me to be "accidentally" bumped by his dad and fall. To this day, I’m still super salty about it.
22. Irrationally Angry
The neighbors called the authorities on my one-year-old son for being too loud. We lived in an apartment on the second floor when my son was a baby. The new neighbors who moved in below us immediately started complaining because we were too loud. The noise they were hearing was our one-year-old son “scooting” across the floor.
He has some neurological differences and didn’t learn to crawl like typical kids. He would lay on his back, arch up, and scoot himself around like a backward inchworm. Most kids his age were already crawling or starting to walk. The neighbor would pound on her ceiling, yell in the shared hallway, and even called authorities on me once because of the noise.
We tried to work with the apartment management, and we explained to them that it was our son. Once our neighbor knew the cause of the noise, it only made her more vindictive. She requested that we be made to move. She worked with young children and said our kid was probably autistic and would only get louder as he got older.
We didn’t get a diagnosis for another year, but it turns out she was right. He is on the spectrum. She only lived there for three months, but it was miserable. She was so irrationally angry that they recommended we keep our doors locked and not go in the hallway alone. The neighbor that moved in after her never complained, and we eventually bought a house so my son could be as loud as he wanted.
23. No Contracts
We moved to a rural area, and our property had 40 acres of field that the closest neighbor rented from the widowed lady that sold us the house. So, we let him continue renting it the first year we were there, but he basically conned us by selling us a bunch of random services and old stuff he didn't need, deducting it from the annual rental payment along with some other things we didn't like quite so much.
So when we decided to make a formal contract the next year, he got mad because "we rely on word of mouth around here". So we got another one of our neighbors to rent it, who turned out to be much more normal and told us that no, everyone does contracts these days. So that worked out well for us. But "petty" must be our neighbor’s middle name.
Among other things, he "accidentally dropped" an enormous hay bale on our driveway, in the dark evening, that we could have easily crashed into coming home if we hadn't seen it.
24. It’s THAT Bad, Really!
We have a front yard garden and our neighbors across the street have one of those overkept yards where they have a lawn service come by twice a week. They passive-aggressively called the health department on us. The health inspector showed up and was laughing because they had made it sound like we had a dilapidated shack infested with vermin.
25. Pinching Underwear
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 had lived there for 10 years or more. Then this weird creepy dude moved in below us. He would play music loud all night and I had to be up for work at 5 am.
He wouldn't answer the door so we couldn’t ask him to turn it down. So, I had to jump up and down until he heard it. He had angry people banging on his door screaming for hours. He'd be home but wouldn't answer. That's when some of the neighbors lost it. A woman ran out and poured nail polish all over his car. His apartment was in the basement, but he had a huge window that was right next to the stairs to get in.
He never closed the curtains and you would see directly down into his living room where he had built a swing with all kinds of freaky stuff hanging on it. Had to explain what it was to everyone that came over, even my mom. Then one day an officer knocked on the door and he was holding about 20 pairs of women's underwear and asked me to pick out mine.
It was like three pairs, and the cop said to throw them away because the downstairs neighbor had been taking them out of the laundry room and wearing them. I guess the upstairs neighbor had walked into the building and saw her underwear hanging on the swing and reported it. So, they took him in for wearing our underwear, and the landlord evicted him.
When he got out, he was so mad he was getting evicted he went and bought a bunch of sand, covered his whole apartment in it, and turned the air conditioning all the way up. He was a nightmare neighbor.
26. Liar, Liar…
I had a neighbor who was old and always treated us badly. My neighbor changed the locks on our communal door which only allowed access to our flat and her flat yet refused to inform us that she changed the locks. She then refused to answer the phone for us or let us in, then called the authorities on my partner when he broke in for breaking and entering.
She also tried to get us to pay for the new keys... The same neighbor called the authorities on me when I was in the bath. I don’t know what she said to them, but answering the door to officers whilst in a towel was not fun. Her reasoning for reporting me was that she thought I was in trouble and wouldn’t answer the door when she knocked.
I didn’t hear her knock and I was in the bath the whole time so unsure what exactly she heard. The same neighbor also called the fire brigade to our property twice claiming we had purposely started a fire in our flat, both times my partner and I were at work and had to come home to check that there was in fact no fire.
27. A Few Loose Screws
I came home from teaching surf lessons and my neighbor corners me at my front door and goes “Let me ask you something”. I have never once talked to this guy before, so I said sure. We both bend down, look at some bolts on his daughter’s bike, and he says “I tightened this last night and today they are loose”. I said, “That is weird”. It took me a minute to realize he was accusing me.
His kids were always riding cardboard down the stairs and being loud in the hallway on their bikes, but I never said anything to him about it. When I realized he was accusing me of messing with her bike, I said maybe we should call the authorities and let them handle this. The dude goes “Go ahead and call them, I don’t care”. His wife came and apologized later that night saying he has some issues, and to please not tell the office because they had already had multiple complaints.
It was awkward as heck the rest of the time living there. I don’t miss apartment living.
28. A Steep Slope
Some guy is building a new home directly behind me. The lot was the last one in the neighborhood because it was unbuildable garbage. It was literally an old, steep, abandoned quarry. The guy was required to keep a minimum rear yard setback of sixty feet. Another neighbor contacts me and is really upset, as it's evident that the new home is WAY too close to the backline.
I check and it's about 40 feet over the setback and 20 feet from my backyard, not the 60-plus it needs to be. This was all done since the builder was trying to avoid blasting rock for the basement excavation, and the neighbor-to-be would end up with a slightly better view out his front windows. So, I sit down with the local zoning official and explain the situation.
The guy asks for my name and contact info and tells me that he will forward it to the builder. I tell him that no, that nonsense won't fly, he needs to do his job and correct this. He then tells me that he doesn't get involved in "neighbor disputes" and he won't deal with it. I then tell him that's fine…But in order to document the situation for the pending complaint against the township and potential lawsuit, my lawyer will be sending you a memorandum of understanding.
It’ll be so we can all be on the same page with the fact that you are ignoring zoning laws, and violations of the approved building plans that you reviewed and signed. I told him to expect the document shortly, and I left. The next day he calls with the good news that the house is being moved 40' and the issue is resolved.
29. The Divorced Couple
I rented a flat with an ex, and the upstairs neighbor was an absolute nightmare. It was a deadbeat dad who had his kid over every weekend and left them screaming all the time. He'd blast music until sunrise every day, even when he had his kid. Got the council involved, nothing happened. 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. The guy was unemployed, owed the landlord a lot of money, and only left his flat to get groceries. He kicked off at me because my cat meowed loudly once.
30. Dog Lovers – Not!
One of our dogs will jump the chain-link fence to get to our front door from the backyard. He said we’d regret it next time it jumps the fence and touches his land. I had to remind him that we actually own that part of the land, and we'll just take out the fence and put it down to where his actual land starts and it would have been like he lost a large part of his yard.
He didn't say anything again about it. The neighbor behind us claimed one of our dogs bit his kid but our animal control, town PD, and a deputy all said it looks more like the kid was trying to climb into our yard and got cut up real bad, due to it being an older chain link fence with the sharp points at the top. That's when things took an even darker turn.
The dad kept threatening to poison all of our dogs. Thing is, he lets his pit bull run around unleashed and his kids just run through everyone's yards. I heard him talking tough to a friend of his on the phone about how he's going to come over here and I told him to mess around and find out. He stopped once we told him we'd sue him for everything he's got if one of our dogs ever got sick.
31. Bundled In Newspaper…
When I was a kid, we had a crazy old cat lady neighbor that would take our newspapers every day. My mom thought it would be a great idea to sabotage an old newspaper by wrapping it up in dog poop, mustard, sauerkraut, dirt, basically anything we could find in hopes that she’d stop taking them. We planted the newspaper and woke up to it being gone.
Even after that day, she still kept taking the newspaper!
32. Window Pains
So, one summer, about 10 years ago, my parents decided to renovate the entire top floor of the house. With this, they got the licenses to build an addition to our bathroom. This included a new set of windows. First, the neighbor came over to my dad and said to him that he had to tint the windows because quote: "It allows you to see inside our house".
What it really meant was that you could see a top-down view of maybe a couple of ground tiles in the right corner of your eye. My parents relented eventually, but didn't want to buy the more expensive tinted glasses. They compromised this by putting tape-on tint on it. By some dumb luck, however, the neighbors noticed when the windows arrived that they were see-through.
The neighbors then went to my parents again. They tried to explain the tape-on tint, but they wouldn't accept it. They were petty enough to sue my parents over that. Oh yeah, somewhere in that situation our neighbor went to a lawyer to make a contract regarding the situation. They did this without my parents’ knowledge, and threw it on the doorstep together with a bill of €300 for the making of said contract. Talk about being petty.
33. The Corner Of The Photo
We went to sell our house and got the fairly standard pictures taken by the real estate agents, one of which was a shot of our backyard. Our real estate then got several missed calls with a very angry voice mail stating "call me back immediately". She does and gets screamed at by our neighbor for posting a picture that has a corner of his shed included in it. It gets so bad she hangs up the call.
He then shows up at her office, shaking in rage, bad-mouthing the reception staff, and has to be taken into a conference room to attempt to get him to calm down. He threatens to turn up at the open house and cause a scene. Real estate offers to crop the photo so you can no longer see the tiny corner of the shed. He finally leaves and thankfully never contacts us again about it.
Luckily, he didn’t cause a scene at the open house but it was very odd.
34. What’s In The Garage?!
She was a crazy lady living in her second home. She put a camera on where our garage was and always complained about business running from the house etcetera. Law enforcement was called a gazillion times. She claimed we were making substances to sell on the street among the many other false complaints. We had an interesting conversation with the authorities.
We requested all her complaints be submitted to the city and used that along with text messages shared by neighbors to get a restraining order against her. She even had the audacity to dispute the restraining order, but her lawyer put her in her place. She moved out within the week and the house went on the market!
35. Holding A Grudge
10 years ago, my neighbor’s garage band was jamming super loudly at around 9:30 pm. Typically it doesn’t bug me too much, but this time was different. On this particular night, they decided to open the garage door because it was a hot summer night and it was too hot. My one-year-old couldn’t sleep because of how loud they were, so I went over to ask if they could play quieter and shut the garage door.
Ever since, he's become a horrible neighbor. He hasn’t spoken to me in 10 years and is mean to my kids when he sees them. He is mean to an eight and 11-year-old because I asked him ten whole years ago to play their music quieter at 9:30 at night.
36. Up On The Curb
My neighbor parked all of his cars on the street instead of in his garage and his driveway because he hated me for some unknown reason. I lived with my grandmother at the time, he straight up lied to her and told her that I was parking on his grass, which I wasn't; I've popped two tires on curbs in my life and had no intention to risk doing so again by parking up on the curb.
He literally screamed at me for "being rude" multiple times even though my car was parked legally according to the city codes. So anyway, he parked all four of his cars on the street instead of on his property, which meant everyone from the other two houses on the street had to park like a half-mile away. He did it to inconvenience me, but he really just inconvenienced everyone else.
The joke was on him, my grandparents were out of town that week and I could park in our driveway anyway.
37. An Immaculate Driveway
As a kid, I lived on a tiny end street with limited parking and very few driveways. So, everyone had to pay for a parking permit if they wanted to park on the street. But there was an older gentleman at the corner who had a driveway that could easily fit four cars. He repaved it every year and hosed it down every day in the summer.
And he also paid to take the only extra spot on the street. Not once did he park in that driveway, but he also yelled and chased the kids away if he saw any of them walking onto it. He was a very strange man. As kids, we got our own form of revenge. I remember my friends and I taking one of his zucchinis in retaliation. So, I suppose the pettiness went both ways.
38. Sorting Bins
I lived in an apartment, and we shared our trash cans with everyone in the building. Someone, and we still don't know who it was, would go through the trash and take out envelopes from letters that were sent to people living in the building. They were so angry about people not putting them in the can for paper that they took every single one with a name on it and put it in that person's mailbox. Dirty paper from a trash can.
39. Just A Sprinkle
When I was younger, I had a neighbor who was an angry older woman maybe in her 60s. I was out watering the yard and decided to put on the sprinkler. It was summer and hot as heck, and I didn’t feel like standing in the 100-degree heat. Not even fifteen minutes later, the authorities were knocking on our door and asked about the sprinkler. I was terrified, thinking I'd done something wrong.
It turns out our neighbor called because the water from the sprinkler got on her driveway which was just next to our lawn, and she just couldn’t take it that we had done something to her property. She had given my family problems before about little things but this incident sticks with me because it is just so ridiculous, and she never explained why except that it just wasn’t right that we “did something” to her property.
40. A Copycat
My neighbor had a large dog that hated my older, smaller dog. One day, her dog ran into my yard and bit my dog. She apologized, and it did not happen again. Then, she dumped her lawn clippings into my back yard. Had to ask her to stop and clean up her mess. She also decided to build a fence. No survey. So, I paid for a survey of my property.
She 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 the same color. I bought a new car. She bought a new car—same color, same configuration. It was all very odd.
41. Grrr…
My upstairs neighbor was peeved that I contacted the office about him and his really loud wife. I had no contact with them directly. So, this grown man waited until I took my 15-year-old, blind, cancer-fighting dog outside to relieve himself, and he came out to loudly bark and growl at my dog to scare him since he couldn’t see. Luckily, my dog didn’t care, but what a petty thing to do.
42. Slinging Ink
We caught my neighbor leaning out his upstairs window throwing open ink cartridges at our washing. He was barking mad and a few years ago got sectioned after hurting his wife. I'm pretty sure he also staged a fake home invasion for insurance money at one point. I am also fairly certain it was him that was injuring my cats—two had airgun pellets embedded in their heads.
43. Piles Of Litter
I live in a bunch of townhomes. Someone would empty their kitty litter into a bag then drag it to the trash, about halfway through the walk it would start leaving litter and cat poop on the sidewalk. One night we finally saw who was doing it. To show them, my roommate hopped in the dumpster, grabbed the bag which was mostly full, went to their house, tied it to the doorknob, cut the bottom, knocked, and ran.
The culprits opened the door and dragged kitty litter and all the garbage that was on top of it right into their house. They stopped dragging the bag to the trash after that.
44. The Worst Of The Renters
The neighbors to my immediate left are always renting out their house. The renters never stay very long, and they're not always what I would call upstanding citizens. One particular renter stands out, though. They had this terrible old yellow Grand Prius that they parked in one of our parking spaces, and left it there. We tried six times to ask them nicely to move it.
The seventh time, my dad had it towed, and the bill sent to the renters. They were furious and threatened to hurt our outdoor cats. They moved pretty quickly after that.
45. Snap!
I’m currently in the midst of filing a restraining order against my neighbor who likes to take pictures of every car parked in front of my house and every visitor to my house. Friends, family, babysitter, house cleaner, and even the license plate of people not even visiting my house but just happened to be parked in front of it.
When asked about it, he said he’s “not doing anything wrong," but then proceeds to send the photos to the HOA and the town code enforcement office saying I must be operating some kind of a business from my home. Heaven forbid I invite our babysitter over so I can go to work... Anyways, he’s a jerk and super creepy, and I’m getting a restraining order so he can stop harassing us.
46. The Three Trees
I spent thousands of dollars removing two very large trees from our property. About a month later, the neighbor sent us certified mail claiming one of the trees we did not cut down, was not healthy. Of course, this was not true because we had all the trees inspected before removal. Because they sent us certified mail, it forced us to get an umbrella insurance policy to cover the event of the tree falling on their house.
They never had one face-to-face conversation with us about it.
47. Stopped By Chains
We moved into a house up a long-shared driveway. Our neighbors are an elderly couple, and the woman has dementia. Sometimes she doesn't know where she is or what she is doing. The new neighbor came over one Sunday night to ask if he could put his wheely bin at the end of the drive so the rubbish truck could back up the drive to empty it as it would save him trying to move it to the road.
I said that was no issue. Turns out the lady that used to live there had her lawyers send the elderly couple a cease-and-desist letter over putting the rubbish bin in the driveway the first week after she moved in. No knock on the door to try to compromise. She went straight to a lawyer. We also found out she got upset about the neighbor wandering onto her driveway.
Remember, the woman had dementia and didn't know what she was doing. So, she put a chain across the driveway to stop her wandering into her property. It was a hazard—and the consequences were brutal. The chain was fitted and hung at about eight inches off the ground, so the first time the elderly lady wandered over she tripped on it and fell face-first onto the drive, knocking several teeth out and breaking her hip.
She spent some time in hospital and before she even got out of the hospital, the elderly neighbor had a knock on the door from law enforcement with a trespass notice...All the neighbors were ecstatic when the lady left and we moved in.
48. Up In Smoke
This happened years ago at my old apartment complex. My downstairs neighbor had a grill that they set up directly underneath our window, and when they grilled, the smoke would get into our house when the window was open. It was terrible. So, I politely asked if they could move their grill further away. They moved it—but then did something absolutely diabolical.
They set up a fan to move the smoke in my window’s direction. That really got me steaming but the breaking point was when they were having a party. I went to close my window, and the wife started shouting "That's right! Close your window!". Okay, you started it. I noticed their car had a paper license plate for several months that looked like it was printed out of computer paper and I could tell it was faked, so I reported it.
I expected them to get a ticket for not having registration and that would've been fine. Guess what? An officer comes by and finds that it's a stolen vehicle. One patrol car turns to three cars, and they arrest the husband and CPS takes their kids because they found substances in the house. All because of a grill!
49. Slamming The Gate
I live in a townhouse that has an adjacent townhouse on either side. The neighbors on one side are absolutely fantastic. The other side? Not so much. About two years ago, the adult male living there was some sort of tradesman who regularly left for work at 4:40 am. Whenever he left, he would slam his front metal gate closed, which would regularly wake me and my four-year-old daughter.
The gate is only about 10 meters from our bedroom windows. I wrote a very polite note, explaining that it was a problem and asking them if they could please close their gate quietly. To his credit, he started leaving via the other exit—but this wasn't the end of it. About a month later, it was becoming clear that my front lawn was increasingly covered in dog poo, so I set up a webcam to see where it was coming from.
Very quickly it became clear that these neighbors were regularly opening their gate, letting the dog out to do its business, and then returning home, with no attempt to clear it up. I approached him one early evening as the dog returned home from its defecation excursion, and, again very politely, asked him and his wife to stop letting the dog leave its business on my front lawn.
They denied it, despite the fact that I had just caught the dog in the act and told them that I had video evidence of what their dog was doing. That absolute jerk decided that every morning he left for work thereafter he would literally slam his front gate using all his strength. Some people are human garbage. Thankfully, they moved out only a couple of months later.
50. Color Me Surprised
In 2001, my neighbor wanted me to join an HOA. I had no interest. She contrived all these rules and insisted the neighborhood follow them. She would call the authorities, city inspectors, and everybody on anyone who didn't follow her rules. She finally got me a warning from the city on my house needing paint. In her vision, she wanted earth tones and encouraged me to change the color of my house from a light powder blue to a tan. Well, I went and did the exact opposite.
I painted the house PURPLE. I sold it as a purple house. The good news is it is 2021 and the house is STILL purple.
51. Fences Don’t Always Make Good Neighbors
While retrieving my mail shortly after moving into my new home, there was a flyer attached to the mailbox post. I read the flyer with interest, finding out that it was from the neighbor who purchased the model home at the entrance of our subdivision. The flyer was addressed to all members of the Homeowners Association.
It essentially informed us that the HOA was using our HOA dues to sue him for not removing a fence from his front yard. The builder erected the chestnut rail fence around the front yard of the model home when it was built and the purchaser never thought anything about it. A contingent of HOA officers notified him that he had 24 hours to remove the fence or face a lawsuit.
Having already faced the wrath of the HOA myself, I stopped at his home to talk with him. After ascertaining the preceding information, I informed him that anything existing on the closing date of the real estate transfer, was grandfathered in and therefore, the fence was fair. I then proceeded to show this to him in the covenants.
At the time, I was an editor with the local newspaper and asked if he minded my writing an article about this incident in the newspaper. He readily agreed and I went off to discuss it with the managing editor. Between us, we decided to run a series of articles about HOAs and the "little tyrants who run them", highlighting this incident.
The series ran seven weeks on the editorial page, during which time, the court case was held and the homeowner won with the HOA having to pay his lawyer’s fees. He told me that had they asked, he would have removed the fence with no problem, but he was a retired colonel in the US Army and was not used to being ordered to do things. Thirty-six years later, the fence is still there.
