They say "good fences make good neighbors," but no boundary—physical or otherwise—could stop these neighbors from being utterly disturbing creeps. These Redditors came together to share their stories of the worst neighbors that they ever had to deal with. Whether they're peeping toms, unhinged weirdos, or worse, one thing is for sure: They make your run-of-the-mill annoying neighbors seem saintly.
1. Burning Down The House
When we moved in, our neighbor came over to tell us the house had previously burned down twice, which was news to us. We got the feeling that he wanted to brag about how he had saved people from the fires. Then a few years later—after leaving our garage door open—we found our stored grill with all the unlit burners on and a bit of burnt paper sitting underneath.
After that, he disappeared, but we started locking up our propane.
2. Mom Freaked When She Got The Scoop
When my sister and I were about five and six, we lived in a small town of about 600 people. We would frequently play outside without parental supervision. Our neighbor would—unbeknownst to our mother—take us to the local ice cream shop for ice cream. One day, we moved without any explanation. Years later, we found out the disturbing reason why.
We were told that the neighbor was a registered offender, and our mom moved for our safety. She freaked out when she learned about our trips to the ice cream shop. Neither my sister nor I were ever harmed, but it is still terrifying to think about.
3. Unexpected Waterworks
One morning, I was in the shower getting ready for work when water started POURING into my bathroom. I mean, water blasting out of my sconce, shower tiles turning brown from being waterlogged, etc. I threw on shorts and ran down to the office. No one was there. I went to the maintenance office. Empty. I called every number for the company I was renting from. No answer.
Lastly, I went to my neighbor's apartment above me where this was coming from, but still no luck. By the time I got back to my place, the entire bathroom ceiling had collapsed and I had water damage visible in two other rooms and a whole hallway. I later found out that his girlfriend had nodded off while filling the bathtub to do laundry (despite there being a giant laundry room in the basement) and the water was running full blast while it overflowed.
She destroyed my apartment and damaged thousands of dollars worth of my stuff. She admitted to exactly what had happened. He came home and tried to talk his way out of it. The maintenance guy shut him down and told him he knew what had actually happened and that he was basically boned. He then made a throat-slashing gesture at me in view of the head of maintenance.
He got evicted as a result of the damage she did and the fact that he threatened to end me. But the nightmare still wasn't over. He blamed me for his eviction, so he started vandalizing my car by kicking off the side window. He slashed a tire as well.
4. A Mother's Obsession
When I was very young, we lived next door to an elderly couple and their adult daughter. The adult daughter had kids and grandkids of her own, but she had some personal issues and she couldn't live on her own with them. I don't remember how it started, but she would venture further and further into our property until one day, she walked right into our house while we were in the living room.
My mother was pregnant and babysitting other children at the time. She was so startled she jumped up and chased her out of the house. On another occasion, she came storming over to our house with a mop in her hand, determined to attack my mother. She had to call my uncle to come over and I remember him putting his entire body weight on the door to keep her out.
We called the authorities on her and she was taken away for psychiatric evaluation. After that, the officers had to come back to talk to my parents because, during her evaluation, she claimed that my mother had kidnapped her son and chained him in the basement. Obviously, none of that was true. After that, if we were playing outside and we saw her, we immediately ran into the house and locked the doors.
I don't know what her diagnosis was or why she was so fixated on my mother. We eventually moved when I was around 12.
5. Meet The Looneys
My boyfriend and I moved into a “nice and quiet” neighborhood about six months ago. We chat with a few of our neighbors here and there, especially while walking our dogs, and are friendly when we encounter anyone, but we mostly keep to ourselves. Showing up at someone’s door with a basket is just in the movies, right? Two weeks ago, I got out of the shower and heard my boyfriend talking to someone in the entryway.
I peeked out and saw him nervously talking to a woman. I had just taken my glasses off, so I was extra blind and didn’t recognize her. I assumed because she was standing inside our house that my boyfriend knew who she was and carried along getting dressed in our bedroom. I have never been more wrong in my life. A few moments later, my boyfriend shouts out to me and asks if I know what’s going on.
“No, I thought you were going to fill me in on what’s going on”. The woman is chiming in now with short cryptic phrases like “Oh really? You don’t know who I am? You should know exactly why I am here”. I have severe anxiety, so my mind was already starting to race and I was trying to place this woman’s face. She seemed vaguely familiar, but in the context and confusion, I couldn’t place her.
My boyfriend keeps asking her who she is and she gives no indication of who she is or why she is there, but keeps insisting that we know what’s going on. He finally asks that they step back outside to talk. I can’t believe the woman’s reaction. She reaches behind her and LOCKS THE DEADBOLT with a smirk on her face. I thought things were about to escalate, so I start looking around for something to grab.
When I see nothing, I just shout for my boyfriend to quickly open the door himself so she can just leave. He follows her out of the door while she is still rambling. As soon as they step outside, I realized who she was. She is a neighbor! Her backyard is diagonal to our backyard, and I see her from afar here and then while walking our dogs, but she never comes anywhere near, smiles, waves, or even makes eye contact.
Now I’m even more confused, wondering if our dog had dug a hole under the fence and she came to chastise us, or what? My boyfriend comes back in and I ask how the heck that all started. He said he didn’t have the slightest clue who she was, or why she was here. I said, “she must have given you some kind of reason for you to let her in the house”. His next words chilled me.
That’s when he said, “I didn’t let her in…she rang the doorbell, I started to answer the door and she pushed in and shut the door behind her”. I felt panic flooding my brain. What did we do? Did we offend her in some way? I decided to text my neighbor whose backyard directly faces ours and asked how well she knew her next-door neighbor, and gave them a brief summary of what had just happened.
She responded quickly that a few years prior, the woman fell and cracked her head open and had gone through multiple brain surgeries since. Good neighbor said loony neighbor was never the same since, but “friendly”. Not in the list of adjectives I would use to describe our interaction. She offers to give us looney’s husband’s phone number, or suggests that her husband could talk to looney’s husband in the morning.
I accepted both. I had never even seen her husband so didn’t want to call out of the blue with something like that, but figured it would be nice to have his number just on the off chance that anything else out of the ordinary ever happened. Boy, we had no idea what our future actually held. The next morning, Good Neighbor texts me that Looney Husband was extremely apologetic.
He explained she had a seizure earlier in the week and started new meds that caused confusion. He said he would take care of it, and that he was so glad we had informed him. I kept thinking that her behavior did not seem like someone who was disoriented, or confused…she seemed paranoid and hostile, but I still felt sympathetic towards their situation and decided to write it off as a weird evening.
Two days later, I get out of a meeting at work and saw someone ringing my doorbell three times. My doorbell records a short clip each time it’s rung. When I saw the footage, a shiver ran down me. It was her. In each clip, about 10 minutes apart, she would slam the doorbell, then huff and puff and pace around, visibly upset we had not answered the door.
She was peering in the windows near our door. In one clip, she glared directly into the camera for about 20 seconds before hitting the button. So creepy. I texted my boyfriend and sent him screenshots, but we were both working, and after all, she was just ringing the doorbell. Maybe she had come to apologize, but was just not a pleasant person?
Three hours later, my boyfriend was on the way home and I was still at work. She’s back at the door. Waiting, pacing, stomping her feet. (Have you never heard of a 9-5?!) I warned him in case he was close but she ended up leaving. She came back 10 minutes later, though. He was right around the corner, so he drove straight to THEIR house and her husband was outside.
My boyfriend told Looney Husband that this is getting a little weird and we would appreciate if she would stop patrolling our front porch. The husband said he’d take care of it and they had a doctor’s appointment coming up. 9 pm rolls around. I decided to take my dog out for a quick stroll. No more than two minutes after I leave, I see the notification that someone rang our doorbell.
No. Freaking. Way. Yep, it was her. So I started screen recording. I thought SURELY my boyfriend would not answer, but he did. It turned into chaos. She tried to rush towards the open door and he quickly stepped out on the porch and shut the door, which upset her. She said, “Don’t even TALK to me” (again, you rang OUR bell). She continues rambling that she knows everything that's going on.
She says she’s hearing all sorts of things from our house, and he needs to let her in so she can see everything we’re doing, and know everything that’s going on. He jests that he was just folding laundry, which really set her off. She started cursing him out, calling him a liar, and insisting she must come inside. She must know. My boyfriend tried to tell her that he understands her situation.
Still, he said, there’s no need to get hostile. This set her off even more. Looney took his sympathetic statement as an admission of guilt that we really were spying on her. He offers to walk her back to her house and she curses at him some more and then storms off. I had him text the husband the video. We wanted him to see that it was not just confusion.
There was something more serious going on. He said he was on his way home from work and would, you guessed it, “take care of it”. We never heard back from him. We were going out of town the next morning, so we had two days of peace. We came home and for a few days, a little more peace. Maybe we all just needed a few days of space for things to settle, right?
Wrong! The last incident had been nine days ago. Today, I’m at work and I see the doorbell alert. I knew in my gut what was happening. It was her again. I tried to open the video, but the signal in my office is atrocious. I was anxious, so I kept an eye on the activity log. All of a sudden I start seeing things pop up… “Front door open”….“Front door shut”….“back door open”….“back door shut”….”front door open”…“front door shut”…and so on.
I quickly called my boyfriend to see if he had come home from work early. My heart sank at his response. He said no. I told him that someone was in our house, and we needed to get home. I was mainly worried about our dogs. At one point, Looney had made a weird comment about our dog, and we had also just gotten a puppy.
Puppy was crated, but I was worried a door was open and our other dog would be wandering loose, or worse. I sped home and ran in the door. No dog running to greet me and no puppy in the crate. I start shouting for them and racing through the house, shouting all throughout. I felt like the house was spinning. I was sobbing uncontrollably when I thought I heard a faint jingle.
I sprinted for the backyard, and there they were. I have never been more relieved but was still terrified. It had to be her. Was she still there? What had happened? My boyfriend got home, and I tried to load some of the doorbell clips again. The first two were unavailable. But when the clips from about an hour later loaded, I gasped. We saw …paramedics.
Paramedics banging on our door and trying to get in, and at some point, they came inside. Who let the puppy out of the crate?! Could not tell you. Apparently, when the fire department comes to your home they don’t leave a notice or anything? One of the only things I could hear in any of the clips was, “She’s gonna flip again when we call her back”.
Who is SHE?!? You guessed it…Looney Neighbor. We called the fire department and they told us she had called to report someone inside of our address was collapsed from a seizure. I’m not sure if she’s just trying to make our life a nightmare at this point, or if she was just trying to find a way to get into our home. My boyfriend went to talk to her husband and he was still extremely short with responses.
He was also not taking it any more seriously. I called the non-emergency line and they sent an officer out. The officer was not remotely helpful. He had gone to talk to the Looneys first, and then gave us the same lines about “she’s trying new medication”. “He’s going to call her doctor”. I 100% understand how stressful that kind of stuff can be, and I truly do feel bad for them.
BUT, I am also scared for our safety. Every incident has escalated, and nothing has changed. I asked about filing a restraining order, but I knew this was a long shot since they live close. I asked if there was anything that could be mandated about her being supervised, or getting a caretaker. Her husband is a firefighter so she’s completely alone for long stretches of time and is always walking around the neighborhood alone.
The officer told me not to hesitate to call again if she comes back…that was it.
6. He Was A Peeping Tom
My wife and I had a neighbor in the apartment complex we used to live in who we called “Creepy Guy”. He had some mental disorder and would roam the complex all day doing his snooping. He once got caught by one of our neighbors cracking their front door open to peek in. When I would leave in the morning, he would come running out of his apartment to see who was leaving.
The bottom floor units were partially underground, so the windows were at ground level. If someone didn't keep their blinds closed, he would peek into the windows. Maintenance would catch him going into empty apartments that they would be working on. The final straw was when my wife went to check the mail. The mailboxes were all together in a central location in the complex.
He had followed her to and from the mailboxes wearing a thick leather jacket in 90℉ heat. My wife reported it, and management finally decided to evict him. For the rest of his time there, before he left, he would walk around saying hostile things about apartment management.
7. Not-So-Secret Service
There's a particular type of person who, for some inexplicable reason, feels like they're the only thing standing between society and total collapse. That was my neighbor. She was aloof and paranoid, and she'd imagine threats from almost everywhere...which made the fact that she thought of herself as some kind of secret agent all the more annoying.
This neighbor was always trying to find ways of getting me (and anyone else whom she thought of as suspicious) to move out of the building. She'd stage loud telephone calls with "headquarters" about the alarming behavior of the other tenants, like my tendency to get home after nine in the evening, which was clearly scandalous.
She'd also frequently yell at the people who'd stand on the corner to light up. On one occasion, I heard her shouting at someone over the placement of a flowerpot in their window, which was obviously an indication that they were selling illicit substances. Then, one afternoon, I found an "official notice" taped to a wall in the stairwell.
It was perhaps the most ridiculous attempt at a government-sponsored document that I'd ever seen. The atrocious grammar, poorly Photoshopped seal, and the distinct absence of any legitimate contact information made the thing about as realistic as a scene from NCIS. Furthermore, the reference to "the past two years" seemed to indicate me as her primary target, since I was, as far as I knew, the only resident who had been there for less time than that.
Still, since the notice was clearly meant to scare someone, I decided to return the favor by taking a page out of my neighbor's own playbook. This led me to stand outside of her apartment while staging my own fake phone call: "You should see the notice; it's terrible! Haha, yeah, it's like they didn't know that impersonating a federal official can get you into some serious trouble! Anyway, the real FBI are on their way, and they're going to dust for fingerprints. Whoever made that notice is looking at a lot of time behind bars!"
I went back inside my apartment after that... and within seconds, I heard my neighbor's door open. There was the sound of hurried footsteps rushing towards the stairwell, followed by an equally hurried retreat. When I went out to check five minutes later, the notice was gone. I've since moved away, but for the rest of the time that I lived there, the lady never bothered me again.
8. Drawing A Line In The Sand
Our next-door neighbors seemed very friendly at first. Weird, but friendly. The first time I met her she made it clear by mentioning 5-8 times that her house was a little bigger than ours, but still no problems. But then it started to get creepy. She also told me she could see that we removed a wall and she could see it from her bathroom window.
We just moved in in the spring after closing in February. Right away, we applied for a fence permit and the township needed us to clear something up. They sent a map of our lot with the surveyor stamp. My neighbor told me that the previous owner of our house told them, for the last 17 years, that the lot line followed a few bushes on the property.
Turns out that according to the township, my property extends about 20 feet over from what they originally thought. Our property is on a curved street so the section that we are gaining is shaped like a slice of pie. The neighbor's wife has made it clear she isn't happy. She mentioned 10 times that it's new information and for 17 years that's the way it was.
She said, "You have to understand that after 17 years this is a shock to us and this is how it's always been". She also was telling me how my fence should look and that she wanted the fence more than 6-10 feet off the property line. The township said it can be one inch off. I decided to have enough room for a mower; about two feet. Then it got simply ridiculous.
Finally, she said, "That window over there is my teenage daughter's and we don't want her looking out and feeling like someone is on top of her". Says the woman who looked into my house from her bathroom window. I get you thought your property was bigger, but it's not my fault you got your information from an unreliable source. I pay the property tax on that piece of land and I want to be able to use it.
My property is only .31 acres and my backyard is small but my side yard is big-ish. So then, the township told me to use a metal detector to find the property pin and I was out there. She came over and started yelling at me. She said the property line isn't contested and that what I was doing "was inappropriate and my daughter is right upstairs studying in that room".
She kept yelling but I walked away. We just had the surveyor out the other day. What he told me made me grin like a maniac. It turns out my property extends another 10 feet beyond where I thought, so that's 30 feet they didn't expect. Well, the surveyor came up to me and said "what's wrong with your neighbor? She was yelling at me saying I'm digging up her lawn and that it's her property, not theirs".
Apparently, her husband was on the phone with the township. Here is a text conversation we had. Him: Hi, I’m from next door. We saw that your surveyor was out today. Are you and your wife both available to talk with us for a few minutes sometime today or tomorrow? Me: Hi. Yes the surveyor was out today. No offense, but at this time we are not comfortable having a conversation.
Me: We went through the proper channels to ensure we are putting the fence on our property. We spent additional money to insure this was correct based off of your recommendation for it. Our son and our dog having their space is our main priority. Not to do anything out of spite. We feel like there is some hostility, as evidenced by things that were said to myself and the surveyors today. Just looking to avoid confrontation. Hope you understand.
Him: There's no hostility. We're not seeking confrontation either. We would just like to have a neighborly discussion about your plans for the fence. Any projects done along that property line have a significant impact on our daily lives due to the close proximity to our primary living and working space in our home, including our teenage daughter. We are not nor have we ever been opposed to you installing a fence.
Basically, they want to tell me where to put my fence. Eventually, I installed it three feet off the property line and I was thinking of planting greenery in that space. But they weren’t finished. They are now demanding I move my ring spotlight. The husband texted me, stating that the light shines in his daughter’s bedroom (on the second floor) and into his kitchen.
There is no way this is true. I'm not the only neighbor that has issues with them. I no longer communicate with them because last time I did I was yelled at for being on my own lawn. They continue to bring up their daughter, even though I've never seen evidence that she even exists. They've also recently reached out to me saying my dog was outside all morning barking.
I looked back at my ring camera and not only was she not out all morning, but when she was barking it was at him slowly walking his dog in front of my fence then yelling at her multiple times. Oh, and his dog pooped on my lawn and he didn't pick it up.
9. A Family Affair
I am a combat veteran and a school teacher at the time of this story, and my wife was a school teacher as well. So, I bought my first house 12 years ago. It was in a low-middle-class neighborhood with a lot of working-class families. My house had a pool in the backyard and my parents bought me and my wife a hot tub as a wedding/housewarming gift.
Two weeks after moving in, we came home to an unsettling sight. We found a stranger and six teenage kids swimming in our pool when we got home. We will call them Entitled Mom, the Entitled Daughter, the Entitled Son, and the others I assume to be their friends and/or boyfriend. The daughter was about 18 or 19 years old and her brother was about 17.
When we told them to get out and get off our property, the mother told me that the previous owner gave them permission to come over whenever they wanted to swim. I explained to her that I was the new owner and that I was not ok with it. I told her that not only do I not know them, but there is a liability for me if they got hurt. I couldn’t believe her response.
She yelled and faked cried, saying I was being a bad neighbor, selfish, and forcing her kids to sweat in the summer heat. She told me that if they got heatstroke, it was my fault for not letting them swim in my pool. I told her to get the heck off my property and never return. Fast forward two weeks. I had put up a "No Trespassing" sign on my property in multiple spots and had gotten to know many of the not-entitled neighbors.
They were great and told me to ignore the mom and her kids. They told us she was already badmouthing us, but no one ever believed her. This is when it took a strange turn. Now I start to notice when I wake up in the morning that there is evidence of people using my pool and hot tub at night when we are asleep or away. Like, I find cans and other stuff.
I figure it has to be the mother and/or her brats. So I install cameras on the grounds and start video-taping. Sure enough, I catch the daughter and a few others hanging out in my pool on Friday nights when my wife and I are out. I figure they must have been waiting for us to leave and then threw a mini-party or were quietly swimming while we slept.
So I discussed it with my wife. We decided to teach the mother and her brats a lesson. So the next Friday night, I park my car a street over and my wife does the same. We wait in the dark house to see if any of them come over. The daughter and I assume her boyfriend, the son and I assume his girlfriend, and four other teen couples come right over and start getting in my pool and hot tub.
I wait 45 minutes for them to get really into their fun. And let me tell you, it was getting hot and heavy out there; they were all undressed. I then spring my trap. I go out with my piece, pointed at the ground but at the ready. When I reach the pool, my wife flips on the backlights and I yell for them to freeze or I'll shoot. Meanwhile, my wife calls the authorities.
They all have the deer in the headlights look on their faces and not one of them tries to speak for a good minute. The daughter then starts to tell us that she has permission to be there and that we need to let them get dressed. I tell them that if they move towards me or their property, that I would consider them to be charging me or reaching for a weapon and I'd shoot.
They must have believed me because they froze. One girl begged me to give her her clothing. Not being a total jerk, I say that I will throw them all their clothing. But there was a twist. I then walk over to their piles of clothing, phones, and purses and throw EVERYTHING into the pool. They freak out trying to save their phones and other goods.
After ten minutes officers show up and they have the kids climb out of the pool wearing their soaked clothes and trying to shake their phones dry. I show the officers the videos from our cameras, the No Trespassing signs, and explain to them that I had told them and their mother they were persona non grata. The kids were detained for trespassing and a bunch of other charges.
The officers recommended that next time, I leave my piece in the safe and let them just come and get them. I told them that I thought they may attack my wife and had to "stand my ground." I proved that I never pointed it at them with the videos, so I couldn't be charged with anything. Then came the very best part. As the kids are being loaded into the cruisers, the mother shows up yelling at the officer, my wife, and me.
She demands they let them go and even tries to open the door on one of the cruisers. The officers threaten her with being detained if she doesn't back off and leave my wife and me alone. I later found out that the charges against the teens were reduced and they all got plea deals. They all got community service, fines, and were put on probation. We got a restraining order against the mother and her brats so they couldn't bother us again.
I then sent a bill to the mother for the cost of draining, disinfecting, and refilling my pool and having a professional cleaning service clean up the kids’ mess. The bill was for about $400. I had my parents’ attorney send it to her with a letter stating that if it was not paid in 30 days, then we would sue her for a larger amount. She sent a check to my attorney and thankfully it did not bounce.
About a year later, the entire entitled family moved away and we never heard from them again.
10. What She Does In The Shadows
I put up a doorbell cam yesterday. My neighbor has not slept and I woke up to 45 new motion alerts. One of which was her throwing herself down the stairs. I now figured out what that thumping in the hallway I’ve been hearing is. It has not stopped going off. She also stands in front of our door and stares at our apartment for random intervals of time. Wonder how long she's been doing that!
11. He Was Itching To Get In
I lived in an apartment building, and at night would hear weird scratching at my door like someone was trying to get in. Then, I would hear someone knocking at my door. I answered the knocking precisely two times. It was my neighbor, and the dude terrified me. He would show up wearing nothing but an open bathrobe and wanted to "just talk".
I actually called the authorities the second time he knocked and gave them the whole story. I was a 20-year-old girl living on my own and had some middle-aged man trying to get into my apartment. It was scary. The authorities and my landlady must have worked together to get that guy to back off because after calling law enforcement, he stopped coming by.
12. My Neighbors Were Bird Brains
I lived in an apartment that was on the first floor—which was really half underground—and my windows were all on the same level as the parking lot. I had two weird neighbors there. One was an older guy who would stand just inside the glass door to the building and look out. As you might imagine, that made getting into the building a little awkward.
He wouldn’t acknowledge my presence until he had to move out of the way to let me in. He would sit in his car in warmer weather, with the driver’s side door wide open, blaring “Endless Love” for hours. But he wasn’t the only creep. The other was the older lady next door. She was tiny and had those giant glasses that made her eyes look magnified. She wore a lot of Tweety Bird-themed clothing and chain-smoked all the time.
She would come around, ask me for $5, saying her social security checks were late, pay me back, then ask me for $5 again. It was a weird place.
13. One Word: Crazy
When I was 13 years old, a new neighbor moved into the house next door. We shared a driveway with her. The families in our neighborhood are really close to one another and everyone likes to have get-togethers and block parties. So, when she moved in, we all got together and had a little celebration to welcome her. Immediately, it became clear that she did not like my dad.
A while later, we found out that she’d been telling our neighbors that my dad was being inappropriate to her at the party. I know my dad would never act like that, but he isn’t a native English speaker (he’s Middle Eastern, which is relevant to the story). Maybe some wires got crossed and there was a misunderstanding. So my dad went over to apologize to her. It did not go well.
She told my dad to leave, which he promptly did. Then, she put up the security cameras. They absolutely covered her house getting views of pretty much every angle including lots of shots of our shared driveway. “Whatever,” we thought. “A lady has a right to put cameras on her house”. But then the authorities started showing up. She called them claiming that we had messed with her cameras and that my friends and I were shining laser pointers at them.
The officers ended up leaving pretty quickly because the supposed "offense" she accused us of was not captured on any of her cameras. We thought she was done with her antics after that, but we were wrong—she then started claiming that we were putting something poisonous her yard. She spent a lot of time on her lawn gardening and growing plants, and for some reason, every six months or so, she’d cut everything down and start over.
Anyway, the authorities came back but they couldn’t find any evidence. We didn’t even have any poison, nor had her cameras picked anything up. We had absolutely no motive to poison her lawn. So she started an inquest with the department of agriculture. A pesticide use investigator showed up, interrogated us, and took samples from her yard.
While that was going on, we had a few other interesting encounters with her. Once, she bought a giant floodlight and pointed it into our windows in the middle of the night. The fire department had to come and unplug it. Another time, our dinner was interrupted when a massive hazmat truck came blaring down our street. Men in heavy gear poured out and charged into her house, then, minutes later, they disappointedly filed out.
One guy came and told us that she had bought a Geiger counter and used it wrong, and she had thought that we had irradiated her house. Finally, things came to a head when she sued us to get an order of protection. She claimed that my dad was a member of a sleeper cell intent on destroying her. She also claimed that he had used his skills as an engineer to develop a device that she referred to as a "white ion laser" which would allow him to turn invisible and sneak into her house.
She submitted one terabyte of film from her cameras, all of which was annotated with such incriminating evidence as “My neighbor leaves the house, my neighbor enters the house.” There were also tons of photos and notes. But that's not the most horrifying part. It was here that we discovered that her cameras were pointed into my bedroom and she had been filming me for years.
I was a young lad by this point so there’s probably video evidence of some pretty embarrassing teenage behavior out in the aether now. We later legally forced her to move the cameras, but she kept moving them back, so I just kept my blinds closed for the better part of a decade. During the trial, the department of agriculture report came back.
It was determined that our neighbor had poisoned her own lawn by over-fertilizing it. She received a fine for contaminating the groundwater. We obviously won the lawsuit and countersued her to get our own order of protection. We also had to legally get the files on us at the FBI and CIA closed since she had reported us to both agencies.
Despite losing the suit, she continued to live next to us, occasionally calling the authorities on us for non-issues. They were called on us a total of 37 times. It’s now been ten years and she’s finally moving out. Why you might ask? Does she feel guilty for accusing us of all sorts of horrible stuff with no evidence for a decade? Had her paranoia finally driven her to move? No.
She didn’t pay her property taxes for six years and her house got taken from her. She tried to sue the city on a bunch of occasions as well and failed. This is only a summary of the situation. There are tons more. I haven’t even gotten into her kids, her horrible husband, the video she posted to YouTube of her dog passing...
14. Doggone It
My neighbors let their children scream like they are in unbearable agony. My service dog doesn't like it and will bark three short alert barks at them. And honestly, I didn’t stop him. It scares the kids a little to hear the dog, but they finally stop screaming once they hear it. These kids will literally scream high pitch like they are having their limbs sawed off.
So yeah, when I hear this and my dog hears this he starts to get visibly concerned. He thinks tiny humans are hurt and I think genuinely wants to make sure they are okay. So usually while this is happening, I let him out, he runs to the shared fence, does a few barks until the kids stop screaming, then he stops and lays down next to the fence.
In my opinion, my dog does a better job at moderating the kids than their own mother does. Anyways, this happened again this morning, my dog does his thing, the kids stop. But then I hear one start to cry. This was the beginning of my nightmare. Their mom comes over to my house furious. I answer the door politely and ask what’s the problem.
She says my dog scared her kids and I responded with "Oh, well he was concerned. Your children were screaming extremely loud and it sounded like they were hurt. They scream quite often in fact". She gets angrier and basically says they are kids being kids. I say "No ma'am, I am a kindergarten teacher and a mother myself—your kids are being excessively loud to the point where it's concerning the neighbors with their screaming”.
She got super angry and said they weren't screaming that loud, to which I responded I can show you my porch ring if you'd like. You can't see your yard but you can definitely hear the noises your children make". It took a bad turn. She then threatened to have my dog taken away. He is a seizure alert dog trained by the academy near here and I have his actions directly on tape.
He simply did three short barks, kind of like "stop it," then laid down. Not a threat at all. I told her she could try, but also maybe work on her kids not sounding like they are in a Saw film. She left more angry than when she arrived. I went ahead and made a call to the local dog trainer to let them know in case this lady makes a false claim against my dog.
Thank God for ring cameras set up everywhere so my husband can monitor my seizures, because I can validate my dog’s whereabouts at any time.
15. The Mysterious Mercedes Man
I lived in an area that was not the best, but not the worst either. Pretty quickly after moving in, I noticed that my neighbor was a bit sketchy. He always got picked up and dropped off in an expensive blacked-out Mercedes. I also once saw a stranger handing him a roll of $20s about two inches thick. I just assumed he was dealing, but if he stayed out of my way, I didn't care.
I installed a camera doorbell outside my door and started to notice a lot of extra weird activity. I would get flooded with notifications several times an hour and throughout the night. It seemed like there was that one guy who lived there permanently, plus several additional men in their 30s/40s staying there with him at a time. Then they would disappear, and new guys would take their place.
They all seemed to have keys and never arrived or left at the same time as each other. They never seemed to speak any English or understand me and tried very hard not to make eye contact with me. Also, when a new guy would “move in”, I would never see them move in any boxes or belongings. He would just show up on his own with a key and then disappear weeks later.
I also never heard any noise coming from their place either—no talking, TV, music—nothing. That always creeped me out because the walls were thin, and I could always hear every other neighbor, but this flat was always completely SILENT. Then, one day they all disappeared, including the permanent guy. I never saw any furniture or boxes being moved out.
About a month later, the authorities came to my door looking for one guy in particular. I recognized him as one of the many temp guys. They wouldn't say why they were looking for him.
16. Something Had To Change
I had a landlord who lived next door to me. He would accost me outside and prattle on and on for as long as you'd let him. He would call me at work and do the same thing, come into my backyard unannounced, make inappropriate comments about all the neighbors, and generally act crazy. He was also obsessed with coin collecting. He always wore the same jeans and grey Member's Only jacket.
He even tried to cheat me out of my deposit when I moved out, so I had to take him to small claims court.
17. We Tried To Shut Her Out
My roommates and I used to live in a tenement before we moved to a different area. Our flat was on the ground floor, and the tenement had a small community garden that was right in front of our living room. We couldn’t eat lunch or even watch TV without seeing one of our old neighbors watching us from the corner of our eyes.
They wouldn’t even pretend that they weren’t watching us. It was really creepy. At the end of our second week there, we agreed we would always keep the blinds down. We never lifted them again until we left.
18."Am I The Drama?"
This happened on a week-long cruise. The first two mornings, our neighbors on both sides were ridiculously loud. They were basically screaming in Spanish and constantly waking us up. We didn't go to bed until 4 am, so they cut into your sleep. On the third night, at around 11 pm we went to our room, blasted the TV, and left it like that all night.
You could hear it outside our door, and it was very loud like they were. The next morning, what do you know—the neighbors realized that other people could hear them and they were quiet for the rest of the cruise.
19. He Was Going Postal
I lived in the country. My neighbor, who was old, was about a three-minute drive down the road from me. He used to have a mailbox next to mine, would go through my mail, then bring it to my door. He would take my magazines and then put them back a day or two later. I got a locking mailbox. Then, suddenly, one day, it fell over, and he came over in a panic.
He told me that a locking mailbox was too heavy and I had to use a regular box. I called the sheriff on him, and a few days later, he got a new mailbox installed at his house. He would also go through my recycling and then judge me based on the number of booze bottles he found. The funny thing was, I barely drank. So, I would have a month or two worth of bottles dumped out at a time.
Therefore, he thought I was going on an occasional bender. Finally, one day he came over to tell me to clean my gutters. I had enough. I told him to get out of my face and never come over uninvited again. He drove up a few days later and asked, "So when is that invite coming? I thought my wife and I were supposed to be expecting an invite soon". I told him, "Never, get out of here. You creep me out".
20. School Daze
Many years ago, we had neighbors who broke into our house when we were asleep and took a lot of valuables. They were a weird bunch. We lived across from a school, and one day, the wife came running out towards the school. She got chased out of her house by her son, who dragged her back inside by the hair. Six officers jumped over our fence to deal with whatever the neighbors had done.
After that, my little sister was scared to be home alone for the first time ever. It took her a long time to recover.
21. He Was Nacho Average Neighbor
My old downstairs neighbor would blackout and watch racy videos on his massive TV—but that’s not the twisted part. He’d do it with the volume turned up. And he would have all the windows and doors open, so the whole apartment would have to hear and see it. He would also pass out in the walkways. Once, he went out to a club and came home an hour later in a cruiser with no shoes on.
He also accused me of sleeping with his girlfriend. On the plus side, he would get completely sloshed and bring home Mexican food and always give me some—so that was nice.
22. Unfair Warning
My neighbor accidentally fired a pistol and the round went through our sliding glass door and ended up in the pantry. We were alerted when 80% of the glass in our sliding glass door fell onto the floor. I'm 5'7" and I could walk through the sliding glass door without opening it. The round was found in a box of pancake mix about six inches over my head, so the odds of it hitting me had I been in the kitchen or walking around my house were very high.
23. Catch The Klepto
I moved a lot growing up so I've had a few. One of my neighbors in Florida was a known kleptomaniac, but he would take the most random items around the neighborhood. When someone moved out of a house, he would dig up the plants from the yard and sell them online. We would just wake up one morning and all of the plants would be gone with the trail of dirt leading to his house.
When his house foreclosed, he took all of the doors off their hinges before moving out. He also took another neighbor's bicycle when they left their garage door open. The owner knew it was him, so he just walked over to his house and took it back without calling the authorities. We also later found out that he was going through a nasty divorce from his wife... who was once his therapist.
24. Make Yourself At Home
I used to have this obnoxious neighbor who invited herself over all the time. If we had multiple cars in the driveway, she assumed we must have had company over, which meant free food for her. She would peek over the fence, see that we were grilling, then would come over to find out what was up. My dad had a semi-trusting relationship with her and he let her know where we kept a spare key should there be an emergency. BIG mistake.
We walked in a couple of times after being gone and found notes from her on the counter. That meant she had used the spare key, gone into our house while we weren't there, and probably snooped around. My dad told her she was not allowed to come in when we weren't there and she apologized...but then, the next day, there were brownies on the counter with a note that said "Sorry".
She clearly disregarded what he said to bring us apology brownies! But the last straw was the worst of all. My dad had left the house one day and I was taking a shower. When I stepped out in just a towel and ran to the laundry room, there was a random woman sitting on the couch.
After freaking out, I learned that she was a Jehovah's Witness and was let in by my neighbor who apparently was snooping around while I was in the shower. She just left the lady alone in my house. My dad came home and changed all the locks that day and told her not to come over ever again. We also ignored her any time she knocked after that.
She hated us after that and she clearly thought all of her actions were completely normal.
25. Strange Homebodies
When I was about ten years old, this family moved into my old neighborhood. They were strange right from the start. Nobody ever saw their faces except for brief glances in passing. If the kids were outside and you happened to pass by, they would run back in and lock the doors. There was never any sign of life coming from the house aside from the occasional flick of a curtain.
My friends and I tried trick-or-treating there, and they opened the letterbox that was on the door to stare out at us. They didn’t go to any of the local schools, and you never saw them get any deliveries or go out to get groceries. Despite moving out of that neighborhood when I turned 12, I sometimes continued to wonder exactly what was going on over there.
26. These Neighbors Stunk
I lived in an apartment complex of 40 units, and one set of neighbors—a family—was just off. One day, I bought a bunch of starter packets to grow some herbs on my balcony. I was out there watering, and the mother came outside and shouted into the empty parking lot how disgusting tattoos were—I had a half sleeve on my right arm.
Not wanting an issue, I went back inside, confused, and texted my husband. I heard her go back inside, so I went out to finish watering my plants, and she came out again, this time shouting that something smelled bad and asked what I was doing because she could smell it. I politely told her I didn’t smell anything and went back inside.
On another occasion, my husband and I rearranged our balcony furniture so we could eat outside. The daughter came out and yelled, “I DON’T LIKE WHAT YOU’VE DONE THERE. CHANGE IT BACK”! Later that evening, the authorities showed up at our apartment. My husband and I had just been grocery shopping, so we had been out. The officer—laughing under his breath—started by apologizing.
He said, “I’m sorry to bother you guys. We got a call about someone harassing some of your neighbors”. He told us they called because we copy them, and sometimes my husband gets into my car. The officer told us we should contact the building manager and let them know if they bother us like this again, so we did. The building manager told us that these neighbors target someone new every month.
27. Something Smelled Fishy
We had a neighbor named Sibbald. He straight up smelled like tuna all the time. He would come to knock on our door to ask for random things—a rubber band, an apple slicer, a doorstop—in his robe. He would do this around once a week. My bedroom door faced his kitchen, and sometimes I would look over and see him lying on the floor. It was bizarre.
28. No Breathing Room
I have a horrible neighbor who loves calling the authorities any chance he gets. If we left our car doors open too long, or if we get too close to his yard or anyone else's yards, he would complain. He's calmed down a bit over the years, but it used to get heated between him and this family that lived next to him for a while. The worst part is that they were just as bad.
They beat their dogs, left them locked up in their backyard, and never fed them. They also screamed at each other, often out in the open, and one time, some of their relatives came over and they pulled guns on each other. I think they may have even tried to burn their house down because they couldn't get it to sell. Needless to say, nothing happened because he called 9-1-1 within minutes.
29. Thou Shalt Not Covet...
Years ago, my wife, kids, and I rented a townhouse. We had been there for four years, and we were on a month-by-month lease. The owner told us that she would not be extending the lease because she was selling the unit. No big deal, but the lease ended in July and we were told this in May. We scrambled but were eventually able to find a great house in an excellent neighborhood to buy.
It was during the housing crisis so we got a huge deal, too. We paid about $100K less than the neighbors. Anyway, at the townhouse, there were a few neighbors who would ogle my wife. I don't blame them, but they were all married except for one guy named Brian. Brian was divorced a few times and had kids in their 20s that lived with him.
He would constantly run outside if he saw my wife out there. He would mention to her that he saw her going to the store or to the mailbox or whatever. But then it started getting creepy. We had a community pool and when he saw her going there with our kids, he'd follow so he could hang out with her while she was in her bikini.
It creeped her out so much that she would wrap a towel around herself until she confirmed he wasn't at the pool. I had to have words with him more than once about this. Moving day came and we hadn't told any of the neighbors we were moving because why would we? Brian came over as we were loading the truck and asked my wife: "Which one of you is moving out?"
I stopped and told him, deadpan as could be: "Both of us". He was hoping it was a divorce situation so he could try to take my place. But wait, there's more...I came home from a work trip one day and my wife told me that Brian was driving past our house. I don't know how he did it, but he found out where we live. We still live in the same city, so I think he either saw my wife and followed her home one day or just drove around until he found us.
We live in a cul-de-sac. There was no reason for him to be driving there. One day, my wife took my car because I had to take hers in for maintenance. The doorbell rang and it was none other than Brian. He was obviously stunned to see me answer the door and he started to stammer some nonsense about why he was there. I told him, in no uncertain terms, that if I ever saw him near my home or my wife ever again that it would be the last thing he did on this Earth.
I made him acknowledge that he understood me and he scurried to his car and left as fast as he could. It's been a few years and neither of us has seen Brian. Every now and then I'll see a car I don't recognize on our cul-de-sac and I always look at the driver...just in case.
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30. Keep Your Hands To Yourself
My next-door neighbor came over to borrow a ladder when my husband wasn't home. He gave off a really weird vibe—he "steadied" me from behind when I was taking the ladder down from the wall hook. At the time, I just told myself I was being overly sensitive, but I should have paid attention to the red flags right then and there.
Later that week, my husband and I ran into him and his wife in a store. He greeted me with a kiss on the cheek...It was weird, and my husband thought so too, but we still didn't look into it too much. We shrugged it off and assumed he was just being overly friendly. Then, a few weeks after that incident, we were visited by a government agency that asked us a couple of questions about him.
Apparently, he needed a security clearance where he worked. There wasn't a lot to report as he seemed okay. But one early Saturday morning, he knocked on our door while my husband was at work. I had all four of my kids there. I don't even remember why he came over, but at one point, he took an opportunity to rub himself against me in front of my kids.
I kicked him out, then I immediately called my husband and his wife. She called me back, begging me to retract it, but I assured her that he really did what he did. Somehow, it got back to his supervisor and his clearance was put in jeopardy. They ended up divorced.
31. He Was Off-Center
My back neighbor's kid got high a few years ago—and things quickly spiraled out of control. He tied up his parents in the living room, got a knife, stripped down, and repeatedly yelled, "I will find my center"! When the authorities were attempting to invade his house to free the parents, he let them go. They ran out of the house with him following.
It took several officers and paramedics to take him down with tasers. I don't walk down his street anymore.
32. He Was A Vlasic Creep
I had a neighbor who lived next door, while his wife and family lived 20 minutes away. He kept the apartment so that he wouldn’t have to commute and had lived there for ten years prior to me moving in. His wife would drop by and stay with him for a few days, about once a year. Maybe once a month, he would go back to her place on the weekend.
He would come up the stairs in the building at all hours of the night dragging stuff. You would hear, “klunk, klunk, klunk” up the steps. He accused other people of taking his mail and accused me of messing with his cable. He had a plastic runner that went from his front door to his bed and milk crate furniture. One night, he went on a rant about how it makes him sick when he goes to the grocery store and sees all the food there.
He started yelling while telling me this and said he only ate pickles. He told me his wife was a nurse, but she was creepy too. He installed deadbolts on his door without asking the landlord, would get weird about his tool bag as he walked up the steps, and put cardboard on his utility van window. Sometimes he would just swing his door open at night and stand in the hall for a good three minutes before shutting his door again.
Thank goodness, he eventually retired and moved back in with his wife.
33. Sunday Psychos
I had some neighbors who I never really knew outside of being woken up by them at 6.30 AM every Sunday morning. That’s when the minibus that picked them up for church would arrive. Everyone on it would sing hymns on the side of the road until the neighbors came out to get on the bus and drive away. They were eventually evicted for not paying rent, and a cat was found in their freezer.
34. These Walls Are Too Thin
While living in Los Angeles, I was staying in a nice area called the Miracle Mile. Most of the residents there are fairly young. I stayed in an apartment complex on the second floor and I had a neighbor under me. My girlfriend at the time lived in Oregon. She came to visit for the first time and we had a lot of fun in the apartment. One day, while walking out, we heard someone downstairs leaving as well.
We made our way to the staircase and once we got down to the bottom floor, my neighbor who lived directly under me said hi. Mind you, this was my first time seeing her after living there for seven months. My neighbor said, “Hey, I’m also from Oregon”. My girlfriend and I exchanged looks, puzzled as to how my neighbor knew where my girlfriend was from.
She then asked us how our dinner date went the night before at Jones'...At that point, we were dumbfounded and assumed she must have been hiding in our apartment. After that interaction, she would randomly come up to my apartment and ask random questions about my girlfriend. Then, toward the end of my lease, I would hear her screaming for absolutely no reason.
I would also see her out in the neighborhood with messy wild hair and smeared lipstick on her face and teeth. She's the weirdest neighbor I’ve ever had.
35. Noise Pollution
The old lady who lived across from us decided to become an opera singer. She would "sing" to her plants almost daily, from 7 am to noon and from 6 pm to 3 am. And I'm talking full-blown "OooOOOoooaaaaaaoooOOO" practically all day every day. It made things like sleeping hard and she caused my partner so much stress it triggered her depression. She got the authorities called on her twice.
The first time, she sang to the officer's face and closed the door. They had to break in and take her away, but she returned the next day. The second time, a senior officer cursed at her while the younger guy tried to hold his laughter. I bonded with one of my neighbors over our shared hatred toward this loud witch...I think he lived above her, which is probably worse.
36. Mormon Hormones
Growing up, there was a big Mormon family across the street. At first, they just kept trying to convert us, but as I got older, I noticed the men paying me more attention, especially since puberty hit me like a truck. At barely 12 years old, I could easily pass for a sixteen-year-old with a chest and ample behind. Every time I saw one of the men, they had some kind of comment, mostly about my chest.
The sons who were at least four or five years older than me often asked if I stuffed my bra and they would ask to feel them, as to prove I didn't. Of course, I never gave them an answer and I would just run home. Luckily, we moved right before I turned eighteen because I've heard horror stories about that religion.
37. I Was Spinning My Wheels
I had a neighbor who called the authorities on me multiple times because my sprinklers got the wheels wet on his van. It was a 20-year-old Chevy Astro van that he would park right on the edge of his driveway. I asked him to park on the other side of his driveway if it bothered him, but that was not an option he would consider.
I spent a couple of weekends meticulously testing and adjusting the sprinklers so they would not go onto any of his concrete, which went all the way to the property line. I was always as gracious and polite as I could be. My wife and I even delivered a gift basket to them as a peace offering. However, a few weeks later, the authorities showed up again.
It was windy, and the WIND had carried some water onto his rims. I later learned they didn't even own the house. The landlord must have had issues with them as well. Despite having lived there for a long time, the landlord refused to renew their lease. I would not have bent over backward like I did to appease him if I had known earlier.
38. A Family That Hates Together Stays Together
I had a neighbor who was a dealer and was obsessed with my mom. It was so bad that if he came out into his garden, we all went inside the house. He took my harmonica and got his saliva all in it. My dad even had to clock him a few times for being a creep. One day my dad and I were outside having fun, and the jerk made an inappropriate comment about my mom in front of me.
My dad went mad, and we ultimately moved out. Years later, we continued to hate the guy collectively.
39. Too Hot To Handle
One day, one of our quiet neighbors got into a fight with his girlfriend, who promptly left in an angry huff with her two kids. His reaction was seriously deranged. He then got rid of all their pets—which included cats and exotic birds— before setting his house on fire. The heat from the fire blew out our windows. He was taken into custody with bail set too high for most people to pay.
After it burned down, his house was leveled. The other neighbor purchased the property and made it into an expanded yard area with a pool.
40. It Was A Blood Bath
I once lived next door to a couple who never paid a single month's rent the entire time they lived there. They would scream and argue in the street all night, swearing and throwing empty bottles at each other until I had to call the authorities. This continued for about six or seven months until they finally got evicted. However, I will never forget when I was home alone on a Sunday evening and heard blood-curdling screaming coming from inside their house.
The husband had invited a female childhood friend and her six-year-old daughter to stay with them while the friend got clean. Apparently, the wife didn't vibe with that and sliced up her own arms. She then started hitting the friend in front of the six-year-old kid. I watched officers carry the child out of the house.
I had never seen such an insane amount of blood in my life.
41. Balcony Battles
I live in an apartment and the balcony is a decent size, but one side is a wall that goes about three-quarters up and the other side is my next-door neighbor's balcony. One day, a couple moved in—they seemed to be in their 20s and the girl was pregnant. They were total nightmares. She would sit on the balcony almost every day, talking loudly on her cell phone or chatting with a friend.
That became annoying very quickly, so my balcony door would often have to be closed. She would go inside in the evening, just in time for her boyfriend to sit on the balcony and light one up. Sometimes it was just him, but other times they would be having a party. It sucked for me because I would never be able to have the balcony door open and it'd get quite stuffy inside my apartment.
When the baby was born, their behavior continued until we had to threaten to call CPS on them. After that, the partying stopped. Later on, they had a second baby, and the first one would scream her brains out all the time, which we could hear through the walls. Thankfully, they moved out soon after.
42. Stuck In The Middle
We had two neighbors get in a feud. They loved tipping over each other's trashcans and scattering trash in the yard. Oh, and since we lived between them, the trash mostly wound up in our yard and they refused to pick it up. Even when our other neighbors recorded them scattering trash across our yard, they denied it. Oh but, here's the twisted cherry on top.
One of them also borrowed our snow shovel and tried to throw animal waste at the other's cars. They missed, hit my mom's, then said we did it to frame them since our shovel had the mess on it.
43. A True Arch-Nemesis
There’s a guy who lives down the street from me and he's a real piece of work. He also has serious problems with women. When I bought my house, I had a boyfriend living with me. He left me alone during that time, but when that relationship ended, I became this guy’s arch-nemesis apparently.
He would come onto my property and take my stuff. He has stolen a porch chair, my garden hose, a string for my trimmer, a doormat, whatever he could find. When I confronted him about it, he told me those items were my “husband’s” property, not mine (even though I’ve never been married). The authorities were called but as long as he gave the property back, nothing happened.
If I had a female friend over, he would shout prejudiced slurs. If I had a male friend over, he would shout derogatory names at me. Again, I'd call the authorities, but they'd only give warnings no arrests were ever made. And that's just the tip of the iceberg—even worse is he'd alternate between trying to hit my dog with his car and trying to come onto my property to take her.
He would also loiter all the time. He cut down my rose bushes, dug up all of the tulips in my flower bed, and brought his animals into my yard to do their business. I sternly told him he was not to trespass, but he responded that he had the permission of the deceased former owner of my home to come onto the property whenever he wanted.
I told him that I owned the property now and that he was no longer welcome. He then said that I had “no authority” and he asked to speak to my father (who lives 1,800 miles away). At that point, I had enough. This time when I called the authorities, I made sure they served him a written no-trespassing order. He violated it twice and was cited, but he never did pay any of his fines. Unfortunately for me, no further action was taken against him.
But things started to get better from that point on—a new magistrate was elected and I installed security cameras. Between having ample video evidence to easily charge and convict him and having a “changing of the guard” at the magistrate’s office (the previous magistrate was very difficult to deal with, even for the authorities), the whole situation has changed dramatically.
While the problems with this guy aren’t completely nonexistent, the frequency has really decreased.
44. This Guy Was Very Sketchy
I lived in an apartment with a pretty weird guy upstairs. One time he slid a note under my door saying he was going to off me, my roommate, and my dog. Another time he had six large fries from McDonald’s, tripped and dropped them in our parking lot. He just sat down and ate them off the ground like it was a plate. The best one, though, was when we saw him leave one day wearing a suit.
My roommate said to me, “Where do you think he’s going in a suit”? An hour later, he came back carrying a caricature of himself wearing the suit and proceeded to hang it in the hallway outside of his apartment. My roommate and I found that to be a never-ending source of joy.
45. How Rude!
When I was a kid, I lived in a subdivision of about 20 houses. Four houses away, a 30-year-old registered offender lived with his mother. When he was let out of prison, his mother had to go to each house and let the neighbors know what he was convicted of and that he was moving back in with her. When she came to our house, my mom answered.
The woman went on a rant about how rude it was that all the neighbors basically told her that if they saw her son anywhere close to their children, they would shoot him. After that, she called the authorities on everyone who walked passed their house, saying they were being threatened.
46. The Glass Menagerie
When I was in college, an old man lived across the street with his sister and mother. The man had a room to himself that had a big sliding glass door that looked out onto the street. At all hours of the night, you could see him watching outside, backlit by the flicker of the TV. It was unsettling at first, but the more it happened, the more it freaked us out.
Both my roommates and my significant other had mentioned him watching them at night and making them uncomfortable. One night, I looked through our peephole and made a nasty discovery. I could see he was in the buff standing in front of the window. It was late, and no one was on the street, so apart from thinking he was an old freak, I didn’t think much about it.
However, a few nights later, my roommates and SO came into the house really upset. They explained that the neighbor was pleasuring himself in front of the window. My roommate ran out, and the neighbor retreated into his house. After that, he tried to do damage control by speaking to me every chance he got. He was a gross pervert.
47. Listen Up—Go Away!
While I was a student, I rented a single room in a big apartment for a short period of time. My room had two doors, both with a frosted window. One was towards a hallway to the kitchen, and the other towards the entrance area. My doors were at the end of hallways, so there would be no reason for anyone to get close to them.
However, every so often through the frosted window, I could see the owner of the apartment, who was my landlady, or some of her male guests standing really close to the door, either listening or trying to peek in. It was really creepy.
48. This Land Is My Land
I had a neighbor that thought all the surrounding lands were his. His plot was pretty small, but he thought that if he mowed my lawn EVERY DAY, he would have ownership of it. He even drafted up some papers saying that the city was giving him ownership of my land, which my lawyer quickly pointed out was not only nonsense but also fraud. Oh, but he went even further than that.
He would do things like jump in my car and break the clutch so he could push it into the alley and have it towed. He and his wife called the city multiple times on me to get my own vehicles towed off my own property while pretending to be super nice to us...they are a prime example of how Iowan passive-aggressiveness can be extremely annoying.
Anyway, I called a tow company to pick my car up and bring it to a mechanic. My neighbors thought they were successful in getting it towed off the property so they started celebrating, but then my car showed up the next week and they were taken in by the authorities. Ha.
49. Community Hazard
One day, my entire street was closed down and we were told by the authorities that we couldn’t leave the block. The other neighbors from across the street called them in after they had found out that our next-door neighbor had a secret lab where they made illicit substances. If it blew up, it would have taken out the whole block.
The craziest part is that they seemed like a totally normal family—the father was a substitute teacher at my middle school, and he and his wife had a three-year-old toddler that would often play outside in their yard.
50. Window Watcher
I lived on the second floor of an apartment. My bed was near the window, and I would sleep with my window and curtain up so that I could feel the summer night breeze. All of a sudden, I had this weird feeling. I opened my eyes and saw my neighbor creepily staring at me from his kitchen in the dark. I slowly slid to the other side of my bed where my other window was, and the curtain was down. I never slept with my window open or had my curtains up again.
51. This Sugar Daddy Was A Real Sourpuss
I had a neighbor who’d been asked to leave his previous job to avoid a series of harassment cases against him. He was in his late 50s to mid-60s with a wife in her late 20s and three young children. He was constantly belittling her. He was also always trying to power move on us as well. He would let himself into our garden to remove trees that weren’t crossing the property line or come to harass my mom when she was alone.
He even suggested we put a gate between our gardens to make it easier for him to let himself in when our front gate was locked. He used to walk around the house on the side that overlooked ours, open the blinds, and walk around in the buff. We also saw him through the kitchen window fondling the au pair’s chest while she was washing dishes.
In the end, his wife divorced him and took the kids halfway across the country. I never breathed such a sigh of relief.
52. It Wasn’t Just The Breeze Blowing In
Once when I was in college, I took courses over the summer. I had an 8:00 AM class, so I would often go back to my apartment and take a nap afterward. I lived on the ground level and had this big window that would open up into the living room right above the couch. I loved taking naps in the sun and feeling the warm summer breeze blowing in—that is, until one morning.
I woke up to my neighbor’s face directly above mine. It was super creepy, and he couldn’t understand why I was mad.
53. That House Is Not A Home
I bought my first house last November. The neighborhood was a mix of nice, young families and some questionable people. Some yards were very nice, while others looked like they hadn't been mowed in years. The neighborhood sat on the edge of a very nice suburb of the city. Our backyard was beautiful—it had a large shed, privacy trees on both sides, and a seven-foot privacy fence in the back.
At the beginning of summer, my girlfriend and I had put up those backyard lights that went from the tall trees across the backyard and connected to the shed. I also installed back deck speakers so we could enjoy music when we had friends and family over. We had met no neighbors at that point. One day, I looked outside and my jaw DROPPED.
I noticed that one row of the hanging lights was cut. We also noticed that someone had put wood beams on top of my fence posts so we couldn't tie our light strings up there. I was in the house while my girlfriend was in the shed, and all of a sudden she came running in. The neighbor was screaming at her over the fence.
We didn't know who he was screaming at—he was just screaming, saying things like "You think I'm afraid of you?" and " I will put you 10 feet in the sky". My girlfriend came to get me, and at that point, I'd already had bad day. Mind you, we had NEVER seen this person before, NOR could we see him over the fence. I came out of the house and I started screaming back: "HEY, IS THERE A PROBLEM?" over and over with a VERY stern voice. No response.
I then decided to go over there to be a good neighbor and see if everything was okay. Well, behind the door, I heard him say, "If I have to open this door, I will end you". I shrugged and left him alone. Then, 15 minutes later, he was back at it again. This time, he sounded tipsy, and he began threatening us again, saying: "I will end your life, I am not scared".
I don't know what triggered him to act that way—Was he messed up in the head? Bored? Did he have a problem with the previous owners? Anyway, I decided to call the authorities and they said they would send someone over. This was on a Monday evening at about 11 pm. He was still yelling as we waited for the officers to arrive. He then got very personal and called all of us out.
"You, your wife, your dog, and daughter...I am going to end you all". At that point, I realized things were getting real. So I called 9-1-1 again and told them they needed to send someone over ASAP. When the officers finally arrived, they couldn't really do anything even after I told them what he had been doing. As they went over to his place, I watched intently.
I saw them on the second floor of their house as the officers were knocking on their door below. Suddenly, they shut the lights off in the house. The officers got more aggressive with their knocking, so much so that you could hear it echo throughout the neighborhood. Finally, they got in and they were there for about 15 minutes. Soon after, one of the officers returned to my house.
He proceeded to tell us that they are known addicts in the area and that they had been in and out of that house HUNDREDS of times over the past year. He also said that they had no wall on the back of their house—there was just a tarp placed over an area where the roof was caving in, and there were weeds growing everywhere. It was uninhabitable.
I asked him how they could possibly live there and afford it without being kicked out. The officer guessed that the house must have been owned by that family for generations. Ever since we called the authorities on them, they haven't given us any problems, but it was disappointing to be told that we'd have to watch ourselves in our own backyard because of these unpredictable psychos.
54. A Total Catastrophe
I grew up in a trailer, so our "front yard" was the neighbor's "backyard". This was also back in the days of clay litter, so we had to dump all the litter in the trash once in a while, then rinse the litter boxes out and let them dry before refilling them with fresh litter. Not my favorite chore by any means, but I had to do it.
My neighbor came out one time, yelling that I couldn't do that. I gave him sass back, saying that I had just as much right to be there as she did. She yelled that I was a horrible kid and that she was going to tell my parents that I was being rude to her. I told her to go right ahead—it's not like I wanted to be cleaning the stupid litter box anyway.
I told my parents about the interaction afterward and the neighbor never said anything to them. But then, a couple of weeks later, we made a shocking discovery—my cat was deceased. I was devastated, and my parents wanted to get to the bottom of it. They found out from their friends who worked at the local grocery store our neighbor had recently bought rat toxins.
Again, this was a trailer park. If she had had rats, then we would have also had rats. There was not proof enough to take her to court, though.
55. Monster Roaches
We had a hoarder next door. The bugs she brought along with her were bad enough, but she was old and forgetful, and on more than one occasion, she put food on the stove and just left it. Smoke would billow from her apartment and I would have to call the fire department so they could race over there, kick in her door, and prevent a fire.
She also liked to hoard newspapers, among other things, so her apartment was basically a tinder box. On top of that, there was this creepiness that took over her whenever her family came over to remove everything from her house. She would just stand there, staring at the dumpster. Much of the stuff they would carry to the dumpster I would recognize as something I had thrown out, sometimes even years earlier.
When we asked her to let the exterminators into her apartment, she would rude and defensive. It would be one thing if she had been a sweet old lady with a problem that she acknowledged and apologized for. But she was downright mean if you asked her to open her apartment up and let pest control keep the monster roaches at bay.
56. Dirty Photographer
When I was in my 20s, I had a creepy neighbor who lived in the apartment next to me. He always acted very weirdly around me. I heard disturbing things about him from people who knew him so I tried to avoid contact, but he would not leave me in peace. He once asked me to turn my wireless LAN off because it gave him headaches.
He also once offered to take photos of me in my lingerie because, according to him, he is "such a good photographer". He didn't take no for an answer and really tried to convince me. It got so bad that I didn't open my door unless I knew he wasn't there. I had to tell my friends to make sure to talk to me on the doorbell system before coming up, otherwise, I would not open my door. It was scary.
57. Into The Deep End
I'm an introvert, I love my privacy, and I hate small talk. A new house was built one lot over from us and every time we are outside, our new elderly neighbor is trying to get our attention and talk. We have a new puppy so we go out at least every hour. The first day, she stumbled through piles of dirt and clay through the lot between us because we didn’t make eye contact.
She came over to tell us how she just loves our pool and wishes she had one but can’t because her lot isn’t big enough. Okay, she’s old and wants company. But she took it to a new level. She also sits on her porch with her chair turned towards us and watches us, and she’s now trying to manipulate us to invite her over to swim. She keeps making comments.
Yesterday she and her granddaughter walked through the empty lot to stand at my fence and stare at our stuff for an uncomfortable amount of time. We were inside, thank God. I feel like I can’t go outside because my anxiety is off the charts because of this. We are getting privacy bushes put in but landscapers are about a good month out.
I don’t want to be rude, but clearly, she doesn't understand boundaries.
58. Disturbing The Peace
So I just moved into an apartment alone and I was so happy. I was finally getting away from my family after living with them for the past year. But all of that went to heck the moment I moved in. I can constantly hear my upstairs neighbors running, slamming doors, jumping off things, moving furniture, and screaming constantly from 5 am to midnight every day.
They never go outside, they literally never leave the apartment. I finally worked up the courage to try and go talk to them. When I did, a man barely peeked his head out from the door and I introduced myself and asked if I had been being loud. I then asked if they could be more conscious because no one lived below them before but now someone was living under them.
He agreed and said he would try to fix it. Well, another week goes by and no change, if anything it has gotten worse. Being woken up at 5 am and listening to them be inconsiderate all day long, constant sporadic jumping, dropping heavy objects, screaming, running. They were interrupting my zoom meetings to the point that coworkers found it difficult to hear me.
I finally got my broom and banged on the ceiling a few times around 10 pm because I could no longer take it. I can’t even drown them out with a loud television. And can’t tell you how many hours of sleep I’ve lost. The next thing I know, the situation escalated. They’re banging on my door telling me to open up. This time it’s a woman. I start talking to her.
She says, “Me and my boyfriend and three kids live upstairs”. And I said, “Ok but I’m going to be honest, I specifically looked at apartment complexes that had a max occupancy of two people in a one-bedroom in the lease/addendums so that there wouldn’t be an obscene amount of noise”. This is when her large six-foot boyfriend comes around the corner.
I didn’t know he was there. He gets in my face and starts yelling at me, telling me that he'd screw me if I go to management and that their lease is none of my business. It was so scary. I was thankful I had my friend in the apartment with me because as soon as the woman saw my friend get up and come to the door and saw I had someone else in there with me, she told her boyfriend to back off.
Then she told me “I don’t have a problem with you”. I wanted to say, good, you shouldn’t because I’m not disturbing you. But then she said there was nothing she can do about her children as they are kids and she had to throw in that she’s a Navy veteran and I’m like girl...I don’t care what you are...I pay rent like you do too. Then I made a huge discovery.
As it turns out, I had been recording the noise from earlier (to take to management/have documentation) and had forgotten to turn off my voice memos before I answered the door. Our entire conversation, her stating her name and unit #, how many people were living in the apartment, how old two of the three kids were, and including her boyfriend harassing me was all recorded.
I finally wrote into management yesterday telling them about how they’re not following the lease and that it’s disturbing me in my home and I don’t feel safe having her aggressive boyfriend living above me. I can only imagine what would’ve happened if she didn’t calm him down. So happy I have the voice recording as proof as well as a witness.
My anxiety is spiking to the point that I’m already mentally drained and now I’m feeling awful and super anxious for reporting them for violating the lease. I can’t believe I’ve only been living here three weeks and am having to deal with this. I don’t know if I have adequate grounds to move to a new unit. I am losing my mind in here, I haven’t had a single moment to relax and I do not feel safe.
59. Don’t Try Me
I live in a town center above a shop with two lovely neighbors. I'm lucky enough to have off-street parking. Over the past few months, someone who lives in a neighboring block of flats has taken it upon himself to park in our spaces. Basically, he moved into a rental property knowing it had no parking and recently dropped $12k on a flashy car.
Yes, we've told him he can't park there but as three single women (46, 60, and 83 respectively) he has used being a large male to try to intimidate my two older neighbors. He won't directly speak to me but does leave aggressive notes on my car. But I still had no idea what he was really planning. A couple of weeks ago, I had a call from the authorities.
They were requesting me to go to my local station for an interview pertaining to damage to his car. Off I trundle to the station, only to be confronted with CCTV and photographic evidence. Turns out, he installed a camera pointing at our property without our knowledge. Sucks to be him, though, because his camera gives a full view into my bedroom and my neighbor’s bathroom—strike one for him.
It did show that I walked past his car with a wheelie bin, apparently scratching his car. They showed me photos of damage to his car. There was just one thing. I pointed out that these were on the opposite side to where I passed. No evidence of damage I supposedly did. I had photos of his undamaged car—strike two for him. In his statement, he said he had it in writing from the owner that he could park there, but couldn't produce the letter.
I had an email from the owner saying he had no permission—strike three for him. I went to the station with the expectation that I would end up with a conviction. I left the station with him having a formal warning for misuse of CCTV and giving a false statement. Couldn't have gone better for me and now he has to find somewhere else to park.
60. The Goob
When I was in college, I lived in a tiny apartment. This guy who had the most sensitive hearing on earth lived next door. We called him "The Goob" because he was shaped like an unshelled peanut. We HATED him. One night, my friend was over, and we were watching our favorite show on TV. We had the volume so low that we had to sit two feet from the TV just to hear it.
It wasn't even 8 PM, and the next thing we knew, there was a knock at the door. The Goob was asking us to turn down our television because he could hear it in his apartment. I couldn’t believe it. We invited him in to show him how low we had the volume turned down. He refused and continued to go on about how it was disturbing him.
My friend had enough and just went off on him. The Goob threatened to call the authorities if we didn't turn it down, and we both told him, "Fine. Call them", and slammed the door shut on him. Nothing happened. He didn't bother us anymore after that.
61. We All Had An Axe To Grind With This Neighbor
As a kid, we could hear the neighbor making pounding noises in the basement that sounded like a pickaxe hitting the concrete between 10 PM and 1 AM. The authorities were called numerous times with noise complaints, but nothing came out of it. We think he lived alone as we never saw any other people coming in or out of the house. Later, we found out the creepy story behind the noise.
It turned out the guy was digging into the basement floor in order to bury various deceased wild animals he had acquired in the woods after eating them. Strange.
62. Forced Restart
My boyfriend and I moved into a cute little apartment together in south Florida. Shortly after, an older gentleman moved in next door. He initially seemed like a nice enough guy, but kind of lonely. We invited him over for dinner once because we noticed he'd get take-out often, and we could tell he didn't know how to cook. Biggest mistake of our lives.
Well, apparently, he had bed bugs that hitched their way over and infested not only our apartment but multiple others in the complex. The worst part is the guy knew about them, yet he made no efforts to treat the issue or get rid of them. We also later found out that he was a heavy drinker and I once had to call an ambulance after he lacerated his arm by punching out the windows of other units in the complex.
I spent the next three years constantly having to pay for repairs to my home and car, and I ended up throwing almost everything away and starting over because of him.
63. Make It Make Sense
I had neighbors above and below. The ones above would get it on for like four hours and then vacuum for 30 minutes. The ones below would get into fights all the time, with the husband criticizing and verbally destroying his wife over her appearance and addiction issues...then they would get it on like monsters. But apparently, I was the problem because my footsteps were too loud??
64. I Pity The Fool
We bought a house in April and the neighbors across the street from us are in the process of moving out. They have a HUGE house, six-bedroom, five-bathroom, that was top of the line....25 years ago. It was listed for 600k about six weeks ago (they took forever to pack), has been pending three times, and is now at 500k, so I'm assuming an inspector is finding an issue.
Other houses in my neighborhood that are that size are selling. They asked us to help change lightbulbs and fix little things, which was perfectly fine. Or it was until their latest actions. They’ve now started sending "requests". Painting their frame of the screened patio, replacing faucets, and cleaning their house. We painted their screened-in patio because we thought (mistake) it was the last thing they'd ask.
We honestly felt bad because the house is in need of some MAJOR TLC. It's got original carpet that has been cleaned and stretched so many times that it is desperately in need of being ripped out. The bathroom tubs are peeling, the house was freshly painted but was terribly done. When they put it up for sale, they left some huge furniture that they requested us to sell, and we could keep 10% of the profits.
They acted like this was a HUGE reward. It's a 20-year-old couch, mattresses, three dressers, and other outdated furniture that is worth nothing, and weighs a ton, and is upstairs. So obviously it didn't sell for anything, and is still sitting upstairs in their house. One person came for a dresser and it was too heavy for us to move, so we figure this is all custom-built and assembled in the room.
When they left, they "requested" us to do daily walk-throughs and send daily reports of their house, which is fine, but we stopped after a week because we have our own house that we are working on, work, and are not trying to spend weekends and time off at someone else’s house when we literally bought a house to spend time there.
We both get up at 4 am for work, get home around 4:30 pm, eat, and sometimes will literally nap the majority of the rest of the day. Yesterday was one of those days. I had no idea what was coming. Little did I know, these neighbors were back in town and had called each of us several times after 7 pm—once we get off work we don't look at phones.
They had then texted us multiple times. We gave polite replies but said we weren't able to help them. We wind down for the day around 7 pm because we get up at 4 am. So then they knocked on our door at 8 pm, 9 pm, 10 pm, and 11 pm according to our ring camera. If you had a problem, you wouldn't be going to just my house, you’d be asking other people.
I really want to just tell these people that we cannot help them anymore and this is not my problem. This doesn't go into detail about everything we have done for them, but it quickly became too much. Every time we leave their house after doing things there, we both feel so bad because it needs so much work. It’s so dirty, and with three people walking away from it, there has got to be some major issue as I notice it goes back on the market after an inspector is there.
65. Do Unto Others…
Last month, my daughter had a seizure. I had my teenage sisters staying over at the time so my parents came to pick them up. My dad’s car blocked over a bit of my neighbor’s driveway as he came to collect the girls. A few minutes later, my neighbor knocked on the door, demanding the car be moved. It was nearly midnight and the ambulance was blocking our driveway.
My dad immediately went out and moved the car and apologized. He explained they didn’t mean to block her in. Quite a few times since that night, the neighbor has now started to park over our drive and block us in. It’s got to the point where me and my partner park one of our cars on the drive and one blocks the drive, even though our drive can fit both cars on it.
When she’s blocked us in we’ve knocked on the door to ask her to move but she doesn’t answer the door. We can hear her in the house but she doesn’t answer. It’s driving us crazy and we’ve now got to the stage where we’re getting a lawyer’s advice.
66. Craziness In Cougar Town
When my husband and I were first married, we lived in an apartment complex with a very strange lady as our next-door neighbor. She was in her 40s but consistently hung around with a bunch of college-age guys who also lived in the complex. It gave off a weird vibe. And they were oddly devoted to her. She was constantly carrying around a red Solo cup of something.
She said it was just Diet Coke, but she didn't ever put it down, and if she did, she would beg somebody to watch it. Then, when she picked it up again, she would be very nervous that somebody had touched it and/or put something in it. One day, she told us that she slept during the day, and while she was asleep, the apartment manager would slip her a mickey so that her ex could come into her apartment and take stuff.
She also accused the apartment manager of getting her trashed in order to take the teeth out of her mouth. Then, she asked us if she could borrow our cat because her apartment had rats. As far as we knew, she didn't have a job, but every night she would drive into the city—about 30–45 minutes away—to spend the night partying while leaving her teenage daughter home alone.
67. Look What The Cat Dragged In
At one point, I lived next to a crazy cat man. He had a TON of cats. We would have at least 20 polydactyl cats lying on our porch at night. We would always find deceased kittens/cats in our driveway, under or by our porch, and in our backyard. He had two basement windows knocked out and had old car hoods put over them, which left enough room for the cats to go in and out freely from his house.
He also burned all of his trash in his backyard. One day we had the authorities banging on our door because someone had called and said our car was on fire. It wasn't. He was just burning trash in a barrel so close to our car that it looked like it was on fire. He got a lot of complaints, but he didn’t care. Luckily, we only lived next to him for about a year.
68. Buzz Off!
My next-door neighbor is a middle-aged woman who lives with her elderly mom. Not because her mom needs to be taken care of—I believe it’s the other way around. She doesn’t work and is basically a little girl in a 50-year-old body. I work from home, and this woman is home all day, doing who knows what. Whenever I go outside, she magically appears and gives me her “expert” advice on whatever I’m doing.
If I engage in a conversation with her (just to be nice), it’ll eat up 20 to 30 minutes of my time. It's one of those inescapable conversations. And if I do anything, and I mean ANYTHING, like bite my fingernail out of nervousness because I don’t know when I’ll be able to exit this conversation, she’ll go: “STOP! Wait, I got a cream for that!”
Or if I shoo away a fly, she’ll go: “WAIT! I got the BEST bug spray! Top of the line!” Everything she has is “top of the line” or “the most expensive, highest quality out there," and she's got something for everything! I literally can't MOVE around her, because she's got something for everything I'm doing! One time she caught me painting a statue in my garden.
She came over with boxes and boxes of paint. And once she starts up with a new topic, tack on another 20 minutes of time And that's just my experience with her while I'm outside. Behind closed doors, it’s a total nightmare. Before I knew any of this about her, I made the mistake of inviting her into my house for a cup of coffee. No wait, let me correct that.
She actually saw me drinking coffee on my front porch one day and asked if she could have one. While I found that a bit intrusive, I felt rude saying no, so I made her one. And while I was making the coffee in my kitchen, she continued talking to me from my front porch, and I couldn't really hear what she was saying. I felt rude, so I invited her into the foyer rather than have her stand outside.
MISTAKE. Now she comes over twice, sometimes three times a week for coffee! And whenever she sees me outside, she asks, "can I have a coffee?" And when she rings my doorbell and I answer the door to greet her, she's already stepping into my house, like a vampire that I can't stop from coming inside because I've already made the mistake of inviting her in once!
And each time she comes over, I face new horrors. She's getting more and more comfortable in my house, sitting on my couch (She reeks of smoke. I don't smoke, and prefer to have my house not smelling like that). And now she's asking to borrow things, browsing the shelves in my living room, and then exclaiming, "Oh! My mom would love to read this! You're not reading it right now, right? I'll bring it back, you know where I live anyway”.
And then she helps herself to an item on the shelf. I don't like being mean to people, but I feel like the only way to stop her is to be That Person. I'm a single, 30-year-old woman, living alone. I think I'm way too nice, to the point where I let things go beyond what I'm comfortable with. This was my mistake, I know. But how do I undo all of this in the nicest way possible?
If I had it my way, I would have it so that she never comes back into my house ever again. She is my neighbor, not my friend. She is not my type of person. We have nothing in common. I just want to be left alone.
69. Disturbance In Suburbia
My husband and I moved into our first home last summer. Coming from the city, we found our slice of “suburban heaven," as the property offered a beautiful yard with well water-irrigated lush grass. We also chose it for what we perceived as privacy, at least compared to where we had lived. It didn’t take long for us to discover we had made a grave error.
When we first met our neighbor closest in proximity to us, she seemed very nice and thoughtful and we thought how lucky we were to have such a lovely neighbor. This changed quickly, as she became overbearing to the point where I couldn’t be in my backyard without fearing she’d yell over to me and to come over. She would interrupt me no matter what I was doing.
She has a dog of her own, and she’s single, middle-aged, no kids, divorced, and she let us know early on that our backyard was like her dog park before we moved in, as the old man who lived here previously passed and the lot was vacant for a year or so. She has her own fenced-in backyard, but it is the opposite of our green grass with rocks and planters and is quite unkept.
For a few months, we let her over frequently, then we began to avoid her. Other strange things happened with her that are beside the point of this thread, but anyways what really started to irk me, especially because I work from home all the time, is that she would be in our side yard property all the time. She tied her dog to our fence, on our lawn, and she used it as a potty spot multiple times a day.
One morning, I even woke up to her loudly on the phone BELOW my bedroom window, looking into our first-floor window. It was getting obnoxious. Our side yards have no barrier, aside from the fact that ours has lush green grass and hers has rock and pine needles. Not once did she have a conversation with us about this. And then it took another turn.
She started to call me in the middle of the workday as I was in meetings and trying to focus, to ask if her dog could come into our backyard. The final straw was when she left a voicemail, asking for permission to let herself into our backyard whenever she pleased, since my two dogs “were always outside”. I felt like that was asking too much after she’d been overbearing for the past four months of living there.
Granted, I think she had good intentions in her efforts to be nice to us, but my introverted husband and I found her overbearing and annoying, especially in the way she used our property as if we didn’t exist or as if she was entitled to it. So, I went outside to talk to her after I listened to the voicemail. It took a lot of working up to and courage because I truly hate confrontation.
I politely and timidly let her know that we don’t feel comfortable with her using our backyard whenever she pleases. She didn’t take that well at all. To begin with, she rolled her eyes and talked back. I went on further to ask that she stop using our side yard because we like our privacy. Then she really lost it on me. She said, “Well so much for having a good neighborly relationship” and stormed off.
I was taken aback because if someone let me know I was overstepping someone’s comfort and property zone, I would say “so sorry, I had no idea”. But of course not. Later she came to our door to pick something up we were borrowing, and she started saying some nasty things, like how I hadn’t tried to be nice (I had, but in my own way), and that my husband and I should get a fence if we were so concerned.
Needless to say, she’s a grown woman and the property line is obvious, but alright. Months have passed, and we hadn’t talked to her much, and I observed that now she would stand on her property with the dog leashed, but the dog is on our property so it can go potty. She was making an effort...? Well, that didn’t last long. A couple of weeks ago she got a new puppy.
She has returned to using our yard as she had done before. She is literally training her new puppy to “Go poo poo! Go poo poo” on our lawn. Really!?!? So my husband wasn’t too upset at first…until he found five piles of poop sitting in our grass. That was it for him. I’ve been annoyed about it for a while because I work from home and see/hear her doing it, and it is also the principle for me at this point.
He went over to talk to her with the poop bagged up in his hand and let her know our property is not her dog’s potty spot. She made a few excuses and said she’d get a property surveyor, and my husband said we’d respect the results. He also asked her to respect us, left the poo on her porch, and walked away. She hasn’t apologized or taken any accountability.
When she makes excuses as to why she uses our property, she passively tries to make us sound like jerks. As mentioned, we will respect the results of a surveyor if she gets one, but I know for a fact that our entire side yard is not her property. I genuinely don’t think any of it is because of land markers and the deed I read, but whatever at this point.
She’s still using our lawn with her dogs after we talked to her twice. Now my husband and I are submitting a fence permit with the town so that we can hopefully resolve this by building a barrier. But I’m bummed it had to come to this. This has caused us a lot of frustration and it slightly feels like “suburbahell” now. So much for our oasis.
70. Smile For The Camera
We had next-door neighbors who had rowdy kids, and they never did anything too bad...until one of their parents passed. That's when they became totally unhinged. Over the next few years, they caused us a number of problems. They vandalized the side of our house with graffiti, left lines of nails on our driveway, threw random objects through our windows, and launched water balloons filled with corn syrup and flour into our yard, just to name a few.
And it got even worse as time went on. The kids started selling illicit substances out of their house, and we had to deal with excessive noise as they threw large parties every weekend. They would sit on the front porch with their friends, screaming bad words at each other almost every weekday. We tried calling the authorities on them, and to our surprise, they were already aware of what the kids had been up to since they received calls from other people in the neighborhood.
Unfortunately, their mother covered for them. She'd somehow managed to gain the sympathy of the officers, and then she'd apologize to us privately after they left. All they could do was give them warnings—but that wasn't good enough for us. At one point, we finally decided to set up cameras around the entire perimeter of the house, and we specifically installed them at a time when the kids were outside.
We wanted them to see every camera go up. The moment they realized that they'd be caught on tape if they tried any of their nonsense again, the problems immediately stopped. It's been mostly peace and quiet (with a few exceptions) ever since.
71. The Fear In Her Eyes
When I was a child, I didn't realize my neighbor was an addict. One time, while my family was about to start eating dinner, a woman opened my front door and screamed into the house: "Please, I need to use your phone to call the authorities!" She was frantic and crying with make-up running down her face. Turns out, she was someone that my neighbor had hired to spend the night with him.
At one point during their interaction, he pulled out a pistol and threatened her in some way. Eventually, he went to get another drink and she seized that opportunity to run to my house. There were other times when I saw him doing pretty horrible things, but this one stands out as it was the first time I saw someone in fear for their life.
72. The Garden Of Eden
So. My cat didn't come home for dinner. Very strange. He's usually the one (we have two) demanding I get to opening the tins. So I look in the usual spots, is he stuck in a closet or the garage? Nothing. I eat dinner, thinking he'll be around meowing any minute. Well, no sign of Frank (the cat). He's mostly an indoor lazy guy who wanders a bit around outside.
Anyway, my neighbor previously (a month ago or so) had yelled at my wife about the cat "pooping" in his garden. Okay that's not cool, he has a litter box, we have a garden. I get that's a bit annoying. So anyway I go over to his place and knock on his door. Said I understand my cat has been bothering you. I gave him my business card, said if he ever bugs you again please call or text me.
I said I'll deal with whatever mess or whatever. Meanwhile, I'll try to improve the situation. I bought some dirt, catnip, made an outdoorsy litter area for my guy, showed it to him a few times. We made an effort to keep him inside more. But I'll be honest, eight years as an indoor/outdoor cat and he gets antsy and crafty about getting outside sometimes.
Anyhow, I'm wandering around the roads near my place hoping not to find a tire print over my cat. No sign. He doesn't come home so now it's worry time. I kind of know in the back of my mind what happened. I sense that the neighbor did something. So I'm wandering around outside and I approach his driveway, calling for Frank—and I hear him.
He's meowing for me. Okay I follow the sounds and yep, he's trapped in buddy's garage. So I tried the door, figured he could have wandered in and got stuck. Darn, he's gotten stuck in mine before. Door is locked. Knocked on buddy's door. Said I hear my cat stuck in your garage. I couldn’t believe his response. He says, verbatim, "Yep! Bye" and goes to close the door.
I knock again, bit louder. Now this guy is a boomer, probably 65 years old. And he says, "What?" and I said, “Man, you got my cat in there. Just let him out thanks”.
And he says "No". At this point I'm at the front door and as he's closing it I put my foot in there. I'm like bud, let him out. He says no again. I said should I break this window to get him out? He pulls out his phone and starts recording and says "You're threatening me!" and I'm like "Bro you took my cat let him out" and he says no again. Goes to close the door and I knocked hard as it closed and it popped open. Guess it didn't latch. It hit a breaking point.
He tells his wife to call 9-1-1. And she does. He slams the door with his shoulder and locks it. I hear them literally on emergency calling the authorities. I'm like, ok, he took my cat. He can't keep him, that's not a thing. So I dialed the non-emergency line and told my end—the neighbor threatened my cat before, now he has him captive. And she tells me a squad car will be there soon talk to him.
Like five seconds later, the first car pulls up. I give him my ID, tell him my cat is in there. He says how do I know. I said I can hear him. Well, does he have a cat? No I’m pretty sure he hates cats. I show him a picture and say he's in the garage here. Two more cars pull up, four more officers. I'm like wow, this is really something. First officer talking to buddy, watching the video.
But then two more! Five total, one guy is like in SWAT gear ready to take somebody down. They talk to him. Cat is meowing like crazy beside us in the garage. The SWAT guy is like "did you take his cat?" the other guy says "he says he did, says that’s this guy’s (me) cat in there...” “He poops on my property! Right there”! He points to a little dirt patch behind a bush.
I'm like, I'm sorry man I didn't tell my cat to come over here and find a good litter box. I'm working on it. It really devolved at this point. SWAT guy is like, we drove 90 mph up here because... Cat poop? Neighbor says "He was threatening me!" At that point I said I just asked how I should go about getting my cat out of the garage.
SWAT guy tells buddy he's called a break-and-enter to 9-1-1 because I was "sneaking around his garage" and the first cop is like "this guy took his cat". SWAT guy is like "why did you call a break-and-enter?" Neighbor says "I didn't" and the officer is like "should we go down to the shop and pull the tape”? Neighbor starts pulling a "do you know who I am? Don't talk down to me”.
The guy is like it's a serious offense to call emergency for a non-emergency. Like down to the station kind of deal. First officer is like "let the cat out now" and he finally does. Frank runs out and home. The officer is like this is stupidly unreasonable that you called 9-1-1 over cat poop. Guy finally apologizes. Shakes my hand and says sorry to me. I knew just what to do.
I say “do you still have my number? I'll literally come fix whatever he messes up while I try to get him trained up to stop using your garden there”. The officer says to me to do what I can to keep the cat indoors. I'm like “I do try, but my niece and five-year-old live with us and sometimes he's crafty". Anyway—now I'm not sure what is going to happen to my cat if he gets out again.
73. Wrong Place, Wrong Time
I bought a townhouse last year and within six months had to sell due to a neighbor from Hades. He was extremely mentally ill. Between the threats to myself and family, damage to our shared wall from him pounding on it, bottles being thrown at us, etc we couldn’t take anymore. The authorities couldn’t do anything, HOA doing nothing—we had to sell.
Without getting into too much of the story, this neighbor was not disclosed to us at closing between the seller and HOA. This neighbor was a serious issue for YEARS before us buying the townhouse. This whole process was very obviously very awful I still suffer PTSD from this person. A beautiful house I renovated and was so excited to start a family in our new 3-bedroom home.
It all came crashing down due to one man. My lawyer (who helped me close on the house to buy and then again six months later closed on the house to sell) put a provision in all his contracts and named it after me, saying all social issues with neighbors must be disclosed when buying a home. Maybe it’s because I’m now pregnant, but I’m crying my eyes out.
I’m so happy that my lawyer put this in all his closing contracts going forward. I tried everything to keep my home.
74. He Was A Living Legend
My oddest neighbor was also my coolest neighbor and my landlord. He was in his 60s, and his grandfather had built the house I lived in, making it well over 100 years old. Both his grandfather and his father had passed on in that house, which perhaps explained some of the weird and creepy experiences I had there. In his basement, he basically had a museum of artifacts he had found over the decades.
He used to stay up until 3 or 4 AM watching TV while kneeling on a small dirty old towel. He never sat in a chair. He had done some amazing things over his life, so it was always a great time chatting with him. Every Friday, I would pop over and pay the rent. Usually, his wife had made cookies, and I'd have a cup of tea before handing it over. If I ever went away for the weekend, he would take money off the rent, saying, "Can't charge you rent when you're not there".
However, there was one really weird thing about him. He seemed to know where things were. It was as if he was totally attuned with the universe or something. He once went to an archaeological site in a swamp that the university had spent a month surveying with a full crew of grad students and equipment. He spent a week there camping and found three canoes simply by wading out where he “felt” was a good spot and feeling with his feet.
Another time he went to a beach, randomly walked over to a sand dune, reached down to grab a handful of sand, and found several pre-European tattooing implements made from bone. These are tiny, the size of your fingernail. He found more in a few minutes than had been found in the entire country up to that point. His wife said all his significant finds were like that.
One day he told his wife it was about time she learned to drive. Until then, he always drove, and she had never bothered to get her license. He taught her to drive, and she got her license. He then decided she needed her own car and bought her a new hatchback. A couple of days after getting her the car, he felt a bit tired, sat down, and died instantly.
75. Feeding The Fire
I had a set of neighbors who were just terrible. They would blast music and shout well past acceptable times—I'm talking 4 AM. They would light a bonfire in their tiny cement yard whenever I put the clothes out on my line to dry. They would feed the bonfire with clothes that still had tags on them, including the security tags.
One lovely summer morning, I opened my back door to a sanitary pad on my doorstep—a used, duct-taped sanitary pad in the very center of my doorstep. It didn’t take long for us to move.
76. Communication Was Key
I had a neighbor who lived in the government housing next door who was in her 50s. She didn't like her house and would spend her days begging in the city. At night, when she was home, she would smash things in her house and yell sporadically. Her accent would change based on her mood. One day I came home from work, and she was pacing back and forth on the footpath.
I stopped to ask what was wrong, and she told me she'd locked herself out of her house and insisted I help her break-in. She asked if I had a crowbar or a hammer, but I didn't. I offered to call a locksmith, but she said she didn't need a locksmith; she required the authorities. I didn't understand how the authorities would help in this situation, but she was very insistent.
I gave her my phone, and she called them. After a heated exchange, she threw my phone to the ground in frustration and started telling me stories about her life. She'd been orphaned at a young age and had lived in institutions for most of her life. She asked me for a crowbar again. I told her I didn't have any tools, and she screamed. She told me that I should be the one to call the authorities as they would listen to me.
I called the non-emergency line, and the woman who took my call audibly sighed when I gave the address and name. This was not the first time this neighbor had been locked out of her house, apparently. Within five minutes, two squad cars and an ambulance arrived. My neighbor explained that all she needed was a crowbar. Her request was refused, and they took her away.
77. Better Yours Than Mine!
My parents’ neighbor owns a landscaping company, so he has a dump truck. His house is set further back from the road than theirs, so his driveway, which is right on the property line, extends past their house and next to their backyard. One time, my dad noticed the neighbor turning the dump truck around in my parents’ backyard when the ground was very soft from some recent rain.
He went back, and sure enough, there were giant ruts in my parents’ yard. When my dad confronted the neighbor about using their backyard to turn around, the neighbor's response floored him: “I’m sorry, but if I turned it around in my yard, it would have left ruts in my lawn.” So he knew it would leave ruts, then decided he didn’t want them in his yard, so he left them in my parents’ yard instead.
78. One Man's Trash...Is Still Trash
I was living in a shifty part of town at the time. I had a couple of older neighbors who could have starred in a Hoarders marathon. The garage door was bowing out and splitting in areas due to the amount of garbage forced into it. To top that, they had hundreds of feral cats with horrible defects. They kept the front door open 24/7 so the cats could come in and out of the house, at least the ones that lived long enough to.
I would have to crawl under my house to remove the lifeless ones so my house didn't reek every few days.
79. Not How I Thought My Day Would Go
I live in a studio apartment that's underneath a house, and a few years ago the original owners moved out and decided to rent it out to adults with special needs. It's pretty much a revolving door, some stay for a year, some stay for a few weeks. For the most part, they're great, they leave me alone, bring me my packages right away, and are generally quiet and friendly.
Then there's this one guy we'll call Larry. He's lived there the longest, since the beginning. He has severe schizophrenia and a speech impediment. He has multiple "people" he talks to and some are friendly, and some are hostile to him. One of these is "Mike". He and I got along for the most part but he's very, very loud. Unfortunately, he can't help it.
I've had to check on him a few times to make sure he's okay when he's having a meltdown and contact his social worker. He's a stomper, and the floors above my bedroom are laminate, so it's amplified. The walls are pretty thin, and above my room is where he likes to hang out the most. Usually, it's him just talking to himself loudly but sometimes he'll dribble a basketball.
He’ll also move furniture, or make other odd noises at times like 4 am when I'm sleeping. He's all by himself in the house this week because his roommates are with their families for Christmas right now. This is a recipe for disaster. He does not do well alone. Today, he had a full-blown meltdown. Screaming, shouting, banging on the walls. I work from home so obviously this got very distracting.
I went out to check the mail and he was outside aggressively playing basketball in the driveway, shouting, blasting music, and making a scene the whole neighborhood could hear. I asked him if he's okay and needs help, and that he's being very loud. I was as tactful as I could be but stern enough to get the message across that he's behaving poorly.
The look he gave me was deadly, and he nearly threw a basketball at me. He stomped off, went inside, and shouted some more. Mind you, I can't understand much of what he's saying because his speech impediment is so severe. I texted his social worker, who never came by. Then it turned downright terrifying.
I was in the kitchen making dinner when I heard him having a conversation with his other personality, and the conversation I overheard was "I want to kill him, Mike". "You can't Larry, he's nice". "But I hate him". "Don't do it". "Yes". "No". "YES I WANT TO”. "YOU CAN'T". It went like this for a few minutes until I heard him stomp off. I always felt safe in my apartment, but this is waaaayyy to much.
I can't say for sure he was talking about me because he never said my name but just the fact that he's contemplating this in the middle of a meltdown by himself is making me VERY concerned. I haven't heard back from the social workers, and my landlord is a state away.
80. His Big-Footed Tales Were Something Else
I had a neighbor across the alley who always hung out in his garage. The large door was always closed, but the smaller side door would be open when he was in there. Usually, he was there from 5 PM to 2 AM. He was retired, so he didn’t work. I would randomly pop over after a couple of drinks to chat. I have never in my life heard stories crazier than the ones he used to tell me.
He also told me that there is a secret band of Sasquatch that currently live around the world and have a massive influence on the goings-on of our society. In addition to this, there is a very special breed of Sasquatch that can travel through time. They come to our present from the future to lure females to better populate their time and world.
He also said that the politics that have evolved between all of the different sects of Sasquatch are tense and political.
81. Man In The Attic
I used to live next to a house with a few guys. The creepiest one of them was the guy that lived in the attic. Once, he blew up all the toilets in their house, and they all had to come to my place to poop until it got fixed. He somehow got my number and constantly texted me. I had barely spoken to this guy before and had to stay with other friends for a few days to get away from his crazy.
Not long after that, my laptop disappeared at a party where he was mysteriously absent for about 20 minutes. He was in nursing school at the time, which was terrifying. I'm praying that career didn't work out for him.
82. He Was Jammin’
Over the holidays, when I was young, it was traditional for a few of the households down to road to meet at one house, then move on to other houses throughout the day and evening. Often the last house would be Jill and Ray's. By that time, all the adults would have had a few drinks. Jill loved entertaining; however, Ray wasn't such a fan.
So, when he decided he'd had enough for the night, he would get changed into his pajamas, come back downstairs with his toothbrush, brush his teeth in the kitchen sink, and head back upstairs. We all knew there was a bathroom upstairs. This was his way of telling everyone to get out and go home.
83. Caught With His Pants Down
I used to live in a townhouse. We had a small puggle dog. One day, I put him on the leash in the backyard while I went upstairs to get ready. The way our backyards were, a small grass area lined up right next to our neighbors’ on each side. I heard my dog barking for a minute and then stop randomly. Usually, when he was ready to come inside, he would continue to bark until we opened the door.
My dog no longer barking triggered me to look out the window. And there I saw it. Our neighbor’s kid—who was probably between seven and ten years old—with his pants down. IN MY BACKYARD, with my dog. I was so shocked I couldn’t move. Then I scared him off, but it haunted me for years.
84. The Making Of A Legend
This goes back to nearly 45 years ago when I built my first house. The neighbor at the back was immediately angry that I bought two lots directly behind him and would not sell them to him or swap. His antics were beyond deranged. The dude would call the county inspectors and report my "violations" constantly. After we moved in the next spring, I began to regrade my property.
I also did things like plant grass and plant 20 trees, including six 5-feet blue spruce trees towards my property line, which I shared on the west with this neighbor. They were a good 10 feet in from the "agreed"-upon property line that HE was using. I spent two months doing all this, and one Saturday morning my neighbor and his wife were out and measuring their property and such.
I paid no notice until he knocked on my door and handed me what appeared to be a "bank survey" of his property that he had for 15 years. It indicated the location of property lines, his house and garage location, etc. He explained that my trees were on top of the "property line" and I need to move them. I kind of agreed with what he said based on his site survey and I proceeded to move them.
Then I looked closely at the survey. What I saw made me gasp. It also indicated the location of an abandoned alley we both had 1/2 possession of with dimensions off his garage. This clearly indicated not only was he claiming ALL of the alley, but a 20-foot strip along the entire back of my yard. Matter of fact, ALL the neighbors were claiming this and did so for years.
My house was the first one built on my side of the block. What makes this interesting? My neighbor had a huge strawberry bed (over 10 years old) along almost the entire backyard ON MY property. 500+ plants, all prime producers and HIS PRIDE AND JOY. I immediately got my own REAL survey done with steel pins driven and stamped hard copies of the site survey.
His bank survey was basically correct. But this was truly bad news for him. It meant that he and his neighbors really were freely stealing this strip of land across the entire block. 12 households in all. This is a small rural farming town (fewer than 800 people) and in all this dust up, I found out this neighbor is THE TOWN's big enormous jerk.
So I took my survey over to this guy and said, listen, no rush to move your plants (this was July) but you need to get them off my property in the next few months. He tore up the survey and threw it at me. Now it was game on. I worked second shift and commuted 25 miles to work. My wife would go out into our garden, which was a huge one, when she got home at night and do some work in it.
About three or four days later, she is out there and the rear neighbors are disrespecting her for all the trouble "us new people" were causing. She told me the next morning and I went to those neighbors (who all refused to talk) and left them copies of the REAL survey in their doors. A couple of days later I am at work and my wife calls me pretty upset.
The bad neighbor along with two of his neighbors screamed at my wife when she was in the garden in such a bad way that she was driven to tears. I told her I will be home in 45 minutes. I called my brother-in-law (a farmer, less than mile out of town) and explained the situation. He told me he can have his John Deere tractor with his tiller at my house at 6 pm.
I next called the country sheriff’s office to request a deputy to be at my house at 5:30, and then I called our police chief and requested the same. I get home and minutes later, both officers show up. I handed them my survey and walked them to show them the steel pins. I asked them what property are the strawberry plants on? They say clearly on my property.
Then I asked them, it’s my property and I can do whatever, right? They said sure. Now, we have about 20 people mulling around, though not my bad neighbor who ran inside the house. He was not going to face me after how he spoke to my wife. Instead, he sent his wife to the door to order me off his property or he will call the authorities. I said, too late, I already did and you have 15 minutes to relocate as many of your plants as you can.
It was almost exactly 15 minutes later when my brother-in-law showed up, and now it’s getting fun. I showed my brother-in-law where to start tilling. Took him 30 minutes to completely grind up all the strawberry plants. The silence was awesome. The rear neighbors were shocked and I became a legend.
85. Don’t Make A Sound
I moved to my new apartment around seven months ago. Having had problems with parties in my old apartment because the walls were extremely thin, I decided that I would not have them in this one. But I didn’t count on one thing. My neighbors are complete jerks. When I moved in I had a dinner with three members of my family and they complained.
I thought they were being ridiculous but as a gesture of goodwill, I gave my neighbors my phone number so that if there were any problems they could text me instead of coming down. They had then been incessantly texting me, telling me to stop using my phone after 8 pm, and to stop laughing. Might I add, I do not speak very loudly nor laugh very loudly.
Their excuse was that the only room in my house (studio apartment) is under their bedroom. I tried to be reasonable and speak lower, but that didn’t satisfy them and I wasn’t about to whisper in my own apartment. I got to my breaking point after four months of this and I told them to not text me anymore, as they were being ridiculous with their demands and I would from then on consider it harassment.
I had five friends over for the first time this August. All heck broke loose. The husband tried kicking down my door after coming down to complain; I had told him that he could call the authorities because I didn’t care and then closed the door. He got mad because since we didn’t have any music and we were a small number of people, he knew it would be useless.
For what it’s worth, we were playing cards. Now they told me they’ve called the HOA about my being on the phone past 8. I’m so over it.
86. Looks Can Be Deceiving
I lived in a small community with about ten houses where we mostly knew one another. Someone new moved in next door, and we didn’t think much of it as they seemed nice enough and didn’t cause any trouble. My grandma was going on a vacation. Since we were mostly girls and my grandpa was out working most of the time, she told the guy next door, “I’m going to be away for a month. Just keep an eye on my family”.
He was nice and said, “Sure”. A few months passed by, and suddenly one morning, the house was vacated in the middle of the night. A few days later, we learned the truth about the day. We read in the paper that that guy was actually taken into custody because he was a big-time mobster and had been on the “wanted” list for quite a while.
87. Something Seemed Out Of Focus
My neighbor was an older gentleman who lived with his wife. He would randomly call over and ask about lights coming from down behind the shed I had at my house. His house was probably a good 1,500 feet from there with quite a bit of dense woods in between. The only way he could see that would be if he was using binoculars.
He had also "staked" out our other neighbors by parking across from their house and spying on them for hours. That neighbor called the authorities.
88. It Was A Big Red Flag
I had a creepy neighbor who was a male in his early 40s. I was in seventh grade when I first met him. He was a very nice guy, but there was just something off about him. My mother was very patriotic, and our whole house was red, white, and blue inside. One day while I was walking home from school, he was sitting on his front lawn and told me he was having a "red, white, and blue sale" in his backyard and that I should check it out.
I told him sure, but I needed to get money first and walked off. My other neighbor was a big guy, mid-30s, covered in tattoos, who had turned his life around but was VERY intimidating if you didn’t know him. Since my parents weren’t home, I went to his house and told him. He walked over to that guy's house with me, and the creepy neighbor took him to the backyard.
Sure enough, it had red, white, and blue items for sale. But I still thought something was off. After we left, the neighbor I was with called the authorities to let them know that something strange was going on. He also told my parents, who then told me to walk home on the other side of the street. Two years later, the creepy neighbor was taken into custody for attempting to lure a child into his house.
89. Pool Partying Pest
I moved into a new house a few years ago. My retired neighbor was helping himself to my backyard swimming pool during the day while I was at work. I didn't realize it until another neighbor let me know. I went over and confronted him, and his excuse was that the previous owner let him use the pool whenever he liked. Trying to be neighborly, I told him he could use the pool as long as he let me know in advance.
Well, that was a brutal mistake. He soon moved his own lawn furniture over, showed up first thing in the morning on Saturdays with a cooler full of booze, and hung out all day. He even hosted a pool party for his daughter and grandkids. Finally, I had to install new locks on the pool gates and told him that the arrangement wasn't working out for me anymore.
I also installed security cameras to keep an eye on his activities. His reaction was chilling. He retaliated by letting the air out of my tires in the middle of the night, putting dog poo in my mailbox, and firing off high-powered fireworks at my house, leaving burn marks on the roof, sidewalks, and driveway. I called the authorities.
Luckily, karma took over—he had a stroke and was moved to an extended care facility.
90. Going Ape
We had these two neighbors who had dozens of stuffed monkeys they would treat like their children. It was bizarre. They would even talk to them, even though they weren’t real. They moved out years ago but once every few years, we would see them on TV in the stands of some nearby sporting event. They had all their monkeys with them as well.
91. She Was Holding On To Dirty Laundry
When I was growing up, there was a middle-aged lady who lived across the street with her young daughter. Every day I would see her walk down the road carrying two large laundry bags, and later she would return with them. She did this almost every day. I was curious as to how just the two of them needed to do so much laundry so frequently.
I thought she was just a total weirdo—but later, I learned the heartbreaking story behind it. Years later, my mom told me the lady had been a refugee from WWII Germany. She was terrified that she would leave the house and the Gestapo would raid it when she was out. Therefore, she always carried all of her clothes with her everywhere she went.
92. I Couldn’t Deal With This Neighbor
I lived in a relatively quiet neighborhood. A high school kid who lived next door to us was a dealer. Our house was on a corner, and he would tell buyers to park in front of our house—on the side street—so his dad couldn't see them. There was so much traffic; it was like a drive-through. Strange and creepy people would often walk into our backyard or driveway thinking that the kid lived at our house or trying to figure out a way to get over our fence into his yard. It was really scary.
93. She Showed Everyone Her Goods
The house I grew up in for most of my childhood had three apartments. Two were big enough for a family of four to live in comfortably, and there was a tiny apartment in the basement with just one room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. A couple who were in their 40s lived there, and they both seemed off right from the start. They were very withdrawn.
They never said hello or anything, never went outside or shopping—from what we could tell— and just gave off a very strange vibe, as if they were hiding something. One day, my older sister and I came home and suddenly heard the running sound of bare feet coming down from the driveway. Before we knew it, the woman from the basement was running past us 100% in the buff.
Her assets were flying all over the place, and then she just stopped at a very busy street and stood there in a proud pose with her hands on her side and her head thrown back a bit. We don't know what she did after, since my sister quickly unlocked the door, so we could get inside and not be seen by anyone. They moved out shortly after that incident.
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94. Hot Rod Hooligan
My next-door neighbor had a Corvette, and one night, I woke up to flashing lights and a squad car on his lawn. I assumed someone had been caught trying to take the car and went back to bed. The next day, another neighbor asked me if I knew what had happened. I said I assumed that someone had been caught taking the car, but the other neighbor revealed the chilling truth. He told me that the guy's girlfriend had taken her own life.
The next day the guy’s couch was sitting on the lawn with a bloodstain on it. It stayed there for a couple of days. He moved out shortly thereafter. Several years later, the District Attorney stopped by our house and asked us if we were friends with that neighbor. We said we weren’t, as we had only just moved in. When we tried to confirm that he was talking about the neighbor whose girlfriend had taken her life, he said it definitely was not suicide.
95. Bad Bunny
When I was seven, we had a family pet that we kept in our backyard. One day, our next-door neighbor came pounding on our front door. He was screaming at the top of his lungs and threatening to off my dad. He said that our pet was being too loud. Our pet was a rabbit. A RABBIT!
96. Your Term Is Up!
I had one neighbor who was the self-appointed mayor of the block. He would tell me all the time what I was doing wrong, from having my sprinklers on at the wrong time to not properly sorting my recyclables. I took his suggestions under advisement and even read the four-page typed note he wrote to me about the correct timing of the crabgrass preventer.
One evening, when I was cleaning off my deck, he walked up and began telling me about the latest landscaping issues. My niece, who was 13 at the time, was showering off after being in the pool. She walked out in a robe from the shower area and slung her suit over the fence to dry. I thanked him for his vast landscaping knowledge and told him we were off to dinner and shooed her inside.
I closed the slider and remembered I left the hose on, so I slipped the door back open and I saw her suit slid over the fence. I took two steps to the edge of the deck expecting to see her bathing suit on my grass. That’s when I spotted him—and it was the most disturbing sight of my entire life. The mayor was on his hands and knees in my grass, sniffing the suit crotch. We had a long talk about how he was going to come with me to the station.
97. Excuses, Excuses
Long story short, my neighbor Greg was into me. We made small talk once in the elevator and a week later when he saw me walk outside, he chased me down the street and asked where I was going. When I told him I was going to get coffee he asked if he could come. But there was something huge he didn’t know. I’m not only in a relationship, I was also 15 weeks pregnant at the time but not showing at all.
I told him I was meeting a friend for coffee just so he would leave me alone. He then asked our doorman for my phone number, claiming I told him they could give it to him. I wish my door people would have asked me first, but they gave it to him. Ever since then, he has been non-stop texting me, asking me to do stuff. Well, enough was enough.
Finally today I replied and told him I’m moving into a house in October with my long-term partner, that I’m pregnant, and while I think he’s a nice person I’m not interested in spending time together. His reply stunned me. He said lol, you don’t have to make things up just to not hang out. I didn’t even want to sleep with you. I replied and said not making anything up, but ok.
You know, take care and best of luck to you, etc. Now I’ve had multiple people in my building tell me that Greg is running around telling everyone that I’m lying about being pregnant and being in a relationship because I don’t want to date him. I’m shocked that a 35-year-old man is acting this way. The good news is my other neighbors know he’s full of it.
Still, it’s going to be so uncomfortable now if I run into him in person. I feel like I’m in high school.
98. We’re Always Watching
My friend's sister has been working on the front lines as a nurse while her husband takes care of their four kids. A couple weeks ago, they finally had the finances to get their driveway repaved. I will mention they have lived in this neighborhood for six years and this is not a HOA. Anyway, yesterday they received this letter from some anonymous neighbors.
"Thank you for finally upgrading your driveway after years of significant deterioration. It's a significant improvement. We are all so happy to see that your family is in a financial position to do this improvement or maybe it took this long to receive enough donations to find this project. Regardless, it's been long overdue. It would also be appreciated if you would give attention to your front lawn.
“Many of us take pride in having weedless lawn and don't appreciate any residents who don't put any effort in keeping the dandelions down".
99. Leave It Well Enough Alone
For the past few months, I've suspected that my upstairs neighbor has been taking some of my mail. I buy a lot of things online like books and craft supplies and every now and then there's been small things that were meant to arrive on a certain day that never did. One day, I caught her wandering around my front door. When I asked her what she was doing she said "Oh, I was looking for something I think I dropped into your yard”.
I got surveillance cameras installed a while ago, which were not noticeable to my neighbors. The camera that's pointed at my front door isn't visible from the driveway. So here comes the trap. I purchased a few postage boxes to set up for her. The first one was a glitter bomb. I set up the box to make sure she would get glitter to the face as soon as she opened it.
I packed it to make it look like a postage parcel, then sat it at my front door. 20 minutes later I saw her walking to my front door. She looked around then picked up the box and walked away. My only regret is that I didn't get to see her reaction when she got a face full of glitter. I haven't noticed any other mail going missing after that, but she will regret it if she does it again.
100. It Was All A Set-Up
New neighbors moved in across the street from me when I was in middle school. They were very odd people that kept to themselves. They had two small children who were adopted. One day not that long after they moved in, the lady came over and apologized to my parents that her kids were always screaming and crying. But there was something off about what she was saying.
I remember it being bizarre because neither my parents nor myself ever really heard the kids screaming or crying. Soon after that, my father was home, and he heard the lady yelling in her backyard. He went over, and she was screaming that she found the younger of her two children unresponsive in the backyard. The authorities arrived, and unfortunately, the kid didn’t make it.
Then things got real. There were tons of officers, unmarked vehicles, and yellow tape. It looked like something out of a movie. She had beaten the child and tried to stage it as if the kid fell and hit his head on the back patio. They had apparently moved out of their last house because numerous neighbors had reported them to child protective services, so they were not welcome in that neighborhood.
But the story didn’t end there. Beyond the brutal incident, it turns out that the children had never been officially adopted—they had been purchased.
101. Oh Yeah, He’s A Character
This happened about four years ago now and still is one of the more ridiculous things to happen to me. I was living in San Diego at the time in a small apartment building with seven or eight units. I lived on the 2nd floor. Our building was right near the highway overpass on the outskirts of downtown. We were also very close to the airport flight path, which made our neighborhood pretty loud.
At this point, I had already lived in my apartment for just over three years. I decided to get a cat, got the permission from my landlord, and paid a pet deposit. When I got her through a shelter, she was probably about three months old. One night I was watching TV when there was a knock at my door. I answered, and couldn’t understand what I was seeing.
Standing on my porch were two officers, both with their hands on their holsters, both seemingly tense. They told me they had a noise complaint from my downstairs neighbor and that he thought I was on substances and rolling a bowling ball around. It took me a few seconds to understand what they were talking about. Then I burst out laughing.
"Oh haha, that's probably just my kitten running around". They were not amused. They told me if they had to come back they would have to do something—which is a pretty wild threat after finding out the noise was from a cat. I left a message with my landlord to let them know what had happened. The next day, my downstairs neighbor came to my door to apologize to me.
He said he thought I may have been into some shady stuff because his “army intelligence friends” told him that those noises he heard align with substance activity. That made zero sense to me, but I came to realize this guy wasn't all there. He said he was sorry and was happy I had a cat and that he even had a toy he would give me. Cool, problem solved, right? Oh, so very wrong.
About two weeks later I had officers at my door again. This time, they were aware of the situation and we all chuckled about how absurd it was. However, since they were called, they had to come. They just told me I'm doing nothing wrong, don't worry about a thing. Right around this time, my neighbor began hitting his ceiling anytime my cat ran around.
It got me anxious to the point of having my cat sleep in a separate smaller room so she couldn't run around. This only lasted a couple of nights since she would cry the whole time. I just thought, whatever, I'm doing nothing wrong, we live in a city in a loud area, it’s an apartment, etc. I'm not sure of the exact timeline, but about a week later, I had an officer at my door again.
This time, it was the San Diego County Sheriff. And that wasn’t all. He had a court summons. This neighbor was trying to get a restraining order against me! For what?? ELDER ABUSE. Yes. Because of the noise of a now six-month-old kitten! The court date comes around and I had printed up about 15-20 pictures of my cat to show the judge. I was furious.
My neighbor’s "evidence" was handed to me, which was basically a list of dates and times that he marked down when he heard noises from my apartment. It's legit insane, and five pages long and I still have it. The judge didn't want to hear any of it, just forced us to enter into court-appointed mediation. I'm fine with that, I just want things to improve.
I received a call a few weeks after our court date to let me know that the neighbor refused mediation and that we would have a second court date towards the end of the month. Throughout ALL this time, he was banging on the ceiling and scaring my cat. But then, things took an even darker turn. He started being malicious and would just whack the ceiling in the middle of the night, oftentimes waking me and causing my cat to go crazy and run around.
Finally, the second court date was here, and at this point, I had already decided I would be leaving San Diego. It had nothing to do with this ongoing situation, but it was a light at the end of the tunnel for sure. We're in court, and the judge starts yelling at my neighbor for refusing mediation and wasting the state’s money. I interrupted to say, "Just want to make sure everyone knows this is about the noise my six-month-old cat is making!"
I hear laughter from other people behind me in the courtroom. Neighbor pleads his case, says I am harassing him and making too much noise. I repeat, this is about the noise my six-month-old cat is making. The judge is clearly angry that this old man is wasting the court's time and said that we must enter mediation. I tell him—I'm sorry, we shouldn't even be here.
“I'm moving out of state in just a few weeks, and again, this is about the noise a CAT is making". Again, more chuckles from the courtroom. To this, the judge replies "Oh. Well, if you don't end up moving then you'll need to come back to court". I said ok, and was ready to be done with all this. My neighbor tried to have pleasantries with me at that point but I just ignored him and walked out.
I wish there was some sweet revenge at the end, but really, I never spoke to him again and my cat and I are living happily in an apartment where she can run around to her heart’s desire and no one can tell her otherwise! By the way, during this entire ordeal, my landlord did nothing to help me out. The most he did was just chuckle and say "Oh yeah he's a character".
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