It's hard to make a house a home when your neighbors are this deranged. These Redditors know that struggle—and their tales are absolutely unhinged.
I lived in an apartment complex with assigned spots, and every day this person in a white Civic encroached into my parking spot. So every day I was parking closer and closer to her car. I was getting good at parking close enough to her, without hitting her.
One day I was walking to my car to head out to work, and I saw her climbing through her passenger side door to get into her car, cursing up a storm.
She saw me, we locked eyes as she was climbing over her middle console. She started her car and drove away.
Since that incident, she has stayed in between the lines of her own parking spot.
My wife and I were moving into our first house. Our new neighbors were on their front porch drinking, which was no big deal. While bringing the last load of boxes into the house, my neighbor came up, welcomed me to the neighborhood, and mentioned how nice my TV was.
A week later, my wife and I were headed out to dinner, and he stopped us to ask how long we would be gone. Something felt really off about him at that moment.
I lied and told him I was just running to the gas station one block away and that I would be back immediately.
Twenty minutes later, I got a phone call from the local authorities. This moron broke into my house in broad daylight, while three other neighbors were watching. He cut his hand on the window as he attempted to climb through it and used his bleeding hand on every doorknob in my house.
He is now a number in the US penal system.
In my first apartment, I lived above an old crazy woman. Our apartment was the only one on the third floor, and hers was the only apartment on the second floor. What she did to us was nothing short of sadistic—she once poured vegetable oil on the staircase leading to our door and then sprinkled thumbtacks on top of the oil so that we would slip and fall onto the tracks, like in Looney Tunes.
She would also scream profanities at my roommates and me whenever she saw us.
We called her "the crazy lady”—we were not wrong.
A neighbor messed up when building a home and put his entire home well within my property. It’s a large piece of land with two huge clearings connected to two roads, but separated by a large isthmus of trees. I didn't notice because I had taken an eight month vacation right after he started building.
It is a huge property, I didn't go around and inspect it often.
So, I got a real estate lawyer and surveyors to confirm it was on my property. I was going to sell him that clearing for a good price...until I went to talk to him and he was the biggest douche I had ever met.
He essentially told me that he is going to sue me for "leading him on" despite the fact that I did not know him, nor had I met him before that day. His wife flipped off my girlfriend and I as we were pulling out of their driveway.
Well, he messed with the wrong guy. Four months later, I filed a lawsuit saying he must destroy the property or turn it over to me immediately. It would've cost him more to demolish it and return the site to original condition, so he signed the house over to me.
He was still out for construction costs. I was living in a single house with my girlfriend, then I had a brand new, 2,600 square foot house with all the hookups for water, electricity, and cable for free.
I got the land for next to nothing, and sold it for almost 50 times the value.
During hurricane Sandy, my street was without power, heat or hot water for 14 days. It was unbearably cold in the house, and at night we could see our breath because it would get down in the 20s/30s Farenheit. I have the west wing of the house to myself.
There is a family that lives in the house proper, and another tenant in the small studio in between us.
I come home from work one day to just swing by the house and get clothes so I can shower at a friend’s house, and my road is blocked off. There were fire engines and officers everywhere.
My neighbor approaches me as I'm making my way up the street through the craziness and I ask whose house it was. He said, "Oh, it's yours".
Immediately, I run towards my house because all I care about is my cat. I arrive and find total chaos. Coming down the driveway, I see the people from the main house being carried away on stretchers. I don't see smoke or fire, but my front door is kicked in and my cat is roaming around outside. Basically everyone that lives on my street is congregating in my driveway/on my lawn.
One of the firemen came over to tell me the people in the main house were cold, so they brought their charcoal grill in the house and lit it to heat the house. It filled the house with carbon monoxide, the mom passed out, the daughter felt weak and called for help.
I had neighbors who were the worst kind of evil. I lived on the ground level, with front door access and a yard, and they wanted my apartment. They thought that stomping as frequently and loudly as possible, at all times of the day, was the best way to make me leave.
While I would enter or exit my house, the entire family would sit on the balcony above and call me names.
After a while, it inevitably began to affect me. The mother of the family taught her kids to vandalize my apartment and hit my dog. It started to drive me insane, and while I dealt with it, I guess my roommate couldn't.
We had been in the apartment for several months before those neighbors had moved in above. It was smooth sailing before then. We had also heard disturbing rumors about our apartment itself.
Apparently, the family that lived there before had burned alive in a fire. We had no idea it was in the actual apartment we lived in because no one disclosed it to us.
The landlord pretended it never happened. The room my girlfriend and I slept in had a family burn in it. The combination of that and the harassment from the neighbors got to my roommate, and he had a breakdown.
There was this neighbor who pretended to be weak from cancer/chemo so that the landlord couldn't get mad at her when her trash bins were full, and the lawn was filthy.
She even went as far as shaving her head and faking a limp, walking with a cane, and everything. After my mom baked her some cookies and offered to take care of her bins and lawn, she spilled the beans about her scam.
My mom, now enlightened about my neighbor's bologna and tired of her trash blowing into our yard, called the landlord.
The neighbor wasn't happy and would blast music in the wee hours of the morning to get back at us. My mom would get frustrated because she worked late and left early, so we filed a noise complaint with the authorities.
Officers arrived. The neighbor claimed that my mom, who was a small old lady, punched her in the chest and wanted her taken in.
She showed the officers our security cam footage, which showed the crazy neighbor locking her nine-year-old daughter out in the middle of the night. The child was banging on the door at 2 am and was crying. The neighbor was taken away, and the daughter was sent to live with her dad.
My first apartment had a creepy old man who lived on the basement floor and this equally creepy kid in his early thirties on the top floor. Both of them regularly sat out on the porch entrance at varying times of the day and would catch me whenever I came home.
I lied to the old man, (we’ll call him George) about my name in a moment of panic.
When he found out that wasn’t my name, he started getting more aggressive in greeting me with my real name to show me how I’d done him wrong. He would circle the building when he realized I started using the back exit, and he'd even sit on the back steps to wait for me to pass by.
I told my landlord twice about it and all he did was tell him not to talk to me, which made matters worse because just continued to harass me but with more of a vengeance.
He ended up stealing the wreath that was on my door because nobody else had one on their door and threw it in the trash.
At that point, I no longer cared about causing my landlord grief and asked him to pull up video footage. Turns out, he’d been coming upstairs several times to see when I left for work and would stand in front of my door. He ended up getting evicted.
But the nightmare didn't end there.
This was all happening while the kid on the top floor was still there. He was weird, but I didn't pay him much mind. After the whole George thing, I wanted to be on good terms with the other tenants, so I started saying hello when I came through the entrance or in the hallways.
Bad call. Such a bad call. He started going around telling the other dudes that lived upstairs that he was sleeping with me and how I wouldn’t waste time jumping his bones.
Whatever, I stopped saying hi to him. About two days later, however, I went to take my trash out and I passed my window that was facing the alleyway.
This dude was pressed up against it, sliding his face around the glass trying to see me. He saw me and tried to play it off, but the situation was already screwed for him. I called the authorities and it turns out he’d been pegged for"peeing" before on two other charges. He was also evicted.
I lived above a guy in a really old fourplex and I guess the wood floors squeaked really loudly whenever I walked around. It wasn't like I was stomping around or anything, but the dude would constantly come upstairs and bang on my door to yell at me about the noise.
I felt bad for him in the beginning because he seemed genuinely frustrated, but he didn't seem to understand or believe that I wasn't intentionally causing a ruckus.
I called my landlord several times asking him for a solution. I couldn't move out because I was locked into my lease, but my landlord was just like, "Buy a lot of rugs". It got to the point that I couldn't take the constant yelling and I was literally either tiptoeing around or hopping from my couch to my chair in order to get out of my living room.
Finally, I went downstairs one day and asked if we could talk about the situation. I felt that maybe if I looked him in the eye when he was calm and explained that I wasn't doing it on purpose, he would maybe understand. After I gave him my spiel, he had a chilling response: "I'm about at the point where if it happens again, I'm going to show up at your door with a really big knife". And then he just stared at me.
I basically ran out of there, called my landlord, and said that I had just been threatened by my downstairs neighbor. A month later the guy moved out, and then as soon as I could, I did too.
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My across-the-hall apartment neighbor is so weird. Like, just overall off-putting.
Anyway, I leave my sandals out next to my door every night since I don't wear shoes in the house. It so happens that one night, I had to meet my best friend, who came over in the middle of the night at the front since she doesn’t know my place very well. As I opened the door, I caught my neighbor doing the most deranged thing imaginable.
He was caressing and smelling my sandals.
I froze and mildly freaked out. He saw me staring, did a weird giggle, said something about his kids calling him back inside, and then yanked me into this weird side hug. Now I leave my shoes in a box inside my house. Ugh.
It started out that we just thought she was a free spirit; just your average hippie-dippie Scandinavian lady with alternative parenting ideas.
But we gradually learned that she was just a horrible person. The first red flag was when she picked up my four-year-old son, claiming she wanted him over for a short visit. She said he was playing with her younger daughter and she said they were playing naked most of the time.
I told her he wasn't allowed to be undressed anymore but I wasn't mad because I knew things were less uptight in Norway where she was from. I later talked to my son about it. Her older daughter, on the other hand, was always misbehaving. Her first time over to our house, she smeared chapstick all over an entire wall.
She was like six years old. Plenty old enough to know better.
Another time, she sneaked into our house while I was outside playing with my kids and started eating some brownies I had just made. I mean, she tore a hole right smack in the middle of the plastic wrap over the dish and scooped out handfuls of brownies.
She would also "pole dance" on the tree out front, singing "Shake yo money maker". Six years old.
She had birthday parties for her children, to which we were invited and brought gifts. But then, we found out their REAL birthdays were later in the year. When we were invited again, we declined.
The lady tried to explain that she celebrated half birthdays. I explained to her that we didn't. Soon, my children were not allowed to play at their house anymore.
Though, we still all ran into each other walking to school. She would tell me how she saw real demons walking around disguised as people, and how God told her that I was really close to seeing the light and becoming Christian.
It was during this time that someone called CPS on her and she accused me of it. It wasn't me, but maybe it should have been.
We finally moved, but she caught up with me one day to give me a bag of used clothes for my daughter.
But her intentions were utterly twisted: I sliced my finger on the razor blade that she put in the bag, luckily not very badly. That was the last I saw of her.
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I used to have neighbors who were, for lack of a better word, trash.
They were clearly addicts and did not live well. My family was always cordial with them because we never had any issues with them despite how they were, but my parents always told me to be wary. Plus, they had a couple of young kids who were good and one my age who I hung out with sometimes.
Once, I was about to walk into my house with my friend. Their young son, who was my age, was outside his house. He started with some general chit-chat—nothing out of the ordinary—yet. But as we were walking into the house, he kept trying to find ways to keep us outside, as if he was stalling.
Eventually, we went into my house.
We immediately heard a noise coming from the back room. When we rushed in, our jaws dropped to the floor. We stepped in to find my neighbor with one leg in my window, clearly climbing through. My friend and I just stopped and stared at him as he stared back, looking like a deer in headlights.
We had absolutely no idea what to do or how to react. We were young kids, and this was a grown man who I had caught breaking into my house.
He just awkwardly smiled and said he was just making sure the window was closed. As he did, we heard his son run around the back and warn him that we were home.
He just told his son that he knew and that we were right there and he was talking to us. He then nonchalantly said bye and climbed back out the window, leaving my friend and me to wonder what had just happened.
I had a problem with a neighbor who drove over my lawn with his ATVs and damaged the grass/shrubs.
He said he'd pay for damage, but that never happened and he kept doing it. So, I put my huge trailer across their tracks to block their path. They went around it. I put up two other barriers that they also drove around. It took a while, but I finally got my revenge.
I found this huge branch that had fallen in the woods between our properties and dragged it across to cover the third path they were making across my yard. But, the branch got caught on a cable. What is a cable doing over the lawn instead of properly buried?
So, I called the cable company to have it buried. They said I was the only registered client on that box and to disconnect it.
So, I did. After the weekend, my neighbor came by totally angry at me for disconnecting his cable. He yelled he was going to call 9-1-1 on me.
So, I left. I got a call from the officers. They asked if I disconnected the cable because of the ATV issue. It was interesting because I wasn't even going to mention the ATV issue, but my neighbor already did.
So long story short, the neighbor got a warning ticket for trespassing and admitted to looting cable.
I took an offer on my house that very day and moved.
I used to have a neighbor in his mid-40s who lived in a small junk house. It looked like a house that a psycho would live in. He would be in the road screaming nonsense and would go off on angry rants at 1:
00 am. He came to my house banging on the door, yelling and threatening to kill my dog for barking when my dog was inside with me, and no barks were heard in the neighborhood.
He would constantly accuse people of stealing his mail and would put cardboard on his utility van window.
He would treat everyone like they were some kind of suspect, to the point where no one wanted to be caught by him outside. One time, he showed up at my house out of nowhere with a hammer. I immediately called the authorities and put a restraining order on him.
A month later, I heard some crazy sounds coming from my attic and thought squirrels got up in the space again. I called pest control to see what was up there, but when they came down, they had this horrified look on their faces. They told me, “I can't get rid of what’s up there, but maybe the authorities can”. I called, and a few officers came out with my insane neighbor.
I was almost paralyzed with fear.
When he’d smile, he would always have some intense anger behind his eyes. Thank goodness he moved.
We had a large fenced-in backyard. My dog wasn't terribly loud, nor was she aggressive at all. She was just the general size of a lab, and my neighbors, specifically the wife, thought that made her evil.
They called the authorities more than once, saying my dog was terrorizing the neighborhood.
Officers came, met the dog, and we explained that she was always in our yard. They left saying just make sure she stays in the yard. The neighbor called two more times to complain, and eventually, the officers spoke with her about her ludicrous complaints.
Then, she started taking matters into her own hands. We noticed our dog was getting sick a lot—really sick.
We took her to the vet, and the vet said we needed to stop feeding her human food that could be bad for dogs. We had NO CLUE what she was talking about.
We went back home and decided to keep a close eye on her. It turns out our neighbor had been dumping a number of vile things over our fence, like food scraps and mop water.
We went and spoke with her about this, and she denied it.
Finally, we caught her on video and made sure she saw us recording her. Later that night, her husband came over and apologized and begged us not to call law enforcement. He promised he would ensure our dog would be left alone. We agreed but said if anything happened to our dog again, we would press charges.
Thankfully, she stopped coming after our dog—but she wasn't done quite yet...She moved on to our landscaping. She climbed over the fence more than once to hack our hedges and a few saplings. She even went and pulled all the flowers out of our flower bed that we had just planted.
We went and spoke with her husband, as he was the saner of the two. We had the same conversation as we had regarding our dog.
One year in university, I ended up finding a room in an apartment building. It was one of those apartments with five bedrooms on one floor with a shared kitchen and two bathrooms.
The landlady ended up renting out each room individually, so I was living with four complete strangers. They were mostly decent guys and we got along okay, outside or normal roommate quarrels.
This was fine until it was time for the roomies to move out before the lease was up.
They didn't want to get charged for the month of rent, so they found subletters. My one roommate gave his room to another total stranger. The new total stranger wasn't really vetted all that well. I bumped into him once when he moved in and he gave me a weird vibe.
He kind of seemed like a sketchy dude, but whatever; we were all poor university students, so I thought maybe I was reading him wrong.
I didn't even really meet him long enough to really catch his name. Anyway, one night, a few days after he moved in, I was sitting in my room with my girlfriend and we were watching a movie. During the movie, I could have sworn that I was hearing radios going off.
I shrugged it off and figured it was a part of the movie. About twenty minutes later, however, there was a knock on our apartment door. None of my other four roommates was home, so I answered it and was greeted with not one, not two, but five officers.
At least one of them was armed with an SMG. Officers: "Does this man live here"? Me: "Uh...Yeah, I think that's the new roommate..".
Officers: "Is he home"? Me: "Uh...I don't think so..". They came in and knocked on his bedroom door. No answer. Curious, I asked them what was happening.
The officers all shared a meaningful look and one of them answered that he may have been involved in an incident and may be injured. About five minutes later, the apartment door opened and the sketchy roommate was standing there in the entrance hall to the apartment.
Our conversation went something like this—Me: "Are you okay? The authorities were here looking for you and said you were injured". His response was horrifying: "Oh, I was involved in a drive-by shooting earlier today. It's okay though, I ran away". He then went into his room as if he didn't just drop an insane story on us.
Five minutes later my girlfriend and I were still sharing looks of astonishment.
Then, a knock on the door again! Surprise, surprise, it was the authorities. Now they had some reinforcements and even a few dogs with them. I just pointed to the guy's door. An officer unbuttoned his holster and I locked myself in my room.
I emailed my landlady that night informing her of what had happened, saying that I would be moving out of my apartment early, and that I was expecting not to be billed for my last month of rent. She did not argue.
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My neighbor’s dog barked nonstop. He was likely just acting out because it was never walked or shown any affection from its owners.
He was often left in their empty backyard for long stretches, usually all day. I would wake up many mornings to barking, as early as 5 am. When I would walk out into my backyard, the dog would bark the entire time. The sound is deafening.
Not only was their dog a problem, but so were they.
Once, they blocked our driveway by accident, so we had to ask them to move their car. For the following days, their car's bumper was about one inch from our driveway, and they parked so tight against the mailboxes they likely had to crawl out the other side.
Then they continued to block our driveway and mailbox on purpose. We decided enough was enough.
We notified the Homeowner’s Association and they had to intervene multiple times because we stopped getting mail. The post office confirmed that they had to hold our mail, as they could not deliver it.
Not only did they block our mailbox, but they would also block our driveway on trash day. They had 50 feet of curb space but instead put their cans right in front of my mailbox or driveway, which was also completely out of their way.
I was off sick one day, and my roommate came home for lunch and checked the mail.
We got a letter with no return address, sent to "the rooftop weed smokers" with our address on it. We knew it was for our next-door neighbors, not us, since one of them had a chair on the roof and smoked up there. Since it had no actual name, and our address on it, I was like, “Of course I'm going to open this, it'll be hilarious"! It was more like a nightmare.
As I'm opening the taped envelope, a little bit of white powder sprinkled onto my lap. My roommate and I looked at each other and thought, “Uh, what”? So, I got up and took the letter outside to open it. A ton of white powder came out of the letter when we took it out of the envelope, so we grabbed a Ziploc bag and some tongs, and sealed up the letter.
The letter was typed and said random things like, "To the douche who likes lighting up on the roof and yelling at people on the street with kids, you'd better have good insurance because I'll damage your stuff. I'm an ex-officer and have nothing better to do than to watch over you.
You angered the wrong guy". But the most disturbing part was at the end: "By the way, the substance in this envelope is noxious, so you might want to get yourself to a hospital”.
At that point, we were half laughing, half concerned, so I called 9-1-1 just in case.
They took it very seriously and sent out everyone: officers, paramedics, fire trucks, RCMP, and the tactical unit. The street was closed off, we were quarantined to our garage, and every neighbor who was home at the time came out to take a look.
Everyone was told to go back inside and stay put.
The tactical team got suited up in hazmat suits and went into our house to test the letter/envelope. We were in the garage for almost three hours. The tactical guys came back out and said the substance was found to be non-noxious but they still had to do some more tests to figure out exactly what it was.
At that point, we were taken into the ambulance for a look-over and then back to the garage. It turns out the white powder was pancake mix. My roommate and I, along with the officers and tactical guys burst out laughing together. We thanked the response teams and they left.
The RCMP officers stayed behind to get our statements and questioned the next-door neighbors to whom the letter was supposed to be sent.
A detective followed up with us a couple of times. Since it was a threat and sent through the mail, it was a serious offense.
The letter/envelope was sent off to forensics for testing. Unfortunately, nothing was found and the case was closed. The people in that house caused some nonsense the entire time they lived there, such as noise complaints, and trash left everywhere outside, but this incident really takes the cake.
Luckily, they have all since moved out.
Maybe I was an idiot neighbor...or a crazy one. When my son was a newborn, he was very colicky and barely slept for more than a few hours at a time. I was so tired and literally losing my mind.
There was a house of old bikers down the street and they would constantly drive down our road and rev their engines. I mean, my husband rides, I know it is possible to drive down the street and rattle windows.
It would wake the baby up. So, I went down there and asked a question very nicely.
I said, "Hey guys, I know it's your street too, but I have a young baby who you wake up every time you do that, can you guys just not rev your engines on the street"? They seemed super cool about it and I was so thankful.
But, it made it worse, not better.
Now it was like a game to REALLY rev when they went by my house. It became like the tell tale heart and started to drive me mad. Every time I heard it, I became one step closer to buying heavy machinery and mowing them down.
I became completely irrational one day and stormed down the street. I burst into their backyard where they were hanging and yelled at them like a crazy person, threatened to kick their butts, call for enforcement officers, cut their tires, whatever it took for them to stop revving their engines.
It finally stopped, but I am still embarrassed by how crazy I acted. Sleep deprivation is a heck of a drug.
I lived next to a foster home that had lots of boys living in it. My mom had allergies to our cats, so we let them outside.
I'd go outside every morning, call their names, feed them, and spend some time with them before heading off to school. Everything was fine for about six months. Then one day, one of my cats didn’t show up when I called for her.
I didn’t think too much of it, thinking she was probably out doing cat things. I went to my aunt's house for the weekend to study with my cousin.
When I came back home, there was still no sign of her. I started calling her name around the neighborhood and asking around if anyone had seen her. Nothing. Meanwhile, my other cat was suddenly suffering from seizures and was lethargic.
We kept her inside to keep an eye on her.
Two weeks later, I had a thought that maybe someone either ran over our cat or took a liking to her and kept her for themselves. Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. When my dad opened it, his jaw literally DROPPED. He saw a young boy holding a plastic bag with our cat inside of it!
He said she was in their hedges.
He told us he had a feeling the new foster kid, who “wasn't right in the head,” had something to do with it. My dad went over and talked to the head of the foster home because he also had noticed someone throw a fish over our fence a few days before.
Apparently, that kid had been causing a lot of trouble for them and was known to poison animals.
Unfortunately, our other cat didn't make it out ok either.
I moved into a brand new house. I noticed an old toilet, garbage, and a broken-down hot tub in the neighbor's front yard.
Nothing special about that. I made cookies and we went over to introduce ourselves. He laughed and slammed the door in our faces. Little did we know, this was the beginning of our worst nightmare. A few days later, I was out landscaping our new yard with my husband, and we just laid some bricks.
He was on his knees, making sure they were level, while I stood beside him and handed over the bricks. Our neighbor then walked by and yelled, “Well, I can see who wears the pants”! My husband and I looked at each other, totally perplexed. Then, a few months later, we got a puppy.
Our other neighbor let us know she witnessed the guy's son throwing lit-up matches over the fence at our puppy when he was in the backyard.
We found about 50 matches in our yard. Then she also had to call the authorities because his other son broke the lights on her garage and defecated on her welcome mat (all captured on her home video system). About six months later, I got a complaint about our dog's barking and ended up with a $500 fine.
It was ridiculous. Our dog never barked, unless someone walked by or came to the door.
We had letters from all 16 surrounding neighbors attesting that our dog never barked, but the letters were not admissible. We sold the house and moved shortly afterward.
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My neighbor was a single mom with a teenage daughter.
For the first few years, we more or less got along. I helped her move furniture in, listened to her complain about her work, and ignored the smoke that billowed off the adjacent back deck. I don't know what happened, but one day, she just absolutely lost it. Suddenly, everyone was out to get her, myself included, and she began to call the authorities for everything.
Once, she called them because the garbagemen put my trash can too close to her driveway after emptying it. Usually, she would call them when I watched TV at 9 pm because she thought any noise coming from my house was a pointed attempt to keep her from sleeping.
However, the craziest moment was when I was having an argument during the summer. I had some windows open, and she called the authorities.
She told them that I had been recording an argument that she had with her daughter and was playing it back on loop to torment her.
When I was a kid, we had this dude living next door who seemed like a nice guy. This is the mid 90s and he had a neon business, so he was doing pretty well for himself. Then, he got together with a crackhead and his house slowly started going down the drain…literally. At one point, his septic system went up and since they were lighting up every dime he made, he decided that he was just going to make a cesspit.
I wish I was joking.
We live on the East Coast in the mid-Atlantic, so it gets hot and humid come July. Thanks to this guy, our entire neighborhood smelled like a temporary toilet at a mid-summer festival for about three months. Fast forward to January, it’s nice and snowy, and we come home to our house being broken into. Our computer is gone, the TV is gone, and a bunch of movies and medications are gone.
Officers show up and they start dusting and looking around. They go outside and lo and behold, there are tracks going from our side door back to the neighbor’s house. Of course, they denied everything and are at least smart enough not to keep the stuff around after we got home.
They were not smart enough to use different names; they pawned everything though.
Needless to say, we had new neighbors within a few months of this incident.
I grew up on a small farm with cows, and turkeys. Across the street, there was a small produce farm.
When I was six or so, we got a new neighbor. He had been a corporate lawyer in New York City and then woke up one day, said, "I really hate my job, I'm going to buy a farm and raise exotic animals". This guy did not know much, but by gods he had a dream and he wasn't going to give up.
He and his wife were both city folk, born and raised in New York City. They moved in during the winter and he asked my dad a lot of questions about pens, fences, vets, and the works. Spring came and I was awakened by frantic knocking on the door. It's the wife, Jen, panicking because, "It smells like poop! Is there a problem with the sewer? Who do we call"?!
My mom starts laughing, which frustrates Jen more. My mom explained that it was spring and the produce farm across the street just laid down their fertilizer.
My mom had to further explain that fertilizer is just a nice word for cow poop. After she left, we could hear her screaming at her husband that she hated it here and this was the dumbest idea he's ever had and she wants to go back to the city.
Keep in mind that our houses were pretty far apart, as we were both on six to 10 acre lots. She could really project. They got some emus and llamas shortly after. This is like 1990, when most people had never even heard of an emu at this point.
My father is suitably impressed with the livestock, less so with the fencing Arthur chose.
It was wire fencing with pretty large holes in it. Large enough for both the llamas and the emus to stick their heads through...and then they'd decide they were thirsty so they'd snake their heads back through a lower hole and get stuck that way.
Arthur would then come running to our house for help getting his animals unstuck before they drowned in the water troughs.
This happened at least once a month for over ten years. Arthur never changed the fencing, despite my dad asking him why he wouldn't change the fencing or at least move the troughs into the center of the pens.
They've since moved, but I'll never forget the zaniness of runaway emus and llamas, fantastical escaping pygmy goats, or Jen freaking out because it smelled like poop.
There's a particular type of person who seems to feel like they're the only thing standing between society and its complete collapse.
About six years ago, my downstairs neighbor was one of those people. She was aloof and paranoid, and she imagined threats from almost everywhere, which made the fact that she thought of herself as some kind of secret agent all the more annoying.
The said neighbor was always trying to find ways of getting me to move out of the building.
She would 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 would also frequently yell at the people who would stand on the corner to smoke.
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 dope. Then, one afternoon, I found a homemade attempt at an official FBI document posted in the building. It had atrocious grammar, a poorly Photoshopped seal, and a distinct absence of any legitimate contact information.
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. I stood outside of her apartment while staging my own fake phone call. I said, "You should see the notice; it's terrible! Hah, yeah, it's like they didn't know that impersonating a federal official is an offense!
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 prison time"!
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 from that location, but for the rest of the time that I lived there, the lady never bothered me again.
This happened to my parents before they had me and my siblings.
When buying their first house, which is our current family home, they arrived on their motorbikes to view the house. After deciding on wanting to buy it, they greeted the neighbors. The neighbors expressed how thankful they were that the "biker couple" didn't buy the house, then proceeded to rant about their dislike towards bikers...not knowing my parents were the biker couple.
As you can imagine, it didn't go down too well when the pricks noticed the bikes. But it gets even more interesting—a few months after their initial chat with the neighbors, my parents were sitting in the living room minding their own business when they heard an explosion. They ran outside to find both of their bikes engulfed with flames.
They called the fire brigade who put out the fire. One of the firefighters approached my mom and pointed out that there were matches laying around and that it was more than likely an arson attack. My mom didn't pursue it with the authorities for God knows what reason, but while in her fit of rage, she told my dad:
"Whoever did this is going to break their right leg".
Coincidence or not, a week later, one of the neighbors came home with his right leg in a cast.
I lived in a room with a private bathroom that was off of my landlady’s house. I was rarely home other than to sleep, so generally, little annoyances wouldn’t bother me. However, her 19-year-old daughter was terrible.
She was taking time off from college and living back home. She would hang out in the room directly next to mine and scream full volume at her mother pretty much every day.
They weren’t normal arguments either. Her mother was always very calm and reasonable, while this girl would throw child-like tantrums because she didn’t like what her mother was making for dinner or because her mother wasn’t paying enough attention to her. It was the kind of stuff toddlers complained about.
Usually, I would just tune it out, but I worked an overnight shift on weekends and needed to catch up on sleep during the day.
Unfortunately for me, she had the weekends off, and it seemed like that was her favorite time to scream for hours on end.
And the cherry to top it all off? This girl also fancied herself a singer and was trying to get herself into a performance art program at some college. She would practice for her auditions in the room right next to mine. Her voice sounded like a dying cat.
The headache just from listening to her in the next room never seemed to go away.
My roommate and I had an elderly couple in their mid-70s who lived directly below us. They were sandwiched between our apartment and the one below them. They would stay in all day, every day, and only went out at the crack of dawn for a walk or a couple of times a week to shop.
Even though they lived underneath two people, they expected total and utter silence at all times.
They complained when we walked around. After the first time, we made a pointed effort to be more light-footed by removing our shoes, etc. We had carpets, but they still complained that we walked around too much.
They also complained that they could hear us go to the toilet. One time, I was lying in bed, without any music, surfing the web, and I got up to use the washroom.
As soon as I shut the door, I heard my front door open and a chill ran up my spine. Thinking it was my roommate, I shouted out, "Yo"! However, I heard a strange voice in return.
I stepped out of the bathroom, and there was my downstairs neighbor. He had let himself in and was complaining, saying, “All I can hear is banging all day"! Meanwhile, I had been in bed for the last few hours.
I had to drive him out amid his protests of, "But your door was unlocked," as if that was an invitation to come in.
When I lived with my parents, we had a knock at the door one day from our neighbors across the road.
They were all flustered and told us that someone had stolen their car the night before. Apparently, the wife had seen a strange-looking man wandering around the street late at night. He had apparently been looking into car windows that were parked on driveways, including our cars.
The next morning, their BMW was gone, including the keys, which were hanging by the front door of their house. They "assumed" the strange man looking in car windows had somehow fished the keys from the house via the letterbox. The whole thing sounded very strange. To not call law enforcement when a man is literally peering through car windows on people's driveways was strange enough.
Months later, the neighbors got a divorce and sold their house. That's when the insane truth came out. Turns out, they'd made the whole thing up, and had dumped the car for the insurance, as they had fallen on hard times. Apparently, their story hadn't held up well, and they were found out.
Who broadcasts a story like that? Why make yourself look stupid for not calling law enforcement when seeing a strange man eyeing up cars? And then tell all the neighbors about the man?
My first apartment living away from home was in a small complex filled with retirees.
Once I was walking to the bus stop before class, and I saw a garbage can smoldering in front of our building. It wasn't flaming, but there was a hole burned through it, and the plastic around the hole was melting. It had been a dry spring, so we were worried it might start an actual fire.
My ex ran inside and got the apartment manager. When she came outside with the maintenance guy, who removed the can, she yelled at my neighbor's window, "HEY YOU! What's the deal here"? Apparently, this old man, who lived across the hall from me, had beginning stages of dementia.
He was cooking a steak in his kitchen.
When the meat lit on fire, he didn't know what to do, so he threw the entire pan in the garbage. However, the can started melting, so he thought it'd be a good idea to throw the whole thing out the window onto a garden full of wood chips.
Hence, we nicknamed him Mr. Fire. He'd glare at me all the time and complain whenever I was sitting outside.
He hated my cat and always assumed I was a smoker. He would say, "Young people and their smokes. You better not smoke around here. The lady down the hall from you is on oxygen, and she can smell it". He was eventually taken away to a retirement home after flushing his diapers down the toilet, bursting a pipe, and flooding the laundry room.
I was in a car accident when I was young, maybe eight years old. I had my two sisters—one younger and one older in the back seat with me, and in the front were our babysitters who were very close family friends. We went off a curb on our very own road that was notorious for accidents and the car flipped several times.
It was the middle of winter in Northern Vermont.
We had tons of snow and it was cold out. We were all okay as it was a low-speed accident, but the Jetta doors had crunched in and the only way we could get out was by kicking the cracked windshield out.
While our babysitters did their best, we couldn't get out. By that time, the person whose lawn we had rolled onto came down. He was very nice, but he couldn't get to us either. He told us he would go get his parents who lived just up the road to help.
He returned with his parents and my babysitters' faces were a mixture of disbelief and concern. You see, my babysitters are Black, and the guy's parents were their next-door neighbors who were EXTREMELY supremacist. They would shoot in the air and in the general direction of the family's home, shouting "American and proud"! on basically every even remotely patriotic holiday.
It came to a head one year when they shot through two layers of the fence that our babysitters' father had installed out of worry for his many kids. Now, while analyzing our situation, the faces on the parents of the guy were a mixture of disgust and amusement.
I'll never forget what they said: "We aren't lifting a dang finger for these losers," and how they turned away, chuckling to themselves.
The guy was embarrassed and apologized on behalf of his parents. A few minutes later, a fire truck arrived and they broke open the doors to help us out.
I was freezing and confused as were my sisters. That act of hate has always stuck with me. I sincerely hope those two jerks met a painful end.
I lived across the street from a duplex that housed a bunch of awful people. The first year I lived there wasn't too bad.
My one neighbor was a reclusive guy, and the other was a woman with three kids. The only problem was that the woman wouldn't watch her kids at all. They would be playing on the road all the time, and during the summer, they were up until midnight every night.
The worst part was none of the kids were over 10 years old. One of them continually bounced on a pogo stick, and I would hear that annoying sound until midnight. Every night I would fall asleep to a sound I can only equate to people getting busy on a bed of springs.
When the reclusive old man moved out, things got really bad. Every few months, people would move in and prove themselves worse than the last tenants.
The first group of people would sit on their porch all day yelling at people who walked past them. That was an interesting few months.
Then, they got replaced by these people who were just plain loud. They didn't seem too bad until one night when the girls of the house got into a fight at 2 am. They started beating the daylights out of each other in the street. One girl fled to her car and side-swiped three cars on the road before crashing.
The last lot was the worst. They were obviously dealers and had swarms of people in and out of the place. They also blocked traffic, which was annoying but still tolerable. We put up with everything until they started throwing insanely loud parties every night. They would constantly throw their empty bottles into the street, so there was broken glass everywhere.
I finally moved out.
We had a cranky old man named Earl who lived a few houses away. He kept security cameras in his front yard pointed at the street. He would dash out to scream at children for "trespassing on private property" when they set one foot on the drainage ditch across the street from his house. He even threatened to injure our dog once.
He was just a weirdo in general.
In addition to Earl, we had "The Chanter". She was a woman who lived at the end of the street and she was a member of a local cult. She would chant weird mantras while walking down the street, knocking on everyone’s door, trying to get us all to convert. She was scary but relatively harmless.
No one compared to the guy at the end of the street.
We called him "The Rabbitmaster". He was the scariest one of them all. This guy used to be the landowner of our housing division, and he set all the rules for what we could keep on our property.
We started noticing domesticated rabbits appearing all over the neighborhood a few months after we moved in. This guy had a rabbit breeding mill in his backyard where he was breeding hundreds of rabbits to sell for pelts and meat.
Eventually, he got charged and decided to flee the country and run off to Mexico.
Before he did, he released all his rabbits. We kept seeing them roaming around for many years later.
I have crazy neighbors. They are actually very nice as far as neighbors go, but the family is totally dysfunctional. They have two grown up daughters living there, along with their teenage daughters and their boyfriends. One has a kid.
There are roughly 10 people living there ranging from five to 70. They keep the yard mowed and keep to themselves mostly, but they are entirely insane.
I actually like them for two reasons. First, they are notorious and crazy around our town, so everyone leaves them alone, so there are not many misdemeanors around us.
Second, they are entertainment. One morning, my aunt was visiting. We are on the front porch and I am telling her about all the neighbors. I was telling her a story about how one of the younger granddaughters got in a fight with her boyfriend at two in the morning on a Tuesday night.
They are screaming at each other, walking up and down the street, explaining that something like that happens once a week. What happened next was too perfect. Like clockwork, one of the daughters comes out screaming back at someone and gets in her car. Her daughter comes out and tries to stop her from backing out.
She grabs a shovel from the back of the truck and starts hitting the front windshield of the card, shattering it.
They call 9-1-1. Meanwhile, the granddaughter with the shovel calls her biological dad, who lives down the road. He picks his daughter up. Two minutes later the officers show up, but she is gone.
I have hundreds of stories like this.
We had one house on my old street growing up, which had just changed owners. A seemingly nice couple and their kids moved in, and they were okay at first. Their kids were a bit annoying, but they were around six and nine, so the rest of us on the block ignored it since we were teenagers.
One day, the kids began screaming profanities at us and throwing stuff.
We just started avoiding them because they were nuts. As a result, they told their mom that we were being mean. So, she started riding her bike up and down the street telling parents what their children had done wrong to her boys.
None of the parents took her seriously, and they told her to take a hike many times. She was way more dangerous than we'd ever imagined.
We had an empty lot on the street where we would dig tunnels and build paintball fields. Every single morning we would find everything on the field destroyed.
We found suspicious attempts at traps made and all kinds of weird stuff. There were boards with nails laid behind my neighbor's tires. I'm certain the mom was sending her kids out on missions to get back at the parents and us.
The unprovable damage went on for about a year.
Peace returned when she moved, and we all grew up.
My neighbor sprayed our hedge between our houses with something that destroyed it. Initially, we planted it there next to her cyclone fence so we wouldn’t have to look at her. Everything we’ve planted there dies, and they always start dying from her side. She’s super nosy and is always watching out the window, which is why we plant things there!
She also moved her in-ground sprinklers onto what I think is our property.
They are touching our driveway, and she sets them to go off in the middle of the night when our cars are parked there. She refuses to set them for when we’re at work because it “interrupts her yard work time”. The water spots on our cars are from the irrigation water, and they leave huge, white, amoeba-shaped marks down one side of our car!
I paid someone $250 last year to use acid to remove them and they were still faintly there. She actually had the nerve to suggest our son park his car there because the color of his car won’t show the water spots as bad! Her husband walks up and down the backyard fence and whistles at our dog to make her bark, then the wife complains to us about our dog barking.
They're real peaches.
I lived in a complex that was a rectangle with a central courtyard. All the units' doors faced inward. It was a very social place, a block away from the beach, and all the neighbors were friends, except for one couple. We would congregate in the courtyard almost every day to barbecue, picnic, or just kick it at the end of the day.
It rarely ever turned into a full-blown party, but occasionally we would have courtyard parties for the complex and invite friends over. This one older couple didn't realize they were moving into this kind of complex and they were on a mission to stop any socializing outdoors.
They would call the owner anytime people were talking outside.
They would yell through their screen door at people to keep it down, even in broad daylight, and if anyone was gathering outside after dark, they would call the authorities. I lived next door to them, and any time I would watch TV at night, have friends over, or even talk on the phone at night, the guy would bang on the wall like a maniac.
We ignored them until they took things too far.
The woman eventually convinced the landlord to remove the patio furniture and, ultimately, the BBQ, which belonged to me. The landlord said I could have it back but had to remove it from the premises. They managed to get the landlord on their side, which destroyed the good vibe we had going.
Then one day, a young family with their new baby had a picnic in the courtyard.
They were sitting on a blanket because the patio furniture was gone. The nasty neighbors actually came outside and started photographing them, causing them to take their baby and flee indoors.
That was the last straw. We wrote up a petition and sent it to the landlord with an ultimatum—shut them down, return the patio furniture and BBQ, or we will all move out.
I got signatures from every single tenant in the complex. The nasty neighbors moved out the following month.
On their moving day, we all threw a going-away party in the courtyard, without them, of course. When they were finished moving, and they locked the door for the last time, we all sang, "Nananaaana! Nananaaana! Hey, hey, hey! Goodbye"!
The summer before moving into an off-campus apartment my junior year, I was staying in free on-campus housing as a part of my RA compensation.
I had bought two bicycles for me and my girlfriend to ride around on during the summer. After taking them for a ride and locking them up outside the residence hall, we went out to dinner.
We came back to find the bike lock clipped and one bike missing.
After reporting it and having law enforcement collect pictures of the logos, I didn't hear back for a month or two. I moved into the off-campus apartment and eventually got a phone call telling me that the officers had located the bikes. I went down to the local pawn shop to find my bike in perfect condition.
I rode it home overjoyed and glad the officers found it relatively easily. I remember reading the letters from the state's attorney updating on the status of the case when I made the connection to the thief’s name. It was my next door neighbor. We shared a wall between our bedrooms and I'd frequently hear his girlfriend yelling his name through the wall.
It turns out he was the guy who took my bike and just happened to move into the unit next to the person he chose to rob just months before.
Our bulk trash day is on Saturdays. We were doing a lot of remodeling in our house so we had a lot to put out over the course of two months.
The last set of stuff we put out, our neighbors parked in front of it on the curb. I woke up the next morning to find a little tag on my trash that basically said, "Sorry, we couldn't get to your trash".
We were irritated because the junk had to sit on the corner for a whole week because we weren't about to haul it back into our backyard to just haul it back out again.
And guess what? They did it again the next week! What made us mad was that they didn't park there at any other time in the week, they did that ONLY on Friday nights, so the trash couldn't be picked up on Saturday mornings.
So, I took the initiative and parked at the spot on Friday night, then got up early Saturday morning to move my car.
The trash finally got picked up after three weeks. Fast forward three or so weeks later, the idiot did the same thing to his own trash, so his bulk stuff stayed out there for multiple weeks. I just relocated my junk to the other side of my yard so my stuff could get picked up while his stuff stagnates.
When I decided to move out of the city to a small town, I found a great deal on a nice house, so I jumped on it. Most of the neighbors were really cool, and we all got along. However, there was one set of neighbors who were terrible. They had a junkyard yard full of stuff, including a big above-ground pool and kids' toys everywhere.
The woman had no teeth and was built like a foosball man, and the guy was this little mousy, beaten down man. She would stand in the yard and curse at him in her inebriated, toothless lisp. You'd occasionally see him just sitting in his truck at the park for hours just to get away from her.
Two weeks after I had moved in, I saw the authorities hauling her off and him bleeding from the head.
She had hit him with some kind of lawn mower part. He went knocking on doors for bail money to get her out. They also went around the neighborhood asking to use our water to fill their huge pool.
Naturally, we all said no, so they paid their water bill to get the service turned on to fill up the pool. Then, when the water got shut off again, they let it stay off for nine months and used the pool water to flush the toilet.
They did this on a yearly basis. The guy on the other side of me discovered they were pilfering water from his house when the guy crawled under his house and rigged a hose to his water main and buried it. They did the same with electricity and cable.
The cable company came out one day and dug up my yard to find the cable lines that went to everyone else’s house around him.
One day, I was chilling in my pool when I heard what sounded like a shelf full of glass tipped over, and I heard the woman screaming. She had thrown the contents of their kitchen cabinets, the cabinets themselves, and part of the counter in the front yard then injured him.
Another time, she had gone around taking Christmas decorations out of other peoples' yards and putting them in her own. Officers showed up.
She tried to hit one of them with a giant plastic candy cane and got pepper-sprayed. It was like living in a reality tv show.
Pxfuel
We lived in what looked like a mansion-type house that was rented out to three different families. My family lived on the bottom floor, and a family of six lived above us—a mother, father, and four daughters from four to 13 years in age. Every morning they would stomp around the house like little elephants and make as much noise as possible to wake each other up so they could prepare for school.
After they were ready, more often than not, they would refuse to actually go out the door to go to school. They would screech as loud as they could until their parents decided to let them stay home. Since we were on the bottom floor, we had free reign of the backyard, whereas the other two families barely bothered to use it.
They would frequently dump garbage and other random stuff off of the balcony into the yard and never bother cleaning it up. We would have to tend to it daily since we had two dogs and an outdoor cat at the time. It was a nightmare. The landlord eventually kicked them out, and when he went to inspect their apartment, he made a disturbing discovery.
Their apartment was full of soda bottles, as well as mold growing in multiple rooms with foul odors everywhere.
I moved into what was supposed to be student housing.
It was a normal house with locks added to all the rooms to make them separate with a shared kitchen, etc. I shared my kitchen/bathroom with two other people downstairs, and there were about eight other people living on the upper floors. There was a weird couple who lived above me.
The guy looked to be somewhere in his 40s or 50s, with a handlebar mustache and very long black hair.
The woman looked to be somewhere in her 70s. I thought she was his mother at first, but apparently, they were a couple. She had trouble getting around and would often be sitting outside the front door in her wheelchair puffing away.
It didn't take long after I moved in for things to take a bad turn. When I moved in, I had cleaned up the whole garden. I was hoping to chill in it when the weather was good.
I started finding smoke butts and other little things tossed in it, but there were a bunch of different balconies facing it, so I couldn't exactly accuse anyone unless I caught them in the act. One day, while I was studying, I heard a crunch in the garden, so I went to check it out.
There was a whole garbage bag sitting by the door, and I could still hear people rummaging around on the balcony directly above me.
By the time I actually got outside, they were already inside and ignored my yells, so I threw the garbage bag back onto their balcony.
This finally got them to come out, only for them to complain that I had all this space that I wasn't doing anything with, so why shouldn't they be allowed to store their garbage in my garden?
I told him to take a hike, and if he did it again, I would call the authorities.
He immediately backed off. A day or so later, I invited some friends to hang out at my place for the first time. We were just talking, playing some video games, not exactly being loud, but not super quiet either. Around 9 o'clock, the banging on the ceiling started.
At first, we thought someone was doing some late-night home improvements or something, but the banging came every time someone laughed a little louder.
Apparently, they expected us to stop talking after 9 pm, which didn't seem reasonable, but I was willing to discuss it. I rang their doorbell tried to see if they would come to the balcony, but they just kept banging on the floor.
This became a recurring theme over the years.
About a week after the first garbage incident, I was sitting on my bed, reading, when I heard a splat in the garden. Again I went to go and see what it was, and to my surprise, I found a whole roast chicken there, with all the bones and some of the meat eaten off.
I called up to my upstairs neighbor again. I clearly heard him moving around, but he once again ignored me.
So, I lobbed his chicken back through his open balcony door. He came out mad, but I was already way angrier at having to explain to him again how throwing trash into my garden was not okay.
According to him, this wasn’t trash—it was edible food. He'd just had part of it for breakfast, and being the animal lover he was, he liked to share it with the cats of the neighborhood.
This also explained why the stray cats in the neighborhood liked to pick my garden for their fight club.
I explained that food scraps attracted all kinds of unwanted things and were even more of a pain to clean up, so if he really wanted to help animals, he should either adopt a couple of cats or go help out at an animal shelter. The next thing I knew, he called the authorities.
Then, one afternoon, I came home from school and found a chicken running around in my backyard. I confronted the neighbor, and he immediately confessed that he had taken my advice. He said he always wanted chickens, but since he didn't have enough room on his balcony, he decided to keep them in my garden instead.
I told him I was having chicken that night, and in 15 minutes, I would decide if I needed to go to the supermarket to get it or if it would be fresh.
In the meantime, I told him, I would leave the front door and the door to the garden open.
I heard him fumbling around in the garden a couple of minutes later, and he finally stopped throwing stuff down there. Eventually, the old lady got sick and had to be moved to the hospital. He stopped paying rent, so they were forced to move.
Apparently, their apartment was a scene straight from Hoarders. There was garbage stacked to above head height, in some cases to the ceiling.
While trying to clean it out, they had discovered all kinds of junk, including phone books from thirty-five years prior. I would regularly hear some of the workers run out onto the balcony and dry heave from the smell. It took them two weeks to clear everything out.
My mother's HOA, which was for a community of only 41 homes, had some pretty interesting characters in it. About ten years into living in this small community, my mother decided to run for their board to try to get some community improvements done and to take her turn in a board position like most long-term residents.
She was elected president of the board.
There was an older family in the neighborhood that included a husband, a wife, and their near middle-aged daughter. They were well known for being extremely nasty and bossy. The wife thought that although she wasn't on the HOA board, she got to determine how the dues were spent.
She claimed that she knew the community money wasn't being saved or spent properly and that she could make up whatever rules for the community and her family that she wanted to.
Like most HOAs, ours had a standard for how front yards looked, what could be planted in them, limits on things such as the colors of the house, doors, and trim, and what you could add to the house and yard.
This family took water from the neighbors by rerouting their drip hoses and also put in fake flowers and yard decor. When they were caught having messed with the drip hoses, they trashed the waterline and tried to blame it on the neighbors they were pilfering from.
They were harassing the board, the community, and their closest neighbors in person, by phone, and by mail. They stored trash in their yard and planted invasive, unapproved species of plants. To top it off, this family hadn’t made one HOA payment and owed about $7,000 in dues, late fees, fines, etc. When the board found out, they banned them from attending meetings.
That did not go over well.
As a result, the wife began harassing my mom, who was President of the HOA board. The woman then served my mother with a summons and notice of complaint. Once we read the notice and calmed down, I decided to do some research.
While the company firm, letterhead, and case information led to a real case, it turned out that it wasn't a case against my mom. It was a case against the woman by her former neighbors from the community she'd lived in before.
She had taken the letter, scanned it into a computer, edited the information to make it seem like the case was filed against my mom and to match the circumstances, and had it reprinted in color onto fancy stationery.
She had even traced over the lawyer's signature in pen very carefully, so it looked like a proper signature. Needless to say, the firm was not thrilled when we called them and told them what this woman had done.
This is about my neighbor two houses over.
We were good acquaintances, probably almost friends; but everything changed in a single moment. I worked for the guy for a little bit—he was actually my boss at the time this happened. I noticed that he's really big on using people's stuff when they aren't around—like one time, he used a guy's woodworking tools while he was gone.
I told him multiple times, "Hey, I'm cool with you borrowing my stuff but just make sure you ask. I also don't like unscheduled visits, so call or text if you want to stop over". I just wanted to let him know where I stood if he wanted to borrow some more tools from me or whatever.
I had let him borrow a 17 mm impact socket from me once.
Then, two weeks went by and I assumed the jerk probably lost it. Whatever...I just told myself never to lend out stuff to him again. Well, after another few days, he said, "Hey, you weren't home so I returned the socket and borrowed another". Yes, he hopped over my fence mid-day while I was gone, opened my garage door, returned the socket he borrowed, very scratched and marred up, and helped himself to some of my other tools.
He told me this a week after he did it, out of the blue, as if it was no big deal. That was the breaking point for me. I told him to stay the heck away from me, my house, my family, and my property.
I have had lots of awful neighbors and different stories to tell about each of them.
However, the worst ones took a five-foot-wide strip of my family's land. They tried to claim an easement across our property to get water access and they built a new house, with their side entrance staircase encroaching on our land. Our property line had been marked by an old post in a marsh, and theirs by the end of the road.
When their road was paved, it was extended farther onto their land than it had been when the road was just made of dirt. We woke up one day to a horrific surprise—we believe they had some friends take our post out of the marsh, as it was just suddenly missing, and they then recorded a deed to their property, claiming their boundary was five feet farther than it actually was.
At the time, my grandfather's health was beginning to decline, so my grandparents decided to settle with them and have that be the end of it.
That turned out to be a big mistake. They took it as a sign of weakness and tried to file an easement on our property to allow them to drive over our land and use the end of our road to launch boats.
We denied them the easement in court, so in turn, they decided to build a big ugly house way too close to ours out of spite.
I had just moved out from my parents' house and into my first rental with my best friend. It was a semi-detached, two-bedroom house in a good area. However, we still ended up next door to a nightmare family. The father was usually seen in dirty grey sweat pants and a white vest, with a can in hand.
He wore a gold chain, had bad tattoos, and a handlebar mustache to complete the look.
He didn’t seem to be fully employed, but he did have a large, high-sided blue box van which was parked in a way that permanently blocked any sunlight from getting into our front room. Occasionally, he went out in it for an hour or so.
He had two wannabe kids who rode around in de-restricted scooters that didn’t seem road ready or insured. They would go buzzing down the road at 3 am in their tracksuits without helmets, crashing into stuff.
One day, after screaming profanities at one another, one kid stormed off into his room and put on drum-and-bass at full volume.
This caused the dad to go into what sounded like Hulk-smash mode. I could hear and feel him thundering up the stairs kick the bedroom door down. The following sounds I heard sent chills up my spine. There was screaming, furniture breaking, repeated cries of pain, and what I was certain sounded like a person being bounced down the stairs.
I contemplated calling the authorities when the one kid burst out and took off on his scooter. This scenario would happen roughly once every six to eight weeks. Our back gardens were separated by a waist-high fence, so there was no privacy. It was impossible to have any kind of BBQ party with friends without one or more of them trying to bum drinks and smokes off the guests or inviting themselves over.
I would regularly come home from work to find our garden gate wide open. I was obsessive about keeping it shut. I set up a webcam which confirmed these guys were regularly letting themselves into the back to see if I had remembered to lock the back door.
I printed off a screenshot of one of the kids peering through my kitchen window and gave it to the father. I also complained to my landlord and got a better gate and lock installed.
If it wasn’t that, it was their dogs. One would bark from dawn until dusk at his own shadow.
He would step it up a notch if we were in the garden. This would fire up the other dog, who could easily jump this fence and charge. Their only redeeming feature was a lovely Russian blue cat with three legs. I obviously hated living in that madhouse as it was at our place 90% of the time.
We adopted him unofficially.
When my wife and I were newlyweds, we lived in a bad area. Our next-door neighbor was a guy named Mike and his girlfriend, Lucia. Mike and Lucia were still married to their former significant others, and Lucia was pregnant. Mike and I became buddies.
We played video games, hung out on our balcony, and talked often. One day, I found out a truly dark secret—Mike was also harming Lucia quite often.
I came home one day, and she asked me to take her to a shelter. I came over, and Mike had destroyed their house, the soon-to-be baby's dresser had been smashed into pieces, all the tables were turned over and broken, and Lucia had cuts all over her body.
I called my wife and asked her to come home from her friend's house.
We patched up Lucia and asked her if she wanted us to call the authorities or just take her to the shelter. She declined both. She had the baby, and postpartum hit her like a train.
She would sit in her living room while Mike was at work and leave the baby in his crib crying all day long. I'd go over with my wife and help her change the baby and give her a break.
Mike would work all day and ignore the baby while at home.
One day Mike was outside, and his face looked different. Lucia had tried to harm the baby while it slept. The baby was successfully resuscitated, and Lucia was taken into custody. She got probation, and Mike became a serious boozer. Several years later, I saw Lucia on a racy website.
We had a new property manager move in below us. It was him, his wife, two kids, and a couple of small dogs. We had lived there for a year without any problems. Once football season started, it got really noisy. Every weekend they would have a big game party at their house that would go on well into the night.
We eventually complained.
Then, we suddenly started getting letters from the leasing office saying we were making too much noise, which was ridiculous because we were computer nerds. We were either sitting at our computer playing games or on the couch watching TV. We didn’t even invite people over for parties. The only thing that would happen was that the floor would creak when we walked on it.
It was a ridiculous complaint compared to their parties that went on until 1 am. They also started setting up “random inspections” on our apartment and said there were “safety or cleanliness issues” we needed to correct, or we would be evicted. It got to the point that if someone accidentally dropped something, the manager below would start banging on the ceiling and eventually come up the stairs to tell us to keep it down.
He was a very aggressive guy. One day, it all came to a head when they were blasting their music on the balcony until 1 am, and we had to get up for work in the morning. One of my roommates walked out onto our patio and shouted, "It's 1 am! Keep it down"! The next morning, the property manager came storming out of his house, fuming, saying they had better never speak to him like that again.
We responded, "Well, what are we supposed to do then? Call the fuzz"? He replied, "Yeah! Whatever". So, the next time it happened, we called the authorities. They drove by, and the neighbors lowered the volume. Once he was out of sight, they put it back up.
So, the officer drove a little ways away, got out of his car, and walked back to catch them.
He talked to them and said he was already filing the paperwork to get us evicted. For the next hour, they were pounding on our floor and shouted insults up to our windows.
The next day, I was walking to the store and passed their balcony. They were all on it, and I heard one of them say, "Is that one of them who called the officers last night"? So before going to the store, I went to the leasing office to complain.
They told me one of my other roommates had also made a complaint. The office offered to move us to another unit. When I got back home, I found my roommate recording them harassing us and sent the file to his boss. A couple of days later, there was a big ruckus down below, and they were being moved to a unit two buildings over.
There was finally peace and quiet.
The house next to mine became a rental property. The woman and her daughter who moved in seemed nice enough. Through getting to know her over the next few months, it became apparent that she was a little slow and not very together.
One day, I was replacing the faucet in my kitchen and the shut off valve under the sink snapped off while I was trying to close it.
As you could imagine, water started getting out all over the new laminate floor. Knowing I had no exterior water shut off on my house, I quickly ran outside to shut off the water main to the house.
My kitchen was quickly flooding, and I was desperate to close it ASAP. It was buried under a foot of sand, so I am frantically digging to access it and close it.
Anyone looking would see that I am panicking and very engaged. At this time, my neighbor comes out and stands next to me.
She tried to start a conversation with me, but I ignored her as I had no time for that. She continues to talk to me, even though I do not talk back. She tells me how her daughter asks her to make some Chinese chicken.
She goes into detail of how she made it, how it tasted, and what else they ate with it.
Needless to say, as I am soaking wet, dirty as heck, and finally got the valve closed, she continues to talk to me as I get up and go back into my house to clean up all that water. As I left, she just stood there and continued to talk as if she had an audience.
My wife and I refer to that as the “Chinese chicken incident”. We ended up moving a few months later, but that was the last time we spoke to our neighbor.
My neighbor was an elderly woman who pretended that she couldn't speak English anytime my dad or I tried to tell her what she was doing was bothering us.
We had heard her having full-blown conversations in English with the landlord. I even had my girlfriend, who spoke the same language as her, try and talk to her. As a result, she called my girlfriend names.
She would water the plants in the complex at 5 am almost every day, using the faucet that is right below the window where my bed is, waking me up.
Then at 6 am, she would go back into her apartment and bang on something for the next five hours. She also had her Christmas lights up year-round and would have them on until 1 am every night.
However, what offended me the most was that she would feed the stray cats.
The landlord told her to knock it off and threatened her with eviction, so she put the cat food in front of MY apartment. The landlord caught on after yelling at me a few times but insisted that since he couldn't prove she put it there, he couldn’t do anything. So, I had about five stray cats who would come around, thinking I had food for them.
I’d have to say, my childhood neighbors were the worst. I grew up in a relatively wealthy neighborhood that was built a few years before the recession. There was a family who really over speculated, couldn’t pay their mortgage, and ended up declaring bankruptcy. They had multiple poorly behaved kids who would run wild all day and cause trouble.
One walked right into our house when we were out. Another time their kids pelted a neighbor’s car with rocks, and when the neighbor asked them to pay for damages, the parents told them to take a hike because they were bankrupt. They were pulling a fast one where their house was constantly on the market for half the value of the others in the neighborhood.
Whenever someone would call about the place, their realtor, who was a family friend, would say it was under contract. This went on for years and began to destroy everyone else’s property values. To top it off, their house wasn’t properly maintained. They kept derelict Christmas decor up until the summer, and the HOA couldn’t do anything because of the bankruptcy.
I lived behind Bob Berdella, the notorious figure from Kansas City.
I lived there for five years and I talked to him daily, as he was the head of the neighborhood watch. Little did I know that he had also been living a secret life, kidnapping people and sending them without remorse. The day he was caught, it was because one of the young gay men he captured escaped and ran down the street wearing nothing but a dog collar.
Because I listened to tapes and CDs at the time, I had not heard anything about it on the radio. I drove home that night to a neighborhood full of officers, and it took me by complete surprise. When I found out the truth, I sounded just like every other neighbor in that type of situation:
"But he was such a quiet and nice guy..".
They used excavators and backhoes to dig up his yard, and they tore down my fence as well. Eventually, he was given life in prison, where he eventually passed. His house was later sold and demolished. It was very weird.
He had a store in a flea market, plus four skulls in the window with a sign that read "Final Four". One was from a victim.
My aunt, who was a single mother at the time and ran a daycare service in her house, lived next to a psychopath.
After a bad ice storm one day, my aunt had a bunch of tree limbs fall into her backyard. Her neighbor's husband came over and cleaned it up for her; you know, just being a good neighbor. In turn, my aunt thanked him with a case of drinks; you know, just being a good neighbor.
Well, his wife took that as flirting, and so began a one-sided feud against my aunt. It was a while ago, so I don't remember everything. What I do remember, though, was horrifying. She tried to run over my aunt's dog once. Another time, she called child protective services and told them my aunt was a night worker and working at her house during the daycare hours.
Probably the worst one though was when my aunt found a bit of grass near the house burnt. She's old high school friends with the fire inspector, so he came and confirmed a fire was started using a propellant. My aunt took her to court over these things, but I don't remember what came of it.
I'm pretty sure she at least got a restraining order.
I lived next to the craziest family I have ever known for about six years. The couple had five kids and they were very religious. For the first few years, they seemed normal. My sister and I hung out with a couple of the siblings and we had fun.
Then, one day, their father passed, and everything went NUTS. When my sister broke up with her boyfriend of three years, the one boy took this as some type of invitation.
He began by texting her more often than usual, which was no big deal. Then he opened up about how he was depressed, dropped off a dull samurai sword, and told her he couldn't handle having it around.
My sister said that they would find help for him, but he was not a fan of that idea. One day she got strep, and the guy decided that, as her self-declared best friend, he would text her incessantly, come over, sit in her room, and comfort her.
When she told him no, he responded in the most chilling way: "I'm not taking no for an answer! I will tell your parents to let me in because you need me"! She eventually stopped talking to him, but he did not stop talking to her. The texts gradually got weirder.
He'd tell her how pretty she was, how much he loved her. He would send her the lyrics to love songs about how he wanted to touch her.
On her birthday, he left a love letter inside her car. Then one day, she officially got back with her boyfriend, and he went absolutely bananas; calling her a tease, saying he was going to harm himself and that he would "end her if she told anyone". At that point, my dad took her phone to the authorities and filed for a restraining order.
I lived next to a hipster couple with two daughters who made me afraid to go outside during the daytime. For reasons unbeknownst to me, they would scream and curse at me when they would see me—especially the wife. She would actually follow me around until I would go inside, screaming insults at me.
They would pound on my door at all hours of the day and night without giving up.
I stopped answering my door when they would knock because the wife had come over with one of her daughters the last time I did, screaming at me to give her my landlord's phone number.
I figured it was to call him and complain about me. But that's not even the worst part—one day, I came home to find a broken window on a wall that only faces their house. I was pretty quiet and kept to myself, so I had no idea what I did to offend these people.
My neighbor had two big dogs that barked a lot when she was gone from home. Polite requests to do something about it always resulted in, "It is not my dogs barking". Take note that this was often late at night when we were trying to sleep.
Sometimes, she would leave them outside all night alone to bark while we tried to sleep close by. In our county, barking for more than one hour is unlawful.
We took her to a barking "court," actually a hearing, where parties present evidence in front of a "judge," We took her there four times and she always lost. She also never paid the fines.
Finally, her soon-to-be ex-husband came over and took the dogs to the animal shelter. He was tired of all the neighbors calling him to complain even though he did not live with her.
She could not get them back from the county shelter without paying the fines.
But this story has a tragic end. They were ultimately put down. She had never trained them and had no control over them at all. They were basically dangerous and un-adoptable. She eventually lost her house to foreclosure after her divorce. It was a bad situation for all concerned.
We used to live next door to a horrible couple. They seemed nice at first, all smiles, but they soon dropped the façade. There are a bunch of stories that lead to us moving houses, to a much nicer place later on. We decided to get chickens, first checking with our closer neighbors if this was okay, to which they all agreed.
However, when we upgraded from three to six chickens, the couple to our right sent a complaint to the council, claiming we were keeping non-domestic animals. A quick phone call to the council confirmed we were fine to keep chickens, and our reply to the couple included the fact that the Latin name for a chicken is Gallus Gallus Domesticus.
Another time, we received a note saying that after we took our Caravan out for a holiday, they noticed how much light was blocking out, being in our front yard.
They asked us to remove it, and also to kill three of our chickens. We obviously refused, so they told us we were going to pay for a fence, taller than the Caravan and blocking out even more light, to be built between our properties.
We also refused.
One day, we came back to see builders erecting a fence and tearing up the picket fence on OUR property. Apparently, they had been told they could remove it by the meaner of the couple. My dad threatened to call law enforcement and the builders just left, causing the couple to confront my dad later that day.
After this incident, they started being vile. They would bang cupboard doors and literally laugh like cackling witches, all of which we could hear through the walls of our home. They would drive slowly alongside my mum walking my brother to school and glare at her for minutes at a time, and once, one of them yelled out the window at my dad, calling me and my siblings brats while we were there.
Soon after this, we moved out, but we have in on good authority that their new neighbors are extremely loud compared to us, so I don't think it'll be long before they start on their new neighbors.
One evening, while having some quiet time at home playing COD with my spouse, we heard a tentative knock on our door. Not expecting company, I hopped up to discover our neighbor's 14-year-old daughter peeking through our door and looking rather pained.
I opened the door to greet her and she immediately started talking like crazy. Her story was probably the weirdest thing I've ever heard.
You see, her grandmother, who was staying with her for the night as her parents were at a wedding, was unclothed. And, she has just peed on the floor.
Now, I am not unaccustomed to having very bizarre situations happen. For some reason, I tend to be a magnet for other people's problems that are, in a word, unique. But, I admit that this one had me more than a bit flummoxed.
I then asked 20 questions…"Has she hit her head? Has she taken any medications?
Has she been drinking booze? Is she slurring her speech"? Debating between calling law enforcement and going over there to see what is going on, I against my better judgement, took the 14-year-old to go grab some clothes so she could just stay with us until her parents got back.
I also wanted to see if this was a stroke, drunken episode, or mental health crisis. So, yes, the grandmother was unclothed and did not care. There was a puddle of pee on the floor, which I tried to avoid but sadly no luck as it was everywhere.
She offered me some pizza, which I declined. We finally got a hold of the parents, and mom was so angry.
She told the 14-year-old to go over there and tell the grandmother to go to sleep. So, as it turned out, the grandmother was a pill popper.
I washed my shoes, and rested well in the knowledge that I helped a worried child. But, I will forever have that whole evening burned into my head.
My neighbors had...problems. They had constant, nightly blowouts and physical fights. They were together but not married, so they were constantly on and off.
The dad was an avid drinker and the officers knew him by name. Once, when we were sleeping, we heard the screaming and cries of their son (who was my little sister's best friend). A minute later, the boy was knocking on the door for my mom to help.
She pulled him inside and a few minutes later the mom showed up, bloody and beaten up. She asked my mom to lock the door and held onto her son. She wouldn't call the authorities out of fear they'd take the son, so my mom pulled the couch out and made them a makeshift bed.
She locked the door and made the mom food while my sister and the son slept. But that wasn't the end of it.
About an hour after they'd showed up, the dad started kicking our door and screaming. My mom fought with him through the door for over an hour, and he eventually left.
My mom then arranged for a place for them to stay in a women's shelter an hour or so away and brought them there the next night after he thought they'd already left.
She spent two weeks sneaking as much as she could to them until she found an apartment back locally and felt it was safe for them to come back.
My current neighbors are the worst. I'm in the Navy and so I'm often away, leaving my wife to deal with things alone. Our neighbors recently got a Staffordshire Bullterrier and rather than walk it, they would just throw it into their yard to do its business.
After a while, it ran out of places to go in its own garden, so it started to jump into ours to take a dump.
My son is also scared of dogs, so he feels unsafe about going into our own yard to play. Since I'm at sea most of the time, there isn't a great deal I can do apart from telling my wife that I'll deal with it when I get home.
But now the dog is growling at my wife in our own yard as it spends so much time there that it probably thinks it's his. I told my wife to leave the gate open and if the dog jumps over, it can go outside to do its thing.
The next day, my wife opened the door to a man screaming at her and calling her a witch because his dogs ran away and might have been run over. He then threatened my wife and son over the issue and left. So my wife called the authorities and to her astonishment, the jerks next door said we were being unreasonable by not letting their dog do its business in our garden; our property.
Anyway, he got a warning from the officers and an order to control his dog by building a fence or risk having it taken away by the dog warden.
I had this one downstairs neighbor who lacked any respect for the fact that our building wasn't sound-insulated.
He would listen to loud music mostly through the day and sometimes late at night. This lasted for months, but nothing had yet been done by the landlord. One day, though, I think he discovered that he really, REALLY loved Gnarles Barkley's "Crazy".
He decided it was appropriate to play it half a dozen times in the course of an hour, and I just had it.
So, being a karaoke jockey and having my equipment on hand, I decided to show him what "loud" was. I connected my speakers to my computer through my console, then I went hunting for the absolute worst "karaoke cover" of that same song.
I remember vividly it was a cover by this creepy fat basement dweller in his late 40s and it was horribly off-tune.
I played it with the speakers flat on the floor so he'd get the full brunt of it. I played it three times in a row, loud enough that he would definitely suffer the consequence of his lack of respect. And, wouldn't you know it, he never played that song again.
He started being much more conservative in his volume levels. He left that summer and I never heard "Crazy" again from his collection. I wonder why.
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We lived at a place that had a seemingly lovely couple next door. Then, one Friday night, we had a decorating party.
We were stripping wallpaper at 9 pm when the dude from next door turned up, angry about how he had to work the next day, and saying that we were keeping him up. My first thought was that his problem was not my problem. However, to be considerate, we stopped.
I even put a bottle of wine by their door the following day.
A couple of weeks later, on a Wednesday night, 2 am, they were having a noisy party, and these sounds like a sled thumping down the stairs were coming from their place. We ignored it and let them get on with it, despite the next day being a standard workday.
That was a big mistake on our part because the Wednesday night partying became a regular occurrence. We dealt with it and still did not confront them.
Then, one Saturday afternoon, the woman knocked on my door while I was playing video games and said, "Can you turn your TV down? It's driving my dog crazy". I was a little miffed as it was Saturday afternoon, a pretty decent time to be noisy.
Still, I turned it down. The noisy Wednesday parties continued. Then, one morning at about 9 am my son, who was one at the time, woke up crying.
I went in to check on him, only to hear a "BANG BANG" on the wall and a "SHUT UP"! being shouted through it.
I flew into a rage. I knocked on their door and unleashed it on my neighbors with no mercy. I also said that if I could deal with their Wednesday night parties, they could deal with 9 am baby noises. I had my rant, noted their house number, got on my laptop, and signed them up for every single piece of odd mail I could.
I felt much better after that.
The town I lived in was odd because we didn’t really have a designated “bad” part of town. Instead, there would be a couple of nice houses surrounded by bad ones that looked condemned, even though they weren’t. All of the houses across the street from me looked like that.
My house happened to be the nice one on our block.
I don't think any of the people worked because they would sit out on their stoops all day in their NASCAR pajama pants, puffing away and being loud. They usually weren’t too bad, though, and they kept to themselves. However, my next-door neighbors were AWFUL.
They would cook outside a lot, and it smelled horrendous. That was bad enough, but then they crossed the line—one day, they brought home a muskrat and cleaned it with a flamethrower.
The smell of burning rodent fur was not something I ever cared to smell again.
I was able to handle their six kids yelling and screaming all day. I was able to handle their yard being full of trash and picking up whatever garbage should come into ours. But I just could not handle the smell of rotten-smelling fish, burning fur, and deceased rodents.
My husband instantly vomited from the odor on more than one occasion. It was gross.
We had a neighbor who appeared to have some mental issues. Their entrance was opposite ours down a track that nobody really owned. So people visiting us had a tendency to turn around by driving up to the front of their gates, then reversing into our driveway before heading back out again.
They absolutely hated this.
Their next move made me absolutely livid—they decided to chain up their garbage bins a few yards in front of their gates so that nobody could turn around there. They didn't put their trash in the containers because they were paranoid that the waste collectors might go through it, so they burnt it in their back garden.
Whenever we had building work or deliveries, people tended to drive past their driveway and park on the lane.
Despite it being an access road for the fields behind, it was rarely used, and the builders could always move if someone needed access to the area. However, the neighbors hated this as people would have to drive within a few yards of their gates to get to that part of the lane.
So, they would threaten workers and occasionally throw eggs at their vehicles.
They eventually bought that field, which was watermeadow, and they decided that they needed to get rid of all the channels in it because they wanted to keep sheep on it. The aftermath of this was brutal—it messed up the drainage and caused flooding problems for everyone. These neighbors were infamous throughout the village and had caused problems for other neighbors as well.
When we got chickens, this neighbor used to wake up early and start making crowing noises to try to agitate the cockerels. We had to record her doing this to show that it was wholly provoked by her, and that the cockerel wasn't waking HER up in the morning.
I had neighbors who were a pair of 80-somethings and were sister and brother. They lived in the apartment below me in a duplex home, and the landlords despaired of what they were going to do when they finally passed, because their place was like a cave of old people stuff.
The sister cooked in their dark kitchen with lots of oil that had been splattering everywhere for years.
So, it seemed like there was a fine, sticky, yellowish brown film of oil on everything, which then picked up all the dust. Basically, if you had allergies, it was the last place you wanted to be invited into.
No matter what it was in their place, if it didn't smell of oil, it smelled like pipe smoke and other musty stuff. They decided I was going to be their replacement daughter.
This sounded nice when the brother said he would happily take out my garbage, but then I found out that they were also going through my garbage after I went to work, because they started commenting on what I was eating and drinking.
Then, they got wildly offended when I started taking my garbage to work with me and accused me of not trusting them.
This was also somewhere around when I told them I didn't need them to make food and leave it outside my door. It wasn't that they weren't being nice, it was the way they would then make sure I told them for days how grateful I was and what a great cook she was.
After we crossed that rubicon, they started complaining about everything from how late I stayed up to my company.
They whispered about my private life to the neighbors and generally made themselves a super PITA. I lasted 18 months there and realized why the landlords couldn't stand them.
Apparently, they did this to every normal tenant who moved into the other unit, but because of their age and because they paid their rent, they couldn't be evicted. Really, they were the worst neighbors ever.
My neighbor would always try to stop and talk to me, usually when I was running late for work, which wasn’t awful. The awful thing was that he would look out the window and wait for me because he always managed to open the door and come outside as I happened to be walking by.
He would then promptly go inside after I would tell him I was running late.
One night at 11:40 pm, as I was putting a new decal on my car, that same neighbor came outside, practically climbed in, and insisted on helping me. He then proceeded to try to talk to me afterward.
Another time, while I was backing out of my parking spot, he was pulling out of his while in my blind spot. He honked his horn, so obviously, I stopped before I hit him.
Instead of pulling forward and leaving like a normal person, he put his car in park and came over.
He knocked on my driver-side window and asked me if I even looked back before I started backing out. He was really aggressive. And the worst part of all? He also jokingly said to me that he had seen me bring a lot of men into my apartment.
I really didn’t like that guy. He was very creepy.
We moved to Florida and our neighbors there were the most messed up people I've ever met. There's almost too much to get into, but here are some highlights: They threatened to poison our dog, they threw stuff in our yard all the time just to try to get a reaction out of us, and they set up two webcams in a window to watch our house.
It goes on and on.
One day, a shoe landed in my pool while I was swimming, so I, being a 13-year-old kid, picked it up and threw it back over the fence. I kid you not, they called the authorities and told a total lie—they said I threw a shoe and it hit their grandma in the head while she was watering her plants. It almost got me in serious trouble.
To this day, I swear we didn't do anything to provoke their horrible behavior. We were friendly with them until they started acting out.
I had a neighbor who went to my landlord to ask if he could borrow my parking space for a short time.
I didn’t have a car, and he had two, one of which he was trying to sell. So, when my landlord asked me, I said it wasn’t a problem. Two years later, he still had made no move to sell the car. Instead, he would sit in it, in my parking space, next to my house, day-drinking until he would be too sloshed to walk home.
Any time I needed to access my bins, which were at the far end of the parking space, he would be totally rude about it. He wouldn’t move his car or help. He would just sit there, drinking, and watching me, trying not to scratch his mobile man cave.
Any time someone came to visit me and parked across the back of him, he would give them a minute to get into my house and settle in.
Then, he would show up at my door intoxicated and insist they move their car because they were blocking him in.
The guy couldn’t drive anywhere—he was trashed. The most frustrating bit was when my landlord came to check-in. This guy happened to be sober enough to have gone out for a drive and the landlord parked in the space. That's when things got interesting.
The neighbor showed up at my door, asking that my friend vacate his space.
The landlord appeared and explained it was his car. The neighbor immediately backed down, began smiling, acting grateful, and said, “Don't be daft. It's your parking space”! I had to correct him that it was actually MY parking space that I was letting him BORROW.
We had some neighbors who were your typical bums that we made the mistake of being nice to.
It was one of those situations where doing one nice thing meant they felt comfortable asking for more. For example, if we would let them use our phone, they would later knock on our door late at night and ask for a ride to the store.
It wasn’t a one-time thing. They were constantly asking for rides to the point where it became ridiculous.
Not only that, but they would get mad if you asked for gas money or if you couldn't drop everything you were doing to give them a lift right then and there. One time, they asked for a ride to the grocery store and made us wait outside for OVER AN HOUR in a bad area of town while they did a week's worth of shopping.
We put our foot down, but they had the nerve to ask if they could just borrow our car instead. And here's the kicker—Neither one of them even had a license! The entire time we lived there, it was pretty much a cycle of one of them asking for a small, reasonable favor like borrowing a cup of laundry soap or using a cell phone that would later escalate to something ridiculous.
When we would refuse, they would stop talking to us for a couple of weeks; then, the cycle would start over again. They also kept getting cats that they would let roam around the busy apartment complex. They refused to have them neutered because "they might want to be fathers someday”. Thankfully a local group went around trapping and fixing stray cats, so theirs kept disappearing and returning a few days later.
My previous neighbor would always fight with her husband, constantly accusing him of cheating on her. There were continual shouting matches through the walls. The dude seemed generally confused about where the accusations were coming from. The worst part was the crazy loud sounds that I could hear fo them knocking boots multiple times a week, usually around 7 am to 8 am each day.
For the longest time, I couldn't understand how they could go to bed so mad at each other and then go at it like wildebeests first thing in the morning.
Then, I got into a conversation with the husband in the hall one day, and I had a shocking revelation—he told me he usually had to be at work at 6 am each day! Soon after that, he figured it out, so he left her and their two-year-old.
Her boy toy moved in almost the next day. They fought almost as much as she did with her ex, only this time about money, and it usually ended with threats of harm. I sent the authorities their way several times. Her ex showed up one day, and they got into a huge shouting match.
She struck him, he struck her, grabbed the kid, and stormed out. I called officers again.
Eventually, the child was returned, and she filed a restraining order against the dad. The fights and threats from the new boyfriend continued. Social services showed up and took the child away.
The fights got worse, almost always about money. Then, one day, I got home, and my bedroom reeked of chemicals. I couldn't quite place what they were, but I didn't want to sleep in there.
I reported it to the landlord, who questioned the neighbors. We searched the building laundry room, which was right below my bedroom.
The smell disappeared after a couple of days, and I was able to air out and return to my room, but we couldn't find the cause. I would come home and find faint traces of the smell again about once a week, but it would always disappear in the evenings.
Not long after that, I heard shouting and banging at the neighbor’s door. I assumed it was the baby daddy again. I walked to my apartment and had my hand on the doorknob when I heard firing. I retreated to the far side of my place and called for help.
I heard the assailants shouting as they stormed through the neighboring apartment. What they were yelling made my face go white: "He's in the parking lot! He jumped"!
The boyfriend had jumped from the second-story balcony and was racing down the alley. The assailants unloaded their clips into the parking lot and neighboring building, trying to get him.
Then they disappeared into the night. Law enforcement came to investigate. The boyfriend was declared wanted, and the girl was declared missing.
The source of the chemical smell was also found. They had turned their apartment into a lab and were cooking illicit substances. They were the worst neighbors I've ever had.
We lived next to this big guy in an apartment building, with our front doors inside a hallway. Now, he was a nice enough guy, but he was always cleaning a puddle up in front of his apartment every other day. We'd always ask him if everything was alright, and he'd talk some incoherent nonsense about how he hates management.
So, out of curiosity, I asked management when I happened to be in the rental office. The lady's response made me burst out laughing. She rolled her eyes and said, "This idiot fills up his tub to the brim, and sits his fat butt in the tub. The water, of course floods his entire apartment, and comes out into the hallway, and this idiot has the balls to blame us somehow"!
I pretty much said, "Geez, that sounds rough," and scurried back to my place. If the tub story is really the truth, this guy must be dumb as rocks.
I lived on a farm, and we had one guy who was a real jerk. He took sheep from us. In some cases, he had shorn the wool off them, sold it, and returned the sheep, (although we suspect he sometimes ate the sheep too). He demanded that we front the bill to fix the fence despite it being between our two properties and refused to split the costs.
He also had someone else's bull jump into his property and used it to service his cattle for two years. When the owner tracked it down, the guy demanded to be paid the agistment costs, or he wouldn't return it. Oh, but it didn't end there. This guy owned a house on the property that he rented to his farmhand.
The farmhand found him there one day going through his things and was told he wasn't allowed to leave the property under any circumstances while under his employ.
Understandably, the poor farmhand quit immediately and wanted to work for us instead.
We lived next to a family when I was younger and they were the worst people.
They were loud and obnoxious, always playing their music loudly and throwing trash on our lawn. They also had a Great Dane who would always run into our lawn and take huge dumps, sometimes on our porch. My dad talked to them a couple of times and they said there was nothing they could do.
My dad took matters into his own hands one day and started picking the mess up with a shovel to catapult it back into their yard. But that's not even the best part—they had kids our age who were not very nice. One day, they were playing in an inflatable pool that was placed on the hill.
We were watching them play when all of a sudden, the best thing happened...
The whole pool tipped over, and those little jerks went sliding down the hill. They stood up, covered completely in their dog's mess. Best day ever.
When I was growing up, the neighbor’s kid would taunt me like there was no tomorrow. It started when I was about two and she took my favorite dinosaur ball and popped it.
Another time, I was invited over for a summer party, and she pushed me up against their shed and tossed a basketball at my head over and over. It wasn't just their daughter, though.
One time, they were backing their car out of their garage and ripped the passenger door off because it was left open.
Their next move made my blood boil—they called the authorities and tried to blame my brother when he was about five or six, saying that he must've snuck over to their house, gone into their garage, and opened the car door when they weren't looking.
Several years later, they called the authorities on me because their inflatable snowman went missing from their front yard.
At 10:30 pm, a state trooper was knocking on our door, and I had to wake my parents up to talk to him. As it turned out, one of their foster kids broke it and buried it behind their house in the woods.
I had a neighbor who lived across the street and would park his commercial van on the road, impeding traffic.
His son, who was 40, also lived there. Although I was irked by the van, I hated them for something much worse. One day, the son decided to burn some leaves and some of the insulation from some wiring, which was not permitted, as we lived in the suburbs with closely-packed houses.
The fire jumped out of his control set his yard ablaze, along with his neighbor’s and five other lots. The fire burned three homes, lit up a car, and melted four fences. It nearly burnt down a deck and almost collapsed an above-ground pool. This all occurred mid-afternoon, around 3 pm, when everyone was still at work.
The only reason it didn’t burn the whole block down was that an officer saw the black smoke from the highway as he was passing through, turned back around, and came to the neighborhood. Once he quickly realized he needed more than his standard-issue fire extinguisher, he called in the fire department.
They put out the fire, but when they shut off the hydrants, the water system broke.
A pipe up the hill ruptured and was forced out of the ground. The pipe at the front of the subdivision a quarter-mile away, uphill, ruptured as well. A pipe three blocks away in a cul-de-sac also broke and began bubbling up through the garden in the center.
Needless to say, it was an absolute disaster. Our entire pipe network started to fail because of that idiot's wrongdoing. Plus, the temperature had recently risen above freezing, which made things worse.
For two months, the water company kept finding leaks and main breaks. As soon as they replaced a section, something somewhere else in the subdivision suddenly failed.
We constantly had yards and streets being torn up because of it. What made it even worse was that the authorities couldn't even charge him with anything because nobody actually saw him being irresponsible.
My neighbor to the rear of my house had farm animals, including a couple of mini-horses, a donkey, and some other unidentified creatures.
He kept them in pens that backed up directly onto the privacy fence, separating his property from mine. The fence was the farthest possible distance from his house and the closest possible distance to mine, about 15 feet from my kitchen window.
He didn’t tend to his animals' living conditions as he should have. The result of this was horrifying—I frequently stepped outside my house and smelled the sweet aromas of barnyard animal waste. I couldn’t open my windows because of the odor, which got worse in the summer. I had to call animal control on him, and they ended up taking two of his full-sized horses away because their hooves were rotting off.
We were zoned for residential and agricultural, so there were no grounds for him to get rid of the animals.
Believe it or not, my worst neighbors were awful because they were too nice. They pretty much lived in their driveway. Every day that it wasn't raining out, they would be out on their lawn or driveway, and they would hang out there all day long.
They'd talk to all the neighbors, play with their kids, and generally be nice people.
They would BBQ on their driveway a couple of times a week and invite everyone in the cul de sac over when they did. Although it may sound pretty cool, it eventually became too much to handle. This went on every day and every week.
Having someone knock on your door twice a week every week, especially after you have turned them down time and time again, was too much.
I couldn’t walk my dog or even just come out of my front door without being greeted and forced to make several minutes of small talk. It got to the point where coming out of my house gave me anxiety because I just wanted to be left alone.
Even my kids were getting tired of their kids insisting they play with them every time they tried to go outside. They were just killing us with kindness, and it was driving my whole family nuts.
My dad had a neighbor when he was young who played his radio loudly all day, even when he wasn't home or was gone on vacation.
But he didn't realize my dad is an evil genius. Every time he left the house and his radio was still on, my dad would go and trip the circuit breaker to his condo. One day, he sees my dad, who was an electrical engineer, and asked him why his breaker kept tripping.
Was it faulty wiring? No, my dad explained, the loud radio was probably just putting too much strain on the circuit when left on all the time. My dad suggested he should try turning it down or off when he wasn't home, and see if that fixed it.
So, the man tried it, and surprise surprise, the circuit breaker stopped tripping! He was very thankful to my dad for helping him with that annoying electrical issue.
My neighbor is an overweight middle-aged woman who seems to have a bad knee only when my kids are outside in the summer.
It quickly got weird. If they are playing in my fenced in backyard, she'll pretend to fall down so they can help her up. I went from, "Kids, you should help her, that's what neighbors do"! to "She fell AGAIN? It seems like she only falls when you guys are playing.
She doesn't fall when I'm working in the garden" to "If she falls again, come get me".
When I started saying that, she seemed to be able to get up pretty quickly. I had to go over there in August and tell her that I can't have my kids helping her get up anymore, they are seven and eight years old and they can't give her medical aid.
I get that she is probably lonely, but three or four times a week, I'd hear her yell, "Kids, Kids! help me up, I fell AGAIN".
We lived beside our neighbors for about three years with no real problems, although we could tell they were a little off. The man kept to himself, but I was friendly with the woman and adored their daughter.
One night, the husband and wife began brawling in the front yard, and he slammed her head into a brick post on their porch.
The MPs were there, firefighters—the works. The whole street was lit up with emergency lights, and they both got carted off. I honestly closed my blinds and locked my doors when I first realized there was something going down.
It didn't end there. A couple of weeks later, they had both been released from wherever they were. We were out of town and got a call from a co-worker asking if we were ok. Apparently, the lady had come back, and they got into it again.
She hopped into her car, drove straight into the garage/house, backed out, and went on a high-speed chase with the MPs through the neighborhood.
She side-swiped a cruiser as she turned onto one of the roads headed towards a gate on the base. They started raising the barriers, but she wasn’t stopping. Never before did I ever deal with craziness like that.
When I moved into my house, I made an effort to meet all of my neighbors.
Instead of being a creep and knocking on doors, over a few months, I just waited until I saw someone outside and casually walked over to introduce myself. Well, one night, a Black neighbor of mine was having a big loud party, and I walked over to say hi around 8 pm.
It was a birthday party for one of his grandkids, but there were folks all out in the yard, so I thought it was okay to say hi. I said "Hey, I moved into this street a few doors down a couple of months ago. I was just stopping over to introduce myself". He said, "Do you look like the color that's supposed to be in this yard"? I apologized and went home.
He passed of a heart attack a couple of years later; probably from being such a hateful jerk.
Pexels
My old neighbor would stay up until midnight on most nights, but once or twice a week, he would stay up until 2 am partying in his garage and blasting music.
I was in school and had to wake up early to go to class and get homework done—I didn't want to hear it. I talked to him a couple of times, and he said he would cool it, but he didn't.
I finally got tired of it and called the authorities.
I was shocked with what happened next—turns out, he was friends with them, so they didn't do anything, and he retaliated by putting sugar in my gas tank. The next night, I called the sheriff's office. Same story, except now they were getting mad at me for calling them because a guy was blasting his music in the morning.
So this time, he put anti-freeze on our patio while I was at school and poisoned my dog. She started having kidney problems and seizures. However, I couldn’t prove anything, so I bit my tongue until one day I spoke to the maintenance guy. He told me that the guy had lived there a long time and was good friends with the landlords.
He also told me that he had the authorities called on him numerous times. Apparently, he argued with his wife often, broke things in their house, and drank nonstop. We told him the story of our dog, and he said he wouldn't put it past him to do something like that.
We got the vet to pull lab work to confirm anti-freeze in our dog's system. He got evicted shortly after that.
I lived in the same apartment for 18 years without any issue. I also had the same neighbor beneath me for all that time and throughout my childhood.
She never complained about anything until one day, I moved my office chair, and she started banging viciously at her ceiling so I could hear it. She then started calling us names, so I took my fancy office chair and threw it away just as a courtesy to her.
But it didn't stop there.
She continued to bang for every little thing. If my phone would accidentally fall, she would bang on her ceiling. If I got out of bed, she would go banging. She finally got tired of banging and would just turn her TV on to the maximum volume.
To make matters worse, one day, she walked upstairs to my apartment after texting both my parents, who no longer lived with me, saying that I was following her around her apartment, mimicking her moves from mine.
She came upstairs, knocked on my door, and asked me why I was following her, even though I wasn’t. I was sitting on my bed watching The Flash. She would also harass my parents by calling and texting them.
The landlord had to take her to court for reasons I don't know. She just made living there a nightmare.
When I was in high school, our across-the-street neighbor declared himself a member of the Montana militia even though we didn’t live in Montana or anywhere near it. He decided that paying taxes and car registration fees were unnecessary since he was now a sovereign nation unto himself.
He knew that eventually, the government would be coming to claim his properties, so he made sure to prepare.
His plan was absolutely bonkers—he removed the fence to his backyard, lined up his three cars side-by-side, and replaced the fence. He then welded all three cars together via a couple of long bars across their bases and left his yard hose on for days, possibly weeks.
When they finally came to take his cars away, they removed the fence and tried dragging the first car out.
The one car carried the other two along, which pulled them all deep into the mud. They had to get several trucks and a welder out to take care of the matter.
We had built our house around the same time as our neighbors did. Everything was ok at first, but then, things started to go wrong. It started with the fence. They wanted the paneling on their side. We said whatever; having the supports or on our side meant that my siblings and I could climb the fence.
Then, they wanted a more expensive fence.
We came in under budget with the house, so we agreed. Then, they wanted the fence moved a yard or so onto our property. That’s where we drew the line and said no way, which caused them to react. We would get pebbles thrown over the fence when we were in the garden, or the wife would knock on the fence and pretend it wasn't her.
It started escalating when she would yell at us. When we came home from school, we would have to wait for the garage door to close fully before we could get out of the car, or she would be out in the front of our house screaming at us holding a broom or a rake.
She was crazy! She even tried poking a hole in the fence so she could watch us. We got out of that house quickly, which was unfortunate because it was the house of our dreams.
The next-door neighbor had a small yard with two dogs—a boxer and a rottweiler. She rarely ever walked them, so they were pent up with energy and not well socialized.
Whenever people or dogs walked by outside, they would go nuts and jump/tackle the mutual wooden property fence that separated us. As a result, every year, the fence needed to be replaced.
She was never willing to pay for the replacement or even split the cost.
My parents would end up footing the entire bill each year for a new fence because my dad did not want to make a big deal. The neighbor also has a very tall tree in her backyard that we tried to get her to trim and maintain so that strong winds wouldn’t bring the cross branches down and damage the surrounding houses and people walking by.
However, she would ignore us.
In the end, karma came for her in the worst way imaginable. On one very windy day, a branch snapped from that tree. It crushed her boxer.
We moved into an apartment and our neighbor informed us that she owned half of the driveway. Cool, whatever; it was a huge driveway and it had more than enough room for all of us.
After a month or so of living there, she divided the driveway in half with a bunch of rocks. Still fine, as we had plenty of room. But over the course of two months, she slowly moved the rocks closer and closer to our apartment.
It got to a point where we would have to physically move them out of the way to get in and out of our driveway.
The landlord finally got a survey done and found out a shocking truth—she didn’t own ANY part of the driveway! From that point on, she was forced to park her car on the road. Serves her right for lying to us and taking advantage of our kindness.
When I was a kid, we lived across the street from a couple who had teenage children. The sister brought home random dudes at least two to three times a week. They were so loud that my parents called the authorities on her once because they thought she was being harmed, which wasn’t the case. Her brother had a lucrative business selling illicit substances and always had customers hanging out in the driveway waiting for him.
His parents were completely in the dark and kept bragging about how well he was doing with his "construction job" because he bought them a new car and a boat. The sister babysat me once but left after an hour because she had to go get busy with somebody.
Her brother showed up to take over, and I made him help organize all of my stuffed animals.
I don't remember if he was high, but he organized the bejeezus out of all of my toys. We left that neighborhood as soon as the drive-bys got more frequent.
They insisted that we pay to have a gate installed between our backyard fences so that they may use our above-ground pool as they please, preferably when they invite friends over. When we denied it, they threw a hissy fit and found an excuse to "punish" us. You see, the pool was going through some expensive issues with leakage into the yard.
They threatened to call the fine-happy HOA because the water was leaking into the yard they rarely used and their dog was allegedly getting sick from drinking the water. Not wanting to deal with that nonsense (and also wanting to clean our own backyard of the pond that began housing frogs), my father spent his birthday day off from work in the Texas heat digging a trench and installing a pipe so that the water could drain.
The neighbors came outside and harassed dad the entire time he was digging the trench, telling him it would've just been easier to install the gate. Would've been easier to install a shovel into their frontal lobes, those freaking profligates.
I lived in a pretty nice apartment, but there was one big downside—I shared a toilet with another person on the same floor. To get to it, you had to leave the apartment and enter the attic that also had storage units.
The neighbor I shared the toilet with was a senile geezer who would never flush and seldom closed the door.
Pretty much everyone in the building had, at one time or another, walked in and seen him sitting on the throne, me more than most. He would even go on the floor sometimes.
I have no idea how he would do it, but occasionally I would walk in and find his mess EVERYWHERE—on the toilet ring, on the floor, on the walls, everywhere. One time, he let it rain on the corridor outside our apartments and it smelled something unholy.
I almost threw up right there.
Back in high school, one of our neighbors moved away and their house sold to this older woman and her mostly grown sons. She was a strange one. She cut down every tree on her property because of the "bad spirits" in them. The sons seemed to be popular, having people drop by at all hours.
All was relatively quiet until one day, while I was home alone, there was a knock on the door. I opened it, and my blood ran cold.
Two gentlemen in very nice black suits and dark ties then identified themselves as FBI and asked me if we were ever approached by a crazy lady or her sons to buy anything.
I basically replied that they are crazy and we don't talk to them, they don't talk to us. They hand me their business card then proceed on to the next house.
I look out the window and I see five blue Ford Tauruses, three red Ford Astro Vans, and one VIACOM truck that was being loaded with box after box from the neighbor's garage.
It turns out the sons were making those special cable boxes that got you all of the channels for free. After this, it was only the strange lady left in that house.
My current neighbor wants us to tear out our driveway because she doesn't like the fact that it's on a slant and lets water roll downhill.
She’s a loon. When the driveway was put in 25 years ago, it was all done by contractors and it is up to code. She’s threatened to sue us because her yard is at the bottom of the hill. We’re in Georgia and last year we had a BUNCH of rain—like, more than normal.
So of course, she had three inches of standing water.
She said she talked to a lawyer and apparently, he said her case was solid. Then, later, she corroborated everything with our builder neighbor across the street. When intimidation didn’t work, we came home to a fence separating our properties. I guess it was supposed to offend us?
Anyway, that was the best fence ever!
Guess what they say is true... great fences make great neighbors. She hasn't bothered us since then and we're both pretty civil nowadays.
I had a family living next to me. I had no idea how many people were actually living at the house, but I had briefly met four of the children and the father.
As far as I knew, they also had a mother there who recently had a baby. I had seen more than one toddler hanging around, and I believed their grandma lived there too. They always had a few extra house guests because we saw their conservatory made up with extra beds.
Nothing could have prepared us for the chaos they would bring. They were absolute slobs. Our houses were situated at the top of what used to be an old quarry but now had several hardware shops. They would bag up their garbage, and instead of putting it in the bins at the front of the house, they would climb up the fence and throw it over towards the old quarry.
Once, they tried to chuck an old duvet down there, and it got stuck in the tree.
Their children were filthy, lazy, and nosey. We couldn’t even take in a parcel delivery without seeing their noses pressed up against the window. Privacy became such an issue that when we replaced our garden fences after a recent storm blew them down, we replaced them with even higher ones than before.
I noticed that the neighbors on the other side did the same.
Some 15 years ago, when my parents and I lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we ended up befriending one of the neighbors and her two kids. Well, one day, we were all hanging out together when I noticed her son had some pretty bad bruises and a nice size knot on his head.
I just shrugged it off and we continued playing. Then, that night, the mother came over and made a shocking confession to my mom.
She said she ended the boy's life. She went into some pretty disturbing details, and she wasn't remorseful at all. When she left back to her house, my mom called the authorities immediately and she was taken to the station shortly after.
The worst part is, she vowed that when she got out, she'd do the same thing to my mom. We noped the heck out of Indiana and moved to another state.
When my boyfriend was 14, he was living with his mom and sister on a housing estate.
It was summer and he liked a bit of light in his upstairs bedroom, so he left the curtains open at all times. That included when he was getting dressed and after having a shower, so if you purposefully stared at his window, you could see him from his waist up (and only his waist up).
Well, their neighbor did not like that one bit. She went pounding on their door, yelling at my mother-in-law that her son was a disgrace, hanging around always naked and exposing himself to her daughter. My mother-in-law told her he had every right to do whatever he wanted in his bedroom, and that if they didn't want to see him all they needed to do was not to look.
A couple of days went by and lo and behold, the authorities showed up at the neighbor’s door. Turned out the neighbor had been filming and taking pictures of my boyfriend to show to the housing people as evidence of his wrongdoing to get them kicked out.
Except that the housing office called the authorities on her for taking pictures and videos of an underage kid and kicked her and her family out.
Public Domain Pictures
We grew up in one of the worst neighborhoods in my state. It was really rough. Anyway, 80s childhood being what it was, we used to ride our bikes everywhere, regardless of danger.
Our home street was divided into three parts. The upper and middle parts were relatively okay in the daytime. The lower part was off limits no matter what, because that’s where the creeps and dealers lived.
We moved out finally and went somewhere a lot safer.
Years pass. Our old neighborhood makes the news every so often for various outrages. One day, I saw in the newspaper that a woman had recently been found deceased in her house—she’d been sitting there for a month on her couch. It was already sad, but then things took a horrific turn.
When authorities showed up to deal with the situation, they discovered a big slab of cement in a strange place in the backyard. A neighbor told them that they’d frequently seen her at night sitting near and talking to the slab. If you knew how strange the people were in our neighborhood were, you’d have brushed this off as yet another weirdo.
Well, it turns out it was her husband.
Only they weren’t officially married, so when he passed on—it was suspected to be natural causes, surprisingly—she couldn’t live without his Social Security check every month, so she buried him in the backyard and kept up the pretense that he was alive and living with his out-of-state relatives.
We used to ride by that house frequently when he was already buried in the yard.
Oh, the 1980s.
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.
My next door neighbor in college. I wasn't really friends with him, but he was an OK guy I talked to a couple of times a week.
Strange, but nice enough to have a conversation. Then towards the end of the year, he told a friend on our dorm floor that he secretly stole girls’ panties from the laundry room downstairs.
Not just anyone's, but specific girls’. He even showed him the collection. This friend told the RA and after about two weeks he was kicked out of the dorm.
It took them two weeks because they didn't have proof, but all of the girls this guy said he'd stolen from mentioned they were missing panties. He came to me and asked if I'd put in a good word—naw dude, we're not cool anymore.
My old neighbor was a grumpy old lush.
He complained when we had our light on in our bedroom too late at night. He was also quite horrible to my girlfriend, even calling her names. Whenever I tried to talk to him, he wouldn't open the door or would run away. When I was at work, he would knock on the door to moan to my girlfriend.
Naturally, my girlfriend started ignoring him when he did this—and karma would end up getting him BIG time.
Unfortunately, one day he started knocking, and she ignored it, not realizing he was having a stroke. He went to a nursing home after that.
When our neighbor moved in and we met him, he gave my roommate and me bad vibes from the get-go. There was no reason for it at the time, but our gut feelings said he was no good.
For an entire year, almost every time we went out the door, he'd come out to our house to try to hang out. We couldn't even walk across the road to check our mail in peace.
Then he would walk up the road and stand in front of our house staring or pace on the road in front of it.
He started knocking on our door in the middle of the night, but there was no way we would answer it. When we would go out, we would come home to find him sitting in a chair in our yard like it was his house. He then started showing up at stores and other places we were at in town and tried to follow us around there.
It got to the point where we hated even going outside and couldn't hang out in our own yard because we felt like we were being watched. We complained to our landlord multiple times, so he warned our neighbor multiple times, but it still continued. Luckily, he got behind on his rent and was kicked out.
He messed up the house he was renting so badly that it took months to renovate it.
There were holes in the walls, floors torn up, and hundreds of empty bottles, burnt foil, and used needles.
I lived in a duplex that shared one large driveway with another duplex.
Parking could be tight, but all of us cooperated and made the best of it, except for one woman. She left a note on my car two days after my husband and I moved in, telling me not to park there because she didn’t like that I was "in front of her door".
I was at least 15 feet away from her house and that was the only spot I could park in without blocking anyone else.
I left her a note back explaining this. She banged on my door at 11 PM and screamed at us, calling me the c-word, and demanding that I get rid of my car. We eventually shut the door on her. The nasty notes persisted and were ignored.
I confirmed with my landlord that this is where I should be parking and he said yes, ignore her.
Then, she started barricading that part of the driveway, so that every day when I got home, I would have to get out of my car and move her stuff before I could park. This became a real pain in the neck when I broke my elbow.
She used her trash can, a pedestal with a birdcage on it, and a bench to block the driveway and I had to move all of them to park. I started just picking them up and gently moving them towards her porch. Then she came up with something else. She started putting Vaseline on them.
I grabbed her trash can and got a gloppy handful of Vaseline. Sure enough, everything else was coated in it as well.
I decided to use my foot to push everything up against her house. Mind you, nothing was damaged or knocked over, just moved. She called law enforcement and reported that she saw me vandalizing her things by picking them up and throwing them into her house, kicking stuff over, and smashing them into the ground.
The officer was angry.
He thought that I was the teenage girlfriend of the guy who lived there, not the adult leaseholder. So he pounded on the door yelling, "Sheriff's department! Come outside"! We went outside. He pointed to me and asked, "Are you the girlfriend!"? I resisted the urge to say something snarky in response to what I found to be a misogynistic and demeaning statement.
He went off on me saying, "Your behavior needs to stop right now, I don't know where you're from, but in [town] we do not tolerate this kind of disrespect blah blah blah"! Well, he didn’t know what he was in for. 15 minutes later, once we'd gotten a word in edgewise, he changed his tune pretty quick.
He realized he'd been misled by our neighbor. We told him we were sorry he got dragged into a petty parking dispute.
He told us he's been dragged into stupider stuff and told us that if she puts up the barricades again, to call them instead of moving it ourselves, to protect ourselves from false allegations.
In fact, he wanted us to call any time she does anything to harass us. She also received a mean letter from the landlord telling her to knock it off.
We got a mean note from her saying, "The reason I don't want you parking by my door is because you are trash! Your druggie psychopath girlfriend runs amok vandalizing!
I want nothing to do with you," among other things. We called law enforcement and she got spoken to by them, and the landlord sent her another mean letter. Hopefully, that'll be the end of it.
When I was 14, I had some neighbors who had about 10 kids.
I would ride snowmobiles with two of the younger kids during the winter. I went over one morning and had to wait for them to get ready. While I sat at the table waiting, I could hear some moans coming from upstairs.
I asked what was going on and no one said anything.
A moment later, the youngest son said, "Show him, mommy". The mom went to the fridge and pulled out a piece of toilet paper. She set it on the table in front of me and unrolled it. To my surprise, it was a baby's leg with a toenail formed on the big toe.
She explained to me that one of their middle-aged daughters had an abortion earlier in the week and when she got home she was not feeling well. When she went to the bathroom, "this fell out of her". I got up, walked out, got on my sled, and went home.
I told my parents about it a few days later.
Apparently, the rumor mill in our small town was running rampant with stories about how the girl was impregnated by her older brother, one of the kids I used to ride with. The image of that leg with the toenail is still in my memory.
It's not like the mom saved the leg to go back at the doctor for malpractice. She kept it as a talking point.
Freepik, cookie_studio
This happened over a year ago. I'm 29-year-old man and am a homeowner. I bought a house in 2019 from my uncle because he was well set and wanted to retire to his second home by a lake.
Before buying the house, my uncle warned me that the neighborhood has an HOA, but it only affects those who joined it and my uncle thankfully did not.
Besides that, the price my uncle was offering was half the home's value. I couldn't pass up the offer.
So I bought a house in an HOA neighborhood that wasn't a part of the HOA. I thought I was okay. I was so, so wrong. Right after I moved in, I got a knock at the door. When I opened it, I was greeted by an older woman with short greying blonde hair and a face covered in thick makeup.
She was holding a welcome to the neighborhood gift basket. She introduced herself as the president of the HOA and asked to come in so she could help me fill out some forms. I knew what she was trying to do because my uncle warned me she did this to every new homeowner in the area who wasn't a part of the HOA.
I quickly and bluntly stated I was not going to join her HOA. The change was frightening.
Her smile quickly disappeared and she started saying that I did not have a choice as all new homeowners are mandated to join. I told her I knew in advance that was a total lie, and that I will not be paying any dues or fines.
I said will be ready to call a lawyer if I have to. She called me a thorn to the neighborhood at that point and said she'd be back.
We did not speak to each other for some time. I expected her to start sending me fines in the mail, but the most I usually got were letters stating that my grass was getting too tall, or my driveway needed sweeping.
Those never bothered me because they are normal home chores and need to be done regularly anyway. But several neighbors that were on the HOA's side made it clear they didn't like me because I didn't join, just like my uncle.
I said that was fine. We're neighbors, but we don't have to be friends.
They said that was fine too because I'm an outsider and they'll never accept me until I join the HOA. Later in early 2020, I got word from a friend that people were starting to buy a lot of disinfectant, toilet paper, and hand sanitizer in mass. I decided the best option was to order these things online.
I got eight big 12-packs of toilet paper, a case of 20 bottles of hand sanitizer, three boxes of disposable latex gloves, a couple of boxes of disposable face masks, and a case of 20 large cans of name-brand disinfectant spray. I set for the delivery to be signed for only me as I did not trust anyone not to take my packages if they were just left on my porch.
When the packages were delivered, several neighbors saw me getting lots of toilet paper and some other packages that contained the other stuff. And just because I'm a paranoid guy, I still bought more of the same stuff when I saw it in stores. Like those small cheap four-packs of toilet paper, or off-brand disinfectant sprays.
I bought them because I had a feeling some friends or family might need some soon.
And I was right. As expected, toilet paper, disinfectant, and sanitizer pretty much disappeared from store shelves for miles around. And people were fighting over hoarding it. Meanwhile, I've got a very generous supply that I still haven't come close to using up.
However, word of my supply got around fast when people started needing some.
A friend of mine ran out of toilet paper and had no hand sanitizer. So I gave him a couple of the generic four-packs of TP and a bottle of sanitizer at my door.
A few family members ran out too, and I shared with them as well. They were all extremely grateful. But then came the downside. I ended up with several neighbors knocking on my door and asking to buy my supply or wanting handouts.
I refused and said I only gave some of what I had away to friends and family.
They made it pretty clear to me before that we'd never be friends since I refused to join the HOA. Moreover, if I were to give some to one neighbor, they'd all want my supplies, and then I'd run out really fast. They didn't like this and harassed me several times from the sidewalk.
I just ignored them. Later the HOA Karen showed up at my door and told me several neighbors had run out of all the items that this post is about. It got ridiculous fast. She then said she wasn't asking, but demanding I share my stock with my neighbors to set a good example.
I told her to buzz off because that had nothing to do with me. I may be a jerk, but I'm a well-prepared jerk.
Also, I've read her HOA bylaws online. So even if I was a member of her HOA, which I was not, I wouldn't have to give up my stock either way.
She left while yelling at me that one day I'd regret not being a good neighbor or being a part of her HOA. Well, I did regret it. The next time I went to work I was notified around noon by the cameras I had at my house that there was a thief breaking into my home.
I could see video of them on my smartphone and it looked like a woman in a spandex suit with her face covered by a hockey mask. I called the authorities immediately and was allowed to clock out at work so I could rush home. Right around the time I got there, officers were walking HOA Karen out in handcuffs to a cruiser.
She'd broken into my home by using a crowbar to force open the back door.
When they caught her, she was tossing all of my toilet paper and any other supplies she could grab out into my backyard, where her kids were picking it up and bagging it.
I pressed charges and HOA Karen got six months in the slammer and probation. HOA Karen's husband called me to apologize for his wife and told me that he had been planning a divorce for a while because this isn't the first time she's been in trouble with the law.
CPS got involved too because she was using her kids to help pilfer me. So he was going to file for full custody in the divorce. HOA Karen didn't return and someone new was elected HOA president in her place. Her husband didn't move and I see him from time to time.
There's no hard feelings between us. And yes, he did get full custody of his kids because his wife had a darker history with the law than I thought.
We're sort of friends now too as we've occasionally had a drink together and he helped me replace my back door that his ex broke.
I'm making this post more than a year later because I just saw HOA Karen again. I was visiting some friends in another city and saw her working at the local supermarket there, bagging groceries. As soon as we saw each other she obviously recognized me because she scowled and refused to look at me again the entire time I was there.
Karma is a real witch, isn’t it Karen!
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.
Our first apartment together we lived in an upper of a house. The lower had a family with a few kids in it. “Great,” we thought. “No crazy parties or anything like that”. A few weeks after we moved in, the flies started showing up.
Our apartment was full of gnats and flies by the end of the first month. We had just scoured the whole place, weren’t leaving food out, could not figure out for the life of us where they came from—until we saw them coming out of the vents.
The family got evicted a few months later.
The landlord showed us the unit, and we all beheld the horror. There was dog poop and rotten food covering the floor. Piles of garbage everywhere. The place was a total gut. They ended up listing the unit at a higher price to make up for refinishing.
“We should get some better people in now. The place looks nice,” we thought. Our apartment was finally bug free.
We didn’t actually see the next family that moved in. They arrived while we were gone on a weekend trip and they immediately covered every window with sheets.
Then a weird smell started filling our apartment. It was acrid and off. We closed the vents (again) and figured they were probably still cleaning as they settled in.
Then the garbage started piling up outside and the overnight noise began. It sounded like they were bowling in the basement.
Plus, there were so many plastic jugs overflowing the recycling. There were no sounds during the day, at all. My husband worked night shift at the time and the nights were long and full of weird sounds shaking the whole house. Like at 4 am: “let’s build a pyramid” noise.
After a week or so of this, my husband politely knocked on their door on his way home from work, hoping to introduce himself and ask them to keep the noise down.
No answer. He tried for a few days and even on the weekend and at different times. No one ever opened the door. A few days later a note was taped to our door. Its contents chilled me to the bone.
The note said: “People upstairs, don’t bother us and we won’t bother you. If you ever step on our porch again, I’ll call the authorities. Mind your own business.
Don’t mess with me. GAZ Chicago” We almost immediately started looking for a new place to live, luckily moving pretty quickly after.
Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
My mom never told me how her best friend passed. Years later, I was using her phone when I made an utterly chilling discovery.
Madame de Pompadour was the alluring chief mistress of King Louis XV, but few people know her dark history—or the chilling secret shared by her and Louis.
I tried to get my ex-wife served with divorce papers. I knew that she was going to take it badly, but I had no idea about the insane lengths she would go to just to get revenge and mess with my life.
Catherine of Aragon is now infamous as King Henry VIII’s rejected queen—but few people know her even darker history.
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