Nightmare Neighbors
Houses, condos, apartments, and townhouses all have one thing in common: neighbors. They come through the walls, over the fence, and even from above and below. They’re like zombies, but instead of eating your brain, they are intent on making your every waking moment a nightmare—and in some cases, sleeping moments as well. From noises to noxious odors, from parking to out-of-control pets, these tales of neighborhood nastiness serve as a warning before you sign that lease.
1. Neighbor Under Surveillance
My wife and I were happy to move into our new house in the summer of 2019. The neighborhood seemed really nice and we were excited to meet the neighbors. The first two families we met—neighbors on either side of us—warned us about the people renting the house directly behind ours. Apparently, they had been known to cause trouble and blow things way out of proportion, bordering on paranoia of everyone around them.
We kept this in mind but had no issues for the first six months or so after moving in. Their house sits on a hill behind ours, and so overlooks the majority of our backyard due to the elevation change. Well, one night (morning, technically) at about 3 am we wake up to ring notifications from our phones showing video from our front doorbell. When we realize what it is, our blood runs cold.
There’s a man standing barefoot in a sleeveless shirt on our porch POUNDING on our front door. We give it two or three minutes just watching him on the app, thinking maybe he’s intoxicated and has the wrong house—essentially giving him the benefit of the doubt. But then we start to hear him say "come out you two, I’m gonna mess you up" etc. and he leaves the porch and starts to head around the side of the house towards our backyard.
Considering we had no idea who this was, my wife now immediately calls the local detachment for officers to come by, as I move out of our bedroom towards the external doors to look and listen for any attempt of a home invasion. At this point, our neighbors directly behind us throw a HUGE spotlight into our backyard from theirs.
We’re thinking, okay cool they know something’s up and they’re trying to help us out by shedding light on our backyard. Officers arrive several long minutes later and knock.We explain the situation and they head out back to look around and get the scoop from the neighbors with the spotlight. Well, the officer comes back with the news that really shocked us.
It turns out that the spotlight neighbor was the one on our porch, and he had jumped our fence into our backyard and then went up into his yard and then threw the light on. He told the officers that several nights prior, I had let my puppy out into MY OWN backyard in the middle of the night and, because I was in my boxers, he said that I was "trying to expose myself to his family".
He then followed this up to the officers with "evidence". This was the most chilling part of all. This evidence consisted of videos he had taken THROUGH OUR WINDOWS of my wife and me inside of our own home doing totally normal things like chores, watching TV, etc. Nothing inappropriate or scandalous—not that it would have mattered anyway, since we were in our OWN HOME.
Because of the elevation difference, if they went out of their way they could technically slightly see through our closed blinds due to the angle…so they had been filming us for no reason at all and expected the officers to see this as reasonable? The constable came back in and my wife was devastated. It was a huge breach of our privacy of course and totally unfounded accusations as we had never done anything to anger these people, we hadn’t even met them.
The officer told us "just don’t worry about it, if he tries something again just give us a call," which wasn’t the most comforting at the time. They moved out a few months later without any additional issues, and my wife and I celebrated like it was a holiday when we saw the moving van in their driveway.
2. Urine Trouble
I moved into a run-dwon apartment in a building that was occupied by basically the worst people in the area. It was a pretty rural small town—a lot of junkies and lowlifes, etc. I moved there because I don’t have a driver’s license and I needed to live close to my new job at a café as there are no buses in the area—except school buses—and it was relatively cheap. I quickly learned what a mistake I'd made.
One night when I came home from work, I met two of my neighbors by the entrance to the building. These two were living wall-to-wall with me, and I had listened to their drugged-up saturnalias more than once. They started following me up the stairs, not saying a single word, just following me. I rushed inside and locked the door, when they started hammering at it.
They were yelling, hammering their hands at the door so hard I thought they would break it. I yelled back at them: "What do you want?? Leave me alone!" Their answer stunned me. They stopped their hammering and the man said, with a fragile voice; "We were just wondering if we could borrow your pee for a drug test tomorrow". I not-so politely declined and told them to get lost. I didn’t live there for much longer, I’ll tell you that.
3. It’s Raining What?
This was in an apartment building. The upstairs neighbor’s dog peed on their patio and it dripped down onto me while I was sitting outside reading. I yelled and ran to shower, and when I texted them to ask them to take their dog out to pee in future, their response made my blood boil with rage. They said it wasn’t their dog and it must have blown over from somewhere else. Blown over? From where?
4. Pot Calls Kettle Black
When I was living in a small apartment, my neighbors always cranked up their music to 11—like very, very loud—and left it there until something like 7 am. Maybe later, but that's when I would leave for work. It was so loud that I couldn't hear my own TV over it. My neighbors and I would bang on the door but they would never open the door.
It was like trying to sleep at a festival. Then at some point, I found out they often left for a bar across the street, but would just leave the music on. When I found this out, I started pulling the breaker for their apartment. It worked for a bit, but they would just come back at 5 am and turn it back on. It was reported by heaps of people, but nothing was ever done. Then I came up with a genius plan.
While they were gone out as usual one night, I jammed their lock so their keys wouldn't work anymore. When they couldn’t get in after coming back from the bar, they had to get the property manager and he heard the music blasting inside. After a couple of times of that happening, they were evicted. Hmmm...maybe I'm the bad neighbor in this story.
5. The After After Party
My neighbor’s son used to go out partying all week, bring his friends back, and then party at his place until 5 or 6 am. The issue? He would party upstairs in his bedroom—music blaring, yelling—and it was right next to my bedroom. If it was just constant noise, I could sleep through it, but not that. I was running on no sleep and had to be up at eight to go to work.
I was getting in trouble at work for being exhausted and no one believed it was because my neighbor wasn't letting me sleep. It was terrible. So, after trying to talk to the jerk, we posted a note through the door. His mom worked nights so when she got home, things went crazy. The note was reasonable, as we asked them to move the after-party downstairs because we couldn't sleep through all the noise.
We didn't intend for his mom to get the note. Wow, she was so mad. When my alarm went off an hour or so later, he was angrily yelling that it wasn't fair that my alarm woke him up every day. Yes, an alarm going off once or twice before work was totally unreasonable, while his music blasting all night wasn't. The parties stopped, though.
6. Grand Theft Auto Neighbor
When I started my first job post-college, I was thrilled to live by myself for the first time in my life. I had this beautiful one-bedroom apartment in a solid part of town. Everything was great until six months later, when new tenants moved in next to my unit. I had a package go missing (a phone case). Amazon had posted a photo of it at my door, so I thought that it was just a fluke.
Then it happened again, and again, and again. The office wouldn’t accept packages, so I had to get my items delivered to friends’ places instead, which was wildly inconvenient. The local authorities didn’t care in the slightest when I reported it, so I just figured I’d deal with it. Fast forward a few weeks, and the situation escalated.
I come home after being gone for less than an hour, to see that my doorknob and front door were scrapped up and the knob was barely hanging on. Long story short, I had been parking in plain view of this guy’s window, so he was able to tell when I was home. I am 100% convinced he tried to break into my place, and that me coming home early interrupted him.
I googled his name after I moved—got it off a package at his door—and found that he was a convicted felon with charges that include grand theft auto, domestic assault, drug dealing, and an attempted break-in.
7. Wait, What About Tenille?
I have a few stories from the same neighbor, let’s call her Linda. Linda would often have men outside the apartment building that she locked out screaming her name. But the best story regards a boyfriend Linda had who insisted my roommate and I call him "The Captain". About a week after meeting him, we came home to a wedding announcement for Linda and "The Captain".
Yes, his name was The Captain on the announcement. But there was one final, delicious twist in store for us. Exactly one week later, The Captain was taken away by officers outside our apartment building for public intoxication at 2 am while screaming "I've made a huge mistake. I hate you, Linda! A huge mistake! I'm ruined!" I wonder what she did?
8. Grandma Girlfriend
I used to live in a horrible apartment with paper-thin walls. The people next door were a woman who looked like she was in her 70s and what I thought was her 30-something grandson. They would yell at each other all day, constantly blast their TV, and the smell of their smoke would waft through into my apartment and make the place absolutely reek.
The worst was at night when the two of them would, well...be very loud in bed. So this was the first clue that they were not grandma and grandson like I’d assumed—at least I really hope not. Every night for an hour I heard their creaking bed banging against my bedroom wall and the old woman moaning like a stuck pig. Nightmarish.
I also think the guy kept track of my schedule and watched for me because whenever I came home or went out, even when I took out the garbage, he would be there outside his place, trying to chit chat with me while staring at my body and being completely gross. I lived there a year, but it felt like ten.
9. This Trash Didn’t Fall Far From The Tree
I had some neighbors below me years ago. It was a mother and her son, plus sometimes his ex, and sometimes their kids. I feel terrible for the kids, because the adults were the trashiest people. The place reeked of weed 24/7, they would park their vehicle on the grass as they were at the back of the building, and they drove everybody nuts with how loud they were.
I once recorded audio of the mom and son fighting where he was screaming and very graphically describing how he was going to kill her. I saw a guy in the building across from us also on his balcony subtly recording in case it escalated. The fight ended when his ex showed up either with or for the kids, and they started arguing instead. At one point she screamed that she had crabs and then drove off. It was absolutely wild.
10. Garbage Battle
We had some neighbors that used to leave their garbage out in plastic bags the night before garbage day—instead of putting it in a bin. Around here, that's just ringing the dinner bell for raccoons and other critters. Sure enough, come morning there's garbage strewn all over the neighborhood. What the raccoons and skunks didn't spread around, the wind picked up the slack.
Some of the people on the street kindly approached the guy and asked him to put his garbage in a bin. He told them to get lost. Thus began the Battle of the Garbage. It was so, so satisfying. Every morning of garbage day some people on my street would collect all the half-eaten and rotten trash from their lawns and toss it back into the dude's backyard.
Next, he would collect it, then dump it back on their lawns. Or cram it into their bushes. People started finding half-eaten burritos and candy wrappers in their mailboxes. The street started to look like a slum. The authorities were called. Health inspectors. City by-law enforcement. Each side was calling in whatever authority they could muster to get their enemy in trouble.
The dude and his family—amazingly his wife seemed perfectly pleasant—lasted about eight months then moved. Every once in a while I find a random margarine lid or piece of styrofoam in my hedge, and my mind goes back to those dark days of the garbage battle.
11. Stop Moving The Invisible Furniture
This horrid individual lived in the apartment right below my husband and me. It went from constant complaints, to him calling law enforcement on us multiple times to him leaving threatening messages on our car and front door. When we first moved in he was upset with the landlord for renting above him—left plenty of unpleasant notes and interrupted quite a few times when we were talking to the landlord.
When we moved in we only had a mattress and no other furniture, but he kept calling the landlord and saying that we were moving furniture around at 2 am and had our TV at full blast. After the eighth complaint in two months of us still moving around furniture and TV being too loud, we finally showed our apartment to the landlord. It revealed the truth.
We literally didn't have a TV and still only had our mattress. Then the neighbor started leaving notes on our car telling us to keep it down and he even put in writing, "There needs to be NO noise after 10 pm or else I'll call the authorities". We usually didn't even get home until after 11 pm and we were respectful to make sure we kept things down because we knew that not everyone had our work schedule.
So, we tried keeping it down even more and there were so many instances when we'd be eating dinner or cuddling quietly, or even sleeping and he'd be banging on his ceiling/our floor. After a few months, he started calling law enforcement and it got to the point where even they told him to stop calling about a noise complaint because it's a landlord issue and every time they came they never hear anything.
The last time they showed up, I was asleep and my husband ended up talking to them and explaining everything. They suggested that we file a harassment complaint. Then he started leaving threatening notes on our car and front door, and we kept hearing our doorknob jiggle. This is where it turned terrifying. He claimed that he and a friend had sat outside our apartment for two hours and listened to all the noise we were making.
He then said that he knows where we park our car so we’d better start parking it somewhere else if we didn't want it to get damaged etc. We kept the notes and made copies for the landlord and let him know that this was what we were dealing with. We were just keeping him in the loop before it got even worse. The last complaint was when he ran outside to the landlord.
He was screaming that something needed to be done about us because he heard our bed squeak the night before and how dare he rent to some crazy college kids who are partying and doing it all night. The landlord finally told him to stop being a bitter old man. Then this crazy neighbor of ours—who’d made our lives so miserable—took a total 180 turn and we found out that he had decided to sue the landlord and was moving.
Suddenly the neighbor kept offering us rides when one of us was walking. He stopped complaining and leaving notes. Our doorknob did, however, keep jiggling and turning at around midnight. Whenever we would check on our door we'd hear someone running down the hall as we'd approach our door. He eventually moved away and shockingly we haven't gotten a complaint from any other neighbor in the last three years we've lived here.
12. Here Today
I lived in an apartment with a lot of rotating tenants. An elderly lady moved in across the hall from me and promptly started hoarding. I started to figure it out when her porch started to fill up with odds and ends furniture including, but not limited to, a roll-top desk. She also yelled at me once for taking her key out of the front door and putting it in the mail slot.
Anyway, after a couple of weeks, I started to realize I hadn’t seen her in a while and started to smell something real weird. Then I found out the dark truth. Turns out, she had passed and no one knew about it for a week—hence the smell. Her family came and cleared out all her stuff about a week after that.
13. Deadbeat Daddy
I rented a flat with an ex and the upstairs neighbor was an absolute nightmare. This was a deadbeat dad who had his kids every weekend and left them screaming all the time. He'd blast music until sunrise every day even when he had his kids. I got the council involved, nothing happened. I got child services involved, nothing happened.
He used to argue every Sunday with his ex about how he wasn't paying child support. They'd argue right outside our door—we were on the ground floor. The guy was unemployed, owed the landlord a lot of money, and only left his flat to get groceries or dope. He then had the nerve to get angry at me when my cat meowed loudly...once.
14. Kids Running Wild
I had some really crazy neighbors once. The matriarch nailed all of the windows shut in their house, then removed the doorknobs and installed several deadbolts. This was to keep her grandkids home and everyone else out while she was at work. Child welfare stopped by and somehow they were okay with this—which really floored me.
While she was at work, the kids were able to get one window open without her knowing, and they would usually leave during the day and make it back before she got off work. This went on for quite a while and eventually, there were maybe a dozen young adults living there too, and they all used the window as the main entrance.
The window, unfortunately, bordered on my driveway, and was mere feet from my house. All hours of the day, people would be out there, wiggling in and out of the window. People got tired of being cooped up and major fights broke out. I regularly heard bodies hitting walls or furniture or fists. I heard yells of "well, stop threatening and get your pistol already!"
I have PTSD, and it was just day after day of trying to keep myself calm. The kids had a pneumatic BB revolver, a lookalike handgun, and one morning shot up my neighbor's car. She left to work at a hospital early in the morning, before first light, and didn't notice. When she shut her car door, all the glass fell out the windows.
Later in the morning, the same kid shot out a window in the school across the street. But what happened next was even worse still. My husband and I were outside planting flowers and my husband felt a sudden pain in his shoulder. Sure enough, the kid had shot him. The authorities arrived and the kid just kept on firing. They called the mother, who had to unlock all the deadbolts.
The officers took away the kids' rifles, and dragged them outside so they could be cuffed and taken away. The youngest was maybe nine. Since no one confessed or ratted, and the officers weren't sure which of the three did it, they were released and not charged. Thankfully this act of physical aggression against my husband got them evicted.
But the eviction just started another wave of bizarre behavior. After tearing up the house, including breaking all the windows and ripping out the electrical boxes and punching random holes in the walls, the kids went to the landlord's house with their lookalike handguns and shot up the windows in her house. Again they were taken away, but being juveniles, no repercussions.
A couple of weeks later, her vehicle and garage were firebombed, but no one was charged with that. I'm so glad they are gone. I live in a wonderful neighborhood—not rich by any means, but the most awesome people—but it's hard to enjoy the community with that going on next door. I hope they somehow find some peace with this life.
15. Dog Gone Shame
The neighbor’s dogs got into my backyard and went after my dog. My dog ended up okay, but it was a long recovery and he still doesn’t walk right. He was and is the happiest dog ever, so to see him on the ground covered in blood was the worst thing ever. The dogs were able to get through because their kids had taken a plank out of my fence—they didn’t have a fence.
I left a letter on their door explaining the situation. They showed up at my door to tell me that it was my fault for not having a stronger fence and that they wouldn’t be paying any medical bills. After a lot of them yelling and me calmly explaining why they actually would be paying, they eventually complied. They did build a fence, backwards, with the flat side facing them.
They are also extremely loud, have chickens that escape on a regular basis in our suburban neighborhood, and are overall scummy people.
16. Leave Well Enough Alone
A guy in my neighborhood owned six cars and kept them all parked on the street in a very congested block of apartments. He spent hours tending to them, and they somehow always looked rustier when he was done. If a leaf landed on one of his cars, he would accuse the neighborhood of intentionally placing leaves on his car to annoy him.
17. Battle Of The TVs
I once lived in an apartment building with little better than paper for walls. You could clearly hear the next-door neighbors' conversations, them doing it in bed, walking up the stairs, etc. For some reason, they thought it would be totally awesome to install a surround sound system and affix the speakers to our shared wall. It was not awesome.
The TV was so loud that it literally shook the wall, and we couldn’t hear our own television unless we turned it up ridiculously loud in return. The neighbors did not respond kindly to our request that they place the speakers elsewhere (or at least turn the bass down)—it ultimately ended with authorities being called on them.
We called them after the guy got super angry at being asked again to turn it down and started pounding on the wall and screaming about how he was going to mess us up. They finally got evicted when he threatened someone at the management office on some other matter.
18. No Remorse
I live in a rural area and my neighbor was a real jerk. The dude was on substances, cheating on his heavily pregnant wife with another addict, just completely out of his mind. It ended in unimaginable horror. My husband had a dog and this guy set out cat food (he doesn’t have cats) just so Scrappy would go to his porch. The guy then chased our dog into our front yard and shot him in the ribs.
Sadly, the dog didn’t pass immediately—he suffered. I could’ve strangled the neighbor right then and there, even as a little 110-pound female. It still infuriates me. He didn’t even show a bit of remorse.
19. A Curse On You And Your Cars
On our street, there really is only parking on one side of the street—the garages and driveways for most of the houses weren't meant for cars, but this is another rant. The parking is on our side. The people across the street from us at one point had a car for each member of the household. To make matters worse, the daughter was a terrible driver so she needed at least two parking spaces.
This means that one family requires seven parking spaces! The best space to park is in front of my parents' house especially in winter as my parents would shovel it all out for easy access—this family never helped to shovel even though they would complain if we didn't shovel out enough. So, if my parents were out, this family would fight to claim my parents' place.
This family calls us the evil neighbors now, because one day my parents were away and the daughter and son-in-law were visiting in their brand new SUV. Of course, they parked in my parents' spot. Cue freak windstorm which destroyed their car and the mom's. Apparently, it was my parents' fault as we had obviously cursed them!
20. We Saw Eye To Eye
We lived next door to this old man who sat in his front yard blatantly just staring at us with binoculars. He only did it when my parents weren't home. When my mom confronted him he claimed we were lying. We weren't. So one night we hear a noise outside, and my mom pulls up the blind to find herself eye to eye with this old man trying to look into our window.
21. Birdbrain Neighbor
A bunch of things happened with my birdbrain neighbor. She had a large dog that hated my older, smaller dog. One day her dog ran into my yard and bit my dog. She did apologize for this one, and it didn’t happen again. The same neighbor dumped her lawn clippings into my backyard, and I had to ask her to stop and clean up her mess.
She decided to build a fence. Of course, she didn’t get a survey, so I paid for a survey of my property. She’d started building her fence three feet over on my property. I had her stop and remove the fence. She was angry and never rebuilt it. I painted my house. She painted her house, same color. I bought a new car. She bought a new car—same color, same configuration.
There's other minor stuff, but that's enough. Odd person. Very odd.
22. Not Avon Calling
I had a neighbor a few houses down who kept to himself. One day he was turning onto our road and I happened to be behind him. Some kids were cutting across his yard so he stopped to yell at them and I couldn’t go around so I was stuck. He then started backing up, but I had only a little room before backing into a very busy road. He then hit the front of my car.
He started yelling at me. I was maybe 18 at the time and was legitimately terrified. I was able to make it down the block to my house, called my mom and she encouraged me to make a report. The officer came, was super kind and offered to go to the house of the man who hit me to get his insurance information. The man refused to answer and the officer made a report and called to check in later in the afternoon. I thought it was over, but it only turned more horrific.
That night the neighbor ended up taking a firearm and pounded on a few neighbors' doors, presumably looking for me. The officers were called and quite a few of them responded. They could not find the man so they had everyone on our street shelter in place until they could find him. Officers ended up finding him under a boat in his backyard.
I don’t know if he was committed or what, but he never was back at his house and his family sold it a few months later.
23. Neighbor Flung Cat
I had a 17-year-old cat, which I loved so much. She was my mother's cat and I got her when my mom passed. So anyways, one day the cat disappears. After a few days of not seeing her, I posted on Facebook about it and it was shared a lot. One day, I was getting into my vehicle to go to work and my young neighbor—about six or seven years old—shyly came up to tell me something.
She said that she saw my other neighbor throw my cat over her fence into the kindergarten playground. We live very near the elementary school. I spoke to the head custodian and he said there was indeed a lifeless cat on the playground. So my neighbor is so far off her rocker that she'd rather throw a lifeless cat into an area where young children play than dig a hole or do the noble thing of telling me what happened.
24. Snack Attack
Some just straight-up rednecks move into my neighborhood. They turned the shared side yard, which was legally ours but shared because we weren't necessarily using it, into a lumber yard/playground where they dug a massive pit for mud wrestling. No kidding—mud wrestling! The youngest kid got stuck in the mud pit up to his head and they couldn't get him out for hours.
They also just wanted the full neighbor experience without putting in any effort themselves. It was like they'd moved from some hillbilly commune where you could just demand things of your neighbors. Every day when I got home from school, the three youngest kids would bang on our door until we gave them snacks. One of them, when denied snacks, came back and broke our glass door with a hammer. But that was just the beginning.
The second oldest kid (there were six in total) had an old A/C air handling unit in the backyard that he was allowed to hit with a sledge hammer when he got angry. He got angry often and at some pretty irregular hours. I ran into him at a bowling alley years after they moved away/got kicked out/went bankrupt. He had giant scars all over his back, chest, and arms—he said he woke up in the middle of the highway on Halloween night, all cut up.
25. Hose Was Neighbor’s Breaking Point
My mom, dad, and I moved into a condominium when I was about 14. When we first moved in, we met Trina, our downstairs neighbor. Trina was an older woman (60s) taking care of her mentally challenged grandson who was my same age but mentally a six-year-old with minimal language development. Trina seemed sweet and welcomed us to the building.
We had a few small issues with Trina, but we decided to keep them to ourselves. You see, she smoked A LOT, like three to four packs a day, and the smell would overtake our house. Also, the grandson would scream a lot in the early morning but nothing serious and we never said a word. We were all friendly enough and life was fine.
About two years after moving in, my mom bought a portable hose to water her outdoor plants and clean the balcony off. This is when the trouble started. Trina lost it when my mom washed the patio for the first time: just water, no chemicals, just rinsing the dirt off. Trina promptly started threatening my mom’s life for doing this.
She then complained to the condo association every single day for years. She started to burn small fires in a coffee can under our windows in an attempt to smoke us out. She once saw my bedroom window was left open and literally flooded my room with her hose. She would call the authorities on every single noise we ever made. Eventually they fined her $50 for wasting their time.
A couple of years later I became pregnant. Yeah, I was very young, just 18 at the time. So my boyfriend moved in and we had the baby and decided to raise it together. The neighbor told my boyfriend that I had a revolving line of men, and I was unsure who the father was, but chose him because he was nice. This was, of course, completely fabricated.
She continued with her nonsense for years and years. Once she was driving down the driveway while I was getting my then two kids into the car. She literally tried to hit my oldest son with her car. I had to physically pick him up and throw him out of the way. When the authorities came she denied everything so nothing happened.
She harassed my family for years to the point where the condo association had to have private meetings with her and my dad, which nothing ever came of. The condo association was just as fed up as we were. Three years ago my mom passed suddenly. When the neighbor realized my mom was no longer around, her response made my blood boil.
She laughed and told my dad and my kids that my mom deserved to die. She was an awful, awful woman. She recently had a stroke. We don't know if she is still alive or in a home but my dad, who still lives there, says it's nice to be free of the constant harassment.
26. What Can I Say
I lived in a three-story apartment building on the middle floor. The bottom floor was basement apartments. It was a very quiet building and a lot of people were older and lived there 10 years or more. Then this weird creepy jerk moved in below us. He would play music loud all night and I had to be up for work at 5:00 am.
I wanted to complain, but he wouldn't answer the door so we could ask him to turn it down. So I had to jump up and down until he heard it. He also had angry girls banging on his door screaming for hours. He was home but just wouldn't answer. One of the girls ran out and poured nail polish all over his car. That was actually a good day.
His apartment was in the basement, but he had a huge window that was right next to the stairs to get in. The guy never closed the curtains and you could see directly down into his living room. There he had built a swing with intimate play stuff hanging on it. I had to explain what it was to everyone that came over—even my mom.
Then one day an officer knocked on my door. He looked kind of embarrassed because he was holding about 20 pairs of women's underwear. He asked me to pick out mine. Three of them were mine and the nice officer told me to throw them away because the downstairs neighbor had been wearing them. Turns out he’d taken them from the laundry room
I guess the upstairs neighbor was walking in the building and saw her underwear hanging on the swing and called it in. So they took him away for taking our underwear. The landlord evicted him while he was behind bars. He was so angry that he was getting evicted, he went and bought a bunch of sand and covered the whole apartment in sand.
He then turned the air conditioning all the way up and left it. Of course, this was after he’d switched the electric back into the landlord's name. He was a nightmare neighbor.
27. Kid Caught In Crossfire
One of my neighbors almost shot me when I was a little kid. I was playing in front of my apartment building when my neighbor got into an argument with one of these other guys from down the street. I wasn’t sure what exactly the problem was, but my neighbor didn't like it, so he pulled out a pistol from his front pocket and fired a couple of bullets.
A stray bullet flew right past my face, and it came really close to hitting me. My mom’s friend from the next floor down grabbed me and pulled me inside to safety.
28. Dog Owner Acts Like A Dog
My current neighbor, let’s call her Kitty, is a woman I‘ve known vaguely on social media for a while. But now that she’s my neighbor, I’m seeing a different side to her. For example, last month, she fostered a dog. She saw me cleaning my porch and asked to come over with her dog, and—wanting to be friendly—I said sure. So she comes over and puts her dog in the backyard.
So, I made a couple of drinks even though she was already half hammered. I finished making the drinks and went to let the dogs inside—her foster Husky and my lab mix. Unfortunately, her dog climbed my five-foot fence and ran into the street and got hit by a car. Luckily he was ok. I offered to pay whatever she needed and drove her to the vet.
She proceeded to scream profanities at the vet. I then took her home while the pup was getting stitches. She promptly walked into my house, drank every ounce of booze left in the entire kitchen, and rolled around on the floor with her crotch exposed to my husband. She then asked him to drive her to the store for more booze. Now I avoid her like the plague.
29. Surrounded By Sound
My partner and I shared a split house with a couple; they were upstairs and we were downstairs. They said they knew that the noise insulation was low and asked us to let them know if it was ever too loud. We texted maybe 10 times in two years to turn down their TV at 3:00. Their TV was directly over our bedroom. On the final time we texted them, they snapped back HARD.
They talked about how awful it was for them and how much they tried to please us with the situation. They went on to complain about how they even stopped using their surround sound system. I mean, who needs a surround sound system in a less than 500 square foot uni? At 3:00 am no less. On top of this they constantly moved and, on one occasion, broke our stuff in the basement storage to the point we eventually stopped using it.
They frequently put shoes in the new dryer to the point it melted rubber on the back. They then broke said dryer by overstuffing it and leaning heavy equipment against the door so it'd stop popping open. They also "accidentally" took our packages from us on several occasions and filled up the other shared space we had with their own stuff so we couldn't use it.
30. Sweet Mustang Revenge
My neighbor poisoned my dog—sadly, it didn’t survive—so the night after we moved out of that neighborhood, I went back and took my revenge. The guy who’d done it was restoring a Mustang and I thought that was the perfect way to get back at him. I spray painted the car, super glued the wipers to the windshield, poured a gallon of bleach in the gas tank, and super glued the gas cap and door shut.
31. Door Opener Opens Man Eyes
The first apartment I lived in, I had a neighbor that would try opening the door. I didn't hear it myself because I worked nights. I came home early one night—around 2 am—and he was trying to get in through the apartment door. We had a huge argument and he stopped doing it after that. I'm guessing he thought it was just my two female roommates living there, because he never tried anything after he knew I was there as well.
It kinda opened my eyes, at the time, to the sort of nasty stuff that women have to deal with.
32. It’s A Chicago Thing
One time, I came in to visit my Gramma in Chicago for Christmas. I was looking for a parking spot near their house but the only one available had a lawn chair right in the center of it. I moved the lawn chair to park a little down from her house. I mean, who leaves a lawn chair in the street in wintertime, right? So I just put it on the sidewalk so someone could pick it up if they wanted it.
When my uncle saw what I’d done, he hustled out in just his socks to tell me to park way down the street in front of an empty lot, and then he very carefully put the chair back exactly where it had been. I had no idea (at the time) just how close I’d come to getting shot that day. You do not mess with the winter lawn chair in Chicago.
33. Said Hi To Wrong Neighbor
After the polar vortex a few years ago, the mail finally came—the sub zero temperatures froze the snow in a way that mail couldn't be delivered. So, I was basically in my house for a week and just so delighted about the mail and seeing another person outside that I said "Hello" to a neighbor I know better than to talk to. I got way more than I bargained for.
She immediately burst into tears and started telling me about how she found out something horrible about her boyfriend. I should mention that she is around 50 years old and dates the kind of guys who use her for a place to live. Anyway, she’d just found out that her boyfriend rurbbed one out into her coffee every morning. Um, but really.
She found out because she was spying on his phone and he texted a friend saying he did it. Right around this time, her big dog burst through the front door and before she could finish saying, "He won't hurt you" the dog bit me in the stomach—luckily it didn't draw blood. I kindly excused myself and went back into my home to regret ever leaving in the first place.
34. Ask Me No More Questions
I have these neighbors who are always asking for things. Like for my wifi password. Or asking us to buy more security cameras to point at his house. They also ask if I would watch out for their chickens—including roosters that are not allowed. They just keep asking for everything. The only thing he didn't ask for was permission to put an animal trap in our backyard. That he just did.
35. I Guess We Were The Bad Neighbors
I used to live in a bad part of Queens, NY until about 2004. The house that we owned there had been owned by my family since the early 1900s. It was known throughout the surrounding area as my family’s house—kind of famous I guess. Unfortunately, not everyone in my family were good people. Some of them were involved in gang life.
My siblings and I weren’t allowed to play by the windows, so we wouldn’t end up in the crossfire of a gang battle. The deciding factor of us leaving that area was when someone broke into our neighbor’s house, mistakenly choosing the wrong house and asking where OUR family was, looking to settle some issue. My parents decided it was time to leave.
36. Sleepless In The Suburbs
I was living in the burbs, and there was a house that let their dog bark all day. Another house would party until 3 am and the people living behind us would throw their dirty diapers into our backyard. The party house and the dog barking house made me miss so much work. Nothing like calling your boss and saying "I can't drive to work because in the last three days I have had four hours of sleep".
37. I’ve Been Watching You
This was almost 10 years ago when my husband and I were still dating and we moved into our first apartment together. There were four buildings of apartments within walking distance of each other and my run-in was with someone in a neighboring building. We had a dog and I was the regular dog walker, because my husband worked all different shifts and I didn’t.
So, one day, I was coming back from a walk with her when this guy comes out of one of the other buildings. He starts walking towards me very directly, pitching a fit about the fact that I’m walking my dog. He says he’s seen me just leave her poop on the grass and just walk away. I can assure you this was an absolute lie, 100%.
He says he sees her squat all the time and I just keep walking. I was dumbfounded. I said, "My dog is a female, that’s how she pees". He then just continues going on and on and on and at one point says, "I’ve been watching you.".. And again, I’m dumbfounded and I just go, "You’ve been WATCHING me?" I remember going back to my apartment and calling my husband at work and just crying because I felt so scared and alone.
We had been at that new place for only one month so we had 11 more to go at that point. We talked to the managers and they were absolutely no help. They said yeah, they knew who we were talking about, he’s had multiple complaints against him and they think he sells illicit substances. Oh, and if he does that again, call the authorities.
38. Mind Your Own Business
My current neighbor runs a small business practice out of her home. She had her customers park on my yard—easement, technically—despite the town telling her she couldn’t. And despite all the times I told her to stop. She never stopped until one person parked facing my house, two feet from my "no trespassing" signs. I called the authorities.
I filed a complaint against the customer and never saw that car again. But she didn't stop, she only got more bizarre. Then she tried to lease my front yard. When that didn’t work, she tried to buy my house while we still lived in it. She told the contractors that they could access her yard through ours, so they dumped loads of gravel and sand in my front yard as their storage area, and a cement truck tore 18-inch ruts in my yard.
A tree on the property line was infested with termites and a huge branch fell on a mutually owned fence. She demanded we pay to have the limb removed because it was damaging the fence, which was actually quite horribly dilapidated. She didn’t want us to cut down the tree because of the shade it provided her back patio, which was installed at the expense of my yard.
39. Screams Heard Through Concrete
We lived next door to a group of "night women" and shared a bedroom wall with one of their bedrooms—this was in a condo building. We would be woken up at regular intervals each night by obnoxious, dirty movie-worthy screaming. It even came through our concrete walls. Forget leaving a window open in the summer. It was too noisy,
Apparently, the building was known for it, but we had no idea before moving in. The neighbors had a whole system in place. Their pimps would wait down on the street and flag the next gentleman caller to enter after receiving payment from the satisfied customer. They had at least five units rented in the building for this purpose.
The authorities knew about the setup but preferred them in a building rather than on the street so they wouldn't do anything about it. The condo board and building manager also knew but never brought it up during official meetings so it wouldn't be recorded in the minutes and tank the property values. Really wish WE had known about it.
40. Bad Neighbor Begets Worse
Our first apartment together we lived in an upper of a house. The lower had a family with a few kids in it. "Great," we thought. "No crazy parties or anything like that". A few weeks after we moved in, the flies started showing up. Our apartment was full of gnats and flies by the end of the first month. We had just scoured the whole place, weren’t leaving food out, could not figure out for the life of us where they came from—until we saw them coming out of the vents.
The family got evicted a few months later. The landlord showed us the unit, and we all beheld the horror. There was dog poop and rotten food covering the floor. Piles of garbage everywhere. The place was a total gut. They ended up listing the unit at a higher price to make up for refinishing. "We should get some better people in now. The place looks nice," we thought. Our apartment was finally bug free.
We didn’t actually see the next family that moved in. They arrived while we were gone on a weekend trip and they immediately covered every window with sheets. Then a weird smell started filling our apartment. It was acrid and off. We closed the vents (again) and figured they were probably still cleaning as they settled in.
Then the garbage started piling up outside and the overnight noise began. It sounded like they were bowling in the basement. Plus, there were so many plastic jugs overflowing the recycling. There were no sounds during the day, at all. My husband worked night shift at the time and the nights were long and full of weird sounds shaking the whole house. Like at 4 am: "let’s build a pyramid" noise.
After a week or so of this, my husband politely knocked on their door on his way home from work, hoping to introduce himself and ask them to keep the noise down. No answer. He tried for a few days and even on the weekend and at different times. No one ever opened the door. A few days later a note was taped to our door. Its contents chilled me to the bone.
The note said: "People upstairs, don’t bother us and we won’t bother you. If you ever step on our porch again, I’ll call the authorities. Mind your own business. Don’t mess with me. GAZ Chicago" We almost immediately started looking for a new place to live, luckily moving pretty quickly after.
41. Ambulance Visit Is Just The Beginning
The very first night my wife and I moved into this townhouse, an ambulance was called to the house. It turns out that our neighbor had pushed his girlfriend down the stairs. We heard the fight and saw the ambulance come. After that, every night at around three in the morning he’d start banging on our walls waking us up, yelling at us to be quiet. We were always asleep.
I confronted him when I finally saw him, and things got heated. He was actually quite crazy. Later he threatened to hurt my wife. We moved out after this threat on my wife’s life. The authorities wouldn’t do anything about it.
42. Stuck In The Middle With You
Many, many years ago, I rented a little house with the girlfriend I had at the time. The neighborhood seemed pretty nice. On one side of us lived an elderly couple, and on the other side my worst nightmare. She was a dealer with six children and three boyfriends. In addition, this neighbor liked her music at full volume.
So, here’s how it went: The elderly couple would hear the music noise coming from the dealer's house and call the officers to my place because it was so loud they thought it was me. The officers would pull up and wake me—I wore earplugs—and then go to the dealer's house and then the dealer would think I had called to complain about them.
The dealer ended up losing her electricity due to unpaid bills, so she came over while I was at work and plugged extension cords into my outdoor sockets. She then got mad and threatened to shoot me when I unplugged them. We had to move in with my mother as an emergency stopgap because my landlord thought I was making it all up.
43. Not A Petting Zoo
My neighbor tried to sue another neighbor because their cat scratched her kid’s arm and part of his face. In the cat's defense, the kid had walked over—when the cat was curled up and resting—and picked it up by its tail and attempted to sling it like a slingshot. That was when the cat scratched the kid. Can you really blame the cat?
Next she tried to claim that my dog bit her kid. Admittedly, my dog did growl at the kid, but only after he repeatedly slapped him on the butt and hind legs. The said bite marks she claimed were from my dog sure looked to me like they came from a human, possibly from my neighbor’s own mouth. Did she actually bite her own kid?
44. That Blowed Up Real Good
So back when I was about five years old, we had some neighbors next door who were basically hoarders of everything. There were car parts out the wazoo in their yard that leaked all kinds of stuff. I am pretty positive that it was this leaked stuff that made my cat sick and caused its passing. But the real story here is actually about the neighbor’s son.
So, basically, they had a kid who was around 18 that was always in trouble: shoplifting, fires, whatever basically you could get in trouble for around that age in high school. One day he decided to light a fire near an 18-wheeler tank filled with gas that they had in their yard for some reason. You can probably see where this is going. So yeah, one night at 2 am, it blew up. Authorities came and took him away. They moved shortly thereafter.
45. Hissy Fit Over Scared Cat
I was living alone in a first-floor studio apartment in a city where I knew basically nobody. The neighbors above me had two toddlers who would run from one end of the apartment to the other from 6-8 am every morning. They weren't that bad, though. The woman across the hall—a senile, intolerant, elderly, shut-in, cat lady—HATED me.
This woman banged on my door to tell me to "quiet down" every evening. After the first four or five times of this, I knocked on her door and explained that I wasn't the one making the noise, and even pointed out that the yelling and music she was complaining about was coming from her upstairs neighbor, obviously, as I was standing right in front of her.
She was so sweet and kind and said "oh my mistake!" and let me know that we would be friendly from then on out. But after that, it was like that conversation never happened. She started to literally hiss at me if we ever crossed paths on the stairwell. She would leave notes on my door saying "stop scaring my cat" and "I know what you did" and "I've alerted the authorities".
One time, I had my long-distance boyfriend over for the weekend, and when she saw us driving out of the parking lot together, she threw the trash she was carrying to the dumpster at my car and called me a very unkind name. Well, that was enough for me to finally tell my landlord about what I was experiencing with the situation.
He let me know that she struggled with mental health issues and, unfortunately, there was nothing he could do about it. That this wasn't the first he had heard of her, and I would just have to put up with it. I lasted five months before moving out. My landlord charged me a giant lease cancellation fee.
46. Bird Brained Idea Worked
When I was growing up, my rear neighbor, Janet, and my mom were both going through rough divorces at the same time. My mom mostly kept to herself at first. Janet did not take that approach. At first, Janet’s complaints seemed frustrating but reasonable. We had dogs and a fenced-in yard in the suburbs. When the dogs were left outside too long, they barked.
Janet filed a noise complaint. Again, quite reasonable. But then Janet started filing noise complaints any time she saw the dogs outside. So, my mom started keeping them inside more. Next, Janet filed complaints when she could hear the dogs barking inside, or when she heard someone else’s dogs, or really just whenever she felt like it because this wasn’t about the noise it was about Janet feeling a sense of control over something during an out-of-control divorce.
Eventually, the authorities must have told Janet she had to stop calling them, so she started calling animal control instead. It got to the point where animal control knew what was happening, and would come to our door to make small talk with my mom just to file their report. They told her, though, that as long as the calls happened they had to at least come out.
That’s when my mom had a feather-brained idea. Whenever animal control showed up, my mom would buy a two-pack of lawn flamingos and put them in our yard. She was a teacher, so she got up early. When she did, she’d take the flamingos and make them stare at Janet’s front door. Then she’d get home earlier than Janet, and move them around just like normal decor.
Whenever Janet made a call, my mom bought more flamingos. And whenever Janet made a call, a bigger and bigger flock of lawn flamingos stared her down when she left for work. To make it more mysterious, the flamingos would be casually mingling when she got home. I can only imagine what she must have thought. One would have to think she questioned her sanity, both because of the movement and the incremental growth.
By the time it got to 12 or so lawn flamingos giving her the hundred-yard glare, she made the connection. Janet never called animal control again after that.
47. Housewarming Went Cold
This dude had just moved in across the street and threw a housewarming party. There was loud music all night until someone called the authorities and they shut it down. I finally got to bed around 2 am. I then woke up at 3:30 am to this same dude going door to door demanding to know if it was the person living there who called the authorities.
48. Blair Cat Project
I had a neighbor in an apartment complex who would sit in her car in the parking lot and blare Christian gospel music, which in and of itself wasn't the worst. But later we discovered a plastic bag hanging in a bush next to our window facing her unit, and found a cat skeleton in that bag. We called the apartment manager, who said, "I think I know who it was".
We then saw the manager knocking on the Christian’s door 15 minutes later. We were a little spooked. We never found any more bones, but we'd catch her staring at our unit a few times. We moved after the lease was up.
49. SWAT’s Happening?
We moved into an apartment complex and the neighbors right next door on our landing made our experience there extremely uncomfortable, to put it lightly. Two weeks after we moved in, 20 armed officers showed up and breached the neighbor’s door. The officers said they couldn’t locate the person they were after and that’s all the info we got on the incident.
Through our shared wall, we once heard a man shout, "If you don’t stop doing that, I swear to god I’ll punch you again". And then: "Do you want me to punch you again?" This shouting was followed by a child crying. We called CPS but then we were afraid because we were the only ones that could have heard—so they’d know it was us who called.
Very often, we’d see strangers at the neighbor’s doorstep. When they’d knock on the neighbor’s door we’d hear a child next door answer, and then shout something like, "Mom, so and so is ready". I’d like to believe she was just giving haircuts or something—technically still against lease agreement—but based on the types of people showing up at the door, it seems unlikely.
We were exiting the apartment at the same time as the neighbors, and their four-year-old child fell all the way down the concrete stairs to the ground level. We were horrified and moved to help. The mother stepped in and ignored us, yelled at her crying and definitely hurt child. They then quickly got in their car and drove off.
We moved after a year and never looked back. But I do think about those kids and I feel sad knowing that so many children are in abusive situations, raised by incompetent parents who were likely raised in the same terrible cycle.
50. It Came From Above
I had an upstairs neighbor who let their dog do its business—number one AND number two—on their balcony. I'm guessing this was going on for a while, as I started to notice a brown viscous substance leaking on my potted plants on my balcony. It wasn't until it rained that I could smell that it was dog excrement and urine. I basically had dog sewage raining all over my balcony from that night it rained.
I spent a ton of effort making my balcony a nice little oasis with nice lighting, plants, outdoor carpet, and furniture. I eventually got him evicted because it kept happening.
Sources: Reddit,
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