Moving to a new place is stressful enough—add some troublesome neighbors into the mix and you've got yourself a sticky situation. The people you end up living next to can either make or break your experience in your new neighborhood. Unfortunately, the following tales are of the latter case...
1. Feline Vendetta
My neighbor was absolutely fine for about seven years. He was a nice old man who recently remarried to a woman who had a 20-year-old student. She partied from time to time, though she was mostly tame. But then, one day, out of nowhere, we found our one-year-old cat lifeless in their garden. We weren't sure if we could be mad since the cat could have passed of a heart attack or something, so my family shrugged it off as a coincidence.
Fast forward two months later—we had a new cat that was younger and cuter. I came home one day and my cat came crawling to me whilst giving the loudest meow of his life. I couldn't believe my eyes. Turns out, my cat was shot. SHOT. WITH A BULLET. Our gardener told us that he clearly saw the neighbor with a pistol, shooting pigeons or something, minutes before my cat was shot.
So yeah, as you can imagine, we haven't been close to our neighbors since that day...P.S our cat survived with surgery and is perfectly fine, but he only has eight lives left.
1. Pesky Problems
My previous neighbors were in their 80s. The elderly gentleman used to dress up in what was ostensibly a hazmat suit and spray pesticide on his lawn. At the same time, she would stand behind him in her muumuu and slippers holding the pail with the pesticides. It seems safe to assume that they got rid of a lot of pests.
2. Kooky? More Like Spooky
It started out that we just thought she was a free spirit; just your average hippie-dippie Scandinavian lady with alternative parenting ideas. But we gradually learned that she was just a horrible person. The first red flag was when she picked up my four-year-old son, claiming she wanted him over for a short visit. She said he was playing with her younger daughter and she said they were playing naked most of the time.
I told her he wasn't allowed to be undressed anymore but I wasn't mad because I knew things were less uptight in Norway where she was from. I later talked to my son about it. Her older daughter, on the other hand, was always misbehaving. Her first time over to our house, she smeared chapstick all over an entire wall. She was like six years old. Plenty old enough to know better.
Another time, she sneaked into our house while I was outside playing with my kids and started eating some brownies I had just made. I mean, she tore a hole right smack in the middle of the plastic wrap over the dish and scooped out handfuls of brownies. She would also "pole dance" on the tree out front, singing "Shake yo money maker." Six years old.
She had birthday parties for her children, to which we were invited and brought gifts. But then, we found out their REAL birthdays were later in the year. When we were invited again, we declined. The lady tried to explain that she celebrated half birthdays. I explained to her that we didn't. Soon, my children were not allowed to play at their house anymore.
Though, we still all ran into each other walking to school. She would tell me how she saw real demons walking around disguised as people, and how God told her that I was really close to seeing the light and becoming Christian. It was during this time that someone called CPS on her and she accused me of it. It wasn't me, but maybe it should have been.
We finally moved, but she caught up with me one day to give me a bag of used clothes for my daughter. But her intentions were utterly twisted: I sliced my finger on the razor blade that she put in the bag, luckily not very badly. That was the last I saw of her.
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2. While It Pours
I had a neighbor who wouldn’t let anyone use his driveway because he didn’t want it to get dirty. Anyone including himself. He parked on the street outside. If he thought you were having a party, he would drag a bunch of plastic bags full of god knows what to the end of his driveway so no one could turn around it. One time I came home and he was outside hosing it down in the rain. To his credit, I’ve never seen a cleaner driveway.
3. A Near Fatal Mistake
My neighbor came home from the bar with his friend and they were both tipsy. At some point, they started screwing around with a pistol and accidentally shot through their floor—down into my apartment. The worst part? I actually got hit in the stomach. I called 9-1-1 and when the ambulance was taking me away, my panicked fiancé was getting ready to leave because the EMTs told her to follow.
My neighbor came down and was like "What happened? We heard a commotion!" The authorities were called and he got taken into custody.
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3. Sweet And Singed
I had a neighbor back in The Day™ who we will call Gary. Gary was a really sweet guy. Middle-aged guy, kind of had it rough in life, but managed to keep his spirits up. He liked beer and BBQ, to a degree that made me like him immensely. He made extra money by doing odd jobs around the neighborhood. Heck, he mowed my grass for pretty cheap.
Great guy. He lived with his uncle, a cool old coot with a hook for a hand. The uncle supplemented his income by buying and selling random stuff, much of which he kept in his backyard. Very Sanford And Son. They even had the old-timey truck. Gary also loved to make BBQ, as I said. He would slow-smoke stuff in smokehouses that he made himself out of random junk.
People would bring him things and he would turn them into smokehouses. He made the neighborhood smell nice. One day, I am off from work, hanging out at my house and playing video games. Suddenly, there is a loud explosion that sounded like an artillery shell. Pictures fall off my walls and my cats scatter and hide immediately.
Being an idiot, my idiotic self goes running out the back door of my house toward the sound. My neighbor's house is right behind mine so I immediately see the following: The awning on the back of my neighbor's house is on fire; there is a 50-gallon drum in the backyard on fire; there is a tarp held up by a number of poles, to provide shade in the back yard, on fire.
Finally, my neighbor is on the ground, unconscious, being rolled around by his uncle and a buddy. He is also on fire. So, I see someone is already calling for help, so I go to help. By the time I am there, Gary is no longer on fire, so one of his buddies grabs the hose, and I grab a bucket. They have one of those dual-spigot thingies, so I can fill the bucket while the other guy uses the hose.
I am putting out the awning on the house, and the other guy sprays down Gary to make sure he is good and extinguished. As I am re-filling the bucket, I see the guy with the hose is putting out the tarp shade. He turns toward the burning barrel, aims the hose, and lets loose. I am doing the slow-motion "Nooooo....!" thing.
When the water hit the barrel, a mushroom cloud of fire and smoke appeared above my neighborhood. I was freaking out, screaming about shooting a hose into burning liquid. I later asked his uncle what was in the barrel. He said, "Oh, a mix of kerosene and fuel oil." I said "That is two of the three ingredients in rudimentary liquid rocket fuel. The third ingredient makes it explode slower."
Eventually, the ambulance came and immediately left with Gary. Turned out he had second and third-degree burns on over half his body. However, the biggest issue was the concussion. He also had a bajillion little internal injuries all through his torso. They almost lost him more than once. It took him a few months to get out of the hospital.
He's fine now, though he is not pretty, but he had to stop doing my lawn because I guess sunlight hurts now. Poor, sweet dude came to me to apologize and to tell me his cousin will be doing my lawn. I was just glad he lived, and here he was making sure I was taken care of. And that is the story of my exploding neighbor.
4. Sketchy Dealings
One year in university, I ended up finding a room in an apartment building. It was one of those apartments with five bedrooms on one floor with a shared kitchen and two bathrooms. The landlady ended up renting out each room individually, so I was living with four complete strangers. They were mostly decent guys and we got along okay, outside or normal roommate quarrels.
This was fine until it was time for the roomies to move out before the lease was up. They didn't want to get charged for the month of rent, so they found subletters. My one roommate gave his room to another total stranger. The new total stranger wasn't really vetted all that well. I bumped into him once when he moved in and he gave me a weird vibe.
He kind of seemed like a sketchy dude, but whatever; we were all poor university students, so I thought maybe I was reading him wrong. I didn't even really meet him long enough to really catch his name. Anyway, one night, a few days after he moved in, I was sitting in my room with my girlfriend and we were watching a movie. During the movie, I could have sworn that I was hearing radios going off.
I shrugged it off and figured it was a part of the movie. About twenty minutes later, however, there was a knock on our apartment door. None of my other four roommates was home, so I answered it and was greeted with not one, not two, but five officers. At least one of them was armed with an SMG. Officers: "Does this man live here?" Me: "Uh...Yeah, I think that's the new roommate..."
Officers: "Is he home?" Me: "Uh...I don't think so..." They came in and knocked on his bedroom door. No answer. Curious, I asked them what was happening. The officers all shared a meaningful look and one of them answered that he may have been involved in an incident and may be injured. About five minutes later, the apartment door opened and the sketchy roommate was standing there in the entrance hall to the apartment.
Our conversation went something like this—Me: "Are you okay? The authorities were here looking for you and said you were injured." His response was horrifying: "Oh, I was involved in a drive-by shooting earlier today. It's okay though, I ran away." He then went into his room as if he didn't just drop a bombshell 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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4. Green Thumbed Success
I used to live in a little town of 300 people where we had an elderly neighbor named Gladys. She would routinely look near our garbage can outside and take the recyclable bottles and cans we would leave for her. After we cleaned out a fish tank, we put the gravel and fake plants in a bag and left it on top of the garbage can because it was already full.
About a week later, Gladys hollered at me while I was outside to come over as she wanted to show me something. She had taken that bag we had left and planted the fake plants along the side of her house. She said she wasn’t really confident that they would make it but so far they seemed to be thriving! I could only nod and compliment her on her green thumb.
5. The Good Prevails
I'm a surveyor. This woman called us with a complaint about her neighbor's garden growing into her property. She was upset at her neighbor and told us all about how nasty she was. We eventually met the neighbor and she ended up being the nicest person ever. She told us she would be willing to move her garden, but only once the survey was completed.
We staked out the line and it went right through the other woman's shed. That's when the horror was unleashed: She screamed at us, pulled our stakes out, and tried to hit us with them. Her neighbor, the one with the garden, was so happy that she was right, she was almost in tears. She made the woman move her shed and then installed a large fence. I love it when the good guy wins.
5. Purrfectly Nice
My neighbor sits in his yard, hides behind his plants, and meows at people who pass by. He is not dangerous at all but he is not right in the head either. His caretakers are his parents and they seem to be very nice people. His dad once told me "he just likes to be a cat" and left it at that. I didn't ask any more questions.
6. White Flag
I moved into a brand new house. I noticed an old toilet, garbage, and a broken-down hot tub in the neighbors front yard. Nothing special about that. I made cookies and we went over to introduce ourselves. He laughed and slammed the door in our faces. Little did we know, this was the beginning of our worst nightmare. A few days later, I was out landscaping our new yard with my husband, and we just laid some bricks.
He was on his knees, making sure they were level, while I stood beside him and handed over the bricks. Our neighbor then walked by and yelled, “Well, I can see who wears the pants!” My husband and I looked at each other, totally perplexed. Then, a few months later, we got a puppy. Our other neighbor let us know she witnessed the guy's son throwing lit-up matches over the fence at our puppy when he was in the backyard.
We found about 50 matches in our yard. Then she also had to call the authorities because his other son broke the lights on her garage and defecated on her welcome mat (all captured on her home video system). About six months later, I got a complaint about our dog's barking and ended up with a $500 fine. It was ridiculous. Our dog never barked, unless someone walked by or came to the door.
We had letters from all 16 surrounding neighbors attesting that our dog never barked, but the letters were not admissible. We sold the house and moved shortly afterward.
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6. That Deflated Feeling
I have one strange neighbor. She has a penchant for going around sticking nails in people's tires at night. This has happened dozens of times to nearly everyone on the street, though she's slowed down since more people have started installing video cameras and motion-sensor lights in their respective driveways.
7. Karmic Justice
This happened to my parents before they had me and my siblings. When buying their first house, which is our current family home, they arrived on their motorbikes to view the house. After deciding on wanting to buy it, they greeted the neighbors. The neighbors expressed how thankful they were that the "biker couple" didn't buy the house, then proceeded to rant about their dislike towards bikers...not knowing my parents were the biker couple.
As you can imagine, it didn't go down too well when the pricks noticed the bikes. But it gets even more interesting—a few months after their initial chat with the neighbors, my parents were sitting in the living room minding their own business when they heard an explosion. They ran outside to find both of their bikes engulfed with flames.
They called the fire brigade who put out the fire. One of the firefighters approached my mom and pointed out that there were matches laying around and that it was more than likely an arson attack. My mom didn't pursue it with the authorities for God knows what reason, but while in her fit of rage, she told my dad: "Whoever did this is going to break their right leg."
Coincidence or not, a week later, one of the neighbors came home with his right leg in a cast.
7. Dancing The Night Away
We used to live next to a woman who would have a disco party for her cats in her backyard at 2 am every few days. She would put up a disco ball and party lights with music playing. It was a little bit odd but what made it crazy was her dancing as though she was performing a ritual around the disco ball. It’s honestly one of the strangest things I’ve ever witnessed!
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8. Mr. De Vil
I was 13 at the time. My neighbor tried to take my dog and her puppies. He literally broke into our house one day to do it. Luckily, my mom and I were there at the time—when he realized we had caught him in the act, he dropped the dogs, but also told us that he could break our necks whenever he wanted. Quite a nice guy. We obviously called the authorities after that.
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8. Agent Bunny Reporting For Duty
Our neighbor plays VR in a large bunny onesie. When I say a bunny onesie, I mean one like the kind the kid gets in A Christmas Story. Which, you know, is cool. I guess you do you. But he plays with his window open so everyone can see him and, on top of that, he plays from what I can tell is exclusively military sims and never ever breaks character.
You can hear him yelling stuff like, "Contact 30 clicks south by southwest!" or “Down Reloading, Ready UP!" The guy will throw himself to the ground and I mean throw himself. The few times I've spoken to him or seen him in person he's had bruises on his arms and face from hitting the ground. And that's only what I can see from his window.
Other than that, at night you can hear the guy grinding, hammering, and drilling on something. I'm terrified to know what he's doing in there. He says that he works for the government and does contractor work for it. He has really nice stuff—including a lot of expensive stuff—and new vehicles all the time. So, he seems to have ample money coming in.
He, however, can't carry on a conversation. He starts getting nervous and will break away as soon as he can. He was home for a few weeks, saying that he was in between contracts, and I managed to talk to him a bit while he was setting stuff outside. That stuff that he was laying out though—a rucksack that had seen some heavy use and everything from medical and survivalist camping gear to empty magazine holders, and a plate holder for bullet-resistant plates.
He said he was letting them air out since he was planning on going on a backpacking trip for a few weeks. Weirdest part is that he leaves almost every night between 9 and 10 pm. Probably to get some of the junk food he'll leave in his car occasionally, but every night? I like to think the guy’s a secret agent and uses the VR thing as an excuse to explain away bruises and cuts.
Either way, I feel sort of safe, he's genuinely nice when he does talk to you, just in that I haven't spoken to another human being for years kind of way. You go Secret Agent Bunny. Saving the world one hop at a time.
9. An Act Of Hate
I was in a car accident when I was young, maybe eight years old. I had my two sisters—one younger and one older in the back seat with me, and in the front were our babysitters who were very close family friends. We went off a curb on our very own road that was notorious for accidents and the car flipped several times. It was the middle of winter in Northern Vermont.
We had tons of snow and it was cold out. We were all okay as it was a low-speed accident, but the Jetta doors had crunched in and the only way we could get out was by kicking the cracked windshield out. While our babysitters did their best, we couldn't get out. By that time, the person whose lawn we had rolled onto came down. He was very nice, but he couldn't get to us either. He told us he would go get his parents who lived just up the road to help.
He returned with his parents and my babysitters' faces were a mixture of disbelief and concern. You see, my babysitters are Black, and the guy's parents were their next-door neighbors who were EXTREMELY supremacist. They would shoot in the air and in the general direction of the family's home, shouting "American and proud!" on basically every even remotely patriotic holiday.
It came to a head one year when they shot through two layers of the fence that our babysitters' father had installed out of worry for his many kids. Now, while analyzing our situation, the faces on the parents of the guy were a mixture of disgust and amusement. I'll never forget what they said: "We aren't lifting a dang finger for these losers," and how they turned away, chuckling to themselves.
The guy was embarrassed and apologized on behalf of his parents. A few minutes later, a fire truck arrived and they broke open the doors to help us out. I was freezing and confused as were my sisters. That act of hate has always stuck with me. I sincerely hope those two jerks met a painful end.
9. Eating The Rainbow
He eats my flowers. In his defense, he told us that he has been doing it for years when he introduced himself after we bought the house. He also brought over frozen cookies in a plastic bag, as a housewarming gift, but wasn't sure what was in them. We share a side yard and as he was talking to us, I noticed his all-brick house was actually roofing shingles, layered to look like brick.
It started to register that he may be a little out there. He's a great neighbor. Just an older, eccentric person who keeps to himself and eats my flowers. No shame. He comes over to my yard and eats my lilies raw. Or, he brings scissors and clips the heads to "boil and make jam." It's crazy to me, but we have embraced it.
I planted a couple of raspberry, blackberry, and blueberry bushes three years ago, when we first moved in, on the side yard we share. Along with those were a few knock-out rose bushes. I told him to help himself to berries/roses anytime, especially before the birds do. The bushes have all gone insane and the entire side of my house is now a yearly buffet for my neighbor.
Having a decent relationship with a crazy guy I share a property line with is worth some deadheaded flowers.
10. Real Peaches
My neighbor sprayed our hedge between our houses with something that destroyed it. Initially, we planted it there next to her cyclone fence so we wouldn’t have to look at her. Everything we’ve planted there dies, and they always start dying from her side. She’s super nosy and is always watching out the window, which is why we plant things there!
She also moved her in-ground sprinklers onto what I think is our property. They are touching our driveway, and she sets them to go off in the middle of the night when our cars are parked there. She refuses to set them for when we’re at work because it “interrupts her yard work time.” The water spots on our cars are from the irrigation water, and they leave huge, white, amoeba-shaped marks down one side of our car!
I paid someone $250 last year to use acid to remove them and they were still faintly there. She actually had the nerve to suggest our son park his car there because the color of his car won’t show the water spots as bad! Her husband walks up and down the backyard fence and whistles at our dog to make her bark, then the wife complains to us about our dog barking.
They're real peaches.
10. It’s A Conspiracy!
She complained to the authorities that neighbors had purchased satellites to spy on her. She set up cameras that were directly aimed at all surrounding neighbors. She built up beams around the inside of her fence so that she could stand on them and look over the fences to the neighbor yards and she would launch large rocks.
She also yelled at everyone who watered their gardens and lawns that all the water was making her property soggy, even though she was at the top of the hill. She planted jeans in the soil as if to use them for landscape fabric. She painted everything (house, sheds, yard art, bike, etc.) on her property red and yellow and blue "to ward off evil spirits."
11. The No-Gooder
We were trying to sell our house and the neighbors' nephew was sabotaging it. When we’d leave so people could look at it, he would sneak around creepily which turned off a lot of buyers. He even went into my house during an open house and told people not to buy it. He lived like 100 yards away from us and to this day, we still don’t know what his deal was.
Once he started threatening my sister who tried to help him after he passed out on my driveway, we called the authorities and made him sign a paper that said if he was caught on the property again, he’d be put behind bars. Luckily, we were able to sell it after that.
11. It’s In The Air
My sister’s neighbor reported my sister to the authorities because her kids were playing in my sister’s garden. She did not for the usual reasons, such as too much noise, etc. Nope, she did it because a volcano in Italy had erupted and the radiation resulting from this eruption would hurt them. My sister lives in the United Kingdom.
12. Crossing A Line
This is about my neighbor two houses over. We were good acquaintances, probably almost friends; but everything changed in a single moment. I worked for the guy for a little bit—he was actually my boss at the time this happened. I noticed that he's really big on using people's stuff when they aren't around—like one time, he used a guy's woodworking tools while he was gone.
I told him multiple times, "Hey, I'm cool with you borrowing my stuff but just make sure you ask. I also don't like unscheduled visits, so call or text if you want to stop over." I just wanted to let him know where I stood if he wanted to borrow some more tools from me or whatever. I had let him borrow a 17 mm impact socket from me once.
Then, two weeks went by and I assumed the jerk probably lost it. Whatever...I just told myself never to lend out stuff to him again. Well, after another few days, he said, "Hey, you weren't home so I returned the socket and borrowed another." Yes, he hopped over my fence mid-day while I was gone, opened my garage door, returned the socket he borrowed, very scratched and marred up, and helped himself to some of my other tools.
He told me this a week after he did it, out of the blue, as if it was no big deal. That was the breaking point for me. I told him to stay the heck away from me, my house, my family, and my property.
12. Leafing Through
My grandparents’ house backs onto a wood. They are also at the bottom of a hill, with the said wood running uphill behind them. Mounds and mounds of fallen leaves on the lawn are inevitable, especially in autumn. Their next-door neighbor is... well... she's very houseproud. And, that is understating her passion for her house.
For instance, her sister visited her and made some toast in the toaster and she freaked out because you don't USE the toaster. It's just for show! And now it's ruined because there are crumbs in it! Anyway, leaves on the lawn are a constant source of stress for her. Every autumn she's out there all day, watching, just waiting for one to fall.
And when one does, she's straight over to scoop it up and throw it in the compost. Once she leaned over the fence to speak to my grandad, and apparently, she just gazed into his eyes, utter despair on her face, and asked, "When is it going to stop?" His response? He pointed at her trees saying, "When all of that," and continued, while then pointing at her lawn, to finish by saying, "is down there."
13. Driveway Dispute
We moved into an apartment and our neighbor informed us that she owned half of the driveway. Cool, whatever; it was a huge driveway and it had more than enough room for all of us. After a month or so of living there, she divided the driveway in half with a bunch of rocks. Still fine, as we had plenty of room. But over the course of two months, she slowly moved the rocks closer and closer to our apartment.
It got to a point where we would have to physically move them out of the way to get in and out of our driveway. The landlord finally got a survey done and found out a shocking truth—she didn’t own ANY part of the driveway! From that point on, she was forced to park her car on the road. Serves her right for lying to us and taking advantage of our kindness.
13. On A Rampage
Our neighbor plants a row of shrubs, waits until they look nice, and then whacks the heck out of them. He cuts every single branch off until there's just a spindly 5' stick. Or, he plants several shrubs along his foundation, waits 3-4 years, and then yanks them out with his car. Once he pulled out a very healthy tree growing at the end of his house and then planted another same size tree in its place.
If we ever sell our house, I think he would buy it just so he could bulldoze everything in our yard.
14. Bird Calls
I'm probably someone's bad experience, although they don't know it's me yet. The malfunctioning smoke alarm in my apartment complex hallway has almost become a sort of a bitter joke among my neighbors—it's been chirping multiple times a day for the past two months; but no matter what, maintenance just can't seem to make it stop.
What my neighbors don't know is that the smoke alarm only chirped consistently for about three days. Everything since then has been my parrot, who liked the sound so much that she's been mimicking it as often as she likes. They don't know I have a parrot. The woman immediately next door does think I have a dog, though, because the feathery little witch also likes to bark and then scold herself for it.
14. Cold Comfort
Not sure if this counts as crazy but I have this neighbor who is part of a spiritual organization called "Brahma Kumaris." Every time someone in the neighborhood is going through rough times, especially deaths in the family, she goes to their house, and instead of offering condolences, she preaches how they should join this organization and things will be better.
She doesn't acknowledge anyone the rest of the time. Indeed, the only acknowledgment is at the time when someone dies or a new family moves in the neighborhood. In both cases, she acknowledges the people to take the opportunity to preach and to give books written by the leaders of the aforementioned spiritual organization.
15. Up In Smoke
I came home to a smoke-filled apartment and I called 9-1-1 right away since I couldn't find the cause myself. Turns out, our downstairs neighbors put a charcoal grill on their stove so they could barbecue indoors. Brilliant. My only relief was that a friend had walked my dog earlier that day so I know he wasn't in a smoke-filled apartment all afternoon.
15. The Hansel And Gretel Trail
He was our landlord/neighbor in a duplex we were renting. He was a hoarder and did a lot of things like rummage through our trash to retrieve garbage we had tossed. It was in LA and he would put out dozens of teeny tiny receptacles; cups, milk cartons, pots, all over the yard any time there was a hint of rain forecasted.
He would also leave little pieces of plastic garbage around the fence to see if anyone took them or moved them. Odd stuff. But then there was the ultimate weird moment. We had a shared set of stairs leading off the back of the house. I went down them one day and saw a piece of bread lying on them. It thought that maybe it was for the birds.
A couple of days later it was a piece of toast. A day after that the toast was wrapped up in a used napkin and propped up against my door. To this day it is still a mystery to me why he would think I would want the 5-day old porch toast.
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16. Public Pool
They insisted that we pay to have a gate installed between our backyard fences so that they may use our above-ground pool as they please, preferably when they invite friends over. When we denied it, they threw a hissy fit and found an excuse to "punish" us. You see, the pool was going through some expensive issues with leakage into the yard.
They threatened to call the fine-happy HOA because the water was leaking into the yard they rarely used and their dog was allegedly getting sick from drinking the water. Not wanting to deal with that nonsense (and also wanting to clean our own backyard of the pond that began housing frogs), my father spent his birthday day off from work in the Texas heat digging a trench and installing a pipe so that the water could drain.
The neighbors came outside and harassed dad the entire time he was digging the trench, telling him it would've just been easier to install the gate. Would've been easier to install a shovel into their frontal lobes, those freaking profligates.
16. The High Life
My neighbor’s doghouse has electricity. The doghouse sits there in his backyard at night with a light on, radio going—the dog loves listening to the radio, apparently—and a small electric fan in summer to keep him cool. It's not so much "crazy" as, perhaps, a bit eccentric. How many doghouses have electricity, lights, fans, and a radio playing for the dog's enjoyment?
17. Don's A Dog
My old neighbor used to walk his dog on a leash to let it take a dump in my yard. My mom had me throw the mess back into his yard once and he called the authorities on us. A few months later, my family and I were going out of town and after we left our house, my mom had realized she had forgotten something. We turned around—and what we witnessed made our blood boil.
There's our awful neighbor, standing in the middle of our yard with his dog on a leash dropping a nice present in our front yard. All I remember is my mom winding down her window and yelling, “Screw you, Don!”
17. The Selfish (Not)Giant
There was one angry old guy in my neighborhood—the one who yelled at kids and had his house egged every Halloween—then one day, he became a totally new person. He woke up and out of nowhere took out his back fences so the kids living on either side of him had a bigger area to play. Other neighbors loved it so much that they did the same thing, creating a massive field with sandpits, swings, slides, a treehouse, little vegetable and herb gardens, etc.
It was the greatest thing ever. Kids used to put four slip and slides in a row. There was a trampoline, an above-ground pool, and a soccer net. In the winter, it was snow forts and an outdoor rink. He also painted his house bright colors, adopted senior dogs from the shelter that were everybody's to enjoy, hosted cocktail parties, played saxophone on his back porch, etc.
I lived on a different block, but spent a lot of time there—he made his block a paradise for kids and families, and people loved him. When he died, more than two hundred people showed up to the cemetery for his funeral. Before he had his sudden change of heart, he might have been gone a week before someone probably smelled something.
No idea what happened or how he suddenly became sane. I think he was probably mourning his wife and woke up one day and decided to move on. I like to think he had a dream where she appeared and told him to let go. Everybody I know who grew up around that block wants to be the exact same guy when their time eventually comes.
18. Black Tie Event
My next-door neighbor growing up had someone in the family pass. On the day of the funeral, he came to our door and asked my dad if he could borrow a tie. My father complied and gave him a nice black silk tie, suitably appropriate for the occasion. He felt bad for the guy and thought it was an easy way for him to help the guy out during his time of sorrow.
We showed up at the funeral and saw the neighbor, strangely not wearing the tie he borrowed. Then we looked at the casket and my dad's tie was being worn by the corpse. Not wanting to be rude, none of us said anything, and as a result, the tie was buried with the corpse, never to be seen again.
18. Something’s Fishy
Our neighbors seem to be into preserving their own food. That’s cool, I suppose. However, the task has become fishy. Literally. For the last few weeks, they have been drying fish in their driveway. By that I mean that there are like 2-3 dozen whole fish just laying on their driveway on tinfoil. No protection, no pans. Just fish. On the driveway.
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19. You Think You Know Someone
I lived behind Bob Berdella, the notorious figure from Kansas City. I lived there for five years and I talked to him daily, as he was the head of the neighborhood watch. Little did I know that he had also been living a secret life, kidnapping people and sending them without remorse. The day he was caught, it was because one of the young gay men he captured escaped and ran down the street wearing nothing but a dog collar.
Because I listened to tapes and CDs at the time, I had not heard anything about it on the radio. I drove home that night to a neighborhood full of officers, and it took me by complete surprise. When I found out the truth, I sounded just like every other neighbor in that type of situation: "But he was such a quiet and nice guy..."
They used excavators and backhoes to dig up his yard, and they tore down my fence as well. Eventually, he was given life in prison, where he eventually passed. His house was later sold and demolished. It was very weird. He had a store in a flea market, plus four skulls in the window with a sign that read "Final Four." One was from a victim.
19. Glow Up
Every spring, sometime in late February or March, our neighbor puts up a fluorescent light strip of the size of a bed in her living room window. It's on day and night for a few months. You can see the light from the window a mile away. At first, I thought she grew weed. But she's like 80 years old—a gray-haired frail lady. But, then I realized she grew pelargoniums.
Pixabay
20. The Psycho Next Door
My aunt, who was a single mother at the time and ran a daycare service in her house, lived next to a psychopath. After a bad ice storm one day, my aunt had a bunch of tree limbs fall into her backyard. Her neighbor's husband came over and cleaned it up for her; you know, just being a good neighbor. In turn, my aunt thanked him with a case of drinks; you know, just being a good neighbor.
Well, his wife took that as flirting, and so began a one-sided feud against my aunt. It was a while ago, so I don't remember everything. What I do remember, though, was horrifying. She tried to run over my aunt's dog once. Another time, she called child protective services and told them my aunt was a night worker and working at her house during the daycare hours.
Probably the worst one though was when my aunt found a bit of grass near the house burnt. She's old high school friends with the fire inspector, so he came and confirmed a fire was started using a propellant. My aunt took her to court over these things, but I don't remember what came of it. I'm pretty sure she at least got a restraining order.
20. Water Over My Head
The neighbor stealing water almost led to my toddler getting, at least, seriously injured. The neighbor was opening my gate and helping herself to the water for her flower beds. I suspected it from the high water bills, but had no proof. We always kept the gate closed because we had a dog and I had two kids under 4 years old at the time.
The youngest was 1 1/2 years old, and he loved to run around the backyard with the dog. One morning, the youngest begged to go outside to run around, so I let them do so while I cooked breakfast and watched them from the kitchen window. I went to the bathroom real quick, checked the laundry, and then heard a knock on the door.
I went to answer it and there was a man holding my youngest. "Is this your kid?" the guy asked. "They were running up the road up there," he continued. Holy moly! I thanked the guy profusely, then went outside to figure out how they got out. The gate had a latch that was way too high to reach for a little one, so I didn't even suspect that option.
Lo and behold, the gate was wide open with the hose suspiciously thrown near it. I was so fricking furious. I bought a lock for the gate and ended up wrapping the hose in and around several cinder blocks. It took all I had not to go over and scream at the woman who was responsible. But from then on, she never complained about my kids near her precious flowers, and I didn't care even if they did pull up every single one after that.
21. A Huge Disturbance
Our neighbor burned something in his oven. Rather than open his windows to get the smoke out, he opened his door to the hall and set off the building's alarms. We all had to stand out in the cold and wait for the fire department while he watched from his apartment. The fire department opened his windows and told him he was an idiot.
We still had to wait outside for them to do mandatory checks of everything to make sure it really was just him being stupid. It was January. In New England. During a cold snap.
21. Guess Who Is Watching
Our neighbor stalks us. Like every time I get home, she’ll walk outside and tell me I was either 3 minutes later getting home this time or that I was home 2 minutes earlier and then ask me why. One time my friend and her sister came to pick me up. The neighbor was against her window with her hands and face pressed up against the glass.
Said neighbor was trying to get a look at who was coming to pick me up. My friend and her sister were so terrified that they called me, telling me to hurry up because a crazy lady was staring at them through a window. I calmly replied to their frantic call by saying, “Oh, it’s just the stalker neighbor!” Yes, that was a funny day.
22. When Greed Takes Over
I live in Puerto Rico, where most of the island has been without power for the past two months following Hurricane María. Due to our government's power authority being quite slow in the recuperation process, a lot of neighborhoods in my area have been hiring private contractors to bring the electricity back. In my case, I found a contractor willing to bring our neighborhood's power grid back on, but I needed unanimous support from the neighbors to pay and authorize the process.
Most were on board for this, but two of my next-doors opposed it for some reason. When we asked them why they were, their response floored us. They said that they wanted the neighborhood without power so the rest of us would eventually leave and they'd never have to see our "annoying and pathetic" faces again. So it was pretty much a no-go on the contractor.
Fast forward a week and we found out that these next-doors had a friend in the power authority who asked them to keep away private contractors from the neighborhood so the authority could take credit when the power is eventually restored.
22. Stay Out Of My Trash
So, we had a neighbor whose trash was being rummaged. Instead of moving his trash or getting locking lids, he stalks your car at night to throw his body in front of it to protest your suspected raccoon-like activities. All the while, the true trash pandas are in the background, having an absolute field day with his trash.
23. Ulterior Motives
My next-door neighbor was always creepy. He always asked us to come inside and play with his cats. Then, when he was moving out, he offered me an Air Force One jacket. I was about 10 at the time. He said that if I wanted to get the jacket, I had to come with him to get it from some guy's house. After I told him I needed to ask my mom, he disappeared.
To this day, I think he wanted to abduct me.
23. (A)Corny Story
My strangest encounter has been with the next-door lady. At one point, she was standing on her driveway yelling at me because acorns had fallen from a large oak tree on my property onto said driveway. This was deemed unacceptable, of course. Thus, she was demanding that I cause the tree to cease and desist from this intentional criminal activity.
24. Caught In The Middle
My neighbors had...problems. They had constant, nightly blowouts and physical fights. They were together but not married, so they were constantly on and off. The dad was an avid drinker and the officers knew him by name. Once, when we were sleeping, we heard the screaming and cries of their son (who was my little sister's best friend). A minute later, the boy was knocking on the door for my mom to help.
She pulled him inside and a few minutes later the mom showed up, bloody and beaten up. She asked my mom to lock the door and held onto her son. She wouldn't call the authorities out of fear they'd take the son, so my mom pulled the couch out and made them a makeshift bed. She locked the door and made the mom food while my sister and the son slept. But that wasn't the end of it.
About an hour after they'd showed up, the dad started kicking our door and screaming. My mom fought with him through the door for over an hour, and he eventually left. My mom then arranged for a place for them to stay in a women's shelter an hour or so away and brought them there the next night after he thought they'd already left.
She spent two weeks sneaking as much as she could to them until she found an apartment back locally and felt it was safe for them to come back.
24. My Way Or The Court Way
My family's neighbors took my parents to court because they didn't like that we bought two unused laundry rooms to enlarge our tiny 38 square meter flat. When they couldn't do that anymore, they invented a story where we played basketball in our flat on the night of Christmas Eve. This, they claimed, happened while we weren't even home and had multiple pictures to prove it since we were visiting grandma for Christmas.
25. The Dog Days
My current neighbors are the worst. I'm in the Navy and so I'm often away, leaving my wife to deal with things alone. Our neighbors recently got a Staffordshire Bullterrier and rather than walk it, they would just throw it into their yard to do its business. After a while, it ran out of places to go in its own garden, so it started to jump into ours to take a dump.
My son is also scared of dogs, so he feels unsafe about going into our own yard to play. Since I'm at sea most of the time, there isn't a great deal I can do apart from telling my wife that I'll deal with it when I get home. But now the dog is growling at my wife in our own yard as it spends so much time there that it probably thinks it's his. I told my wife to leave the gate open and if the dog jumps over, it can go outside to do its thing.
The next day, my wife opened the door to a man screaming at her and calling her a witch because his dogs ran away and might have been run over. He then threatened my wife and son over the issue and left. So my wife called the authorities and to her astonishment, the jerks next door said we were being unreasonable by not letting their dog do its business in our garden; our property.
Anyway, he got a warning from the officers and an order to control his dog by building a fence or risk having it taken away by the dog warden.
25. One Man Home Improvement Project
I lived in a really nice suburban neighborhood and the diagonal across-the-street neighbor was always strung out. He would be in his boxers in his front yard literally at all hours of day and night. He would water his front lawn over 10 times a day, cut the lawn with a hedge trimmer for hours on end and it'd look terrible afterward.
He also tore down his backyard fence and painted his house in multiple colors. He took down all his blinds and keeps his windows open 24/7. He would also keep his garage open all day and night. It was the strangest behavior I have ever seen in my life. Luckily, he was taken away after his wife had had enough of his behavior, I guess.
He alone turned a nice quiet street into the most stressful living situation I have had in my life. He would passively harass my wife and I as we walked down the street. He would also shadowbox in the corner of his lawn closest to mine or rap out loud with his phone at full volume in the quiet neighborhood and only when we were outside the house.
26. The Pesky Beggar
I once had a neighbor in college who would knock on my door and ask me for money. I would just say that I was a broke student who couldn’t spare anything. It was weird as heck because it was a weekly occurrence at the least. She was in her 50s and working, so I didn't understand why she would do that. One day, I got fed up, so when she knocked on my door, I said, "Yeah, I got some money for you."
I asked her to hold out her hands and gave her like, two dollars worth of nickels that I had in a change jar. Surprisingly, she never bothered me again after that.
26. Wiping Away Evidence
We had a house blow up in our neighborhood years ago. It turned out they were cooking stuff, and it wasn't dinner. A few days after the initial boom, we were all surprised to see a fire raging in the same house. It turned out that one of the guys not home at the time of the first blow-up got the brilliant idea to come back days later to commit arson.
He reasoned they wouldn't have started the investigation yet and he could burn the evidence from the last fire with a new one.
27. Problem After Problem
I lived on the top floor of a sketchy house in college because it was the only place that would let seven of us rent together. The first week we were there, the SWAT team did a raid on one of the units below us. They busted in the door and used flashbang grenades on them. One of the other units smelled like urine and constantly had people coming in and out buying illicit substances.
Our keys barely fit in the lock because people had tried to pick them so much. Our cable and internet stopped working, so we called the cable company to check it. The guy took us over to the box outside and showed us nine different lines that were ripping our internet. I could go on and on. On the plus side, we could shoot bottle rockets in our hallway because it wasn't like anyone was going to call the authorities on us.
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27. Stop! In The Name Of Law!
My neighbor pulled us over pretending to be a police officer, saying that we had somehow broken the law while pulling out of our driveway and that she was “going to call it in.” She isn’t a cop. After chatting with the other neighbors, it turns out she’s just the “wannabe HOA president” in a neighborhood with no HOA. So, mostly harmless. Just very annoying.
28. Doorbell Bandit
We had a neighbor of ours—a retired officer in his 50s—doorbell ditch us for around a month. The crazy thing is we never knew it was him. Apparently, he was mad at us because we had a dog that would bark and disturb him. He never told us about this, so I didn’t feel too bad about his little prank. But we did want to catch him in the act at least once, just to spook him a little.
Finally, one day before we were moving out, he doorbell-ditched us. My wife and I looked at each other dead in the eyes, and without a word, I sprinted out the front door. She, on the other hand, went out the back door. We had this unspoken thing where we were like, “Let’s trap this jerk!” I was so impressed that we did this without needing to say anything to one another.
I caught up with our shirtless neighbor and he put his hands up, saying, “Okay, you got me.” I said, “Dude, what the heck? Why are you doing this?” He was tipsy as heck, and he proceeded to tell me about my barking dog. He apologized and said he should’ve told us about it.
28. It’s A Plant
We lived in a four-plex. At the end of our driveway was a eucalyptus tree that occasionally shed its seed pods which are shaped a bit like a sleigh bells, about the size of a quarter. Evidently, she slipped on one and broke her foot. She kept trying to get my kids to admit they had placed the eucalyptus seeds there as a booby trap and that they needed to pay her bills.
My kids were six and eight, by the way. I told the kids not to talk to her. So, then it became this rant about how my kids were so disrespectful and her grandson would never ignore a grownup like that and get those kids out here right now to apologize! But, she'd say this on repeat. One time I just stood there listening and she repeated herself for 20 minutes.
It was truly bizarre. Eventually, her hoarding caused a rodent issue so I had to call the landlord. She got evicted but I didn't feel bad because she owned another house. In fact, the only reason that she was renting and was living there was because of her hoarding too. Simply put, she had hoarded so much at the other house she couldn't live there since there was no room.
29. Downstairs Disturbance
I rented a house that had a rental basement suite. It was a one-bedroom, but an adult mom and her two adult sons all moved in there. They would fight, burn their food, and it would stink up our house. But the worst part? The mom had the yappiest dog ever. At the time, my five-year-old son had seen something on TV and told the mom that he heard that yappy dogs have short lives. She got offended and from that moment, she stopped talking to us.
They all eventually moved out, thankfully.
29. Dogging Your Steps
My old downstairs neighbor blocked my car to tell me that she was reporting me to the authorities for injuring her dog. Apparently, we were so loud the night before that her dog jumped off the bed and injured its eye and was now blind. The funny part is that we weren't home the night before. We had stayed at my brother's house.
She also used to follow me around with a camera, yelling things at me about the dog situation. She also posted letters in the public areas outing me as gay and calling me a sinner, even though I'm straight and, at the time, lived with my girlfriend who she had met. So, not entirely sure how she came to that conclusion.
She was a character. They kicked her out of the complex shortly after.
30. Right Back Atcha
I had this one downstairs neighbor who lacked any respect for the fact that our building wasn't sound-insulated. He would listen to loud music mostly through the day and sometimes late at night. This lasted for months, but nothing had yet been done by the landlord. One day, though, I think he discovered that he really, REALLY loved Gnarles Barkley's "Crazy."
He decided it was appropriate to play it half a dozen times in the course of an hour, and I just had it. So, being a karaoke jockey and having my equipment on hand, I decided to show him what "loud" was. I connected my speakers to my computer through my console, then I went hunting for the absolute worst "karaoke cover" of that same song.
I remember vividly it was a cover by this creepy fat basement dweller in his late 40s and it was horribly off-tune. I played it with the speakers flat on the floor so he'd get the full brunt of it. I played it three times in a row, loud enough that he would definitely suffer the consequence of his lack of respect. And, wouldn't you know it, he never played that song again.
He started being much more conservative in his volume levels. He left that summer and I never heard "Crazy" again from his collection. I wonder why.
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30. Get Off My Lawn (Not Everyone Though)
This older lady lives across the street from me and she is obsessed with leaves falling on her lawn. This is to the point that she will come out of her house and pick up one individual leaf off the grass in the fall, or any other time. She spends hours a day outside with the leaf-blower in fall just blowing the leaves away.
She will go and knock on other neighbors' doors if she thinks you have too many leaves on your grass. She'll even come over into your yard and do it herself if you're not home. What I think is weird is that she's in her 70s, no kids or grandkids living with her, and lives alone in a pretty large four-bedroom house with an amazing in-ground pool in the backyard—with a slide and diving board and everything.
Nobody has used that pool in at least five years yet she opens it up every summer. Somehow, she likes my family and has never once yelled at us about our leaves and, in fact, randomly brings things over like half-eaten gallons of ice cream and asks if we want it because she's not using it. I do not know what to make of it.
31. Exam Stress
My upstairs neighbor, who was quiet and respectful for the entire year, decided to crank his music during finals week in my senior year. I knocked on the door twice and asked him to turn it down, only to have him crank it up minutes later. It was so loud that my windows were shaking from the bass. Finally, on the third try, I called the authorities who issued him a citation.
After the officers left, he decided to bring three or four friends over to knock down my apartment door. It took pointing a pistol at them through the window to make them go away. I was happy to be done with college.
31. Birds Of A Feather (And Other Things)
The old lady who lived below me left me multiple cryptic letters blaming me for the birds chirping too loudly in the mornings. Not pet birds. The sparrows and other birds outside. This went on for months. The notes were quite accusatory. For instance, one of the notes said, “AGAIN, your bird dodo is on my railings, bird seeds on my porch & chairs, & your birds are ruining my nite rest, wee hours of the morning, birds in your feeder chirping.”
I did not have a bird feeder when I received this note. Yes, for a brief period I had had a bird feeder, but I had taken it down after a few months after multiple cryptic letters. Also, eventually, management had gotten involved and took her side even though bird feeders were explicitly allowed per the lease. So, no more bird feeder.
However, there were several trees nearby, including one that literally hung onto both her and my balconies. I assure you that birds existed before I set up the feeder, and they continued to exist after. My sister and BIL took over the lease four years ago, and they still get the occasional note from "bird lady." Apartment management has even inspected their unit to verify there's no bird feeder or any other bird luring devices.
32. Heavy Footed
I live in Brooklyn, NY. I recently got my own apartment in Greenpoint. I have a pretty great job in midtown Manhattan that offers a lot of overtime, so I have crazy hours and I commute to work. So, when I leave work late (usually around 11:45 pm every night), I catch the late trains and it takes me anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour to get home.
When I get home around 12:30 am, I’m exhausted—I just kick my shoes off and just throw them and my duffle bag wherever they land (usually on the floor right by my apartment entrance). When I first moved into my apartment, I always heard banging from the neighbor downstairs. I never thought anything of it, and I was always like, “Is this person serious? They’re working on their apartment at 1 am in the morning?!”
It wasn’t until maybe three weeks ago that I realized that he was getting upset about the banging that I was doing over their heads. I guess our apartments are set up differently and their bedroom is directly under my living room? I’ve since become more conscious of the noise I make when I get home—I started gracefully taking my shoes off and placing my belongings on the couch.
Regardless, the person who lives down there has never actually come up to my apartment to address the issue, but I find it hilarious because I just picture them laying in bed cuddled up with a broomstick or something similar and just waiting for the slightest pin drop to jump on top of their bed and start stabbing their ceiling.
32. Silence Isn’t Golden In This House
If the sun is up, my neighbor has to be making noise. Yet, he goes ballistic on anyone who makes even the tiniest peep after the sun goes down. This is what a regular day seems to be for him. From 8:00 AM–10:00 AM: mow the grass, and get out the LOUD leaf blower to blow even the tiniest particle of grass off the sidewalks and driveway.
10:00 AM–1:00 PM: get out the pressure washer to wash the sidewalks, driveway, siding on his house, his boat, his cars, the dog, whatever he can find; break for lunch, but play talk radio in his garage at maximum volume while he eats; fiddle with the engine on his motorcycle, revving it every 30 seconds to make sure it "sounds right."
1:00 PM–6:00 PM: get into a screaming match with his wife, all on the front lawn; fiddle with the motorcycle again; get out the table saw and randomly cut a pile of lumber that he will never build anything with; get out the chainsaw to cut up wood for his fire pit; dinner time...with loud talk radio blasting in the background.
6:00 PM–9:00 PM: pressure wash the sidewalks...again; get out the weed trimmer and mercilessly destroy even the slightest hint of a blade of grass that is too tall; leaf blower time again; and, finally, the last shouting match with the wife, with talk radio playing, until the sun goes down and he is, apparently, done for the day.
And, then…9:05 PM: go bananas at a neighbor (me) for coming home and parking my car too loudly after dark.
33. Driveways And Fences
My current neighbor wants us to tear out our driveway because she doesn't like the fact that it's on a slant and lets water roll downhill. She’s a loon. When the driveway was put in 25 years ago, it was all done by contractors and it is up to code. She’s threatened to sue us because her yard is at the bottom of the hill. We’re in Georgia and last year we had a BUNCH of rain—like, more than normal.
So of course, she had three inches of standing water. She said she talked to a lawyer and apparently, he said her case was solid. Then, later, she corroborated everything with our builder neighbor across the street. When intimidation didn’t work, we came home to a fence separating our properties. I guess it was supposed to offend us? Anyway, that was the best fence ever!
Guess what they say is true... great fences make great neighbors. She hasn't bothered us since then and we're both pretty civil nowadays.
33. Hear Me Roar
My previous tenant was super quiet. These new guys scream all night and day at each other and never seem to sleep. Their front door gets slammed no less than five times an hour. Their kid even shows up occasionally to get in a screaming match with her boyfriend before they get back in the car and peel away from the house again. Plus, they have about 10 cats that they released outside the second they moved in and which constantly end up under our house driving our dogs insane. Truly lovely people.
34. Open Fire
Just three days ago, the neighbor's dog attacked my dog in the street. My dog was on a leash, while the other dog wasn't—it just came charging at us. Being that the dog looked like a pitbull and was about 60 lbs, and I didn't know if it had diseases. Not wanting to risk getting bitten, I tried to shoot it. Just one shot and it ran away.
The shot woke up the entire neighborhood and the owner came out yelling at me as if allowing my dog, or myself, to be ripped open would have been the better choice. Three officers showed up and it created quite the show. Now I have to go to court for discharging a firearm within city limits. I can't wait to go actually.
34. Thar She Blows!
I recently moved out of an apartment I shared with some friends and moved into a new place with my partner. While we were looking, we saw the unit next door to my shared apartment had become available. The apartment was in a great location, and it'd be nice to live next door to my good friends, so I called the number listed but didn't hear back for over a week.
The housing and rental market in my town is always quite crazy, and lately it has absolutely skyrocketed. So, when my partner and I had the opportunity to look at another unit in a different building, a unit that was way bigger and nicer, for the same price as the unit in my old building, we pretty much jumped all over it.
I eventually got a call back from the realtor listing the unit next to my old one. As we talked, I politely told him that I'd found something else but that I had lived next door to his unit and loved living there. In response, he was very smarmy and told me he'd have no trouble finding someone else to rent it. And, I agreed with him. He was so smug—but he wasn't smug after what happened.
A couple of months after I moved out, my friends posted on social media that a fire in the unit next door had evicted everyone else in the building temporarily. There was an explosion that blew out the windows in that unit, and the people living adjacent to it are still displaced, even though it is almost four months since.
My friends told me that the people who did move in were sketchy. They were always yelling at each other, and there was a quiet teenaged daughter (?) who never seemed to go to school. Additionally, theft in the area got worse immediately after these people moved in—mostly cars getting rummaged through. I ran into someone else I know who lives in that building and she agreed with my friends.
It turns out that the accepted theory among the people who live there is the new tenants had a lab that exploded.
35. The Worst of The Worst
I saw my neighbors hang their pet dog on its hind legs to “train” it. It was at 5 pm and my sister and I were chilling at home, watching some Doctor Who. We then heard this really loud yelping outside our house and my sister and I decided to walk outside and peer through a bush and see what the heck was going on in our neighbor’s backyard. When we saw it, our blood ran cold.
We decided to call 9-1-1 and get the authorities over to apprehend the jerk. By the way, it turns out that they have mistreated animals before, but it was only when we caught them that they were taken in.
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35. The VIP Syndrome
We had a woman in my old neighborhood who used to pretend she was a cop all the time. First, I encountered her screaming at the post office staff because she’d arrived past the pickup time and they couldn’t guarantee her letter would be in tomorrow. She was there almost an hour just pitching a fit while they opened the other counters around her. Her rant was along the lines of “Do you know who I am?!” and all that stuff.
The second time that I encountered her she’d cornered some poor child on the bus and was telling her she’d have her taken away because she was an officer and she didn’t like the way the kid was eating a bag of crisps or something like that. Real invective stuff. I stepped in and politely asked if the child knew this person, at which point she backed off.
Anyway, I guess she saw me leave at my stop because I woke up the next morning to find my garden torn up. Total weirdo.
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36. Floridian Feud
We moved to Florida and our neighbors there were the most messed up people I've ever met. There's almost too much to get into, but here are some highlights: They threatened to poison our dog, they threw stuff in our yard all the time just to try to get a reaction out of us, and they set up two webcams in a window to watch our house. It goes on and on.
One day, a shoe landed in my pool while I was swimming, so I, being a 13-year-old kid, picked it up and threw it back over the fence. I kid you not, they called the authorities and told a total lie—they said I threw a shoe and it hit their grandma in the head while she was watering her plants. It almost got me in serious trouble.
To this day, I swear we didn't do anything to provoke their horrible behavior. We were friendly with them until they started acting out.
36. I Will See You In Court
An ex-member of our condo board lawyered up and said she'd sue the new member running for her position and the condo as a whole because she claimed he was falsifying documents and was slandering her. When her lawyer saw the signatures of the residents, he laughed and said, "She's got nothing." Only two people voted to keep her and the 74 others voted for the new guy.
37. No Consideration
I can tell so many stories about my current next-door neighbor. One time, she decided she didn’t like the bush that was next to my mailbox, so she tore it out. She also has four dogs and none of them are EVER on leashes. They always run over to everyone else’s yards to do their business, and she doesn’t bother to pick it up. She also allows them to run in the streets, and gives people dirty looks when they need to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the dogs.
I myself recently got a puppy. When I take him outside, I have him on a leash in my front yard. If her dogs are outside, they’ll come charging over, scaring my dog, and he’ll run up the steps to go back inside. I have asked her to put her dogs on a leash so that they don’t come into my yard. Her response? “They don’t like being on a leash,” and “Your dog needs to get used to other dogs.”
Yeah, screw you and your poor dog ownership.
37. Binning It
I once totally randomly caught my neighbors on camera, at 1 am, dumping trash into and onto my bins which were already on the curb for morning pickup. I wouldn't mind a little trash if there's space in my bins, but they put in about twice as much as can fit, causing the bins to overflow and mixing the recycling and compost with their trash.
I promptly returned it, neatly piled on their porch with a note written on a bill with their name and address on it, quoting the county ordnance on dumping (the volume was enough for a $5,000 fine), and that they were on camera. A couple of days later they left an envelope saying, "Sorry, neighbor," with tickets for a concert.
It was a "free" concert in a sketchy venue with a printed invitation that screamed "MLM recruiting event." I wonder if they even understand that what they did is not an apology. I haven't crossed paths or words with them again.
38. Neighborhood Karen
When I was around 10 years old, my neighbor would occasionally watch me open my mailbox to see if my GameStop magazine had arrived. She would threaten me each time, saying that she would call the authorities on me since it was unlawful for me to check my parents' mail. I actually believed this until I was 15 years old.
38. Too Loud Up There
My neighbor, an old lady, complained about many things. First, she complained that my “dog ran around at all hours of the night,” even though I never had a dog, or any other animal for that matter. Second, she claimed that I was "always too loud." This despite the fact that I lived alone and I'm in the Navy and would literally be away for weeks at a time.
Also, understanding that I lived in a condo, I had bought an expensive Bluetooth headset to use with all of my devices. There was literally not a speaker in the house connected to an entertainment system. She also complained that the rainwater coming off of my deck would drip on hers, because I apparently engineered the building in such a way that her deck stuck out further than mine.
I sent her letter to the property manager and the strata board, ccd her, and said that the next time she left me a letter like that or screamed through the ceiling at the top of her lungs I was going to charge her with harassment.
39. The Best Revenge
We lived next to a family when I was younger and they were the worst people. They were loud and obnoxious, always playing their music loudly and throwing trash on our lawn. They also had a Great Dane who would always run into our lawn and take huge dumps, sometimes on our porch. My dad talked to them a couple of times and they said there was nothing they could do.
My dad took matters into his own hands one day and started picking the mess up with a shovel to catapult it back into their yard. But that's not even the best part—they had kids our age who were not very nice. One day, they were playing in a blow-up pool that was placed on the hill. We were watching them play when all of a sudden, the best thing happened...
The whole pool tipped over, and those little jerks went sliding down the hill. They stood up, covered completely in their dog's mess. Best day ever.
39. Privacy? What Privacy?
When I first moved in my neighbor walked into the house, unannounced. Now, when my wife gets home, sometimes she wants to stay in her car having a phone conversation. He will come out and walk down the side of his house, checking his sprinkler controls and looking at my wife. He also has two huge bushes he refuses to cut.
It blocks our view of backing out of our driveway. The fire department came by to clear trees and bushes around the fire hydrants. The neighbor came out and yelled at the fireman. "This bush is older than you!" Needless to say, I just hope there are no house fires.
40. About The Garbage
A retired woman on my street follows the garbage truck and moves the garbage cans off the street while the rest of us are at work (because they are an eyesore). This would be fine, except she leaves them in the middle of the driveway, and that's a problem because there is no stopping on our street during rush hour. You either need to park a block away to move the garbage can, then go back to get the car, or risk getting a ticket while you move it.
Since the houses are quite close together, we found out what she was doing for the first time when we turned and hit the garbage can. It was just far enough back that you couldn't see it until you turned.
40. Water, Water Everywhere
The neighbor behind us had a leak in his water pipe and, rather than fix it, he just had the sump pump drain it out into the back yard. This meant that all year round the back of our yard was a little bit damp. Eventually, the leaky pipe burst and filled the house with five feet of water. His solution to this was just to keep the pump running and flood the entire neighborhood.
After about an hour, a posse of all the neighbors whose yards were being flooded confronted him and called the city to shut off the water. The city fixed the water pipe and the neighbor ended up with a large fine. At least my yard stays basically dry now.
41. Family Feud
One got the authorities called on them because their eldest son was under the influence of something and got into a huge fight with the mom on the front lawn. Turns out, he was also wanted for a number of federal offenses. The officers got to the wrong house and started banging on our house at 1 am in the morning until my very irritated father pointed them to the real home.
41. My 30 Seconds of Fame
One time in 2004, my mom participated in a TV show. This was a show where a singer would visit your house and a professional chef made food for both you and the singer. My mon’s neighbor, apparently, could not stand this. So, the result? Well, she constantly yelled at the camera crew and tried to hit their equipment with a broom.
42. Case Of The Ex
I heard a really loud banging one evening and walked outside to see a fire extinguisher on the floor and a woman on her phone. I was puzzled, but I put the extinguisher back and went back inside. A few minutes later, I heard the banging again and opened up the door to see the woman trying to beat down the door across from mine with the fire extinguisher.
Apparently, she was the ex-girlfriend of one of my neighbor’s friends and she was trying to find him even though he was quite clearly not there. I called the authorities, and interestingly enough, my neighbor told me she got charged for driving under the influence that night in an unrelated incident.
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42. Let Them Eat Cake
She throws baked goods of all sorts into our yard, bagels, half loaves of bread, German pancakes, literal unbaked dough, all while knowing I have two dogs with sensitive stomachs, and even after I throw the bread back into her yard every time. We finally caught her on camera today literally chucking white bread pieces over the fence and into our yard so I think we might confront her soon.
43. What Could Have Been
My next-door neighbor when I was growing up was bipolar-schizophrenic. He was always doing bizarre and invasive things, like repainting our front door with this awful purple color when we were on vacation. After his wife left him, he parked his car under our balcony, doused it in gasoline, and set it on fire. Luckily, the fire department was quick to respond. But here's the creepiest part...
We later found out he had installed a deadbolt lock on our fire escape beforehand.
43. A Cat Lady (Not So Much)
I have this neighbor lady who makes a big issue out of one of our cats and she can never just leave us alone about it. One of our cats was hit by a car at a young age and as a result, she’s a few cards short of a full deck but for the most part, she functions normally. Well, one time the cat was outside and found its way onto neighbor lady’s porch.
So, neighbor lady brought her over to us and explained that our cat got into her porch somehow. We thanked her for bringing our cat back and made sure to not let it happen again. Everything about that interaction seemed perfectly normal—we were so wrong. We later found out that she had reported us to the authorities because our cat was “very thin and hungry like they were being starved.”
This was even though that cat was a chonker at the time. It turns out she had done it to our other neighbors who have cats too. The cats don’t even have to leave the yard, if the cats are out of the house then according to the neighbor lady they are being neglected and starved. She’s, suspiciously enough, never done such a thing to our neighbor who has dogs though, even though that neighbor regularly plays with her dogs outside.
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44. NOT Welcome
When I moved into my house, I made an effort to meet all of my neighbors. Instead of being a creep and knocking on doors, over a few months, I just waited until I saw someone outside and casually walked over to introduce myself. Well, one night, a Black neighbor of mine was having a big loud party, and I walked over to say hi around 8 pm.
It was a birthday party for one of his grandkids, but there were folks all out in the yard, so I thought it was okay to say hi. I said "Hey, I moved into this street a few doors down a couple of months ago. I was just stopping over to introduce myself." He said, "Do you look like the color that's supposed to be in this yard?" I apologized and went home.
He passed of a heart attack a couple of years later; probably from being such a hateful jerk.
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44. Free For All
We rented a house from my mom's coworker who grew up in this house and was renting it out. Across the street was Jeanette, an 80ish-year-old lady, who had lived in that house most of her life and knew our landlord very well. Well, because she knew the landlord, that meant she felt she could come into our house whenever she wanted.
She watched us through her window and had every excuse to come by. I have never really locked my doors, but obviously, we started to. It didn't stop her. If she knew we were home, she would ring the doorbell incessantly. Our blinds always had to be down, living room lights off, so she wouldn't know we were home. Just got in? Quick, run inside before Jeanette sees you.
We saw her peering out of her blinds on a regular basis. One morning was my breaking point. The doorbell was going. I hid in the bathroom to pretend that I wasn't home. How did she see me?? The doorbell stopped, but the doorknob kept rattling. She tried for five full minutes to open our door. It probably would have been longer, but I gave up and let her in.
Some of the notable things that she did/said included coming in when my husband was cooking and calling him a good little housewife. She also told our neighbor he shouldn't be dating his daughter. They were, of course, not father-daughter, and were in fact a 40-year-old couple, and there was not actually a big age difference.
Why didn't I tell her to go away? Look, I'm a nice midwestern girl. I can be confrontational if someone is being mean, but she was just...lonely? A tad crazy? But harmless. It's like she was a character from a sitcom...we didn't know these people existed.
45. A Horrible Trade-Off
I started mowing our lawn when I was 11 or 12. We only had a push mower and it sucked. Our next-door neighbor had a riding lawn mower and told me I could use it whenever I wanted; I just had to leave the gas tank full. I was ecstatic. Then my dad told me, in exchange for that favor, I should mow my neighbor's lawn too.
Well okay, I figured I could still do that in less time on a riding mower. But, then, my dad decided he didn't like it when the other next-door neighbor's yard wasn't even with ours, and he felt bad that I was mowing only one of our neighbors' lawns and not the others. Like, he didn't want to show partiality to one neighbor. Mighty big of him.
So at that point, I was mowing three lawns, over four acres, every Saturday. Luckily, a new neighbor moved into that third house within a couple of years and he wanted to mow his own lawn.
45. Not On My Turf
I had a situation where I didn’t want my neighbor using our driveway. It was a long driveway, like 60 feet long two cars wide. The problem was the across-the-street neighbor would pull into my driveway still driving about 30MPH, slam the breaks while putting his truck in reverse, then floor it back into his garage across the street.
I never said anything to him about it until one day he almost hit my 5-year-old using chalk 40 feet up the driveway. I was watching and jumped on the hood of the truck to get his attention. He apologized profusely, then did it again five days later when I was leaving the house with my dog for a walk. In both scenarios he used more than 60% of the driveway.
He didn’t apologize that time and just parked in his garage and closed it. For the next month, I parked on the street and didn’t let my kids play in the front yard until the 30 feet of staked razor wire across my driveway found a new home. So, I guess I’m technically the crazy one but I don’t really care.
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46. Here's Your Proof
When I first moved into my house, I didn’t know my exact property line yet, so I put a marker by a tree I thought was mine. My neighbor came over and said I had to remove the marker since the tree was on his property. So I went ahead and got a survey done to settle any troubles. His face when I showed him the surveyor's findings was priceless—turns out, I actually owned the tree, plus the 10 feet beyond it. Problem solved!
46. Squirrelly Business
We had a couple living downstairs from us, in a condo, who thought that they were living in a single-family house on a 20-acre lot in the woods. Among all the things they did to their neighbors, one of the craziest things they did was leave a note on our door threatening to sue us and make us pay for their Pomeranian’s surgery.
This was because my mom had a bird feeder on our balcony and the squirrels running up to try to get the seeds made their dog bark constantly. The dog had a collapsing trachea. They did not think that the fact that they walked her on a retractable leash attached to her collar, and that they would hit the stop button on it if she started running so she jerked so hard she flipped had anything to do with it.
Even the fact that they dragged her around by the leash couldn’t be a reason, apparently. It was obviously the squirrels. They dropped the threats after I filmed them walking their dog when they did their little stop maneuver. My mom tried to talk to them about it and they both denied posting the note, each saying that it must have been the other one because, "I don't think it's the squirrels, but my husband/wife does."
They moved out after six months.
47. Blood On Her Hands
Some 15 years ago, when my parents and I lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, we ended up befriending one of the neighbors and her two kids. Well, one day, we were all hanging out together when I noticed her son had some pretty bad bruises and a nice size knot on his head. I just shrugged it off and we continued playing. Then, that night, the mother came over and made a shocking confession to my mom.
She said she ended the boy's life. She went into some pretty disturbing details, and she wasn't remorseful at all. When she left back to her house, my mom called the authorities immediately and she was taken to the station shortly after. The worst part is, she vowed that when she got out, she'd do the same thing to my mom. We noped the heck out of Indiana and moved to another state.
47. Drawing The Battle Lines
My neighbor seemed to have opened hostilities against me for reasons unknown. He cut down my row of cedar trees, removed the branches, sharpened the trunks, and pointed them at my property. I never thought I would see the modern use of an abatis outside of trench warfare. Well, I guess, you see and learn something brand new every single day.
48. Slipper Sniffer
My across-the-hall apartment neighbor is so weird. Like, just overall off-putting. Anyway, I leave my sandals out next to my door every night since I don't wear shoes in the house. It so happens that one night, I had to meet my best friend, who came over in the dead of night at the front since she doesn’t know my place very well. As I opened the door, I caught my neighbor doing the most deranged thing imaginable.
He was caressing and smelling my sandals. I froze and mildly freaked out. He saw me staring, did a weird giggle, said something about his kids calling him back inside, and then yanked me into this weird side hug. Now I leave my shoes in a box inside my house. Ugh.
48. The Missing Spark
I started getting random power cuts multiple times a day, and had the landlord call the electrician out a few times before we realized that someone was turning off my main electricity switch by hand. The switch is in a room accessible by everyone in my building. When I told my landlord it had to be someone in the building turning it off, he said he had a thought.
I got a call back 10 minutes later. My downstairs neighbor had just then made multiple noise complaints about me. I guess the landlord had called and asked if he'd been switching off my electricity, and the neighbor chose then to actually complain. This is when I realized that all the power cuts happened when I was in my kitchen, right above my neighbor's bedroom/where he spends most of his day.
I had thought my appliances were causing the power cuts before. It turns out he thought that turning off my electricity frequently would magically make me understand that I was being too loud when I used the kitchen late at night. When I didn't receive the telepathic message that he was trying to send me via power cuts, I guess he got angry and did it even more!
Somehow, it got even worse from there. Every time I went into the kitchen, any time of the day, he would turn my electricity off. I had to leave my apartment, go to the other side of the building and turn it back on every single time. It happened 2-3 times a day usually, but at worst it happened 5 times in a day. I started tiptoeing and being as quiet as possible.
However, he listened for me and turned off the power to punish me for using my kitchen at any time. By the way, as soon as he actually complained, I started being as quiet as possible late at night, because I do stay up late and hadn't taken care to be quiet before. But by now, he had decided I should be punished any time I use my kitchen.
The letting agents were unable to do anything without any proof, and installing CCTV wasn't an option for some reason. So, one day a lady from the office offered to help me catch him. I met her in the street, she waited near the electricity box, and I went to my kitchen and started making myself a drink. The power went off.
I get a text from her saying that she had caught him, and the sting operation was a success. Right then, I hear an unholy tantrum begin below me. For the rest of that day he bangs, screams, puts on his vacuum cleaner for 20 minutes straight. Anything to get revenge, I guess. After this, the landlord locked my electricity switch away so only I could access it.
In between the guy being served an eviction notice and him leaving, he decided to just scream at me through the floor when I was in the kitchen, and go outside and throw stones at my window. I installed my own CCTV camera and the stone-throwing stopped. I was so intimidated by the thought of using my kitchen I actually lost weight before he left.
49. Noise Complaint
I lived above a guy in a really old fourplex and I guess the wood floors squeaked really loudly whenever I walked around. It wasn't like I was stomping around or anything, but the dude would constantly come upstairs and bang on my door to yell at me about the noise. I felt bad for him in the beginning because he seemed genuinely frustrated, but he didn't seem to understand or believe that I wasn't intentionally causing a ruckus.
I called my landlord several times asking him for a solution. I couldn't move out because I was locked into my lease, but my landlord was just like, "Buy a lot of rugs." It got to the point that I couldn't take the constant yelling and I was literally either tiptoeing around or hopping from my couch to my chair in order to get out of my living room.
Finally, I went downstairs one day and asked if we could talk about the situation. I felt that maybe if I looked him in the eye when he was calm and explained that I wasn't doing it on purpose, he would maybe understand. After I gave him my spiel, he had a chilling response: "I'm about at the point where if it happens again, I'm going to show up at your door with a really big knife." And then he just stared at me.
I basically ran out of there, called my landlord, and said that I had just been threatened by my downstairs neighbor. A month later the guy moved out, and then as soon as I could, I did too.
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49. Boarding House
My neighbor was an 85-year-old widow who lived alone. She had two vehicles, a car and a truck. Over the course of a few months, I realized that she was no longer parking her car in her garage as she had for the many years prior to that. Then, suddenly, the truck was not being parked inside the garage of the lady either.
It turns out she no longer had room in her garage to park her vehicles because she was walking down to a residential construction site about a block away every evening and she'd grab two 2"x 4"s and bring them home. She had over 500 boards stacked in her garage and when she was questioned on what she was going to do with them, she didn't have an answer.
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50. Double Eviction
My first apartment had a creepy old man who lived on the basement floor and this equally creepy kid in his early thirties on the top floor. Both of them regularly sat out on the porch entrance at varying times of the day and would catch me whenever I came home. I lied to the old man, (we’ll call him George) about my name in a moment of panic.
When he found out that wasn’t my name, he started getting more aggressive in greeting me with my real name to show me how I’d done him wrong. He would circle the building when he realized I started using the back exit, and he'd even sit on the back steps to wait for me to pass by. I told my landlord twice about it and all he did was tell him not to talk to me, which made matters worse because just continued to harass me but with more of a vengeance.
He ended up stealing the wreath that was on my door because nobody else had one on their door and threw it in the trash. At that point, I no longer cared about causing my landlord grief and asked him to pull up video footage. Turns out, he’d been coming upstairs several times to see when I left for work and would stand in front of my door. He ended up getting evicted. But the nightmare didn't end there.
This was all happening while the kid on the top floor was still there. He was weird, but I didn't pay him much mind. After the whole George thing, I wanted to be on good terms with the other tenants, so I started saying hello when I came through the entrance or in the hallways. Bad call. Such a bad call. He started going around telling the other dudes that lived upstairs that he was sleeping with me and how I wouldn’t waste time jumping his bones.
Whatever, I stopped saying hi to him. About two days later, however, I went to take my trash out and I passed my window that was facing the alleyway. This dude was pressed up against it, sliding his face around the glass trying to see me. He saw me and tried to play it off, but the situation was already screwed for him. I called the authorities and it turns out he’d been pegged for"peeing" before on two other charges. He was also evicted.
50. Stay Away!
My friends used to live in a gentrifying neighborhood near the beach in my city. They had a regular apartment, but someone bought the building in front of them—it was beach adjacent—knocked it down, and put up a few luxury homes. Among all the people who bought homes there, a crazy woman bought one.
She had a two-car garage, and a driveway, and best we could tell, she had one car. But NO ONE was allowed to park on the street in front of her house, which was clearly marked as a public street and where people had been parking since forever to go to the beach or because their building didn’t have parking. We could see this street from their apartment.
She went out and keyed any cars parked there. It took a while to figure out it was her, but eventually, people saw her doing it. All the neighbors warned their friends not to park there, and people started putting up cameras to get evidence of it. Some dude with an ugly truck started parking directly in front of her house every day just to mess with her, because he didn’t care if she scratched it up. Well, that just made her get even worse.
She slashed his tires. It got to the point where every time she opened her door to walk outside, neighbors would cuss her out through their windows. One night she went out in the middle of the night, and then painted the entire curb on that street red. Someone got it on video, and several neighbors called the city.
I think she got a talking to and a fine, and she had several insurance claims pending against her from damage to cars. She finally stopped. Everyone still hates her though, even new neighbors, who are told the story of her from older residents.
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