Having an awful neighbor is the worst, and they come in every form imaginable. From the downright mess-makers to the peeping creepers, these characters run the gamut. If a silver lining exists in any capacity, it's the sensational stories that these unfortunate situations allow for. Buckle up, and get ready to meet the most awful neighbors imaginable.
1. The Family That Fights Together…
I just recently had a new family move into my neighborhood. The neighborhood is relatively small and close-knit; it’s the kind of neighborhood where everyone knows each other and we generally all get along well. We have big block parties and shoot off fireworks together on holidays. The new family is a middle-aged couple with their four children.
The kids’ ages range from around 14 to two, and this incident is just the first of several problems that I have had with this family since they moved in. So I was hanging out in the living room just relaxing and watching TV. From the couch, I have a clear view of my backyard. That’s when I noticed the retractable cover of my swimming pool begin to roll up.
I was home alone and no one else has access to my backyard. For insurance reasons, I have a lock on my back gate because of the pool. The gate always remains locked as we would be liable if anything was to happen in the yard. I rush outside and see what was going on. That’s when I see this Entitled Mother standing next to my pool with her four children.
They are dressed in their swimsuits and the mom is rolling up the cover of my pool. Me: Excuse me, what do you think you’re doing in my backyard? Her response shocked me to the core...EM: My kids have been well behaved today and they want to go for a swim. I saw that you have a pool so we are going for a dip. Me: This is not a public pool and you are on my private property. I need you to get out of my backyard now. I never told you that you are allowed on my property without permission.
EM: WHO THE HECK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? IT IS A VERY HOT DAY AND MY KIDS WANT TO GO FOR A SWIM AND THEY WILL. Me: Not in my private pool they will not. How did you even get in my yard anyway? The gate is locked. EM: SCREW OFF! IN MY OLD NEIGHBORHOOD WE DID THIS ALL THE TIME. MY KIDS ARE GOING FOR A SWIM NOW AND YOU WILL NOT EVEN KNOW WE ARE HERE. YOU ARE JUST BEING SELFISH AND I WILL NOT ALLOW MY BABIES TO SUFFER BECAUSE OF YOUR BAD MOOD.
Me (Now angry): I will not ask again. You either get off my property now or I will call the authorities. You are not using my pool and that is final. EM (finally gets the cover off): Okay kids jump on in. Don’t listen to this stupid witch. Kid: Yeah you stupid witch. We are going for a swim now and you can’t stop us. Me: THAT’S IT! I AM CALLING THE AUTHORITIES.
EM now sees that I am serious and tries to the “reason” with me. EM: You would really not allow four kids to go for a swim on a hot day. What kind of heartless person are you? Just let us go swimming for an hour and we will leave. Don’t you want to be a good neighbor to us? Me: No I do not. You just broke into my backyard without permission? Please get off my property now.
She starts to mumble something to her kids and then she grabs her two youngest and starts to walk out of my yard. I then turn around and see her two oldest boys still standing by the pool. I start to walk over to tell them to go with their mother, and that’s when I see what they are doing. Her two oldest spawns are PEEING into my pool.
Kid: MAYBE THAT WILL TEACH YOU TO BE A BETTER NEIGHBOR, YOU STUPID WITCH. Me (grabs the arms of the two oldest and pushes them out of the gate): GET OFF MY PROPERTY YOU DISGUSTING LITTLE BRATS. EM: DON’T YOU DARE LAY A HAND ON MY BABIES OR I WILL CALL THE POLICE ON YOU. WHO DO YOU THINK THEY WILL BELIEVE? A GOOD MOMMY OR A PATHETIC LITTLE WITCH LIKE YOU? YOU JUST GOT WHAT YOU DESERVE. ENJOY SWIMMING IN YOUR PEE POOL.
They then all walk off laughing as they went back to their house. I was in complete shock and I didn’t know what to do. I now wish I called the authorities after this first incident, but I sadly did not and things have since escalated with this family. Remember how I said that I had a lock on the gate? I later found it broken on the ground. I have no idea what they used to smash it, but they were successful. I have since purchased a much more heavy-duty lock.
2. Noise Pollution
I used to have a terrible work schedule. I'd have to wake up at 2:30 am every morning so I could be at work by 4 am. My downstairs neighbors would blare loud music at all hours of the night and I could feel the bass through my mattress. I went downstairs and politely asked them to turn down the music, and they seemed to kindly agree.
As soon as I got back into bed, they turned it up even louder and kept it going until about 1:30 am. They didn't know who they were messing with. Before I left for work at 3:30 am, I turned over my amplifier so that the speaker was facing the floor. I turned the volume up and set my guitar on top of it. I left for my 12-hour shift, and the feedback was still screaming when I came home. The neighbors never blasted their music again.
Tip: The Golden Rule
According to a recent survey, being a good neighbor does not mean you have to be friends with your neighbor (thank god). In fact, 59 percent of voters believed that the greatest quality in a neighbor is trustworthiness. And the worst quality? According to 67 percent of voters—being disrespectful of property. In the end, getting along is pretty dang easy.
Just respect your neighbor. It’s the golden rule, people.
3. Living Your Best Life
I lived in Melbourne, Australia for about a year. While there, I met a gorgeous gay couple, Brian and Derek (names changed). They were both bisexual, and they lived in the same building as me on the floor directly above mine. I soon entered into an intimate relationship with both of them. We would have threesomes, and sometimes more.
Besides the awesome bedroom stuff, I also became really good friends with them and we're still in touch. It was tons of fun for all involved. Among my neighbors was a middle-aged couple with two children. They lived right across the hallway from me and were quick to judge us after seeing Brian and Derek exiting my apartment early in the morning on more than one occasion.
The woman, Karen, asked me in the elevator what I was doing with "those two gays." I politely told her it was none of her business. When she kept on pestering me, I told her "If you must know, I'm friends with benefits with them, now leave me alone." I still remember the look of shock on her face. I don't think she expected me to reply so brazenly.
When I told Brian and Derek about this, they shared their own experience in dealing with them. This couple had tried to talk to the property manager about "gays moving into a building with families and children." They were told to screw off but any time either or both of these guys were in the elevator with them or ran into them in the parking lot, the husband (Let's call him Todd) would stand between them and his kids while giving Brian and/or Derek angry looks.
They must've been trying to prevent their kids from catching "the gay." HA. In the weeks that followed, the entitled couple continued to give me the stink eye any time they saw me. I just smiled back at them sweetly, which annoyed them even more. On one occasion, their teenage daughter said "good morning" to me and tried to make small talk, before her mother dragged her away by the arm while berating her for talking to "that woman."
Interestingly, their kids seemed very well behaved and nice and I truly felt sorry for them. My next-door neighbors (another couple with kids with whom I got along very well) later told me that Karen had tried to get them to file a noise complaint against me. According to Karen’s logic, since I shared a wall with that family, they could probably hear all the "ungodly" noises coming from my apartment and they should complain in order to protect their children.
The nice couple told them they would do no such thing as I had never bothered them and they had never heard any such noises coming out of my apartment. One night, Brian, Derek, and I decided to have a foursome that would involve the three of us and Brian and Derek's friend Dean. The next morning, Dean asked if he could come back to my place with me.
As it was a Sunday morning and Dean was hotter than Hades, I agreed. As he and I were walking down the hallway to my place, Karen was just getting out of hers. She saw Dean and I smiling and talking with his arm around my waist. She approached me, asking angrily if I was “selling my body." I told her she was insane and asked her to kindly screw off.
Later that day, I received a terrifying call from the property manager. She wanted to let me know that Karen and Todd had complained that I was "a prostitute" and that it was dangerous for their children to be in the same building as me. They told her in great detail about how I was bringing home different men. The property manager had gotten to know Brian and Derek quite well and had an inkling that I was “friends” with them.
So she contacted them and they told her all about Karen’s crazy behavior and accusations. They said that the man they had seen me with was a mutual friend. The property manager dissuaded the family from filing any sort of false complaint against me as it could cause a world of trouble for them. I thanked that kind lady and later had a good chuckle over it all with Brian and Derek.
The blatant harassment from Karen and Todd had stopped, but of course, the hateful looks continued. On one occasion, when we were in the elevator together, Karen made a pathetic attempt at shaming me by condescendingly asking if I was going to have any men over that night. What she didn't realize is that shame about my promiscuity is something I'm entirely incapable of feeling.
I proceeded to tell her in great detail about all the acts I was going to engage in that evening. I mean, she's the one who asked, right? After this fun little interaction, she and her husband avoided me completely. Good times.
4. A Messy Message
We lived in a neighborhood of townhouses. One neighbor let her dogs go #2 all over everyone’s lawn and she never picked it up. We tried asking her to be more considerate, but she didn't listen. We even tried picking the mess up for her and putting it on their doorstep, but she still refused to do it. So, my one neighbor decided to get a piece of it and smear it all over the front of the house. After that, she started picking it up.
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5. Adventures In Babysitting
Years ago, this new neighbor of mine kept trying for the better part of a summer to use me as a free babysitter. It started when her kid, who was really a cute, well-behaved kid about seven years old, showed up at my door at 7:15 in the morning. We were all just waking up and getting around so I told him that my boys weren't ready to play yet and to come back in a few hours.
That is when the kid told me his mom had gone to work. This seemed a bit odd to me so I brought him in and tried to call his mom. Sure enough, she was gone. So I brought him in and fed him breakfast. He stayed with us the rest of the day and he got along well with my two boys who were five and 10. I had only talked to his mom about two times, so I had no idea why she would think this was a good idea.
When his mom came home, I walked him over so I could talk to her. I told her not to do that again, though I did say that I would be willing to watch him on occasion if asked first, but not every day. Her response was: "Well, what else do you have to do all day?" This kind of took me by surprise. I tried to tell her that I work at home on commissions.
She rolled her eyes and told me that being an artist isn't a “real job,” and besides I was married so I didn't need to work. I should have pointed out to her that she was married and working, but I felt myself getting angry and I didn't want to argue with her. "Just don't do that again." I said to her. "You have teenage kids home for the summer, have them babysit."
She frowned at me and said, "They work." I said, "So do I!" Then I went home. The next morning at 7:15 the kid sheepishly shows up again. Once again I bring him in and feed him breakfast and later lunch. Once again I took him to his home and once again told his mother to please not do that again. She actually tried to tell me that it was my neighborly duty to watch him and I told her that if she sent him tomorrow I wouldn't be there because of a doctor’s appointment. Her reply blew my mind.
She said that as a babysitter I should have given her several day’s notice about this. I angrily told her I was NOT a babysitter and then went home. The next morning I made my 7 am appointment. I did some grocery shopping afterward and it was about 10 am when I got home. The poor kid was waiting for me on my porch. He had been there for nearly three hours and the little guy was scared and hungry.
That night when I took the kid home, I was angry. I told her how the kid was scared and alone. She actually said that she had told me I hadn't given her enough time to find anyone else and that his being alone was my fault. I pointed at her and said: "I am NOT a babysitter! Don't send him over again!" That night, this woman had her adult nephew call me to scream at me for not being home when his poor aunt dropped her son off.
How dare I leave a small child alone like that? I told the nephew that his aunt KNEW I wasn't home so it was HER that left a child all alone. I said that I had repeatedly asked his aunt NOT to send the kid over anymore and I was NOT a babysitter. This nephew freaked out at me when I said that. I hung up on him while he was still screaming at me.
This worked for two wonderful, quiet days. Then right back to it. I tried everything, but this woman insisted that it was my neighborly duty to babysit and would tell me as much. Finally, I decided that to solve this problem I would just get a job outside of my home, and that way she would have to stop. (I was too much of a pacifist back then. I no longer am). I landed an interview for a position at the local library and I was ecstatic.
I told the woman to keep her son home because I had arranged for my kids to stay with their grandmother while I went to this interview. The next morning, I drove to my mother-in-law's house and took my kids inside. When I went to leave, I found this woman's kid waiting for me in my car! She had actually followed me there and put her son in my unlocked car and then zoomed off while I was dropping off my boys.
My mother-in-law wasn't the most flexible person in the world and she adamantly refused to watch an extra kid. I had to cancel my interview. I was livid. I toyed with several ideas at this moment. I could take the kid to her job and leave him with her...or I could call CPS. I really wasn't sure how stable this woman's job was and I didn't want her to get fired, and when I went to go call the CPS I chickened out because it really wouldn't be fair to the little boy.
Besides, I had heard really scary stories about CPS. In the end, I just waited for her to come home. I left the boy at my house with my husband (I planned on doing a lot of cussing) and I stomped over to her house and met her before she even got out of her car. I shouted at her. I told her she was dense, stupid, moronic, and crazy. I told her that she had lost me my job interview and if she sent her kid over to be watched again I was going to call CPS.
I told her that she was violating my space and if it took going to court to get her to knock it off, then so be it. She then put her hand on her hip and in her most snotty tone she said: "Well if you didn't want to sit with him, all you had to do was tell me." I really do not know how I kept from punching her right then and there, this comment was so asinine.
I turned on my heels to start stomping home when I saw her husband pulling up. Now, this was the first time I had ever met her husband. He worked at a job that only allowed him to be home on weekends. (I can't blame him, I wouldn't want to be around her either), but when she saw him she turned tail and RAN into her house. He saw that I was upset and asked me what had happened.
I told him. Told him all of it, especially the incident at my mother-in-law's. The poor man was shocked. He had been told that I was being paid and he had been giving her money to pay me! He had no idea all this had been going on and he was very, very apologetic over the whole thing. In fact, he apologized again to my husband when he came over to pick up his little boy.
Finally, FINALLY, she stopped sending her kid over! Later I heard from others that she was badmouthing me and warning folks about what a horrid babysitter I was, but I took that as a favor. I didn't want to babysit any kids other than my own and I still hate doing so. I don't hate the kids, I love kids. It's dealing with the parents that I don't like.
The kid came over only once in a while after that to play with my kids, after he called first to get permission, exactly the way it should be done. I'm sure his dad had something to do with that because the kid only came over on weekends. This is one of a few stories I have involving this crazy lady. Her only entertainment in life seems to be seeing how bizarre she can act in this neighborhood.
I'm luckier than my other neighbors in the fact that she leaves me alone now, and I'm very happy with that.
6. 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.
7. Nope, Nope, And Nope
My partner and I purchased the house next door to my best friend. I had lived with him for close to a decade when his kids were babies, so the children viewed my house as an extension of theirs, and were in and out all day, every day. I have a more flexible schedule than he and his wife, so I have them in the mornings, after school, and on days off of school.
I had a pool in my yard, and because my friend's kids were still little, I installed a retractable cover and made sure it was locked so they couldn't open it. My friend's yard had one of those wood fort/climbing wall/swing set deals and a large sandbox. Throughout the year, we spent most evenings outside, grilling, drinking, and watching the kids play/swim/whatever.
One summer day, I came home from work a little earlier than normal, and started to prep for dinner. I heard a knock at my back door, which was odd, since my buddy's kids never knocked. I went to see who it was and discovered a mom and two kids who looked to be maybe 5-7 years old. As I opened the door, she informed me that her kids needed to use the bathroom and that I needed to come out and get the cover off my pool.
I was confused and asked her to repeat herself, and she said that her kids needed to pee and that they were hot and bored with playing in the sandbox, so I needed to open up my pool. I asked her why the heck she was in my friend's yard and what made her think her kids were welcome to swim in my pool, or use my bathroom for that matter.
She got really witchy and told me that she had moved into the house behind us and that she had watched my buddy's kids come over all the time and watched as I opened the pool for them. She insisted that since I was willing to open my pool for the kids next door, I should also open it for the children who lived behind me. I tried explaining the relationship between my best friend's family and mine.
She claimed it didn't matter that I had known them since birth and pretty much had helped raise them, I just needed to get to know her kids too and it would be OK. I told her no and closed the door on her. She spent a while knocking and fussing at me through the window, and then had her kids pee in a planter on the side of the patio.
When I still didn't react, she took her kids back into my friend's yard to play on the swings. I texted him to let him know what was going on, right at the moment he was letting his 300+ pounds worth of Newfie dogs out into the yard without noticing the unwelcome visitors. The mom starts shrieking and climbs up into the fort, leaving both kids on the swings.
She starts demanding that we put the dogs inside and how dare my friend let his dogs out into his own yard when her kids are clearly playing there. He tells her to get the heck out and calls the authorities. When the officers arrived, she put on the whole waterworks about how her kids are just looking for friends, and my buddy's kids are somehow mistreating her kids, even though they'd never met.
She said that he invited her over just to let his dogs attack her children, blah blah blah. They eventually move her back onto her own property, then come back later to tell us they warned her about coming back. She lived in that house for almost a year before she and her husband divorced. But even then, she still managed to be a nightmare neighbor.
During that year, I had to replace the lock over the pool cover controls three times, have a fencing company remove a gate at the back of my property that was meant to let the lawnmower through, and eventually payed a security company to come to check on the yard any time we were going to be away for more than a few hours.
We found her and her kids in our yards repeatedly, but she'd leave when we got home. What finally resolved the issue was my partner catching her in the pool. She told him she knew the man that owned the house and that he had told her it was OK to swim. He told her he was married to the man that owned the pool and that it's not OK to swim.
She apparently had a bad reaction to realizing she was immersing her sons in gay water. We didn't see her again after that.
8. Shade Of Blue
My dad was talking to our neighbor about what color he should paint the house and he said, as a joke: “Well, I might as well paint the old house blue.” The neighbor became angry and responded, “You can't do that! A blue house? How stupid and annoying! Don't be dumb,” etc. And that’s how I grew up in a blue house.
9. Don't Be Crabby
My mom's neighbor called the city on my mom to force her to repair the fence that divided their yards. This lady had always been a crabapple for 10-plus years, but this move really ticked my mom off. The fence did need a few mild repairs, and my mom would have done them right away if the neighbor just talked to her about it (she was already in the process of getting quotes).
The city contacted my mom and told her that she needed to maintain her fence. My mom asked if she had to have a fence by law and the person she talked to could already sense where this was going. Turns out, there are rules about maintaining a fence, but she was not required to have one. So my mom paid a contractor to tear it down entirely.
The neighbor came to talk to my mom and asked when the new fence will be built. My mom replied, "If you want a fence, build it yourself!" A couple of weeks later, my mom had a nice new fence, courtesy of her annoying neighbor. A little petty, perhaps, but hilarious nonetheless.
10. The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far
My neighbors have three boys all under the age of seven. In my first encounter with the mom, she promptly tells me (not asks) that her kids wander. I naïvely thought that meant there might be the odd rogue ball episode or something so don't protest at the time. Our yards are unfenced, and we share a driveway. Oh boy, was I wrong.
My yard, back deck, front garden, and even the inside of my house were seen as an extension of their space. The boys would even have sword fight tournaments on my back deck, off my kitchen. The parents would literally do nothing. I was put in a position many times to ask for more privacy as it was affecting my work and a general sense of well-being as I am a very private person.
It took some pushing, but finally, things got a bit better. They still "wander," however to a level I am not willing to cause drama over. This past early winter, I decided to put in security cameras. I live alone in a not-so-great area and I wanted some peace of mind. I also wanted to document encroachment in case it got bad again. In that time, the cameras have picked up a lot of encroachment from kids, but I did not raise the issue.
The relationship with the parents is peaceful, and I wanted to keep it that way. Fast forward to yesterday, my camera picks up a clip of the middle kid peering into my window with a pair of binoculars. I send the clip to the parents, explaining one of my cameras picked it up and that I am not comfortable with this behavior. It is inappropriate and an invasion of my privacy. Their reply blew my mind.
They send a note back saying he was only trying to see if I was home so he could say hello. Then they insisted on knowing more about my security cameras, what they can see, and if they pick up the kids playing in their yard. I explained that they don't...as they only pick up motion in my yard. But, if the kids are in my yard, which they are...a lot…they are recorded.
The parents are now insisting I take the cameras down. The lesson is, entitled parents raise entitled children. I am frightened to see what kind of adults these kids will turn into. Who knows if I will be here long enough to find out.
11. A 'Hole' Lotta Trouble
My great-grandfather was one of the last people in town to get indoor plumbing, and as such, he had an outhouse in his backyard. Every year on Halloween, the neighborhood kids would come into his yard and knock over the building, exposing the cesspit. He got tired of it. So one year, the night before Halloween, he moved the building forward and covered the fess with burlap, disguising it in leaves and grass clippings.
In the dark, it was almost impossible to tell it was there. On Halloween night, he sat in the outhouse and waited. It wasn’t long after sundown when he heard the wet splat outside as a couple of kids fell into the muck. He lowered a ladder into the cesspit for them and said they could leave, but only if they promised to never mess with his outhouse again.
The kids honored their promise and even spread the word around the neighborhood not to mess with that outhouse anymore.
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Tip: Love Thy Neighbor
Believe it or not, 50 percent of Americans are not on a first-name basis with their neighbors. In fact, most people don’t know their neighbors at all. The best way to avoid a nasty feud with a neighbor is to actually converse with them and learn who they are. The statistics say that those who have maintained a healthy rapport with their neighbors actually like them.
12. Get Out (Leave)
After all of my siblings moved out for college, my parents changed the basement into a liveable unit and started renting it out. The first two tenants stayed for five years and they were great. We never had an issue with them. The third group of tenants, however, gave us a lot of problems. They stopped paying rent after three months and since it was winter we couldn't evict them.
My parents had to suffer through their parties while not receiving rent that was meant to go to 70% of the mortgage...They almost lost their house because of these jerks. Well, my brothers and I were home for Christmas that year and after hearing about the issues, we decided to take care of it. Since it was my parents' house and the tenants stopped paying rent, we decided to "move in" with them. These people were such jerks, I don't even regret what we did.
We had the keys, so we would come in and out of the apartment as we wanted. A friend needed a place to sleep? No worries, we had a unit downstairs with two beds and two couches. We'd let them stay for as long as they wanted. The bars were closing but we wanted to keep partying? No problem, we had a furnished apartment and we wouldn't be bothering my parents.
I would go there to shower at 2 or 3 in the morning so I didn't wake my parents up. My brother slept in one of the beds for five days. I invited 20 people once and we were all drinking until 5 am, up until one of the tenants left for work in the morning. They did complain about privacy. We told them that according to the law, we were not allowed to throw them out at that moment; but since they stopped paying rent, they lost all privilege over the unit.
They called 9-1-1 the first night they found my brother sleeping there. We explained the situation to the authorities and said that they'd have to take us to court if they wanted us to stop using our apartment. Some other things we've done: We brought our pets (the tenants were allergic, so I borrowed my friend's cat), we used one of the bedrooms as storage for stuff we were supposed to get rid of, we opened all the windows in the middle of winter, and we disconnected the water heater. We told them to take care of it themselves since they weren't "tenants" but squatters.
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. Music Mayhem
We had neighbors (one girl above us, one girl below us) that were good friends with each other. The one above had two small dogs (we were only allowed one per apartment) and the one below had a bigger dog. We all got along fine, but the girl above us was a bit of a jerk—she would leave her dogs alone for far too long and be very invasive of our lives.
She'd constantly beg to use our internet or drop by and make herself at home. I was sitting in the living room one day and I heard dragging in the hallway. I went to check it out and saw both of the girls moving a mattress upstairs. They told me the girl below was moving in with the girl above us, making the living room her bedroom so she could sublet her apartment to save some money.
This was an old building, so there was not much in the way of soundproofing. That meant that we would have girl #1 still living there, who was loud enough, as well as girl #2 and the three dogs above us. We decided to keep the peace and not say anything....until that first night. They decided to have their own dance party at 3 am, in HEELS, while screaming wildly.
We said "screw it" and called the landlord. The next morning, there was a pounding on my door. I went over and saw that it was the girl above us. She was flipping the heck out. We apparently ruined their lives by revealing to the landlord that the girl who lived below us was subletting her apartment. That's when the serious battles began.
It turned out she had been behind in rent, so the landlord was sick of her and gave her an eviction notice. That led to her going absolutely nuts. She would constantly stomp on her floor, run the hot water in the building for hours so it would run out on everyone else, encourage her dogs to bark, etc. We changed our WiFi password, enraging her more.
We wanted to take the high road, but soon enough, we needed to take action. We were going away for a couple of days and we knew our next-door neighbors quite well, so we mentioned our plan. They thought it was hilarious. Right before we left, we turned on that annoying French nun song, "Dominique." The upstairs girl may or may not have been named Monique. We hit the replay button, cranked it to full volume, and left for two days.
The landlord called us after about 24 hours. We feigned innocence and claimed that it was a simple oversight on our end (but really, he knew what was up). We gave him permission to go into our place and turn off the music. Both the girls ended up leaving by the end of the month. They did not stop being jerks, but it was satisfying to know how much they suffered for at least 24 hours.
17. 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.
18. Nature's On Her Side
My grandmother had a neighbor who refused to help her repair the fence between their properties. It was still fully functional as a boundary line, but it was falling apart. Any conversation about fixing the fence ended with him saying that it was on her property, so it must be her responsibility to repair it. I guess that was fair.
She took a fall and was hospitalized for a few weeks. Upon her return, she found a new fence built an extra five feet into her property and a bill in the mail from the neighbor. He argued with her for months that she owed him, saying that the original fence was actually on his property and that where it was now was the boundary line. So my grandmother got a surveyor and...surprise!
The neighbor had taken five feet of her yard. At that point, she was already very old, frail, and tired of fighting her neighbor. But she had an ingenious way to get her revenge. She planted blackberries along the back fence and within two years, it was covered. Every year, she’d walk the fence and throw seeds over it because, of course, it was still her yard.
After five years of fighting, the blackberries had reclaimed her property. She’s been gone for a few years now but the blackberries remain, and it's her way of haunting her neighbor. He’s tried ripping up the ones on his side of the fence on numerous occasions, but the plants reseed themselves and grow back every year from her side.
19. The Foolproof Solution
I was visiting my aunt a couple of years ago in Arizona. She lives outside of Phoenix. Her next-door neighbors had three or four kids who were super annoying. There was a brick wall dividing their backyards, and such is common for the area. Upon my arrival, I found out that the kids next door were throwing things over the wall for fun.
Not just like harmless objects like twigs and pebbles, but like rocks, toys, garbage, and even knives. My aunt’s family had to keep their trampoline on the other side of the yard so it wouldn’t get stuff thrown into it. I asked my aunt about it and she said she talked to their parents, but they still kept throwing stuff. So that night, I went online and filed a report with their address.
A couple of days later, the neighbors left a note at the front door with a long apology that basically said “it won’t happen again.” It pretty much stopped after that.
20. 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.
Tip: Revenge Isn’t Always Sweet
When it comes to annoying neighbors, noisiness might be one of the worst. Inconsiderate folks blasting music or letting their untrained dogs bark forever, not to mention late-night parties and all the lost sleep that goes along with it...However, if you’re the angry neighbor and want to avoid an all-out feud, it’s probably best not to stoop to your neighbor’s level.
Do not start cranking the music or banging around just to make a point. It just feeds the bad blood and will only make things worse.
21. Hello Neighbour
I have a neighbor who lives on the same floor as me and his apartment is right next to mine. He's over seventy and blind, and every now and then he enjoys walking down the hall, while feeling the walls around him, because he has no strength to actually go outside anymore. Last year in August, I was locking my apartment door and getting ready to leave and meet a friend, when I noticed him walking slowly down the hall towards me.
I politely said hi to him, as usual. As I fumbled with my keys, he approached me slowly and then he did the most demented thing ever: He leaned in and started fondling my butt. I took a step away in shock, but he came after me and said, "Let me kiss your pussy." I felt my blood freeze. I then said in disbelief "What the? You should be ashamed!" but he replied by repeating the exact same phrase. I pushed him away and left quickly.
I still live here, and he still takes strolls in the hallway. I have told a few friends, but not my landlord or any authority, because I'm sure they won't take me seriously or say something like "Don't mind him, he's old and senile, he doesn't know what he's doing." My friends were concerned though and asked me if I was ok. I wasn't.
22. Lawn Invaders
My neighbor had a super annoying son. His friends were constantly running over into our yard and breaking stuff. So, we got a dog named Molly. Every time she had to poop, I'd put her on a leash and walk over to the property line so she could drop off some landmines for the kids. They were always on my property so the neighbors couldn't complain about my dog pooping in their yard.
Finally, the bratty kid had his bratty friends over for a bratty birthday party and his parents sent them all outside to play. Of course, they were running over into our yard. I ended up getting three or four of those little jerks with Molly's landmines. After that, they never came into our yard again. Molly got belly rubs and a hamburger that night.
23. On The Fence
I decided to fence in my backyard and I asked my neighbor if he would pay for half of it since it also ran along his property line. He declined. So I installed a fence around my backyard a few inches on my side of the property line. My neighbor then tied a new fence into my fence, as well as to our other neighbor's fence on the other side.
So he only paid for about 40 feet of fence altogether and he managed to get his entire yard fenced in. Jerk move! But it wasn't a big deal, even though he got a few extra square feet of backyard space and a free fence on two sides for free. Sometime later, his dog knocked a hole in my fence. He asked me to fix it since his dog could escape.
I declined. I told him to fix it since it was my fence and his dog did the damage. He called code enforcement and the homeowners association. It turned out that if I have a fence, I have to keep it in good repair. I was out of luck—but I knew how to get my revenge. I repaired the fence and then painted the side of my fence that faced his property high liner yellow, blue, green, mixed with slates of black and brown.
According to the bylaws, I get to choose the color of my fence as long as it is in good repair. He complained about it to the HOA but they told him they couldn't do anything. Eventually, he caved and painted over my fence. I had him charged with vandalism and he was fined. He also had to repaint my fence with the original terrible colors.
But he didn't stop there—he then bulk emailed the entire subdivision, asking them to support him in his attempt to get me to paint my fence. Instead, the neighbor to his other side and behind him all painted their fences to match mine. He moved a few months later.
24. 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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25. Bringing The House Down
I had the neighbor's house condemned and torn down. It's kind of a long story, but it was so worth it. So, the property next to me had two houses on it. The owners decided to gut and remodel one of them, and they piled the demolition debris in the front yard...directly next to my house. That stuff stayed there for a full year, with the owners ignoring my every effort to get them to do something about it (they did not live on the property, they were renting it out).
So I eventually checked with the city about their remodel permits and found that not only did they not have permits, but as far as the city was concerned, the house didn't exist. It had been built with no plans or permits filed and tied into the other house utilities. So I talked to the city planner’s office and they came out to put a stop-work order on the house (which was not really necessary since no work had been done in a year).
They also condemned the house. They told the owners they wouldn't be fined or prosecuted if they demolished the property. That sounds drastic, but the house was already gutted with no windows or doors, and they weren't going to let them restore it. So that's how I got someone's house torn down.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. Snitch To Win
I had a neighbor who won the lottery (about $800k USD after taxes) and he decided that made him God. He also had an addiction problem and would stay up late partying and playing music at all hours of the day and night. I live in a small mountain town and the sound echoes terribly. Well, this guy "Dear John'd" his husband of 8 years and at one point was making violent threats against him.
The authorities got involved and the neighbor got slapped with domestic charges. But that's just the beginning: AFTER the charges were filed, this neighbor decided he would buy a firearm, which was totally not allowed. He had to lie about the pending charges to get it, and then he told his ex that once he got it, he was going to end him. After that, he decided that partying out in Portland was more important than attending his court date, and he subsequently had a bench warrant issued to him.
On the Friday of a St. Patty's weekend, he was blasting his music again, so I called 9-1-1 to register a noise complaint. He likely had a scanner, because every single time, before they came, he turned down the music. They'd arrive not hearing any music, then let me know there was not much they could do. At that point, I let it slip that he had an active warrant. They ended up taking him in.
Because he blew all of his lottery money and alienated himself from every friend he used to have, he spent the whole long weekend behind bars with every other jerk who was there. About three weeks later, he put his house up for sale. A crowning achievement for me.
29. Rock On
My house is right on the corner of an area where the road turns into a T, and I had issues with people cutting the corner and driving through my yard. One time, someone even nearly hit my dog. So I bought a boulder that was probably 300 or 400 pounds and put it right on the corner. That winter, we had a bad snowstorm.
Someone was coming through in a lifted Dodge and he hit the boulder going about 20 mph. He totaled the truck. Since then, I’ve had zero issues with people.
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Tip: Open Communication
No matter the relationship, communication is key, but when it comes to keeping the peace with your neighbor, it is absolutely essential. Here’s where your manners come in. Keep it calm, polite, and empathetic. If you’re throwing a wild party, be considerate and give your neighbors a heads up, maybe even invite them?
Offer them an open line of communication if things get too noisy on your end. This might help you avoid hearing sirens coming down the street...Nobody wants that.
30. The Grass Is Greener
In our first house, my wife and I had a neighbor who disliked us from the start. Apparently, the people who lived in the property before we did were his family friends—they went through a divorce and ended up selling the house to us. He was petty and mean to my wife, who doesn’t like confrontation, and he'd do annoying things to mess with her.
He'd park across our driveway before she left for work, throw pieces of wood over the fence, let his dog go all over our lawn and not pick any of it up, etc. I tried talking to him a couple of times, but he promptly told me to screw off. That was the last straw—I had to fight back. I knew he loved his lawn because he'd always brag about how it looked to everyone, so the next time it rained, I went out back and threw an entire box of oxo cubes into their backyard and let the rain melt them into the grass.
His dog absolutely destroyed his yard looking for the smell and I would make sure to comment on it every chance I got. We moved shortly after.
31. Going Out With A Bang
Our neighbor was a pain in the butt. He would call the authorities on us even if we were just standing in our yard, minding our own business. He didn't have a mental problem; he was just a jerk who thought calling 9-1-1 would scare us. We would hear him on the phone saying, "They're standing in their yard, talking again."
The officers would often apologize for coming by, explaining that they had no choice but to respond to the complaints. Sometimes, they would just drive by and wave to us while shaking their heads. So one night, we had enough. We bought a thousand-count string of firecrackers, made a makeshift fuse, put it in his garage, and waited. Needless to say, it was super lit.
32. 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.
33. 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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34. I've Got The Power
My upstairs neighbor was noisy late at night. At like 2 am, he'd blast music and walk around with heavy feet. We had repeated conversations about it, but he blew us off. He bought us earplugs and told us to simply "deal with it." Unfortunately for him, the breaker box for the building was in our unit. After conducting a few tests with his friendly roommates who hated him just as much as we did, we zeroed in on the breaker to his room and an unoccupied area.
Guess who had strange power issues at night while he was being disruptive? He wasn't the brightest bulb in the box and he never suspected us. The landlord was aware of his disruptiveness and he was already on thin ice, so we asked him not to follow up on the guy's complaints and he was on board. After he got aggressive toward one of his roommates over an unrelated incident, he was kicked to the street at the end of his lease.
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35. 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."
36. Right Back Atcha
My grandpa's neighbor's septic tank started leaking into his backyard. He repeatedly asked him to fix the septic tank and clean up the mess in his yard, but he completely brushed him off. So my grandpa took matters into his own hands. He rigged up a "plumbing" system in his yard and installed an upright PVC pipe that pointed at the neighbor's backyard over the fence.
I don't know how the system worked (I was only about eight years old, as this happened in the early 90s), but it was set up to spray the neighbor's own septic waste over the fence and into the neighbor's beautifully polished yard. And just like that, the neighbor fixed his septic tank. They remained enemies until my grandpa died a couple of decades later.
I miss that old crazy man.
37. 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.
38. Full Stop
My old boss had a problem with tipsy kids taking his mother's mailbox. He got tired of replacing them, so he told me to go out there and make sure whatever hits it doesn't keep going. I bought a six-foot-long steel post with under three feet sticking out of the ground, then poured concrete around it and installed the mailbox.
The next tipsy kid that hit it never got a chance to take out the rest of the mailboxes on the street.
Tip: Take Note
If your neighbor truly is the biggest piece of work, it’s important to start documenting their bad behavior right from the get-go. Any time they cross the line or create an issue, write it all down—the dates, the times, and what was said. Take photos and keep a record of any updates. If by chance, you need to talk to a lawyer, these handy notes are going to be an absolute blessing.
39. 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.
40. 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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41. 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.
42. Shut It Down
The rich brats next door were always throwing loud parties whenever my mom and dad went out of town for a few days, which was often. One Sunday morning, I did a quick inspection of the property and found a bunch of litter had been left in the street or thrown into the grass. The worst part is that there was a public bus stop at the corner of our street, so we started getting complaints.
That night around midnight I gloved up, collected a bunch of them, then snuck into the neighbors' yard and scattered them around the pool, the garage, and the back door where mom was sure to see them when she came home. There were no more parties.
43. 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.
44. 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?
45. 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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46. Mind Your Own Beeswax
Beehives. Putting them up is allowed where I live, and I have had them for over 10 years. They don't bother anyone and most of my neighbors love them as they are good for their gardens and they get free honey. However, one of my neighbors who moved in five years ago does have a problem with them, apparently. She has called the council and the authorities too many times to count, and they say all tell her the same thing:
They're allowed, they're not annoying anyone, and the bees were there first. So, she tried to take matters into her own hands whilst tipsy—she jumped the fence in the middle of the night with a can of fly spray. It was very dark, so she accidentally jumped into my neighbor's yard instead. Their very large guard dogs bailed her up and she pretty much destroyed their gardens, boat, shed, and car windows trying to get away from them.
When officers arrived at the scene, she admitted that she had tried to poison my bees but went into the wrong yard. She tried to sue me, saying: "If I wasn't trying to poison her bees, none of this would have happened." The officers just laughed at her. They threw the book at her and now my neighbors are suing her for all the damage she caused.
She is now beyond broke. The bees are still there. When I hand out free honey around the neighborhood every few months, I always make sure she is around watching me and I intentionally don't give her any. Other neighbors tell me they regularly mention my bees around her just to see her lose her cool.
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47. 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.
Tip: Don’t Blame The Dog
Even the biggest animal lovers on the planet can get fed up with a noisy dog, not to mention unleashed animals or poop all over the lawn. If this sounds like your neighbor, then yes, they are indeed a terrible pet owner. Still, when voicing your grievances, it’s best to err on the side of caution and refrain from insulting their beloved animals. It’s the best way to spark a rivalry.
48. Saturday Sale
When I was 10 or so, an old lady yelled at my brother and me for sitting on "her" curb. She could have asked nicely, but she decided to be a jerk instead. So we came up with the most ingenious prank we've ever pulled. We decided to have an estate sale for her. We got up at like 4 am on a Saturday morning and put up homemade cardboard garage sale signs we made with her address on them.
In big, bold letters, we also wrote: "Early birds welcome." We then sat on the curb a little down the street across from her house and watched people bang on the door for an hour or so. The best part is we didn't put a date on the signs, so if she didn't find them all, people would just keep showing up every Saturday.
49. 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
50. Peace Offering
I think I was the annoying neighbor. I used to live in a townhome complex where the back "porches" were just slabs of concrete and there was a field that connected all of them together. One night, I had like six friends over and we were on the slab grilling some chicken wings. We weren't too loud (we had no music playing and we weren't trashed), but I imagine we were still audible to the other buildings.
A woman from across the way started hollering at us, threatening to call the authorities. A few of my friends were like, "Screw that lady," but I decided to take a different route. I plated up about eight wings with our scratch-made buffalo sauce and walked it over to the lady on a paper plate. I then apologized for disturbing her, handing over the plate as a sort of peace offering.
She told me she overreacted and was sorry for yelling at us. I told her it was okay, but I also asked her if she was doing alright because she'd probably had a terrible day; yelling at strangers for a little noise at 7 pm on a Friday like that. She ended up confessing that she did have a bad day, and I told her I was sorry. Moving forward, we kept our volume at a reasonable level as a courtesy to her.
A little while later, she yelled back over that they were the best wings she'd ever had, and we gave a little cheer back to her. Never heard from her again. Hope her days are better now.
51. 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.
52. I See The Light
My friend had a neighbor who put in a very bright yard light that was pointed at her bedroom window. She asked him to re-aim or dim the light, but he just gave her the cold shoulder. Cue theatre stagehands. She put up a parabolic mirror pointed directly at the dude's bedroom, then used an old projector dowser and an old lighting board to program a chase sequence that was put on repeat for hours on end.
The end result was a beam of randomly blinking light aimed at the neighbor's bedroom window. When he complained, she let him know that it was his light source and all he had to do was turn off his yard light.
53. Break Up With Your Boyfriend
We did this at our last rental house. The neighbors were constantly fighting and we'd hear it through the walls since we lived in a semi-detached property. They would also get tipsy every weekend and blast loud music until 4 am. Well, one time, the girlfriend went out of town for a week for some work training thing and while she was gone, we saw another girl park outside the house. We also heard the boyfriend and the new girl going at it very loudly.
At their next party, my partner and I both went over to ask them to turn the music down. The boyfriend opened the door and started shouting that we should mind our own business. Then, the girlfriend appeared behind him and said the same. That's when my wife casually asked the most devastating question: "Oh, did you get back together? What about that nice blonde girl who was here all last week?" Then we just went home and enjoyed listening to them throwing everyone out and having their last fight.
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54. 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.
55. It's Raining Snails
My parents have an extremely nosey neighbor who would just stand at the fence and watch what we did. I mean, with her nose resting on the top of the fence. This woman was in her 60s and she had kids and grandkids. I found out the other day that my dad was in the garden with a shovel. Turns out, he throws the slugs and snails in their trampoline and on their veggie plot for being annoying every time they aren’t there.
I couldn’t stop laughing at how petty and hilarious this was. Still makes my day.
56. 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.
Tip: Nip It In The Bud
Property disputes are a massive headache, so it’s best to nip them in the bud before they become a major issue. Fences are the worst culprits around, but that’s not all. There’s also the encroachment of overhanging plants or large structures that demolish sightlines. Simply put, there’s so many ways to cross the line. If you notice that your neighbors are getting ready to build a new addition or repair a fence, bring communication to the table and set your boundaries before it’s too late.
57. Chain Of Fools
My neighbor used to insist on mowing his lawn at 5:30 am every Saturday morning. He had to drive on our property to access his back lawn and he would buzz right past my window with the mower deck down. It would always wake me up. I asked him to stop but he brushed me off. One Friday night after working a late second shift, I left my dog's chain in the tall grass on our property between our houses.
5:30 am Saturday came around and I woke up to the sound of the mower sucking the chain up into the mower deck. The next weekend, I got to sleep in.
58. (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.
59. Feeding The Problem
We briefly had a neighbor who was a complete jerk. My personal pet peeve was when he would yell at our kids to "shut up" while they were playing in the backyard. Next to his driveway was a big tree and I noticed he'd throw occasional hissy fits over the birds defecating on his car. One week, he was out of town but his car was still in the driveway. This was the perfect moment for revenge.
Each day, I put a heaping pile of berries (blueberries, strawberries, etc.) next to the tree. He returned home to a car absolutely COVERED in technicolor bird poop.
60. 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.
61. 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.
62. Are You Chicken?
My neighbor is a cop and his kids would always come over to my yard and throw rocks at my house, screech loudly, harass my chickens and leave their coop open, etc. I put up a no trespassing sign and they still showed up. I put up some wire fencing and they still showed up. There was nothing I could actually do to get them in trouble because they felt they were “above the law," given that their dad IS the law.
But luckily, last year I worked at a Halloween store, and so I put a rubber pig mask on the light post in my backyard. Needless to say, he doesn’t let his kids over here anymore.
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63. Cat-vantage
Our cats did this all by themselves. Our neighbors got a small yappy dog and they would let it go outside. Our cats figured out if they sat on the fence and stared at him, it would drive the dog completely insane. They were completely safe because the dog couldn't jump that high. They would sit there just watching him lose his temper.
The neighbor asked us to please tell our cats to stop torturing their dog, and we said, "Well, they're cats...they're not really gonna listen to us. How about you don't leave your dog outside all the time?" The guy was kind of a jerk anyway, so we didn't have much motivation to stop them anyway. The dog seemed to be on the verge of losing its sanity, so eventually, they just stopped leaving the dog outside all the time.
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64. 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.
65. 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.
Tip: Keep It Clean
Messy neighbors are the worst, but condescension never helped anyone. The best way to ruffle a neighbor’s feathers is to offer to help them clean their yard. Don’t do that. But also don’t be the person who lets their yards run wild. Be diligent and clean up after yourself. Treating your property like a trash can is only going to bring down the resale values of your neighbors’ homes, and they’re bound to have a bone to pick with you.
66. Oops, I Did It Again
In college, the guy in the dorm room next to mine was apparently a bit insane. He would bang on our shared wall whenever he heard any noise. The first time he did it, I was just talking to a friend in my room at normal volume in the middle of the day. It kept going like this for months. He once banged on our wall for like five minutes because I sneezed. One day we noticed that he had a large pair of panties and a pair of earplugs taped to his door.
There was a note that read: "Put on your big-girl panties and deal with it." Apparently, his neighbors on the other side were sick of him, too. So one weekend, I was leaving the dorm to visit home, and he started banging on the wall because I flushed a toilet. That was the last straw. I ended up putting a Britney Spears song on repeat, with my speakers up against his wall, and I left for the weekend...being sure to lock all the doors behind me.
67. 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.
68. That's Bananas
I had a girl at my old apartment complex open the washer with my clothes inside, take them out, and put them on the folding table. She did this right in front of me as I was removing my second load into the dryer. I asked what she was doing and she was like, “These have been in here for like 20 minutes,” and I was like, “No, they haven’t."
I used the laundry app and it said it had just finished washing two minutes prior. I was literally about to put them in the dryer, so I told her, "Please don’t touch my clothes like that." She just let out a rude scoff. I went back 45 minutes later to take my clothes out of the dryer and she was in there doing the same thing AGAIN with someone else’s load. She was taking their damp clothes out to put her own load in.
I knew for a fact the clothes were just done because the cycle only goes for 45 minutes. So I decided to teach her a lesson. I threw my half-eaten banana in with her wash.
69. 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.
70. 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.
71. Over The Moon
In college, our neighbor kept trying to get us evicted because we had too many cars. She also installed cameras to spy on our house. She called a noise complaint on us one day while we were playing basketball in our driveway and my roommate told her to kiss his butt. He then mooned her and she did not like that one bit. She proceeded to call 9-1-1, saying he had been indecent in front of her kid.
The officers who arrived watched the tapes over. Seeing as we did nothing wrong (and my friend only mooned her as a joke), they just told us to ignore her. We ended up hanging a giant sheet of plastic 20 feet up in the trees along the entire property line so they couldn’t see us. It looked trashy as heck, but it actually brought us peace until our lease ended. Unfortunately, we weren't allowed to renew.
72. Gas Guzzler
My friend John had a neighbor named David who would siphon gas out of everyone’s vehicles. Nearly all of John’s neighbors had cameras, so they knew who it was, but couldn’t get the guy to stop. John went to the store to purchase a locking gas cap and while he was there, he had a bit of a light bulb moment. He decided to buy one for David’s car instead. John waited until David was asleep that night to hatch his plan.
At around 9 pm, he installed the locking gas cap on David’s car. Apparently, David flipped out and went door-to-door asking all of the neighbors he knew had cameras to tell him who did it. Miraculously, everyone’s camera failed to work that day. John said the car sat up for about a week before David was able to remove it. After realizing how much his neighbors hated him, David decided to move.
73. 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.
74. 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.
Tip: Alert The Troops
Sometimes a neighbor can be the worst of the worst—violent, thieving, vandalizing, and even peeping. This is when things start to get dangerous. The best way to combat a threatening neighbor is to notify your community so that the entire neighborhood can remain vigilant. If you notice criminal behavior, be sure to contact the proper authorities.
Never engage with your neighbor if they mean you harm.
75. An Ominous Voice
I have some upstairs neighbors that are obnoxious. Their subwoofer quakes to action movies around midnight. They also have LOUD, bed-breaking intimacy. But the worst thing they do is tan leather in their apartment, which means there is hammering and dragging around of equipment at all hours of the night. Sometimes, I blast my stereo for 30 seconds and they quiet down.
One weekend, I had my kids over and the neighbors were being super loud. Things were being dropped on the floor and people were rolling around. It was like they were wrestling with all the yelling and laughing. I remembered seeing a Bluetooth speaker show up on my devices list when they moved it. It wasn’t secured with a PIN, so anyone could join it. I instantly had an idea—it was evil, but it had to be done.
I waited until the kids were gone and at around 10 pm I connected to their speaker. Then. I found a creepy ASMR video on YouTube where a guy role-plays as a slayer and describes what he will be doing to his victim in detail. I turned it to max volume, then after a few minutes, I turned it off. I heard frantic running around all over the place with doors opening and slamming.
I couldn’t stop chuckling. Dead silence for two glorious weeks.
76. 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.
77. 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.
78. Snowed In
My neighbor had a bad habit of parking too many cars in our really small parking lot. There were only enough spots for two cars per apartment, and there were four apartments total. They often had three to five cars parked at any given time. I always had to ask them to vacate our parking spots when we got home. Every day practically.
The neighbor on the other side of me got their Pontiac stuck in the driveway because of the snow. They left it there overnight and the next morning when everyone needed to leave for work and whatnot, it was right in the middle of the driveway. Everybody started yelling at me because I guess they both expected me to fix the situation with my truck.
I told my boyfriend at the time that we were NOT to help either of them. They both went to HIM and asked if my truck could be used to get the car out. My truck. No. I dug out enough of the snowbank to get myself out and let them deal with the rest. Both of the neighbors got in my face, so at that point, I definitely wasn't lending them my truck.
79. 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.
80. The Innovation Is Immaculate
On my last day in my old apartment, I went #1 on a plate and stuck it in the freezer. Then, I waited until it froze, detached the frozen disc from the plate, and slid it under his front door so that it would eventually melt on his carpet. Thanks to three years of loud music at 3 am every night, neighbor.
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81. 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.
82. Float On
I live in a weekend lakefront community. My neighbor is just a weekender, but when he comes out, he acts as if we all work for him or something. It's like he thinks we owe him—he expects us to be completely silent and be essentially invisible to him. He hates dogs and physically hurts my puppies through the fence. Naturally, the dogs are terrified of him and bark as soon as they see him.
It drives him crazy and it simply makes things worse. I don't let the dogs bark for long, but I refuse to keep them inside all weekend just for his sake. Anyway, the lake flooded a few years ago, and it presented the perfect opportunity to teach him a lesson. I went around securing all my neighbors' boats and kayaks—all but his stuff. I enjoyed watching his boat float away.
83. 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.
Tip: Use Your Ears
When it comes to complaining to your neighbor, it can easily evolve into harassment. Unfortunately, it’s human nature to respond to a complaint made against them with resistance. Nobody wants to admit that they’re the one in the wrong. If your neighbor comes to you with a grievance, the best way forward is to actually listen to them and respond calmly. Take anger out of the picture.
84. 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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85. That Sinking Feeling
When the house next door was being built, the "new" owners told the builders to use my electricity to build their house. When I said heck no, they put a really big generator on the border of my house and placed boards along the side to force the noise in my direction. Well after three days of that nonsense, they all went home for the weekend.
I went out with my sprinklers from the front and back and I let them run over it until Sunday night. Needless to say, after they walked over to start it on Monday, it sank in about six inches. They tried to tow it out with their truck but it sank too, and they had to call a heavy wrecker to pull themselves out as the truck sank to the doors.
They threatened to sue for damages but couldn't prove anything and all the other neighbors sided with me.
86. 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.
87. Cinderblock Surprise
The street I grew up on was paved to a certain point, and the rest was a dirt road that ran up through a farm. A family lived in a trailer on that dirt road and their son, Gary, would FLY down the road in his '84 Lincoln. We, as kids, were always riding bikes or playing hockey in the street, and pretty much every parent had complained about Gary to his parents.
They didn't care. We had county leaf pick-up, so we could blow all our leaves into a pile near the street and a truck would come by and suck them all up. This was Gary's favorite time of the year as he would drive his car through the leaves with multiple passes to hit both sides of the street. My neighbor across the street was fed up with him and decided to act.
He put cinder blocks in his leaf pile. It was 2 am and the neighborhood was awakened by a loud BOOM followed by people laughing on their front porches as Gary's '84 Lincoln had a cinder block through his grill.
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88. 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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89. Crowdsourcing
I moved to a small rural town where everyone knows everyone. The townspeople love to inject the “will of the Lord” into everything. It’s quite annoying. I was just some random guy nobody knew. Last year was my first time having a garden and I was so proud of my tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. I told a trusted neighbor to help herself to some of my crops.
When the time came to pick a bunch of tomatoes and peppers, I went to the garden and found it absolutely picked clean from the day before. Knowing that the frail old lady didn’t do this, I set up cameras in the garden to catch the thieves in the act. Over the course of a week, I caught four different fully-grown adults on camera snooping and taking from my garden.
I did some research and found out that all but one of them worked full-time and they were in no need of food or financial assistance. I left the needy family out of this. I went to the community Facebook page with 5,000 members and posted pictures of them stealing from my garden with the caption: “God blessed me with this beautiful bounty and I’m so thankful he led the less fortunate and hungry to my garden to nourish their HONEST souls.”
I sat back, and watched the notifications and hate comments fly. Never again has a tomato been picked without someone asking.
90. Not An Olive Branch
I have an old neighbor who represents maybe one of five white households in a mixed minority neighborhood. He likes to call code enforcement on everyone for every little thing. He did it once when my trash can lid didn’t close completely. It’s gotten to a point where the code enforcement guy just texts me directly because he’s obligated to respond to every complaint.
I get someone to do a massive trim of my three pecan trees every other spring. This past fall, after an incident in which he contacted the city over my just expired registration, I got a knock on my door from the power company. They were present “on behalf” of my neighbor. They had recently fixed the street lamp dividing our front property which had been out for two years, and a singular large pecan tree branch was preventing light from shining on his driveway.
They couldn’t do anything to force me to trim the branch, but they were still requesting I do so on behalf of my neighbor. So naturally, this year, when it was time to trim my pecan trees, can you guess which branch didn’t get cut?
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91. Blades Of Glory
The woman who lived above our apartment was a psycho when it came to noise. I’m talking just regular, run-of-the-mill, everyday noise. My partner and I are very quiet. This woman could not stand the ceiling fan in our apartment. She said she heard it over her TV at all hours (even though we only ran it in the afternoon when we were in our living room).
Our landlords said she was a nuisance for years about the ceiling fan. They had technicians come in several times and they all said there was no real sound coming off it. Yet, the woman would be so upset over it that she'd throw tantrums, stomping her feet back and forth across her unit whenever it was on. We had no AC, so it was really our only source of air circulation when we used it.
The day we moved out, we knew the apartment wouldn’t be accessed for two weeks. We cranked that ceiling fan up to 11, closed the door, locked it, then dropped the key in the mail back to the landlord who was five states away.
92. A Taste Of Her Own Medicine
When my boyfriend was 14, he was living with his mom and sister on a housing estate. It was summer and he liked a bit of light in his upstairs bedroom, so he left the curtains open at all times. That included when he was getting dressed and after having a shower, so if you purposefully stared at his window, you could see him from his waist up (and only his waist up).
Well, their neighbor did not like that one bit. She went pounding on their door, yelling at my mother-in-law that her son was a disgrace, hanging around always naked and exposing himself to her daughter. My mother-in-law told her he had every right to do whatever he wanted in his bedroom, and that if they didn't want to see him all they needed to do was not to look.
A couple of days went by and lo and behold, the authorities showed up at the neighbor’s door. Turned out the neighbor had been filming and taking pictures of my boyfriend to show to the housing people as evidence of his wrongdoing to get them kicked out. Except that the housing office called the authorities on her for taking pictures and videos of an underage kid and kicked her and her family out.
Public Domain Pictures
93. They Say He’s A Real Blockhead
We grew up in one of the worst neighborhoods in my state. It was really rough. Anyway, 80s childhood being what it was, we used to ride our bikes everywhere, regardless of danger. Our home street was divided into three parts. The upper and middle parts were relatively okay in the daytime. The lower part was off limits no matter what, because that’s where the creeps and dealers lived.
We moved out finally and went somewhere a lot safer. Years pass. Our old neighborhood makes the news every so often for various outrages. One day, I saw in the newspaper that a woman had recently been found deceased in her house—she’d been sitting there for a month on her couch. It was already sad, but then things took a horrific turn.
When authorities showed up to deal with the situation, they discovered a big slab of cement in a strange place in the backyard. A neighbor told them that they’d frequently seen her at night sitting near and talking to the slab. If you knew how strange the people were in our neighborhood were, you’d have brushed this off as yet another weirdo.
Well, it turns out it was her husband. Only they weren’t officially married, so when he passed on—it was suspected to be natural causes, surprisingly—she couldn’t live without his Social Security check every month, so she buried him in the backyard and kept up the pretense that he was alive and living with his out-of-state relatives.
We used to ride by that house frequently when he was already buried in the yard. Oh, the 1980s.
94. 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.
95. 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.
96. Confessions of a Serial Thief
My next door neighbor in college. I wasn't really friends with him, but he was an OK guy I talked to a couple of times a week. Strange, but nice enough to have a conversation. Then towards the end of the year, he told a friend on our dorm floor that he secretly stole girls’ panties from the laundry room downstairs.
Not just anyone's, but specific girls’. He even showed him the collection. This friend told the RA and after about two weeks he was kicked out of the dorm. It took them two weeks because they didn't have proof, but all of the girls this guy said he'd stolen from mentioned they were missing panties. He came to me and asked if I'd put in a good word—naw dude, we're not cool anymore.
