Although people can choose where to live, they can’t necessarily choose who will be living next to them. All one can do is hope that whoever their neighbor is, they don’t turn out to be a problem. More often than not, agreeable neighbors are a rarity. Here are some stories about nightmare neighbors that prove “loving thy neighbor” is sometimes impossible.
1. Leaping Lizards
I lived next door to a pet hoarder. She had an unkempt yard, and a MONSTROUS amount of dung kept in a garden shed on the edge of their property, amazingly right beside our deck. We always wondered what was going on over there. Then, an unsettling flyer showed up in our mailbox. It read, “Lost male iguana. Aggressive and will bite. Do not approach.”
A few days later, animal control arrived with trucks and vans. They went into the house and pulled out hundreds of animals, all of who were sick or injured. There were exotic birds, lizards, cats, dogs—it was insane.
2. Serial Psycho
I used to have a neighbor in his mid-40s who lived in a small junk house. It looked like a house that a psycho would live in. He would be in the road screaming nonsense and would go off on angry rants at 1:00 am. He came to my house banging on the door, yelling and threatening to kill my dog for barking when my dog was inside with me, and no barks were heard in the neighborhood.
He would constantly accuse people of stealing his mail and would put cardboard on his utility van window. He would treat everyone like they were some kind of suspect, to the point where no one wanted to be caught by him outside. One time, he showed up at my house out of nowhere with a hammer. I immediately called the authorities and put a restraining order on him.
A month later, I heard some crazy sounds coming from my attic and thought squirrels got up in the space again. I called pest control to see what was up there, but when they came down, they had this horrified look on their faces. They told me, “I can't get rid of what’s up there, but maybe the authorities can.” I called, and a few officers came out with my insane neighbor. I was almost paralyzed with fear.
When he’d smile, he would always have some intense anger behind his eyes. Thank goodness he moved.
3. I Made A Ritual Our Of Getting Revenge
I have very religious neighbors. They would hang signs for the local church camp on their property. They kept putting our garbage cans in our driveway. While it was stupid and annoying, their behavior became more and more aggressive, to the point where they would trespass on my property and do damage to my house. However, I could never catch them in the act. So, I did the only thing a sane person would do.
I put on my velvet ritual cloak and made a show of putting a salt circle around my property, chanting and carrying on. They never bothered me again.
4. She Was Doggone Crazy
We had a large fenced-in backyard. My dog wasn't terribly loud, nor was she aggressive at all. She was just the general size of a lab, and my neighbors, specifically the wife, thought that made her evil. They called the authorities more than once, saying my dog was terrorizing the neighborhood.
Officers came, met the dog, and we explained that she was always in our yard. They left saying just make sure she stays in the yard. The neighbor called two more times to complain, and eventually, the officers spoke with her about her ludicrous complaints. Then, she started taking matters into her own hands. We noticed our dog was getting sick a lot—really sick.
We took her to the vet, and the vet said we needed to stop feeding her human food that could be bad for dogs. We had NO CLUE what she was talking about. We went back home and decided to keep a close eye on her. It turns out our neighbor had been dumping a number of vile things over our fence, like food scraps and mop water.
We went and spoke with her about this, and she denied it. Finally, we caught her on video and made sure she saw us recording her. Later that night, her husband came over and apologized and begged us not to call law enforcement. He promised he would ensure our dog would be left alone. We agreed but said if anything happened to our dog again, we would press charges.
Thankfully, she stopped coming after our dog—but she wasn't done quite yet...She moved on to our landscaping. She climbed over the fence more than once to hack our hedges and a few saplings. She even went and pulled all the flowers out of our flower bed that we had just planted. We went and spoke with her husband, as he was the saner of the two. We had the same conversation as we had regarding our dog.
5. Their Antics Pooped Me Out
After I moved out of my parent's place, I moved into an apartment where the neighbors were hoarders to the extreme. About two months after they moved in, we started getting roaches in our apartment. Then came mice. Then came RATS. About once a month, we would have to call emergency services on them because we'd find one of them passed out in the parking lot, on the doorstep, or on the stairs.
One day, they came over and asked if it was us who kept calling the authorities. Then, they cursed us out because they didn't have insurance and had to take out numerous payday loans to cover the ambulance costs. After "someone" pooped on our welcome mat, we'd had enough. We broke our lease and moved out.
6. Cat Napping Nitwit
I lived next to a foster home that had lots of boys living in it. My mom had allergies to our cats, so we let them outside. I'd go outside every morning, call their names, feed them, and spend some time with them before heading off to school. Everything was fine for about six months. Then one day, one of my cats didn’t show up when I called for her.
I didn’t think too much of it, thinking she was probably out doing cat things. I went to my aunt's house for the weekend to study with my cousin. When I came back home, there was still no sign of her. I started calling her name around the neighborhood and asking around if anyone had seen her. Nothing. Meanwhile, my other cat was suddenly suffering from seizures and was lethargic.
We kept her inside to keep an eye on her. Two weeks later, I had a thought that maybe someone either ran over our cat or took a liking to her and kept her for themselves. Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. When my dad opened it, his jaw literally DROPPED. He saw a young boy holding a plastic bag with our cat inside of it! He said she was in their hedges.
He told us he had a feeling the new foster kid, who “wasn't right in the head,” had something to do with it. My dad went over and talked to the head of the foster home because he also had noticed someone throw a fish over our fence a few days before. Apparently, that kid had been causing a lot of trouble for them and was known to poison animals.
Unfortunately, our other cat didn't make it out ok either.
7. What A Bunch Of Bull
I lived on a farm, and we had one guy who was a real jerk. He took sheep from us. In some cases, he had shorn the wool off them, sold it, and returned the sheep, (although we suspect he sometimes ate the sheep too). He demanded that we front the bill to fix the fence despite it being between our two properties and refused to split the costs.
He also had someone else's bull jump into his property and used it to service his cattle for two years. When the owner tracked it down, the guy demanded to be paid the agistment costs, or he wouldn't return it. Oh, but it didn't end there. This guy owned a house on the property that he rented to his farmhand. The farmhand found him there one day going through his things and was told he wasn't allowed to leave the property under any circumstances while under his employ.
Understandably, the poor farmhand quit immediately and wanted to work for us instead.
8. Doo Not Use Our Lawn
My neighbor had two dogs, which they let outside twice a day. The dogs were friendly and not very loud, except they always pooped on our lawn. My husband and I actually saw our neighbors encourage their dogs to use our lawn instead of theirs. I finally had enough, so I got my garden trowel and flicked all their dogs' doo onto their lawn.
To make things worse, they acted like nothing was wrong.
9. The Show Must Go On
I was at university and had neighbors who, every time they threw a party, a television would get thrown out of a window or balcony. Not a flat screen, but an old school tube TV. It would just fall from the heavens and explode. The noise it made would sound like a car crash. One year, it happened four times in one semester alone.
10. She Was Fast And Furious
We lived beside our neighbors for about three years with no real problems, although we could tell they were a little off. The man kept to himself, but I was friendly with the woman and adored their daughter. One night, the husband and wife began brawling in the front yard, and he slammed her head into a brick post on their porch.
The MPs were there, firefighters—the works. The whole street was lit up with emergency lights, and they both got carted off. I honestly closed my blinds and locked my doors when I first realized there was something going down. It didn't end there. A couple of weeks later, they had both been released from wherever they were. We were out of town and got a call from a co-worker asking if we were ok. Apparently, the lady had come back, and they got into it again.
She hopped into her car, drove straight into the garage/house, backed out, and went on a high-speed chase with the MPs through the neighborhood. She side-swiped a cruiser as she turned onto one of the roads headed towards a gate on the base. They started raising the barriers, but she wasn’t stopping. Never before did I ever deal with craziness like that.
11. She Annoyed The Living Daylights Out Of Me
There's a particular type of person who seems to feel like they're the only thing standing between society and its complete collapse. About six years ago, my downstairs neighbor was one of those people. She was aloof and paranoid, and she imagined threats from almost everywhere, which made the fact that she thought of herself as some kind of secret agent all the more annoying.
The said neighbor was always trying to find ways of getting me to move out of the building. She would stage loud telephone calls with “headquarters” about the alarming behavior of the other tenants, like my tendency to get home after nine in the evening, which was clearly scandalous. She would also frequently yell at the people who would stand on the corner to smoke.
On one occasion, I heard her shouting at someone over the placement of a flowerpot in their window, which was obviously an indication that they were selling dope. Then, one afternoon, I found a homemade attempt at an official FBI document posted in the building. It had atrocious grammar, a poorly Photoshopped seal, and a distinct absence of any legitimate contact information.
Still, since the notice was clearly meant to scare someone, I decided to return the favor by taking a page out of my neighbor's own playbook. I stood outside of her apartment while staging my own fake phone call. I said, "You should see the notice; it's terrible! Hah, yeah, it's like they didn't know that impersonating a federal official is an offense! Anyway, the real FBI are on their way, and they're going to dust for fingerprints. Whoever made that notice is looking at a lot of prison time!"
I went back inside my apartment after that, and within seconds, I heard my neighbor's door open. There was the sound of hurried footsteps rushing towards the stairwell, followed by an equally hurried retreat. When I went out to check five minutes later, the notice was gone. I've since moved away from that location, but for the rest of the time that I lived there, the lady never bothered me again.
12. I Doubted Mr. Fire Was Sane
My first apartment living away from home was in a small complex filled with retirees. Once I was walking to the bus stop before class, and I saw a garbage can smoldering in front of our building. It wasn't flaming, but there was a hole burned through it, and the plastic around the hole was melting. It had been a dry spring, so we were worried it might start an actual fire.
My ex ran inside and got the apartment manager. When she came outside with the maintenance guy, who removed the can, she yelled at my neighbor's window, "HEY YOU! What's the deal here?" Apparently, this old man, who lived across the hall from me, had beginning stages of dementia. He was cooking a steak in his kitchen.
When the meat lit on fire, he didn't know what to do, so he threw the entire pan in the garbage. However, the can started melting, so he thought it'd be a good idea to throw the whole thing out the window onto a garden full of wood chips. Hence, we nicknamed him Mr. Fire. He'd glare at me all the time and complain whenever I was sitting outside.
He hated my cat and always assumed I was a smoker. He would say, "Young people and their smokes. You better not smoke around here. The lady down the hall from you is on oxygen, and she can smell it." He was eventually taken away to a retirement home after flushing his diapers down the toilet, bursting a pipe, and flooding the laundry room.
13. This Baby Is Crying No More
I had a neighbor who would bring women back every weekend. I'd hear the bed squeak for about 20 seconds, stop, then silence, followed by laughter. Usually, it was cool, but when he constantly played German house music at 4 am, I started getting mad. After talking to him about it, he essentially told me to take a hike. So, I came up with an excellent plan for revenge.
The next time it happened, I YouTubed "babies crying." I put it on full blast through my speaker, which I had sat up against the wall. Needless to say, it stopped after that.
14. No Field Of Dreams
We had one house on my old street growing up, which had just changed owners. A seemingly nice couple and their kids moved in, and they were okay at first. Their kids were a bit annoying, but they were around six and nine, so the rest of us on the block ignored it since we were teenagers. One day, the kids began screaming profanities at us and throwing stuff.
We just started avoiding them because they were nuts. As a result, they told their mom that we were being mean. So, she started riding her bike up and down the street telling parents what their children had done wrong to her boys. None of the parents took her seriously, and they told her to take a hike many times. She was way more dangerous than we'd ever imagined.
We had an empty lot on the street where we would dig tunnels and build paintball fields. Every single morning we would find everything on the field destroyed. We found suspicious attempts at traps made and all kinds of weird stuff. There were boards with nails laid behind my neighbor's tires. I'm certain the mom was sending her kids out on missions to get back at the parents and us.
The unprovable damage went on for about a year. Peace returned when she moved, and we all grew up.
15. Fenced In
When I was a kid, our neighbor built this giant deck on his house that actually went over our fence. We ended up having to go to the city to force him to make it smaller. We went to a family reunion shortly after, and when we came back, he had a sign on his fence facing our front door that said, "Peekaboo, I see you." He had set up a bunch of security cameras on his house that were all aimed at our house.
We pretty much just avoided him from then on until my parents divorced and sold that house.
16. Dream House Drama
We had built our house around the same time as our neighbors did. Everything was ok at first, but then, things started to go wrong. It started with the fence. They wanted the paneling on their side. We said whatever; having the supports or on our side meant that my siblings and I could climb the fence. Then, they wanted a more expensive fence.
We came in under budget with the house, so we agreed. Then, they wanted the fence moved a yard or so onto our property. That’s where we drew the line and said no way, which caused them to react. We would get pebbles thrown over the fence when we were in the garden, or the wife would knock on the fence and pretend it wasn't her.
It started escalating when she would yell at us. When we came home from school, we would have to wait for the garage door to close fully before we could get out of the car, or she would be out in the front of our house screaming at us holding a broom or a rake. She was crazy! She even tried poking a hole in the fence so she could watch us. We got out of that house quickly, which was unfortunate because it was the house of our dreams.
17. She Was Loaded With Problems
I used to be good friends with the girl next door from when we were ten until high school started. Her parents had a drinking problem, so I felt sorry for her more than anything. My little brother, who was autistic and could barely speak, came along with me to her backyard one day, and he accidentally tripped and fell into their back-porch door. BIG mistake.
Her mom, who had daily naps from all of her drinking, woke up and stormed outside to scream at him. When he didn't respond, she burned him on his arm with her smoke.
18. Karma’s A B—oxer
The next-door neighbor had a small yard with two dogs—a boxer and a rottweiler. She rarely ever walked them, so they were pent up with energy and not well socialized. Whenever people or dogs walked by outside, they would go nuts and jump/tackle the mutual wooden property fence that separated us. As a result, every year, the fence needed to be replaced.
She was never willing to pay for the replacement or even split the cost. My parents would end up footing the entire bill each year for a new fence because my dad did not want to make a big deal. The neighbor also has a very tall tree in her backyard that we tried to get her to trim and maintain so that strong winds wouldn’t bring the cross branches down and damage the surrounding houses and people walking by.
However, she would ignore us. In the end, karma came for her in the worst way imaginable. On one very windy day, a branch snapped from that tree. It crushed her boxer.
19. Just Pivot
One day as I was leaving for work, my neighbors were out front. I locked my door and was walking towards my car when a couch landed in the car park in front of me. They had decided that taking their couch down the stairs was too much effort. Since they were just going to throw it out anyway, they decided to push it over the balcony but didn't think to warn anyone below.
20. Where The Grass Was Not Always Greener
The guy next door was a hoarder. He would have so much junk on his front and back porch that the door wouldn't open, and he never cut his grass. After a couple of years of the city not enforcing lawn care, neighbors on either side started cutting the front lawn for him. But we couldn't mow the back for him because he always had two large dogs who only understood Polish.
The grass was always unbelievably tall in the backyard, which along with the trash, meant the mosquitos along the fence were horrendous, rendering our otherwise pleasant shade garden unusable after any rain. At one point, he was stealing our water which drove up our water bill. We suspected he didn't have electricity either.
21. Not So Fragrant Feline
I had a lady that lived on the third floor. She must have let her cat pee everywhere because the entire building reeked like cat urine. The smell entered my apartment frequently. When I passed her in the hallway, I would have to hold my breath because it smelled so bad. I dealt with this for two years, complaining to the management multiple times.
Eventually, I called animal control. The truth was absolutely horrifying. It turns out she had 30 cats in her apartment. They were taken away, and she was evicted shortly after that.
22. No Pets Allowed
I lived in an apartment that didn’t allow any pets, except for service animals. A lady moved in and LIED that her dog was a "service dog." This dog was no service dog, it didn't even have basic obedience training, and she would turn it loose all day long in the communal gated courtyard. She never cleaned up after it, and it would chase and harass everyone because it was starved for attention.
She got tons of complaints, but because she kept claiming it was a service animal, there was nothing that could be done. She eventually got evicted after getting a second dog she let run feral and poop everywhere. When she left, the landlord found out that she was also a hoarder. Her apartment was packed full of all kinds of filth, including bags of clothes she had been taking at night from charity donation bins.
23. Living Next To These Guys Was Ruff
I lived in an apartment. I paid my rent on time, didn’t break stuff, and was overall a good neighbor. A guy moved in with his girlfriend, and they got a dog. She decided that she didn’t want to walk or play with the dog, so she would put him out on the balcony all day. The dog barked ALL DAY LONG. This went on for about two months.
The city I lived in had a noise ordinance, but it wasn’t enforced much. The property manager said, "We've talked to him, and the dog isn’t out much during the day.” I was at my wit's end, so I contacted the property owner. I told him I had been here for several years with no incident and that the new neighbors had a dog they kept on the balcony.
I mentioned that the smell of dog excrement was horrible, and I couldn't sit out on my balcony in peace. He contacted my property manager and told them to either evict the couple or move them away from me. To top it off, before they moved out, he got loaded and smacked the girlfriend around. I called the authorities who took him in. They finally moved.
24. This Guy Needed To Get Cleaned Out
A man who lived on my floor was infamous in our neighborhood. He lived with his mother, who, ironically, was our building's janitor. She made moonshine in her bathtub, which often stank up her neighbors' apartments. Her kid began "sampling" the moonshine early on and was a full-blown juvenile delinquent by the age of 16. He soon moved on to harder stuff and began hurting his own mother just so he could get his hand on her tiny janitor's salary.
One time he nearly put her in a coma, but she refused to press charges or kick him out. But the worst was yet to come. He broke into his neighbor's apartment once and ended up behind bars for about two weeks. He would deface the walls of the building and urinate everywhere. The downstairs neighbors actually had severe water damage because of his pee, and his flat was so foul that the next residents had to gut it completely.
Eventually, they fell behind on their utilities and had to relocate to a smaller place elsewhere in town.
25. These Guys Belonged On Jerry Springer
When I decided to move out of the city to a small town, I found a great deal on a nice house, so I jumped on it. Most of the neighbors were really cool, and we all got along. However, there was one set of neighbors who were terrible. They had a junkyard yard full of stuff, including a big above-ground pool and kids' toys everywhere.
The woman had no teeth and was built like a foosball man, and the guy was this little mousy, beaten down man. She would stand in the yard and curse at him in her inebriated, toothless lisp. You'd occasionally see him just sitting in his truck at the park for hours just to get away from her. Two weeks after I had moved in, I saw the authorities hauling her off and him bleeding from the head.
She had hit him with some kind of lawn mower part. He went knocking on doors for bail money to get her out. They also went around the neighborhood asking to use our water to fill their huge pool. Naturally, we all said no, so they paid their water bill to get the service turned on to fill up the pool. Then, when the water got shut off again, they let it stay off for nine months and used the pool water to flush the toilet.
They did this on a yearly basis. The guy on the other side of me discovered they were pilfering water from his house when the guy crawled under his house and rigged a hose to his water main and buried it. They did the same with electricity and cable. The cable company came out one day and dug up my yard to find the cable lines that went to everyone else’s house around him.
One day, I was chilling in my pool when I heard what sounded like a shelf full of glass tipped over, and I heard the woman screaming. She had thrown the contents of their kitchen cabinets, the cabinets themselves, and part of the counter in the front yard then injured him. Another time, she had gone around taking Christmas decorations out of other peoples' yards and putting them in her own. Officers showed up.
She tried to hit one of them with a giant plastic candy cane and got pepper-sprayed. It was like living in a reality tv show.
Pxfuel
26. Tossed Out With Their Trash
We lived in what looked like a mansion-type house that was rented out to three different families. My family lived on the bottom floor, and a family of six lived above us—a mother, father, and four daughters from four to 13 years in age. Every morning they would stomp around the house like little elephants and make as much noise as possible to wake each other up so they could prepare for school.
After they were ready, more often than not, they would refuse to actually go out the door to go to school. They would screech as loud as they could until their parents decided to let them stay home. Since we were on the bottom floor, we had free reign of the backyard, whereas the other two families barely bothered to use it.
They would frequently dump garbage and other random stuff off of the balcony into the yard and never bother cleaning it up. We would have to tend to it daily since we had two dogs and an outdoor cat at the time. It was a nightmare. The landlord eventually kicked them out, and when he went to inspect their apartment, he made a disturbing discovery.
Their apartment was full of soda bottles, as well as mold growing in multiple rooms with foul odors everywhere.
27. Garden Grump
I moved into what was supposed to be student housing. It was a normal house with locks added to all the rooms to make them separate with a shared kitchen, etc. I shared my kitchen/bathroom with two other people downstairs, and there were about eight other people living on the upper floors. There was a weird couple who lived above me. The guy looked to be somewhere in his 40s or 50s, with a handlebar mustache and very long black hair.
The woman looked to be somewhere in her 70s. I thought she was his mother at first, but apparently, they were a couple. She had trouble getting around and would often be sitting outside the front door in her wheelchair puffing away. It didn't take long after I moved in for things to take a bad turn. When I moved in, I had cleaned up the whole garden. I was hoping to chill in it when the weather was good.
I started finding smoke butts and other little things tossed in it, but there were a bunch of different balconies facing it, so I couldn't exactly accuse anyone unless I caught them in the act. One day, while I was studying, I heard a crunch in the garden, so I went to check it out. There was a whole garbage bag sitting by the door, and I could still hear people rummaging around on the balcony directly above me.
By the time I actually got outside, they were already inside and ignored my yells, so I threw the garbage bag back onto their balcony. This finally got them to come out, only for them to complain that I had all this space that I wasn't doing anything with, so why shouldn't they be allowed to store their garbage in my garden?
I told him to take a hike, and if he did it again, I would call the authorities. He immediately backed off. A day or so later, I invited some friends to hang out at my place for the first time. We were just talking, playing some video games, not exactly being loud, but not super quiet either. Around 9 o'clock, the banging on the ceiling started.
At first, we thought someone was doing some late-night home improvements or something, but the banging came every time someone laughed a little louder. Apparently, they expected us to stop talking after 9 pm, which didn't seem reasonable, but I was willing to discuss it. I rang their doorbell tried to see if they would come to the balcony, but they just kept banging on the floor.
This became a recurring theme over the years. About a week after the first garbage incident, I was sitting on my bed, reading, when I heard a splat in the garden. Again I went to go and see what it was, and to my surprise, I found a whole roast chicken there, with all the bones and some of the meat eaten off. I called up to my upstairs neighbor again. I clearly heard him moving around, but he once again ignored me.
So, I lobbed his chicken back through his open balcony door. He came out mad, but I was already way angrier at having to explain to him again how throwing trash into my garden was not okay. According to him, this wasn’t trash—it was edible food. He'd just had part of it for breakfast, and being the animal lover he was, he liked to share it with the cats of the neighborhood.
This also explained why the stray cats in the neighborhood liked to pick my garden for their fight club. I explained that food scraps attracted all kinds of unwanted things and were even more of a pain to clean up, so if he really wanted to help animals, he should either adopt a couple of cats or go help out at an animal shelter. The next thing I knew, he called the authorities.
Then, one afternoon, I came home from school and found a chicken running around in my backyard. I confronted the neighbor, and he immediately confessed that he had taken my advice. He said he always wanted chickens, but since he didn't have enough room on his balcony, he decided to keep them in my garden instead. I told him I was having chicken that night, and in 15 minutes, I would decide if I needed to go to the supermarket to get it or if it would be fresh.
In the meantime, I told him, I would leave the front door and the door to the garden open. I heard him fumbling around in the garden a couple of minutes later, and he finally stopped throwing stuff down there. Eventually, the old lady got sick and had to be moved to the hospital. He stopped paying rent, so they were forced to move.
Apparently, their apartment was a scene straight from Hoarders. There was garbage stacked to above head height, in some cases to the ceiling. While trying to clean it out, they had discovered all kinds of junk, including phone books from thirty-five years prior. I would regularly hear some of the workers run out onto the balcony and dry heave from the smell. It took them two weeks to clear everything out.
28. Time To Blow This Joint
When I was a kid, we lived across the street from a couple who had teenage children. The sister brought home random dudes at least two to three times a week. They were so loud that my parents called the authorities on her once because they thought she was being harmed, which wasn’t the case. Her brother had a lucrative business selling illicit substances and always had customers hanging out in the driveway waiting for him.
His parents were completely in the dark and kept bragging about how well he was doing with his "construction job" because he bought them a new car and a boat. The sister babysat me once but left after an hour because she had to go get busy with somebody. Her brother showed up to take over, and I made him help organize all of my stuffed animals.
I don't remember if he was high, but he organized the bejeezus out of all of my toys. We left that neighborhood as soon as the drive-bys got more frequent.
29. Double Headaches In That Dump
My first apartment was a real dump in a seedy complex. I had two neighbors that were the worst. The first was the lady who lived above me. She would let her small dog pee and poo all over the balcony, meaning we basically couldn't open our back door in the summer because of the stench. She also smoked weed constantly and asked to borrow money several times.
When they moved out, they had to tear up all the carpet and deep clean the whole place. The other was the guy who lived a few spots down from us. One night I could hear him fighting with his girlfriend through my window. Naturally, my girlfriend and I were content eavesdropping on it until we heard a loud smack. I called the authorities immediately, and he went off to prison.
30. They Caused Havoc At The HOA
My mother's HOA, which was for a community of only 41 homes, had some pretty interesting characters in it. About ten years into living in this small community, my mother decided to run for their board to try to get some community improvements done and to take her turn in a board position like most long-term residents. She was elected president of the board.
There was an older family in the neighborhood that included a husband, a wife, and their near middle-aged daughter. They were well known for being extremely nasty and bossy. The wife thought that although she wasn't on the HOA board, she got to determine how the dues were spent. She claimed that she knew the community money wasn't being saved or spent properly and that she could make up whatever rules for the community and her family that she wanted to.
Like most HOAs, ours had a standard for how front yards looked, what could be planted in them, limits on things such as the colors of the house, doors, and trim, and what you could add to the house and yard. This family took water from the neighbors by rerouting their drip hoses and also put in fake flowers and yard decor. When they were caught having messed with the drip hoses, they trashed the waterline and tried to blame it on the neighbors they were pilfering from.
They were harassing the board, the community, and their closest neighbors in person, by phone, and by mail. They stored trash in their yard and planted invasive, unapproved species of plants. To top it off, this family hadn’t made one HOA payment and owed about $7,000 in dues, late fees, fines, etc. When the board found out, they banned them from attending meetings. That did not go over well.
As a result, the wife began harassing my mom, who was President of the HOA board. The woman then served my mother with a summons and notice of complaint. Once we read the notice and calmed down, I decided to do some research. While the company firm, letterhead, and case information led to a real case, it turned out that it wasn't a case against my mom. It was a case against the woman by her former neighbors from the community she'd lived in before.
She had taken the letter, scanned it into a computer, edited the information to make it seem like the case was filed against my mom and to match the circumstances, and had it reprinted in color onto fancy stationery. She had even traced over the lawyer's signature in pen very carefully, so it looked like a proper signature. Needless to say, the firm was not thrilled when we called them and told them what this woman had done.
31. Snatched
We had a beautiful pitbull/boxer mix that was taken out of our backyard by our neighbors and given to a shelter for pit bulls. We looked for our dog for WEEKS, all day and night. Just as we were about to give up, my mom checked the local adoption ads and found our dog. The shelter she was given to was literally a block away from our house.
When asked, they informed us that our neighbors had brought her there. We got our dog back, but the neighbors continued to try and get her taken away from us. They would call the authorities and claim we were neglecting her, even when we were playing with her in our own backyard, and very obviously loved her.
32. Rock N’ Roll Couldn’t Save This Guy
The guy who lived across from me would spend all weekend blasting rock music and singing along. This would go on all day and all night. When he did this, he would also drink. He would then start coming out into the hallway and scream at other tenants for perceived wrongs. I called the authorities on him twice and complained to the landlord at least a dozen times, but nothing was done about it. I eventually moved.
33. We Gave Her Cookies, But She Was A Monster
When we had moved in, my roommate brought our neighbor a plate of cookies and all of our phone numbers and names. We told her to always feel free to call us any time of day, and we would do what she needed. Her response shocked us to the core: "No, we'll call the authorities instead." And boy, did she ever. She called the authorities on me because I was watching television on mute with closed captions, with the windows closed and the blinds shut in my own home at 7:00 pm on a Friday night.
34. Midnight Madness
We had a noisy neighbor for a while. The guy liked to have parties. We could handle them once or twice a week, but he started having them more often. Then one week, he decided to have loud parties every night. He kept his music blasting and his friends making a racket until 6 or 7 am. I couldn't sleep for a whole week straight. I started getting in trouble at work for being exhausted when it wasn't my fault.
After a few days of that nonsense and getting nowhere with him, we wrote a letter and posted it through his door, just before the time his mom got home. It turned out the parties would end at 7 am because that was the time SHE got home. She found the note on the floor and read it. I was happy to be awakened by her screaming at him.
If he had been smart and kept his parties downstairs, everything would have been fine, and we even stated it in the letter we sent them. The parties subsided after that, and he eventually moved out.
35. He Can’t Bail Himself Out Of This One
When I was a kid, we lived next door to an awesome dude and his wife. One day, they lost their house to the bank and moved out. The next thing we knew, a skeezy guy who would routinely fight with his wife in the front yard moved in. They immediately built a fence all the way around the property. After a few years of antics and shenanigans by these people, we got a knock on the door.
My father was taken in for the destruction of private property because they said we hit their fence with stuff and broke it. In court, they presented blatant pictures of a completely different fence as evidence. My father had pictures of their fence, and the judge sent the sheriff out to take his own pictures. They were found in contempt of court for cursing at the judge and falsifying evidence.
They were also taken in on the spot for threatening the judge. My dad immediately sold the house, and we moved out. However, he got the last laugh in the end...We sold the house to the bailiff of the court they were in. So, then his new next-door neighbor was the man who arrested him.
36. The Manager Got Miffed
We had a new property manager move in below us. It was him, his wife, two kids, and a couple of small dogs. We had lived there for a year without any problems. Once football season started, it got really noisy. Every weekend they would have a big game party at their house that would go on well into the night. We eventually complained.
Then, we suddenly started getting letters from the leasing office saying we were making too much noise, which was ridiculous because we were computer nerds. We were either sitting at our computer playing games or on the couch watching TV. We didn’t even invite people over for parties. The only thing that would happen was that the floor would creak when we walked on it.
It was a ridiculous complaint compared to their parties that went on until 1 am. They also started setting up “random inspections” on our apartment and said there were “safety or cleanliness issues” we needed to correct, or we would be evicted. It got to the point that if someone accidentally dropped something, the manager below would start banging on the ceiling and eventually come up the stairs to tell us to keep it down.
He was a very aggressive guy. One day, it all came to a head when they were blasting their music on the balcony until 1 am, and we had to get up for work in the morning. One of my roommates walked out onto our patio and shouted, "It's 1 am! Keep it down!" The next morning, the property manager came storming out of his house, fuming, saying they had better never speak to him like that again.
We responded, "Well, what are we supposed to do then? Call the fuzz?" He replied, "Yeah! Whatever." So, the next time it happened, we called the authorities. They drove by, and the neighbors lowered the volume. Once he was out of sight, they put it back up. So, the officer drove a little ways away, got out of his car, and walked back to catch them.
He talked to them and said he was already filing the paperwork to get us evicted. For the next hour, they were pounding on our floor and shouted insults up to our windows. The next day, I was walking to the store and passed their balcony. They were all on it, and I heard one of them say, "Is that one of them who called the officers last night?" So before going to the store, I went to the leasing office to complain.
They told me one of my other roommates had also made a complaint. The office offered to move us to another unit. When I got back home, I found my roommate recording them harassing us and sent the file to his boss. A couple of days later, there was a big ruckus down below, and they were being moved to a unit two buildings over. There was finally peace and quiet.
37. Neighborhood Creeper
My neighbor would always try to stop and talk to me, usually when I was running late for work, which wasn’t awful. The awful thing was that he would look out the window and wait for me because he always managed to open the door and come outside as I happened to be walking by. He would then promptly go inside after I would tell him I was running late.
One night at 11:40 pm, as I was putting a new decal on my car, that same neighbor came outside, practically climbed in, and insisted on helping me. He then proceeded to try to talk to me afterward. Another time, while I was backing out of my parking spot, he was pulling out of his while in my blind spot. He honked his horn, so obviously, I stopped before I hit him.
Instead of pulling forward and leaving like a normal person, he put his car in park and came over. He knocked on my driver-side window and asked me if I even looked back before I started backing out. He was really aggressive. And the worst part of all? He also jokingly said to me that he had seen me bring a lot of men into my apartment. I really didn’t like that guy. He was very creepy.
38. Stray Cat Stuck
My neighbor was an elderly woman who pretended that she couldn't speak English anytime my dad or I tried to tell her what she was doing was bothering us. We had heard her having full-blown conversations in English with the landlord. I even had my girlfriend, who spoke the same language as her, try and talk to her. As a result, she called my girlfriend names.
She would water the plants in the complex at 5 am almost every day, using the faucet that is right below the window where my bed is, waking me up. Then at 6 am, she would go back into her apartment and bang on something for the next five hours. She also had her Christmas lights up year-round and would have them on until 1 am every night.
However, what offended me the most was that she would feed the stray cats. The landlord told her to knock it off and threatened her with eviction, so she put the cat food in front of MY apartment. The landlord caught on after yelling at me a few times but insisted that since he couldn't prove she put it there, he couldn’t do anything. So, I had about five stray cats who would come around, thinking I had food for them.
39. Speculating Scammers
I’d have to say, my childhood neighbors were the worst. I grew up in a relatively wealthy neighborhood that was built a few years before the recession. There was a family who really over speculated, couldn’t pay their mortgage, and ended up declaring bankruptcy.
They had multiple poorly behaved kids who would run wild all day and cause trouble. One walked right into our house when we were out. Another time their kids pelted a neighbor’s car with rocks, and when the neighbor asked them to pay for damages, the parents told them to take a hike because they were bankrupt. They were pulling a fast one where their house was constantly on the market for half the value of the others in the neighborhood.
Whenever someone would call about the place, their realtor, who was a family friend, would say it was under contract. This went on for years and began to destroy everyone else’s property values. To top it off, their house wasn’t properly maintained. They kept derelict Christmas decor up until the summer, and the HOA couldn’t do anything because of the bankruptcy.
40. The Screaming Banshee
My neighbor across the road constantly screamed at her kids in this high-pitched voice similar to a banshee. She let them race up and down the street all day and literally all night on their motorbikes and let them have rowdy parties. Not only that, but she was so lazy she would drive across the road to her parent's house, which, unfortunately, was right next to mine.
So, I would have to listen to her voice through the paper-thin walls of the duplex we share.
41. She Fought With The Fuzz
My next-door neighbors would constantly neglect their kids. They would never feed them or bathe them. On most days, I would come home to find them playing in the street barefoot and hungry. Then the mother of the family decided to get into an argument with our other next-door neighbor over a parking space. As a result, she threw dog doo over the fence at him. Not the smartest idea. He was a law enforcement officer.
42. He Wanted To Fight For His Right To Party
I've only had two apartments in my life. When I was 24, I had neighbors above me that were as loud as could be. They had raging parties until three or four in the morning. They would play drinking games and loud bass music. I asked them many times to keep the noise down, but the dude refused, saying he has a "right to do what he wants in his own house."
Luckily, they finally moved out.
43. Her Family Caused Me Friction
When my daughter was five, we rented the top floor of a two-family house. The owner gave the bottom floor to her sister, who had issues. One day my daughter's tricycle went missing. We found her kids on it an hour later. I confronted her about it, and she said that my daughter was spoiled and my family didn't deserve to have anything that her family didn't.
She continued to taunt my daughter and take her belongings, so we terminated our lease.
44. Night Shift Nag
There was a young couple with a baby living in the basement of the place I was living in. They used to work the midnight shift and were extremely noisy. There was loud music and loud fights. Even so, I never complained. On the other hand, they would complain about me vacuuming the house at 2:00 pm. Several times they were playing very loud music in the middle of the night, and I did nothing.
However, one day I was watching tv around 10 am, and they were furious. They threatened to call the authorities. I had to move shortly after.
45. Bathtime Boozers
We had neighbors who were a family of four. The parents were usually loaded, and the children were annoying. They never really went anywhere, and one of the kids kept knocking on our window so we could come out and play. One time, he even stuck his hand through our door and tried to get in. Not only that, but sometimes, the mother asked my sister to bathe their two-year-old.
46. Not Worth A Whistle
My upstairs neighbors were so loud that one time when their kid was roughhousing, it actually caused the mirror in the bathroom to fall off the wall and crack my sink. I had to buy an electronic dog whistle because, when we moved in, their dog would bark outside our bedroom window every morning for about a half-hour. Not only that, but we lived at the basement level, and her dog would pee on our window air condition unit.
47. Time To Get Rid Of This Cancer
There was this neighbor who pretended to be weak from cancer/chemo so that the landlord couldn't get mad at her when her trash bins were full, and the lawn was filthy. She even went as far as shaving her head and faking a limp, walking with a cane, and everything. After my mom baked her some cookies and offered to take care of her bins and lawn, she spilled the beans about her scam.
My mom, now enlightened about my neighbor's bologna and tired of her trash blowing into our yard, called the landlord. The neighbor wasn't happy and would blast music in the wee hours of the morning to get back at us. My mom would get frustrated because she worked late and left early, so we filed a noise complaint with the authorities.
Officers arrived. The neighbor claimed that my mom, who was a small old lady, punched her in the chest and wanted her taken in. She showed the officers our security cam footage, which showed the crazy neighbor locking her nine-year-old daughter out in the middle of the night. The child was banging on the door at 2 am and was crying. The neighbor was taken away, and the daughter was sent to live with her dad.
48. This Neighbor Had Some Bad Juju
When our neighbor moved in and we met him, he gave my roommate and me bad vibes from the get-go. There was no reason for it at the time, but our gut feelings said he was no good. For an entire year, almost every time we went out the door, he'd come out to our house to try to hang out. We couldn't even walk across the road to check our mail in peace.
Then he would walk up the road and stand in front of our house staring or pace on the road in front of it. He started knocking on our door in the middle of the night, but there was no way we would answer it. When we would go out, we would come home to find him sitting in a chair in our yard like it was his house. He then started showing up at stores and other places we were at in town and tried to follow us around there.
It got to the point where we hated even going outside and couldn't hang out in our own yard because we felt like we were being watched. We complained to our landlord multiple times, so he warned our neighbor multiple times, but it still continued. Luckily, he got behind on his rent and was kicked out. He messed up the house he was renting so badly that it took months to renovate it.
There were holes in the walls, floors torn up, and hundreds of empty bottles, burnt foil, and used needles.
49. Ripped Off
A few years back, our neighbors were getting kicked out because they were eight months behind on their mortgage. The week before they left, they ripped out everything in an attempt to sell the stuff off—bathroom fixtures, oven, doors, paving stones, you name it. If it could be removed, it was. When they finally moved out, the only things they left behind were the dog, the cat, and their kid.
50. Upstairs Upset
I had neighbors who were the worst kind of evil. I lived on the ground level, with front door access and a yard, and they wanted my apartment. They thought that stomping as frequently and loudly as possible, at all times of the day, was the best way to make me leave. While I would enter or exit my house, the entire family would sit on the balcony above and call me names.
After a while, it inevitably began to affect me. The mother of the family taught her kids to vandalize my apartment and hit my dog. It started to drive me insane, and while I dealt with it, I guess my roommate couldn't. We had been in the apartment for several months before those neighbors had moved in above. It was smooth sailing before then. We had also heard disturbing rumors about our apartment itself.
Apparently, the family that lived there before had burned alive in a fire. We had no idea it was in the actual apartment we lived in because no one disclosed it to us. The landlord pretended it never happened. The room my girlfriend and I slept in had a family burn in it. The combination of that and the harassment from the neighbors got to my roommate, and he had a breakdown.
Sources: Reddit, .
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