Since you have to see them pretty much every day, a house is only a good as its neighbors—so some of these houses were pretty terrible.
1. Let Them Eat Cake
Our neighbor is nut. I hate her. She throws baked goods of all sorts into our yard, bagels, half loaves of bread, German pancakes, literal unbaked dough. It's not just weird—it's psychotic. She does it only because she knows I have two dogs with sensitive stomachs, and even after I throw the bread back into her yard every time. She denied she's doing it, so I bought some cameras and laid a trap.
We finally caught her today literally chucking white bread pieces over the fence and into our yard. Can't wait to see the look on her face...
2. Boarding House
My neighbor was an 85-year-old widow who lived alone. She had two vehicles, a car and a truck. Over the course of a few months, I realized that she was no longer parking her car in her garage as she had for the many years prior to that. Then, suddenly, the truck was not being parked inside the garage of the lady either. I asked her what was happening, and her answer blew my mind.
It turns out she no longer had room in her garage to park her vehicles because she was walking down to a residential construction site about a block away every evening and she'd grab two 2"x 4"s and bring them home. She had over 500 boards stacked in her garage and when she was questioned on what she was going to do with them, she didn't have an answer.
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3. 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.
4. Pesky Problems
My previous neighbors were in their 80s. The elderly gentleman used to dress up in what was ostensibly a hazmat suit and spray pesticide on his lawn. At the same time, she would stand behind him in her muumuu and slippers holding the pail with the pesticides. It seems safe to assume that they got rid of a lot of pests.
5. 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.
6. That Deflated Feeling
I have one strange neighbor. She has a penchant for going around sticking nails in people's tires at night. This has happened dozens of times to nearly everyone on the street, though she's slowed down since more people have started installing video cameras and motion-sensor lights in their respective driveways.
7. Dancing The Night Away
We used to live next to a woman who would have a disco party for her cats in her backyard at 2 am every few days. She would put up a disco ball and party lights with music playing. It was a little bit odd but what made it crazy was her dancing as though she was performing a ritual around the disco ball. It’s honestly one of the strangest things I’ve ever witnessed!
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8. Agent Bunny Reporting For Duty
Our neighbor plays VR in a large bunny onesie. When I say a bunny onesie, I mean one like the kind the kid gets in A Christmas Story. Which, you know, is cool. I guess you do you. But he plays with his window open so everyone can see him and, on top of that, he plays from what I can tell is exclusively military sims and never ever breaks character.
You can hear him yelling stuff like, "Contact 30 clicks south by southwest!" or “Down Reloading, Ready UP!" The guy will throw himself to the ground and I mean throw himself. The few times I've spoken to him or seen him in person he's had bruises on his arms and face from hitting the ground. And that's only what I can see from his window.
Other than that, at night you can hear the guy grinding, hammering, and drilling on something. I'm terrified to know what he's doing in there. He says that he works for the government and does contractor work for it. He has really nice stuff—including a lot of expensive stuff—and new vehicles all the time. So, he seems to have ample money coming in.
He, however, can't carry on a conversation. He starts getting nervous and will break away as soon as he can. He was home for a few weeks, saying that he was in between contracts, and I managed to talk to him a bit while he was setting stuff outside. That stuff that he was laying out though—a rucksack that had seen some heavy use and everything from medical and survivalist camping gear to empty magazine holders, and a plate holder for bullet-resistant plates.
He said he was letting them air out since he was planning on going on a backpacking trip for a few weeks. Weirdest part is that he leaves almost every night between 9 and 10 pm. Probably to get some of the junk food he'll leave in his car occasionally, but every night? I like to think the guy’s a secret agent and uses the VR thing as an excuse to explain away bruises and cuts.
Either way, I feel sort of safe, he's genuinely nice when he does talk to you, just in that I haven't spoken to another human being for years kind of way. You go Secret Agent Bunny. Saving the world one hop at a time.
9. Eating The Rainbow
He eats my flowers. In his defense, he told us that he has been doing it for years when he introduced himself after we bought the house. He also brought over frozen cookies in a plastic bag, as a housewarming gift, but wasn't sure what was in them. We share a side yard and as he was talking to us, I noticed his all-brick house was actually roofing shingles, layered to look like brick.
It started to register that he may be a little out there. He's a great neighbor. Just an older, eccentric person who keeps to himself and eats my flowers. No shame. He comes over to my yard and eats my lilies raw. Or, he brings scissors and clips the heads to "boil and make jam." It's crazy to me, but we have embraced it.
I planted a couple of raspberry, blackberry, and blueberry bushes three years ago, when we first moved in, on the side yard we share. Along with those were a few knock-out rose bushes. I told him to help himself to berries/roses anytime, especially before the birds do. The bushes have all gone insane and the entire side of my house is now a yearly buffet for my neighbor.
Having a decent relationship with a crazy guy I share a property line with is worth some deadheaded flowers.
10. It’s A Conspiracy!
She complained to the authorities that neighbors had purchased satellites to spy on her. She set up cameras that were directly aimed at all surrounding neighbors. She built up beams around the inside of her fence so that she could stand on them and look over the fences to the neighbor yards and she would launch large rocks.
She also yelled at everyone who watered their gardens and lawns that all the water was making her property soggy, even though she was at the top of the hill. She planted jeans in the soil as if to use them for landscape fabric. She painted everything (house, sheds, yard art, bike, etc.) on her property red and yellow and blue "to ward off evil spirits."
11. It’s In The Air
My sister’s neighbor reported my sister to the authorities because her kids were playing in my sister’s garden. She did not for the usual reasons, such as too much noise, etc. Nope, she did it because a volcano in Italy had erupted and the radiation resulting from this eruption would hurt them. My sister lives in the United Kingdom.
12. Leafing Through
My grandparents’ house backs onto a wood. They are also at the bottom of a hill, with the said wood running uphill behind them. Mounds and mounds of fallen leaves on the lawn are inevitable, especially in autumn. Their next-door neighbor is... well... she's very houseproud. And, that is understating her passion for her house.
For instance, her sister visited her and made some toast in the toaster and she freaked out because you don't USE the toaster. It's just for show! And now it's ruined because there are crumbs in it! Anyway, leaves on the lawn are a constant source of stress for her. Every autumn she's out there all day, watching, just waiting for one to fall.
And when one does, she's straight over to scoop it up and throw it in the compost. Once she leaned over the fence to speak to my grandad, and apparently, she just gazed into his eyes, utter despair on her face, and asked, "When is it going to stop?" His response? He pointed at her trees saying, "When all of that," and continued, while then pointing at her lawn, to finish by saying, "is down there."
13. On A Rampage
Our neighbor plants a row of shrubs, waits until they look nice, and then whacks the heck out of them. He cuts every single branch off until there's just a spindly 5' stick. Or, he plants several shrubs along his foundation, waits 3-4 years, and then yanks them out with his car. Once he pulled out a very healthy tree growing at the end of his house and then planted another same size tree in its place.
If we ever sell our house, I think he would buy it just so he could bulldoze everything in our yard.
14. Cold Comfort
Not sure if this counts as crazy but I have this neighbor who is part of a spiritual organization called "Brahma Kumaris." Every time someone in the neighborhood is going through rough times, especially deaths in the family, she goes to their house, and instead of offering condolences, she preaches how they should join this organization and things will be better.
She doesn't acknowledge anyone the rest of the time. Indeed, the only acknowledgment is at the time when someone dies or a new family moves in the neighborhood. In both cases, she acknowledges the people to take the opportunity to preach and to give books written by the leaders of the aforementioned spiritual organization.
15. The Hansel And Gretel Trail
He was our landlord/neighbor in a duplex we were renting. He was a hoarder and did a lot of things like rummage through our trash to retrieve garbage we had tossed. It was in LA and he would put out dozens of teeny tiny receptacles; cups, milk cartons, pots, all over the yard any time there was a hint of rain forecasted.
He would also leave little pieces of plastic garbage around the fence to see if anyone took them or moved them. Odd stuff. But then there was the ultimate weird moment. We had a shared set of stairs leading off the back of the house. I went down them one day and saw a piece of bread lying on them. It thought that maybe it was for the birds.
A couple of days later it was a piece of toast. A day after that the toast was wrapped up in a used napkin and propped up against my door. To this day it is still a mystery to me why he would think I would want the 5-day old porch toast.
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16. The High Life
My neighbor’s doghouse has electricity. The doghouse sits there in his backyard at night with a light on, radio going—the dog loves listening to the radio, apparently—and a small electric fan in summer to keep him cool. It's not so much "crazy" as, perhaps, a bit eccentric. How many doghouses have electricity, lights, fans, and a radio playing for the dog's enjoyment?
17. 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.
18. Something’s Fishy
Our neighbors seem to be into preserving their own food. That’s cool, I suppose. However, the task has become fishy. Literally. For the last few weeks, they have been drying fish in their driveway. By that I mean that there are like 2-3 dozen whole fish just laying on their driveway on tinfoil. No protection, no pans. Just fish. On the driveway.
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19. 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.
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20. Water Over My Head
The neighbor stealing water almost led to my toddler getting, at least, seriously injured. The neighbor was opening my gate and helping herself to the water for her flower beds. I suspected it from the high water bills, but had no proof. We always kept the gate closed because we had a dog and I had two kids under 4 years old at the time.
The youngest was 1 1/2 years old, and he loved to run around the backyard with the dog. One morning, the youngest begged to go outside to run around, so I let them do so while I cooked breakfast and watched them from the kitchen window. I went to the bathroom real quick, checked the laundry, and then heard a knock on the door.
I went to answer it and there was a man holding my youngest. "Is this your kid?" the guy asked. "They were running up the road up there," he continued. Holy moly! I thanked the guy profusely, then went outside to figure out how they got out. The gate had a latch that was way too high to reach for a little one, so I didn't even suspect that option.
Lo and behold, the gate was wide open with the hose suspiciously thrown near it. I was so fricking furious. I bought a lock for the gate and ended up wrapping the hose in and around several cinder blocks. It took all I had not to go over and scream at the woman who was responsible. But from then on, she never complained about my kids near her precious flowers, and I didn't care even if they did pull up every single one after that.
21. Guess Who Is Watching
Our neighbor stalks us. Like every time I get home, she’ll walk outside and tell me I was either 3 minutes later getting home this time or that I was home 2 minutes earlier and then ask me why. One time my friend and her sister came to pick me up. The neighbor was against her window with her hands and face pressed up against the glass.
Said neighbor was trying to get a look at who was coming to pick me up. My friend and her sister were so terrified that they called me, telling me to hurry up because a crazy lady was staring at them through a window. I calmly replied to their frantic call by saying, “Oh, it’s just the stalker neighbor!” Yes, that was a funny day.
22. Stay Out Of My Trash
So, we had a neighbor whose trash was being rummaged. Instead of moving his trash or getting locking lids, he stalks your car at night to throw his body in front of it to protest your suspected raccoon-like activities. All the while, the true trash pandas are in the background, having an absolute field day with his trash.
23. (A)Corny Story
My strangest encounter has been with the next-door lady. At one point, she was standing on her driveway yelling at me because acorns had fallen from a large oak tree on my property onto said driveway. This was deemed unacceptable, of course. Thus, she was demanding that I cause the tree to cease and desist from this intentional criminal activity.
24. My Way Or The Court Way
My family's neighbors took my parents to court because they didn't like that we bought two unused laundry rooms to enlarge our tiny 38 square meter flat. When they couldn't do that anymore, they invented a story where we played basketball in our flat on the night of Christmas Eve. This, they claimed, happened while we weren't even home and had multiple pictures to prove it since we were visiting grandma for Christmas.
25. One Man Home Improvement Project
I lived in a really nice suburban neighborhood and the diagonal across-the-street neighbor was always strung out. He would be in his boxers in his front yard literally at all hours of day and night. He would water his front lawn over 10 times a day, cut the lawn with a hedge trimmer for hours on end and it'd look terrible afterward.
He also tore down his backyard fence and painted his house in multiple colors. He took down all his blinds and keeps his windows open 24/7. He would also keep his garage open all day and night. It was the strangest behavior I have ever seen in my life. Luckily, he was taken away after his wife had had enough of his behavior, I guess.
He alone turned a nice quiet street into the most stressful living situation I have had in my life. He would passively harass my wife and I as we walked down the street. He would also shadowbox in the corner of his lawn closest to mine or rap out loud with his phone at full volume in the quiet neighborhood and only when we were outside the house.
26. Wiping Away Evidence
We had a house blow up in our neighborhood years ago. It turned out they were cooking stuff, and it wasn't dinner. A few days after the initial boom, we were all surprised to see a fire raging in the same house. It turned out that one of the guys not home at the time of the first blow-up got the brilliant idea to come back days later to commit arson.
He reasoned they wouldn't have started the investigation yet and he could burn the evidence from the last fire with a new one.
27. Stop! In The Name Of Law!
My neighbor pulled us over pretending to be a police officer, saying that we had somehow broken the law while pulling out of our driveway and that she was “going to call it in.” She isn’t a cop. After chatting with the other neighbors, it turns out she’s just the “wannabe HOA president” in a neighborhood with no HOA. So, mostly harmless. Just very annoying.
28. It’s A Plant
We lived in a four-plex. At the end of our driveway was a eucalyptus tree that occasionally shed its seed pods which are shaped a bit like a sleigh bells, about the size of a quarter. Evidently, she slipped on one and broke her foot. She kept trying to get my kids to admit they had placed the eucalyptus seeds there as a booby trap and that they needed to pay her bills.
My kids were six and eight, by the way. I told the kids not to talk to her. So, then it became this rant about how my kids were so disrespectful and her grandson would never ignore a grownup like that and get those kids out here right now to apologize! But, she'd say this on repeat. One time I just stood there listening and she repeated herself for 20 minutes.
It was truly bizarre. Eventually, her hoarding caused a rodent issue so I had to call the landlord. She got evicted but I didn't feel bad because she owned another house. In fact, the only reason that she was renting and was living there was because of her hoarding too. Simply put, she had hoarded so much at the other house she couldn't live there since there was no room.
29. Dogging Your Steps
My old downstairs neighbor blocked my car to tell me that she was reporting me to the authorities for injuring her dog. Apparently, we were so loud the night before that her dog jumped off the bed and injured its eye and was now blind. The funny part is that we weren't home the night before. We had stayed at my brother's house.
She also used to follow me around with a camera, yelling things at me about the dog situation. She also posted letters in the public areas outing me as gay and calling me a sinner, even though I'm straight and, at the time, lived with my girlfriend who she had met. So, not entirely sure how she came to that conclusion.
She was a character. They kicked her out of the complex shortly after.
30. Get Off My Lawn (Not Everyone Though)
This older lady lives across the street from me and she is obsessed with leaves falling on her lawn. This is to the point that she will come out of her house and pick up one individual leaf off the grass in the fall, or any other time. She spends hours a day outside with the leaf-blower in fall just blowing the leaves away.
She will go and knock on other neighbors' doors if she thinks you have too many leaves on your grass. She'll even come over into your yard and do it herself if you're not home. What I think is weird is that she's in her 70s, no kids or grandkids living with her, and lives alone in a pretty large four-bedroom house with an amazing in-ground pool in the backyard—with a slide and diving board and everything.
Nobody has used that pool in at least five years yet she opens it up every summer. Somehow, she likes my family and has never once yelled at us about our leaves and, in fact, randomly brings things over like half-eaten gallons of ice cream and asks if we want it because she's not using it. I do not know what to make of it.
31. Birds Of A Feather (And Other Things)
The old lady who lived below me left me multiple cryptic letters blaming me for the birds chirping too loudly in the mornings. Not pet birds. The sparrows and other birds outside. This went on for months. The notes were quite accusatory. For instance, one of the notes said, “AGAIN, your bird dodo is on my railings, bird seeds on my porch & chairs, & your birds are ruining my nite rest, wee hours of the morning, birds in your feeder chirping.”
I did not have a bird feeder when I received this note. Yes, for a brief period I had had a bird feeder, but I had taken it down after a few months after multiple cryptic letters. Also, eventually, management had gotten involved and took her side even though bird feeders were explicitly allowed per the lease. So, no more bird feeder.
However, there were several trees nearby, including one that literally hung onto both her and my balconies. I assure you that birds existed before I set up the feeder, and they continued to exist after. My sister and BIL took over the lease four years ago, and they still get the occasional note from "bird lady." Apartment management has even inspected their unit to verify there's no bird feeder or any other bird luring devices.
32. Silence Isn’t Golden In This House
If the sun is up, my neighbor has to be making noise. Yet, he goes ballistic on anyone who makes even the tiniest peep after the sun goes down. This is what a regular day seems to be for him. From 8:00 AM–10:00 AM: mow the grass, and get out the LOUD leaf blower to blow even the tiniest particle of grass off the sidewalks and driveway.
10:00 AM–1:00 PM: get out the pressure washer to wash the sidewalks, driveway, siding on his house, his boat, his cars, the dog, whatever he can find; break for lunch, but play talk radio in his garage at maximum volume while he eats; fiddle with the engine on his motorcycle, revving it every 30 seconds to make sure it "sounds right."
1:00 PM–6:00 PM: get into a screaming match with his wife, all on the front lawn; fiddle with the motorcycle again; get out the table saw and randomly cut a pile of lumber that he will never build anything with; get out the chainsaw to cut up wood for his fire pit; dinner time...with loud talk radio blasting in the background.
6:00 PM–9:00 PM: pressure wash the sidewalks...again; get out the weed trimmer and mercilessly destroy even the slightest hint of a blade of grass that is too tall; leaf blower time again; and, finally, the last shouting match with the wife, with talk radio playing, until the sun goes down and he is, apparently, done for the day.
And, then…9:05 PM: go bananas at a neighbor (me) for coming home and parking my car too loudly after dark.
33. Hear Me Roar
My previous tenant was super quiet. These new guys scream all night and day at each other and never seem to sleep. Their front door gets slammed no less than five times an hour. Their kid even shows up occasionally to get in a screaming match with her boyfriend before they get back in the car and peel away from the house again. Plus, they have about 10 cats that they released outside the second they moved in and which constantly end up under our house driving our dogs insane. Truly lovely people.
34. Thar She Blows!
I recently moved out of an apartment I shared with some friends and moved into a new place with my partner. While we were looking, we saw the unit next door to my shared apartment had become available. The apartment was in a great location, and it'd be nice to live next door to my good friends, so I called the number listed but didn't hear back for over a week.
The housing and rental market in my town is always quite crazy, and lately it has absolutely skyrocketed. So, when my partner and I had the opportunity to look at another unit in a different building, a unit that was way bigger and nicer, for the same price as the unit in my old building, we pretty much jumped all over it.
I eventually got a call back from the realtor listing the unit next to my old one. As we talked, I politely told him that I'd found something else but that I had lived next door to his unit and loved living there. In response, he was very smarmy and told me he'd have no trouble finding someone else to rent it. And, I agreed with him. He was so smug—but he wasn't smug after what happened.
A couple of months after I moved out, my friends posted on social media that a fire in the unit next door had evicted everyone else in the building temporarily. There was an explosion that blew out the windows in that unit, and the people living adjacent to it are still displaced, even though it is almost four months since.
My friends told me that the people who did move in were sketchy. They were always yelling at each other, and there was a quiet teenaged daughter (?) who never seemed to go to school. Additionally, theft in the area got worse immediately after these people moved in—mostly cars getting rummaged through. I ran into someone else I know who lives in that building and she agreed with my friends.
It turns out that the accepted theory among the people who live there is the new tenants had a lab that exploded.
35. The VIP Syndrome
We had a woman in my old neighborhood who used to pretend she was a cop all the time. First, I encountered her screaming at the post office staff because she’d arrived past the pickup time and they couldn’t guarantee her letter would be in tomorrow. She was there almost an hour just pitching a fit while they opened the other counters around her. Her rant was along the lines of “Do you know who I am?!” and all that stuff.
The second time that I encountered her she’d cornered some poor child on the bus and was telling her she’d have her taken away because she was an officer and she didn’t like the way the kid was eating a bag of crisps or something like that. Real invective stuff. I stepped in and politely asked if the child knew this person, at which point she backed off.
Anyway, I guess she saw me leave at my stop because I woke up the next morning to find my garden torn up. Total weirdo.
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36. I Will See You In Court
An ex-member of our condo board lawyered up and said she'd sue the new member running for her position and the condo as a whole because she claimed he was falsifying documents and was slandering her. When her lawyer saw the signatures of the residents, he laughed and said, "She's got nothing." Only two people voted to keep her and the 74 others voted for the new guy.
37. Binning It
I once totally randomly caught my neighbors on camera, at 1 am, dumping trash into and onto my bins which were already on the curb for morning pickup. I wouldn't mind a little trash if there's space in my bins, but they put in about twice as much as can fit, causing the bins to overflow and mixing the recycling and compost with their trash.
I promptly returned it, neatly piled on their porch with a note written on a bill with their name and address on it, quoting the county ordnance on dumping (the volume was enough for a $5,000 fine), and that they were on camera. A couple of days later they left an envelope saying, "Sorry, neighbor," with tickets for a concert.
It was a "free" concert in a sketchy venue with a printed invitation that screamed "MLM recruiting event." I wonder if they even understand that what they did is not an apology. I haven't crossed paths or words with them again.
38. Too Loud Up There
My neighbor, an old lady, complained about many things. First, she complained that my “dog ran around at all hours of the night,” even though I never had a dog, or any other animal for that matter. Second, she claimed that I was "always too loud." This despite the fact that I lived alone and I'm in the Navy and would literally be away for weeks at a time.
Also, understanding that I lived in a condo, I had bought an expensive Bluetooth headset to use with all of my devices. There was literally not a speaker in the house connected to an entertainment system. She also complained that the rainwater coming off of my deck would drip on hers, because I apparently engineered the building in such a way that her deck stuck out further than mine.
I sent her letter to the property manager and the strata board, ccd her, and said that the next time she left me a letter like that or screamed through the ceiling at the top of her lungs I was going to charge her with harassment.
39. Privacy? What Privacy?
When I first moved in my neighbor walked into the house, unannounced. Now, when my wife gets home, sometimes she wants to stay in her car having a phone conversation. He will come out and walk down the side of his house, checking his sprinkler controls and looking at my wife. He also has two huge bushes he refuses to cut.
It blocks our view of backing out of our driveway. The fire department came by to clear trees and bushes around the fire hydrants. The neighbor came out and yelled at the fireman. "This bush is older than you!" Needless to say, I just hope there are no house fires.
40. Water, Water Everywhere
The neighbor behind us had a leak in his water pipe and, rather than fix it, he just had the sump pump drain it out into the back yard. This meant that all year round the back of our yard was a little bit damp. Eventually, the leaky pipe burst and filled the house with five feet of water. His solution to this was just to keep the pump running and flood the entire neighborhood.
After about an hour, a posse of all the neighbors whose yards were being flooded confronted him and called the city to shut off the water. The city fixed the water pipe and the neighbor ended up with a large fine. At least my yard stays basically dry now.
41. My 30 Seconds of Fame
One time in 2004, my mom participated in a TV show. This was a show where a singer would visit your house and a professional chef made food for both you and the singer. My mon’s neighbor, apparently, could not stand this. So, the result? Well, she constantly yelled at the camera crew and tried to hit their equipment with a broom.
42. 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.
43. 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.
44. Free For All
We rented a house from my mom's coworker who grew up in this house and was renting it out. Across the street was Jeanette, an 80ish-year-old lady, who had lived in that house most of her life and knew our landlord very well. Well, because she knew the landlord, that meant she felt she could come into our house whenever she wanted.
She watched us through her window and had every excuse to come by. I have never really locked my doors, but obviously, we started to. It didn't stop her. If she knew we were home, she would ring the doorbell incessantly. Our blinds always had to be down, living room lights off, so she wouldn't know we were home. Just got in? Quick, run inside before Jeanette sees you.
We saw her peering out of her blinds on a regular basis. One morning was my breaking point. The doorbell was going. I hid in the bathroom to pretend that I wasn't home. How did she see me?? The doorbell stopped, but the doorknob kept rattling. She tried for five full minutes to open our door. It probably would have been longer, but I gave up and let her in.
Some of the notable things that she did/said included coming in when my husband was cooking and calling him a good little housewife. She also told our neighbor he shouldn't be dating his daughter. They were, of course, not father-daughter, and were in fact a 40-year-old couple, and there was not actually a big age difference.
Why didn't I tell her to go away? Look, I'm a nice midwestern girl. I can be confrontational if someone is being mean, but she was just...lonely? A tad crazy? But harmless. It's like she was a character from a sitcom...we didn't know these people existed.
45. 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.
Unsplash
46. Drawing The Battle Lines
My neighbor seemed to have opened hostilities against me for reasons unknown. He cut down my row of cedar trees, removed the branches, sharpened the trunks, and pointed them at my property. I never thought I would see the modern use of an abatis outside of trench warfare. Well, I guess, you see and learn something brand new every single day.
47. 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.
48. Squirrelly Business
We had a couple living downstairs from us, in a condo, who thought that they were living in a single-family house on a 20-acre lot in the woods. Among all the things they did to their neighbors, one of the craziest things they did was leave a note on our door threatening to sue us and make us pay for their Pomeranian’s surgery.
This was because my mom had a bird feeder on our balcony and the squirrels running up to try to get the seeds made their dog bark constantly. The dog had a collapsing trachea. They did not think that the fact that they walked her on a retractable leash attached to her collar, and that they would hit the stop button on it if she started running so she jerked so hard she flipped had anything to do with it.
Even the fact that they dragged her around by the leash couldn’t be a reason, apparently. It was obviously the squirrels. They dropped the threats after I filmed them walking their dog when they did their little stop maneuver. My mom tried to talk to them about it and they both denied posting the note, each saying that it must have been the other one because, "I don't think it's the squirrels, but my husband/wife does."
They moved out after six months.
49. 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.
Pexels
50. 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.
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