_They say good fences make good neighbors. But there are some neighbors who will never let you live in peace, no matter how good of a fence-builder you are. _
These Redditors have been fortunate enough to meet a few of them!
[Source listed at the end of the article.]
He drew the line there
“When I first moved into my house I didn’t know my exact property line yet, so I put wood up against a tree I thought was mine. The neighbor came over to lecture me, saying it was his tree. So I went ahead and got a survey to settle any troubles.
The look on his face was priceless when he saw that my property went 10 feet beyond the tree. Problem solved!”
She certainly sent a message
“She intentionally backed into my wife’s car because, she claimed, my wife was parked in her spot. That spot was on a public street. In front of our house. The cops saw it differently than she did.”
He got shot down
“He came home from the bar with his friend, both having had a few too many. They were messing around with a pistol and accidentally shot through their floor – down into my apartment. I got hit in the stomach, while sitting watching TV on my couch.
I called 911 and when the ambulance was taking me away, my panicked fiancé was getting ready to leave because the EMTs told her to follow instead of riding with. My neighbor came down and was like, ‘What happened? We heard a commotion!’
The cops were called and he got arrested.”
In the club, 24/7
“My neighbor in the next apartment loves the song ‘Yeah’ by Usher. Like, she really, really loves it. I relive the early 2000s club hit almost daily.”
Noise complaints
“I once lived above a guy in a really old four-plex and I guess the wood floors squeaked really loudly when I walked around. It’s not like I was stomping around either, but the dude would constantly come upstairs and bang on my door and yell at me to stop moving around. I felt badly for him in the beginning because he seemed genuinely frustrated, but he didn’t seem to understand or believe that I wasn’t slamming my feet on my floor/his ceiling.
I called my landlord several times asking him if he had a solution. I couldn’t move because I was locked in to my lease but my landlord was just like, ‘buy a lot of rugs.’
It got to the point that I couldn’t take the constant yelling and I was literally either tip toeing around or hopping from my couch to my chair in order to get out of my living room so that he wouldn’t be standing at my door yelling at me.”
“Finally, I went downstairs one day and asked if we could talk about the situation because I felt like maybe if I looked him in the eye when he was calm and explained that I wasn’t doing it on purpose and that there was literally nothing more I could do–I had already bought areas rugs–he would maybe understand.
So I went downstairs and very nicely explained and he seemed to be listening. And then he said, ‘I’m about at the point that if it happens again I’m going to show up at your door with a really big knife.’ And then he just stared at me.
I basically ran out of there, called my landlord and said that I was more or less being threatened and a month later the guy moved out. And then as soon as I could I did too. Terrible situation.”
The real Dennis the Menace
“We were trying to sell the our house and the neighbors’ rotten nephew was sabotaging it. When we’d leave so people could come look at it, he would sneak around just being creepy to them, which turned off a lot of buyers.
He even went into my house during an open house and was telling people not to buy it. These people lived like 100 yards away and we still don’t know what his deal was. Once he started cursing at my sister who tried to help him after he passed out on my driveway–she’s a nurse–we called the cops.
He signed a restraining order that said if he was caught on the property again he’d be sent to jail. Luckily we were able to sell the house after that.”
Don’t mess with his lemons
“I was in the process of selling my townhouse, so I abandoned my house for a while and moved to another home. The dude who lived next door took down the fence separating our townhomes and cut down my lemon tree. I was livid.
We gave him 24 hours to put the fence back up, and he did begrudgingly. We considered taking him to court over the tree for destruction of property, but we didn’t live there anymore, and we honestly didn’t want any problems or worries.
We were luckily able to sell the home just fine.”
Should I be asking you for money?
“I once had a neighbor in college that would knock on my door and ask for money. I would just say ‘Sorry, I’m a broke student and I can’t spare anything.’ It was super weird and a weekly occurrence at the least. She was in her 50s and working.
One day I got fed up when she knocked on my door. I think I was stressed for exams. I said ‘Yeah, I got some money for you.’ I asked her to hold out her hands… and gave her maybe 2 dollars worth of nickels that I had in a change jar. She never bothered me again.”
Nice email to receive
“My least-favorite neighbor ever? Probably the one I caught in bed with my ex-fiancé.
To be fair, my ex-fiancé was the real scum in the situation. We had known each other for 10 years, dated for 2. We got engaged. Bought a house. I know he cheated on me throughout the relationship but turned a blind eye. It turns out he was sleeping with the neighbor.
How did I find out? She emailed me to let me know.
I guess she had no idea we were together. We had JUST bought the house two weeks prior. And he seduced her while he was cutting the sticker bushes between the two properties (I guess, I don’t know). He kicked me out by changing the locks. I had a friend drive me up, threw a rock through the window, got my stuff back, and then sued him and won.
The last I heard, my neighbor left him and his life is in shambles.
Karma.”
Here kitty kitty
“My neighbors and my family were absolutely fine for about 7 years. It’s a nice old man that was recently re-married. They have a 20-year-old student that parties from time to time which is fine.
But then one day out of no where we find our 1 year old cat dead in their garden. Obviously we cannot be mad. The cat being in their yard was weird, but it probably died of a heart attack or something. So my family shrugs it off as a coincidence.
Fast forward 2 months and we have a new cat, younger, cuter. I come home one day and my cat comes crawling to me giving the loudest meow of his life. Turns out he was shot. SHOT. WITH A BULLET.”
“Our gardener told us that he clearly saw the neighbor with a weap, shooting pigeons or something minutes before my cat was shot. So yeah, as you can imagine we haven’t been close to our neighbors since that day.
Yes, we should’ve taken him to court. But we had no physical proof other than the word of a gardener. And it was over a year ago, when I was just 14. So yeah, I am upset that we didn’t take it to the authorities.
P.S our cat survived with surgery and is perfectly fine, but only has 8 lives left.”
Too much time on her hands
“When I was around 10 years old: my neighbor would occasionally watch me open my mail box to see if my GameStop magazine had arrived. She would threaten me each time, saying she was calling the cops and that it was illegal for me to check my parents’ mail. I actually believed that it was a big deal and would try to sneak and do it when she was out of the house. I did this until I was 15 years old.”
There’s no smoking in here
“I’m probably someone’s bad neighbor experience, although they don’t know it’s me yet. The malfunctioning smoke alarm in my apartment complex hallway has almost become a sort of bitter joke among my neighbors–it’s been chirping multiple times a day for the past two months, but no matter what, maintenance just can’t seem to make it stop.
What my neighbors don’t know is that the smoke alarm only chirped consistently for about three days. Everything since then has been my parrot, who liked the sound so much that she’s been mimicking it as often as she likes… which is about 57 times daily for the past for months.
They don’t know I have a parrot. The woman immediately next door does think I have a dog, though, because the feathery little thing also likes to bark and then scold herself for it.”
Not exactly a warm welcome
“I lived on the top floor of a very sketchy house in college because it was the only place that would let 7 of us rent together. The first week we were there the SWAT team did a raid on one of the units (there were three below us).
They busted in the door and used flash grenades on them. One of the other units smelled horrible and constantly had people coming in and out buying sketchy stuff. Our keys barely fit in the lock because people had tried to pick them so much. Our cable/internet stopped working so we called the cable company to come check it. The guy took us over to the box outside and showed us 9 different illegal lines that were stealing our internet. I could go on and on.
On the plus side, we could shoot bottle rockets in our hallway because it wasn’t like anyone was going to call the cops on us. College was fun.”
A pleasant surprise
“There’s a retired woman on my street who follows the garbage truck and moves the garbage cans off the street while the rest of us are at work–because they’re an eyesore. This would be fine except that she would often leave them in the middle of the driveway, and there is no stopping on our street during rush hour as it’s a bus route.
So on garbage day, you either you needed to park a block away to move the garbage can, and then go back and get the car… or risk getting a ticket while you moved it. Since the houses are quite close together we found out the first time by turning in and hitting the garbage can… it was just far enough back that you couldn’t see it until you turned. Thanks a lot, neighbor.”
The signs were there
“We moved into a brand new house, and immediately noticed an old toilet, garbage, and a broken down hot tub in the neighbors front yard. Ok.
We made cookies for all the neighbors and went over to introduce ourselves. This same neighbor laughed and slammed the door in our faces. Ok.
I was out landscaping our new yard with my husband and laying some bricks. My husband is on his knees making sure they are level while I stand and hand him the bricks. The neighbor walks by and yells, ‘Well, I can see who wears the pants!’ My husband and I look at each-other perplexed. Ok.”
“We get a puppy. Our other neighbor lets us know she witnessed the neighbor’s grown son throwing lit birthday candles over the fence at our puppy when he was in the backyard. We found about 50 of them in our yard.
This other neighbor tells us she also had to call the police because the other son broke the lights on her garage and dropped a big one on her Welcome mat–all captured by her Home video system. About 6 months later, we get a complaint for dog barking with a $500 fine. It was ridiculous. Our dog never barked, unless someone walked by or came to the door.
We had letters from all 16 surrounding neighbors attesting that our dog never barked, what great neighbors we were and how absurd the complainant was. The letters were not admissible. It was 2 adult sons and the neighbor’s word against ours–2 working adults with a spotless record–and we lost and had to pay. We sold the house and moved shortly afterward.”
Double standard much?
“In the middle of the night strange noises would come from our neighbors’ apartment; like an owl mating with a German shepherd.
Ironically, the had zero tolerance for any noise on my part. If I breathed too heavily, they’d come up and ask me to be quieter. I once told them honestly that I was literally sitting on the couch reading a book and had no idea what noise they thought they were hearing.
Never found what that noise was in their apartment.”
Wrong window, buddy
“I had a neighbor who burned something in his oven. Rather than open his windows to get the smoke out, he opened his door to the hall and set off the whole building’s alarms.
We had to all stand out in the cold and wait for the Fire Department while he watched from his apartment. The Fire Department opened his windows and scolded him for wasting their time.
We still had to wait outside for them to do mandatory checks of everything to make sure it really was just him being dumb. It was January. In New England. During a cold snap.”
“Ohhh, so that’s why you’re supposed to barbecue outside!”
“I once came home to a smoke-filled apartment. We called the fire dept. when we couldn’t find the cause. It turns out our downstairs neighbors put a charcoal grill on their stove so they could barbecue indoors.
My only relief was a friend had walked my dog earlier that day so I know he wasn’t in a smoked-filled apartment all afternoon. Seriously folks, buy a carbon monoxide detector.”
My cat plays the bass
“My neighbor was a 40-year-old man who considered himself a ‘DJ on the side.’ About once a week, he tried to ‘mix’ at like 2 am. I was in my first year of law school and studying every night.
When I went to talk to him, he explained that he moved into the apartment building first and so he had seniority to do whatever he wanted. And then he told me that sometimes it’s his cat that plays the bass really loud and that he would have a convo with his cat. Fortunately I was taking property law at that time and learned about the right to quiet enjoyment, to which I promptly brought to my landlord’s attention. And that fixed the problem.
That neighbor was a real character, but I’m glad I don’t live there anymore.”
Cruella de Vil, Cruella de Vil…
“I was 13 at the time when my neighbor tried to break into our house and steal my dog and her puppies. When my mom and I stopped him, he told us he could ‘bring the pain’ whenever he wanted… quite a nice guy. We obviously called the cops after that.”
We live next to The Sopranos
“They insisted that we pay to have a gate installed between our backyard fences so that they could use our above-ground pool as they pleased, preferably when they invited friends over.
At the time, our pool was going through some (expensive) issues with leakage into our backyard. They threatened to call the homeowner association because the water was very slightly leaking into their yard and their dog was allegedly getting sick drinking the water. (It wasn’t.)
When we denied them this absurd request, they threw a hissy fit and we fully expected them to find a way to ‘punish’ us.”
“Not wanting to deal with that and also wanting to clean our own backyard of the leakage, my father spent his birthday day off from work in the Texas heat digging a trench and installing a pipe so that the water could drain.
The neighbors came outside and harassed my dad the entire time he was digging the trench, telling him it would’ve just been easier to install the gate.
Wrong. The easier thing would have been to install a brain in their heads.”
How nineteenth-century of you
“Not a bad experience, more just hilariously strange. I had this one elderly woman in the apartment next to me who would tap on her side of the wall separating us. I was freaked out for about a week and when I finally bumped into her going into my house, I asked her about the tapping.
She said she was trying to have a conversation with me through Morse code.”
Great timing
“Our neighbor hurled insults at the paramedics who had turned up to save my dad’s life after he had a heart attack in the bathroom.
All because one of the ambulance tires was on his front lawn’s grass.
My dad is fine now, this was his second heart attack and it’s going to take more than that to get rid of him. Seriously though, this was a year ago and we’ve thankfully gotten some new neighbors since then.”
These comments have been edited for clarity.