These people share crazy stories of their insufferable neighbors.
A Neighborhood Confrontation Ended In A Police Chase
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“I was around five years old and we had a husky at that time. My dad and I were home alone, and he went to a neighbor to borrow something. I stayed outside to play with our dog when a few minutes later our other neighbor comes with a broom in his hand, yelling at 5-year-old me to keep the dog quiet or he will kill it right there and then.
That man scared me so much I cried and peed myself because he was in my face shouting and spitting at me. A third neighbor (an old grandma-type) saw this going on and rushed to get my dad to save me. Dad came and he and the angry neighbor pushed each other around a little. The best part was when my dad broke this guy’s broom and said if he ever talks to his kids again he will beat him up with that very broom.
The jerk went home and grabbed a knife, but in the meantime, the police were already there (the old grandma called them because she thought he assaulted me; I loved that woman). He panicked, ran into his car and drove off. This only got him into even more trouble. It ended up with him crashing into a tree and the knife he took got stuck in his leg, but nothing critical happened. I remember seeing him sometimes limping around his garden, but we moved soon after that because why would we want to keep living next to the crazy neighbor who didn’t like dogs? I don’t know the aftermath with the police though, this was 15 years ago.
Oh, and by the way, he was a father of 6-year-old twins who were never allowed to hang out with the rest of us ‘hood kids’ in the streets. I sometimes talked to them over the fence and even gave them a few Pokemon cards because they were not allowed any. Sometimes I think of them and feel bad; they were good kids.”
The Trash Lady
“A few years ago, I lived in a bit of a tract home situation. In my cul-de-sac, on trash day everyone would line their trash cans up on the curb where the trash truck could easily get to them. My crazy neighbor would get upset if everyone didn’t pull their trash cans in immediately after the truck came. Trash day was on a weekday, so I couldn’t bring my cans in until after I got off work. Needless to say, this infuriated her. It started with her just spinning the can around, or moving it in front of my garage. Eventually, it escalates to her knocking it over or pushing it across the street into a small park. I’m at work, lady; what can I do about it?
Eventually, I had enough. I bought a tube of marine grease for my grease gun. It’s made to stand up to all conditions and difficult to get off your skin without a strong solvent like kerosene. So I lather up the handles and take the can out with a pair of gloves then head out for work. When I came home the can was moved a few feet and sure enough, her hands left an imprint in the grease.
She never touched it again.”
“He Looked Like Something Out Of A Zombie Movie”
“My neighbor is about 5 foot 4 inches, ripped, and covered from head to toe in tattoos. I was eating pizza on the front porch when I had the pleasure of observing this individual try to break down the door to his own house, get hit in the head with a bottle by whoever was trying to keep him out, and then run around screaming in a rage while profusely bleeding from his head.
He ran around the back of their house and I walked around back to see what he was up to. He was screeching furiously while punching out windows with his bare hands, blood flying everywhere. He had been wearing nothing but white basketball shorts, but they were covered in blood at this point along with his face, head, back, stomach, and obviously hands. He looked like something out of a zombie movie.
He then walked back around to the front of the house and directly into the street. He started throwing himself on the hood of cars and smearing blood across their windshields while screaming and moaning incoherently. After several minutes of this, my neighbor heard the police on their way and decides to handle this by laying down spread eagle on the median and loudly screaming, ‘help me!'”
He Wouldn’t Leave Her Alone
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“My last neighbor stalked me for over a year.
The dude moved into the house next door with his elderly parents. Right off the bat, things started to go wrong. The first night he moves in, it’s the middle of the night, and someone starts knocking on my door. Not strong knocks like it’s an emergency, but these light taps. I did not open the door. The next morning at around 10 a.m., there are more knocks, and this time I answer it and it’s my new neighbor. He introduces himself, and I ask him if he was knocking the night before, and he admits it. I ask him to not come to my house so late.
Cue the next year of my life.
The dude continues to show up randomly in my yard. Pretty much every single time I went outside, this dude would leave his house and come over to mine. It was like he would wait on his porch, watching my house, just to see when I’d leave it. I’d go out to check the mail and he’d come over. I’d go out getting ready to go somewhere, and he’d come over. I’d go out and would be working in my garden, happen to look up, and he was standing there. Sometimes he just walked over, stood in the middle of the road, and stared at my house or me not saying a word. Most of the time he just hung around silently and made the barest attempts at conversation, mostly asking if I had a boyfriend, which made me uncomfortable. I told him multiple times to leave me alone, starting by being polite and eventually just telling him to get lost outright. He’d act like he listened and understood but he kept doing the same stuff. It got to the point where I didn’t even want to leave my house or answer my door. He still kept knocking. I’d sometimes just get this ‘feeling’ that someone was standing around just outside, even though I had no knowledge whether that was true or not.
Then he started showing up at other places I was at.
It’s a small town, so I thought at first, okay, maybe it’s a coincidence, you’re being paranoid. But it became clear that the guy was following me. I’d be at the grocery store, and he’d come around the corner. I’d be at the gas station, and he’d pull up next to me, not even getting gas but just parking there and watching me while I filled my car. It happened too many times, and his behavior was too odd for it to just be happenstance.
Throughout all of this happening, I was telling people about it. I told our landlord the first time the dude knocked on my door in the middle of the night that I liked my privacy and didn’t like that kind of crap. I told him again after the guy kept showing up in my yard. My landlord promised to talk to the dude and tell him to leave me alone after that. Then after I complained to my landlord that the dude was stalking me outside of the neighborhood, too, he told me that he’d talk to the neighbor again and that if anything else happened then he’d kick the guy out. I also have a close friend whose husband is a cop and talked with him about everything, and he told me there wasn’t anything that could be done unless the guy outright threatened me or otherwise damaged my house/property. He told me the best thing to do would be to move out or to keep talking to the landlord and hope that he’d kick the dude out.
As it turns out, the landlord kicked the guy out, but not for anything that he was doing to me — the dude couldn’t pay his bills and was several months behind in rent. The whole family got ousted. They left and, according to my landlord, destroyed the house in the time they were living there. Holes in the walls, the floors, hundreds of empty bottles in the basement, needles on the ground in the yard, burnt foil all over the place. They also left their pet dog behind when they moved out, locked in the house and half-starved. The poor thing would probably be dead had the landlord not found him.
The landlord ended up taking him to court over damages and unpaid rent, and I have no idea where they moved, but I haven’t seen the guy since. I now have a new neighbor who I barely ever see and wouldn’t know I had if I didn’t see his car come in and out or occasionally see his dog hanging out on his porch. I can’t tell you how much I prefer it that way.”
He Is Completely Delusional
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“I have a neighbor who is currently in jail for threats against my other neighbors. He is legitimately delusional. The first time I met him, he explained to me that he called the cops on any black people in the neighborhood. I thought he was just racist, but he is a lot crazier than just that. Some stories:
1) He called the cops to report that his wife was kidnapped. He explained to them that she had gone missing earlier that day and that he believed his black neighbors had kidnapped her. When the police came to investigate, it turns out his wife was just at work where she goes every day.
2) He wandered around the neighborhood naked, wrapped in tin foil and babbling about the government. You know, standard crazy stuff.
3) He occasionally went around trying to get into people’s houses. He found a door unlocked one time and went inside.
4) The incident that got him jailed happened recently. He has a grudge specifically against my downstairs neighbors, I believe because they have called him out and attempted to protect the neighborhood from him before. Because of this, he decided to slash their tires. Then he called the cops and told them that someone else had slashed my neighbors’ tires. Later that day, he apparently believed that he was missing a bike tire. Naturally, in his mind, this meant that my neighbors, who did not know that he had slashed their tires yet, had taken her revenge on him by stealing his bike tire. So he went over there and confronted them while screaming about how he knew people who worked in pool restoration and could get ahold of acid. When the cops took him in, he was trying to say that he was friends with my neighbors and had simply been chatting with them. He maintains that the arrest was unwarranted and illegal.
From what I know, he has been in and out of mental institutions at least three times. This latest incident happened about two months ago. I don’t know if he has gone to trial yet, but I do know that he is still locked up somewhere and likely will be for some time.”
A Squabble Over A Raccoon
“I lived in a complex of sorts with stacked townhouses and a communal backyard. One night I went out for a smoke and heard a commotion. There is a messed up, wasted middle-aged woman yelling at her upstairs neighbor for stealing her raccoon.
Yes, she yelled that it was her raccoon because she left a bag of sugar out for it, which is apparently a delicacy to raccoons. The raccoon was on the upstairs neighbors’ balcony, so to get it back she constructed this ramshackle stairway of garbage (upturned garbage cans, broken chairs) and tried to climb up while wielding a hula hoop. She managed to get to the top of garbage mountain and somehow thought she could trap the raccoon with a hula hoop. To this day, I don’t understand how that would have worked.
The other neighbor came out and a fight ensued, with the upstairs neighbor biting the woman. The police were called. The raccoon was never seen again.”
“I Was So Astounded”
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“My neighbor came into my backyard when she thought we (university students) had gone home for the summer. I still lived in the house. In fact, I was sitting by the window when she entered our backyard. I thought nothing of it — I chalked it up to her looking for her cat.
I went back to reading my book and completely forgot about her until I saw movement out of the corner of my eye some while later. She was walking out if my backyard with all our plants.
She stole our garden. I was so astounded that I just sat there and stared at her. I never even tried to stop her.”
The Tale Of Moany
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“Our downstairs neighbor has been dubbed ‘Moany.’ At least once a week, he unleashed a series of anguished, banshee-esque wails, always after midnight. Eventually, my next door neighbor called the cops. He thought Moany was in some manner of trouble.
The cops were pounding on the door. Moany keeps a-moaning. One cop is interviewing people in the building. Moany keeps a-moaning. Finally, the officer gives an ultimatum: open the door or we bust it down. Moany stops a-moaning.
Turns out, Moany is fine. Just INCREDIBLY vocal when engaging in self-pleasure.”
He Was So Creepy
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“My neighbor is weird. He never waves and has a permanent sneer on his face. When we moved in, we were warned he was a registered offender and to call the cops if we saw him with kids. One day, he calls up out of the blue. I’ve never spoken to him before, but he proceeds to launch into his explanation of the offender record. Basically, he claims that he hurt some kid in a locker room while they both happened to be naked. He says it was plain old vanilla assault where both parties happened to be nude. Then he hung up.
One day he starts building a sign in front of his house. Not like a little poster, it’s professionally printed on metal and mounted on two huge posts set with concrete. The sign is a picture of a puppy and a long rambling story about how he let his puppy play in the street and it got hit by a car 10 years ago, but it’s written in a way where he seems to accuse the neighborhood of murdering his dog. Next to this sign, covering his entire fence, is an enormous banner reading ‘We Miss You’ (I don’t know who ‘we’ is. He lives alone) and an even larger picture of the puppy, which isn’t necessary because directly in front of the banner, sitting on a folding card table, is the actual puppy. He had it stuffed and set it out on display and left it there for days and hid behind the fence waiting for someone to mess with it, but nobody did. The puppy and the banner disappeared but the metal sign was permanent. It stayed up for years until a storm ripped it down.
I always wondered what he does with the dog. Does it stay in a closet or does he keep it out in his house? I got my answer. I have a friend who does construction and one day he was hired by weirdo neighbor to build a shed. Without my even asking, he tells me the guy keeps a stuffed dog in the living room like a piece of furniture and that he talks to it.”
It Was Like Living Next To A Frat…
“I lived next to three bro-type mid-20s guys — who clearly all just found each other on Craigslist — for a year a while back. We were in row homes, so we shared a wall. They were Brad, Dave, and Sherman. Here are some highlights:
1) Brad’s girlfriend knocking on our door at 3 a.m. to have a fight with him, and then barging into our house and falling asleep on our couch. Then he showed up, and they had their fight in our living room, then she left, then he left and came back five minutes later with a stiff drink and drank the whole bottle, by himself, while he sat on our stoop in his tank top, basketball shorts, long socks and sandals. Around 9 a.m., I heard her waking him up by screaming his name at the top of her lungs about five times. He passed out on the stoop.
2) Sherman and Dave showing up to a party at our house, uninvited, with a case of drinks that turned out to be empty. They bragged about themselves to our other, female, roommate. Who kicked them out.
3) All three of them standing outside of our houses whenever we had a party, trying to get girls to come to their party instead.
4) Brad crashing his dad’s car into Sherman’s car, which, in turn, crashed into our other neighbor’s car. Everyone was in their car when this happened. First thing out of Brads mouth was, ‘Sorry dude, I was itching my balls.’ They all laughed it off, except for our other neighbor, who called the cops. Brad later got a DUI.
5) All three of them getting arrested for peeing off of their roof into their own backyard, midday, wasted, on Easter. They narrowly escaped being charged with exposing themselves to minors since they were in plain view of our neighbors’ family gathering. Brad moved out after that, and the last time we saw him, he had one of those ‘comfy’ toilet seats around his neck while carrying a box of his belongings, which were: a lamp, a framed picture of himself graduating from high school, some socks, a weight, and a bottle of shampoo.
6) Sherman making us cookies because they had a party and threw all of their trash into our backyard because they ran out of trash bags.
7) Dave sobbing in his room all night long, which we could hear through the wall.
8) Dave getting banned from the local bar because he was on some unknown substance and repeatedly passed out in progressively stranger places and positions.
9) Dave getting re-banned from the local bar when he attempted to use a menu to obscure his face while Sherman ordered.
10) Dave sitting on our stoop drinking all morning, while holding some sort of legal textbook, and telling every passing woman that he was studying for his LSATS (false). Dave also tried this on my roommate’s girlfriend and her mom, and when they just walked passed him, leaving us momentarily together on the stoop before I closed the door, he said ‘dude, can you believe chicks are falling for this?’
11) Dave and Sherman arguing about whether or not Dave pooped himself.
12) Dave falling off our roof and landing in our rosebush.
13) Sherman getting into a trash fight/verbal argument with an old Chinese woman who had beaten him to a bookcase someone threw away. Sherman lost that fight.
14) The two weeks in which Dave had a girlfriend and was lying about having a job. He would leave his house with her every morning, in a shirt and tie, sweaty, drive her to work, and come home. Then leave again and come back with her. He would also make a big show of being a sober healthy individual who, you know, sometimes drank but ‘never really got wasted’ and ‘didn’t like how it felt.’ He usually gave you this speech while swigging from a gallon bottle of water and sweating profusely.
15) The time Dave crashed his car in an empty parking lot while he was blacked out after running three consecutive red lights and evading arrest somehow, and then just went home, prompting the police to show up and arrest him at 3 a.m. It was during this interaction that someone let it slip that this is like his umpteenth drinking-related arrest and his girlfriend stopped yelling at the cops and started yelling at him while he just kept shouting some stuff about it just being mouthwash and for the cops to just ‘get her home safe,’ ‘I’ll sort it all out, baby I promise,’ ‘baby why are you crying? Aw babe.’
16) The second time Dave fell off of our roof, but this time he missed the bush and landed on the concrete and spent the next hour and a half crying like a baby for someone to come help him. Then he yelled at us for not getting there quicker. This was the day we realized we were on a first-name basis with several police officers.
17) Sherman had his computer seized by the police. Sherman was then arrested for corporate espionage. With Sherman moving on to better things, we now enter the ‘Just Dave’ era, in which Dave forgot which door was his about twice a week. He locked himself out almost every day. He cut his belly open climbing into our alley because he locked himself out and covering both of our backyards in blood. He was banned from the local bar for the third time for trying to sneak in, and then popping his stitches and bleeding everywhere while wearing a cowboy hat and fake facial hair. I don’t know if that was part of his plan or just some other adventure.
This is also when we started messing with him because we knew he was moving out and that his landlord had sold the house to some young gentrifier. He was allowed to see out his lease as long as there was no more damage and no more major incidents of any kind. We put every speaker in our house up against our shared wall and played recordings of giant turtles mating, and responded to his texts with ‘Nah man, no one’s home, not us’ until he flipped out and called the cops. We heard him doing it during a gap in the sounds and so we called the cops and said the noise was coming from his place, hid the speakers, and left. He got a citation, and so somewhere in writing, he’s been charged with playing animal mating sounds at a volume exceeding acceptable levels.
I would pick up rocks from the construction site across the street and place them on his side of the stoop, right in front of his door. Each night I grabbed a bigger rock, until one day there was essentially a piece of debris the size of a basketball just sitting in front of his door. My room is above the stoop, and every morning I’d been watching him move the rocks and becoming more and more frustrated. I did this for at least two weeks. In the morning when he saw the giant rock, he finally lost it. He flipped out, screaming, pacing angrily, whole nine. But then something amazing happened; he grabbed the giant rock and threw it directly at the facade of his house, which broke an enormous piece of the building. These are old houses. This was not a cheap or easy thing to fix. He just stood there staring at what he’d done and then just started slamming the rock into the steps screaming profanities until he fell across the sidewalk backwards and smacked his head into a parked car. The alarm went off and he went inside. About 20 minutes later, the cops showed up. Two days later, he was gone.”