There's nothing worse for a homeowner than waking up one morning and looking out the window to see that their yard, car, or even mailbox was destroyed overnight. Sometimes, people can be the better person and let it go while others decide to take matters into their own hands and formulate a plan to get revenge.
A Reddit thread recently asked people the share their experience with getting back at someone who either destroyed their property or was trying to destroy their property. Some of these people came up with a fun way at poking fun at would be vandals, while others took their plans too far. All posts have been edited for clarity.
They’ll Get To Read Their Own Paper After This Stunt

“I had a problem for a while with my morning newspaper being stolen out of my driveway.
So one morning, I got up early and waited on the paper to be delivered (4 am or so) and got it. I opened it up and took a huge dump in the middle of it. I then rolled it up and put it back in the plastic sleeve. I placed the sleeve back in the driveway and went to bed.
I woke up later that morning to see my paper missing, but that was the last time it went missing.”
It Took The Whole Family, But They Got The Best Of These Pranksters

“Back in high school, some guys who were not on the greatest terms with my brother (used to be friends, but now had nothing in common and were basically bullying him) used to come by my house in the middle of the night and egg us and ring the doorbell. Since we figured out who was doing it, we tried politely asking them to stop. When they didn’t, we went to their parents. They just got sneakier about it and invited more people in on their little schemes, people we didn’t know and could not contact. That meant that at least three times a week, we’d stay up for large parts of the night either trying to prevent people from approaching our house or chasing them off when they rang the doorbell.
It pretty much only stopped because of two things. My brother sat in the driveway with the front porch light shut off, huddled in the car in complete darkness. I was at the front window, also in the dark. My dad was in the foyer. I saw them coming and told everyone to get ready. The guys ran up, smashed their fists against the door, predictably getting my senior dog all fired up over nothing. My brother turned the car on, floored the engine, and put on the high beams. The guys freaked out, and dropped the hockey sticks, bolting for their truck being driven by the first guy who started messing with us in the first place.
My dad came roaring out of the house, chasing these guys on foot. My brother peeled out of the driveway, lifting his paintball shooter off of the passenger seat. I watched them go – they jumped in their truck, while my brother is half hanging out of his car, shooting pretty impressively with one hand on the wheel as he sped after them. They got to a busy intersection, rode up on the curb and wrecked the bumper and maybe the bottom of the truck, which most likely belonged to one of their parents. No one was injured, but they drove off and never came by again.
I also like to think it was because I (a quiet girl in grade 9 at the time), approached them at school the day after and told them to stay off my property or they’d regret it. One of the guys’ sister, who was in my grade, tried to get me to tell her what the other repercussions would be, so I made up stuff about police now patrolling by my house, a hidden camera, and buying a rottweiler.”
Their House Became A Target, So He Had To Fight Back

“Each year, my father would put on a haunted house. He was really into projectors, lights, sounds, and the works – even back in the early ’80s, I remember blood and guts every year.
By the time I turned 16, we had about 2,300 people show up each year. The Connecticut State PD patrolled the area and because of the number of kids, they quickly became friends with my dad after seeing his haunted house.
The problems started mostly because I was the youngest kid and my dad started to wind down the haunted houses. Kids in our area didn’t take too well to it and each year, we would have a handful who would sneak up in the backwoods and paintball our house, RV, and other belongings. They even broke some windows doing this.
So, one year, I got on the roof with my own paintball shooter and hid behind the chimney. My thought process was simple: we had large speakers on top of the chimney (so no one could hear me), and because of the past issues, we had floodlights aiming towards the woods and out to the front yard (so they couldn’t see me up there.
Sure enough, the kids came around with the intent of continuing their annual tradition of decorating our house with paintballs, and as soon as I saw them, I put several rounds off in their direction. I hit the first kid in the forehead the other in the neck and arm. They quickly retreated.
The next year, they changed things up. One went through the woods, intent on catching me off guard, the other went out front with the rest of the kids.
For whatever reason that year, the ‘popular’ girls in my school got together and thought it would be fun to wear nothing but a bath towel as their costume.
So the first kid showed up in the backwoods and I took him out. I remember hearing him cry as he ran off. The second kid was walking along the front of my house and pulled out his shooter to plaster the front (large bay style) windows. I put two on his chest and one on his knee. He took off running, still unable to locate me to shoot back. I was evil and put two more onto his backpack and he flopped forward on his stomach. Again, he looked for me, and when he couldn’t find me, he ran off to join a group – that had the girls in it. I was a jerk and thought I could manage to hit him once more, so I aimed forward a bit, expecting him to walk into the shot and fired off one paintball.
But it missed him – and hit one of the girls in the butt! Her towel dropped off and she screamed out in pain. The whole group of kids turned around and started yelling at the second kid, thinking he shot her.
She was so mad, she went to the police who were half a block away. They brought both kids right in front of my house, as that’s where it happened. They found paint on the road, took his weapon and called his parents to come get him.
To this day, I haven’t told the girl that it was me who shot her. I feel bad about that, but the end result was just too priceless.”
The Third Time Was The Charm For This Family’s Mailbox

“A few years ago, the fad of smashing mailboxes resurfaced here on Long Island, and at least once a week (random nights) in the late/early hours, someone would come blasting through our road and randomly smashed mailboxes.
After the first one, my father bought a new mailbox made of steel and put it up the next day.
Four days later, we woke up to the dogs barking and peeling tires. My father took off in his car, but they were long gone by then. When he was about to buy his third mailbox, I suggested buying one with a much larger box and told him my idea. He proclaimed his son a genius and bought it.
After we put it up, I grabbed a cinderblock from the garage and put it inside for a few nights. About a week later, we all woke up to the loud crash, someone crying out, and peeling tires. We found the mailbox dented, sure, but also an aluminum bat lying next to it.
Come to find out the guy three houses down had set up a camera for the little jerks. They were using a conversion van, hanging out of it, and at decent speeds driving past and taking a nice swing at the boxes. The guy had to have broken something when he hit mine.
Our mailbox has remained lightly dented and untouched since that night.”
When Revenge Goes So Well You Have To Skip Town

“My great-grandfather lived in Southern Indiana during the Great Depression and always chopped all of his own wood for the winter. One day he went out and someone had stolen all of his wood. So he went down, angry as a first generation Irishman can be, to the family farm to chop up some more wood. This time, he built a shed to put the wood in, a few weeks later they stole the shed’s door and the wood. Great-grandfather said consarn it, went into town, out to the bars and got wasted. While in the third or fourth bar he went to the bathroom to find the door to the ladies room was his freaking shed door. How he knew this, I don’t know, but he proceeded to take it off its hinges while someone was inside. Bar patrons took him down and threw him out into the cold.
A few days after sobering up, he decided he was going to do one more stack of firewood and if they stole that, he would just freeze to death. After getting home with a load of firewood, he went out to his workshop and drilled a hole in one of the logs and filled it with dynamite, then he put the log on top of all the other logs. A few days later, the pile was gone; a week or so later, the owner of the bar’s house exploded, killing him. My great-grandfather, who was engaged to my great grandmother at the time, eloped and moved 200 miles away and changed his name, which is now my last name.”
So That’s How He Got Free Lawn Care For The Summer

“Someone had started bashing mailboxes in our neighborhood. After our mailbox was smashed, I went and got one of those large mailbox shaped novelty covers.
I took it to my uncle, who is a welder, and had him create a mailbox shaped frame that would fit inside it. This frame was made out of half-inch rebar. Once we had it fabricated, I set it up, set a camcorder to record, and went to bed.
It took two nights before the vandals came back. They were driving around in a Land Rover hanging out of the window. The video was priceless; they came driving up pretty quickly, I would guess 15 mph. The guy leaned out of the car, swung the bat, the bat hit and shattered the outer facade of the mailbox, bounces off the rebar, and shatters the car’s rear window. Just a moment later, you hear the guy screaming like a little girl.
The next morning, I noticed that the Land Rover down the block had a shattered rear window. I walked over there and started talking to him. He told me that his 17-year-old son broke his arm last night, but wouldn’t tell him how it happened. I just looked at him and said, ‘I have a video you HAVE to see.’
I walked with him back to my house and put in the video. He sat down and started watching, and once he realized that it was his Land Rover in the video, he got mad. Then he saw his son lean out the window and he started shaking his head in disbelief and said, ‘That little jerk.’ But when he watched the bat rebound, shatter the window, and heard his son screaming, he started laughing.
I was a little shocked at his reaction, as I didn’t expect him to laugh about it. I looked at him and told him that it wasn’t exactly the response I was expecting. He said he was laughing because it was great to see a situation where the consequences were enacted immediately. He also said that he was going to make his son pay for the ER visit, the window, and give up the names of the other people in the vehicle. Then he would get the parents of the other kids and make sure everything was taken care of. Three days later, I had a nice new mailbox on my doorstep and free lawn care for the rest of the summer. It was great.”
Armed With Vengeance And A Water Hose, They Waited For Their Attack

“For about a month in a row on garbage day, someone would sneak out the night before and dump all their stuff in our cans to the point they were overflowing all over the road, which cost me an extra fine from the sanitation department if they even picked it up at all. Often they wouldn’t and I would be left with an overflowing trashcan for another week.
A housemate and I got tired of these shenanigans, so we sat out on our driveway with some lawn chairs, a hose, and a bottle of Jack.
So 4 am rolled around and a pickup truck parked in front of our house and a guy started unloading his trash. We turned on the high beams and he was frozen.
We yelled, ‘Gotcha’ and hosed him down. This was in the middle of winter so the water was COOOOLD.
Never had a problem again.”
This Is Why No One Messes With Construction Workers

“These little idiots used to kick the orange cones around from some long-running construction work near my house. The workmen got so sick and tired of it, they put a line of cones near the edge of the road and the final one went over a short cement post that started a line of posts.
One night around 2 am, I was chilling out in my backyard when I heard a blood-curdling scream. It sounded like a murder, so I ran through the house and out of my front door to see this moron lying on his back, a pack of his mates disappearing around a corner and 10 or so orange cones all over the show with one resolute, reinforced cone standing over his prone form like a David over Goliath.”
When Signs And Fines Didn’t Do The Job, This Guy’s Dad Took Matters Into His Own Hands

“When I was in my mid to late teens, I lived across the road from the local primary school. When 3 pm rolled around, people would park on our verge, crush our irrigation pipes, and break the sprinklers.
We spoke to the local council, they put a sign in front of our house, and repeat offenders got a $50 fine. All that did was to create a new space, which some other idiot would park in. Cue my dad spending every Sunday replacing the piping. Sometimes, they would even drive over the sign, just to be jerks.
Eventually, my dad got sick of it, and built a new signpost out of angle iron, and set it in concrete, about 15 inches down. He replaced the signboard on the top and it all looked like nothing had been changed.
The next day, someone tried to drive over the sign, and the signpost went through the floor of his car. The guy had to jack the car up to get free, and apologized profusely to my father.”
He Might Want To Destroy The Evidence After This Crime

“My dad had enough of people treating our mailbox like a baseball, so he lined it with cement. Soon after he did that, someone hit the mailbox and we’re pretty sure the guy broke his arm upon impact.
A couple days later, they put a cherry bomb in it. So my father being completely sane, installed a homemade spike strip a few nights later.
The vandals wrecked their car and were hospitalized and arrested upon release. My dad destroyed the spike strip after that one. Never had a smashed mailbox again.”
This One Was A Long Time Coming

“My grandma had an insane witch neighbor for about 60 years.
She would call the cops on my poor grandma about once a month for various trumped up things such as accusing her of throwing out car batteries or for the dog being loud. The cops would come and usually play with my grandma’s dog and make sure she was ok.
My grandma lived with my aunt but was home alone a lot so she would have to get to the door, open it for the cops, and put up with the stress of dealing with the police, and once you are past 80, you shouldn’t need to deal with this teenage drama.
This woman was such a witch when I was a kid. For example, if we were playing football and the ball touched her lawn, she would come out and start screaming at us. She was also obsessed with her lawn and would cut the grass super short every day in a saggy gross bikini. My uncle got revenge by salting her lawn and killing all her grass.”
Well, This One Went A Little Too Far

“When my dad was a kid, a neighbor of his was a car mechanic who filled a hollowed-out car engine with cement and buried it as the bottom post to his new mailbox with the neck holding the box up filled with cement as well. Kids kept coming around his neighborhood at night doing the same thing prior to this, for kicks I imagine.
These particular youths weren’t using bats to knock down these mailboxes in the driveby, they were basically jumping over the curb onto people’s lawns to knock them over with their car, for whatever reason you’d want to dent your car. So try to imagine a car hitting a cement-filled post weighed down with a cement-filled steel engine block at 30 miles an hour.
The hilarious thing was the cops wanted to arrest him afterward for premeditated assault.”
Revenge Is A Dish Best Served Cold

“When I was a wee girl, my big brother and I had a tradition of making a 12-foot snowman in our yard every year around Christmas. We got in the paper and everything. Once during our five-year run, some people came at night and tied one end of a rope around the snowman and the other end to a truck and pulled Frosty down. We rebuilt him, only to find him chopped up into pieces the next morning.
We waited until a particularly cold day and rebuilt Frosty yet again, but this time we doused him in cold water and let him freeze to become a solid, formidable sculpture. We found him standing tall and beautiful with a rope around his middle and skid marks in the street the following morning. I hope we ruined their transmission.”
The Kids In His Neighborhood Just Didn’t Know When To Quit

“I had some kids ringing my doorbell and running… a lot. After dealing with this for some time, I decided to set up a hose above the door on a balcony and another sprinkler in the walkway to the door. It was the last ding dong ditch I ever had.
Another time, a kid kept poorly prank calling, and he sounded young. I googled his number and got his address and the names of his parents. The next time he called, rather than answering with the customary ‘Hello,’ I just started to read off his information and he hung up. He never called back after that.”