Not every neighbor can be like Mister Rogers. There are some neighbors who are everything BUT friendly and nice. These people share stories about the most trifling thing their neighbor had ever done to them. From threatening to poison their dog to constantly getting the cops on them and a lot more!
Content has been edited for clarity purposes.
Old Fart
“When we bought our place, my husband went next door to introduce himself to the new neighbor. Mr. C led with ‘I don’t like dogs or children, y’all better be quiet!’ and it didn’t get better from there (My husband also took down the no trespassing sign that the previous owners had put up. That sign only faced Mr. C’s property).
The pettiest thing he did was probably the day he cut our cable because he thought the provider didn’t bury it quickly enough (Mind you, it was entirely on our land). We made a police report so that we wouldn’t have to pay for the repair. We told the deputy that we knew what happened but had no proof. The officer had a little chat with the old man, but no charges were filed.
Or maybe the day he had a huge fit because the movers took down a fence post to get their truck in, and inadvertently left it on Mr. C’s lawn for three to four hours until they got the truck back out.
Perhaps it was the morning that he came banging on the door at 7:30 am, like there was some emergency, and had the gall to yell at my husband because he answered the door shirtless. The ’emergency’ was that the children walked to the bus stop on the right of way in front of his house. It was a dirt road, no sidewalk, and the other side of the road had a ditch and woods – not suitable for pedestrians. Mr. C made threatening noises about ‘teaching the girls a lesson’ about staying out of his yard. And my husband lost his cool. He informed the old fart that the right of way extends 40 feet from the center of the road, per Georgia law, and that the old man better never, never, never mess with his children.
The only other time he ever spoke to me was to complain about the noise from a cookout we’d had. I told him that if he continued, I would have my timber cut, but only that between his house and the highway. Then we’d talk about noise.”
A Messy Situation
“I lived in a townhouse that had an adjacent townhouse on either side. The neighbors on one side were absolutely fantastic.
About two years ago, there were renters on the other side, where the adult male living there was some sort of tradesman who regularly left for work at 4:40 am. Whenever he left he would slam his front (metal) gate closed, which would regularly wake me and my four-year-old daughter (the gate was only about 10 meters from our bedroom windows).
I wrote a very polite note, explaining that it was a problem and asking them if they could please close their gate quietly. To his credit, he started leaving via the other exit.
About a month later, it was becoming clear that my front lawn was increasingly covered in dog poo, so I set up a webcam to see where it was coming from. Very quickly it became clear that these neighbors were regularly opening their gate, letting the dog out to do its business, and then return home, with no attempt to clear it up.
I approached him one early evening as the dog returned home from its defecation excursion, and (again very politely) asked him and his wife to stop letting the dog leave its business on my front lawn. They denied it, despite the fact that I had just caught the dog in the act, and told them that I had video evidence of what their dog was doing.
That absolute idiot decided that every morning he left for work, he would slam his front gate using all his strength. Some people are human garbage. Thankfully they moved out only a couple of months later.”
Control Freak
“I had a neighbor who was old and had bipolar episodes.
My neighbor changed the locks on our communal door which only allowed access to our flat and her flat, yet refused to inform us that she changed the locks. She then refused to answer our phone call or let us in. Instead, she called the police on my partner when he broke in for breaking and entering. Also tried to get us to pay for the new keys.
The same neighbor called the police on me when I was in the bath. I didn’t know what she said to the police but answering the door to armed police whilst in a towel was not fun. Her reasoning for calling the police was that she thought I was being attacked and wouldn’t answer the door when she knocked. I didn’t hear her knock and I was in the bath the whole time, so I’m unsure what exactly she heard.
Another time, she also called the fire brigade to our property twice claiming we had purposely started a fire in our flat. Both times my partner and I were at work and had to come home to check that there was in fact no fire.
We couldn’t get WiFi installed in our flat (top floor) but our neighbor (bottom floor) could so we shared the WiFi bill 50/50. Our neighbor would turn the WiFi off if we ticked her off, if she went away for a few days, and if she wanted to spite us. She would change the password and then demand more money from us to change it back. When she moved out, we cleared out her flat and found letters from the internet company. She literally took our money but never paid the actual bill. I don’t know why they let her have internet for so long but alas.
Also, she would fill up our own outside bin then called the council to complain we were overflowing our bin. The council believed her and provided an enforcement notice for causing waste in a communal area.
Not petty but proved how much of a nightmare she was: my partner asked our landlord for a private postbox as our post and takeaways kept getting stolen (from the building with only two flats in). The landlord said no because only we and the neighbor lived here. Our neighbor denied ever stealing our post and takeaways. The said neighbor was then arrested a week later for selling fraudulent tarot readings online. When the police arrested her, they also found my partner’s bank card which we assumed just never got delivered and many other items that were addressed to us. Police did not prosecute because apparently could not prove that she actually stole them even though they were in her flat.”
Payback
“We lived in town when I was a kid and had a neighbor who owned a lot that spanned across the block, house on one side, huge maple trees and such through to the other street. They had a solid fence that was about 6.5 feet high around the entire perimeter and was adamant that no one should enter their yard at all. Fair enough, but our driveway was adjacent and we had a basketball hoop on the garage and every so often the ball would bounce over the fence. I would shimmy between the garage and fence and pull myself over, toss the ball back, and then climb the fence supports on the other side to get back. I was always careful not to damage anything.
Until the husband, who was older and whose kids were grown, saw me and started running out chasing after me every time he caught a glimpse of me out the window. He would watch for me. A couple of times he was working outside, hid nearby, and jumped out and grabbed me, pulling me into his house, and ejecting me out the front door. He eventually started bringing the ball inside his house if he happened to see it go over, and refused to give it back unless we walked around the entire block, knocked on his door, and politely asked for the ball. We subjected ourselves to a berating lecture and apologized. I was just a seven-year-old kid that wanted his ball back.
A few years later, he wrote a five-page handwritten letter to my parents, sent through the mail mind you, about how they were incompetent as parents and had failed to raise us properly.
My dad was livid at this point after years of strained relations, the ball wasn’t the only friction point. He snapped a bit, stormed into the garage cursing loudly, grabbed a sledgehammer, and was about to bust down a large section of the fence. I calmed him down and talked him out of it.
The next day, once I’d read the letter myself, I wished that I had just let him tear it down. I also had a couple of encounters with the neighbor on the heels of this incident where he was extremely insulting to me.
To compensate for this, I began sneaking out to the corner of the fence next to their house late at night and shooting out an exterior light that was way up under the second-floor eaves and would require a very tall extension ladder to reach. I continued to do this every time I saw the light bulb had been replaced for some time until eventually, he gave up on replacing it.
I never told anyone that it was me shooting the bulb that was the cause. He suspected me, I was sure, but never caught me nor had any proof.”
Crazy Driveway Neighbor
“We moved into an old, cozy two-bedroom on an undersized lot. There was a tiny, one-car garage tucked in the backyard, but it used a driveway shared with the neighbor. She owned the driveway and we had an easement to use it to access our outbuilding.
The previous homeowners told us at closing there had never been a problem in their 20 years of living there.
Liars.
Turns out, Driveway Lady had a reputation around the neighborhood. After we moved in and started taking walks about the block, every other neighbor along the way asked, ‘How’s it going with Mary?’, while cringing. Apparently, she had screamed at the previous owners’ children for drawing with chalk on the driveway, she had re-piled snow on their parking pad after they’d cleared it, and she had flung grass on their vehicles while mowing.
She watched us from her kitchen window whenever we were in the backyard. She was verbally accosted with every contractor we had working on the house, from the mason repairing the chimney, painters putting on the new color, and worst, the roofer.
In an unfortunate moment of timing, the roofer’s boom truck was blocking the driveway as she came home for lunch. She berated him so harshly, he told me he moved his accounts from the bank she worked at to a new one and said he wouldn’t come back unless she was out of town.
But she never left! She went to work at 8, home for a half-hour lunch at noon, gone again from 12:30 until 6, Monday through Friday.
When she did go, she left a garbage bag of lawn debris, a pink bucket, and sometimes her garbage bin out to cordon the parts of the driveway not included in the easement.
She left a minute and a half voicemail about which parts of the driveway we could use and which we couldn’t. She actually chased my in-laws back down the driveway to our parking pad as they were trying to leave, and told them they couldn’t block it.
I gave her a heads-up once that plumbers would be walking up and down the driveway to get to the basement door.
She responded, ‘My driveway.’
She threw snow, pebbles, leaves, grass clippings over our fence. It was not the stuff, it was the disrespect and damage her shovel had done to the fence.
Like, it was a driveway. Everyone wants to get in and get out. Just be normal!”
911 On Speed Dial
“We were six working adults, mid-20s in a large four-bedroom house. We had a dinner party one night in the summer, ending maybe at 11 pm. There was no loud music, no wild drinking, maybe some folks out on the back deck smoking and talking. This woman and her husband came over at eight in the morning to give us a talk about how it was a nice, quiet neighborhood and we needed to be mindful of the families.
This was an older development so the houses and yards were large, and far back from the street. The neighbors on either side of us had no issues, and one would frequently share baked goods from his wife, or we’d chat with his teenage kids out front.
But this woman across the street started complaining about us: ‘Coming home at all hours and closing car doors’ (one roommate was a manager at a restaurant and the rest of us were all 9-5 workers), ‘Talking with the windows open’ (it was summer/ no AC), and ‘Running a used car lot’ (Three were working, registered cars in the driveway and three parked on the street, just like our neighbors with teens). Just all sorts of utter rubberish.
The icing on the cake was two back-to-back frivolous calls that were blatant lies and tied to her. My boyfriend and I returned from a two-week-long camping trip, parked our camper in front of our house to unload it, began the work, and decided to finish in the morning. We were getting ready to hitch up and take it to storage when the police code people pulled up. They were there to check on an abandoned camper matching the description of ours, that had been reported to have been there over a week ‘in obvious disrepair.’
We showed them we had in fact only gotten home around eight the evening before and obviously the vehicle was licensed, registered, and in working order, and was in fact about to be taken back to storage. They apologized and we asked it be noted that we had a neighbor who repeatedly called in frivolous claims on us, and they said they would. Within a week, around 11:30 pm, there was a knock at the door and amusingly enough we’d all been home all night, even the restaurant working roommate who opened the door. I’d been asleep for at least an hour. The officers asked my roommate who answered the door, in their pj’s, very obviously having just been asleep if we were having a party.
He said, ‘No?’
They’d had a call about loud music, cars, people, and drinking. But they’d been sitting outside our completely dark house for half an hour or so and had dispatch verify the address. The police were baffled, but unfortunately for the crazy neighbor lady, my roommate did not suffer fools. He very firmly, respectfully, and (most importantly) persuasively told the police about the constant mysterious, frivolous police complaints from one of our neighbors. He explained that obviously, he wasn’t sure it was the same person, but he laid out a list of all the complaints, and gave them the address of the neighbor who we knew it was. One officer went back to the car, the other officer made small talk, and then when the second officer came back he apologized because they obviously had a clear pattern of harassment and encouraged roommate to file a complaint, which he did. A few weeks later I saw a police vehicle parked across the street near the crazy neighbor’s house and we never had another visit, although I moved before the next summer.”
What Did The Dog Do?
“One of our dogs would jump the neighbor’s chain-link fence to get to our front door from the backyard. He said he’d shoot it the next time it jumped the fence and touched his land. I had to remind him that we actually own that part of the land and we would just take out the fence and put it down to where his lawn actually started. He knew it would have been lost a large part of his yard. Didn’t say anything again about it.
The one behind us claimed one of our dogs bit his kid but our animal control, town police department, and a deputy all said it looked more like the kid was trying to climb into our yard and got cut up real bad, due to it being an older chain link fence with the sharp points at the top. Then the dad kept threatening to poison all of our dogs and call the cops every time one was outside. Even though he would let his pitbull run around unleashed and his kids just run through everyone’s yards. I heard him talking tough to a friend of his on the phone about how he was going to come over here. I told him to mess around and find out what would happen. He stopped once we told him we’d sue him for everything he got if one of our dogs even got sick.”
Loud Music
“My neighbor at my old apartment used to listen to loud music, get completely blackout, and yell/scream random stuff on the steps in between our front doors. When I first moved in, I had to get up extremely early for my job, so one night I got fed up and asked him to turn it off at like 9:45 pm. He refused when I asked politely so I ended up yelling that I was trying to sleep and he was being inconsiderate of the people in the building. So he turned it off but then spent the next eight hours stomping up and down the stairs calling me a nasty prick to anyone who would listen. He would say I was ‘breaking the law’ because he was allowed to make as much noise as he wanted before 10 pm. The next morning he slid a note under my door.
It said, ‘I don’t know why you were mad at me and being rude. It wasn’t 10 pm yet. I’m allowed to do whatever I want before then. I’ve been here for 20 years.’
I hated him so much. He was the type of person that would corner you as you were walking down the stairs and talk your ear off, no matter how many times you said ‘I’m running late,’ or ‘I can’t talk right now.'”
Empathy Was Not Her Forte
“We lived in an apartment on the second floor when my son was a baby. The new neighbors who moved in below us immediately started complaining because we were too loud. The noise they were hearing was our one-year-old son ‘scooting’ across the floor. He has some neurological differences and didn’t learn to crawl like typical kids. He would lay on his back, arch up, and scoot himself around like a backward inchworm. Most kids his age were crawling or starting to walk.
The neighbor lady would pound on her ceiling, yell obscenities in the shared hallway, and even called the cops once because of the noise.
We tried to work with the apartment management, and we explained to them that it was our son. Once our neighbor knew the cause of the noise, she requested that we be made to move. She worked with young children and said our kid was probably autistic and would only get louder as he got older. We didn’t get a diagnosis for another year, but it turns out she was right. He is on the spectrum.
She only lived there for three months but it was miserable. She was so irrationally angry that when the police were called they recommended we keep our doors locked and not go in the hallway alone. The neighbor that moved in after her never complained, and we eventually bought a house so my son could be as loud as he wanted.”
Party Pooper
“We had a weird neighbor. Friendly at first but slowly got colder and colder. They had the same landlord as us.
We were going to have neighbors’ backyard party with us, the neighbors on both sides, and the neighbors across the alley. Only the weird neighbor declined. Everyone was bringing something, a six-pack from across the alley and sides from most of the others. We were hosting so it was our job to grill some brats and host in the backyard. We had the charcoal grill fired up and put some store-bought wood chips on at the end to give the sausages a smokey flavor. I was stepping out of the kitchen with a big tray of raw meat when a firefighter poked his head over the back gate.
Firefighter: ‘Hi, we’ve had a smoke complaint that you are burning trash or yard waste?’
Me: ‘Gosh I hope not! I’m not that bad of a cook.’
Firefighter: ‘May I come in and look at your fire?’
Me: ‘Uh, ok, let me put down this tray.’
I let the guy in, he looked at our charcoal grill.
Firefighter: ‘Did you put anything other than charcoal and lighter fluid in this?’
Me: ‘Yeah, some of these wood chips from the grocery store.’
Firefighter: ‘I hate to say this, but the city has an ordinance against any organic matter other than charcoal in grills.’
Everyone: ‘What??’
Firefighter: ‘Yeah, it’s a dumb law and almost never comes up unless you are really burning yard waste or if you have a neighbor who has it in for you. I won’t give you a citation, but I do have to stand here and watch to make sure the fire is completely extinguished before I go.’
Me: ‘So I can’t grill these dogs?’
Firefighter: ‘I’m afraid not.’
I proceeded to take the tray of raw meat into the house, popped them in the oven to broil, and came out to hose down my grill until the whole thing was cold and wet. The firefighter left with an apology and thanked me for not getting mad at him for the bad news. Only one person within six houses wasn’t there and I didn’t think any of my guests called the fire department on our own party.”
