Who knows what sort of monster is living just several feet form your house? What may seem like a perfectly innocent person could be a devious nightmare in disguise. These poor homeowners faced the strangest and most terrifying neighbors they could have found. This certainly didn't come up in the open house tour. Content has been edited for clarity.
Freaky Frank Stalks All Of Them
“So, get this. My sister was walking home from school one day, she must’ve been a freshman in high school. The walk is about a mile, but there are multiple ways to get back to my house. Anyway, she drops a friend off in one direction and heads home through the park. A nice quiet neighborhood park where all the kids would play, seems safe and legit, right? When she reaches the park, she hears knocking and she looks up the hill to see a middle-aged man standing without any clothing on the other side of his sliding glass door, and he just waves at her with his other hand on his junk. She runs home to tell my mother, who in turn calls the police and it ensued from there. It didn’t stop at that though.
It turns out this man, who we all lovingly call Freaky Frank, can see our driveway and the front of our house from his house. He ends up stalking my family, with weird phone calls saying he was selling something but would say, ‘Oh I’m sorry, it looks like you’re busy, I’ll call when your company leaves.’
He would drive up next to my mother in traffic, after we ended up getting a restraining order against him, and he would smile and wave in his truck next to our vehicle. Just some seriously creepy nonsense. He ended up moving due to the entire neighborhood hating him and knowing what he did and was doing to my family. It took years for us to be comfortable ever going back to that park, even after he was gone. It still creeps me out thinking about it, and that was in the late 90s.”
What Is The Uncle Scheming?
“I’ve had a lot of weird, creepy neighbors folks. I actually think my tolerance for weird and creepy is significantly high because of some of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in. The guy that creeped me out the most though was my next door neighbor’s uncle, in the house my ex and I shared for 5 years.
A little back story: we were moving back home to California, but we had to pick our house from a distance because we were currently based in Nashville.
My ex had this laundry list of ridiculous requests on finding a rental. I only had one. I did not want to be in an apartment complex again. But because I wanted to rent a house and because my ex had requests like ‘can’t be hardwood and carpet, the place has to pick a side’, it made finding a property and possessing a finite amount of money extremely time-consuming and difficult.
Finally, we find a house. My ex obsessively scours online maps and I hear, ‘Aha! Come look!’
I walk over and he’s pointing at the aerial shot of the neighbors’ property. You can see just stacks of stuff. It looked like a miniaturized junk yard. He said, ‘These neighbors are hoarders, and I can’t live next to that.’
Mostly because I was tired of looking, I pointed out that the picture was timestamped at 3 years previous and he doesn’t know who actually lives there, he was basing an entire opinion of a person on their backyard. I slowly logic’d his argument into oblivion. I would live to regret this. The first day we show up and we realize nope, these are the same neighbors. There is junk piled EVERYWHERE, including the front lawn. I’m trying not to make judgements after I just defended this family with every scrap of justification I could find, but I already had some opinions forming about the type of people they were. Then the first person of that household came over. Before I start, I want to point out this man was never anything but kind, but he was beyond bizarre.
He ‘welcomed’ us to the neighborhood by bringing us, which he mentioned with a very peculiar sense of pride, his famous squirrel chili. So many things bothered me about that statement that I didn’t know where to start. He told me he was a long haul truck driver and he lived with his aunt and uncle when he wasn’t on the road, which explained the other older people I saw sitting on the porch and staring. He then went to tell me he had grown up in this house and the people in my new house were his family friends for 20 years so he knew, ‘Everything about this house, including how to get in if you were locked out.’
Again, his words. He turned out to be the sanest member of that household.
This turned into months of random homeless people showing up at 3 a.m. in my neighbors yard yelling for food, knife fights breaking out, cops showing up, weird people digging through my recycling bins that were clearly my neighbor’s ‘guests’. I was pretty much numb to the consistent potent mixture of feelings I felt as I quickly walked up my driveway every day after work. But I hadn’t really met The Uncle yet.
One day, for no clear reasoning I could gather, The Uncle, who I used to only see in passing from a window of the house or quietly smoking on the porch, changed up his behavior. He started sitting directly in the middle of his lawn and talking. A lot. Pretty loudly. To no one. At first, it was just mildly spooky. My mother had worked with schizophrenic patients a lot when I was younger, so I was familiar with those behaviors and know that most schizophrenics aren’t violent. I kind of just wrote it off. Then one day I walked by and happened to actually listen instead of tuning him out. From what I could establish he truly believed he was talking to people in the trees, people who had tried to kill him in some war he was in, except he was sure they were all black and he was going to kill them first. Every time after that I made sure to listen as I walked by, because I was genuinely curious what his mind thought was happening. At one point, about a week of me actively trying to listen to him, he was saying something so strange I actually stopped moving and unintentionally stared at him while he finished his point. He didn’t even notice me.
Months into this one day I’m walking up and I am actually quite busy that day, so I don’t intend to really engage in whatever his babble was currently, but I hear him start talking about how he’s going to blow up the tree with grenades to destroy the enemy first. I had gotten used to him elaborating in quite impressive detail about how his plans would work out, so when he said that and immediately stopped talking, it caught me by surprise enough that I glanced up.
When I did, he was staring directly at me. This was literally the first time as far as I know he had ever acknowledged my EXISTENCE.
I went to glance away but before I could he said quietly but firmly, ‘Maybe I’ll just have to kill you first so they know I’m serious.’ I completely froze and in about .3 seconds, he had completely forgotten about me. I stood there for a minute and a half in sheer terror and mild disbelief. He never acknowledged me again and I never looked up either.”
He Had It Coming
“I had a real redneck neighbor for a while that ticked me off one day to the point where I almost hurt him badly. Seems that him and his wife liked to drink, to the point that he’d get belligerent. Well, this one day, I don’t know what brought it on, but all of a sudden my wife and I could hear banging, yelling, and screaming real loud coming from next door. Then all of a sudden, first I see him throwing his wife out the front door with only her panties on. I tell the wife to call the police. Then as I’m opening my front door, I hear his 14-year-old daughter yelling. Then she comes flying out the door with nothing on. Followed by their 10-year-old son, also with nothing on. The father is standing in the door, yelling something about how they don’t deserve anything. He paid for everything and to get off his property before he kills them. By now I’m in their front yard with my oldest son who’s 14, getting the three of them off the ground and over to my house. At some point I notice bruises on all three of them from what I presume to be a belt.
He’s standing on his front porch screaming and hollering how they’re all useless and that I should just stay out of it because they’re not good for anything. And that me and my family are garbage for helping them.
Well that’s when I lost it. My wife is yelling for me to come back inside and wait for the cops. I’m not hearing any of that. I walk over as he’s threatening to kick my butt if I come any closer. I walk straight up onto his porch, and we go at it. Next thing I realize is he’s on the ground and I’m making a blood pie out of his face. When the cops pulled up he’s unconscious, I’m sitting on top of him pounding the life out of him. The cops, with weapons drawn, are yelling at me to stop and get off of him.
Took over two hours for them to finally take the handcuffs off me. He was transported to the hospital. After all was said and done the lead cop told me, officially, that I should wait for the police. Unofficially, though, he said he didn’t blame me, but next time be more careful, the guy could have died.”
Hazmat Team Needed
“It’s just after 2 a.m. when I hear my neighbor stomping his feet in the apartment above mine. This was not an unusual occurrence, so I just tried to ignore it and soothe myself back to sleep. But it continues. It gets louder and louder. Then I hear him screaming, ‘HELP. 911. HELP. HELP.’
There’s more slamming. It almost sounds like furniture being moved. It’s louder than a person could be with their own body. I can’t ignore it anymore, it’s the only thing I can hear. It doesn’t stop, “HELP ME. HELP.” I call 911, as I’m on the phone with them, I hear the window shatter. “HELP HELP HELP.”
I try to stay silent, pretend I don’t even exist. My anxiety is through the roof. I can hear him through my headphones. I keep checking the lock on my apartment as I hear my neighbor screaming his lungs out. The police finally arrive, they’re stampeding up the stairs and through the hallways. They’re loud, louder than this man. I look out the window, and police cars are blocking the whole main road. I’ve never seen this many police cars lit up.
The next morning, a hazmat team is at the apartments to clean up the blood that was tracked up and down three floors. Hand prints of blood were placed on each front door (except mine, oddly enough). I don’t know how it’s possible for a person to bleed out that much and still continue making hand prints on doors. An entire trail of blood went up and down the stairs a number of times. When I looked up at this third floor broken bedroom window from across the street, I could see all of their furniture stacked up to one side of the room. Looking through the sliding glass door, there wasn’t anything left in the living room.
One of the two people in that apartment changed units. Lord knows what happened to the other one. I was glad to leave that complex. When I asked the apartment manager, she said someone broke in the apartment and that the woman who lived in the apartment had changed units. I don’t know exactly what occurred during that night. I never got full, honest answers.”
Dizzy With Grief
“Years ago, I was awakened early one Saturday morning by crying and the sound of someone get whipped. I lived in an upstairs apartment at the time, and I thought the cries were coming from a house on the other side of a lot between us. This family had a 12-year-old son who had a very contentious relationship with his dad. I cringed every time I heard the cries. I assumed that was where the cries were coming from. I knew the dad and had decided that I was going to confront him later that day.
But then I heard the voice of a woman yelling. I listened more intently and heard her say, ‘Why did you pee on yourself? Why didn’t you get up and go to the bathroom? I’m not going to clean you up! You’re going to clean this mess up!’
I was horrified to realize that the voice was of the woman directly across the street from me. She was beating her elderly aunt with a belt. This was an aunt she was ‘caring’ for. I was dizzy with grief. I cried and wanted to go over there and whip the niece instead. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I’d never heard/witnessed elder abuse. It still brings tears to my eyes to think that someone would abuse an elder. I didn’t know whether to call the police or social services. Then it stopped. Complete silence. I wondered if the woman’s husband stepped in.
I did share this with several people later that morning, including the father that I thought was the original culprit. Not many days afterwards, that aunt of my neighbor was removed from the home and placed in a nursing facility. I never spoke to that neighbor again. I wouldn’t even dignify her with eye contact. I was both outraged and ashamed that a woman who had to be in her late 50s would be so disrespectful to her mother’s sister.
Someone asked me a question once about what I have no tolerance for, and I said disrespect. This incident is a big part of the reason why I feel the way I do. I grew up with extended family always being a part of our nucleus. I grew up with respecting and never to be rude to our elders. I have little patience for, nor do I want to be around, people who do not share these values.”
Horror Beyond The Fence
“When I was about 12–14 years old, my family lived next door to this older guy and his wife. They were in their 60s or 70s, and they often had their grandchildren over to visit (their grandchildren were just a couple years older than I was). Everyone in the family seemed nice. But there was something about the older guy that seemed kind of creepy. Now, he had a really big pool in his backyard. Every summer, all the kids/teens on our block would come over to play in the pool at their house. I had been invited a couple times before, but didn’t know how to swim and felt a little uncomfortable being around all of their horseplay. So I never went.
One day my parents and I were doing some gardening in our backyard. It was very hot outside. I could hear a couple boys over the fence having fun in the pool (someone was ALWAYS playing in that pool). I stood up from my work for a moment and caught a glance over our fence of a boy (he was only 10 and lived just a couple houses away from me) standing on the diving board without any swim trunks. I panicked and turned around quickly, thinking that his swim shorts had fallen down or something (I was too short to see the whole scene). At that same moment, my dad had looked up too. He could see what was going on. He sent me inside and called my mom over.
Turns out, that boy and his younger brother were both playing in the pool with no clothing with the old man. The old man even sat the younger boy on his lap. My parents, of course, called the police on him. I don’t really know what happened next. But the old man did not get in much trouble for what he did, as he claimed he was legally blind and had no idea the boys had no clothing on. The two boys and their family moved away almost immediately after that. We even helped them with the move.
It’s selfish to say, but I remember being so grateful that I never swam at their house. The old man often swam with those kids. And any one of them could have been abused. We avoided contact with the old man completely. And I rarely saw any of the other family members at that house. My family moved away a couple years later. So I don’t know whatever happened to him, and quite frankly, I don’t want to.”
Family Feud Gets Ugly
“This may sound too crazy to be real, but it happened around midnight outside my home. My neighbor attempted to murder a cop’s relative. You see, I lived on a main avenue, in front of the beach in a nice home with a store beneath it, next to a family-owned business that was involved in shady business. They had a bar and restaurant, but they also operated with some women of the night and other less savory products. One would see the men come and go, sometimes with one of these women hanging from each arm, and they’d come back a few hours later telling tales of how good or bad the client’s performance had been when it came to the action. These events became common – so common, in fact, that I stopped caring. ‘Here they go again,’ I’d mutter some nights, when one of the clients got too out of control and started smashing bottles outside the business, or even when a group of men rushed out one early morning, followed by another group with a guy firing rounds up into the air. What happened on the night I’m about to tell you about was that there were three men playing cards at one of the tables outside, drinking and overall having fun.
One of the men was the defacto ‘owner’ of the place, alongside his nephew and a well-known local substance peddler. They sat there for hours in the dark, the odd cackle punctuating the otherwise quiet night, but at some point things got awkward. I sat in my room, working on my computer while my parents watched television in the living room, but the noise outside was growing.
The shouts, screams, and sounds of shattering glass bottles echoed from outside a few moments after. A scuffle had broken out. Cue the fearful gasps and the moaning coming from a man pushing his stumbling form away from the chaos. I don’t think anyone will ever forget what we all saw in that instant. The dealer was walking towards the avenue, his hands gripping something and pushing it up into his abdomen, the two other men looking at each other in shock as they realized what they had done. A fight had broken out and, well, somehow the nephew had gotten his hand on a large knife and used it to slice open the dealer’s gut, so the man’s bowels slipped out.
Anyway, the two men were suddenly fearful and called their aunt, an influential woman in the area. Turns out the dealer was a family member of one of the police sergeants in the city, and this was why he operated freely in our neighborhood. Just imagine the faces of his assailants as they heard this. Before long, her car came to a screeching brake in front of their business to help this dying dealer before he became history, and karma came for her nephew and his nephew with him.
Flash forward a month or two, the dealer survived and recovered. My dad saw his scars, and he told me how horrible they were. They had patched him back together at the general hospital, but it wasn’t pretty. The dealer wasn’t going to let it slip anytime soon. He went after the younger attacker, but the man was gone. He had left the next morning after the stabbing and had never been heard of again. The other guy, his uncle? He went missing for a time as well. Everyone heard about this in the area, and things got tense. It was an ugly time, to be honest, and I’m glad they never actually confirmed that we had watched it all from the comfort of our home. Guess it helps to have large windows? The dealer died eventually a few years later from complications linked to the attack. The older nephew still operates in the area. His nephew, though, still never came back. I haven’t asked, but I guess that he has never ever felt safe again in his life. Such is life.”
Neighborhood Nightmare
“My neighbors have been bullying me for 20 years, since the day I moved into my house. They stepped up their campaign when I became seriously ill 12 years ago, because like most bullies, they’re also prejudiced, and they prey on the weak and vulnerable. They LOVE to kick people when they perceive them as down. On Friday, the neighbors next door, who have caused me to develop PTSD and live like a prisoner in my own home, teamed up with my narcissist ‘Mother’ who has ingratiated herself to them. She pretended to give them all my personal details (because they don’t know I have a Harassment Warning out against her and haven’t actually spoken to get for years), and were all standing outside the front of my house, in an acutely obvious manner. They were talking at the top of their voices about me being ‘mentally ill’ and seeing exactly how far they could get my so called ‘Mother’ to join in with them, basically in front of me. Which just for the record, was all the way. There was literally NOTHING, however despicable, that they could say about me, that she would not agree with, just to ingratiate herself with them and make herself popular with these people, who have attacked her own daughter twice and are basically trying to bully me to death in my own home.
After attacking me, and getting their corrupt policeman brother-in-law to falsify police reports claiming I am ‘very paranoid’ and simply imagined it all, my neighbors then set about spreading false rumors and hate campaigns, stating that I had imagined it all and was a ‘weirdo’ and a ‘loon’, as well as their usual campaign that I am a ‘Benefit Cheat’.
On Friday, in desperation, and having had every report about these people I have made to the police ignored for YEARS, I put a note in what I thought was one of the slightly more friendly neighbor’s letterboxes, telling them what these people were doing to me, and that I hadn’t actually spoken to my ‘Mother’ for years. I had noticed that she kept ‘updating’ people about me with total lies and made the situation far worse, so the note was basically a way of me defending myself for once and letting them know that what she was telling people was obviously not true.
Part of the note I put through their door, because it matters for what comes next, read:
‘Frankly if I did not have pets I do not want to leave behind, I would have killed myself already.’
These people were WELL AWARE that these people are bullies. They know they are incredibly prejudiced, because these people stand outside their drive, saying Hate Speech at the tops of their voices, always about me, because it is from there that they know I will best hear it. So imagine what the thought process must have been, for the two supposedly ‘friendly’ neighbors to take my note, and walk right up to the people they KNEW full well have been bullying me for 20 YEARS, and HAND THEM MY NOTE.
This is the conversation that immediately followed from my prejudiced bullies reading that note:
Female Bully: ‘So what are we going to do to her NEXT?’
Male Bully: ‘Well we can’t do anything can we, she’s got cameras everywhere now.’
Female Bully: ‘Next thing we’re going to do to her is to go out and get some poison, and throw it straight over her fence.’
So my bullies have literally just read a note that says the only thing that has STOPPED me from hurting myself already is that I don’t want to leave my pets behind, and so the NEXT thing they’ve decided to do to me, (note that NEXT is the operative word with these people), is murder my pets, because that will kill me faster.
I’m not sure which is the more disturbing, the gas lighting prejudiced bullies plotting to poison my pets, or the supposedly ‘friendly’ neighbors who ask me ‘How I am’, take in my parcels, and send me Christmas cards, handing people who are basically bullying me to death, a note with all my personal information on within 10 minutes of me posting it through their letterbox.”
Heartbreaking Neighborhood Fight
“My neighbors dog was psychotic, and it would rip the boards off the fence trying to get into my yard to attack my female, docile, and sweet dog. Their dog would attack mine every time they were out together unless we kept them leashed and walking forward. One day, their dog was exceptionally aggressive, running up and down the fence line, growling and barking at my dog, who I guess had had enough and was starting to bark back, and she seemed very uneasy. I have a doggy door in my basement and a swimming pool, so my yard is very secure, except for the missing boards their dog had ripped off.
That evening, I was out with friends and I got a phone call from my neighbor’s sister, saying they were at the emergency vet’s office with their dog. They had to euthanize that dog, the trauma was so severe. They told me the neighbor on the other side of their house said my dog was in their yard and attacking their dog. My dog, a very stocky girl with a 15” chest, supposedly squeezed through a 12” hole in the fence and attacked their dog. Then allegedly my dog was circling their dog as she lay on the ground.
Now, if there had truly been a dog fight, my dog would have had more than one bite mark. She had one puncture wound on her neck. Their dog was shredded. It’s horrible to think of how she suffered, but I honestly believe that their dog (who was much thinner and sleeker, and completely psychotic) tried to get into my yard and got wedged in the fence and couldn’t escape, unable to defend herself, and my dog just had at her. My dog had been bullied by this dog daily for several years, and this aggressive dog was coming into her safe space, so she did her job and protected her yard.
When I offered my condolences and expressed my heartbreak over the situation, my neighbor asked that I just leave them alone. I got it, they were grieving and needed time. Then, three days later, I got a text asking what my intentions were with my dog. The neighbor told me, ‘Well, I can’t ask you to euthanize her, but I don’t want to live next to a vicious dog, so I am asking you to re-home her.’
Let me add here that her kids and my grandchildren have dog-sat for me so many times, and this dog adores kids. She loved my neighbors’ little girl and never ever made any attempt to so much as bristle around her. She would lay on her on the couch and give kisses and snuggle and allow kids to do anything they wanted to do to her, as long as she was getting attention. So I said I would not re-home her, that if they had repaired the fence and trained their dog, this never would have happened. Their dog tried to enter my yard and my dog stopped it.
That was in April. They haven’t spoken to me since. Not even an attempt to be cordial. At first, I was sad, as I missed our friendship. The neighbors’ dog’s attempt was to get into my yard and hurt my dog backfired, and I am supposed to be accountable. They own no part of their dog’s aggression or fence destruction, or their responsibility to repair the damage to the joint fence. I am sad that they lost their dog. I am sad that we lost our friendship. They are angry that the animal warden supported me, the laws support me, and they are powerless to hurt me because they hurt. It’s a sad situation, but one they have to own. So I guess I’ve been lucky with my neighbors until now. Every neighborhood probably has a family like this. Too bad I have to live next door to one.”