Got a pesky neighbor? These people share how they got back on them. Content has been edited for clarity purposes.
Months Of Harassment
“My friend’s awful neighbor would harass people on the block constantly. At any chance he got, he called the code compliance officers to cite them for having their grass one inch too high and even called the cops for ‘loud music’ which was not that loud.
Then my friend called in to place ads in the newspaper for huge ‘Moving Sales’ at this neighbor’s house.
The ad said, ‘Husband just died, everything must go! Many tools and hunting equipment, and a five-year-old Harley Davidson. Come early, bang on the door!’
So, all these rough bikers came roaring to the house at six a.m. Saturday morning.
My friend also arranged for salespeople to come at late hours. Also arranged for lots of goods and services to come to the house. Finally, my friend arranged for horrible adult magazines to come to the neighbor.
After a few months of harassment, the neighbor sold his house and moved.
My friend innocently asked, ‘Why are you moving?’
The neighbor answered, ‘Ah, this neighborhood is going to pot.'”
“The Mom Got Involved”
“I had a downstairs neighbor who at first was wonderful. Our daughters were the same age and went to the same school. All was good until the girls had a petty argument and the mom got involved. After that, it was war.
She called the landlord saying we were too loud, the noise from my shower kept her son awake, and I parked too close to her car. My response was always unfailingly polite (kill ‘em with kindness).
He finally told her to stop bugging him and work it out between us. She didn’t and decided to step up the harassment.
Her downfall came the day the police and CYS (Child and Youth Services) showed up at my door one day. My neighbor made a report that my daughter threw a rock at her daughter and it took 10 stitches to close the cut on her scalp. The police wanted to question my kids and CYS was there to take them away as my neighbor also told them we lived in squalor. I politely invited them in to my very clean apartment and asked if anyone wanted coffee.
They all said, ‘No.’
Then one asked, ‘Ma’am, where are your kids?’
I told him, ‘Well that’s going to take a while since for the past month they have been in Florida with their dad. He has visitation with them for two months every summer. They’ll be back in the middle of August if you want to wait.’
She was charged with making false reports to the police and CYS. They moved a few months later. Funny thing, the girls ended up being friends again all on their own; the way it would have been without parental interference.”
Car Scratches
“After I moved to a new town in the United Kingdom and was living in a decent enough suburb of a large town in West Sussex. At the time I owned a VW Passat estate (station wagon), it was a pewter or metallic grey color; a very nice car.
One morning I came out to find it had been scratched from one end to the other, in some places down to the metal. I was livid. A neighbor saw me examining the damage and told me it was done by the two kids who lived at the end of the close. Their mother couldn’t bear anyone having a better car than them, since they owned a ten-year-old red Ford Sierra. She would tell her boys to scratch the car. I couldn’t believe my ears but some other neighbors came out and confirmed the story.
Well, every Sunday at 10:00 AM sharp, this family would all wash and polish the family car, have lunch, and then go for a drive, dressed up as if they were going to a wedding. So the following week, I bought two bottles of clutch fluid.
On one very early Sunday morning, I poured it all over the bonnet, roof, and boot. For those who have never seen the effects of clutch fluid on car paint, it’s very effective. The paint very quickly swelled up, blistered, and then burst, revealing the bare metalwork. Believe me, I’ve seen the results.
At around 9:45 am, I started to ‘work’ on my car when the family started to come out with buckets of foaming water, ready to clean their car. Within minutes, the shrieks and screams could be heard a mile off. The sleepy Sunday morning was rent with the noise.
Being ‘concerned’, I approached the distraught family and enquired what had happened. I was shown the damage, it was impressive. The blister on the bonnet had already burst and the one on the boot was due any minute.
I looked the woman in the eye and exclaimed, ‘Little pricks, I wonder if it’s the same ones who scratched my car?’
She looked back at me and knew it was me who had vandalized her car but there was nothing she could say or do. Several of the neighbors bought me pints in the local bar that Sunday lunchtime.”
Dog Barks
“My wife and I were newly married in 1970 and rented our first place, a garage apartment. It overlooked the landlord’s house and a fence surrounded his backyard. All was well until the landlord brought home a dog for his son.
The dog was an ‘inside’ dog but the landlord would let the dog out the back door at night to relieve itself. The landlord forgot to let the dog back in a few times and the dog would yelp endlessly. Sometimes all night long.
Naturally, we couldn’t sleep with all this barking going on. And we didn’t want to find another place because rental properties at that time were very scarce. After another night of barking, I rolled over in the bed, picked up the phone, and called the landlord’s number. When he picked up, I hung up. As the dog kept barking, I kept calling the landlord’s phone and hanging up.
Finally, the landlord put two and two together, came outside, and brought the dog back inside. We never saw or heard the dog again. Problem solved.
Psychology 101 paid off that night!”
Handicapped Parking Zone
“Many years ago, we were living in Florida and had a neighbor that was paranoid and extremely aggressive. It started with our pets being poisoned and escalated from there.
We had the main electric feed to the property cut, the water turned off and padlocked, and had damage to plants and landscaping on the property line, etc. I installed an extensive security system (45 cameras with night vision and sound) after which things calmed down for a while.
The next thing was a handicapped parking zone installed for him. He was allegedly handicapped, which I have nothing against that. It was the fact that it was not in front of his house but instead, in front of ours. That was the last straw.
I hired a private investigator and had him followed 24/7 for months. Yes, it was expensive but it was worth it. Finally, his next move was to take us to court for code violations and the use of his ‘personal’ parking space. During the court proceedings, we presented all the blueprints, permits, and sign-offs that showed everything we did was within the law. However, he made a huge pain of himself especially when it was clear he was losing. Finally, he claimed we blocked his view of the ocean, which while untrue required the entire courtroom to pay a visit to his home to see his alleged lack of a view. Unbeknownst to him, we had done a full investigation of the history of his property including permits, construction, and violations.
Once on his property, which was two stories high, he could not make his case for the lack of view since ours was three stories. However, he made it very clear he had built fully from lot line to lot line and installed windows overlooking his neighbors on both sides. That was a clear violation.
In the end, he managed to prove to the court that his entire renovation of 1/3 of his building was completely illegal and the original property was built four feet too close to the lot line. The court ruled he would have to apply for a variance and no matter what the result was, he had to eliminate all windows on the lot lines. If the variance was denied he would be required to demolish the addition done without permits. He would also have to apply for a hardship variance for the original property as he purchased it. In the end, he got his hardship variance but lost the battle for the new construction which he had to remove at great expense. We also got the handicapped parking removed since we had him on camera clearly not handicapped.
The moral of the story: People in glass houses (or illegal ones) should never throw stones (or lawsuits).”
His Idea of Fun Was To Hurt People
“Many years back, I was in primary school. I was nine. Our neighbor was one of my teachers and as luck would have it, her son was in my class and a nasty piece of work. His idea of fun was to run up behind someone and if it was a boy hit them hard on the back of the head, and if it was a girl he would pull their hair. He never got into trouble as his mother protected him.
One day I saw him running up behind me so I turned and hit him. I ‘tapped his claret’ good and proper. After that, his mother did everything she could to punish me, up to and including the slipper.
That winter of 1963 was very cold. So one night, I spent the night getting up every quarter-hour and spraying her car with water. In the morning, I was exhausted but her car had a huge layer of ice over the top, frozen solid about two inches thick.
I do wonder if my parents ever realized why I was in such a rush to get to school the next day when normally it took a bomb to get me out of bed.”
Cat Lady
“Many years ago, I lived in a condo complex. My next-door neighbor was an angry old woman who lived alone. She had a cat that was frequently outdoors.
One day when I got home from work, her cat jumped up on the hood of my car because it liked the warmth. Normally this wouldn’t bother me, but the cat was scratching up the paint on my car with its claws. I decided to nicely ask her if she could keep her cat indoors, as it was damaging my car.
She became belligerent and yelled at me, ‘I can’t control what my cat does. You’re just going to have to accept that my cat will go on your car whenever it wants. If your paint gets scratched then that’s just too bad and that’s YOUR problem! How DARE you ask me to control my cat!’
The next day when I got home from work, I laid strips of duct tape on the hood of my car sticky side up. Sure enough, a few minutes later, her cat jumped up on the hood of my car, laid down on the sticky duct tape, and rolled around. The cat had duct tape stuck all over it and wasn’t happy. The old lady came out and started screaming at me.
She also called the police and tried to get me arrested for animal cruelty.
I explained to the police officer, ‘I put duct tape on my car. There are no laws forbidding that.’
The police officer agreed and told her I hadn’t broken any laws. The old lady lost her mind and started yelling at me and the police officer. The cop warned her that she was now on the verge of being arrested. She went back into the house.
A week later she moved out.”
Underage Drinking
“My parents scraped every little bit they had together to buy a two-family house on a small quiet dead-end road to have a safe place to raise their children. We had 14 houses of great neighbors, and one house of very nasty neighbors, the Dicksons. A whole family of dirtbags who rented an apartment in the house just before ours. Their 16-year-old son, Junior, was friends with the overgrown child of a tenant we had when we bought our house. The tenant was in his 40s and hung out with the teenagers next door. One of the first interactions we had with anyone in that family was when my mother caught Junior rummaging through our things in our private basement.
My father tried getting them to quiet down, but they got louder. He tried talking to the father to control his son, but his son was ‘a man now’, so the father had and desired no control in the house. They would have loud drinking parties with his son’s teenage friends clearly not old enough to drink.
The police came several times, but it seemed the Dicksons lived with a police scanner in every room, so things got eerily quiet when a call came over the radio with their address. The father would claim not to know anything about the problem and would talk to ‘the boys’. The police were bothered by this, but couldn’t force their way into the apartment without a warrant or probable cause and nothing incriminating was ever left out in the open.
A neighbor’s child once called 911 accidentally and the police had to check the house for possible victims. Apparently, a 911 call is a probable cause for entry even if you answer the door and say everyone is ok. The police also didn’t dispatch cars to 911 calls or domestic abuse calls over the radio. The dispatcher would contact the officer with their Nextel phones or you’d hear the dispatcher telling the officer to call into the station. The public would not hear the person’s address for privacy purposes or possibly to not alert an aggressor.
This gave me the perfect opportunity as a nerdy 14-year-old. I knew all about phone systems and with the tips about the ‘privacy’ policy the police had in place for 911 calls. So I got to work.
My mother and I took a bunch of pictures of the morons in the yard with kids drinking Natty Lites, and some glass pipes clearly not used for legal purposes, and got them developed.
The next Thursday night I went to work, like some super agent spy or something. I had it all planned out for a while beforehand. One night I connected two long thin wires to their phone box and left the ends in a bush where our yards met.
The wire ends were left in the bush until Friday night came along. I walked over, threw the envelope of pictures on the front stairs, twisted the wire connections to a cheap phone we had, and dialed 911. Now the 911 operator would see the call as coming from the Dicksons’ phone line. I remember making it sound like I was crying and saying something stupid about a little girl, to which there were no girls at any of these parties. Then I twisted the wires together which is the equivalent of leaving the phone off the hook.
Soon thereafter the police showed up. Not one or two cars, but six local cars (which might have been all of them), two cars from the next town over, two staties, a fire truck, an ambulance, and then a couple unmarked or off-duty showed up. Nothing happened on the scanner until after they were already all on the scene. Both parents were arrested, the house was ransacked trying to find the girl, but instead finding strung out kids hiding in closets, a larger amount of weed than any of us expected, and satisfaction.
Junior was arrested for resisting and assaulting police officers. The street was completely impassible for anyone including the police trying to leave while for the next hour or two as the parents of the other kids came to claim their little delinquents. A couple of them had warrants and were also arrested on sight. I was scared out of my mind for what felt like weeks afterward.
My uncle had helped me with some of the planning including the tip about twisting the wires together afterward so 911 wouldn’t be able to call back. My father realized what I did rather quickly and I confessed as soon as he gave me that ‘Holy mole what did you do look’.
He told me how horrible it was what I did, but that they deserved it and he hoped I would talk to him before trying anything like that again. When the police finally left around four hours later, he went and plucked out the phone wires. He was laughing like a mad scientist telling my mother what happened when she came home from work. After several criminal charges and a nice article in the newspaper, the landlord finally kicked out his ‘perfect’ tenants.
We had almost 20 years of peaceful neighbors after that.”
Side-By-Side Driveway
“Twenty-five years ago, my husband and I rented a house for a year until we could save a down payment to buy a home. Our neighbor’s driveway and ours were side by side and rather long, but required a little car jockey at times. The neighbor suggested we stagger our vehicles, so they could get in our driveway and back out and vice versa. That worked out really well until our neighbor died.
When our new neighbors moved in, it was an older couple and their adult son. Unfortunately, they didn’t like that suggestion at all. Within a week, there was a chain-link fence from the road to the rear of the property and no trespassing signs every 10 feet or so. There wasn’t fencing anywhere else so they weren’t trying to keep a pet safe or anything. Just making sure we didn’t use a smidge of their property. There was street parking also and you could only back in one direction because the fence was literally to the road.
I left one day to get groceries and when I got home there was a police car in their driveway. After I carried bags in and went back out to get the rest, I walked right into a pair of cops and the adult son. He began ranting the moment I walked out. The officers had to literally step between us.
Apparently, I had demolished his fence with my reckless driving. So we walked over and they asked him to point out this demolition. He had one of the little metal rods with the reflector to show that my bumper was mangled and scratched. He kept pointing at that, but I nor the officers could see.
Then he said, ‘She left the scene of the accident! I want her arrested immediately!’
When one officer picked up the reflector and poked it back in the ground, this guy went berzerk. He took his little cordless phone and called the cops on the cops, screaming how I wanted to act like a snob and pretend I didn’t know him when I did. Then claimed I used my feminine wiles to get the first set of cops to destroy the evidence.
During all this hullabaloo, my husband and younger brother pulled in as my brother was working my job at our business. I thought my husband was going to kill this fruitcake.
Turns out, he was one of my little brother’s school friends. He was mad that I didn’t recognize him. I moved out long before my brother graduated and never paid a bit of attention to his friends.
My brother finally got him calm but he insisted I be arrested. He wanted a report and planned to sue me.
I was in the yard crying over my spoiled groceries and the prospect of possibly having to give birth to my son in jail. Yes, I was 38 weeks pregnant and yes, my husband was livid.
Thankfully, we were told by the officers that no report was happening, and gave us their cards if anything happened.
They said, ‘Just try to not even let your shadow fall across his darn fence.’
Our job was installing kitchens and bathrooms. So every chance he got my hubby would toss a handful of nails through the fence. I wonder to this day if they ever figured out why they kept getting flat tires.”
Don’t Mess With His Sprinklers
“This was Central Florida. The lawns were St. Augustine grass, so with a lot of water, mulching, and fertilizer, they grew a couple of inches a week. The leaves were wide and tough unlike the soft lawns up north.
My neighbor disliked me because I built a two-story house that blocked the view of the lake. We worked for the same company and he was upset that I was hired at a management level although he didn’t work for me.
Our lawns were about a 1/3 acre. So a Saturday cut and trim would easily take three hours with a normal lawnmower.
He bought a basic riding lawnmower, and he would drive his mower on my property, up to 5′ before making a U-Turn. That was fine, except he would make the hard turn on top of my sprinklers. Almost every week, I had to replace the broken PVC pipe, digging up my lawn. I tried several things to dissuade him, but in the end on a Friday night, I brought home about 20′ of high-strength braided steel cabling. It was the smallest diameter I could find.
I uncoiled it, surrounded it around the sprinkler heads, and pushed it down into the tall grass so you would never see it. But you would hear it. I was in my garage when I knew he ran over it. The racket it made was frightening.
Even a 25″ blade on a 10 HP motor couldn’t cut it. But it did wrap it around the shaft and stalled the motor. All 20 feet of the cable were gone from my yard.
He had to push his mower to the garage and spent the rest of the day disassembling his mower to untangle the mess.
That was the last time he went on my lawn.”