Ah, neighbors. You can't live with them, and you can't live without them. For these people, they DEFINITELY wished they could live without them. From straight up weirdos to abusive liars, it's a miracle these people lived to tell these tales.
Crazy Old Delores Didn’t Care For Strangers In Her Yard
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“Crazy old Delores. Lived kitty-corner to my parents’ backyard growing up. My sister and I always tip-toe sprinted past her house to be as quick and quiet as possible.
One spring day our other neighbor lost their puppy. The whole family was out looking for it. Well, the dad was checking under cars and gets to Delores’s prehistoric Chevy that was held together with duct tape and a prayer. I don’t think the thing even ran. Well, Dolores kicks open her front door and pumps the weapon she’s got strapped to her chest. The guy backs away hands up as quickly as he could trying to explain about the puppy. Dolores would tell anybody who listened how she caught a Mexican trying to steal her car. (It should be noted that we lived in a particularly safe neighborhood in a relatively safe, quiet city so the fact that her first instinct was to grab the weapon was a particular overreaction)
One day my dad hired a plumber. The plumber coincidentally grew up in the neighborhood and unfortunately had his bike stolen as a kid. He told us he had been hired by Dolores’s children to fix something in her crawl space and while he’s inching along in the dark he sees a collection of nearly a dozen children’s bicycles including his own. She just stole and collected kids bikes as a sadistic hobby.”
She Wanted To Teach These Parents A Lesson
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“My previous next door neighbor was awful. She called CPS on us last year because my older two sons (7 and 5 years old at the time) were playing football in the front yard during a sun shower. She basically told CPS that we locked all of our kids (including our toddler) outside during a thunderstorm and wouldn’t let them back inside. She said they were begging to come in and we wouldn’t let them. It was a complete lie. They were having fun, the door wasn’t locked, and my wife could see them from the living room window. We got a CPS visit and the case was closed. A few days later, my wife was outside playing with our toddler when the neighbor approached my wife and asked her if she had learned her lesson.
We try not to make any contact with her after that, but she has made complaints about our tree house and complaints about the kids playing too loudly outside. She also called CPS on our friends across the street because their son had a black eye. He got the black eye in wrestling, but the neighbor called anyway. She frequently yelled at kids for not wearing jackets at the bus stop and still went to the bus stop with her 12-year-old. I let my kids ride their bikes to school with their friends and she expressed concern about that as well.
We had a neighborhood party once she finally moved.”
They Caught This Little Girl Red-Handed For This Stunt
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“The little girl next door to our rental house lived with her father and grandparents and I guess she didn’t want to tell them that she got her period so she started throwing her used sanitary pads over the fence into our yard where my dog would chew them up and come running into the house with his new ‘toys.’ We couldn’t figure out where they were coming from until I set up a sting operation (basically peering angrily out of my kitchen window from behind the curtains like a crazy old bat for two hours straight). We caught her, ahem, red-handed and told her granny who was suitably horrified. I assume they had ‘the talk’ because it stopped that day.”
This Neighbor Had An Ultimately Crappy Meltdown
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“There’s a girl who lives next door to me who’s probably about 19 years old. I don’t talk to her or her family as they’re not very neighborly.
At around 1:30 a.m. one night, I’m gaming in my basement with my headphones on and the window open for a nice draft. All of a sudden I begin to hear something in the background. I take my headphones off and all I can hear is a girl screaming bloody murder and making weird gurgling noises. I rushed upstairs to see if my parents were okay and find out what the heck is going on at that time of night.
Turns out, the girl was having some sort of illegal substance-fueled episode. My dad saw everything. From what he told me, the girl had a fight with her mom and lost it. She ran outside the house and started screaming while rolling on the lawn. The best part is that they’re crap neighbors and don’t pick up their dogs’ turds. She rolled in poop and her mom had to run out after her and forcefully bring her crap covered daughter back into the house.”
They Just Wanted Peace And Quiet, But Now They’re Living In A Nightmare
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“Currently have neighbors out of a nightmare. We just bought our first house last year, on the street I grew up on. Always been a very chill and quiet neighborhood, which was a big part of the appeal, in addition to the fact that we both loved and could afford it. Everything about this place is perfect. All the neighbors are nice and quiet…except one house.
Dog that barks incessantly? Check
Super loud parties every weekend? Check and check. (I have to get up at 4 a.m. for work on Saturdays so this peeves me greatly)
Blaring explicit gangster rap outside all day/night all weekend? Oh you betcha!
Kids of all ages running amok throughout all above listed activities, often until well after midnight? Yes, sir.
A plethora of uber-trashy signs promoting vigilante home protection and weapon ownership? Obviously.
These people are the worst. We have called Animal Control on them multiple times, after which the lady of the house inevitably runs out into the street screaming about ‘whichever of you jerks want to call the freaking cops on me, come on out so I can beat your freaking butt!’
Animal control won’t come out again unless we file a Nuisance Abatement, under which the accused would have access to who filed the report. I am here alone with my kids all day. No thank you.
So now we just call the sheriff’s department (which they told us to do), but I am pretty sure the neighbors have a scanner because their bull usually quit shortly after we call. My husband is about ready to go balls-out crazy on these people, and I just don’t know what to do anymore.”
Her Child Had To Beg Her Neighbor To Let These Charges Drop
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“I rented a house in a nice neighborhood with lots of young kids, and everyone knew each other. My neighbor is a grandpa who has custody of his two grandsons because their mom is in jail. They were great neighbors for the first few months. The boys have lived a traumatic life but are sweet kids.
Mom gets out of jail. She is doing ok, gets a job, is focusing on her kids. Then she gets a new boyfriend. They both start doing illegal stuff. All the neighbors notice that anything that’s not nailed down goes missing. Leave your mower on the side of your house-gone, kids leave toys in the front yard in broad daylight-gone, and so on.
My husband and I leave for work one day and not 15 minutes after we’re gone, we get a call from another neighbor that the mom, her boyfriend, and someone they have never seen were in our house. I call cops and race home. Cops probably missed them by minutes. The tv, computers, and game consoles are all gone. Luckily, they did not find my jewelry.
Cops track them down and they go to jail. The next day one of the grandson’s is at my front door crying. ‘I just saw my mom in jail. She wanted me to ask you that if she got your stuff back if you could get the charges dropped. I just want my mom to come home.’
It broke my heart to have to explain to that kid that it was a state charge and there was nothing I could do to get his mom out. Ten days pass and guess who’s out of jail and right back next door. The jail is so overcrowded that non-violent offenders get released without even being arraigned.
She proceeds to sit on her front porch and glare at us every chance she got. About a month later, child protective services show up at my door. Someone reported that we were doing illegal substances, drinking, our house was filthy, and our kids were neglected. I invited the nice lady in, let her see the house, and let her interview our kids, while we waited outside. Once she was done I asked if we could know who called. She said it was anonymous and couldn’t tell me. I proceeded to tell her who I thought it was, and why they called (junky neighbors attempt to harass us). I even showed her a copy of the police report. She said obviously we were good parents and nothing bad was happening at our house, but could she please have a copy of the police report for her file? That confirmed for me that it was her who called.
A few months later, we moved several thousand miles away. I still had the news app for that city on my phone and would read it once in a while. About two weeks before the burglary case was set to go to trial, she was found executed in a ditch. Her boyfriend was the suspect. She had threatened to testify against him in the burglary trial. And that is my story about my neighbor out of a nightmare.”
Not Even Bob Ross Was Quiet Enough For This Crazy Neighbor
“He shared a wall with me and my now ex. We couldn’t make a peep after 9 p.m. without him angrily beating on the wall or our door. His reason for sleeping so early? He had to get up early to go skiing. This man didn’t have a job, he just skied every day. It made it hard to feel bad about his sleep.
One night probably around 10 p.m., my ex and I were watching Bob Ross, and Bob must’ve tapped his paint brush too hard because it sent my neighbor into a frenzy(and at this point we learned to watch things very quietly). He banged on my door and when I opened it he was in his boxers with his man parts flopping out. He told me he called the cops because he’s had it with our noise and I told him that I’d make sure I’d tell the cop that his junk was out when he came to my door. Shut him the heck up real fast.
Cop comes to my door and I open it only to see that it’s the cop my sister had been sleeping with. He realizes that it’s me, laughs, and closes the door. The neighbor moved when the snow melted.”
She Never Kept Her Eye On Her Grandkids
“I had a neighbor across the hall who was an old lady with custody of three grandkids; one of them being a toddler. I was outside one day and heard the toddler yelling and looked up at the second story window to see him standing up on the window sill, and the only thing keeping him from falling was the screen. I went up and banged on their door, but no one ever came. I went back outside and he had gotten down. Several months later it was spitting snow one night around midnight and I came into the parking lot to see the little boy outside in nothing but a diaper with a woman I didn’t recognize. Turns out she found him walking around out by the road (probably 100 yards from the apartment) and called the cops. Police showed up to find mamaw and her boyfriend passed out and some illegal substances there with them. None of them ever came back to the apartment.”
Her Reign Of Terror Seems Like It’ll Never End
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“First, she managed to sink her claws into our ‘actual neighbor’ who owned the house by acting as his guardian angel as he was dying of cancer. Pretty sure she was hanging around the chemo ward trying to meet people. Of course, my sick neighbor left her the house when he passed away.
One of her first neighborly acts was when she decided to chop down our 60-year-old 15-foot high front yard privacy hedges (50 feet in length) into a 4-foot high mess. These trees were 100% entirely on our property (we weren’t home, imagine coming home to that!). She also threw about 60 pounds of mothballs underneath the trees to keep our cats from her yard as she claimed they were spraying. Our cats have always been fixed, but her two cats weren’t.
Then she told me, in front of my young children, that she was going to buy a weapon and kill my cats. Then she wrote a letter to city hall complaining about my dog barking, complete with an ‘incident report’ that detailed times of the alleged barks, even though we were out of the country at the time and the dog was at a pet sitter. Then, just to add some weight to her complaint, she made a dozen copies and handed them out to every neighbor, with a pre-stamped envelope so all they had to do was sign the letter and mail in their complaint. Fortunately, they laughed in her face and didn’t comply. She used to jab a stick through the fence to freak our dog out and make her bark, and she did the same to the neighbors on the other side too.
She also wrote libelous slanderous letters about us and handed them out to the neighbors. She passive-aggressively hung up fluorescent orange tarp along the back fence (it was a wire fence on our side with hedges on her side so the effort she went thru to wedge herself between the trees and the fence to hang 75 feet of tarp must have been astronomical). The tarp was used for paint drop cloth so it looked awful, and the only reason she did it was so that our yard looked like a horrible crap hole while the tarp wouldn’t even have been visible to her side.
Another time my kid was having a typical kid-like temper tantrum and I decided to let her cry it out…. and the witch neighbor called the cops and said we were abusing our kid. Nice, hey?”
His Records Proved He Was Bound To Be A Terrible Neighbor
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“I was a single mom with a busy career and a teenager. I often had several teens staying over because they had family issues, etc.
A guy moves in across the street from our house (I owned mine, he ‘rented’ his from his parents.)
We soon discover that he’s a registered offender. Great! But he seemed like he was staying to himself so I just kept an eye on things. Over the course of a few months, he started getting crazy. Here are some highlights: He worked out in his garage non-stop, with the door open, grunting like crazy. He would sit in his open garage at night watching every single coming and going at my house. He escalated to getting ticked off that one girl parked on the street in front of his house (legally). The next day she found that he’d deliberately turned his hose sprinkler to douse her car with water (window was stuck open), poured molasses or something on her windshield and broke her radio antenna. When she was looking at her car the next morning, he came out hurling threats at her. He slashed the tires of the next kid who parked on his side of the road, harassed my son every time he was outside, and threatened to have ‘crazies murder your whole family.’
It became terrifying and was just escalating every day. I was so freaked out. During this period, my dog died suddenly. I’m pretty sure he poisoned her.
One day, my son walked over to him, asked him to talk ‘man to man’ and basically told him there needed to be peace. They ended that conversation shaking hands. It all stopped. My son later got an apartment and I moved to a neighboring town to live with my then boyfriend. I rented out the house and my tenant told me hilarious stories like the guy standing in his open garage wearing only a towel. It’s been five years since I’ve lived there.
I recently learned that he’s in prison for brutally violating two different women in his house. One was stabbed with a knife (in her area). I know this because I requested and read all the court docs. Horrifying.”
She Didn’t Believe She Could Take Care Of “Her” Kids
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“There was a lady who lived next door to our duplex, who I’m sure was on illegal substances. No one took her seriously at all. My parents had custody of my sister’s four kids, but this lady was dead convinced they were actually mine (Yes. a 15-year-old is the mother of a 5-year-old, a 3-year-old, a 1-year-old, and a 6-month-old).
In private, she regarded them as my children and even once claimed that she knew they were mine. I’ll admit, I wasn’t some helicopter caretaker because I was a teenager, but I think I wasn’t overly negligent either. I had a lot on my plate. As soon as I got home from school, their babysitter would drop them off so I would be watching four little ones for four hours.
The two youngest would go down for their afternoon naps, and I’d then proceed to clean which was another responsibility of mine. If I didn’t get it done, my dad would flip his lid, scream at me and ground me. So I put the babies in their cribs, and waited until when I thought they were asleep, and proceeded to go clean the kitchen. In a matter of 10 minutes, the 1-year-old managed to get out of his crib, out of his room, unlocked the front door, go down the stairs, unlock the shed, open it, get naked, and opened a can of paint. I didn’t hear a thing over the water and dishes, plus the kitchen was not in the path between the bedroom and the front door. The lady called the cops and grabbed him and came to the door and proceeded to scream at me and said she would do all it takes to make sure that I am never allowed to birth a child again. Now, I can understand being upset at finding a baby in that situation. However, when the facts were laid out, you need to let it go. It was an honest accident. My nephew was undiagnosed autistic at the time, and anyone who knows autistic kids, they’re stealthy, sneaky, and clever as heck. He was not your average one-year-old and we were just now figuring that out.
The cops were like ‘shrug, stuff happens, just keep a better eye on him and invest in better childproof locks.’
Run-ins with this woman would happen a multitude of times throughout our three years of living in that duplex. She once called the cops on me because I was letting my 5-year-old nephew play in our gated front yard. One Halloween, we had made arrangements where my nephew was going to be going trick or treating with her and her son (they were friends). I had volunteered at a haunted house and my ride had arrived early (not crazy early, just… a half an hour early). I walked over to her house and asked if it were okay if I dropped him off a half an hour early because I had somewhere to be and my ride was early. She said sure, but I shouldn’t be surprised if the police show up at the church looking for me. For what??? Apparently child abandonment.
I don’t know what the heck was going on in this lady’s head, but I hope her kids are doing okay.”
He Seemed Friendly At First, But Then Things Got Weird
“I once had an upstairs neighbor (we’ll just call him Upstairs) for about three months before he got evicted. When Upstairs moved in, he knocked on my door to introduce himself, and tell me to let him know if I was ever bothered by noise. Excellent! He had the strangest haircut I’ve ever seen (shaved with a ponytail in the back, but with…disembodied pointy sideburns, and some of it was dyed blue?). But hey, we all have our quirks.
I soon realized that Upstairs traps you in conversations every time you see him. He would also stop like two minutes into every conversation, shake my hand, and introduce himself again. But hey, sometimes people are weird and that’s fine. I totally sympathize with awkwardness.
Eventually Upstairs seemed to convince himself that we had met before in another town (we hadn’t) and that it was fate that we met again (it wasn’t) and possibly that we were soulmates (we weren’t).
He was constantly on every stimulant ever and just kind of…never slept. And thanks to his love of playing music full volume at 3 a.m., none of us ever slept either. He also screamed, full on screamed, the lyrics to each song.
I later heard from other neighbors that he had been propping the doors open at night so his dealer could come in.
And that another neighbor had seen him in the parking lot one night, naked from the waist down, setting an abandoned van on fire. He also had a very loud speakerphone, must have had it hooked up to his sound system, and I got to hear half a conversation of his friend saying things like ‘Well, of course, he called the cops on you, you chased him with an ax.’
I started getting cryptic notes and a postcard under my door, and then more notes asking me to return the previous notes. Guess he was just lending them to me?
One night at 1:30 a.m., he knocked on my door, then went around and knocked on my window when I didn’t answer, then came back around to the door again. I opened the door with the chain on and we had a conversation that started with ‘Upstairs. It’s 1:30. I’m going to bed.’ ‘You weren’t in bed. You were sitting on the couch.’ and ended with him angrily asking if I just wanted him to ‘bugger off forever’ and me saying yes, please do that.
The noise got worse.
This all culminated in a night where a couple neighbors and I confronted him over the noise. I had no idea how soundproof my ceiling actually was until I went up there. It was like concert level volume. I didn’t know a human could make that much noise.
He was…very not sober when he eventually answered the door, and the conversation went nowhere. After we all went back to our rooms, he started throwing things on his floor (my ceiling) and yelling, ‘How do you like that, witch?’
Upstairs left the apartment that night, accompanied by police, at 4 a.m., after three separate 911 noise complaints from different neighbors. I felt kind of bad using 911 for that at the time, but looking back my only regret is that they didn’t arrive while he was blasting ‘I fought the law and the law won.'”
She Tried To Be The Parking Monitor Of This Neighborhood
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“I lived across the street from a very bored stay-at-home mom whose excess idle time turned her into an insufferable busybody. Her husband backed out of the driveway and slammed into my roommate’s car parked on the curb. He apologized, gave us his insurance info, and took care of it. He was never a problem because he accepted responsibility for what he did.
His wife, however, demanded that we never ever park any cars at the curb again, because ‘we can’t get out of our driveway otherwise.’ The street was very wide – she was just completely unable to accept that the accident was her husband’s fault, and figured we were somehow responsible for it, ergo we were responsible for preventing it in the future.
We told her that we would avoid parking there whenever possible, but that we still had the legal right to park on the street, and that if necessary we would still do so, and that it was her and her husband’s responsibility to avoid hitting other people’s legally parked cars when backing out of the driveway. She wasn’t happy with that answer, but just told us we better stay out of her family’s way, and stormed off.
One day, she came storming over, banging on the front door, cussing us out. We got her on our security camera saying ‘If you don’t move that dang car in the next 10 minutes, I am going to freaking total it with my truck. It’ll be your fault, and you’ll have to pay for the damage to my freaking vehicle.’ To this, I simply responded: ‘I don’t know whose car that is, but I didn’t park it there. I have you on camera, so if you do anything to that car, I’ll have to call the police and hand over this tape.’ She then threatened to sue me for an invasion of privacy for recording her and still insisted that we move the car, even though it wasn’t our property. We just ignored her, and she did not do anything to the car – we did keep the recording though.
A few weeks later, I had a friend visit from out of town. He parked his car on the curb, and then started unloading some stuff from his trunk. She came storming out, screaming and cussing at him ‘I have told you repeatedly never park your freaking car on this curb. If you don’t move it, I am going to freaking total it, and you can freaking pay for a new car, as well as the damage you do to mine!’ He tried to calm her down and asked if there was somewhere else he could park, and she replied ‘You can park it in a fire because that’s where you’ll end up after I freaking kill you!’
Unfortunately for her, he had his dashcam running the whole time, and it captured everything. He called the police, and she was arrested for threatening to commit vandalism and for threatening violence. A few days later, she left a long-winded hate-letter in our mailbox. It was written as if it were an open letter from the entire neighborhood, and it basically said that ‘nobody knows who you are,’ and ‘Everyone wishes you would move away,’ and ‘Nobody wants you living in our neighborhood.’ Thing is, she forgot about the security cameras. I took the video of her opening my mailbox – which included her taking all our letters out of the mailbox and rifling through them – and I gave them to the post office. This led to her getting arrested for a second time that week.
After that, we used her two arrests, our collection of security and dashcam footage, and her letter to get a restraining order against her that actually prohibited her from entering her own home, and then we called the police every time we saw her because she was in violation of the order.
She ended up having to live in a hotel room, and her husband came over, apologized to us, and asked if we would drop the restraining order so his wife could come home. I told him I would do it, but only if she wrote me, my wife, our roommates, and the friend of mine she threatened an apology for her harassment and that she would promise to never ever contact us again for any reason whatsoever moving forward.
I received no apology, and the house went on the market a week later.”
She Couldn’t Keep Quiet About This Horrible Noise Her Neighbors Were Making
“I had already had words with the building owners that while I felt deeply sad for them that whatever illegal substance user handyman wannabe they had hired to manage the apartments had gone off with the rent again, they weren’t getting me to pony up extra money.
I suggested they add some questions to their hiring practices, specifically: Do you own window coverings or do you just nail sheets over the windows? and Do you have your own teeth or a reasonable replacement for your teeth? If the answers to these questions are no, then these are not PERMANENT type people.
Then they hired a father of five kids with no teeth or window coverings.
My beef with this dude was his treatment of the oldest daughter. Once, she was out on the balcony helping her little sister buckle her sandals. The father screams her name. She calls back where she is and what’s she doing. She was already scared, on account of she’s going to get in trouble for not coming right away, and she’s gonna get it for not getting her sister’s shoe buckled. This big meaty fist comes out the door, grabs her by a handful of hair, and rips her into the house. From there, I can only hear what he’s doing to her, and it’s not good.
This is basically every interaction. I hear it all. And every time, I call 911 in hysterics. And nothing happens. I never even see a squad car.
So one day it happens again, and I call 911, but instead of being panicked I am calm. I am channelling my inner ‘I would like to speak to your manager!’ attitude. I explain I am massively pregnant and exhausted and I have had enough! I am filing a noise complaint!
No problem. Right up until they ask me if the noise is the stereo or the television. Neither. It is the sound of this guy’s 11-year-old daughter being brutalized, and she’s screaming for him to please stop hurting her.
Excuse me? Are you making a noise complaint about a child being beaten!? You have my records, lady. I have made at least a half-dozen 911 calls in the past month, all about this child being brutally beaten. Right now, at this moment, I can tell he’s got her off the ground and he is slamming her against the wall. Her voice always gets fainter towards the end. I am legitimately curious whether he’s got her by the throat. In all the time I’ve called, nobody has ever freaking come.
So yes, I am making a noise complaint. Cops love noise complaints. The paperwork is simple, there’s almost never any follow-up needed. So I want a freaking cop here to tell an 11-year-old to keep her voice down while her dad beats her because she’s scaring the neighbors. I don’t give a crap what goes on the report, as long as someone freaking shows up.
Four squad cars, and a supervisor’s van, all pull up within two minutes. They stormed the apt and caught him red-handed. He was taken away in handcuffs.
He was back the next morning.”