An elderly neighbor across the street I had seen only one time in eight years, and that was when I cut my foot doing yard work and she showed up out of nowhere with bandages and was dumping hydrogen peroxide on me before she’d even explained who she was.
Two years after that the Police knocked on my door - turns out she had died in her house, and they wanted to know if I knew anything about her - they suspected foul play b/c the place was a mess inside. It looked fine from the outside - she had people always doing her yard and stuff. I told them the bandage story, the only time I had ever laid eyes on her. (They later determined it was natural causes).
While the Police, Coroner, etc were there, Animal Services brought out a bunch of cats, which were all well-cared for. Including the other neighbors’ cat, which had gone missing a year or so before, which she had apparently stolen. Still had the collar and name tag on.
I few people living on the street behind my yard fit that bill to a “T”.
If any of their houses caught fire and a live human being ran out, I’d be very surprised.
There’s a house a couple of blocks from us between a restaurant and a parking lot. The house looks normal enough, except all the blinds are always drawn. I never saw anyone come in or out for 15 years or so. When I finally did, they looked perfectly normal. I’d probably seen them in the neighborhood, just never happened to see them go in or out. I don’t know about the blinds; maybe they just walk around nekkid all the time.
There’s a rental house across the street from me. The owner rented it to some college students. The one whose name was on the lease, sub-let the extra rooms to other student who figuring out that they had no responsibility to the house turned it into a party house. They were smoking weed in the front yard, and leaving trash there.
One of my neighbors called the owner and the property manager, who did squat.
I put up with it for a bit, then one day I got so fed up, I called Code Enforcement. They stuck the owner with a walloping big fine, she kicked the kids out, then the kid’s parent came up and cleaned the house out. They were the ones that told me that there were bags of trash up to the ceiling in the basement.
Cpde Enforcement is the homeowner’s friend.
I rarely saw my former neighbor in the rental house across the street. The main clue that he lived there was his car parked in front of his rental. He moved a couple months ago, and I see the new neighbor entering and exiting her house a lot. She often parks her car on the curb next to my house across the street, where I’ve parked for years without hindrance, rather than parking in front of her rental.
The rental neighbor before the quiet neighbor would camp on his front door entrance nearly 24/7 (doing nothing all day like other people described in previous posts), so almost every time I’d walk to my car, he’d be there at his door staring at me.
The rental neighbor before that was an odd character with many visits from the police, and when I helped clean the rental out after he left, his living room sofa consisted mainly of box springs without much of any cushion left.
We’ve got someone like that, except for the defoliation part (and we almost wish he would). We pay for trash hauling, and never see a can out for pickup. Sometimes we see corrugated cardboard cartons from frozen vegetables in bulk in the recycling bin. Once a week we see a tiny lady visitor that isn’t dressed like a maid. About once every 3 weeks one or the other of us sees the owner leave, I assume for buying groceries.
For a few years, there was a thirty something woman living in the house attached to ours. She would drive off every morning around 8 and come back home after 10 every evening. We speculated what she could do, but didn’t actually meet her for several years. Was she a lawyer, tyring to make partner? The hours were wrong for a hooker. Eventually, it turned out she was a pediatrician who ran the emergency room of a children’s hospital a few miles away. Then she acquired a husband and started keeping saner hours. Also we finally met her.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned our current neighbors - the ones I forget about because they’re not as flamboyantly entertaining as the ones across from us who can’t stand a blade of grass one-eighth of a inch too tall, or a flake of snow in their driveway.
Their house is set way back from the road and is almost invisible in summer, not very noticeable even when the leaves are gone. It’s a youngish couple, maybe early 30s. They come and go on a fairly even working-professional schedule. Other than a little yardwork, driveway clearing, trash cans in and out, we never see them. Know their names only from the town property list. Have never met them, although theirs is the closest house to ours by direct line.
Their house is dark nearly all the time. We see a sort of 3/4 view, and the only light seems to be from the far back - maybe a kitchen light. The only time the front of the house is lit is when they have company (maybe 5-6 times a year) and then it’s a little disorienting, because this fully-lit 2-story colonial sort of appears out of nowhere in our dark arc.
This has been the situation for four years now. I can’t imagine why they live in the woods of Nwingland only to huddle in one or two back rooms of a large house almost 100% of the time.
I bought a newly constructed home four years ago and shortly after moving in, they finished the house to the left of mine and a guy moved into it.
Still haven’t met him.
I feel bad for not going over and introducing myself when he moved in, but I seem to recall the way he moved in was that a moving truck came and unloaded stuff, then I saw him pull out of his garage a couple weeks later.
He’s never outside and for a while I had a theory that he’s out of town a lot, but I don’t know.
Another car often appears in his driveway and stays for days. It probably took a year for me to be outside as the driver pulled in and notice that it was another guy. My current theory is that they might be gay and this is a small town in the south, so maybe that’s why he is so private. If so, that makes me feel even worse for not being friendlier.
Not that I really feel bad. I never think of him except when he drives by and I wave and think “Hey, there goes that guy. Dang, I should really talk to him sometime.” Then I forget about him until the same thing happens 2 months later.
This thread has cracked me up. Also made me keen to remain a rural dweller, where my contact with neighbors is close to non-existent. We hear more than see one another. If someone is logging, we all know it. There is one neighbor group that lives across the road from my barn, but I’ve never met them. There is a weird, chanting sort of music that faintly emanates from there every morning… I can hear it when I go down to feed my animals. It’s monotonous and odd, but it’s their own business.
I do fear I may have harshed their mellow the other morning. It was Slaughter Day and my home kill butcher prefers to do his work very early in the morning. He slipped over around 5:30 a.m. and it took us about 15 minutes to get the designees into the area he uses to do the deed. Unfortunately, it’s near the chanting neighbors’ place. We can’t see each other for the trees, but it’s probably only half a block (if we had blocks) away. For every other event, my butcher has used a .22, from 1,600 lb. steers to 150 lb. hogs. I was slaughtering an older boar, however, and for that he used a .30-30. I’m sure we woke every single sleeper in their house. I felt bad, but I couldn’t risk an animal suffering a less than clean kill. At least he went back to the .22 for the two younger pigs.
My new neighbor in the rental house across the street is starting to get on my nerves a bit. The former neighbor parked in front of his house like normal people in residential housing districts, and I hardly ever saw him. The new neighbor parks across the street from her house along the curb at my house where I usually park unhindered. Her car has a front windshield with major damage and in need of replacement. Last night, I went out in the late evening to walk around my front lawn. She and her boyfriend were sitting at my curb smoking cigarettes and talking so I went back inside my house. I’ve seen her standing there smoking at my curb several times and she just moved here maybe a couple weeks ago. The next day, cigarette butts were strewn along the cement where I usually park. Tonight, I came home and her bicycle is being stored resting the handlebars on my fence although there’s plenty of places to store it on her rental house property. What’s up with her? Would she like it if I parked in front of her house? I don’t think so.
My wife & I were the Mysterious Neighbors for a few years. We both worked 3rd shift.
We would get off from work, & since neither of us wanted to cook dinner, we would get breakfast at a Mom & Pop place near her work. Then we would go home & go to bed. We both regularly pulled double shifts at the time, so we often went to work in the early afternoon instead of 11:00 PM.
On the days I only worked one shift, I would do the yard work in the morning after breakfast . On the weekends that we did not work, we went on overnight motorcycle rides.
One weekend that we were home, we met an older neighbor gal. She tripped on a broken part of the sidewalk across the street from us. I happened to be stepping outside to fix a leaking gutter & saw her fall. I told my wife to get the first aid kit & come outside. As I helped our neighbor up, she asked me who I was, so I told her. My wife brought out our first aid kit, as they bandaged the leg, I introduced them to each other.
She confided to us that “all” of the neighbors were at the least puzzled by our weird behavior. We were never home, & we were never seen to do the yard work, yet, it got done.
It turned out that most of the neighbors worked normal shifts. She babysat her grand kids in the daytime at her daughters home. While we were getting breakfast, she would be going to the daughters home, so she rarely saw us.
The one neighbor who did know us, was fairly reticent, so no one asked him about us.
When we moved into a rental house some years back, neighbors across the street were out on their front stoops/porches, intently observing us as we moved boxes and furniture from our U-haul into the house.