do i have the worst neighbors on the planet?
can anyone top this?
my upstairs neighbor called the police on me and actually tried to have me arrested because (and i promise this is true)
he said that i was making the voices in his head tell him to kill his family
the police took him for some nappy time at the nearest state hopsital.
i’ll elaborate on the story if anyone is interested.
but mostly i want to know if anyone has a better story than mine
Run away, run away.
Wow, and I thought I had it bad with a neighbor that loves the bass on his stereo too much.
Well, shut my mouth. It’s also illegal to put squirrels down your pants for the purposes of gambling.
I just hope I never top this!
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge…others just gargle.
That’s pretty damned good. My sister could write a book on weird neighbors, but here are two quick stories:
Nieghbor one was called “Father Ignatious” by people who stopped by and knocked on her door by accident, even though he was introduced to her as “Joe”. He built some sort of shrine in the front room in front of the picture window and had weird religous gatherings there all the time.
Neighbor two called the cops when she was on vacation to say that the “couple upstairs” (she and her husband) had been murdered. Her proof? There was “blood” running down her walls from the upstairs. After much scaring of everyone (the cops called my parents, her employer, etc) they came over to discover a burst, rusty waterpipe was the culprit.
Wow.
Zette
Love is like popsicles…you get too much you get too high.
Not enough and you’re gonna die…
Click here for some GOOD news for a change Zettecity
Well, my downstairs neighbor isn’t that whacked out, but he’s on his way. About a year-and-a-half ago, when I first brought my two cute little fur-persons home (they were 8 weeks old, about 2.5 lbs each), this nutcase downstairs started complaining that I should “stop stomping around up there, put down some rugs on your hardwood floors, you’re keeping me up all night long walking around, slamming doors,” etc.
I don’t stomp. In fact, I’ve always been VERY careful to walk on the balls of my feet, not clomp around, don’t wear hard-soled shoes on hard floors, etc. (I’ve lived beneath people who don’t give a crap how much stomping they do, so I’m quite sensitive about not doing it myself.)
I have wall-to-wall carpet (linoleum in the kitchen and both bathrooms).
I don’t slam doors (don’t know if anyone was slamming doors - I certainly never heard it).
I don’t walk around all night long. Usually, I sleep all night long. Of course, the kitties would chase each other around in the evening, but I honestly cannot imagine 2.5 lbs of kitten on carpet making so much noise that this freak can’t sleep.
My condo (and his below me) is at one end of the building about 70 feet away from a freeway. How two kittens on carpet can possibly be heard over the constant traffic noise is completely mystifying (to me and everyone who’s ever been in my place).
The complaints started out with him going down to the front door of the building and using the buzzer/phone thing to call and complain (you know, don’t knock on my door and discuss it with me face-to-face, or anything). Then he started leaving snotty notes on my door. After awhile the irate and totally out of proportion pounding on the walls and slamming of doors started. He pounded on the wall at anything and everything - he even started banging on the wall when I dropped the soap in the shower one morning. (I learned later that he even called the cops on me, but they told him to suck it up, get over himself, and leave them the hell alone.) Pretty soon he was complaining to the condo Board of Directors that my cats were “ruining his quiet enjoyment of his home.” Okaaaayyyyy…
After a month or so of this, I’m called in front of the Board to answer to this asshole. He went on for 40 minutes about how much noise my cats and I make, then he started ranting about the guy below him “who must be playing tennis against his bedroom wall every morning at 6 a.m.” Fortunately, there were other tenants at that meeting who all agreed that common-wall living means you WILL hear noise from your neighbors, and the Board members all agreed - there’s reasonable noise and there’s unreasonable noise. The noise he was complaining about was clearly NOT unreasonable noise. Again, some of his complaints were about noises that could not possibly have been me, which leads me to wonder how much of what he said was true and how much was exaggeration (or outright lies) just to get me in trouble.
As the meeting progressed and it became evident that everyone in the room felt he was WAY out of line and should just shut the fuck up about it, he tried another tack. Started whining that his poor miserable wife suffers terribly from migraines and I’m inflicting actual PAIN on her. I asked him, if she was in so much pain, why he was always pounding on the walls and slamming doors at me, instead of coming to talk to me like a reasonable, civil human being, since HIS unreasonable noise was only aggravating his poor suffering wife’s pain. Everyone snickered at that one and he turned an amazing shade of magenta.
Finally, one of the Board members told him flat out that he should NOT be living in a common-wall building, in the middle floor, right next to a freakin’ freeway, if peace and quiet were what he was after. It was suggested that he move. I seconded it.
He didn’t, but the pounding stopped, and after several months I heard the distinct noises of him installing a soundproof ceiling.
Of course, NO ONE can hear him practicing his electric guitar at night (he STARTS at 10 p.m…)
Hell IS other people, no doubt about it.
StoryTyler
I am too in shape! :::muttering::: Round is a shape.
C’mon up and see me sometime.
My next door neighbor is pretty bad himself. To set up, he and I share a driveway and our side doors (the ones we actually use) are about 30 feet apart, facing each other and exactly aligned. He is in his mid 70s, I in my mid 20s. One night shortly after buying my house, I was sleeping in the den, on the end of my house nearest to his. I was awakened by a stream of high volume, high impact obscenities and a volley of thumps, bumps, slams, and bangs. Turns out he was in a drunk, and this was fairly normal activity for him at 2 in the morning - had been going on for years.
Back in the summer, his wife suffered an aneuyrism and died after a 3 week illness. He relied on her for everything, and since then, his granddaughter, about my age, has been caring for him on a pretty much daily basis. He still has the drunken fits, but now that the wife is gone, he has directed them at me.
He steps out onto his porch and yells at me when I get home, and when I leave. When I turn my lights on or off on that end of the house, he yells, slams his door, and flips his porch light on and off. He has called my mother a whore, my house a whorehouse, and has threatened to shoot my pets and me. He has threatened my father for parking on my half of the driveway. He has also threatened to contact our local branch of the KKK, though I can’t think why, as I am of the caucasian persuasion.
He watches almost constantly. The night I left for Thanksgiving vacation, he was standing in his kitchen window banging on the glass and yelling curses at me as I packed my car and put my animals in.
It is about the same thing every night: me alone in my own home, minding my business, and him yelling “I know what you’re doing in there, you whore!” and “You come out here so I can shoot you, you son of a bitch!”, and the constant slam of the door and fists pounding on it, the porch light flicking on and off, him standing in his darkened kitchen peering out from between the curtains. I can hear him over the tv, washer, and dryer combined.
There have been times I was genuinely afraid to leave the house, or even be in the rooms with windows that face him. I’ve called the police several times, and they will drive by. However, by the time they get here, he’s always back in his house behaving, and there is no proof of what just happened.
I keep hoping he’ll die - is that so wrong?
Insert Random Witticism Here.
missdavis102, it sound like he’s seriously mentally ill. If you can, you should talk to the granddaughter and see if she sees this behavior too. If so, perhaps she can have him institutionalized for his own well being.
I’ve had mostly good neighbors. I try to forget the bad ones, but a few stick out:
[list][li]the upstairs couple who had primal sex at all hours.[/li]
They did it once in their living room, which was closest to their door, on Columbus Day when everyone in the building was home. You could hear her moans up and down the central stairway.
[li]the sidewall couple that threw things. or at least she did, including him.[/li]
[li]the downstairs old lady who heard our TV.[/li]
She said we turned it “way up” after 10 pm. She probably did hear something through the HVAC system, which was not independent per apartment. But we had it on barely loud enough to hear.
She called the front desk several times. Once, they called us to tell us of the complaint. I was mystified, as our TV was on low volume. Then the desk attendant said that she had come up to our door and listened and didn’t hear anything. So I asked, “Then why are you calling?”
I looked in the mirror today/My eyes just didn’t seem so bright
I’ve lost a few more hairs/I think I’m going bald - Rush
When I lived in Baltimore about 20 years ago, I had a senile downstairs neighbor who thought he was Adolph Hitler. He kept calling me “Eva” and inviting me over to see his bunker. Happily, he was very old and I was very young and I could outrun him up the stairs.
Though now that I think of it, Hitler would have been in his nineties 20 years ago . . . Hmmm . . .
I think the statute of limitations has run out on this one, so I can tell it. If not, it’s just a story. Honest.
The house I grew up in was stiuated on the top of a hill. The house across the street was more or less in the valley of this hill.
A very grouchy family moved in across the street- I’ll call the head of the household Mr. Q. Mr. Q had been fully briefed as to the landscape of the house and some of the problems with living next to a hill- namely, when there were heavy rains (and in Maryland, spring and summer showers can come down in buckets), the runoff from our house would end up in Mr. Q’s lawn, turning it into a semi-swamp.
Mr. Q’s response to this situation was to call us up and threaten us with lawsuits every time there was a heavy rain. In his opinion, the fault was ours, and it was our responsibility to build a ditch on our property to keep the rains from flooding his lawn. These calls and threats continued to escalate throughout the year.
The final straw came that winter. Being on a serious backroad, our street was one of the last to get plowed. My father, given his need to get out of the house early (a combination of a heavy workload and fear of being trapped in a house with three children on a snowday), would call a friend of his who had a snowplow, and my father generously covered the expense of having the road cleared.
The night after the first snowfall, the police showed up. Apparently, Mr. Q had called the police regarding the snowplow, claiming that the plow had specifically pushed the plowed snow into Mr. Q’s driveway in order to prevent him from going to work. My father was let off with a ‘warning’- namely, the warning that Mr. Q was an obviously dangerous crackpot who was pissing off the police with these frivolous complaints, so please don’t aggravate him any further because we can’t afford to send officers out here to investigate his idiotic complaints.
At three o’clock in the morning, my father slipped out of the house and performed some impromptu surgery on Mr. Q’s car’s engine. With a ball-peen hammer.
Mr. Q continued to complain, but he never called the police again.
JMCJ
Die, Prentiss, Die! You will never have a more glorious opportunity!
Well if it is, then I’m just as bad. As I read your message I kept thinking, with any luck he’ll be dead soon.
It does sound like he’s truly frightening to live near, and I don’t think I’d take death threats lightly. If the police won’t do anything because there’s no evidence, get a video camera and record him making his threats. If you don’t own one and can’t borrow one from a friend, you can rent one.
Good luck and I sure hope something can be done to stop him so you can live in peace.
As for my neighbors, I’ve always been pretty blessed. I live in a 4-plex townhouse with an identical one across a shared driveway. Everything echos between the buildings and if anyone has their door open and music playing you can hear it as though it was playing in your own apartment. But no one seems to mind. We all understand we live in close proximity and there are certain noises we have to just deal with. And everyone’s pretty considerate about turning the volume down or being quieter at night.
My wacko upstairs neighbor has made some bizarre requests about noises she hears from my place (she claims to be able to hear my ceiling fan humming at night), but we still get along well and there’s never been any threatening phone calls or police involvement, even though I should have called them on her quite a few times.
She used to have a boyfriend that she had screaming matches with. Well, she did all the screaming - he just took it. She’d stomp her feet, throw and bang things around and scream at him to get the f*** out of there. He’d leave and all would be quiet again. They’re broken up now (thank goodness), so I don’t have to worry about that anymore.
Oh, and StoryTyler, she has 3 cats and wall-to-wall carpet too. I can still hear her cats running around up there like thunderclouds rolling over. But I’m a cat person with a nutzo kitty of my own that occasionally goes on rampages, racing around from room to room and flying over furniture as she goes. Cat pad noises don’t bother me. Your neighbor needs to get a life.
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” - Anne Frank
My sympathy to all those with bad neighbours.
I’ve been lucky so far. The only sign of trouble so far was when a new family moved in. I said ‘Hello’ over the garden fence. The FIRST words they said were ‘That tree of yours needs to be cut down.’ I introduced myself, then thanked them for offering to do it for free. (It’s still there.)
But here’s one from English TV. A dispute over 30 INCHES of driveway was settled after years, culminating in court action costing £30,000 (that’s about $50,000). Eeeeew!
In the bathtub of history, the truth is harder to hold than the soap… (Pratchett)
At my old house (not in the best neighbourhood) some new neighbours, that moved into an older house across the street, started to collect old rusty cars, preferably with missing body parts. At first I fancied that they might be eccentric yet charming vintage auto collectors, but I was quickly disabused. My theory that the gentleman had once been a member of the navy derived more from his colourful vocabulary than any sea-worthy characteristics. They were a high-spirited couple, however, as evidenced by their frequent and boisterous social gatherings. I was charmed to see that they did not limit their festivities to week-end nights.
One day, upon spotting a fairly new vehicle parked next to the house, I congratulated them (in petto), assuming that lady luck had hugged them to her perfumed bosom. The next Saturday, while mowing the lawn on the side of the house, I noticed the neighbour next door and one of his chums drinking and laughing. Then the friend commandeered an old jeep, backed up, accelerated, and drove straight into the “new” car. Much hilarity ensued. Of course, we all know that the best jokes improve upon repetition, so the clever chap backed up and did it again. After the fifth loud crash, I decided I might as well take off and go to the beach, since the afternoon didn’t seem to be shaping up all that well.
Another time, I came home late and saw two people screaming and fighting with chains in the middle of the street. I ducked into the house and called the police. By the time they showed up, no one was around. The police asked me what I had seen, and I mentioned that one of the people looked like my neighbour. They pounded on his door, but he said he’d been asleep the whole time and heard nothing.
I’m glad I don’t live there anymore.
Quand les talons claquent, l’esprit se vide.
Maréchal Lyautey
Storytyler: Your story is so familiar!!
My fiance and I have neighbors that live downstairs from us. Twice the female has handed me long notes detailing the noises she hears and the impact they have on her and her boyfriend’s lives.
We also take care not to stomp. She told us we should not be wearing shoes in our apartment (the only time I wear shoes in the apartment is when I get home from work at 6pm).
One of us went into our spare bedroom at 3am on a Saturday and she said we shouldn’t walk around in that room between 11pm and 8am. So if I had to work shift work or if that room was a nursery, I’m not allowed to be in there?? WTF??
She also said she hasn’t had any sleep in two months and we should only spend the nighttime hours in the bedroom or the “parlor” (she’s, like, 21 years old–who uses the word “parlor” in the 90s??).
AAAAARRRRGGGHHHH!!! Had to vent.
Anyway, the landlord basically laughed at her and told her they could move, but they are still there and the worst part? She screams bloody murder at her boyfriend at least once a week, slamming doors, etc. (at almost 4am one morning) and last Saturday around 2am, we heard a sound like she had knocked over a large china cabinet! She’s really in need of help. But we can’t wear shoes?? Nah-ah!
Thanks for listening!
And that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Come to think of it Dewaholic, your story reminded me that my wacko upstairs neighbor blamed me for losing her job. She claimed she could hear my television at night (which was so low that one click down on the volume control and there was basically no sound at all). It supposedly kept her awake so she couldn’t get up and make it to work on time. Since she was late so much they put her on warning and she had a nervous breakdown and ended up leaving on a “medical” disability. She hasn’t worked in 2 years! And it’s all my fault - yeah, right.
It’s amazing that we really do get along just fine. Go figure 
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” - Anne Frank
The next door neighbor on one side was truly from hell. There are MANNY stories to tell about her, but my favorite is when I was about six or seven months pregnant with Middle Son, and hubby was painting the extra bedroom to turn it into a nursery. This was in August.
There was one window in that bedroom, and it looked out across the fence into the neighbor’s backyard. When I got home from work one night she accosted me in the driveway, with accusations that my husband had been “peeping” at her while she was sunbathing in the backyard all day. (What he had actually been doing was scraping old paint, prepping around the window, and giving it a base coat.)
Mind you, this lady was not somebody you’d’ve dragged the telescope out for to get a better shot . . . .
-Melin
Reading more of these posts, I’ve remembered other bad neighbors:
[list][li]Same wild sex neighbor, except once she decided to do aerobics at 2 am in the bedroom directly above mine. Thankfully, only one bedraggled request to her stopped the practice.[/li][li]This was in rural Colorado. We had irrigation ditches run in vast grids across the valley. Many of them were the borders between properties.[/li]
A new neighbor moves in to our west. They lay pipe in our border ditch and bury it. Then they put a chain-link fence 3 feet east of where the ditch was, basically claiming some of our land.
The pipe was too small for the flow of water, so water backed up onto our property. We had to dig a ditch parallel to the fence to drain our lot.
They built a large garage 6 inches from their fence, and directly under the branches of our large cottonwood tree. Now, every autumn, we’d light fires in the ditches to burn out all the dead grass and weeds. But we can’t do this for our new ditch, because the leaves from the cottonwood have accumulated in the narrow space between the fence and their garage. Any fire would be too hard to keep from torching it.
Then to top it all off, the next year the guy comes over to our house and insists we get the cottonwood seriously trimmed or cut down, as branches from it fell on his garage. If not, he’d sue. Why the fuck did you build the garage under it!? I wanted to ask.
I looked in the mirror today/My eyes just didn’t seem so bright
I’ve lost a few more hairs/I think I’m going bald - Rush
I, for one, would like to hear more about melanietarrant’s neighbor’s voices…
The margarine of evil
Until I married and moved to the tranquil countryside, I’ve never had a physcotic neighbor. Since, I’ve had a run in with two nutjobs.
#1 - It was two weeks after our honeymoon and I am outside (still on vacation) on a spring day working in the mud that I charmingly refer to as my garden. We have one neighbor visible from our house (That in nearly 7 years we NEVER see or hear from), everything else is hidden by trees or too far away. An old man comes riding up on a motorbike, sans helmet, leather. This is ok. He is on a dirt road and only creeping along. BUT his 3 year old grandson is on the bike with him and this bothers me greatly. This is not the point, anyways.(Still bugs me, though)
He lives at the end of the dead end street that runs parallel to our property. We exchange pleasantries. Things are going fine, but my spidey sense is tingly that there is a light bulb out on this guy’s chandeleir somewhere. Can’t explain it, he seemed so normal.
On the back of our house is our deck, we put a wheelchair ramp on it so my father in law can get in and out of our house w/o a problem. This neighbor then asks, this still floors me, " So, I hear there is a cripple living here."
My mouth must have hit the mud. Instead of even dignifying this exceptionally rude question with an answer, I just said,
" Oh,there’s the phone. Nice meeting you…" and took off. When hubby came home I ranted to him about the entire exchange and he thought I must have made up just how incredibly insentive and rude remark while I stewed waiting for him to come home. Then about six weeks later, hubby comes into the house and says, “I owe you an apology. I met Mr. H today. He asked me the same question.”
But wait, there’s More! This Mr. H is a retired GM employee and received free legal for anything for the rest of his life and GM Legal cannot refuse, no matter how frivolous. He had us and another Nice neighborwhos house we cannot see from our house except their chimney.) in a law suit.
Part one of the lawsuit was with the nice neighbor stating that their propane tank was too close to their (nice neighbors house, not mr.H’s) and could blow up and kill people in that house. WTF? (this nice couple were nice, but incredibly dense. They actually ACTUALLY took out a second mortgage to fight this lawsuit. Anyone with a brain in their head knew it would be thrown out.No amount of reasoning from us could persuade them not to go overboard with the lawyer/legal crap.)
Part two was with us and equally stupid: He had been mowing the grass on the side of the private drive that gives him access to his house ( and now 7 other houses) for over 20 years. When hubby and his dad bought their 10 acres, the surveyor restaked the property for 2.5 acre allotments. Large metal stakes were put in legally along side the easement and spray painted orange to show where the property lines are. (And to find when the weeds/grass is really high)
Mr. H constantly pulled these stakes out and threw them aside so he could mow. It’s a bitch to put them back in their proper spot, to say the least and who want to pay to have the area resurveyed? Mr. H contsantly said they were on HIS property. Hubby, who has the patience of 10 saints would nicely tell Mr. H not to remove the stakes because it showed where the property lines were.And then show him the blueprint thing FROM THE CITY stating that YES, the property up to X was ours and ours alone. Mr. H constantly said it was his property by virtue that he had mowed the grass for over twenty years.
My father in law, who prior to his accident worked in construction and is use to dealing with knuckleheads like Mr. H, just looked at this nutjob from his handicap van one day, “You pay the taxes on this section, and you can do what ever you want with the stakes.” (Mr. H said something to the effect that " you’re a cripple, what do you know?" Very nice So much for thinking we had a nice old Jimmy STewart guy living down the road.)
It ended in court. The GM lawyer and our friend, a lawyer both knew they were wasting their time and Mr. H refused to back down on his lawsuit. The GM lawyer told him the judge was going to throw it out. The GM lawyer was the top gun at GM legal ( because he files so many frivolous suits (several against his own kids, she told us on the hush hush), they figured they better send in the big who-ha because he says all they give him are lackeys and it just gets mucked up with him citing poor legal or whatever the phrase is.) Mr. H refused and the judge threw it out.
He hasn’t mowed the easement in 5 years and I’ve always entertained the idea to put gloves on the metal stakes with the middle finger up and the rest taped down to say
" Hi" to him as he drives to collect his mail every day.
Mr. H, btw, has purchased, but I don’t know if he’s ever installed them yet, several huge rolls of cable ( like the phone companies use) so he can (get this) cable his house to the ground when the polar ice caps melt and his house won’t float away.
We haven’t spoken to him since the summer we moved in and we don’t wave to him he drives by. (Talk about the cut direct.) No one does. His wife must be equally physcotic, thou no one has ever met her or seen her except her profile as they drive by in their 1975 GM Crapomatic mobile. (And he has a mean dog.)