Tell me your tales of awful neighbors

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I used to live next to an old lady that frequently called the police on me for noise. The first time she came over to complain about noise, she was wearing a borrowed/discarded police constable vest, and took care to inform me that she had family connections to the Vancouver Police Department.

Not sooooooo bad, I guess, except that her complaints usually took place in the complete absence of noise. The few times that there was any music on at all, it was just barely audible standing directly outside the house, I don’t believe it would have been perceptable inside her house at all - when I asked the police this directly, they insisted that I must have just turned it down before they knocked. (Keep in mind we’re talking about stuff like The Holly Cole Trio here, not anything that benefits from over-amplification.)

Once or twice a week, the police would show up at my door and tell me to keep it down. “Keep what down?” “Your music.” “I’m reading.” “Well, it was loud enough earlier to disturb your neighbours.” “I haven’t been listening to music.”

She called the police on me for noise violations when I wasn’t home, and then days later they came out again, approached the silent house, told me to keep the noise down, and commented that they’d been out earlier, when I “refused to open the door.”

Several times I came home late (club-closing late) and found her outside my house in her night-dress with her ear pressed up against the window, trying to tell if I might be listening to music in there. (Nothing, I’m not one of those people that leaves the radio on to keep the cat from getting bored.)

She told me that she “knew” I was doing something illegal in there, and that eventually I would be caught. I have no idea how she got that bee in her bonnet.

Eventually I asked one of the officers how long they were going to continue to respond to her complaints, and the officer confirmed that she had some family connection to the police, and that they would therefore continue to take her seriously. She actually advised that she considered moving my best option if I wanted to be left alone.

At that point I told them that I would be bringing a harassment suit against her, and that if they didn’t want the VPD to be named as a co-defendant, they had better reconsider - given that officers had been called to my door more than a dozen times without finding any cause for complaint, and that my other neighbours were prepared to give statements to the effect that they had never heard any noise coming from my house.

I guess she didn’t have all that much pull, because that was the last time the police came to my door. Evil old harridan.

22

This was 8 years ago. My wife and I bought our first house in NJ. Our next door neighbor was an older woman, who seemed very friendly at first. We did think it was odd, however, that during the very first conversation we had with her she outlined her recent life, including the death of her husband (the ex-mayor of the town) and how most of her children (adults) don’t like her. This included her youngest son who was in his late 20s and lived in her attic.

As time went by she showed some odd traits. She would walk through the trees that separated our yards, uninvited, when she saw my wife working in the garden. She would wander the lawn, picking up stray leaves by hand as she talked. On trash day she would move our cans from the curb to our garage door after pickup, unasked.

It started getting really wierd when she came to our back door one day very upset. She had a fight earlier with the son that lived with her, and she had a letter in her hand from him. It was rambling and incoherent, with many religious references (including something about how she stole his 30 pices of silver…) She was visibly scared and thought he might try to harm her. We told her to call the police, but she refused because it was her son.

After that incident we tried to avoid her when we could. My wife had asked her more than once not to walk into our yard at will. She continued to do it, so we put up a fence. That really pissed her off and she came storming over yelling that she was no longer going to briong our trash cans in for us and we would surely be robbed because “the thieves” target houses with the cans on the street all day, knowing th eowners weren’t home. I had to tell her to leave us alobe and kep away from us.

A year later, we sold the house and moved. We found out recently that the person we sold the house to got into a lawsuit with the neighbor because she kept telling him his lawn wasn’t neat enough and he then tore down her brick bbq pit that encroached on his (previously our) property by less than 1 foot.

I’ve never regretted moving.

23

At a townhouse we used to rent, we use to let our cats out in the back yard. They’d run around, stalk some birds, and then come back in after a few hours. My next door neighbor put out a lot of bird feeders, and made a comment one day about my cats scaring the birds. She said it in a kind of joking way, like “Man, the birds sure do scatter when your cats are out, heh heh”. I’ve always been really bad at getting the hint when people are trying to be subtle, and this has gotten me into trouble on multiple occasions. I honestly thought she was just joking around/making conversation, and didn’t realize that it really bothered her when my cats chased the birds.

So then I got a letter from the rental management people about a complaint they had gotten about my cats being left “unattended”. The letter pointed out a clause in my lease (that I hadn’t noticed before) stating that all pets must be leashed when outside on the rental property. My bad. I apologized to the neighbor (who denied making the complaint) and stopped letting my cats out.

But I kept getting notices from the rental management that people were still complaining about my cats. I called to talk to them about it. They wouldn’t tell me who was complaining, naturally, but they did give me the dates and times of the complaints. I assured them that I hadn’t let my cats out of the house since I got the first letter, but the complaints kept coming in. I didn’t know for certain if it was bird-lover at this point, and I didn’t want to make any accusations, so I started mentioning it to various neighbors when I saw them. Basically saying someone was complaining about my cats, but they hadn’t been outside since such-and-such day. I didn’t mention the bird-lover at all. I just said that I didn’t know who was complaining, I just wanted to let it be known that it wasn’t my cats.

The bird-lover then comes knocking one evening, furious because I’ve been telling everyone that she’s been lying about my cats. I try to explain that I never said it was her, but of course she doesn’t believe me. She also doesn’t believe me that I’m not letting my cats out anymore, and she’s going to start sending pictures to management to prove it. True to her word, she starts sending pictures to management of every random stray cat she sees anywhere in the vicinity of her back yard, of course telling them they’re my cats. Several times while I lived there I was actually threatened with eviction for breaking the rules in my lease, but each time I gave them pictures of my actual cats to show that they didn’t look like the ones she was reporting. Luckily my cats were both calico with pretty distinctive fur patterns, so even when she was sending pictures of other calicos, it was easy to tell they were different cats.

I fully admit that the start of the issue was my fault. Really it was a bit thoughtless of me to let me cats loose in the back yard considering it was a yard I shared with the other row homes. I just wasn’t thinking. But I think holding me personally responsible for every stray cat in the neighborhood was a bit much.

24

Back in Indianapolis, my next door neighbor was a drug dealer, and we went through 3 drivebys. Oddly enough, he got raided, turned on his supplier, married the daughter of the cop who busted him, and was a decent neighbor by the time we moved.

+++++

The tale below is a story I posted in an MMP early last year, about a logging operation going on a few hundred yards from my house.

Attack of the trespassing lumberjacks

Some of you have seen pictures of my place in Cottonfield County. I have 1 acre of land (about half a hectare for you metric folk), surrounded by about 30 acres of field on three sides. To the north is a small creek running through woods, and the closest the woods get to my place is maybe 500 feet. I’ve been watching for 2 weeks a small potatoes timbering company clear cut the creek area.

Wednesday, I get home, and parked in my yard right next to the shed where Reggie the farmer stores equipment is a trailer with a tank on it, commonly used to haul diesel fuel. Hmmm, that’s odd. Reggie doesn’t usually park fuel in my yard, and when he does haul it, he has an old truck just for this. I park my car in the garage, do my usual gathering of crap, and when I come out, there’s a big green log skidder driving right across my yard and through the soft sand where my derelict barns and jungle used to stand. :mad: :mad: :mad:

I put a lot of time and effort into grading that sand for grass planting, and twice before, some clod in heavy equipment had driven across it and left ruts that I’ve not been able to handle with hand tools. This made the third time.

Off I stormed to the log skidder, and an old black guy got out.

“How you doing?” he asked.

“You’re trespassing.” I replied.

“I need to fuel my tractor.”

“You have one minute to get off my land, because in two minutes you’ll be held at gunpoint for the sheriff.”

Back into the cab he went, where he must have had a radio, because a blue pickup truck came racing out of the field towards me. It was the job boss.

There was a very spirited conversation that took place, where I let him know in no uncertain terms that his guy was trespassing, and I was holding them liable for the damage to my property. The job boss said he’d fix everything the next day, and he moved the tank off my land. He assumed that I owned the field, and he wanted the fuel hidden because he’s had a similar tank stolen recently.

When I came home yesterday, the ruts are still there. I took a lot of pictures, because it’s monsooning today, and I want proof of the incident. I’m sick of people assuming they can drive on the VunderLair to suit their own purposes, so this will not go away quickly.

Epilogue: The ruts stayed for the duration of the timber job. On the day they were moving out, I parked my van across their path so the semis could not get out, and stayed put until my yard was graded.

25

Nothing severe here, but we (white, only English-speaking) lived in an almost 100% Mexican town. Truthfully, our neighbors on both sides and across the street kept chickens / roosters. For eggs, I guess, and maybe the occasional chicken soup.

Anyone who tells you that roosters only crow at sunrise is a filthy liar.

Joe

26

Take care you don’t watch Lakeview Terrace, then. :wink:

There was the elderly recluse man who used to grow waist-high grass and weeds in his backyard, once upon a time–any ball that went over the fence stayed lost–but he’s been gone for a long time now.

Oddly enough: the house was completely demolished when he moved out, the whole lot was remodeled. But there used to be a wind chime hanging in one of the windows, which tinkled softly every once in a while, and some nights you can still faintly hear it…

27

I live in a Duplex that apparently attracts some stellar examples of awful neighbors:

Couple #1: They were both long line truck drivers. She decided to leave him on the sly while he was away on a long haul. She moved all of his belongings outside to the driveway, where she sold it all. After splitting with her new Beau, her hubby shows up to an empty house a week later. Hilarity ensues when he found out the my ex had purchased his car, and my in-laws had bought his tv and china hutch.

The Two Hispanic Families: Yes, two families moved in. Bear in mind that there were only 3 bedrooms and a single bath. But 15 assorted adults, children and complete strangers made the attempt. It was not unusual to see someone in the driveway, urinating on my ex’s new car, or discovering that the awful smell outside was coming from a Goat’s head cooking on the back porch in a converted clay flower pot. They had a cousin down in Oakland that ran a carpet business; when the existing carpet next door finally gave up the ghost, they got a great deal on some outdoor carpet they installed themselves.

They were finally evicted, much to their surprise. They did not get their deposit back, much to their even greater surprise. It seems that the land lord had to replace the sub-fooring in the bathroom, after the toilet was broken in half. Vertically. I’m not sure how you can break a toilet in that manner, but suffice to say that the foundation was in shock as well. All of the flooring/carpet had to be replaced, along with 60 to 70% of the dry wall in each room.

After their departure, they kindly left a refridgerator in the driveway. It was so full of cockroaches that the local Exterminator had to be called out five (that’s 5) times for pest control.

I could go on about the speed freak mechanics, the unfaithful husband that impregnated his wife’s twin sister or even the water heater that ran all by itself for a year and a half, but I’d be taking time from other posters that have a tale to tell as well.

28

I lived in a small tri-plex for about 3 years. My most memorable neighbor in that time was Crazy Tamara. Creepy Guy moved in and lived there quietly (if somewhat creepily) for several months before Tamara came to stay with him.

One night…or I should say morning, since it was 1:00 AM I was awakened by wall-shaking music. Not the rock or rap music that you’d expect to be blaring from someone’s speakers…no, this was…*”Gloria” *by Laura Branigan.

”Gloria! Gloria! I think they got your number! Gloria!”

I put my pillow over my head and thought that, at least if the music didn’t stop, at least the song would change…right? Wrong. She had it on repeat. After about 20 minutes of Gloria I gave up. I knocked on the door and Creepy Guy opened it. I asked him if he would please turn down the music. He stared at me in shock and said that there was no way he was going in there because she’d get mad at him. I informed him that I would be going be calling the police if that was the case. He sighed and shambled over to her bedroom door. He yelled to her that the neighbor was going to call the police if she didn’t turn her music down.
From behind the still closed door, over the ear-shattering music, I heard her scream, “FUCK YOU!!” then the door flew open and a boot flew out, narrowly missing Creepy Guy’s head. He looked at me sheepishly and said, “I guess you’d better call the cops.”

So, I went back to my apartment and called the police. They tried knocking on the door, but got the same response as Creepy Guy did. They ended up breaking down her door, cuffing her, and hauling her ass to jail for assaulting an officer.

Two nights later, she was back and, I was treated to Cher’s “I Believe” on repeat. I once again called the police. This time, she turned it down when they showed up, only to turn it back up immediately after they drove away. I called them back and the officer told me that they could make her spend the night in jail if I performed a citizen’s arrest…so; I stood on my front porch in my fuzzy pink bathrobe and told her that she was under arrest for disturbing my peace while she stood there cuffed and cursing at me.

I got to perform at least one more (maybe 2…I can’t remember) citizen’s arrests on her before my landlords evicted her and Creepy Guy.

Other notes of interest:
One night the song was Tom Petty’s “American Girl” then it went back to Gloria for the rest of the time she was living there.

Creepy Guy came over to my apartment and asked me to have her arrested again so that he could either clean her stuff out of her room and get rid of it or have her committed…I’m not clear on which, so he wouldn’t get evicted too. I suggested that he call the police and have her removed from the house himself and he said, “Oh, no I couldn’t do that!” I declined because at that point, I knew the eviction was in progress and frankly, I didn’t care that Creepy Guy was getting kicked out too.

One night, I banged on the wall and yelled, “Tamara, turn that music down or you’ll be going back to jail!” to which she replied, “Go ahead and call the police! They won’t care because I’m a secret spy!” The arresting officer was pretty amused by that one.

When they finally did get evicted, she threw a rock through the plate glass window of their apartment. I wasn’t home to see the actual leaving/eviction process, but I bet it was spectacular.

The receptionist at the rental agency told me that Creepy Guy told her that he’d dropped Crazy Tamara off at a truck stop so she could hitchhike her way to California to be with her husband, David Hasselhoff.

About 2 weeks after they’d been evicted I received a voice message on my answering machine from Crazy Tamara that I transcribed as follows:
“I don’t know you, but yes I do. You need to stop calling the police about me in the middle of the day. Leave me alone and leave my family alone because my husband and President Bushes[sic] will hunt you down.”

I called the rental agency and they swore up and down that they didn’t give her my unlisted, unpublished phone number. I can only guess that she got it from the police reports. Thank goodness I never heard from her again and I moved soon after that.

29

That’s the creepiest part of the tale, right there.

30

I’ve had one quite recently that I’m still quite upset and pissed off about.

I live in a house with 9 studio type flats, we each have our own cooking facilities but share a shower room and loo (not at the same time :slight_smile: ). I’m on the top floor and the walls/floors are pretty thin. A woman moved into the room below me a month or two ago and has been giving me dagger looks for a while now. FTR, I don’t do anything more noisy than a normal person and I think I’m quite considerate.

On Saturday, when the landlord called for rent, he said she had made a complaint about the noise from my room. The complaint was about people drinking late at night - fair enough, I said, I haven’t been working for a bit and yes, have brought a friend back after the pub maybe once or twice a week for a beer. (I don’t put music on though and make sure we talk in whispers.) I’ll stop doing that, wouldn’t want to annoy anyone.

But, here’s the rub. He says she has been complaining about ‘other noises’, and the embarrassed way he says it and the awkward way he smiles makes me know he’s talking about sex. :eek: Now this is really unfair. I’ve had someone here two nights last week, and I have tried my best to be quiet. My bed is squeaky so I ended up dragging the poor guy onto the floor so as not to disturb the woman downstairs. Also, one time was at 2 am but the other was only 9pm. And I am not what my ex boss used to refer to as a ‘howler’. We’re talking normal, muted noises.

The impact on my life? Half of me is embarrassed and the other half is going to kill her. I will never bring anyone back here again, even a friend for a cup of tea. I got in from work this morning at 1 am and was scared to even put the kettle or TV on.

OTOH, I am now contemplating an orgy.

31

The 17-year old girl was having an affair with the married late-30’s guy in the apartment next to ours. When he broke things off with her, she got drunk and drove a car into, yes into, his apartment. Luckily, no one got hurt.

One of the neighbor ladies who was married to an abusive drunk, go tired of it and stabbed her husband one night. The first person she called? My mom. “Nancy, I just stabbed Junior.”

There was the schizophrenic neighbor lady who would occasionally go off her meds and need us to get her checked in for in-patient treatment.

Oh! Oh! How could I forget? When I was about 7 years old, the next door neighbors let their german shephard into our yard where it proceeded to gut our chihuahua. Then a few months later, their son (also 7 years old) and some of his friends beat me unconscious one day while I was walking home from school. Good Times, let me tell you.

32

We have a big crabapple tree in the front yard. there are 3 or 4 of them spaced evenly around the court, and we happen to have one on our lot. Anyone who’s got one of these trees knows about the snow of pink petals they create every spring. Well, we came home one spring day to find that the new neighbor had raked up all the pink petals from his lawn and piled them on our front step.

Jerk.

33

Thank goodness…I have mostly pretty good and even great neighbors. There is just one noisy-ass bunch, two doors down, that I could do without.
Whenever they have a party or decide to watch some big game in the garage, they make as much noise as they possibly can, well into the night. The local police here say that there a disturbance of the peace can be reported at any time of the day or night–and I have made several reports. It has lessened the frequency but not the volume so much.

That’s minor compared to what goes on in many places, though, so I count my blessings.

34

When I was in high school, the guy that lived two doors down from me was really into amateur radio. He had a radio tower in his backyard that was twice as tall as any of the oak trees in the neighborhood and he’d scale it (with climbing gear) and do work on it most weekends.

He had so much power in his output that we could hear his voice through stereo speakers that were not in use. Also, forget trying to use a cordless phone when he was using his setup. It would interfere with the television too and would completely drown out the audio with a distorted broadcast of his voice.

When my mother called to report him, he called her within 15 minutes to tell her that he would be installing filters that weekend. Apparently he had a scanner and had been listening to our calls for who knows how long. He just happened to hear my mom make the call and file the complaint. He also knew our telephone number, our names, and the names of our cats. He just wasn’t sure which house was ours.

It took him over six months to get the filters working properly and then the problems mostly went away. I still made it a point to call him nasty names whenever I used the cordless phone from then on though.

35

Okay, I’ll cop to being the neighbor that is probably being talked about in some other thread on some other message board.

My ex had a dog who liked to fight.

One day I was getting ready to walk him and I opened the door. At the same time, the neighbor was walking his dog. My dog pulled away from me and zipped up the stairs, all hell-bent on beating the crap out of the neighbor’s dog.

I go running up the stairs to break up the fight. Did I mention that my neighbor only had half an arm? Well, it’s an important detail because my dog was hanging from his stump. Evidently he tried to break up the fight and kind of got in the way of the action.

Actually, he took it quite well. He was a nice guy and we continued with the friendly chit-chat.

36

(After reading everyone else’s stories - mine seems somewhat tame. But I still wanted to share and all that.)

My husband (now ex, we’ll call him Grumpy) and I bought our very first house and it was just the delight of my soul - a little country-style cottage. We signed the papers and drove over only to find out that our next door neighbor had cut all the saplings down that the previous owners had planted - because they were “too close to his property.”

They weren’t, actually. See - he had built a garage and driveway on the property and in reality, he didn’t abide by the easements and his garage/driveway was not the minimum 6 feet from my property that was required. The previous owners had evidently planted the shrubbery and trees in hopes to create some privacy and buffers from this wonderful neighbor.

He was on some type of disability so he didn’t do anything all day except go around and pick through people’s trash. Every trash day he would take things from the side of the road, “fix them” and then try to sell them back to the people who had thrown them out. If they didn’t buy them back, he would then put them in his weekly yard sale. WEEKLY YARD SALE. Every Saturday and Sunday he held it and I would never get to enjoy my morning coffee and paper on my beautiful screened in porch because I would be less than 6 feet from little old ladies in pink track suits digging through his treasures and looking in to my house.

He knew we were virgin homeowners, so he was always trying to tell us that we were required to pay for things he wanted done. He wanted us to pay when he removed a bush because part of it had expanded on to our lawn (it was his bush) then he wanted us to pay for tree branches that were on our property because they extended over to his side. We pointed out he couldn’t have it both ways - either he paid for what started on his side, and we paid for what started on ours, or vice versa. And he still owed us for a row of saplings.

Our first winter was a huge blizzard season followed by a rapid thaw and everyone on the street had flooding issues. Whole neighborhoods were underwater - some had flooding on the whole first floor. Our little cottage was on the end of the street at the bottom of the hill. Despite all the flooding, we got less than an inch, which we shop-vacced out non-stop for over 48 hours (as in I got less than 4 hours sleep all weekend when I finally paid my pastor’s son to vaccuum for a few hours so I could sleep). I also had carpet cleaners out 3 times to use their high-powered machines in to suck out the extra water. Once the thaw was done, we then had our french drain checked to make sure everything was okay. The inspector said there wasn’t much we could have done - it was just a fluke. And we had never had another problem.

Grumpy got laid off (whole other issue) and we had to sell our house or face foreclosure. We had lots of visitors, but no sales. Then my realtor found out our next door neighbor was walking over and telling people that we had easement issues, that our house had had several floods, that the house was almost in foreclosure, and that the bank was probably going to seize the house any day, even if someone else bought it!

Of course, every piece of information was a slight hint of the truth (except the bank seizing it) but nothing was actually true. Turns out, he was actually hoping we would go in to foreclosure so he could buy our house and combine the lots. We had to contact a lawyer friend of mine, file a cease and desist letter and a TRO.

I was so mad because we had let the things he had done (the saplings, the illegal home-based business, the garage/driveway issues) slide because we were trying to not be “that” kind of neighbor. Only to find out he was intentionally sabotaging us.

I even wrote to Judge Judy!

Her people actually contacted me several times but I chickened out because our home sale was still pending. We were unable to calculate definitively how much we lost on the sale of the house by not being able to have multiple offers and having the house sit so long, but we figure the people who bought it got a “nasty neighbor” discount.

37

Our little hamlet is supposedly one of the biggest areas for meth cookers and dealers to live in, especially since there are “hollers” that go up into the hills for miles and in some spots, you’d need a ATV to get where you were going. But where we live is somewhat civilized, and nice to live at.

We’d been living at The Farm for about a year or so, and never really paid much attention to the people who lived down the hill from us. There was one couple we sort-of knew as the husband was a lay minister who knew some of my hubby’s relatives, and he and Hubby had talked off and on when they ran into one another at the grocery store, post office, etc. His wife was a real sweetie with the BIGGEST beehive hairdo I’ve ever seen. Nice folks, salt of the earth.

Anyway, we came home from work one afternoon and had to pull into the Wendy’s parking lot to let a convoy of police cars, CSI vehicles, ambulance, fire truck and a couple other vehicles go by…

…then we saw the bomb squad truck go by. :eek:

We rushed home, wondering what the fuck had happened to the barn, and were met in the driveway by our friend Kenny, who had owned the Farm and was living up the hill from us. He came running up to the car and yelled, “Damn, you folks just missed the excitement! Where you been?”

Seeing as there was nothing wrong around us, I asked, “Huh? What?”

It turned out that the minister and his wife had a son who was the epitome of a meth dealer/user. If you looked up the worth “meth head” in the dictionary, his picture would be there. I guess Junior was cooking up a nice big batch of meth in the trailer his folks had bought him, when he got busted. The cops showed up, there was a stand off, and when his dad tried to reason with him, he shot him in the gut. Dad lived, Mom ended up scolding Meth Head into surrendering.

The trailer was right down the hill from our place, about 1000 feet or so. If that idiot had screwed up his cook or the bomb squad not been there to get everything under control, that place would have gone up and taken his trailer, his parent’s trailer and a good chunk of our property—and set the barn on fire.

I saw the idiot’s mom in the grocery about a month or so later and she said that she told the judge that “I forgive him for being an idiot, but I’d still like to see your sorry butt locked up for the rest of your natural life. I can’t believe I raised an idiot like you!” She also apologized and I told her that all that mattered was that she and her hubby were okay and the cops had kept a really bad situation from getting worse.

Never a dull moment!

38

Thank you all – these stories are GOLD!

Most of them I couldn’t have dreamed up in ten years. :slight_smile:

39

To keep a long story short, one of my neighbors went crazy and was convinced that I was an agent of Satan, my brother was an agent of Jesus, convinced my mother that she was having some sort of domestic crisis, spent all night in my brothers room (with her little 7 year old son) lighting candles and scribbling prayer notes, threw away my Dragon Magazine Deck of Many Things thinking it was a tarot deck, took my brother all over town in preparation for some spiritual journey she was about to take, frantically went to the Catholic priest who evidently did not do enough to convince her the Devil was not after her, then all of a sudden (this was in the span of a day) took off for New England with her son (which she got taken away from her for skipping out on his schooling amongst other things.)

At least my brother and I are still alive and unhurt by this and this was over and done over the span of a day or so. (Except finding the prayer notes in random crevasses in our house over the next couple months.)

40

That’s downright scary!