The Barking Mad Neighbors Thread!

The BBQ Pit
1

My neighbor is off his fucking rocker.

Usually he seems like a garden variety neurotic. Very little social life. Still depressed about Mommy and Daddy dying and leaving him all alone (note that he was in his twenties when they died, and the latter death was nearly twenty years ago). Mopes a bit about how most of his life has passed him by and he’s still all alone except for his (large, undisciplined, extremely affectionate and dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks) dog. So he’s not the type you want to go out of your way to strike up a conversation with, but he seems like a human being at least.

Most of the time.

We suspect he has a drinking problem. Or maybe he’s just clinically cuckoo. In any case, he will periodically stand outside on his deck, front porch, hell anywhere, and start yelling about how he hates his neighbors. Since we’re his closest neighbors, we’re his favorite “target”. He swears like a sailor, demands that the family he’s yelling about move away, and then swears some more. His complaints are rarely even tangenital to reality. The stupider they are, I think, the louder he yells them.

And then - now this is the crazy part - then a few days later he bumps into me in front of the library and attempts to have an ordinary, neighborly conversation.

So let’s hear it, Fellow Dopers. Do you have a neighbor whose elevator doesn’t quite make it to the top floor? Does the guy across the hall have conversations with Winston Churchill? Does the sweet church-going little old lady believe the government is being run by extraterrestrials? In short, do you have a Barking Mad Neighbor?

2

I have a few - but I live in an Apartment so that’s not too unusual. Next to us we have the dog who must see dead people or something because on occasion he just starts barking at nothing for 30 minutes on end.

Below us - an older couple, of which one or both are seriously hard of hearing. They yell (seriously) at the top of their lungs at either other at all hours of the day and night. It’s not agitated yelling either, stuff like “HEY COME LOOK AT THIS WEBSITE!” or “WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR DINNER!?!”

If we weren’t moving in a month I would have to do something drastic (potato in the tailpipe comes to mind).

3

Not barking mad, no—just classic white trash.

She’s an umarried welfare mom who sits around drinkin’ and smokin’ all day; he’s her married jailbird boyfriend. Three screaming kids (one theirs, two his); two huge unchained attack dogs; lots of loud, bellerin’ friends.

I really like my apartment and the neighborhood—with the exception of these Kallikacks—is quite nice. I am hoping one of them will eventually kill the other, and the miscreant hauled off to jail. The kids and the dogs will all eat each other eventually.

4

My friend, who lived in an apartment, had a woman living below him that used to call the cops on him all the time even though he wasn’t doing anything. One time she said that he was staying directly above her…if she went to the kitchen he stayed right above her in his apartment in the kitchen, if she went to the bathroom she could here him walking above her to the bathroom, etc, etc. What a loony!

5

Well, my first apartment was very neat. It consisted of two large upsairs rooms in a decaying antebellum mansion in Tennessee (plus some very narrow kitchen and bathroom space clearly built in when it was converted to apartments). I even had some of the original furniture, like a big four-poster bed.

My landlord lived next door, and he and his wife also used the living room and the parlor downstairs in my house.

From him, I learned:

  1. In the book of Genesis, the Bible describes the cross-breeding of human women with demons. The descendants of these unholy unions still walk the earth, without souls, the enemies of all that is good and decent. They are easy to recognize, because their skin is black to indicate their hellish origins.

  2. The real, original Jews were fair-skinned, and Jesus came from this group. Most of them emigrated to Europe before the fall of Rome, and the people we know as “Jews” today are not at all the people described as “God’s People” in the Bible, just foreign interlopers who moved into Israel after the real Jews moved out.

  3. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a large number of high-ranking Communists fled the country and settled in Knoxville, Tennessee, where they carefully watch my landlord via satellite, as they know what a threat he is.

  4. The best time to mow your lawn is after midnight.

  5. Most Democrats are Communists.

  6. The world is full of people who want to hurt you. Never answer your door without your pistol.

I’m glad I live somewhere else now.

6

When I lived in RI, I lived on the third floor of a three-family house owned by my father. The woman who lived below me was a loon, and I got to hear all sorts of wacky tenant stories in addition to wacky neighbor stories. A selection:

[ul]
[li]When I moved in, the woman lived with her cousin, who she hated. She would force her cousin to do odd things, like put her kitchen trash in separate garbage bags and use a separate roll of toilet paper. The poor cousin, who was always being screamed at, had to keep all her stuff in one room, too. She eventually moved out.[/li]
[li]Crazy Tenant once called my father to ask him what a particular light switch did. She was afraid to try it. He had to come over to demonstrate. (I think it was a hall light). She would continually call my father about things like this and scream at him for not being helpful enough. He had to stop answering his phone at work in order to get any work done.[/li]
[li]In the time I lived above her, she stopped leaving the house for any reason. At one point, she was putting her filled trash bags in an otherwise unused closet in our shared hallway. Naturally, they stunk. I had to repeatedly ask her to put her trash in the garbage cans out in the back yard.[/li]
[li]This woman hated our first floor tenants, who were Haitian. She always complained that they were being loud. I never heard them make any noise, even though there were quite a few of them and they had lots of guests. Granted, there was a whole floor between their apartment and mine, but I never heard any noise in the summer, or while coming and going. Maybe they quieted down when I walked past. :rolleyes:[/li]
[li]This woman had worked in City Hall before retiring. Apparently, when she retired, her co-workers threw a party… after she left. They were celebrating the fact that she was gone.[/ul][/li]
I imagine that there was something wrong with this woman, aside from agoraphobia. But I’d feel a lot more sympathetic towards her if she was actually nice.

7

I live in a beachfront Southern California neighborhood, so a lot of the locals wear shorts year round. My last apartment was in a small 4-unit building, with all the front doors facing a central courtyard. We had sort of a community garden going. It was great until one of my neighbors got a new live-in SO, Bert. Bert was a mature gentleman. A little elderly. Um… aged like a fine wine.

Oh, the hell with it. Bert looked like a refugee from an archeological dig. Bert could recall the Black Death from personal experience. As a young man, Bert helped build Stonehenge.

Bert never wore a shirt. His only clothing was a pair of shorts. Now, Bert’s incredible life span had not been without a little wear and tear. Nor without the effects of gravity. Though his shorts were mid-thigh, they were insufficient to cover some of the dangly bits.

I’d get up on a Sunday morning, get my coffee, and sit down to look at the garden, only to get a full view of Bert from behind as he bent over to dig, his testicles swinging in the breeze like a horrible, bulbous, mutant windchime.

Late afternoon? Bert waxes his car. His gonads run wild and free.

Evening? Bert hunkers over the BBQ. His balls are dangerously exposed, but he has lived long and knows no fear.

He was a nice guy otherwise, but I finally moved to get away from his testicles.

8

This is just crying out to be used as a sig.

9

Nope, nothing weirder than the Sudanese family next door. Sweet people. I don’t talk world politics with them just in case.

The grand-daddy came by for a visit and talked weather. He said MI was too hot in the summer.

10

I used to live blow this really crazy guy. He did lots of crazy things and I often had to call the police on him.

The worst was when he would follow me around while he was up in his apartment. I could tell that no matter where I went in the apartment he was always right above me. When I went to the kitchen he went to the kitchen. When I went to the bathroom, I could hear him walking to his bathrooms. It was creepy, I tell ya! :wink:

11

Umm, as opposed to dead blow? :smiley:

Come on, I CAN’T be the only one that caught this…

-BK

12

Feel free to use it. I can’t, because the memory gives me the heebie-jeebies. ::shudder::

13

Hey, I thought those WERE the heebie-jeebies. As for this line:“his testicles swinging in the breeze like a horrible, bulbous, mutant windchime.” my cube neighbors now think I’m the barking mad neighbor because I’m laughing my ass off, trying to be quiet, and tears are streaming down my face.

Thanks for the laugh.
b.

Incidentally, I never wear shorts, because I have the same problem. Sometimes scares the hell out of the dog.

14

Y’know, I always hear that there’s one wacko in every neighborhood, but in all the places I’ve lived, I’ve never seen him.

Now excuse me, I have to line my underwear with tinfol so WalMart will no longer be able to use microwaves to mutate my sperm.

15

Long, long ago in a galaxy far away …

Uh. No. That was something else. What I meant was:
When I was still living with my parents (this has been a good long while,) we had a really screwy neighbor move in next door.
It was this guy and his daughter. I don’t remember if the guy’s girlfriend or wife lived with them. Never saw anybody but the guy and his daughter anyway.
This guy is a drunk. He gets loaded every day. Mostly this is not a problem - he gets drunk and passes out and we don’t see him at all. Late one evening, though, he wakes up from his stupor, chugs some more, and recalls from the deepest pits of his besotten mind that he owns a 22 caliber rifle - and shells. He staggers around the house, collecting rifle and shells, and loads the rifle. He then goes out to his back yard and starts shooting. At a target? No. At squirrels, cats, or dogs? No. At the windows of his house or his pickup? No. This loony aims the rifle straight up (or at least as straight up as he can get it in his state of inebriation) and fires off every shot in the loading tube. I guess he was shooting 22 short rounds, because this went on for the longest time before he ran out. After the first shot, my Dad is on the phone and calls the sheriff’s office (small town, no city police.) The deputy comes and arrests the guy and confiscates the rifle. The dweeb does his time, pays his fine, and comes home. He hasn’t been out of the poky for a week, and we hear it again “pow, pow, pow.” Loony is out in his back yard trying to shoot down the stars with a 22 rifle again. I guess he had two. Call the deputy again, arrest ,etc. The guy gets out of jail again, and I guess he gets bored because he doesn’t have anything to shoot anymore so he decides to finally mow the lawn. Sort of.
They had moved in in the spring, and it is now late summer. Neither the guy nor his daughter has done any yard work, so the back yard has grass four feet high growing in it. So, drunk guy decides to do something about the tall grass (or else the city gave him hell about it.) Problem is, he doesn’t have a lawn mower - not that it would have done him much good. He doesn’t have a brush-hog either, and sure as hell isn’t going to pay anyone to do it. Besides, like I said, he is drunk and bored. He drives his pickup into the back yard, and scrounges a couple of chains and what looks like a piece of railroad track from somewhere. He chains the track piece behind the truck so that it will drag a path about as wide as the truck through the grass. Now he gets his daughter, and they pile into the truck and start doing donuts around the yard. They do this for like ten or fifteen minutes, raising a god awful amount of dust and tearing donut tracks all over the place. Somehow, they manage not to hit all of the grass - they are just repeating the same tracks over and over. I guess he noticed, and tried to change his path to get more of the grass. Did I mention the tree? There is this one huge tree near the house, and the idiot has managed to avoid it for fifteen minutes. Now, with all of the dust flying and him trying to use his brain, the inevitable happens. WhaaHooom. The idiot slams into the tree at full tilt - dead on. Smashes in the whole front end of the pickup. Steam comes out of the radiator, water, oil, and other anonymous fluids leak onto the ground. Idiot gets out, looks at the damage, blinks like a hoot owl a couple of times, and staggers off to pass out in the house. His daughter ducks her head in shame and goes inside, too.
The truck stayed there, stuck to the tree, for a couple of months. School starts, and one afternoon I come home and the truck is gone. Never did find out what he did with it. A couple of months later, they moved out. Now my parents have a relatively normal neighbor. He just has a thing about his lawn being perfect and is always out working on it with lawn mower, trimmer, edger, etc. My parents never complain about the noise, though. They know:
It could be MUCH worse.

Oh, by the way. His daughter was weird, too. I don’t remember all of the events leading up to it, but at some point her nick-name in the neighborhood was Abby. As in “Abby-normal.” Anybody remember the Frankenstein parody with Gene Wilder? Right. The monster’s brain.

16

The apartment complex I used to live in was full of them - it was very cheap, all bills paid, and was the dumping ground for senior citizens and people recently released from mental institutions. There was one old guy who always dressed like it was 20 below, even in the middle of the summer, had an apartment FULL of junk, and bought every issue of Solider of Fortune, despite the fact he couldn’t read (one of my friends took a GED class at the same place that had a class for adult illiterates). He talked about the weather all the time. The weirdest was the guy who lived right next door to me. His name was Joe but most of the people in the complex called him It.

He looked to be in his thirties or early 40s. He was about 6’3" and 250 lbs. He had long stringy hair, always wore makeup, and usually wore women’s jeans and a halter top, though on Sundays he would wear a dress. He was always having muttered conversations with himself, and sometimes you could hear him have screaming arguments with himself from the hall outside his apartment, in two or more different voices. I clearly remember him once screaming ‘I’ll cut it off!’. He was an excellent keyboard player, though, I’ve probably never known anyone better and I’ve been playing in various bands since I was 18. He would go to a local church on Sundays (when he wore the dress) and they would let him play the organ. One time me and my friends were jamming in the storage room behind the lobby downstairs and Joe showed up and asked if he could join in. We let him, and he immediately started playing extremely intricate accompaniment to our original songs, chords, melody, the works, it was awesome.

Anyway, his condition degraded. He started smelling bad and changed his clothes even less often than he did before. A foul stench started to emanate from his apartment, and the screaming became more frequent. The smell got so bad that you could smell it on the entire floor of the building, and near the stairwell on the floor below too. He got sent back to the mental hospital, and when they went in his apartment to clean it out there was excrement scattered around the house, and the toilet was filled to the brim with it.

17

The LOL (little old lady) in the apartment below mine must be a mutant with superhuman powers of hearing - she knocks on by door every so often to complain about my snoring. When I politely suggested that she might benefit from earplugs, she said that she already wore them, with a wool hat pulled down over her ears for good measure. When I declined her invitation to join her for soup one evening, she laughed and said, “Are you afraid that I’m going to poison you?” After returning from a week-long business trip she asked me where I had been and responded, “Oh, I thought your mother had died.” :rolleyes: