The mysteries of your neighborhood

In My Humble Opinion
21

There was a full blown miniature Japanese castle built next to a farmhouse down the road from us over the course of a couple of months. We were fascinated by it and would drive by to see its progress. The other week we drove by and it was GONE. Just vanished. Down to the foundations being gone too.

That one was far too upsetting to leave, so we drove up the little lane to the farm, and there was a man in the yard. My son got out and apologised for being nosy but where was the castle?

The man said that it hadn’t passed the final city building inspection and that it had been ordered down.

OK, but that raises more mysteries. Like, did he ever get planning permission in the first place?? Why couldn’t he just adapt the bits that were not in line with regulations? Surely he checked the regs before he began?? What happened to all the building materials, and presumably he has to pay for them anyway? And finally, wow, that was fast. It probably wasn’t even built ten days before it had vanished. Wierd, eh?

22

Who stole the neighbors’ baby donkey? And why? Why would anyone want a baby donkey that wasn’t weened yet?

23

There is a house on the next block that was always empty, run down and ugly, in an otherwise pleasant middle class neighborhood. We always wondered why it wasn’t fixed up or sold, because at the height of the housing boom it could have fetched $500k as is.

Then we saw a show about it on TLC.

The owner (who had moved out some time ago) died and his daughter came to clean it out. She opened the garage, which she hadn’t been inside since the '60s, and found a 1920something Dusenburg under stacks of newspapers with WWII headlines. There were only two others of this model known to still exist. The engine was in terrible shape, but the interior was in excellent condition due to spending decades in the dark. Her father (a mechanic) had evidently bought it to restore but had gotten in over his head.

Someone told Jay Leno about it and he bought it, and spent something like $100,000 restoring it. Rumor around the neighborhood was that he paid 3 million for the car.

I rented a house in the same neighborhood years ago. When I first moved in, I could tell an elderly couple had owned it before me due to a lingering “old people smell” in the closets and a virgin mary in the garage. A neighbor confirmed it, vaguely referring to a sad situation that evidently led to the vacancy. I didn’t press her about it, but always wondered.

I had to move when the house was foreclosed and auctioned, but I met the subsequent owner when he called me to pick up some mail that seemed important. Turns out the wife took an overdose of sleeping pills, and after he found her, the husband went out onto the back porch and shot himself in the head. The present owner said that two previous buyers had backed out of escrow when they found out about it.

24

My house had a reputation for killing people. Specifically, it killed husbands, always within three years of them purchasing the house. I’ve been here more than ten years so I guess I managed to break the curse.

The neighbors where I used to live were two guys that no one ever saw. When they moved out, we all found out that they had a dog, which nobody knew about. The reason nobody knew about it was that they never, ever, let it out. Needless to say, the inside of their place needed a bit of cleanup work before anyone else was willing to live in it.

My neighbor is one of these people. He throws his trash in the dumpster at work (with their permission). The trash company in our area has threatened to sue him because he doesn’t pay for their service. In fact, they want him to pay trash fees going back to the date when he moved into his house, despite the fact that they have never picked up his trash, ever. He’s of the opinion that there’s no need to pay for a service he already gets for free elsewhere.

25

I always wondered what nuthouse the people I used to live across the street in Burbank escaped from. Once, during a heavy downpour, the old man was in the front yard franticly hosing down the lawn, with the hose about six inches above the surface. The only time I ever talked to any of them was when they held the most absurdly overpriced yard sale in history. A three foot long sheet metal Budweiser sign, the kind you’d see in a liquor store, was priced at one hundred dollars. There was a bag of very old, very beat up golf clubs, some with wooden shafts, that I was ready to offer thirty dollars for the whole bag. "Fifteen dollars each says one of the wackos. They did have a fully functioning Van de Kamp Bakery neon windmill, but I didn’t have a house to mortgage.

26

The mystery framing galleries, just off town square.

None of which ever are open, or have customers.

27

I was going to mention my next door neighbour and his Garden Gnomes and plastic flowers/shrubs and whatnot.

But you already know about him

28

My across the street neighbors are seemingly ordinary people. I’ve had brief conversations with them. But why do they never come out of the front of their house? Their porch light broke and fell off six months ago and they only just repaired it, because I think they literally never look at the front of their house.

I worked for a woman who is probably considered a neighborhood mystery. Her next door neighbor takes care of her garden, and explained that it belonged to a sort of reclusive old woman who doesn’t really like talking to people. She would pay me to weed and rake leaves in her garden, but I was instructed not to speak to her.

Going slightly beyond the stretches of my neighborhood, near a housing project there was a tiny convenience store, only recognizable by the Coca-Cola sign hung in the front. It shut down at least ten years ago and was boarded up and padlocked. It has been graffitied but never opened. But yesterday I saw a van parked in front of it and a man going inside!

29

When I lived in San Diego we had the “Safety First” neighbors. Before cutting the grass, weed-wacking, or even using non-power lawn tools, they would put on full-length industrial overalls, safety glasses and safety shields (kind of like light welding helmets) and steel-toed boots . . . and it’s not as if they were tackling an acre or something; closer to a 10’ x 15’ postage-stamp lawn that took four minutes to mow.

Why? Were they haunted by a terrible mowing accident? Lost a family member to a wacking?

30

A friend’s mother works across the street from a shop that used to be a beauty salon. This shop is now a jewelry store, supposedly. Friend’s mother says the blinds are always down in the front window, there’s a small sign, and maybe 3 people go in an out during the day. She wonders if the place is a criminal “front” posing as a struggling jewelry store.

31

How many people actually live next door? There’s a blond woman, a dark haired woman. Men are never seen entering or leaving the house, but there’s at least one that likes to have loud arguments with the women in the house.
And who’s are the dogs? At any time, there can be one dog, two dogs or no dogs.

32

Me four on this one: it was the woman next door to me. She was a compulsive horder, and once or twice during the years she lived here would have a crew come in and bag up a couple of dozen bags of trash, which then disappeared quickly, albeit not to the curb on trash day.

She died in her bed one day, and the cops came around to ask some questions: the house was such a mess that they couldn’t tell if there was foul play or not – the knife sitting in the middle of the stairs to the second floor was particularly odd. They finally decided it was natural causes.

She was a child psychologist, BTW.

33

That was our old neighbors. Then they got evicted and it took the owner two months to clean the house up - he told my boyfriend there had been an indeterminate number of people in there living like animals, kids on filthy floor mattresses, that sort of thing. You couldn’t tell a thing from the outside, the kids seemed fine, only you could never tell how many of them there were and whose. And the dogs, ditto.

34

The guy behind us is a case, for sure.

A couple of years ago, I was cleaning out my shed, trying to organize it for better use. He stopped at our side gate (we’re on the corner, so there’s a road out front and along the north side of our lot) and called me over to warn me.

All the lots in this neighborhood are 3 acres or more. Apparently, “someone” was sneaking through my yard at night, choosing to walk along a rusted wire fence and climb over downed trees and who-know-what-all to go from the front of my house to the neighbor’s back yard. Because, you know, going a hundred-some feet to the right to walk on a paved road wouldn’t make sense. :rolleyes:

He heard stuff at night. He saw evidence in his yard of someone going thru the fence. Probably teenagers. Probably the illegal aliens next door to me - they spoke Spanish, you know… :eek:

The back is really dark - I turn on the yard floodlights only when I take the dogs out at night. I asked this guy if he saw who was going thru my yard, but he never actually *saw *a person out there. But he knew, because he used to be in law enforcement. He also went on and on about how the neighborhood had “changed” and all the older people were moving away. Well, duh! The folks we bought from were in their 80s and moved to Florida to retire.

After he left, I was telling my husband about this. The alleged “illegal aliens” was a reference to the Puerto Rican couple and their 2 kids renting the basement of the house next door. The “evidence” he saw was probably from when my idiot dog squeezed thru the fence in the far corner of our yard to go walkabout. The noises? Well, I’ve seen deer many times, there are dogs that roam free, and whatever critter got into our trash that one night… And I’m guessing his stint in law enforcement (that’s the exact term he used) was probably night watchman or mall cop or something. Oh, and the “illegal aliens” moved out about a year ago. There’s now a black family living there. I can only imagine what he thinks about that…

What I found really creepy, tho, was that he “noticed” when our utility trailer was missing from the place we usually parked it. Ordinarily, I’d feel good knowing a neighbor was looking out for us, but this guy just made me feel weird. I picture him sitting in his house with cameras and listening devices and alarms and binoculars, maintening a neighborhood watch. I’ve not seen him since he stopped to warn me that day.

35

Probably got taken by the mystery house from the next block over.

36

House down the street has had a security door fitted, along with a spotlight. For about a month, there were police officers, unidentified officials of some sort and council workmen there every day (or night). The police presence has included a patrol car parked outside for several hours, before being replaced by another patrol car which also sat there for hours, and police officers standing guard outside the front door.

All the police left a couple of weeks ago, though there were a few there the other night to arrest someone while the woman who lives there (and her mate) ranted at them for doing so.

37

Our building has two dumpsters which sit side by side in a little area surrounded on three sides by a wooden fence. One day someone put a full but neatly packaged (that is to say, you could tell it was full but you couldn’t see the evidence) diaper on the upper rail behind the dumpsters.

Why? As far as immature practical jokes go, it seems more trouble than it would be worth. It was neatly placed on the narrow rail, so it couldn’t have been tossed to its resting spot. And to squeeze between the dumpsters would mean you’d get who-knows-what kinds of trashy, germy residuey goodness on your clothing and/or skin. You gonna handle your freshly changed baby like that?

Maybe it’s payback for having to change the kid in the first place but then you should have thought of that before you started procreating. As for grossing out people who don’t even know you (we have no people young enough to think this would be funny in our building or several buildings around, I think) it just falls flat. Maybe if the poopy evidence was smeared on the outside of the diaper but nice and clean? Meh!

Maybe the idea was to get people (like me) to wonder why you’d bother. Otherwise, better luck with your next practical joke, buddy.

38

You didn’t mention the brown trim, but I believe you are referring to my house. There are community recycling containers in one corner of the parking lot at the industrial complex where I work. So every now and then, I bring my containers of recyclables to work with me.

I accumulate a full bag of trash only once every 4-6 weeks, so it isn’t cost effective for me to pay a monthly fee for pickup. I take it to the town dump. It goes from my kitchen to the garage, so unless you peer into my garage, you’ll never see it.

39

(((freckafree)))

I’m not sure how you do those internet hugs.

40

There’s a pleasant guy in my neighborhood who would never say anything bad about anyone, except that he likes to refer to our less orderly neighbors as “The Hillbillies”. I guess he thinks “hillbilly” is just another word for “dirtbag”, but actually it refers to people from Appalachia, some of whom are sloppy and some of whom are neat. I happen to be descended from hillbillies, so it bugs me when he uses the word this way. However, I don’t want to come off as touchy, so I let it slide. It’s puzzling that such a nice guy can say something so offensive and be completely oblivious about it.