I have to say, I’m really lucky that I’ve never had any truly horrible neighbors in my life. Other than keeping to themselves (which I can respect), none of my neighbors ever did anything odd. I once lived next to a lady who had a VERY large dog that she walked on a pretty flimsy leash, but he was quite friendly so it wasn’t a problem.
Sadly, not everyone can be as fortunate. Weird neighbors are definitely out there, as these 10 Reddit users will tell you.
1. But it’s my land
I live on a 50+ acre New England farm. About 2/3 of it is wooded.
After I’d been here for about a year I was walking the boundary stone wall, about 10′ on my side of the land.
From a neighbor’s yard I hear a bellowing voice. “YOU’D BETTER NOT BE ON MY LAND.”
I replied “I’m not. I’m on my own land.”
He yells back, from somewhere in the trees on his side “JUST SO YOU KNOW, NEVER STOP FOOT ON MY LAND.”
Me: “OK, we’ve got a deal. And you stay off mine, OK?”
I hear a grunt.
Then I ask “By the way, is this your deer hunting tree stand on my side of the wall?”
At which point he exploded “THAT STAND HAS BEEN THERE FOR TEN YEARS!”
tldr: dumbass picks a fight for absolutely no reason and ends up agreeing to not trespass on my land…and had been tresspassing for a decade.
2. Annoying electrical issue
My dad had a neighbor when he was young that played his radio loudly all day, even when he wasn’t home or was gone on vacation. Every time he left the house and his radio was still on, my dad would go and trip the circuit breaker to his condo.
One day he sees my dad, who was an electrical engineer, and asked him why his breaker kept tripping – was it faulty wiring? No, my dad explained, the loud radio was probably just putting too much strain on the circuit when left on all the time. My dad suggested he should try turning it down or off when he wasn’t home, and see if that fixed it.
So the man tried it, and surprise surprise, the circuit breaker stopped tripping! He was very thankful to my dad for helping him with that annoying electrical issue.
3. Moo
My upstairs neighbors moo at each other. Very loudly. I used to live in the country and it sounds exactly like a cow, and me and my roommate have no idea why they do it. Nobody believes us until they come over and hear it for themselves. We “moo” back at them sometimes now if they get too loud and they usually stop for awhile. They’re just weird people though.
4. Smart, except not
When I was a kid we had this guy living next door who seemed like a nice guy. This is the mid 90s and he had a neon business, so he was doing pretty well for himself. Then he got together with a crack head and his house slowly started going to shit.. literally.
At one point his septic system went up and since they were smoking every dime he made he decided that he was just going to make a cesspit. We live on the East Coast in the mid-Atlantic, it gets hot and humid come July. Thanks to this guy, our entire neighborhood smelled like a spot-a-pot at mid-summer festival for about 3 months.
Fast forward to January, nice and snowy, we come home to our house being broken into. Computer is gone, tv is gone, bunch of movies and meds are gone.
Cops show up and they start dusting and looking around. They go outside and low and behold there are tracks going from our side door back to the neighbor’s house. Of course, they deny everything and are at least smart enough not to keep the stuff around after we got home. They were not smart enough to use different names they pawned everything though. Needless to say, we had new neighbors within a few months of this incident.
5. Not enough to go around
Neighbor dug a hole in our side yard because she needed dirt. Both of us live on an acre of land.
6. Hard times
When I lived with my parents, we had a knock at the door one day from our neighbours across the road. They told us a story that resulted in their car getting stolen the night before.
Apparently, the wife had seen a strange looking man wandering around the street late at night. He had apparently been looking into car windows which were parked on driveways, including our cars.
The next morning, their BMW was gone. Including the keys which were hanging by the front door of their house. They “assumed” the strange man looking in car windows had somehow fished the keys from the house via the letterbox.
The whole thing sounded very strange. To not call the police when a man is literally peering through car windows on people’s driveways was strange enough.
Months later, the neighbours got a divorce and sold their house. Turns out, they’d made the whole thing up, and had dumped the car for the insurance, as they had fallen on hard times. Apparently, their shitty story hadn’t held up well, and they were found out.
Who broadcasts a story like that? Why make yourself look stupid for not calling the police when seeing a strange man eyeing up cars? Then tell all the neighbours about the man?
7. Neighborly approach
I had a neighbor with a drag racing car. At the time, we didn’t have A/C. Like clockwork, at dinner time, he would start the car and revved it so loud my windows rattled. If we had any Windows open (because it was summer), we wouldn’t be able to have dinner conversation.
One day, I’d had enough. I walked to the fence and got his attention and politely asked if he could maybe not rev the car at dinner time. I said I was cool with it otherwise.
His answer was “FUCK YOU!!!”
Fuck me? Hehe ok
I went inside and called the police and filed a noise complaint. They came out, heard it live, and wrote him up. He fought it in court, so I had to go. Judge asked me what happened, I told the story above. She asked him and his wife of it was true, they said yes. BOOM $1,000 fine. Judge told me to call the police if it continued.
To be clear, I wasn’t wasting 911 time. I was calling the non-emergency, ordinance enforcement number.
All dumb ass had to do was avoid 1 hour a day and we’d have been fine.
I never called again, because he didn’t Rev during dinner. One day his common law wife gets in my face about calling again. I told her I didn’t, but she wouldn’t believe me. He got hit with a SECOND $1,000 fine. Turns out it was the neighbor TWO houses away who was a migraine sufferer and had similarly tried the neighborly approach first.
Edit: typos about window rattling and revving
8. No time!
I watched my across-the-street neighbor cut his three-quarter acre lawn entirely with an electric weed whacker because he didn’t have time to drive a mile to get gas for his lawnmower.
9. Dumb as rocks
We lived next to this big guy in an apartment building (front doors inside a hallway). Now, he was a nice enough guy, but he was always cleaning a puddle up in front of his apartment every other day. We’d always ask him, if everything was alright, and he’d talk some incoherent crap about how he hates management.
So, out of curiosity, I asked management when I happened to be in the rental office, and the lady rolls her eyes and says, “This idiot fills up his tub to the brim, and sits his fat ass in the tub. The water, of course floods his entire apartment, and comes out into the hallway, and this idiot has the balls to blame us somehow!” I pretty much said, “geez, sounds rough” and scurried on back to my place. If the tub story is really the truth, this guy must be dumb as rocks..
10. Freebie
A neighbor messed up when building a home and put his entire home well within my property (large piece of land with two huge clearings connected to two roads but separated by a large isthmus of trees). I didn’t notice because I had taken an 8th month vacation right after he started building (huge property, I didn’t go around and inspect it often).
So I got a real estate lawyer and surveyors to confirm it was in my property. I was going to sell him that clearing for a good price until I went to talk to him and he was the biggest asshole I had ever met. He essentially told me that he is going to sue me for “leading him on” despite the fact that I did not know him nor have did I meet him before that day. His wife flipped my girlfriend and I as we were pulling out of their driveway.
4 months later, I file a lawsuit saying he must destroy the property or turn it over to me immediately. It would’ve cost him more to demolish it and return the site to original condition so he signed the house over to me. He was still out for construction costs. I was living in a single wide with my girlfriend, then I had brand new, 2600 square ft house with all the hookups for water, electric, and cable for free.
Got the land for next to nothing, sold it for almost 50 times the value.