When you have good neighbors, you don’t really realize how lucky you are.
How can you, after all, until circumstances change and you find yourself living next door to some kind of nightmare?
From lawn care to noise complaints and a hundred other issues people have living in close proximity, these 16 people’s neighbors really put them through the wringer.
16. Linda the Siren.
I have a few from the same neighbor who I’ll call Linda. Linda would often have men outside the apartment building that she locked out screaming her name.
But the best story regards a boyfriend Linda had who insisted my room mate and I call him “The Captain.” About a week after meeting him, we came home to a wedding announcement for Linda and The Captain. Yes, his name was The Captain on the announcement.
Exactly one week later still, The Captain was arrested outside our apartment building for public intoxication at 2 AM while screaming “I’ve made a huge mistake, eff you Linda! A huge mistake! I’m ruined!”
15. A bunch of creeps.
When my wife and I moved into our house in the summer of 2019, the neighbors on either side of us warned us about the people renting the house directly behind ours. Apparently they had been known to cause trouble and blow things way out of proportion, bordering on paranoia of everyone around them.
We kept it in mind but had no issues for the first 6 months or so after moving in. Their house sits on a hill behind ours and so overlooks the majority of our back yard due to the elevation change.
Well one night (morning, technically) at about 3am we wake up to Ring notifications from our phones showing video from our front doorbell – there’s a man standing barefoot in a sleeveless shirt on our porch POUNDING on our front door.
We give it 2-3 minutes just watching him on the app thinking maybe he’s drunk and has the wrong house… essentially giving him the benefit of the doubt. But then we start to hear him say “come out you f**king pussy, I’m gonna f**k you up” etc and he leaves the porch and starts to head around the side of the house towards our backyard.
Considering we had NO idea who this was, my wife now immediately calls the police as I move out of our bedroom towards the external doors to look/listen for any attempt of home invasion. At this point our neighbors directly behind us throw a HUGE spotlight into our backyard from theirs.. we’re thinking okay cool they know something is up and they’re trying to help us out by shedding light on our backyard.
The cops arrive several long minutes later and knock, we explain the situation and they head out back to look around and get the scoop from the neighbors with the spotlight. It turns out that the spotlight neighbor was the one on our porch, he had jumped our fence into our backyard and up into his yard and then threw the light on.
He told the police that several nights prior, I had let my puppy out into MY OWN backyard in the middle of the night and because I was in my boxers, that I was “trying to expose myself to his family” because they could look down on our entire yard from where theirs sits.
He then followed this up to the police with “evidence” which consisted of videos he had taken THROUGH OUR WINDOWS of my wife and I inside of our own home doing totally normal things like chores, watching tv, etc.. nothing inappropriate or scandalous (not that it would have mattered anyway, we were in our OWN HOME). Because of the elevation difference, if they went out of their way they could technically slightly see through our closed blinds due to the angle… so they had been filming us for no reason at all and expected the police to see this as reasonable?
The cops came back in and my wife was devastated, a huge breach of our privacy of course and totally unfounded accusations as we had never done anything to anger these people, we hadn’t even met them. The police told us “just don’t worry about it, if he tries something again just give us a call” which wasn’t the most comforting at the time.
They moved out a few months later without any additional issues, my wife and I celebrated like it was a holiday when we saw the moving van in their driveway.
14. Well that’s awkward.
My drug dealing neighbor got murdered on the sidewalk in from of my house.
13. What can you do?
Lived in a small apartment and my neighbours always cranked up their music to 11. Like loud, loud. And until something like 7am. Maybe later, but that’s when I would leave for work. It was so loud that I couldn’t hear my own tv over it. My neighbours and I would bang on the door but they would never open the door. It was like trying to sleep at a festival.
Then at some point I found out they often left for a bar across the street but would just leave the music on, so I would pull the breaker for their apartment, but they would just come back at 5am and turn it back on.
It was reported by heaps of people, but nothing was ever done, so at some point I would jam their lock when they went out so their keys wouldn’t work anymore and they had to get the property manager in while the music was blasting inside.
After a couple of times of that happening they were evicted.
Maybe I’m the bad neighbour in this story…
12. They could still be related.
I used to live in a horrible apartment with paper-thin walls. The people next door were a woman who looked like she was in her 70s and what I thought was her 30-something grandson.
They would yell at each other all day, constantly blast their TV, and the smell of their cigarette smoke would waft through into my apartment and make the place absolutely reek. The worst was at night when the two of them would have loud s^x (which is how I figured out they weren’t related).
Every night for an hour– creaking bed banging against my bedroom wall and the old woman moaning like a stuck pig. Nightmarish. I also think the guy kept track of my schedule and watched for me because whenever I came home or went out, even when I took out the garbage, he would be there outside his place, trying to chit chat with me while staring at my body and being completely gross.
Lived there a year, but it felt like ten.
11. Thank goodness for that.
My neighbours son used to go out partying all week, bring his friends back and then party at his place till 5/6am. The issue, he would party upstairs in his bedroom, music blaring, yelling. If it was just constant noise I could sleep through it but not that. I was running on no sleep and had to be up at 8 to go to work.
I was getting in trouble at work for being exhausted and no one believed it was because my neighbour wasn’t letting me sleep… It was hell. So after trying to talk to the dick, we posted a note through the door. His mum worked nights. She got home and all hell broke loose.
The note was reasonable, we asked them to move the after party downstairs because we couldn’t sleep through all the noise. We didn’t intend for his mum to get the note. Wow, she was so mad.
When my alarm went off an hour or so later he was angrily yelling that it wasn’t fair that my alarm woke him up every day. Yes, an alarm going off once or twice before work was totally unreasonable and his music blasting all night was. The parties stopped though.
10. Those poor babies.
I had some neighbors below me years ago that this reminds me of. Mother and son, plus sometimes his ex, and sometimes their kids. I feel terrible for the kids because the adults were the trashiest people.
The place reeked of pot 24/7, they would park their vehicle on the grass as they were at the back of the building and they drove everybody nuts with how loud they were. I once recorded audio of the mom and son fighting where he was screaming he was going to kill her very graphically. Saw a guy in the building across from us also on his balcony subtly recording in case it escalated.
The fight ended when his ex showed up either with or for the kids, and they started arguing instead. At one point she screamed that she had crabs and then drove off. It was absolutely wild.
9. Definitely bad.
When I started my first job post-college, I was thrilled to live by myself for the first time in my life. I had this beautiful 1 bedroom apartment in a solid part of town.
Everything was great until 6 months later, when new tenants moved in next to my unit. I had a package go missing (a phone case). Amazon had posted a photo of it at my door, so I thought that it was just a fluke. Then it happened again, and again, and again. The office wouldn’t accept packages, so I had to get my items delievered to friends’ places instead. Overall wildly inconvenient and the police didn’t care in the slightest when I reported it, so I just figured I’d deal with it.
Fast forward a few weeks, and I come home after being gone for less than an hour, to see that my doorknob and front door were scrapped up and the knob was barely hanging on.
Long story short, I had been parking in plain view of this guy’s window, so he was able to tell when I was home. I am 100% convinced he tried to break into my place, and that me coming home early interrupted him. I googled his name after I moved (I got it off a package at his door) and found that he was a convicted felon with charges that include grand theft auto, domestic assault, drug dealing, and an attempted break in.
8. You can’t be mean to the kitty.
We rented a house that had another apartment in the basement. The lady who lived below us kept to herself for the most part so we didn’t see her much.
Part of our rental was a detached garage and she asked if she could put small deep freezer in our garage. We were using it for storage, so we were fine with it. After a couple weeks of having her freezer in there, it somehow got unplugged and she came unglued on us and wanted us to pay to replace everything. I understood her frustration, but we hardly ever went into the garage since it was only for storage. In other words, we definitely didn’t unplug it and our landlord agreed. But she was PISSED.
She had a son in college who came home for the summer. During that summer he found a cat and brought it home. His mom said no cats inside, so he would feed the kitten outside. She was pretty wild. He left for school again in the fall and we noticed that the cat was getting very thin. We started feeding her outside in her usual spot. Around Christmas we bought a bag of cat food and I made a plate of cookies and left them both at our neighbor’s front door. The next day they were both back on our porch. Rude. Whatever.
We continued to feed the cat because she obviously wasn’t feeding her. A few weeks later the cat came to our door crying. She was trying to come inside. Super weird considering she was pretty wild and we had never let her inside before. I let her in and noticed she was pregnant and for sure about to have babies. I made her a little corner and she had babies the next day. We let her stay in the house with us but we knew we couldn’t keep her. I went downstairs to talk to our neighbor. She said that her son’s cat was a boy so the cat we had obviously wasn’t his.
I posted on Facebook to see if anyone was interested in fostering a cat and her kittens because we couldn’t keep her. Her son saw my post on Facebook and got SUPER mad at his mom. She then called the cops and said that I stole her cat and lied to her when she confronted me about having the cat in my possession.
It was the stupidest, most frustrating thing that had ever happened to me as far as neighbors go.
Edit/update:
Didn’t mean to leave you wanting more, honestly didn’t think people would care so much about the story.
The police called animal control who then contacted us. They asked us to take the cat and her kittens to the shelter so that if our neighbor really wanted the cats she would have to pay the fee as well as get her vaccinated and licensed. We did take them to the shelter and as far as I know, she did pay the fees to pick her up. However, I did see her on the animal shelter’s Facebook adoption page not long after that. Poor baby.
For the record, I was heartbroken to have to take her to the shelter. I felt awful for moving her and her babies around like that, I am sure that she was so anxious and scared. We would have tried to keep her but we were moving to a new place that same week (hence the urgency to find her a foster home) and we weren’t allowed to have pets.
All authorities involved thought that she was nuts and I think they were also frustrated to have to deal with this stupid situation.
7. Not a club.
Lived on the bottom floor of a two story Victorian. There was very little sound insulation between the two floors. When we moved in there was a friendly older couple that had a dog. We could hear it running around but honestly no big deal. Then they moved out and these three young guys moved in. Seemed nice at first but they turned out to be horrible.
Officially the rental agreement said quiet hours started at like 9pm. We basically told them, look, we’re usually out of the house a lot and not home until late. As long as you’re quiet by midnight during the week and 2am (bar time) on weekends we’re cool. This seemed incredibly reasonable to me. Within a couple weeks of them moving in it was non-stop crappy techno music being blasted at all hours. As we had said, we weren’t home much so that didn’t bother us all that much. What did was the Tuesday night parties going until 4am. I’d go to their front door to ask them to quiet down and it would take a few minutes of ringing the doorbell and pounding before anyone would come down. Usually eyes were glazed over from either booze or drugs. I complained to their landlord multiple times but nothing really fixed it. I finally just started calling the cops and that would get them to stop for that night at least.
The final straw was they had a party with easily 60 or 70 people. Again, not a big deal, until it was 3am and the club music was blasting and everyone decided jumping up and down would be a great idea. I actually could see the ceiling flexing. I finally sat down and wrote a cease and desist letter detailing the city’s noise ordinances and various other legal s**t that would give me cause to sue them and put it in their mailbox. Sent it to their landlord as well. That stopped things. Should have done it months before that.
Finally the landlord had enough I guess because he came in and raised their rent to something insane like $6000 a month. We live in an expensive city but that was like 2x market rate at least. There was no rent control for this building so they were out within the month. Was pretty glorious to hear them yelling at each other about finding a new place to live.
6. Flat-out disgusting.
We had some neighbours that used to leave their garbage out in plastic bags the night before garbage day – instead of putting it in a bin. Around here, that’s just ringing the dinner bell for raccoons and other critters.
Sure enough come morning there’s garbage strewn all over the neighbourhood. What the raccoons and skunks didn’t spread around, the wind picked up the slack. Some of the people on the street kindly approached the guy and asked him to put his garbage in a bin. He told them to go f**k themselves.
Thus began the Garbage Wars.
Every morning of garbage day some people on my street would collect all the half eaten and rotten trash from their lawns and toss it back into the dude’s backyard. He would collect it, then dump it back on their lawns. Or cram it into their bushes. People started finding half eaten burritos and candy wrappers in their mailboxes. The street started to look like a slum. Police were called. Health inspectors. City by-law enforcement. Each side was calling in whatever authority they could muster to get their enemy in s**t.
The dude and his family (amazingly his wife seemed perfectly pleasant) lasted about 8 months then moved.
Every once in a while I find a random margarine lid or piece of styrofoam in my hedge, and my mind goes back to those dark days of war.
5. What dog was it?
Apartment building- The upstairs neighbours dog peed on their patio and it dripped down onto me while I was sitting outside reading.
I yelled and ran to shower and when I texted them to ask them to take their dog out to pee in future they said it wasn’t their dog and it must have blown over from somewhere else.
What?
4. This could have ended up much worse.
He lived in the apartment right below my husband and I. It went from constant complaints to him calling the cops on us multiple times to him leaving threatening message on our car and front door. When we first moved in he was upset with the landlord for renting above him (left plenty of unpleasant notes and interrupted quite a few times when we were talking to the landlord), when we moved in we only had a mattress and no other furniture but he kept calling the landlord saying that we were moving furniture around at 2am and had our TV at full blast.
After the 8th complaint in 2 months of us still moving around furniture and tv being too loud we finally showed our apartment to the landlord. We literally didn’t have a tv and still only had out mattress. Then the neighbor started leaving notes on our car telling us to keep it down and he even put in writing “There needs to be NO noise after 10pm or else I’ll call the cops.” We usually didn’t even get home until after 11pm and we were respectful to make sure we kept things down because we knew that not everyone had our work schedule. So we tried keeping it down even more and there were so many instances when we’d be eating dinner or cuddling quietly, or even sleeping and he’d be banging on his ceiling/our floor.
After a few months he started calling the cops and it got to the point where even the cops told him to stop calling about a noise complaint because it’s a landlord issue and every time they came they never heard anything. The last time they showed up I was asleep and my husband ended up talking to them and explaining everything, they suggested that we file a harassment complaint. Then the cops showed up at the coffee shop I worked at at the time and explained that they were getting almost nightly calls and they suggested to me too that we should file a harassment complaint against the neighbor.
Then he started leaving threatening notes on our car and front door, and we kept hearing our doorknob jiggle. He claimed that he and a friend had sat outside our apartment for 2 hours and listened to all the noise we were making, he’s a retired cop and will call in a few favors if we continue making noise, he knows where we park our car so we better start parking it somewhere else if we didn’t want it to get damaged…etc. We kept the notes and made copies for the landlord and let him know that this was what we were dealing with so we’re just keeping him in the loop before s**t started getting real aka we’re tired of this and if an old guy gets his s**t rocked then just know that it’s been a long time coming.
The last complaint was when he ran outside to the landlord screaming that something needed to be done about us because he heard our bed squeak the night before and how dare he rent to some crazy college kids who are partying and having s*x all night. The landlord finally told him to f**k off and stop being a bitter old man.
Then the neighbor took a total 180 and we found out that he had decided to sue the landlord and was moving. Suddenly the neighbor kept offering us rides when one of us were walking, he stopped complaining and leaving notes but our door knob kept jiggling and turning at around midnight and whenever we would check on our door we’d hear someone running down the hall as we’d approach our door. He eventually moved away and shockingly we haven’t gotten a complaint from any other neighbor in the last 3 years we’ve lived here.
3. Dislike. Hard.
I had an upstairs neighbor let their dog take craps on their balcony.
I’m guessing this was going on for awhile as I started to notice a brown viscous substance leaking on my potted plants on my balcony. It wasn’t until it rained that I could smell that it was dog poo and pee.
At that point it was very obvious. I got him evicted because it kept happening.
Edit*
I basically had poop water raining all over my balcony for that night it rained. I spent a ton of effort making my balcony a nice little oasis with nice lighting, plants, carpeting, and furniture.
2. Rude doggos.
Their dogs got into my backyard and attacked my dog.
My dog ended up ok but it was a long recovery and he still doesn’t walk right. He was and is the happiest dog ever so to see him on the ground covered in blood was the worst thing ever.
The dogs were able to get through because their kids at taken a plank out of my fence (they didn’t have a fence).
I left a letter on their door explaining the situation. They showed up at my door to tell me that it was my fault for not having a stronger fence and that they wouldn’t be paying any medical bills.
After a lot of them yelling and me calmly explaining why they actually would be paying, they eventually complied. They did build a fence, backwards, with the flat side facing them.
1. Actually scary.
The first apartment I lived in I had a neighbour that would try opening the door. Didn’t hear it myself because I worked nights but I came home early one night around 2am and he was trying to get. Had a huge argument with him and he stopped doing it after that.
I’m guessing he thought it was just my two female roommates living there because he never tried anything after he knew I was there as well.
I only thought I had some bad neighbors – nothing like this.
If you’ve got a story that belongs on this list, we want to hear it in the comments!
