In a lot of scenarios, neighbors are relative strangers we nod and pass every now and then. We may have a vague sense of what they look like, their ages, and their "vibe," but many modern neighbor relationships are relatively surface level.
However, there are some neighbors who are so bizarre, so loud, and so intrusive, there is no way to ignore them. They are the neighbors that scream across the building, cause neighborhood dramas, and sometimes even get the law involved (beyond the run-of-the-mill noise complaints.
In a popular Reddit thread, people shared their "idiot neighbor" stories, and the whole thread is a gorgeous testament to how weird people are.
1. TheFeshy's dad had a real piece of work for a neighbor.
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.
2. konfuzedmonkee's neighbor had a rapid decline.
"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."
3. TJIC1 has a really territory neighbor.
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."
4. TheRealBobbyC's neighbor drove a drag racing car.
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.
5. SuchANiceGirl's neighbor has creative gardening methods.
"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."
6. napalm_anal_emission's neighbors believe in torturing each other equally.
Couple that lives across the hall from me fights often and loudly. One night, the girl found something on the guy's phone that she found objectionable (either porn or evidence of cheating, either way she was yelling a lot about skanks and sluts) so she throws his phone off the (2nd floor) balcony onto the concrete walkway below where it shatters. Guy then goes back inside grabs her phone and does the same.
Moral of the story is: an iphone for an iphone makes the whole world entertaining for the neighbors.
7. golfnthat's old neighbors are very bad at scamming.
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 neighbors 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?
8. manofruber's neighbors literally 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."
9. popesnutsack's neighbor's plan didn't go as well as intended.
"My constantly drunk neighbor came up with the brilliant idea that he could collect the leaves in the stone parking lot with his snowblower!!! He duct taped a plastic garbage bag over the discharge chute, and off he goes. It actually inflated the bag for a few moments until the stones started flying. He broke three windows on his garage door and splattered a bunch of cars in the lot. Shit my britches laughing. I could write a book on all the stupid shit i saw him do."
10. yelrambob619's neighbor pettily damaged a rock.
"Neighbor before I bought the house everyday would park but use a wide sweeping arc to get into his spot. Over my lawn. After asking many times for him to stop I put an enormous rock directly in that path on my own property."
"Lo and behold he smashed into it hard. After threatening to sue very loudly and forcefully I informed him I'm a lawyer and he damaged me rock on my property and is liable for all the damages to my brand new rock.......he stopped driving on my lawn after"
11. largecozz's neighbor was afraid of bad spirits but not the law.
Back in high school, one of our neighbors moved away and their house sold to this older woman and her mostly grown sons. She was a strange one, she cut down every tree on her property because of the "bad spirits" in them. The sons seemed to be popular, having people drop by at all hours.
All was relatively quiet until one day, while I was home alone, there was a knock on the door. Two gentlemen in very nice black suits and dark ties then identified themselves as FBI and asked me if we were ever approached by crazy lady or her sons to buy anything. I basically replied with they are crazy and we don't talk to them, they don't talk to us.They hand me their business card then proceed on to the next house.
I look out the window and I see: 5 blue Ford Tauruses, 3 red Ford Astro Vans, and one VIACOM truck that was being loaded with box after box from the neighbor's garage. Turns out the sons were making those special cable boxes that got you all of the channels for free. After this it was only the strange lady left in that house.
12. Luder714's neighbors just don't quit.
I have crazy neighbors. They are actually very nice as neighbors go, but the family is totally disfunctional. They have two grown up daughters living there, along with their teenage daughters and their boyfriends. One has a kid. There are roughly ten people living there ranging from 5 to 70. They keep the yard mowed and keep to themselves mostly, but they are batshit insane. I like them actually for two reasons: First, they are notorious and crazy around our town so everyone leaves them alone, so little crime around us. Second, they are entertainment.
One morning my aunt was visiting. we are on the front porch and I am telling her about all the neighbors. I was telling her a story about how one of the younger grand daughters gets in a fight with her boyfriend at 2AM on a Tuesday night. The are screaming at each other, walking up and down the street, explaining that something like that happens once a week.
Like clockwork, one of the daughters comes out screaming back at someone and gets in her car. Her daughter comes out and tries to stop her from backing out. She grabs a shovel from he back of the truck and starts hitting the front windshield of the card, shattering it. They call the cops.
Meanwhile the granddaughter with the shovel calls her bio dad who lives down the road. He picks his daughter up. 2 minutes later the cops show up, but she is gone.
I have hundreds like this.
13. Ghostlier doesn't miss their old neighbor.
I had a neighbor on our old street who we're pretty sure was on some serious drugs. When we first moved there, he wanted to invite us to a BBQ, but we declined because we were still busy unpacking and said "maybe another time." A few months later, we hear a woman in distress, and turns out he was beating his wife in the middle of the street; we called for her to come over here so she could call police or whatever. The wife left him, and some drama between both of them throughout the years; it's irrelevant to us though.
Because our family helped his wife, we were his enemy and he harassed us multiple times throughout the years. We'd call the police and they'd come out and basically have him stop for a time. At one point, he bought a megaphone and started yelling threats and swears at us. Another time he started driving his motorcycle around our neighborhood to annoy us and then used the motorcycle's back tire to throw dirt and rocks at our car. We called the police who told him "don't do this again;" he denied he ever did it in the same breath that he said he did because my mom is evil.
A few years later I go to get the mail and I hear him talking to his (1-2 year old) child. Basically telling the child "the woman over there is evil. Never trust her" referring to my mom. I tell my mom and she's thinking "oh boy what's he up to now?" Later that afternoon he drives by our house very slowly and stops, staring into our living room window. He later goes home and uses his megaphone to insult my mom and yell threats at us again; one specific threat being "you better not leave your kids alone or something will happen to them." My mom calls the police, they recommend a restraining order. The next day and his ex-wife calls us, saying her kids heard him saying he was going to get a restraining order against us. We filed one at the same time so we had the same court date.
He told the court that my mom had been "training" me and my siblings (and an unnamed teenaged boy) to climb his fence and go into his tree at night to harass him and one night he caught us and we all ran back into our house at my mom's orders. Apparently we only harassed him when his kids were at his ex-wife's. He basically spouted insanity throughout the entire court hearing and the judge asked for our side of the story and we told him. The judge asked if our neighbor was taking any meds and he told the judge "yes, I was taking anti-psychotics but I stopped them." The judge then told him that my family would never bother him again, and granted us our restraining order.
Dude was completely insane. I worry about how those kids of his turned out."
14. roogoogle almost got Anthraxed.
I was off sick one day, and my roommate came home for lunch and checked the mail. We got a letter with no return address, sent to "the rooftop pot smokers", with our address on it. We knew it was for our next door neighbors since one of them had a chair on the roof and smoked up there. Since it had no actual name, and our address on it, I was like "hell yeah I'ma open this it'll be hilarious!".
As I'm opening the taped envelope, a little bit of white powder sprinkled onto my lap. My roommate and I looked at each other and were like "uhh, wtf", so I got up and took the letter outside to open it. A crap ton of white powder came out of the letter when we took it out of the envelope, so we grabbed a ziplog bag and some tongs, and sealed up the letter.
The letter was typed and said random shit like "to the asshole who likes smoking pot on the roof and yelling at people on the street with kids, you'd better have good insurance cuz I'll damage your stuff, I'm ex military and have nothing better to do than to watch over you, you pissed off the wrong guy, blablabla" ...and at the end it said "by the way the substance in this envelope is toxic, so you might want to get yourself to a hospital. Who's the mother fucker now??"
At that point we were half laughing, half concerned, so I called the cops juuuuust in case. They took it very seriously and sent out everyone; cops, paramedics, fire trucks, RCMP (my roommate works for them), and the tactical unit (our version of SWAT). The street was closed off, we were quarantined to our garage, and every neighbour who was home at the time came out to take a look. Everyone was told to go back inside and stay put. The tactical team got suited up in hazmat suits and went in our house to test the letter/envelope.
We were in the garage for almost 3 hours. The tactical guys came back out and said the substance was found to be non-toxic but they still had to do some more tests to figure out exactly what it was. At that point we were taken into the ambulance for a look-over and then back to the garage.
Turns out the white powder was fucking pancake mix. My roommate and I, along with the cops and tactical guys burst out laughing together. We thanked the response teams and they left. The police stayed behind to get our statements and questioned the next door neighbours to whom the letter was supposed to be sent.
A detective followed up with us a couple of times; since it was a threat and sent through the mail, it was a serious offense. The letter/envelope was sent off to forensics for testing. Unfortunately nothing was found and the case was closed.
The people in that house caused some shit the entire time they lived there (noise complaints, trash left everywhere outside, etc.), but this incident really takes the cake. Luckily they have all since moved out. Dickbags.
TLDR; asshole neighbours piss off another neighbour; threatening letter laced with powder gets sent to us by mistake
15. slashystabby made things really easy for bike thiefs.
"Neighbour after someone had attempted to steal his bike and being advised by me to get a better lock, proceeds to save his time by not locking his bike up at all but balancing the lock so that it looked like his bike was locked up unless you actually looked at it for a few seconds. I warned him that someone had already tried to steal his bike and that it wasn't really clever leaving it unlocked like that he says "I promise you I'll lock it up", why he's promising me anything I have no idea I was just being neighbourly, he then leaves his bike unlocked like that for about a week until someone stole it. I guess it did save the thief time. Edit: He did exactly the same thing again! About two months after his first bike was stolen he left another bike out unlocked for weeks and it was stolen. Edit, no one is going to read this but fuck me he did it a third time!"
16. 23farendheight's neighor microwaves her ice cream.
Our neighbor is a strange woman with a lot of strange habits. For example, she waters her plants even when it's raining outside, and she complains about ice cream being cold so she microwaves it first.
17. yungcatmom's neighbor installed a basketball hoop on the shared wall.
"In college I lived in a big apartment building. I lived in a two bedroom and only had neighbors on one side. They also shared a wall with only us. One day we just start here this constant loud banging on the walls. This went on and off for days and was extremely loud and annoying. Finally we figured out what it was via the one guys snap chat story. These guys had installed a full size basketball hoop on the wall we shared with them and were constantly shooting hoops."
"This was especially annoying because the wall directly across from where the hoop was, was not shared with anyone. So we talked to them about it and asked if they could move it. The next day we hear loud drilling in the wall and assume the are taking it down. Nope! They either installed a second hoop or made the first one more secure in the wall."
18. lespaulstrat2 can't even exchange waves with their neighbors.
"I own about 8 acres. The house next to me has a right of way drive that goes through it. A couple bought the house about 10 years ago. One day they were down near the mailboxes planting some plants. I went down and very nicely told them that what they had done was fine but in the future before they do anything on my property they need to ask me first."
"He argued with me that they had rights to all of the property on 35' of each side of the right of way. I explained to him that this just wasn't true. They haven't spoken to me since and won't even return my wave when I wave at them. If they want to be mad at someone it is the agent who sold them the house, not me.
19. Isthisaweekday's neighbor has a deep abiding sense of pettiness.
My neighbor of the last house I lived in had about 1/3 of his property inside our backyard because the previous tenants didn't measure correctly when they installed the fence.
2-3 times a week my neighbor raked leaves. He start in his backyard and then drag a giant trash can to his 1/3 of the property of my yard and rake for hours. Then he'd go to the front and rake that area and walk the trash can back through our backyard and into the woods where he'd dump the leaves and yard clippings.
This neighbor was so obsessed that his 1/3 of the yard didn't have grass growing from how often he raked and walked through it. And in the summer he'd mow this dirt patch, sometimes after the sun had gone down and it was completely dark.
20. Mattsoup's neighbor got in a fight with a groundhog.
"I was out planting grass over some holes I had filled in, and I heard my neighbor yelling. He's an older guy, but big and threatening looking. Anyway, I look over and there's a groundhog lumbering around his yard. He's yelling at the groundhog to go away, but it doesn't give a shot and just keeps walking toward the garage. The guy grabs his hose from the garage and gets ready to spray the groundhog, but it starts running toward his garage because the noises scared it and it couldn't hear where they came from. I have never seen a grown man run like he did that day. He got inside his house faster than I would have thought possible. I went over and scared the groundhog out of his garage, but never told my neighbor I did it. I think he hid in his house for a solid 3 hours."
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