Neighbors From Hell: 21 People Share Their Horror Stories

1. Yippy little Chihuahuas

“My neighbors are Polish, and they have 3 dogs. Chihuahuas. Yippy little bastards. I’m trying to sleep since I wake up at 4:00AM, and all I can hear is YIPYIPYIPYIPYIPYIPYIPYIPYIPYIP….”

2. A hundred wind chimes

“My next-door neighbor is lovely in nearly every way. He’s friendly, has a cute dog and he brought us fish and chips for lunch on the day we moved in. He watches our house when we’re away, and deals with repair people if we’re at work, since he’s retired. Practically perfect in every way.

BUT.

His garden is full of wind chimes. Like, there could well be more than 100. The constant chiming 24/7 makes me want to garrote him. I hear them in my sleep. I hear them at work. I swear they’re following me. The chimes never stop.”

3. The one who burglarized my house

“My wife and I purchased our first house about three years ago. While moving in there were my new neighbors drinking on their front porch, no big deal. While bringing the last load of boxes into the house my neighbor comes up, welcomes me to the neighborhood, mentions how nice my TV is. Fast forward one week, we are headed out to dinner, this neighbor stops me before getting in the car and asks how long we will be gone (huge red flag). I lie, tell him I’m just running to the gas station one block away, and will be back immediately. Twenty minutes later I get a phone call from the local police, this moron broke into my house in broad daylight with three other neighbors watching (luckily these neighbors weren’t pieces of shit, too). He cut his hand on the window he was attempting to climb through and used his bleeding hand on every doorknob in my house. He is now a number in the US penal system.”

4. We lived across the street from a rapist murderer

“When I was just born, my family lived across the street from a dude who my mom said was initially really friendly. Up until the point when he was caught by the police with a bunch of dead men in his basement. My dad described it like this—he was holding me in his arms rocking me to sleep while watching TV, and he suddenly realized the helicopter news camera on TV was directed on the house across from us. My mom and dad went to the window and watched the guy come out in handcuffs, then a coroner with body bags. We moved shortly after. I didn’t know what exactly happened until a few years ago when my Dad got drunk at baseball game and told some of my friends. As my dad described it, the police found out the guy had drugged random men, chained them up in his basement, and ‘buttfucked the men to death’ with some sort of weird contraption. Barking dogs suck too though.”

5. A revolving door of awful people

“I moved not too long ago, but my old neighbors were the worst. The place across the street was a duplex and had a revolving door of awful people.

The first year I lived at that place wasn’t too bad. It was a reclusive guy on one side and a woman with three kids on the other. The only problem was this woman wouldn’t watch her kids at all. They would be playing in the road all the time. In the summer they were up to midnight every single night. The worst part was none of these kids could be over 10. One of them always bounced on a pogo stick. I’d just hear that annoying sound until midnight. It’s like that fucking kid did nothing else but bounce on that pogo stick. Every night I’d fall asleep to a sound I can only equate to two fat people having sex on a bed of springs.

The reclusive old man moved out, and shit got real bad. Every few months people would move in and prove themselves to be worse than the last tenants. First group of people would sit on their porch all day yelling at people who walked past them. All day, every day. ‘Hey girl, where is your fine ass going? Where the fuck are you going? Stop and talk to me! You stupid bitch!’ That was an interesting few months. Then they got replaced by these people who were just loud. They didn’t seem too bad until one night when the girls of the house got into a drunken fight at 2am. They started beating the shit out of each other in the street. One girl drunkenly fled to her car and side swiped three cars on the street before crashing.

The last lot was the worst. They were obviously drug dealers and had swarms of people in and out of the place and blocking traffic. This was annoying, but still tolerable. Then they started throwing insanely loud parties every night. The main kicker was the one dude who lived there wouldn’t drive anywhere without a beer. I’ve never actually seen someone drink and drive. The dude would just stumble to his car at 11 AM with a beer in his hand almost every day. I never saw this guy get into his car without a beer. Occasionally he would just chug it and then throw it on the ground as he got in. The other problem with these neighbors was broken glass. They would throw their empty liquor bottles into the street constantly. I never bothered to get cops involved until these neighbors had moved in. Apparently everyone on my street had complained about them, but they were still there when I moved out. 2,600 miles later and I have much better neighbors.”

6. My landlady’s screeching demon daughter

“Does my landlady’s daughter count?

I live in a room with private bathroom off of their home, and it’s a pretty convenient setup. I’m almost never home other than to sleep, so generally the little annoyances don’t bother me.

But holy hell I want to throw this girl into a bag and drown her into the river. She’s 19 years old, living at home while she takes some time off from college. Okay, pretty reasonable, I’ve been there before.

Except she acts like a five-year-old. Her speaking voice is, at best, a yell. At worst it’s a demon screech from hell. She likes to hang out in the room directly next to mine and scream full volume at her mother pretty much every day. They’re not normal arguments, either. Her mother is always very calm and reasonable, while this girl just throws tantrums like a child because she doesn’t like what her mother is making for dinner, or her mother isn’t paying enough attention to her, just really the kind of stuff toddlers enjoy complaining about. Normally I just tune it out, but I work an overnight shift on the weekends and have to catch up on sleep during the day. Unfortunately for me she has the weekends off and it seems like they are her favorite time to scream for hours on end.

This girl also fancies herself a singer and is trying to get herself into a performance art program at some college. She’s applied to a bunch now I think, and she likes to practice for her auditions again in the room right next to mine. Her voice literally sounds like a dying cat (hence the river drowning). Of course if anyone tries to give her constructive criticism she just shrieks, so they let her be. Now recently I’ve heard a lot of sobbing from her because she’s starting to get rejection letters from the colleges she’s been applying to with these horrible auditions.

I normally try to keep as much distance from her as possible, but her sister and I are friends so when her sister is visiting from out of town this girl will invite herself along on our plans and since we don’t want to listen to her scream we just let it happen.

On one of these outings I learned that she’s also a ‘dancer.’ I figured we had finally found some common ground! So I ask her what styles she’s into and she says ballet, modern, and tango. I don’t know much about the first two, but I’m a competitive international ballroom dancer, so I tried asking her what style tango she dances, assuming she probably also dances the other dances in the style and just mentioned the dance she’s working on.

She just met me with a blank stare and repeated as if I were the 5-year-old that she’s dancing tango, didn’t I hear her? So I elaborate, asking if she means international or American, and she starts to get pissed off saying that she just dances ‘regular’ tango. Apparently she just walked into an Arthur Murray dance studio and told them she wanted to dance tango. And because it’s Arthur Murray they charged her an absurd amount of money for their studio gear and just started teaching her some unidentifiable form of tango. At that point I was just like ‘Oh okay cool’ but I had already set off her rage so she starts shrieking asking what I even know about tango. I reminded her that I’m a ballroom dancer, and her response was, ‘I don’t dance BALLROOM, I dance TANGO aren’t you fucking listening?’

We just don’t really speak anymore. And yet the headache just from listening to her in the next room never seems to go away.”

7. He said he was a member of the Montana militia, even though we didn’t live anywhere near Montana

“When I was in high school our across-the-street neighbor declared himself a member of the Montana militia (we don’t live in Montana, or anywhere close), and decided that paying taxes and car registration fees was unnecessary since he was now a sovereign nation into himself. He had quite a few Dale Gribble eccentricities.

He knew that eventually the guv’ment would be coming to claim his properties so he prepared. He removed the fence to his back yard, lined up his 3 cars side-by-side and replaced the fence. He then welded all three cars together via a couple long bars across the bottom, then left his yard hose on for days (weeks?).

When they finally came to take his cars away they had to remove the fence, then tried dragging the first car out. That one dragged the other two along with it, which pulled them all deep into the mud. They had to get several trucks and a welder out to take care of the matter. It was pretty fantastic.”

8. At least eight hit-and-runs in the last three months

“I have these stupid college kids that just started renting a house next to me. Every single weekend for three months straight they’ve been throwing parties. That’s not so bad, even though they are super loud and won’t shut up until about 3AM. What makes them the worst is that we live in a court, so whenever the party ends, all these drunk fucktards get in their cars and drive home. Almost every single neighbor, including me, had had windows shattered, cars dented, or side panels destroyed because of these assholes. Not a single note left or insurance info exchanged. At least 8 hit-and-runs in the last three months. Fuck these people.”

9. A dog that barks like he has nothing better to do

“My current neighbors are loud and they smoke like chimneys. They have a medium sized dog that lives outside. He’s called Rocket and he’s so bored that he barks a lot at small things. Open the back door on their side of the house? He’s off. He won’t stop barking for 15 minutes to an hour. That barking ruins me. They go out shopping on the weekend and he starts barking. Not irregular ‘I’m excited’ barks, I can filter those out in my head. These are ‘I have nothing better to do’ barks, one every second with a monotonous regularity that does my head in. They constantly leave the poor mutt outside in the cold and he sits and whines all the way into the night until he falls asleep.”

10. But we don’t own any dogs

“We received a very stern letter from our town Animal Control Officer. One of our neighbors (the one who happened to drunkenly hit our mailbox) contacted them to complain about the unlicensed dogs which we allow to roam through the neighborhood, barking and digging up lawns. We don’t own any dogs.”

11. Their shitty guests throw trash in our yard

“They have a house with knocked-up add-ons and junk all in their yard, which I wouldn’t care about except it’s pretty unsafe for their 4 dogs that stay chained up in the middle of everything. unfortunately we live in the country so it’s them or a kill shelter. We hardly see the same car twice and they’re always outside fighting/partying. We’ve talked to them once because one of their motorcycles got stolen. The guy’s exact words were, ‘Keep an eye out and if you see anything tell me not the cops. This ain’t really a cop thing.’ Their shitty guests throw trash in our yard and one came into my yard and chased my cat for fun. I had to act nonchalant about it though because who fucking knows what that dude was on. BTW, we actually live across the street from them so the fact that they cross just to dump shit here is infuriating. Did I mention we’re both homeowners? So no one’s moving for a while.”

12. She thought she was a secret agent

“There’s a particular type of person who seems to feel like they’re the only thing standing between society and complete collapse, and about six years ago, my downstairs neighbor was one of them. She was aloof and paranoid, and she’d imagine threats from almost everywhere…which made the fact that she thought of herself as some kind of secret agent all the more annoying. Said neighbor was always trying to find ways of getting me (and anyone else whom she thought of as suspicious) to move out of the building. She’d stage loud telephone calls with ‘headquarters’ about the alarming behavior of the other tenants—like my tendency to get home after nine in the evening, which was clearly scandalous—and frequently yell at the people who’d stand on the corner to smoke. On one occasion, I heard her shouting at someone over the placement of a flowerpot in their window, which was obviously an indication that they were selling drugs.

Then, one afternoon, I found this taped to a wall in the stairwell.

It was perhaps the most ridiculous attempt at an official document that I’d ever seen, and I’m including the time that my friend Jonathan—then nine years old—made a flyer for bodyguard services. The atrocious grammar, poorly Photoshopped seal, and distinct absence of any legitimate contact information made the ‘notice’ about as realistic as a scene from NCIS. Furthermore, the reference to ‘the past two years’ seemed to indicate me as her primary target, since I was (as far as I knew) the only resident who had been there for less time than that.

Still, since the notice was clearly meant to scare someone, I decided to return the favor by taking a page out of my neighbor’s own playbook and standing outside of her apartment while staging my own fake phone call:

‘You should see the notice; it’s terrible! Hah, yeah, it’s like they didn’t know that impersonating a federal official is a felony! Anyway, the real FBI are on their way, and they’re going to dust for fingerprints. Whoever made that notice is looking at a lot of jail time!’

I went back inside my apartment after that…and within seconds, I heard my neighbor’s door open. There was the sound of hurried footsteps rushing towards the stairwell, followed by an equally hurried retreat. When I went out to check five minutes later, the notice was gone.

I’ve since moved away from that location, but for the rest of the time that I lived there… the lady never bothered me again.”

13. Asshole dogs on every side

“Three-way tie for my neighbors on each side. They all have asshole dogs that jump and lunge at the fence and want to kill my dog. The giant bloodhound on one side actually broke through and managed to get his head in my yard. This is why my dog only goes out in the back on his leash. Luckily this is only a temporary rental.”

14. Crackheads

“My neighbor is a crackhead, watched her and boyfriend using flashlights on multiple occasions looking for that lost baggie in the yard. Watched them try and start a BBQ up for 15 minutes until they went and got a plastic gas can so went and got my roommate and told her the crackhead neighbors were gonna burn the house down and she had to come watch so she follows and we proceed to watch them almost burn the house down, she caught herself on fire and flapping around like a moron and laughing. So many more stories…”

15. Pam was nuts

“Fucking Pam. Pam was a single mom with her teenage daughter, and for the first few years we more or less got along. Helped her move some furniture in, listened to her bitch about her work, and ignored the smoke that billowed off of her adjacent back deck. I don’t know what caused it, but Pam started to lose her shit. Everyone was out to get her, myself included…and she loved to call the cops. Once she called the cops because the garbage men put my trash can too close to her driveway after emptying it. Usually it was for watching TV at 9:00pm at night, because she thought any noise was a pointed attempt to keep her from sleeping. The craziest was when I was having an argument during the summer (and some windows were open). Pam called the police, and told them that I had been recording an argument that she had with her daughter and was playing it back on loop to torment her. Pam was nuts.”

16. She stormed across the street toward me like an enraged rhino

“I have a story that made living close to them really awkward until we moved. The family opposite us at our old house was really strange. And their daughter was a bully. As a kid she’d pushed me over into glass, spread rumors about me and fed lies to her mum in order to start drama.

Eventually my mum said to the girl if she didn’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all. So in response the girl goes to her mum and I don’t know what she said, or whether her mum was just nuts (more likely the latter) but this woman was absolutely furious.

She storms across the street towards me, the seven-year-old girl, like an enraged rhino. Scared shitless in run inside my house. Seconds later (she ran to the door) she started furiously hammering on our door. My mum answers and this woman is SCREAMING, yes SCREAMING about how dare she do x, y and z. My mum tells her to get off the property and tries to shut the door, this woman puts her foot in the gap of the door, practically foaming at the mouth, points in my direction and screams, ‘SHE IS A LITTLE BITCH.’

Fun fact, my even crazier aunt was living with us at the time with my two cousins, my younger cousin was standing in front of me as this crazy lady pointed and screamed at me so my crazy aunt thought she was talking about my cousin.

My aunt LAUNCHES herself at this woman, tackling her to the floor. My mum tries to break it up but then this delightful specimen pulled her hair and so my mum started punching her in the face. It went on like that for a while until the husband literally drags his crazy wife home by her hair.

So living with them opposite was really awkward for a long time, the bully girl bit off more than she could chew seemingly as after that there was no more drama from her. Her crazy mum is still a nurse.”

17. Fucking perverted old man

“My current neighbor, he’s been my neighbor for about 5 years and I didn’t really know him until 3 months ago.

When I first came into the area he seemed nice, but always wanted to see my little brother (who is autistic and 16.). We eventually started making my brother stay inside for his safety.

No surprise, but my neighbor is the ex-principal of the elementary school nearby. Same principal that raped a few boys several decades ago. Fucking perverted old man. I saw him mowing his yard while I was getting the mail yesterday and I had this urge to run up to him and beat the shit out of him.”

18. Old miserable lonely cunt with a disobedient dog

“Fuckin’ Bob. Old miserable lonely cunt with a disobedient dog. Always complained about noise well before the curfew, let himself into our apartment on one occasion to drop a letter or something off when we left the door unlocked. I bumped lightly into his car whilst backing out of the parking lot once, leaving a half-inch chip in his bumper and stupidly went and told him about it straight away and he lost his mind on me. I was a student at the time and broke, driving my roommate’s car so insurance was off the table. I had a friend mechanic assess it and he said he’d do it for $250 to which Bob said, ‘I’m not having some chop shop touch my car, I want to pick my own place.’ So he made a big deal about not having his car while it was in the shop (he’s retired and hardly ever left the fucking house) and the diagnostic comes out to be around $950 dollars (2 months rent). I explain that I can’t pay it all up front and have to break it up into 4 payments to which he replies ‘I need to have it fixed right away, if that thing cracks then my whole bumper is ruined blah blah blah.’ I tell him I can’t just pull money out of thin air and give him 4 post dated cheques.

6-8 months go by after the last cheque clears and guess what? Bumper still has a chip in it. No wonder he’s alone at this age.”

19. Crackheads near the Arctic Circle

“Small town in the northern edge of Alberta, very close to the Arctic territories. You wouldn’t think there’d be drugs or anything right? Wrong. Some guy moved next door when I was about 10 years old. Decent guy with a family, moved to town cause he’s a long-haul trucker. Well, my dad helps him get a new job so he can be close to his family all the time, but fuck head decides instead to try and get my dad fired so he can move up the ranks. Doesn’t work out, buddy gets fired, and now we have a neighbor that we don’t like. Still tolerable, but then shit really goes down hill. Guy’s family leaves him cause he’s becoming a deadbeat, and then he goes off the rails. Throwing parties all the time, gets a new weirdo of a GF, then eventually the drugs start. This motherfucker went from a decent life with a good family to a crackhead mental case. Cops always busting down his door, fuckin’ creeps comin’ in and out all the time. This is a quiet neighborhood in northern Canada, there shouldn’t be Compton shit going on next door. Eventually greaseball sells his house and moves away to start something else, but fuck me was that a weird 10 years living next to him. New neighbors are a super chill young couple from down south, they’re cool.”

20. I’d like to toss a grenade over the fence

“They have little ankle-biter dogs that are outside all. damn. day. My dogs are 10 times their size and actually behave when they go outside. I’m tired of listening to the yapping dogs, though. I’d like to toss a grenade over the fence.”

21. Grumpy old alcoholic

“My old neighbor was a grumpy old alcoholic. He used to complain when we had our light on too late at night. The light on in our bedroom. He also used to be quite horrible to my girlfriend. Once called her a bitch. Whenever I tried to talk to him he wouldn’t open the door to me or would run away because I shouted at him once.

Here is the karma, though. He used to knock on the door to moan at my girlfriend when I was at work. So naturally my girlfriend started ignoring him when he did this.

One day she hears frantic banging. Ignores him. Turns out he was having a stroke and couldn’t speak so couldn’t call an ambulance. He now lives in a nursing home.

We aren’t horrible people at all. If we had known what was happening we would have opened the door and called an ambulance. It just goes to show, be nice to everyone. You might need their help one day.”