Bad Neighbors

I've had some crazy neighbors over the years.  A few of them have been good, but most of them have been really, really bad.  After reading the prompts from Mama Kat's this week, I knew I had to tell you about some of the worse neighbors I've encountered.

When I was a tween and still living at my parents' house, we had a new neighbor next door.  Her name was Jeanie.  She was a witch with a b.  She used to yell at my sister and I when we were playing in our backyard.  She screamed at me for being too close to her lawn when walking my dog (who then left spite poop in her yard a few times, haha).  She put up a big wood fence facing the wrong way (so the ugly side faced our yard) and on our property.  Eventually she had to move it, but fighting with her made things infinitely worse.  Actually, half the fence fell down in a storm this year, so the people who live there now (who are super nice) actually turned the fence the right way so the ugly side is in their yard.  I was so happy when she moved, but the next neighbor was almost as bad.

Susan and her husband had 2 small kids, and she thought she was right about everything.  The woman lectured my sister and I, called the cops when we were out in our yard after dark (even when we were quiet and my parents were supervising us), and just grated on my nerves.  Oh, and apparently my sister's dog, a pit mix who happens to be incredibly sweet, somehow "threatened" her on multiple occasions while tied to an apple tree in our backyard (when she was in her backyard, on the other side of the fence), causing her to call animal control.  This happened 5 or 6 times, when the dog was tied up or in the house, and absolutely nowhere near her or her property.

I thought I would be home free when I moved to Philadelphia for college, but I had my share of crazy neighbors there too.  There were the drug dealers outside my window in my first apartment.  They were pretty cool, and watched my car for me when I needed to pack and unpack from my weekly trips back home.  Then there was Mama, the funny Jamaican lady who owned the restaurant below my best friend's apartment.  She was pretty awesome, especially when she helped us Macgyver our way into my friend's locked apartment.  And then there was the obese lesbian who live next door to me in my high-rise apartment who loved tattooed girls and creeped me out by trying to get in my pants every time I saw her.

My senior year of college, I lived in another high-rise.  It was in a good, safe neighborhood and had security.  There I found the worst neighbor yet.  He was a stalker.  He lived one floor up from me and his windows looked onto my bedroom and living room windows.  Apparently, he had been watching me through my blinds, which I didn't always close (which was maybe naive, but I never thought someone would be watching me from another apartment).  One evening, there was a "missing you" greeting card under my door.  It had a questionable stain on it  (if you're thinking the worst-yeah, that's exactly what is was-so nasty).  He wrote that he wanted me to take a shower at 10pm so he could watch.  I called security, and they called the cops.  The police wouldn't help because we didn't know for sure who left the card.  But my security guy tried to help me.  We looked out my windows and saw a camera sitting on the sill of an apartment.  He went to check it out, and told the guy not to bother me anymore.  Turns out he had a wife and child.  I gave his wife the card he sent me.  I hope she left the asshole.  I never felt safe again in that building again after that.

When I was pregnant with Goober, the boyfriend, the MIL, T, Princess, and I moved into a 2 bedroom apartment in the downstairs of a house.  The landlady lived upstairs with her 3 grown children, one of whom was a schizophrenic.  He was harmless, but I always felt weird with how he looked at me when he saw us outside and came to talk to us.  He always stared right through me, like he was looking at someone standing behind me.  It was so disconcerting, and after a while I made it a point to avoid him.  At one point, he broke into my car and my MIL's truck.  The boyfriend found him and called the police.  He told the police that a voice in his head told him to do it.  After that, his mom kept the doors locked so he couldn't wander outside at night like that.

His sister, who couldn't have weighed more than 90 pounds soaking wet, had the world's heaviest footsteps.  She stayed up all night because of her work schedule, and I was woken up almost every night between 2 and 4 am to her THUNK THUNK THUNKing footsteps shaking my ceiling and my wall.  The other brother handled the rent and thought he was a hotshot.  He drove a Beemer, took girls to the casinos all the time, and gambled away so much that one of his cars (yeah, he had 2 Beemers) was repossessed.  Oh, and he would fight with the schizophrenic brother.  We could hear them screaming at each other, and he would throw his brother into the walls.  He threw him so hard that ashes would fly out of our fireplace and the house would smell like smoke for hours.  This happened once or twice a month.

It got even worse when, during a snowstorm, water started pouring in one of the bedroom windows.  The house was on a hill, so it was a little window set high on the wall, and it was level with the ground outside (like a basement window).  We called the landlady and her son refused to do anything.  The boyfriend went outside and ended up fixing it by digging out a drainage ditch.  Then there was the big flood.  I was 8 months pregnant with Goober.  It had rained really hard all day, and when I came home from work and went into my room to change, the carpet was wet.  There was 3 inches of water covering half the room.  We moved the furniture to the living room and found a hole in the corner that went all the way through the foundation.  You could see the outside of the house through it.  My nightstand had been in that corner, so who knows when the foundation crumbled.  We put fans in the room to try and dry it out, and called the landlady.  She and her son refused to even look at the damage.

After a few days, the smell was so bad (mold and mildew) that I couldn't even be in the house without getting sick.  The kids and I moved into my parents' house.  We kept asking the landlord to call someone in to fix the hole and replace the carpets.  They did nothing.  So we looked for a new place and found the house we live in now, which I love.  We stopped paying the rent on the old house and just moved out one day without telling the landlady.  They were pretty pissed off at us.  I didn't care.  You should never make a really pregnant lady move.  They threatened to sue us for not paying them rent, and I flipped out on her and her son.  They stopped after that.  I am vicious when I'm angry.  I found out he was badmouthing us to everyone (we had some of the same friends), and they embarrassed him in public for being a liar to the point that he stopped hanging out in a certain town.

Now I have no real neighbors, and I like it that way.  There is a big office building on one side of my house, and the landlord's company is on the other side.  He has a landscaping company and also rents space to a towing company.  This works out well for me.

 Have you guys ever had crazy neighbors?