Weirdest neighbour antics you’ve ever come across?

[Mariohatesmushrooms]

I have a neighbour who comes running out of her house to stare at me whenever I go outside, but pretends that she’s doing something else like watering her plants or looking out for visitors. I have no idea why she does this, she is a bit odd in general though. I was taking the rubbish out once and she came dashing out so quickly that she tripped over a bucket and went flying! She landed on grass so would have been fine but it really cracked me up.

When I lived in my very first flat I had an 50+ year old alcoholic neighbour. He appeared in my kitchen one day when I was bringing in some shopping, made sexual advances and took ages to kick out (I was very polite and awkward about it when in hindsight I should probably have seen red!). After that he’d periodically throw things repeatedly at my door when he was very drunk like a bike, fridge shelves, his kitchen bin, a coffee table. It wasn’t too bad and I wasn’t there for long.

I’ve had a few other bizarre neighbours over the years but these are the two who really stand out for me. What sort of neighbour antics have had you chuckling or raising an eyebrow?

Last year I caught my neighbour dragging her hosepipe down to the bottom of the garden so she could hose the neighbours opposite who was sat in their garden with a couple of friends listening to some music. It was 8pm on a Saturday, during the summer holidays and the music wasn't even loud, we couldn't hear a thing if we went in side 🤣

Lived next door to a single mum with two young children for about five years. She kept herself to herself but would say hello. Then a couple of weeks after they moved another neighbour showed me an article about her husband, who had lived with her, and his conviction for smuggling lots of drugs. We never saw him, ever! Apparently he only ever used the back gate.

Current neighbour is lovely but since his wife died he's a bit lonely. During the pandemic, he embraced technology, got into online church services and unfortunately (for us) discovered that even if he's up at 3am there will be a live service somewhere in the world.

I remember babysitting my little brother so my mum and dad could go to a neighbour's house. They were back within about 20 minutes because the neighbours had a massive row and they got out just as the sofa was coming through the window. This was also the neighbour who got drunk, stole a bus, and left it outside his house.

My neighbour talks to his car. I can often see him remonstrating with it loudly while pulling faces and gesticulating. Sometimes he stands in front of it in the road and other times he talks to it's driver's side wing mirror. It's a brand new BMW iX M60 The garden in that old house was gorgeous when he moved in. He spent today dumping gravel over the whole massive garden - every plant, tree, path and blade of grass. At 2.30am every night, without fail, a thumping and hammering noise starts, sometimes a drill, for half an hour, then stops. He also neglects his dog which was a lockdown dog for his brat child. Now left outside and ignored. I fucking hate this guy and get a bad vibe from him so I avoid him. I take parcels in for him but no more.

We moved to a new, semi-rural house. The second night there, we were woken by the sound of a bomb exploding close by - so close, our windows rattled. More explosions followed. It turns out our new neighbour enjoyed setting off acetylene bombs in his shed (filling up plastic bags acetylene up lighting them).

After a few nights of this, the police were called (not by us) and thankfully the bombing ceased.

Another former neighbour was convicted of selling quack remedies for cancer. I can pick 'em!

An old neighbour who was notorious for arguing with a brick wall used to loudly argue with her 9 year old step daughter constantly about really stupid stuff. One of the arguments which sticks in my mind is one where they were in the back garden (overlooked by many houses) and she went on for an hour (no exaggeration) repeating the same phrase but putting emphasis on different words -
“WHY have you got my sock on your hand?”
”why have you got my SOCK on your hand?”
”why have you got MY sock on your hand?”
”why have you got my sock on YOUR hand?”

etc etc etc , she just would not stop.

She also fell out with every single person on the estate and eventually moved, I hear she’s the same in her new neighbourhood !!

Moved into a semi detached house was warned by someone else on the street not to annoy the non attached neighbours as apparently they took down their communal fence and would glare at the previous owner when she put her washing out, whilst standing on the boarder. Lived there 15 years never had any issues.

The other side tho.... they lived on the corner and had a massive front garden which they converted into a drive, they also had a double garage. They could basically park 5 cars on their property. They owned 1. Half the pavement outside their house was a drop kerb (in front of their driveway) the rest wasn't. We had no drive (garden not deep enough.) for eight years we had 1 car so just parked outside our house. We bought a second car, rather than park it randomly outside someone else's house we fit both cars in front of our with a slight overlap to in front of the neighbours (about a foot) it didn't even go to their window eye line. This was the side that did not have the drop kerb and was in fact a good car length away from the drop kerb. The first time they asked us to move their eldest was getting married the next day so absolutely fine no problem. Then it was every few days, they had visitors who needed to park outside their house (there was enough room without us moving) Eventually we pointed out that legally we can park there. So they started blocking us in . Instead of using their garage or drive they parked their one car bumper to bumper with ours so we had to move both cars to get out. Was so glad to move.

Nothing compared to some of the absolute belters on this thread, but until I very recently complained to them, my neighbours would sit out in their garden while their dog went batshit in their conservatory FOR HOURS. I’m sure the whole street could hear it, and they just sat around having lunch etc, acting completely nonchalant, while it screamed its head off. Neither are deaf. I would just marvel at it, how on earth could they bear it?

Unless there's more to this..... Your the odd one. It's OK for him to say it, it's OK for you to knock him back. Doesn't make him weird.

It’s taken me ages to read through all these but I’ve had a good laugh, thank you.

Some of them sound absolutely bonkers! I love the sound of the nice, eccentric types best like the hippies😂

@Tilllly there was deffo cake at some point. Also popping fizz bottle corks and wondering where they landed as well … 🫣

You can’t be serious?

You think it’s entirely okay for a married man to tell a married neighbour (with children!) who is FORTY years younger that he fancies her? !

I’m in my forties, married with kids…..if an elderly neighbour said this to me I’d feel it entirely inappropriate!

Ours sits all day - I mean aaaaaallll day - in a wingback chair facing the bay window knitting and avidly watching everything that happens on the road. It's sort of a comfort in a way. If anything bad happened she'd be a super eyewitness. She sees absolutely everything and even tracks which houses people's parcels are diverted to, but you can't do anything without her knowing.

"Oh, you left very early for work the other day, you must be busy?"

"Oh, you had lots of Amazon parcels delivered yesterday, didn't you - is it someone's birthday!?"

"Oh, had your windows done/boiler serviced/[insert handyman here] did you?"

ExH and I used to go out into our garden at night with a torch looking for slugs and snails so we could get rid of them. We used to call it 'Snomping'. 😂

We bought our first property, downstairs flat in a street of very middle class semis. Upstairs neighbour lost his job due to drug use, started partying til 2am. We asked him to turn it down one night when we had visitors, he punched me in the face and started a campaign of music played at full volume from 7pm-7am every night. The neighbours who’d been there over 40 years moved out, as did we.

Guy was South African and did not give a shit about police, told us it took 7 to take him down when he was last arrested. Arsehole ruined our year and now we’re paranoid about noise..

Of course it's OK 🙄 he didn't assault her. He just chose to shoot his shot and got knocked back.

Sucks for his wife to be married to him but he's done nothing illegal or 'weird' married people shag each other all the time.

Invite me next time 😁

i have a batshit neighbour. I could write a book. But I fondly recall the day she came round to tell me that a cow had died in the field and that a UFO had hovered above it and beamed it up.

I love this one! How did you respond?

Not so extreme but we have neighbours who spend all day tending to their very small garden , it’s awful, the lawn is scalped with coffee grounds sprinkled on it. Back lawn is fake. They also cut the tree down which was in the centre of the front lawn , obviously hate leaves as they are out constantly picking up leaves . As we live opposite loads of trees this is a full time job for both of them.

In a sort of “oh, is that so?” kind of way. Although it did make its way onto the list of batshittery we presented to Social Services when we were trying to get support for her.

When I was much younger I lived in some temporary digs in an old house around which a new housing estate had been built. The house opposite our garden gate was on the curve of a bend in the estate road which was the main walking route into town from all the developments.

This house was slightly lower than the throughfare, with a short open front garden before a very wide and deep lounge window. When walking past you could see right into their lounge especially early on a Winter Saturday evening when the lights would be turned on. The problem was Mr and Mrs 40 Something would be sitting there stark naked. If not sitting, one or both would be walking around with all their podge and bits on display.

People would be walking past and Mrs 40 Something could be standing up completely naked just 8 feet away completely nude. One day she was jumping up an down trying to swat a fly while pressed nude against the pane.

I'd love to have seen your face.
Feel sorry for her though if she was mentally ill or had dementia.

I am seriously wondering whether you and I have lived nextdoor to the same lady! I had a very similar neighbour who clearly had some significant mental health issues but unfortunately made our lives a misery. When she first moved in, I was living alone and she barely bothered with me - but when I met my boyfriend (now DH), she started writing me letters saying she knew he was staying overnight and that we were ‘fornicating’ and she had reported us to the police. We had multiple visits from the police in response to spurious complaints she had made about us, including us being drug dealers because she saw me take in a parcel one day which was obviously full of drugs (it was clothes), being people traffickers because she saw a child when peering through our windows (it was my niece) and us breaking into her house and switching on her gas fire (which she believed we had done together with her dentist who was trying to kill her). She also told a PCSO (who I knew quite well so she told me) that we were ‘doing voodoo’ and making her furniture levitate.

By the time we reported HER to the police (for telling my DH she would set fire to our house if he didn’t move out), they told us she had made more than 1,000 complaints about us in less than a year that they hadn’t acted on, all things like she had seen us holding hands or we had left washing on the line for more than 24 hours. The worst bit is that when we expressed concern for her, we were told only a family member could raise a concern with social services and they wouldn’t intervene on the basis of a neighbour being worried, so it seemed she had fallen through the gaps because she had no family and wasn’t getting the help she needed. She was eventually taken away screaming in an ambulance one night after setting fire to her kitchen, and after that we never saw her again and the house went back on sale. She did apparently bump into another neighbour in the supermarket about a year later and told her she’d had to move away because she couldn’t live nextdoor to the brothel I was running anymore.

Not nearly as batshit as some of these but there was the neighbour who nearly set the place on fire by putting a chicken in the oven to roast before going out at 8am. Six hours later I noticed a heat haze outside my window and called the fire brigade, who turned up with two tenders and sirens and brought the entire street out. I had the twitches about housefires for months after that.