Unreasonable batshit neighbours - what have yours done?

[Waitingforwaiter]

Something on another thread (about outside sockets for Christmas decorations) made me think of this.

A couple of years ago my upstairs neighbours (we're in maisonettes) decided to install a plug socket outside. Only it wasn't an actual proper outdoor socket, just a normal socket like you'd have in your living room ... But on a brick wall outside.

It is gone now. But - wtf?!

Assuming I am not BU about this!

But ... now I'm curious - What's the most batshit thing others' neighbours have done?

We left our lovely neighbours the neighbours from hell.

We lived near the end of a small culdesac, quite a few similarly aged children to our own - 2-4 ish. A nice safe area.

Alf And Elsie (both well into their 70s and long since departed) put in an offer for our house. Just one visit, they lived 200m S. We called about one or two details, they seemed to be in an old peoples home with a communal phone. They asked us not to call/give away details of their forthcoming move. Were they doing a flit? All seemed a bit odd/secretive.

So we moved out and they moved in. Not long after they removed the fencing that would have kept stray balls out. Balls came into their garden and were returned popped.

They managed to fall out with most of our friendly former neighbours. Not clever as they would have needed them as they got older.

There was a sort of spread out family living in houses a few doors down either side of me. They used to share a washing machine and I'd see them carrying it backwards and forwards. They'd carry sofas back and forth as well.

(said family also were involved with theft, vandalism, domestic violence, drugs and attempted murder - it's not a naice street)

Not NDN but neighbours who are NDN to them reported us to Planning for leaving building materials in the front garden and for erecting unauthorised structures.

We'd had the membrane, gravel and stone delivered for a landscape project at 18:00 on day 0. 12.5 hours later, the neighbours took a photograph of the front garden with the bags (helpful timestamp of 06:30 with the date) and used that to complain to Planning.

I had personally moved the tonnes of material through to the back garden by early afternoon on day 1. Coincidentally, I'd taken photographs so the builders would know where the pea gravel was and where the decorative top level gravel and stone were. Also date and time-stamped.

We had a very aggressive no-notice enforcement inspection by planning (not the process they should have followed). Telling us we'd left it there for weeks. Fortunately, they showed me the date and time-stamped photo. I showed them the delivery notice which also had the time at which I'd signed for the materials. And then my own photos of when I'd moved the materials.

The unauthorised structure? The carpenters on this 1 day project had erected a pop-tent to protect them from the rain.

Same neighbours reported us to Planning and Environmental Health for an unsightly front garden (we'd "dumped sinks") and growing unsightly plants. Those would be our alpine sinks and that we'd mixed in beans and tomatoes with the flowers in our raised beds.

Same neighbours apparently circulated a petition about us that didn't manage a single signature outside their own household.

My friend parked outside my neighbours house, so he tried to push it down the street with his bare hands.

My current neighbours are lovely but I used to live in a small block of flats, in the flat below me lived a couple that were a bit too fond of amphetamine. They and their friends would take a whole lot, go out for a few hours, then come back at 3am and have loud karaoke parties. Constantly getting woken up at 3am by the same bloody iskelmä song that is burned into my memory. They were social housing flats and after a year I finally had enough, called the housing office and demanded that either they be moved or we be moved and we got moved to a nice little house so worked out quite well for us in the end!

Ooh where to start. I flat shared with 2 other girls in my early 20's, we were all working and fairly quiet it was not a party flat.
Our downstairs neighbour banged on the door the day after we moved in and told me she's 'had trouble with prostitutes like you' before, called the police multiple times a week for noise complaints often when out flat was empty, chased me up the stairs and shoved a hand through the letterbox trying to get to me, attacked the other neighbours downstairs with a curtain pole, smashed her own potted plants then called the police in an attempt to have us charged with vandalism, contacted our landlord to share photos of our pimp who she'd seen leaving the building (it was my dad), wrote letters declaring we were going to hell for premarital sex, banged on her ceiling shouting 'whore! Whore! Shut up you whore!' when I was getting ready for work because I opened a drawer.....
Only lived there 4 months but it was extremely eventful.

The day I moved in there was a car in the street blocking the driveway with feet sticking out from under it. I approached and said hi I need to get in the driveway, am your new neighbor moving in upstairs. Fred said oh sorry the brakes are off and I can't move the car now. I had a back door entry so stood there wondering what to do as a neighbor looked on amused. I ended up driving the truck across the lawn to access my entrance.

Fred was the only other tenant and he was required to pay the gas bill. One day in mid summer I went to take a bath and no hot water, went to ask Fred and his girlfriend said times are hard, Fred can't find a job. (Times were not hard then lol, Fred was just a lazy useless man)

Fred also was required to cut the grass, shovel snow etc and one day I came home to him on the roof holding a rake, stabbing at a tree limb above him. I asked him what the fuck he was doing, he said he was tired of raking and wanted to pull down the last leaves. How he didn't fall off the roof I'll never know.

He later decided to park his inoperable piece of shit car blocking the drive. I left for work at 430am and he'd turn off the back light so I was venturing out in the dark. This was a half mile outside Detroit, MI and I felt unsafe going out in the dark at that hour and had to tell the LL to make him move the heap so I could park in the drive.

I wonder what dumb shit Fred's up to these days. Remembering him makes me adore our current lovely neighbors even more.

My current neighbours are mostly ok although when having work done on their house they told the delivery people it would be fine to drop the materials on my drive so they could still use theirs (I also have a car!). It was not fine.

Progressing on from the bin-taking-out... came home one day to find our builder neighbour had decided he'd had enough of our guttering dripping and since he had his ladders out anyway, he'd taken it upon himself to fix it! Loved that guy - he was just the sweetest person to live next door to!

Guy on the other side - installed a dart board onto his garden fence and would play darts in the garden in his boxer shorts while drunk. Would also sit out there and watch TV in the garden, all the family, with a pet parrot in the cage out on the garden table into the mix.

Current ones - well attempting to mock up impromptu sandbags (the council gave the street 30 in total when we flooded) out of an old mattress wasn't the sharpest idea in the world recently but it was good for a laugh on a really crappy day as the street flooded.

You're not. When we moved in to our house we found a normal electrical cable plugged into a regular socket running out of our house down the path, then disappearing under the soil of a flower bed and emerging by the shed. The previous owners had managed to conceal its presence when we viewed and when the survey was done.

It no longer exists.

Ds's neighbour is the same. Ds was mortified to discover this when he moved in as neighbour is 87 and it felt so wrong that he was moving and returning his bins for him. He tried beating him to it but was regularly unsuccessful so now he leaves him to it and helps them out in other ways when needed instead.

One neighbour didn't like the way I'd put my recycling in the recycling bin so he tipped it all out and waited for me to put it back to his preference. I just left it knowing it would drive him batshit seeing it there and after a week or so, he couldn't stand it so he tidied it back up again.

Another one got so mad at me parking in my own space that she tried to wrestle me over my car. When she realised I was too strong to be thrown over, she settled for pulling my glasses off my face and stamping on them.

Another one was a quite sweet woman with some problems who was constantly sending her daughter round because apparently mummy needed a spoon. We used to give her a plastic one 😂

Presume the toddlers parents went into the toddlers room more often than the upstairs neighbour tho. They never noticed before this point?

Oh I also had a really sweet neighbour once with schizophrenia. He used to sit outside dressed as Father Christmas in high summer wishing everyone a merry Christmas.

Enjoying the light hearted posts. Horrified by some of the others. Bloody hell.

I want to hug and kiss my neighbours. One is passive aggressive but otherwise delight, and we’ve been mutually helpful and ‘neighbourly’ to each other. The other is quite mad and has threatened several times to firebomb my cats but she’s not actually harmful, just…eccentric.

Used one of those paint sprayers on a lovely, but breezy day to paint their fence..... and all of my washing on the line, and the side of our conservatory and our living room window, and my DH company car. Came home and found her in our garden with a bucket and sponge trying to get the "freckles" off everything. She was actually devastated (and is a good neighbour) so didn't tell her about the car which had to be t-cut.

Where to even start with mine!

1. It is an unofficial HMO and although only a two up two down there is a floating population of at least 10 adults and the occasional child there
2. Shout and scream from 11 am until the early hours
3. Broken the communal gate then broken the new gate that I paid for to replace the one they originally broke
4. Deal scrap from their back yard
5. Used my address to open a bank account, take out a mobile phone contract and claim benefits, then run up debts so of course all the threatening letters come to my home I'm guessing that the person who did this used their original address at first so it matched their ID and then said they had moved and gave my address. Same street and postcode, so very easy to do.
6. Used my address to register a child at school, then not taken the child to school so I had visit from the Attendance Officer. Child has vanished apparently which is very concerning
7. Broken into my back yard and taken out my green bin to fill with their rubbish as they produce so much waste due to having so many people living there. I have now put a padlock on my high back gate to keep them out.
8. Called me a mother F*ing C*t when I asked them to keep the noise down
9. Flytip

I have reported them to the council and to the police and to ActionFraud but nothing changes. I just hope I wake up one day to find they have done a flit

The male half of my ndn suddenly decided, when I started building my extension, that he was the fount of all knowledge on all things buildery, and wanted to come round regularly to inspect the proceedings and explain them to me as if I were somehow hard of understanding.

He is not, and never has been, a builder/carpenter/groundsman/brickie/building inspector or any other trade connected with the building industry.

He is, however, A Man, and therefore sees it as his job to tell me, a mere woman, how things should be done.

He was most miffed when I told him that his advice was not required.

I realise that in the past I may have been in the batshit neighbour house.

One housemate taught sword fighting (for LARPers mostly). Another said she was a white witch. I was a recent graduate who had moved in in a hurry and didn’t know either beforehand. They were both really very nice, it was a great house to live in in many ways and the landlady charged super low rent in order to get long term tenants who she liked and who paid on time.

Front door lock broke. House was in a WELL dodgy area.

Normal course of action? Get a locksmith or ask landlord to get a locksmith.

My housemates’ course of action? Stand in front of the house in full armour (yep) with a longsword (yep yep) for several hours in the middle of the day, several days in a row, loudly and menacingly practicing manoeuvres.

In hindsight it’s amazing he wasn’t reported to the police. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t lived it.

But to be fair, no one ever broke in, and it was months before we got the lock replaced…

We had someone on my road who had bi-polar disorder and when she was struggling people would really look out for her and take care of her.

I wonder if this cuts down her heating bill?

…child has vanished? :(

I lived in a converted Victorian house where each floor was a different flat, and literally everyone was just batshit.

I had the middle floor.

The people above me used to scream at each other in Italian at top volume practically 24/7. I mean literally scream and scream for hours without pausing for breath.

The people below me stole everything that wasn't nailed down, left their giant mountain bikes across the stairs so that no one could get up without problems, then I found out they'd told everyone it was a campaign to punish me for dumping a sofa in the front garden the day I'd moved in. Surely it was obvious the sofa had been dumped by the person moving out, not the person moving in? If you were moving and wanted to dump your sofa, surely you'd just leave it in your old property or dump it outside, not pay a moving company to transport it halfway across the UK only to dump it in the front garden of the flat you were about to move into where you'd have to see it every day?

Lower bottom floor was a woman who never went outside and had about eight dogs who also never went outside, except into the (unfenced) garden where the entire lawn was soon entirely covered in their shits, which she never picked up. The house was on a very busy main road in London and the dogs were just allowed to roam free, back door left permanently open. Anything could have happened and anyone could have just walked inside off the street.

And as a bonus, next door neighbours on one side had suddenly acquired a lot of money, did extensive building work without telling anyone, had their builders dump tons of stuff (like 10 massive bags of rubble) onto our front garden, building stuff all over our garden and driveway. They also installed a marquee with concert-quality professional speakers and threw an outdoor rave till 4am with genuinely 02 Arena-level noise, without warning anyone.

House on the other side was some kind of temporary accommodation place where, because it was a borough where you had to put bin bags directly onto the pavement on bin day (no wheelie bins or anything else) everyone just chucked their black bags of rubbish onto a giant pile in their front garden. It was literally a mountain of rubbish and stank to high heavens, clouds of flies all year round. You'd see people come out of the house, throw another bag on the pile, then go inside again. I swear the bags on the bottom of the pile had been there since Tony Blair was PM.

I left asap.

Funnily enough right before that I lived in an extremely posh area where I shared a hallway with someone who was very obviously dealing drugs, and he was a perfect neighbour at all times.

That was a ghost surely