Everyone has at least one horror story about some douchebag neighbor, and if you don't it might mean you were the douchebag.
Charles Hart - The Great Wall Neighbor
They say good fences make good neighbors.
Based on that, Dennis Hawes of Fleetwood, England should have described Charles Hart as the greatest neighbor in the history of professional neighboring, instead of as a psychotic bastard who built a 16-foot high wall between their two properties.
The trouble started for Hawes when he decided to
Evidently he needed to protect the secret identities of his gas grill and
"Go ahead, complain some more. I can totally make this wall higher."
Paula Bolli - The Shitty Neighbor
When it comes to neighbor feuds, dropping poop on each other's property is a time honored tradition, whether it be direct deposits on the lawn from a pet's buttchute or flaming bags placed on the doorstep. It's what community is all about, really.
However, there are times when this admittedly gets out of control, like in the case of Gus and Lucille Midura of Mariners Harbor, Staten Island. The octogenarian couple's neighbor Paula Bolli took about 60 cubic yards of horse manure and dropped it on her own front and side yard just to piss them off, a plan that we argue could have spent more time in the development process.
"So... so why didn't we put the manure on their yard?"
There had been bad blood between the Miduras' and Bollis for over two decades, which somehow escalated to the point of two dump trucks full of noxious animal shit. It's natural to assume that they had to deserve it somehow, like by strangling Bolli's entire family with a used condom or something, but according to the other neighbors the mountain of manure gambit literally came out of nowhere, unlike the army of rats that quickly showed up to feast on it.
Neighborhood spite is a powerful thing, just ask any guy who leaves the rusty car in his front yard specifically because he knows his neighbors hate it. But Bolli is clearly a cut above because she's willing to live in the center of a metropolis of shit-eating rats just to piss off a couple of old people.
Paula Ariail and David Anthony Johnson - The Grave Robbing Neighbors
In Jacksonville, Florida back in 2008, Paul Douglas was afflicted with an acute case of being dead alone in his apartment. With no friends or family to speak of, he could have remained undiscovered for weeks if it weren't for his plucky neighbor Paula Ariail from down the hall, who noticed his suspicious absence and went to check on him, discovering his dead body.
"Can I borrow some sug- oh..."
The shocked Paula immediately rushed to the phone and presumably put it in her giant loot sack, because why call the police to report a dead body when you can just steal everything around it? Over the next few days she emptied Paul's apartment, helping herself to his credit cards and checkbook, but was finally arrested after the cops found her driving around in the dead guy's car.
"I couldn't help but notice you ignored that stop sign back there. Also, you smell like a dead man."
David Anthony Johnson from Baltimore was in a very similar situation when his partner's neighbor, Frederick A. Kessler, Jr., died alone in 2004. But instead of just turning Fred's apartment into their own personal Big Lots like Paula Ariail, the two men decided the better course of action would be to bring Kessler back to life.
By settling Fred's taxes and mortgage bills, Johnson and his partner managed to keep Kessler alive in the eyes of the system for three fucking years. Before being discovered, they had opened a few credit lines in his name and emptied the man's pension fund for a grand total of $140,000. Basically, it's like David Leisure exhuming your corpse and stealing your wallet.
Reddit.com Readers story!
The neighbor on either side of the house I grew up in was pretty good. On the right was a ghost neighbor who eventually started talking to us and being pretty cool, and on the left were my godparents.
Across the street was a family of meth addicts, two doors down from them on the corner was a guy who cooked and sold meth. He had a network of users and sellers all down the street, and damn near one corner house at every intersection was involved with him.
This guy was a fucking icon. People in the area called him a number of things, "Tweaker Dan" was one nick-name, "the White Guy" was another.
He had a make-shift auto-shop in his garage, and he worked on cars from around 5am until about midnight every day, loudly, punctuated by people coming and going from his house to buy meth or shoot the shit or whatever. Sometimes he would have loud arguments with people outside, and sometimes he would have gunfights with people he argued with. More often when he went for his gun people left.
Dan rode his bike everywhere. He had a car, and it worked, but he generally just rode his bike all over the place.
Now, growing up, I just saw him as a shitty neighbor, to be feared and avoided.
The thing was, Tweaker Dan was actually a pretty friendly guy. He would wave to everyone, neighbors, anyone who lived in the neighborhood, anyone he recognized, really.
It wasn't until I was older that I learned a little more about Dan and his operation because of some mutual friends I ended up knowing.
Dan didn't just supply meth to the neighborhood users and sellers, Dan controlled a large amount of the local supply chain. There were two major gangs in the area, but our neighborhood fell directly in a kind of neutral area between their territories. One gang probably could have taken our neighborhood if they had wanted to, they were big enough, and powerful enough, but for Dan.
Dan was their supplier. They knew him as "the White Guy," and part of their arrangement with him is that he sold to them, but they stayed the fuck out of the neighborhood. This was his arrangement with anyone "affiliated" that he sold to. He would sell to pretty much anyone, but if he dealt with you, you kept your shit out of his neighborhood. "Don't shit where you live" sort of thing.
Turns out, this is also why he rode his bike everywhere and waved to everyone. Dan was keeping an eye on who came and went. He waved because he wanted you to know he was watching. It wasn't so much that he was being friendly, though he was, but that he was communicating something very important: he was watching.
To those of us that weren't involved with him, we didn't know. We didn't know about his rules, who he said was allowed to come and go, the arrangements he'd made that basically kept our neighborhood from getting worse as the city around us turned to shit. We only knew about his erratic and peculiar behavior, that he never slept, that he dealt drugs, that he did them.
A lot of the clean houses in the neighborhood vilified him, but it was always peculiar to see which houses were friendly with him, because it was not always who you'd expect. For a guy who had so much interaction with the meth heads, he was also friends with the prison guard, the family who lived a few doors down, my godfather. People you'd have thought would have avoided him.
But they knew. Fuck knows how, but they did. I asked my godfather about it after I found out and he said yeah, he knew, he just didn't see it as something that should be talked about.
So that's Tweaker Dan. One of the best and worst neighbors I've ever had.
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