12 Nightmare Neighbors That Made People Sleep With One Eye Open

Some neighbors bring over cookies. Others bring chaos. Most of us hope for friendly waves and borrowed sugar, but what happens when the people next door turn everyday life into a daily drama? Whether it’s pettiness, boundary-breaking, or plain old bad behavior, these stories prove that not everyone deserves a spare key. And once you read what these people went through, you might never look at your neighbor the same way again.

• “We had a neighbor whose child would wonder into people’s home and eat their food and go through their house. I’d come home to him in my room. My other neighbor said they came home from a movie to find him in the pantry eating and spilling everything. And the worst part is every time we’d chase him out, his parents would come complaining to US!” © ReadAlex / Reddit

• “We lived next to a family when I was younger, they were the worst people. They always threw trash in our lawn, and they had a Great Dane who would always run into our lawn. My dad talked to them a couple times, and they said there was nothing they could do.
  My dad took matters into his own hands one day and started picking the trash up with a shovel and catapulting it back into their yard. They were also very loud and obnoxious.” © EatsCrayons4ALiving / Reddit

• I politely asked my upstairs neighbor to stop stomping around in heels at midnight. She scoffed, “It’s my apartment, deal with it.” So I recorded the noise and sent it to management.
  A week later, she started blasting music at 3 a.m. every night. Then came the kicker—I found raw chicken stuffed in my mailbox.

• “I had a house with 2 other roommates and our landlord was our neighbor. At first, I thought it would be awesome because he would fix our problems quickly, because he was next door. It actually wasn’t.
  We would be without water for a day because he forgot to pay, and if we had people over, having them outside was not an option because it would be too loud, and none of us got the $400 deposits we paid back. I think his justification for not reimbursing us was that the windows were filthy.” © araesaenz / Reddit

• “My mom owns several Malamutes (big dogs, like Huskies), they have kennels and runs in the backyard. They howl when there’s a siren, and bark a little when they’re being fed. Been there for 20 years and no one ever had a problem. Several yippy dogs made a lot more noise.
  Then the trailer moves in across the road. Animal control is called out three times a week. Every time they come, they sit outside, hear nothing, and leave.
  Finding that that didn’t work, she started calling the city when our lawn went a week without being mowed. Said a bush (on city property) needed to be cut down. It was about 3 feet tall, with nothing but a mailbox anywhere near it.
  Screams profanities at my mother every time she’s working in the yard. The list goes on.” © Unknown author / Reddit

• I noticed a camera pointed directly into our backyard. I knocked on my neighbor’s door. He said, “It’s for security.”
  I asked him to angle it down. He said, “Maybe stop sunbathing.” I put up a tall privacy screen. He started flying a drone instead.

• My neighbor kept parking in my driveway because “it’s more convenient”. I (35F) asked nicely five times for him to stop parking in my spot. He laughed: “Sue me!”
  So I had his BMW towed. He went absolutely insane, screaming threats. I just smiled. Big mistake.
  The next day, I walked outside, and my blood ran cold—I found that someone had dumped a huge bag of grass clippings and mulch all over my front steps and mailbox. It was petty, messy, and completely ruined my morning.

• “Not my neighbor, but my aunt’s neighbors. It’s an old couple, and they really wanted to have the house for themselves (it’s a house with 2 flats). So they try everything to get my cousin, his mother and her husband to move out. What they have done so far:
  1. Sue my aunt because the glass cleaner she has produces ‘toxic gases’ (which was not true).
  2. Install security cameras ‘for safety’ but they actually just point at the door of my aunt’s flat so they have video proof if she ever does anything wrong.
  3. Call the cops at every birthday party of my cousin, although my aunt always tells them a few days before that it may get a little loud.
  4. They are currently suing my cousin (18 years old) for making a huge scratch into their car. (I know him well enough to know that he’s smart enough to not do this kind of revenge thing, and I’m 99% sure that he didn’t do it.)” © Seife / Reddit

• My neighbor’s kids kept kicking their ball into our yard and demanding we toss it back. I told them to be careful around my flowerbeds.
  One day, I found every single bloom pulled out of the ground. Their mom came over that evening and said, “Kids will be kids. You should’ve planted something less breakable.”

• “I currently have a neighbor who only does one annoying thing: she leaves the window of an upstairs bedroom open year-round. So that her Pomeranian can sit in the window and bark at everything that moves.
  Everyone who comes to my house comments on the dog yapping. It sounds minor, but it’s been going on for years now. CLOSE THE WINDOW.” © maggiebennett / Reddit

• My neighbor trimmed my hedge—on my side. I asked her not to do it again, and she rolled her eyes.
  The next week, the entire hedge was gone. She said she “didn’t like the look of it.” I went to plant a new one. The next morning, every plant had been dug up and tossed on my lawn.

• “We lived in an apartment complex that had paper thin walls. You could be sitting in a room and hear the conversation next door as if you were in the same room.
  Our next door neighbors decided to install surround sound... and even better, attached the subwoofer to the connecting wall. We literally could not hear our own TV when they were playing theirs.
  I started to have anxiety attacks over the constant barrage of noise coming from next door (and any attempt on our part to request a lowering of volume was met with disdain and outright hostility). Management would do nothing; police were eventually called, and they did nothing.
  We ended up just breaking our lease and moving out.” © d***_999 / Reddit

Have you ever dealt with a neighbor straight out of a horror movie? Tell us your wildest neighbor story in the comments—we’re ready to be shocked!

And while you’re here, here’s what one of our readers shared: “I paid extra for my window seat. The woman beside me asked to switch so she could sit with her teenage son. I refused. She cried, called me heartless, and the whole plane turned on me. Then the flight attendant rushed over: “You have exactly one minute...’” 👉 Click here to find out what happened next.