Weirdest neighbour you've ever had?

[HEyHEY]

I moved into my first solo apartment when I was 22, it was an old building that used to have a crappy floor and at one time was a retirement home. Anyway, one day I'm sitting there staring at the wall...cause I had nothing else to stare at.... and this scruffy looking guy holding three beers stumbles onto the deck and knocks on my door.

"Hey man, I live upstairs, names Troy. How are you?"

He then gives me a beer, I had to try hard to not bust out laughing at the fact he'd brought TWO beers down for himself. So then he invites me to his place.... offers me some whiskey, sits me down and says, "Yeah I've been in jail most of my life...." And goes on this rant and how he now works in an Axe-handle factory for a living..then shows me all these axe handles he smuggled home because they were his personal favourites. Then he proceeded to show me his dope plants.

He was a very strange guy.

[sangh0]

1. You're a brave person

Speaking only for myself, I would have been gone as soon as the words "ax handle collection" were out of his mouth.

[HEyHEY]

3. Nah, you could tell he was harmless

Axe-handle is much better than Axe.

He was what you'd call a broken man. You could tell he'd been kicked around most of his life and in and out of prison. He just wanted people to talk to.

[Loonman]

2. I've never had really weird neighbors

I'm the weirdo

[pagerbear]

4. I'm the weirdo too

[HEyHEY]

5. AH!

That damend right middle finger is quicker than the left everytime!

[JVS]

6. Maybe he thought you might have a room-mate, thus beer#3

I've never really had a weird neighbor. Does that make me the weird neighbor?

[HEyHEY]

12. No, no roomies..it was clearly a one person place

But what a shithole..the floor was uneven everywhere, the washer was in the living room next to the TV and the dryer in the bedroom. The shower had a clear window in it...wich was kinda neat cause I could look out the window while showering (till it fogged up)

The toilet couldn't be sat upon without fighting the door for knee space. And the "bug screeens" we just mesh stapled to the window frames.

[JVS]

23. One of my friends had a toilet that you had to put a leg in the tub...

to sit down

[HEyHEY]

25. who the fuck builds these places?

[JVS]

28. It's the cheap landlords who modify original construction...

so they can pack more people in and overcharge them

People may not like many aspects of Mao's cultural revolution, but the whole kill and eat your landlord fad really struck a chord.

[texas1928]

7. We lived below a guy

Who ever morning around 5 AM weekday or weekend, would start building stuff. Banging away with hammers and the like it was nonstop till noon, and he has the nerve to complain aobut my tv one time.

[Nicholas D Wolfwood]

8. Lemme get this straight

He offered you beer and whiskey and then showed you his marijuana, meaning he's got that too? Fuck "weird", this dude is awesome!!

[JVS]

9. Yeah, I gotta agree. Best friend material

[HEyHEY]

10. Imagine Hunter Thompson unwashed and without the wit

That was him

[Loonman]

13. "What would I do with a million dollars?"

[HEyHEY]

17. "Nah..no man no..

I believe you'd get your ass kicked for saying something like that."

Actually that is a good example. Except dirty and with a coarse mumbling voice

[underpants]

11. Weirdest I've ever had was a electornic/security freak

I have to say I really haven't had a lot of weird neighbors.

This guy was Mr.Security. In a walk up apartment he had all kinds of security systems (cameras, alarms, etc.) which I only saw in passing as NO ONE was allowed in....not that I really wanted to go in there anyway.

Oh yeah I just remembered this one: Same apartment building there was a 12 foot in diameter octogonal apartment with no kitchen and only a bathroom. It was super cheap $200 a month and I always thought it would be a great "get away" place for someone who was married (and I mean that only as like kicking back with the buddies and watching a game). Anyway, I was talking to the guy who moved in there and asked him what he did for a living-he said he worked for Child Protective SErvices or some type of social work thing like that. I never thought anything of it but I did happen to catch him with young girls (late teens mostly) on occassion. When I was moving out I asked my landlord about the guy and the land lord told me that the guy worked at Pizza Hut. I hope those where just his young employees but I shudder to think what might have been going on.

[Alenne]

14. the heroin addicted prostitute was kinda weird

and really noisy between the hours of 10pm and 3am. And she was fast.

With all of the business she brought home I couldn't figure out why she didn't have enough money for a phone.

[TX-RAT]

15. OK"' You went to his place

Drank his beer, smoked his dope and he showed you his handle.
Where you going with this?

[HEyHEY]

20. I never..wait, I did smoke his dope

I left when his equally strange brother got home....thank god for school I had shit to do.

[The empressof all]

16. Not my neighbor but....

After we purchased our house we found out from the neighbors that the man who originally build the house over 20 years ago use to dig large holes around the property. (about 3 acres) We have never seen anything that is anywhere near suspicious about the property and when we pressed the neighbors about it they just dismissed it as him being an odd guy who dug holes for a hobby.

I sometimes wonder if my neighbors where just trying to freak me out or if there is anything in these holes. It creeps me out when I think of it.

[Screaming Lord Byron]

18. I've had a few.

One room-mate who was a self-professed genius hacker. I'd come home at night and he'd have even more telecoms equipment jacked up against the wall. He used to break into empty office space to steal old computer equipment.
Several were constantly drunk.
One was compiling a book of the best ancient archaelogical sites to drop acid at.
One died mysteriously one weekend at a waterside party. His death was deliberately obscured by his family, so we'll never really know how.
One carried a potato everywhere he went.
One never, ever, ever left the apartment. Really.

[Teddy_Salad]

46. One carried a potato everywhere he went?

And you think that's weird?

Seems logical to me.

[Beware the Beast Man]

19. There's always one neighbor who's a total weirdo..

I never met 'em. :crazy:

[tekriter]

21. Lived in a real freak-show apartment bldg once, years ago...

when I was single and broke. Many things on the weird-shit-o-meter:

1. Couple in next apartment who alternated between screwing and fighting - one day he got fed up with her watching something on TV, so he threw the TV out the window (2nd floor).

2. Manager and his girlfriend SCREAMING at each other 23.5 hours a day.

3. Woman across the courtyard who did her ironing in the front window, naked, no curtains. She told the guy upstairs from me that she liked to be watched.

4. 2 a.m, lots of footsteps up the stairs outside my apartment, I look out the door peephole to see a cop with a shotgun talking to another cop. I do NOT fling the door open to see what's going on. More cops come up the stairs, lots of commotion. Long story short, an upstairs neighbor was drug busted when the cops were sure he was asleep.

Epilogue: I was the only NORMAL s.o.b. in the whole place.

[DS1]

29. One question

Was she hot? and I don't mean from handling an iron...

[tekriter]

36. Yes, she was...

She said she wanted to be watched, and we obliged...

No pictures, no video. Like I said, I was pretty broke.

[ironflange]

41. You mean she charged too much?

:bounce:

[tekriter]

44. No, I meant I couldn't afford a camera or film...

and small video cameras hadn't been invented yet.

[orthogonal]

22. The "Prince of Mexico"

Roommate who claimed -- in utter seriousness -- that he was the "Prince of Mexico", and had an idea for running a "business" out of our group house involving "the sons of princes and diplomats" who he knew from his university. (I put my foot down on that one, so I never did learn if he was planning on selling whores or selling coke.)

He turned me in to FBI -- really, he called the FBI and reported me -- because I a) had a computer with a modem, and b) had "illegally" replaced the phone wallplate/jack, which was literally crumbling to pieces, with a replacement I bought a Radio Shack (this was after the deregulation of ma Bell had made internal phone wiring the home owner's property and responsibility, in case you're wondering). He apparently decided that anyone with a modem and the skill to unscrew a wall plate and splice together the color-coded wires had to be a spy or criminal of some sort.

He insisted on making the lease individual, despite local law requiring that all house leases be "jointly and severally", because he didn't trust the rest of us to keep up with the rent. But after three months he skipped out on the rent himself (and fortunately the landlord didn't come after the rest of us for his share) -- we just never heard from him after the Christmas holidays.

It turned out that the "Prince" had returned to his mother's -- he was her illegitimate son by some Mexican guy she'd met, thus the prince bit and the roommate's absurd, self-designed "aristocratic" name -- and she worked in a shoe factory in Oklahoma.

(I learned this epilogue from the other roommate, a friend of the "Prince", who looked like a shorter Rick Moranis, had been raised in and was a devout member of some tiny splinter fundamentalist sect, lived in the basement, took great pride in his security clearance and "secret" job, and was -- I strongly suspect -- a closeted homosexual. But he's a another story.)

[Canuckistanian]

24. We lived in a Co-op

We had a new neighbour moving in and I heard a lot of noise. Not too loud, the usual moving noises. I saw a pleasant woman and her daughter who lived in another building in the co-op. They said they weren't moving in, but the woman's son was. So the guy's mother and his sister did all the moving for him and then painted the apartment.

Never saw the guy until a couple of weeks later. I used to see him RUNNING out of his door, down the back stairs and out the back door.
I actually came face to face with him, introduced myself, and he turned and walked away from me without a word.

Then the hammering started. Hammering day and night, like he's putting pictures up on the wall. Not loud and not late at night, just far to often to be reasonable.

Then music started playing. Not whole songs. Just fragments of songs 2 to 5 seconds long, like he's searching through a CD, very loud. For about 1/2 hour. Then nothing. Absolute quiet for the rest of the day. Happened several times.

Then we heard that he's not living alone. He has a girlfriend! And she stays home all day. We never had a clue that someone was in there. Someone said she was oriental. We just didn't know.

Some 6 months later, we were going to a General meeting (tenant's meeting). My wife and I finally met them. They went to the meeting, the girl volunteered to be on the Children's Committee. They never showed up to any more meetings.

The hammering and the music would happen, just not as often. No voices. No moving furniture. And no more emergences from the apt.

Nobody else in the building saw them either. I thought that maybe.....
But no. The guy had switched to a night shift and started to run out late at night.

Weird. After spending a year with them as our neighbours, we never saw them again. We moved out in July 2000.

[TlalocW]

26. Right now - the guy across the street

He's in his mid-50s and goes by the name of "Chief" (he's Native American). He lives with his girlfriend and her father, Archie (who's also a character) and upwards of 7 other people in a three bedroom house at times (whenever one of his girlfriend's daughters have a problem, they tend to move back in). I think they're slowly clearing out the house to where it's just the 3 of them again.

I first met him when I was trying to open the hood of my car (girlfriend had backed into the front, bending the release mechanism). He came out of his house to help and proceeded to tell me his life story of hard drinking, police troubles, and doing Ultimate Fighting (he's around 5'8", 350 pounds, and while he has a belly on him, his arms and calves are solid). He keeps wanting to teach me self-defense or show me knife throwing. He also comes over at all hours of the day and night to talk - I had to break him of that habit when I was working a night shift, and he would come pound on my door at 8 am. At times he's kind of like a little kid when he'll tell me his stories because it comes off as the bragging done by a 5th-grader. He's obviously taken a few knocks to the heads, but for the most part he's a good guy - just not very savvy socially.

Anyway, I'm stuck with him now because I've helped him out on a few things from loaning him some money to driving him someplace during an emergency to doing a couple of things on the computer for him. He says that I'm his best friend now. He's an okay guy - you just have to take him in small doses, and he and Archie are both better at fixing things than I am so they've made themselves useful on a few occassions. :)

TlalocW

[tjwash]

27. Well there is the person three houses down...

...who will not shut their damn dogs up. they have two, a huge rotty, and a tiny little cocker-poo. The rotty is quiet, but the damn cocker-poo barks ALL FREAKIN' NIGHT LONG.

[LisaM]

30. I have weird neighbors now....

but years ago, a friend and I had two rooms upstairs in a house (we shared a kitchen and bathroom) and downstairs was an apartment. One day, the two guys who lived in it (who were about our age) came to her room and invited us down to their apartment because they had this great record they wanted us to hear (it was some weird synthesized music.) So we sat there and listened to it. They might have given us a beer, I don't recall. We listened to the entire thing while the two of them raved on and on about how they just found it and how great it was and they just had to share this with us. When the record finished, we went home and they NEVER SPOKE TO US AGAIN!

Now, we have these four young guys who live next door. They've been there about a year. The first thing they did was put up a badminton net (BADMINTON!) Even though they dress in a mildly angst-ridden manner, I picture them as, underneath, being a bunch of Tony Randalls, leaping and cavorting at the net. They have a garden gnome and a small wooden bear in their front yard, and while they have let all their outside bushes die, they keep a giant jade plant inside which they bring out and coddle. When they tire of playing badminton, they also have some croquet wickets going (I'm just waiting for the cricket pitch and the lawn bowling.) They have a television, but I think they just play video games all day long. Girls come over most days and one or two of them will stay outside in their driveway (about two feet from our house) talking till 3:00 a.m. When I get really tired of them, I do a little late night laundrey to blast them back into their house. There's nothing really wrong with them, they just are eccentric.

[Champ]

31. Pretty damn wierd

Him and his brother were umm.. not all there. I recall many times where they were blasting WWF music and then you hear "CAAAAAAN YOU SMEEEEEL WHAT THE ROCK IS COOKING!!!!!?" and then one would always miss with his younger brother, I remember when they were playing football they got into an argument and starting arguing with each other with wrestling terms and he chocked slammed his younger brother. I recall many times where police showed up over them. One time when the older one was arguing with his sister he said "I went to jail for 20 years!" she says you only been 1 night. And when he left I asked her what for and she said for urinating outside a 7-11. But they were cool but wierd, I have lots of interesting tales.

[Dookus]

32. The last place I rented

before moving here to Santa Cruz.... a nice young couple moved in next door. Very pleasant people. She raised the baby and he worked as a traffic officer in the next town over, where I worked.

He very generously "fixed" every parking ticket I got. I wouldn't even ask him - he'd just ask me if I'd gotten any tickets. Thought he was really nice.

Then he came over one day to sell me on Jesus. I passed.

Later, he came over to sell me Amway. I passed.

Once, he came over to ask if I wanted to see his extensive collection of "crime porn". Evidently, he was a cop wannabe who got off on violent crime-scene photos.

I started paying my own parking tickets.

[skypilot]

33. In the apartment building I live in now...

...there was once a guy who ran a gay escort service and bred cats in his apartment. He was apparently in the country illegally because he fled, leaving everything behind, when INS showed up one day. Well, actually, he didn't leave EVERYTHING behind. He did somehow manage to get all the cats out.:shrug:

[1gobluedem]

34. Oh so many...

I suppose the weirdest was the autoworker who lived next door to my parents for awhile. He had 'beer' tattooed on the knuckles of one hand, 'wine' on the other, and gave my parents a case of PBR for Christmas every year that he bought cheap in Indiana. His two daughters had a double wedding in the backyard one summer Saturday, when he came over to borrow chairs from my parents he said 'You're coming over tonight ain'tcha?' My mother was the only woman besides the brides who was wearing a dress.

He had a mousy little wife who threw him out one day when she learned he had a girlfriend. So, he moved into his conversion van (complete with garishly painted sunrise) with the girlfriend -- they spent their days drinking beer and listening to very loud c/w music. They divorced and sold the house soon after that; it's since been occupied by a state cop and now a Hindu priest.

[Zuni]

51. Holy sh---

I knew a redneck drunk guy who worked with a friend of mine who also had a beer tatoo.
On one of his arms he had: BEER and under it someway down, on a banner were : CRAZY INSANE. He said Beer made him 'Crazy and Insane'.

I knew another guy who carved 'Desperado' in his arm, misspelled.

[1gobluedem]

35. Oh, I forgot about the werewolf

My first 'real' apartment after college was in a huge cookie cutter apartment complex. On the day my roommate and I moved in we made the usual moving in noises but nothing too obnoxious. We could hear the guy in the apartment below us yelling and singing to music all day but, having just moved from the campus area, that was nothing strange to us. However, he must have been watching us all day because just as soon as the guys who helped us move left we heard him yell "Sh-t" and come stomping up the stairs. My roommate was much better in a crisis than I was; she jumped up, locked all the locks, and told me to call the police. The guy kicked our door so hard he broke one of the locks and yelled "Who's in there?" My roommate explained that we were and he shouted that we were too noisy (note: we were not noisy at all) and "I'm a werewolf and I need my sleep at night!" She politely responded that we didn't know and we'd try to keep it down while I rather hysterically relayed the conversation to the police. They came and stomped around our apartment -- not a peep out of the guy but as soon as they left, he started yelling and singing all night but didn't come up again. We called the complex manager the next day and learned that this guy was a mentally disabled veteran (they got government subsidies to house these guys, we learned) and that he was basically harmless, however we were going to grad school at night and not too anxious to run into him in the evening. Then the manager suggested that "...if he's a werewolf, why don't you just tie some raw meat on the door?" I didn't find that humorous, called the VP of the rental company, and had a new apartment by the end of the day.

[Lisa]

37. one of mine is a biker who served time for killing somebody ...

... and the guy on the OTHER side of me is an appliance salesman.

Frankly, I'm more worried about the appliance salesman!

[DancingBear]

38. A tri-plex in Columbus, Ohio

We lived upstairs, and EVERY morning at 5 a.m the downstairs guy would play Sgt. Pepper's at max volume, and sing along with it. He also NEVER threw his garbage in the dumpster - he would just let bag after bag pile up by the back door.

The people next door to us upstairs were three guys who had a habit of stealing dope from me, then claiming they didn't. One time they stole almost a pound, and another friend of mine came over, knocked on their door, stuck a .38 in one guys face and "reminded" them that this was not a very sporting thing to do. Later that month, the same guy had a big argument with his girlfriend, and she went upstairs that evening and shot herself in the head - dead. He stayed drunk for two days and then went walking down the alley with a huge knife. I found him later in the day playing mumbly peg with it near the dumpster.

[Guy_Montag]

56. What's mumbly peg? n/t

[ForrestGump]

39. Black Bush supporter who'd inform on us to our neocon f***wit landlord

Two of the scummiest people I've ever known. I don't care how many times a week that aberration of a neighbor went to church...I got a strong reading on relevant sensors that he might be of the gay persuasion, too, even if he didn't know he was, so I think there was more than the obvious amount of self-loathing going on. He may even have hated himself more than I hated him.

Actually, I just intensely disliked the sumbitch...the landlord was an evil mother, through and through, and I came thiiiiiiiiisssss close to decking him when we moved out. Seriously...he treated us like crap and him spouting off about Clinton in the middle of an intense conversation in which he tried for one last larcenous bit of gouging was more than I needed to oush me to the edge. He was a Green Beret lieutenant colonel, but I had the advantage of suffeirng weeks of sleep deprivation and intense physical labor, mixed with enough rage to easily match a retired fascist like him. I hope he gets what's coming to him, and that it hurts.

[Unperson 309]

40. In the rinky dink place we were in about five

years ago, we had the cat Lady next door. No, she didn't have zillions of cats, she had *one* cat.... and *eight* scratching post cat trees... in her living room!

She had six cat boxes (meticulously cleaned, too!), five dishes of water out, four or five cat beds in each room! For ONE cat!

She also had the wall outlets taped over and she wore a small chain dragging from her ankle "to ground her" from static shocks.

Everything she owned was sealed in vacuum plastic bags and stored in boxes. She slept on an inflatable matress wedged between the cat trees. She gave me about $1000.00 in jewelry and electronic stuff, computer software and cameras because they were "inhabited by evil spirits"! Never bothered ME! :D

She was engaged in "The first really TRUE translation of the Bible" and kept asking me if I knew Hebrew because I reminded her of someone she knew when she was Pharaoh in a previous life.

That cat, however, led the life of Riley! She cooked his food herself, by hand because he was the reincarnation of some king or other. Ohhhh-KAYYYYY!

We moved!

309

[Guy Fawkes]

42. Coupla' vampires...

The never went outside during the day. never. And they were deathly pale.... And when they moved away, I swear I saw 2 coffins being moved.

[mitchum]

43. Right after I got out of high school, I lived beside a guy who would...

offer you money to sleep with his wife. As long as he was allowed to watch while in full-on drag. That's when I realised that not ALL Penthouse Forum letters are made up.

[nini]

45. a big family in a 4plex two doors down

when I was a kid.


they built a huge cage in their backyard and filled it with monkeys.. some of whom they would walk down the street with clothes on. :eyes:

There were 3 generations of them in the building. A mean ass grandma who would pop our kick balls if they went her yard. A mom who drove a huge pickup truck and would go up our driveway and across our yard and the neighbor's between us because she didn't want anyone to steal her piece of shit.

Then the grandson with an IQ of maybe 12 or 13 who would drive their riding lawnmower on the sidewalk to the grocery store about 2 blocks away. You could walk faster than that thing moved.

Eventually both the front and back yard turned to jungles and the building fell apart with indoor electric extension cords being draped all over the outside of the house since not all of them were paying their bills. Then they steal water out of others faucets. guess you couldn't flush those toilets if you don't have running water :puke:

Talk about inbreeding at its finest.

[hunter]

54. Cool, I used to live in places where the neighbors borrowed...

... water and electricity. They'd have these scary looking orange extension cords with prongs at both ends, and garden hoses attached to washing machine hoses.

[AngryAmish]

47. This is the best thread ever

[Lou_C]

48. Axe-handle factory...boy they weren't choosy

I had a guy that lived across the hall from me in a high rise apt. and he would empty his garbage in the nude and we lived at the end of the hall.
One time he had a cardboard box on his head and it was around 7 pm and I passed him and he was in the nude. When I walked past him he scared the hell out of me because he was saying beep, beep, beep and he then said that he was Sponge Head Bob in the nude.

[Philostopher]

49. Oh, let's see ...

My first hubby was in the Air Force, so we got to live in some interesting places with some interesting people.

Our first place was a trailer in a 'military ghetto' trailer park. The guy across the road from us was a four-foot-ten Hispanic guy whose entire trailer, as best could be determined, was filled with plants. Not those kinds of plants, mind you, but just ... house plants. He also had put a window box on the end of the trailer, in which he grew cilantro. He drove an enormous mid-seventies Monte Carlo, which required a stack of phone books for him to see over the steering wheel. Don't get me wrong -- he was a very sweet guy, he never behaved strangely around us. It's just that he'd created a jungle in a 10x50' house trailer, and drove a car that was so big he had to sit on phone books to see out the windshield.

Then there was the military couple who lived next door, the female half of which used to come to the door when her hubby was on maneuvers and gone for the weekend to beg sodas. She showed up on a fairly regular basis, even though she knew we usually bought Coke and she was looking for Pepsi. We lived not twenty steps from a convenience store -- she knew I didn't have Pepsi -- so I'm guessing she was just lonely. We used to have a terrible German cockroach problem in that apartment. Once my (ex)husband and I were out on the deck behind the apartments taking in the breeze, and she stepped out to talk with us. He asked her if she had bugs in her apartment, and she said -- I could not make this up -- "yeah, I've got 'em something awful. My mother told me to put vinegar and breadcrumbs in all the places you see them, because they don't like vinegar and they'll eat it and go away."

[Zuni]

50. At my first apartment

there were drug dealers next door. All kinds of strange charecters were in and out of their apartment. Unfortunately, they didn't sell just pot or something--they sold coke and heroin. I worried that one day someone would start shooting. They were creepy guys too.

At my second there was a huge family of Mexican immigrants living upstairs. This was not a big apartment. They would go in and come out of the apartment like they were clowns getting into one of those little cars. They also had impromptu pinata parties out front, right infront of my window. Their kids sometimes threw basketballs and stuff at my window to scare my cat. Not one spoke any significant amount of english. They were always banging around and shouting. Most annoying neighbors I ever had.

[hunter]

52. I'm just reading these to see if anyone here was my neighbor...

#7 sounds about right. I can build anything, starships included, with a drywall hammer, the right music, and an Atari 800 home computer. I usually get out of bed before the sun rises.

My favorite strange neighbor once jumped through my bedroom window while I was nearly unconscious with the flu, and she landed right on top of me. I might have kissed her, but there was glass everywhere, and we both were bleeding.

I had another strange neighbor who would stand in his backyard wearing only an open bathrobe, and he would stare at all his junk car parts while holding a can of Budweiser in his hand. Sometimes he wouldn't move for half an hour, and then he'd turn a little, take a sip of beer, and stare off in another direction. If he had to piss, he'd just piss, without moving at all. I was just tall enough to see over the fence. I always tried not to.

[HEyHEY]

53. That second one sounds like a confused shop teacher

;-)

[wickerwoman]

55. 400 pound schizophrenic man who kept running for mayor.

He was actually a really nice guy and stuck on his meds pretty well. We traded dieting tips and talked about basketball.

We lived in this really tiny town. He told me when he became mayor he was going to build a 20-story Vegas style casino with a penthouse suite from which he could officiate.

I actually voted for him one year, just because I'd love to see that casino stir things up.