I Finally Caught My Neighbor Vandalizing My Property At Night r/Relationships

[00:00:01] Hey Waffle Gang, I do hope you are well. My name is Mark and today we're checking out some more reddit stories and if you do love a reddit story why not consider hitting the like, subscribe, maybe that notification bell too and let's crack on with today's first stories.

[00:00:32] So you know what I'm like with this sort of stuff, absolutely love it. But our first story is titled, My elderly neighbor has been secretly vandalizing my property at night and I finally caught him, not sure how to proceed. For the past three months I've been dealing with what I thought was just teenage vandals or maybe some wildlife getting into my bins. Every few nights I'd wake up to find my trash bins completely overturned, garbage scattered all over my driveway.

[00:01:00] At first I didn't think much of it. Cleaned it up, cursed the local kids and went about my day. But it kept happening. Like clockwork, two or three times a week. The weird part? I never heard a thing. No laughing teenagers, no animals rustling around, nothing. Just waking up to the same mess over and over.

[00:01:23] Last week I finally snapped. After picking up used coffee grounds and junk mail for the hundredth time, I decided enough was enough. I set up a chair by my living room window, made a massive pot of coffee and prepared for an all-nighter.

[00:01:39] Around 2am I saw movement. Someone was definitely approaching my bins. As they got closer, I couldn't believe my eyes. It was Mr. Thompson. My 70-something year old next door neighbor. The same guy who always waves and comments on my garden. The same guy who brought me homemade cookies when I first moved in.

[00:02:00] I watched in disbelief as he methodically pushed over both bins, careful not to make any noise. Then he just walked away. Like it was the most normal thing in the world. I knew I needed more proof before confronting him. Who would believe me otherwise? So I ordered a security camera the next day. Set it up yesterday evening, pointed right at the bins. Felt pretty clever about it too.

[00:02:26] But guess what? This morning I checked the footage and there's Mr. Thompson at 1.45am approaching the bins as usual. But then he stops, looks directly at the camera and walks away. Bins untouched. Now I'm sitting here completely stumped. Do I confront him directly? Try to set up a more hidden camera. I feel like I'm living in some weird Twilight Zone episode where my sweet elderly neighbor has a secret vendetta against my trash bins.

[00:02:56] What would you do in my situation? I really don't want to escalate things but I also can't keep cleaning up garbage every other morning. Edit. Thanks for all the responses. Some of you suggested checking if he has some form of dementia or other health issues. That's actually a really good point I hadn't considered. We'll update once I figure out my next move. And we actually have a little update to this particular one.

[00:03:21] But the question is why isn't it? Why is he doing this? What's happened? You know if he was sweet to begin with and the behaviors changed what's happened in between? Have you pissed him off somehow? Is it some kind of mental health issue? Some other kind of cry for help? What's going on here? And I assume it's just your bin he's doing it to. You never mentioned any others. But anyway, let's go straight to the update.

[00:03:45] Opie says, well folks, I confronted Mr. Thompson today. And let me tell you, that sweet old man persona? Complete act. After he spotted my camera, I figured there was no point in trying to be sneaky anymore. This morning I walked over to his house and knocked on his door, trying to keep things civil. The moment he opened the door, I could tell this wasn't going to be the reasonable conversation I'd hoped for. I said, Mr. Thompson, I wanted to talk to you about my garbage bins. And he cut me off saying, you!

[00:04:14] He jabbed his finger at me, face turning red. You and your fancy cameras spying on me like some kind of criminal. I tried to explain that I only installed the camera because someone had been vandalizing my property. But he cut me off again. Your bins are an eyesore. They're ruining the neighborhood's character. I've lived here for 40 years and I won't have them sullying my view. Turns out, my crime was having regular garbage bins.

[00:04:42] In the spot designated by the city. The same spot where everyone else on the street puts their bins. I pointed out that tipping over the bins and creating actual messes was way worse than just having bins out on collection day. But he wasn't having it. Started ranting about property values and neighborhood standards. Like my standard issue city bins were somehow bringing down the street. The cherry on top? He threatened to call the police if I didn't take down my camera.

[00:05:12] When I reminded him that I had the right to have security cameras on my own property. He slammed the door in my face. So there you have it. No dementia. No misunderstanding. No tragic backstory. Just an unreasonable neighbor who decided that garbage bins offended his delicate sensibilities enough to justify three months of midnight vandalism. I'm leaving the camera up. And I've already filed a report with the police. Just have it on record. Also getting a second camera installed tomorrow.

[00:05:40] This time, hidden better. Edit to everyone suggesting I put glitter bombs in my trash. Well tempting. I'm trying to keep things legal here. But thanks for the creative suggestions. I was sort of left wondering how OP put up with this for three months without not confronting it. But holy shit. I think it's one of the things I enjoy about neighbor stories. Sometimes there is no reasoning. It's just pure bloody chaos. Guy didn't like the bins.

[00:06:06] So instead of doing the proper thing and just going around to OP and saying that, is there somewhere we could put them where they're not in my view or something? Even though I think that's a bit weird in itself still. It's still, you know, it's still a way of approaching it without, you know, tipping over the bins every night. But our next little one comes from Joelle VD who says, Connie and the Arby's sandwich incident of 18. The consta had a lot of issues. It's the consta.

[00:06:32] But she finally snapped when she found a rotting Arby's sandwich on the curb outside my house while she was dutifully sweeping the pavement at 3am with a handleless broom. She decided to place the Arby's sandwich on my porch. The Arby's sandwich was not mine. So the next morning I put it back on the curb. The next morning the Arby's sandwich had appeared on my welcome mat. I returned it to the curb.

[00:06:55] This kept going for a week with the Arby's sandwich finding itself in my mailbox, wedged in my screen door, etc. And finally ending with screams and threats being traded from our respective porches. Could this all have been avoided if I just put the Arby's sandwich in the trash after Connie first put it on my porch? Absolutely. So this is the story of two crazy neighbors.

[00:07:21] I think it's the vivid images that these paint for me as well. I just got a picture of these two houses facing opposite each other. And them going backwards and forwards with this fucking sandwich. That slowly growing mold over time. And then at the end something like you see in a TV show where they're both stood on their porches just yelling across the road at each other. People peeking out the window finding out what's going on. But Sagebrush ID comes in with airs and says every day when I came home from work.

[00:07:51] Upstairs neighbor would turn on a stereo full blast a couple of minutes after I entered my apartment. I couldn't hear my TV or radio over the sound of a stereo. Since it only got loud a few minutes after I entered my apartment, I suspected he was doing it just to annoy me. So I decided to do an experiment. When I made my lunch one morning, I also made a sandwich for dinner and filled a pitcher with water so I wouldn't have to turn on my water when I got home. Before leaving work, I used the restroom so I wouldn't have to flush when I got home.

[00:08:19] I parked my car a couple of blocks away from my apartment and walked around the block so I wouldn't pass any of his windows. I very slowly and carefully put my key in the lock, very quietly opened and closed the door and sat on my sofa to read a book and eat my sandwich. Eventually, I had to use the bathroom again and a minute after flushing the toilet, the stereo came on full blast. The attorney helped me write a letter to the landlord to get out of a lease and not lose my deposit and I soon moved.

[00:08:45] I found out later from a co-worker who had lived in that apartment building that the stereo guy did that to other tenants as well. He was a friend of the apartment owner and the owner made a lot of money by getting rid of tenants before their lease was up and keeping deposits and going after them for lost rent. Cheeky bastards. Oh, I'd want some kind of revenge on that. The Fesci says, My dad had a neighbor when he was young that played his radio loudly all day, even when he wasn't home or was gone on vacation.

[00:09:15] Every time he left the house and his radio was still on, my dad would go and trip the circuit breaker to his condo. One day, he sees my dad who was an electrical engineer and asked him why his breaker kept tripping. Was it faulty wiring? No, my dad explained. The loud radio was probably just putting too much strain on the circuit when left on all the time. My dad suggested he try turning it down or off when he wasn't home and see if that fixed it. So the man tried it and surprise, surprise, the circuit breaker stopped tripping.

[00:09:44] He was very thankful to my dad for helping him with that annoying electrical issue. Clever dad. But deleted user says, I had a neighbor with a drag racing car. At the time, we didn't have air conditioning. Like clockwork at dinner time, he would start the car and revved it so loud my windows rattled. If we had any windows open, because it was summer, we wouldn't be able to have dinner conversation. One day, I'd had enough.

[00:10:10] I walked to the fence and got his attention and politely asked if he could maybe not rev the car at dinner time. I said I was cool with it otherwise. His answer was, Fuck you! Fuck me? Okay. I went inside and called the police and filed a noise complaint. They came out, heard it live and wrote him up. He fought in court, so I had to go. Judge asked me what happened. I told the story above. She asked him and his wife if it was true. They said yes.

[00:10:40] Boom. $1,000 fine. Judge told me to call the police if it continued. To be clear, I wasn't wasting 911 time. I was calling the non-emergency ordinance enforcement number. All dumbass had to do was avoid one hour a day and we'd have been fine. I never called again because he didn't rev during dinner. One day, his common-law wife gets in my face about calling again. I told her I didn't, but she wouldn't believe me. He got hit with a second $1,000 fine.

[00:11:10] Turns out it was a neighbor two houses away who was a migraine sufferer and had similarly tried the neighborly approach first. How hard is it just to be a good neighbor? Golf and that says, When I lived with my parents, we had a knock at the door one day from our neighbors across the road. They told us a story that resulted in their car getting stolen the night before. Apparently, the wife had seen a strange-looking man wandering around the street late at night.

[00:11:36] He had apparently been looking into car windows which were parked on driveways, including our cars. The next morning, their BMW was gone, including the keys which were hanging by the front door of their house. They assumed the strange man looking in car windows had somehow phished the keys from the house via the letterbox. The whole thing sounded very strange. To not call the police when a man is literally peering through car windows on people's driveways was strange enough. Months later, the neighbors got a divorce and sold their house.

[00:12:05] Turns out, they'd made the whole thing up and had dumped the car for the insurance, as they had fallen on hard times. Apparently, their shitty story hadn't held up well, and they were found out. Who broadcasts a story like that? Why make yourself look stupid for not calling the police when seeing a strange man iron up cars? Then tell all the neighbors about the man. A deleted user comes in with their story and says, A neighbor messed up when building a home and put his entire home well within my property.

[00:12:32] A large piece of land with two huge clearings connected to two roads, but separated by a large isthmus of trees. I didn't notice because I had taken an 8th month vacation right after he started building. Huge property. I didn't go around and inspect it often. So I got a real estate lawyer and surveyors to confirm it was in my property. I was going to sell him that clearing for a good price until I went to talk to him, and he was the biggest asshole I had ever met. He essentially told me that he's going to sue me for leading him on,

[00:13:02] despite the fact that I did not know him, nor did I meet him before that day. His wife flipped my girlfriend and I as we were pulling out of their driveway. Four months later, I filed a lawsuit saying he must destroy the property or turn it over to me immediately. It would have cost him more to demolish it and return the site to the original condition. So he signed the house over to me. He was stood out for construction costs. I was living in a single wide with my girlfriend. Then I had a brand new 2,600 square foot house with all the hookups for water,

[00:13:32] electric, and cable for free. Got the land for next to nothing. Sold it for almost 50 times the value. Another person comes in with a short one and says, My upstairs neighbors moo at each other. Very loudly. I used to live in the country, and it sounds exactly like a cow. And me and my roommate have no idea why they do it. Nobody believes us until they come over and hear it for themselves. But we... We moo back at them sometimes now if they get too loud,

[00:14:02] and they usually stop for a while. They're just weird people though. I wish that opiate recorded that. I would have loved to hear that. Just... Anyway. Pope's Nutsack, great name, says, My constantly drunk neighbor came up with a brilliant idea that he could collect the leaves in the stone parking lot with his snowblower. He duct taped a plastic garbage bag over the discharge chute, and off he goes. It actually inflated the bag for a few moments, until the stones started flying.

[00:14:31] He broke three windows on his garage door, and splattered a bunch of cars in the lot. Shit, my britches laughing. I could write a book on all the stupid shit I saw him do. We've all got a bunch of neighbors like that. I've told you about that one dude I grew up with, who took that barrel that I used to attach my skateboard with, took it down the river and tried using it as a boat. That flipped over. He also tried once, you know, bagging in a black sack a wasp nest and bringing it round to us. Dude once jumped out of the back of a van onto the car behind,

[00:15:00] and often you'd see him riding around the area on his push bike, which had a front wheel on it that was buckled and looked like a 50p. For any non-Britz, it's kind of shaped like a heptagon. But anyway, another commenter comes in with, Neighbor before I bought the house every day would park, but use a wide sweeping arc to get into his spot. Over my lawn. After asking many times for him to stop, I put an enormous rock directly in that path on my own property. Lo and behold, he smashed into it hard.

[00:15:30] After threatening to sue very loudly and forcefully, I informed him that I'm a lawyer, and he damaged my rock on my property, and is liable for all the damages to my brand new rock. He stopped driving on my lawn after. Poor rock. Large Cause says, Back in high school, one of our neighbors moved away, and the household to this older woman and her mostly grown sons. She was a strange one. She cut down every tree on her property because of the bad spirits in them.

[00:16:00] The sons seemed to be popular, having people drop by at all hours. All was relatively quiet until one day, while I was home alone, there was a knock on the door. Two gentlemen in very nice black suits and dark ties then identified themselves as FBI and asked me if we were ever approached by a crazy lady or a sons to buy anything. I basically replied with, They are crazy and we don't talk to them, and they don't talk to us. They hand me their business card and then proceed on to the next house.

[00:16:29] I look out the window and I see five blue Ford Tauruses, three red Ford Astro vans, and one Viacom truck that was being loaded with box after box from the neighbor's garage. Turns out the sons were making those special cable boxes that you get all of the channels for free. After this, it was only strange lady left in that house. Luda says, I have crazy neighbors. They're actually very nice as neighbors go, but the family is totally dysfunctional.

[00:16:56] They have two grown-up daughters living there, along with their teenage daughters and their boyfriends. One has a kid. There are roughly 10 people living there, ranging from 5 to 70. They keep the yard mode and keep to themselves mostly, but they are batshit insane. I like them actually for two reasons. First, they are notorious and crazy around our town, so everyone leaves them alone. So, little crime around us. Second, they are entertainment. One morning, my aunt was visiting. We're on the front porch,

[00:17:26] and I'm telling her about all the neighbors. I was telling her a story about how one of the younger granddaughters gets in a fight with her boyfriend at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday night. They're screaming at each other, walking up and down the street, explaining that something like that happens once a week. Like clockwork, one of the daughters comes out screaming back at someone and gets in her car. Her daughter comes out and tries to stop her from backing out. She grabs a shovel from the back of her truck and starts hitting the front windshield of the car, shattering it.

[00:17:55] They call the cops. Meanwhile, the granddaughter with a shovel calls her bio dad who lives down the road. He picks his daughter up. Two minutes later, the cops show up, but she is gone. I have hundreds like this. This person sounds like me. And I'll give you one of my own little stories or just talk about a character that used to live round where I did. I've actually written it down this time so I don't waffle on too long like I am right now. Damn it, Mark.

[00:18:23] So talking of neighbors, let me tell you one of my own growing up. There are some memories that stick with you and not because they're pleasant, but because they're so surreal that they almost feel dreamlike. And this is one of those. In our neighborhood, there was a woman who lived in the upper flats. Someone who looking back now as an adult was clearly struggling with serious mental health issues. She's probably in her sixties and become something of a local figure that everyone knew to be cautious around.

[00:18:52] The situation was genuinely concerning. She would sometimes appear with a knife, wordlessly watching the children from a distance. There were darker elements to her story. Rumors about her deliberately setting her own home on fire, which ultimately led to her losing custody of her child. These weren't amusing incidents. They were signs of someone in desperate need of help. But there's one memory that stands out, not for its darkness, but for its sheer absurdity. At the end of our block of flats, there was a lift and a stairwell.

[00:19:21] An elderly gentleman who lived there had a mobility scooter that he would park near the lift, just a normal part of the neighborhood landscape. We were out playing football on the grass, as we usually did, nearby when we heard it. This tremendous banging noise that made us all stop in our tracks. There she was, the woman, having somehow gotten hold of his mobility scooter, riding it down the stairs. Picture this, a full-size mobility scooter

[00:19:50] bouncing down a flight of concrete steps with this woman just going for it. And just interjecting my own story here. And she made it down a couple of flights of steps. And can you just imagine the noise? Just like... But anyway, the inevitable happened. The scooter flipped at the bottom of the stairs and she just laid there afterwards. And while no one dared approach her directly, someone called an ambulance. The paramedics had to essentially force their way in to help her.

[00:20:18] And now, I feel like I always have to say this. Looking back now, it's a story that sits in this strange space between comedy and tragedy. The image of that scooter bouncing down the stairs was almost cartoonish. You know, like I said, imagine someone just doing that. That's crazy. But it's wrapped in this larger story of someone who was clearly suffering. It's one of those memories that reminds me of how complex our life can be. How sometimes the absurd and the serious are so tightly interwoven

[00:20:47] that you can't quite separate them. I want to be clear. I'm not sharing this to make light of mental illness or property damage. But sometimes, life presents us with moments that are so bizarre, so outside the realm of normal experience, that they stick with us forever. This was one of those moments. I'm always mixed emotions to this day talking about my own stories. Like, I love to do so, but it does make me think about the mental side of things and what people were going through

[00:21:17] and how people would think that I'm thinking about them. This was just my life. I'm not meaning to take the piss in any way, but some of them I still do find funny. You know, sad at the same time, but I do find them funny, but some of them funny at the same time as well. Just because, like I said, the sheer absurdity of some of the stuff that happened. And I really hope you do understand where I'm coming from with that. I've hinted at the wedding cake eyeball story for a long time, and I've got it written down,

[00:21:46] but I read it, and I'm just like, it's so fucking crazy. I'm not sure if I can tell it. But then I think back, that was my life. It's bad. But anyway, what do you guys make of this collection of stories? Do you enjoy the neighbor stories as much as I do? I hope you really do, because I really do enjoy it. And don't forget to share your own neighbor-based stories at r slash marknarrations. They don't need updates on these ones. We just like hearing about

[00:22:15] the wildness of neighborhoods. Gives me a chance to get to know you guys better, as well as me being able to tell my own stories at the same time as well. Just a huge thank you for being here today, getting involved in the stories, your love, your support, your time. It always means the absolute world to me. So thank you so, so much for being here, and hopefully I'll see you in the next one. Take care, and much love.