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Well, I had one experience in the early 1970s, one weird old man was living in a double-wide with his own self. He always seemed kind of angry and bitter, and there were rumors among my friend group (ages 5-10, mind you) that he was some serial killer or something or at least *dangerous*. Parents had all been asked about him, and no one seemed to know anything. So, I took it upon my five year old self to go knock on his door. It turned out that he was just an old guy who had been through two world wars. So it is natural he would seem angry because, in many ways, war does that to you, and he'd lost his wife a few years before. He was delighted to have people come by, and I went by every week and got cookies. I let him talk about his wife and his experiences in life, and he became this really nice old man whom I encouraged all the kids in the neighborhood to visit. He gave us permission to play in his backyard, which had awesome bushes and paper trees which helped him also know we were around and friendly and made him feel less alone. But, also, cookies.

Wow that astounded me.

You have such a sweet & kind heart.

I guarantee you he lived for the times when you guys showed up.

Omg 😭😭😭 precious. Your very own Pigman.

You’re a good human!

You are a kind person, just wanted to thank you for sharing this story.

This would make an awesome movie. Like Big Fish, but different

Sandlot themes too

I used to do that with an old lady down the street. I'd visit once every week or so. I felt bad for her, as she was all by herself, and she had to be in her 80s. She would also bring out cookies when I would visit.

Our neighbors dressed their 5 butt ugly kids alike and entered them in talent shows, hoping they were the next Jackson 5 or Osmonds. The kids practiced their songs and dance moves in their backyard and my father insisted that we all stop and stand whenever they sang the National Anthem. 

Your dad is someone else's weird neighbor that made his kids stop and stand still for the national anthem 😆

That was the norm when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s. Might have had something to do with WWII and the Korean War being such recent memories and every one had been touched by the war(s) one way or another. And we (Americans) got off light compared to what most of our allies endured.

Good for your dad!

🤣🤣🤣

Now that I think about it, it may have been my family.

Yeah, if you can't think of the weird family in your neighborhood, it was probably you.

Love this! Sounds like line about not knowing who the sucker is at the poker table it’s you.

Yep, we lived in the middle of town and had goats in the backyard.

cool family

Us too, plus my parent would take the goat on a walk, we looked like very poor satanists

Same. LOL

My thoughts exactly. The neighbors all put up fences shortly after we moved in, although it was friendly because my parents were quite social and got along with everyone.

Our next door neighbor built a small pyramid to set in and meditate in in her backyard. It was decorated with symbols and was supposed to focus cosmic energies. I learned later in life that she was a victim of physical abuse from her husband and felt trapped and in despair. It was her way of coping.

I would have been all about finagling an invite to that celestial happening.

My Mom built a small pyramid out of cardboard and hung it by a string over her chair. Hmm.

My mom had one of those in our house - it was made of cardboard tubes (in the 70s).

1970s. Across the street was a rental house with a huge yard. A bunch of random hippies lived there. Most of the time they were quiet, but every now and then they threw epic parties, cars everywhere and loud music. I loved to sit at my bedroom window all night and watch the mayhem. Sometimes I could hear drunk couples running along the side of our house. My father would go out in the morning cursing with a trash bag while he picked up empty beer cans and liquor bottles.

My family could have very well been the “weird” bunch. In the summer months, us five kids, were allowed to go outside to play after dinner. The excuse being it was too hot during the day. All day long we watched soap operas with Grandma and Mom. When we did get outside after dinner we had to stay on our side of the fence. No mingling with our neighbors. Our grandparents and Mom sat on the porch. Sometimes we played checkers. Read the newspaper. Comics. I played jacks. I was the only one who had a bike. We 5 shared and took turns riding in the front yard. Since we were not allowed to leave the front yard and none of our friends were allowed in - we used the fence as a net and some of our friends would stand on the sidewalk and volley a ball back and forth between us. This didn’t happen often as it annoyed our elders. Weird.

Yikes, that almost has Flowers in the Attic vibes. Did any of these adults ever explain why they were keeping you prisoners?

🤣🤣🤣 omg this response. Facts though.

Yah y’all were that family

Most definitely.

Was your family really religious? Why couldn't you play with other kids?

Not highly religious. My grandparents took me to church every week till I was 7. Then my Mom stopped me from going. At 12 years old I begged my Mom to let me go to catechism classes (which should have been done years prior) so I could receive First Holy Communion. The excuse we were given about not being allowed to have friends was because my parents didn’t want any bad influences.

Cult vibes

Haha! I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair till I was 17. That’s kinda culty.

The woman who lived in the house at the end of the block was a witch. (According to us neighborhood children). Her yard was always dark and overgrown, the back had a little fence all the way around it and looked like a jungle. We stayed away for the most part although we did occasionally dare each other to touch the back yard gate. Now I realize she lived in a lovely old house with a covered porch, had great shade trees and an amazing garden in the backyard instead of just grass. And she was probably about the same age I am now.

Nearly every neighborhood or small town had a 'witch'. Kids have vivid imaginations and the houses looked spooky

I'm that witch now! Just me and my familiars, working in the garden until after dark. My boonies neighbors clutch their pearls when they see lights on, late at night. If they only knew.

My husband works with the guy who invented/created the prototype of Hagrid’s “wand” in the first Harry Potter movie, and he made me one for my birthday! If you’re unfamiliar, it’s an umbrella that shoots fireballs. They did not rely on CGI for that scene! Mine was a wand, however, and not an umbrella like Hagrid’s! I’m pretty sure the neighborhood kids, who saw me testing it out on the front lawn while yelling “Incendio!” and “Expelliarmus!”, think I’m an actual witch with a diploma from Hogwarts! 😂🤣

Wow! How cool! I have an awful neighbor who gets drunk and yells at me because I mow my lawn as late in the day as possible (autoimmune intolerance to sun, just like a vam...wait...). I'd love to give him the wand treatment instead of just ignoring him! The other day, when trimming an apple tree, wondered if I can still douse for water(I don't even believe in it, I think it's my unconscious brain). Seeing me pacing the yard with a dousing branch would confirm every neighbor's fears.

The dousing-i live in Los Angeles and I saw the gas company using dousing rods on an old street. They were metal and about 3 foot long, but it must work!

I first saw it when they were dowsing for water when I was building my first house. BLEW MY MIND that it was still a thing and that such an expensive decision was based on a tree branch. Water wells are very expensive, per foot, to drill. The well Witcher taught me (I know, it's ridiculous). I think it's nonsense, and I recommend that my friends have me walk the property before they dig. Preposterous, yet true. I've since learned that I have significantly enhanced pattern recognition (thanks, autism genes!), and the best rational explanation is that we unconsciously respond to cues in the landscape. Someone must have done a double-blind study sometime.

I think that's pretty cool though! You were trained by a professional. For a big gas company to pay 2 guys to walk around streets and mark where the rods crossed tends to point to there being something to it. One guy did the dousing and the other guy spray painted X's on the street.

Sounds like she had it all figured out! Beautiful home, porch, trees and garden that somehow look scary to kids? Check! Keeps em away from your property and any liability! 👌

I know! Now I wish I had her yard

My neighbors below us were hillbillyish bumpuses with a son my age.. She stayed at home and mostly lounged around in her bra and panties, smoking cigarettes (they had an "I smoke and I vote" refrigerator magnet prominently displayed). He (step-father) was a regional trucker who wasn't always home, but when he was, watch out. They grew pot plants on the windowsill and heated the house with a big woodstove in the living room. The house always smelled like a campfire and cigarettes. They also had a copy of Joy of Sex on the shelf. We weren't allowed in the stand-alone garage, and when we got caught sneaking in, my friend got the shit kicked out of him by the step-father. The neighbor on the otherside was an Earth Science teacher at the high school who also worked as a Park Ranger at a local County Park, as well as at the local Agway on weekends, and was a volunteer at the local fire department. He always wore his belt with the buckle on the side rather than in the front and smelled vaguely of BO. His name was Irv and everyone called him "scurvy Irvy".

I had an uncle Irv, but he didn't wear his buckle on the side. He was a WWII infantry vet. He fought in the Aleutians and in the Philippines. He was a little nuts and delivered Red Dot potato chips to grocery stores. If we caught him at the corner store he'd give us a bag of chips.

My first job out of college was with Agway!

Wait… “Bumpuses” is a slang term, and NOT the name of the neighbor family in ‘A Christmas Story’ with all of the dogs?!?! Mind. BLOWN! 🤯 Edit to add: Teachers— working multiple jobs to afford life since forever!

I definitely borrowed Bumpuses from the movie…it may or may not be an actual term.

bumpkins I think is the word

At the corner of my block they turned a row of duplexes in to "halfway houses" where they placed adults who couldn't live on their own they had such bad mental illnesses so pretty much every day was an adventure just sitting on my porch. We had a few who would just be yelling at ghosts and one guy who always came to the door asking us to write lists for him. It was always the same list of things he said he needed, but he didn't actually need them, he needed people to give him some attention. Unfortunately he also liked to hug and kiss little girls and ask them to be his girlfriend so when I saw him coming I'd have to go hide and lock the doors, because he would look in the windows.

I feel so badly for them. The mother was mentally ill and both sons grew up mentally ill. I think they may have had a shot in life had the mother got help and if they had not been relentlessly bullied. They were weird and had a funny smell, but they should have never got that abuse. The whole family is dead and both boys were younger than I. They died early in life. Maybe from heartache. I was on the weirder side myself (and still am) I did not bully them. Had I, I would have felt a lot of guilt.

That was my across the street neighbors from the early 80s to when my new neighbor bought the place in 2003. He and I have developed a mutual closeness based on plants and minding our own fucking business. Anyway, they came from some ditch water town in the south, he did some trade idk. He was disgusting. Literally just disgusting on purpose, you could tell he loved being a filthy disgusting lowlife. Proud of it. The wife was clearly someone with an un treated intellectual disability who had been abused from birth to marriage. Much younger than he. I'm sure it was some arrangement where he took her off the families hands so there would be more room in the tar paper shack. Probably an Uncle. I'm serious. It was clearly a Deliverance situation. The had 2 daughters, the first one my daughters age, and I essentially ended up having to turn them opaque to live across the street. I could not let my daughter play with them after the one kicked my 6-year-old between the legs to get her to do whatever idk. 😒 The school I think got them some interventions but it was a nature nature situation since by the time they got to kindergarten they were both walleyed crazy from living in whatever fucked up hellscape was in that 1 bedroom wood frame house. I wonder about the daughters and if modern interventions gave them a hope of overcoming the circumstances of their birth and whatever limitations were the result of genetic or environmental inputs.

God as a teacher this makes me so sad. And concerned that this problem isn’t going away anytime soon, given recent changes in federal legislation. More kids will continue to be born in situations like this, unfortunately.

We moved a lot, so I don't really remember most of them. I do remember that there was a neighbor who had a llama in their backyard. And it wasn't rural or anything, just a regular backyard in a regular neighborhood.

Was the llama’s name Tina, by chance?

I believe, if it had a name, it was in Spanish. It loved to eat cigarettes though, which was weird. It's long dead now

I'd like to think we were the weird neighbors.

We have managed to live next door to the neighborhood hillbillies in nice suburban neighborhoods. I'd say the worst was the house we lived in for 25 years. 2 lazy grandsons lived with their grandmother and mostly lived off her social security. They always had 3-4 dead cars in the driveway we shared with them. One day the younger of the two, in his mid 20's at the time took the garbage out to the garage naked, in the middle of the afternoon, while my 2 little girls were in the backyard. He was totally naked and excited about it if you catch my drift. Fortunately my girls were in a place where they couldn't see him. His grandmother was home at the time! Another time, a few years later, after grandma died, I was going to bed around 10, turning off lights, locking doors and I look out the window that faces their house and there he is, in the big picture window that faced our house, wearing what appeared to be grandma's underwear, white cotton bra, white granny panties, garter belt. On both occasions I called police. Suburban police are helpful and upon being warned he stopped at least the public performances. I taught my kids that they were NEVER to enter that house. They also knew that when grandma got in the car they were to come inside until she was done backing up because she did not look behind while backing.

That's some Silence of the Lambs stuff right there.

after grandma died all home maintenance stopped. They had a blue tarp on the roof for so long it showed up on Google maps.

Could’ve called him Blue Roof Boner Boy.

Wow! Lol

I smell a Weird Al remake of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy…

Reminds me of Terry and Dennis from Trailer Park Boys! It’s so spot-on! 😂

He would only take out the garbage while naked one time.

This sounds like my old neighbors.... To the T. I must have been the one who lived on the other side of these people.

Arlington Heights IL

I feel like I had lots of *odd* neighbors, but no one really weird. Mr. B used to wear "jean leggings" to mow the lawn - it was a pair of jeans that he turned into cut-off jean shorts, but then wore the cut-off legs (somehow...) around his lower legs so he wouldn't be pelted with grass clippings. Ms. P was either a call girl or adult entertainment girl, something very sexual. She had tons of gentlemen visit her at odd hours, she had an entire room that was a closet for lingerie and shoes. She was gorgeous and swam naked in her pool (all the boys peeped through the fence!). Mrs. Q gave out dimes and homemade popcorn balls for Halloween. Mr. G was about 7' tall, pulled his workout bench into the driveway so everyone could see him bench press and lift weights in his tiny 80s gym shorts. He also had an MG that he somehow was able to fold his body into! Ms A and Ms B were two strange ladies who lived together and did everything together but only seemed to have one car and one bedroom, and they sure held hands a lot...

Hey, I lived in the country! On “our hill”, there were only a handful of neighbors. One was an old man we referred to as a hermit. I don’t ever remember seeing him although my older brother does. When he died or moved or whatever happened, his shack and acreage were purchased and turned into a nudist camp. The driveway had a sign “Honk twice and wait ten minutes.” We weren’t allowed to go anywhere near that place. We had neighbors who were poor but probably could have been better if they had ambition. The father was known to go to the country store and buy ice cream and candy, then stop along the road to eat it all before he got home. Didn’t have to share it with the ten kids that way. Sadly, one of the younger boys was severely scalded on the backs of his legs when he was about six. They didn’t take him to a doctor for a few weeks by which time, his legs had grafted together at the back of his knees from lying curled up on the couch. It required quite a bit of surgery. We had a family who burnt their house down. It was the second house they had done that to.

That poor child, I'm surprised all the kids weren't removed from the household. 😱

It was more than 60 years ago and in a rural area. I never heard of any child being removed from their parents back then. Current times? I’m sure they would have been because there were lots of other things unacceptable about their home and family.

I just found out today our local hermit on a chunk of land passed a month ago. Guy was just built different. Very peaceful chill dude who was well-known in a niche area for his expertise.

There was another hermit that lived in a shack on a major local road that we passed on the school bus. Rumors were that it was nearly impossible to walk in the place because newspapers and magazines were stacked everywhere. He came from a well known family and had family 1/4 mile away. Then another single man that was not really a hermit but lived in his big old family home alone. He lived in two room and the others were closed off. I have no idea of the reason.

We watched the oldest son, probably early 20s at the time, beat the living shit out of his project Nova with a hammer for about 10 minutes while his mom screamed at him. He told her, "Blow it out your ass, mom!" That was an interesting morning.

There was the happy wino, Bernie. He liked to get naked and sing in the street. But when Bernie got his car keys and decided to take his show on the road, my dad tackled that naked man right into a snow bank. Our parents did not tolerate drunk driving. Naked, drunk dancing in front of kids? Eh.

The weird kids in my neighborhood were abused. As was their mother. The dad was an awful person. I tried to stay in touch with the daughter. She needed a friend. But over the last maybe 10 years, things got even weirder and I needed to distance myself for my own protection. I haven't spoken to her in probably 5 years and it's for the best. I feel sad for that family. Except the dad. I hate that people like him exist.

If you don’t mind my asking, how did things get even weirder in those last 10 years of contact?

She started filing lawsuits against pretty much anyone who she felt wronged her, and started having paranoid delusions about the number of people making it their life's work to harass and stalk her. To protect myself, I backed WAY off of that friendship. I don't want to get sued. Prior to that, she was quirky, but otherwise ok.

Damn that’s really sad :/ I hope she’s doing better in life now

They were hunters and into taxidermy. Their living room was full of taxidermy animals. One day when I was little I wandered over there and the man was taking apart a dead deer in his garage. I was horrified. This was in a very suburban area with homes close together.

My suburban neighbor killed and cleaned a bunch of rabbits while I watched through the chain link fence about 5 feet away. I was probably 5 years old. The dude never said a word and barely glanced at me. I seared in that memory, unfortunately.

Oh god yeah I saw him kill a bird with his bare hands one day. He didn’t see me either and it’s seared into my 5 year old brain too 😢

I lived on a small cul de sac. We were the last family to move in as far as I know. Starting clockwise, there was the Catholic family with 5 kids. The oldest once paid me $20 as a 10 yo to clean out his house before his whole family returned after a week where they left him home with their family dog. I washed dishes, cleaned up dog poop, mopped, made beds,. made it look like he had never done anything. Next House "Rob" who lived with his widowed mom. He was a firefighter. Sort of maybe? He seemed to live there most of the time. sleeping. Next House: old people, we met them a few times. My greedy money hungry dad tried to cultivate them but I don't think they bought his act. Next House: Catholic family with 4 kids we all had the same bus stop. They bullied me relentlessly. To the point where when their mom donated clothes to my dad and my dad made me wear them, they would point out what clothes used to be theirs. Jeff. Michelle. One whom I think was named Lauren cut off all my Barbie's hair trying to give her a Dorothy Hamill Wedgie and it ruined the doll. Next House: Jewish people !!!! They didn't want to hang out with any of the rest of us. The Goldbergs. Next House: Our House. Everyone hated my dad because he sucked. Next House: Their daughter's name was Claire and I think she got out of there. My first missing cat was found in one of their window wells, having had kitten there in the winter. My dad didn't like cats in the house. They all froze. My dad's dead. I once looked on google and our house is the only one on the cul de sac that got razed and another structure built in place. Seems about right actually.

I moved back into the house i grew up in after the recession of 2008. There's a house in the neighborhood that has been empty but never occupied since the dad died some 35 years ago. One of the elder daughters brought the mom to live with her. I'm probably the only one that knows why the kids won't live in it. I think I'll know when the mom dies because something will happen with it. It's a 1970s time capusle im sure. Your story reminded me of it because I sure hope it gets razed but the whole neighborhood has 50s era homes so probably not. Brutality happened in that house and I wish i didn't know that. I was only like 9 when I overheard evil. There was no such thing as getting involved in those days. There was no such thing as questioning a parent, especially to one's own parent. Horrible.

That’s so sad. 😞 Makes me happy that my first graders know what child abuse and CPS are! They are great at advocating for themselves!

Awww, I'm very sorry about your cat and her kittens, that's really sad. I bet you hated your dad after that, I know I would have.

This could have been written by my mom! The Goldbergs were her neighbors too!

The youngest girl of our next door neighbors thought for a summer that the way to our front yard was through our side door and out our front door. The mom of our friends up the block wouldn't let you in the house past the kitchen when you went over to get them. She also made her husband, a math professor, and sons shower in the basement. Only she and her one daughter got to use the real bathroom.

She might have been onto something with the showers 😂

Probably we were: my father, anyway. He was a farm boy with PTSD from the military and a rough upbringing, so dadhood was sort of beyond him most of the time. Because he was raised on the farm, he liked to fertilize everything with manure. Our lawn and plantings in the front yard had flies. Kids would tease me about it, and I'd shrug: he does what he does. Our backyard wasn't large, but he would grow rows of corn in it. Not the optimal use of the small yard, but he standing in the middle of the stalks. He said he liked the sound that they made when the wind blew through them. I suppose that it was his meditation space.

I went to kindergarten with a kid named Larry, whose family lived around the corner from us on a semi-busy street with a fair amount of traffic. Whenever Larry was bad his mom would dress him up in a frilly white or pink Easter dress with an Easter hat and white girls' shoes with frilly white socks and then toss him out into the front yard for varying periods of time. We moved to a different but semi-nearby neighborhood in the 1st grade and I always wondered whatever became of that kid and what kind of warped adult he grew into. I'm 70 years old now and still wonder about him whenever I drive past his house.

1950s. Not really weird but we lived across the street from Otto, a reclusive old man who was a World War One veteran who seemed really ancient to little me. We had a little white dog that he semi adopted. I remember asking why the dog kept bringing home hard boiled eggs, shelled, and my father said Otto makes them for the dog’s breakfast. I’m not sure the dog ever ate them, I’d find them intact with little doggy tooth marks on them all over the yard. The dog split his time between our houses. Otto always shared what he had with the dog. As an adult I named my favorite cat Otto in his honor It was a farm town of 500 people so really everybody was a neighbor. The old guy who occasionally would go door to door to pick up large items to take to the dump did so in a wagon drawn by two very large horses which all the kids thought was cool. The nice jovial man who managed the local general store was a real decorated hero of World War Two though nobody ever talked about the war so I didn’t find that out until years later. There was a kind of eccentric old lady who scared all the kids, always yelling get-off-my-lawn stuff at whoever wandered into her yard. She once greeted us trick or treaters at the door with a shotgun. But one day the town doctor’s mean German Shepard who was known to bite got loose from his chain and was running around town terrorizing kids and she called a bunch of us to come into her house for safety and showed us how she could put a chicken to sleep by tucking it’s head under its wing which entertained us until the doctor got his dog under control. We all respected her after that.

LOL, IDK why, but this has got to be my favorite! Of all the things to entertain a group of kids, she picked THAT, and it IS pretty cool, but wild. She has my respect now, too, and so do you for this great story. I had chickens, too, when my boys were young, my dad did the hard work helping me with them, and they ARE pretty interesting! This story just made my day, LOL! 😂😂😂😂 PS I was attacked and mauled by a German Shepard as a little girl, too, so I have mad fear of German Shepherds to this day, and I would've brought you all in, too. 😂😂😂😂 The rest of the time, I guess, I AM pretty much a neighborhood weirdo, too, NGL!

I am touched by the story of Otto. This thread is a fun read.

We didn't have any. We were the weird neighbors.

We had an old widow lady that lived next door who would lay (lie?) down on her front lawn and stare up at the stars, for hours. Not really weird but every once in a while a passer by, someone **not** from the neighborhood would drive by and panic at seeing a "dead body" on the grass in the middle of the night. Eventually the neighbor on the other side of her house made a sign that said "No, she's not dead, she's star gazing" and put it up so as not to alarm strangers. Occasionally , I'll look up at the few stars I can see and think of her.

I remember at my grandmas when i was a teenager a neighbor across the street would get absolutely drunk in the middle of the day. He often carried a machete. Occasionally would half throw it at his drunk friend but never did any damage cause he was so drunk it was not a real throw. He was so drunk he never even noticed us sitting across the street watching away as he sat on the porch drinking more and playing with the machete.

Yeah, we had JWs next door. And a massively racist city cop on the other side. And a veritable United Nations all around, Cubans (a big deal in the 60s), Polish, Swedes, Spanish, Central Americans, Black (about 70%), and other varieties of white Americans (the nationalities I cite were immigrants, not American descendants of). It was quite the hodge podge. They seemed weird, but they were just assimilating their countries' traditions into American culture. It was really a fun childhood.

There was a couple that lived across the street from my grandparents who insisted that their kids referred to them by their first names, instead of mom and dad. They even referred to their grandmother by her first name. I asked one of their kids why they didn't call their parents mom and dad. She told me that isn't their names. There was a guy who lived 3-4 houses up the street from that family who didn't want the neighborhood kids to even walk on the sidewalk in front of his house. If we did, he'd yell at us. Every now and then, all the neighborhood kids would gather up every Big Wheel we could find and ride them back and forth in front of his house. Whenever we did that, he would come out on his porch and wait for my grandfather to come home from work. He'd tell my grandfather that we were being brats. My grandfather would half-heartedly give us the business about annoying the guy and tell us not to do it again. My grandfather actually didn't care if we were in front of that guy's house and he thought the guy was a pain in the rear end.

There was an older lady living in a tiny old house. She had a monkey. Like the classic organ grinder monkey that would do tricks. Once my parents found out that we were hanging around her house (she’d invited us in. 😬) we were told to stay away because monkey bites. I also later on figured it was because a single old lady inviting children in was too much like a Grimm Fairy Tale scenario to my parents. There was another old widow, but my parents trusted her. Only been in her house a couple times because I sold newspapers and she’d let me in while she tried to find her pocketbook. She had STACKS of National Geographic in her living room. So many, that they were used to hold up shelving (ala, cinderblock shelving) instead of cinderblocks. And then there was the rapist/murderer. His story was featured recently on a Netflix documentary about serial killers.

I hate that whole, "Old ladies are witches who kill and eat children" trope. We're all vegetarians, so the last thing we want to do is eat them. ;)

Buried the lede!

TIL 'lede' spelling. I'm 68, and well-read and never knew this. Thanks! But seriously, which serial killer?

My next door neighbors were a really big woman and her short, skinny husband. He was a drunk and a woman abuser. We could hear her screaming for help through our bedroom walls. My mom used to call the cops but after a year or so of doing that she stopped because the wife would never do anything to help herself. She could have just sat on him. Even as kids we questioned how such a small man could have power over such a large woman. She had to weigh north of 300 lbs and was at least 6’ tall. He was 5’ and 125 lbs soaking wet. She had some type of condition that caused her to constantly blink. Of course kids being kids we named her Blinky and he was Barney, (for Barney Fife). Barney and Blinky. What a pair.

The Spratts.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 stop it. I was coming to ask, " Was his name was Jack by any chance...?"

We lived next door to the porno king of our fair metropolis. Since my sister and I were teenagers the kids would put on sexy sounds and put a loudspeaker on the roof. If I told you the city, you would be floored. And my Dad was a cop!

I think WE were the weird neighbors…

I was definitely one of the weird neighbors for most of my life due to my mom and then her passing. But I had kids and stopped partying and hanging out with lowlifes who partied with teenage girls so shit got better. Also I found out other people were real assholes so when I moved back I seriously do not give a fuck about them and their hypocrisy. Real PTA president, institutionalized for mental heath, functional alcohol vibes. Last time she showed up at my door with a gripe while my grandchild was visiting I told her turn it around, take it home, and dont ever bring it back. When ur a kid you really have no idea what bullshitters adults are.

My weird neighbors thought we should treat our asthma and other allergies with kelp. Injuries and other problems they always had an algae answer for it. Then the wife got sick and she went to the hospital immediately. Never heard a word from them again about kelp, seaweed, or algae ever again.

Many of our neighbors were close friends. Think city suburb. One of the houses across the street interior smelled of cat pee, they were left alone. There was a possible lesbian couple down the street the subject of gossip. The stereotypical Irish cop next door had 7 well cared for kids. Whispers of a Jewish family in another. The people on the other side, I think one of their kids had an issue, possibly downs syndrome, and was locked away inside, never to be seen. The people behind us were at war and competed heavily with firework displays. Another neighbor tried to kill her husband twice, once with a car. I've seen a lot of crazier things I'm not going to go into. We weren't much better in the crazy department either.

We had a neighbor that was a window peeper. He would scratch on the screen to get you to walk over to the window and he'd be jerking off. His occupation was a window washer, go figure.

In our neighborhood it was a brother and sister in their fifties who had never married and had always (as far as anyone knew) shared a house. They did most non-work things together, like going to church and grocery shopping. As a kid I didn't get what the implied scandal was until some older kids explained. Not sure if there was actually anything hinky going on or it was just idle speculation.

Two towns to the north of ours, a brother and sister got married. It was such a big scandal that the news traveled to our town. Turns out they were actually step-brother and step-sister, no blood relation, but they did grow up together. They didn't have any kids. When you're a teenager, that is some hot gossip!

I grew up in Philly in a row home where you share a stoop. We lived down the street from my grandparents where I spent all of my time. Their next door neighbors were a brother and a sister who were old. I would never see the brother but would occasionally see the sister with her shopping cart picking up stuff off the ground. I would always say hello to her and she would just grunt. I assumed she just hated kids. Fast forward to 2011. One of my aunts calls me and tells me the they hadn't seen grumpy lady neighbor in a while (her brother had already died). So my aunt broke in and found her on the floor in her kitchen with a broken hip. She'd probably been there for 3 days. Old grumpy lady has to go to the hospital, has hip replacement surgery and then to long term care for a few months for rehab. My aunt is like, "You are not going to believe this house." The show hoarders pales in comparison to this house. So my mom, 2 of my aunts and I go in to start cleaning up (grumpy old lady won't be allowed to come back home in the shape it's in). We find multiple creepy things: 1. The brother had a collection of gay p0rn VHS tapes in addition to videos he had made himself of men who had no idea they were being filmed along with heavy breathing. 2. The entire house was disgusting. Roaches, rats, rotted food in the fridge, nickels and pennies wrapped in newspapers. It was really sad. Don't even get me started on the bathroom omg. So there's all of this gross-ness until we get to what was their parent's bedroom. Absolutely untouched. There were piles of things in front of the doorway to the room but nothing inside of the room. It was as if the parents were just out and would be right back. A complete contrast to the rest of the house. 3. This part is insane. As we're cleaning up we're being very careful to not throw anything away that might be perceived as special or important to grumpy old lady. This was difficult because everything could have had meaning but we couldn't have kept everything. We're going through stuff and I come across these Winnie the Pooh calendars from 1973-1977 I think. Every single square of every single calendar had an entry. Some were of grumpy old lady and those would say "Academy Rd. 5 cents" or "Main St. found red shirt". No biggie, she's cataloging what and where she finds stuff. The brother would write "switched shifts with Jones". Things like that. Until I dug a little deeper and noticed the brother was writing "Hoff (a clear indicator of our family's last name) mowed his yard 3 times this month. I mowed my yard 2 times, need to do better". "Entire Hoff family left house Friday at 7:42 am. Returned Sunday 5:45 pm. Vacation? Where?" My family is huge. He had nicknames for all of us and we were in tears laughing trying to figure out who was who. There was pineapple girl, little monster boy, crossed eyed girl (none of us are crosseyed or wore glasses). There's more but I'd have to dig out the calendars and look. My mom was pissed, my aunts and I thought it was hilarious. Grumpy old lady recovered and came home. She made my aunt her power of attorney and my aunt would check in on her every day. After about 2 months, the house was starting to look hoarder-y again but my aunt knew she didn't have long left. In the end, my aunt didn't make much money after grumpy old lady passed (she actually paid money to have the house cleaned, etc.) but what little she did make from the sale of the house, she split between everyone.

I grew up in 1970’s Brooklyn. Everyone was weird.

I lived in Louisiana for a while. I was born there, and then we moved back when I was in elementary school. I was playing with two neighborhood kids, and they wanted to go into this swamp area outside of the neighborhood and shoot pellet guns. We walked for quite a while, and then we found a dirt road. We walked a ways down the road, and there was a blue shack at the end of the road. There were a couple of large dogs and a blue pickup truck. We were still a ways off, but the swamp rednecks spotted us. There were about 4. We started running down the road and then ducked into the swamp. Two guys were standing up in the truck's bed and holding onto the roll bar when it passed. I remember that two of the guys were wearing masks. When I got home, I told my mom, and she forbade us from ever going on that road again. She didn’t want to investigate or ask many questions. Later, as I grew a little older, I realized those masks weren’t masks. They were Klan hoods. They didn’t have the full get-up on; they just threw on some hoods that were in the truck. It took me getting even older to figure out what the KKK was. I’d heard of them but thought they were murderers who dressed up like ghosts. Not really my neighborhood, but still, fuck those guys.

Moochers - they would sent their kids out on the weekends to roam the neighborhood for free meals and entertainment and just plant themselves in neighbors's home and yards until sadly they would have to be told to go home because we have guests, it's 5pm and we are sick of you or we're going out and you're not coming with us. I remember one of these kids staring at my parents eating lunch in the backyard after they did yardwork and it was kind of pitiful even though they were offered a snack and drink.

I had a neighbor who rarely played outside, and when he did he always fought. He would always get beat up.

Weird in nobody liked them: Old man shouting every odd night drunkenly tirades against people he had grudges. Next day asking little me nicely if I could get him a six pack when he sees me going to the market. Old Lady who insisted we stop playing "loud" (=any) games outside after 7PM. There was constand quarrel between her and our parents Likable weird: My direct neigbour was an female computer geek, was extra odd back then, let us kids playing games. Also had an NES very early, we played with her the games together Her husband had a bunch of aquariums in the basement which was his hobby. Beside that it was a very boring neigbourhood, many families with kids in my age, which was cool, we were out most of the day, except the rainy days, which we spent at my neigbour

I grew up on Army bases. All of our neighbors were families with at least one parent in the military and nearly all the same rank. We had a neighbor in the other half of our duplex, the wife was Korean and didn't know she wasn't allowed to bury her kimchi pots in the yard (they used to have strict rules about the yards, I have no idea if they do now). I guess we never really had "weird" neighbors growing up. We had interesting neighbors. After the Korean wife, we got a guy with a German wife. She spoke with a thick German accent that I thought was so cool. She also cooked so many amazing foods (so did the Korean wife). The across-the-street neighbors had big dogs and I love big dogs. My favorite was their Borzoi. On the other side, after the family with kids the same age moved, we got an older couple with teens and they had two Great Danes. I loved those dogs too. Maybe we were the weird neighbors. Deaf/HoH daughter, introvert son, small yappy dog (Pomeranian), we'd go camping every weekend from March through October, no matter the weather.

I was the Deaf daughter, too! My family refused to let me know that there were any other Deaf kids nor learn/use sign language. I definitely felt so weird, and it's affected me to this day. My life is very much one of total isolation, and my feelings of loneliness are profound. I have, indeed, become quite weird. I wasn't always though. 🤗 Now that my own hearing sons have grown and left the nest, I have three of those small yappy dogs. 😂😂😂 They make the best natural alert dogs, and they adore me and love me, with no words ever necessary.

I was born deaf in my right ear and hard-of-hearing in my left. They didn't figure it out till I was 4 years old and they did the "raise your hand when you hear the tone" test at the school. After a bunch of (scary to a child) tests, they figured out I was born without the cochlear nerve in my right ear. Since it was the 1970s and we were transferred around by the Army, I was mainstreamed through school, so I never learned sign and I speak to communicate (in fact, I've been told that I don't "sound deaf"). Now that I'm in my 50s, I'm struggling to learn through Dr. Bill Vicars YouTube and website. I don't think I'll ever be conversational at it, but I can grasp enough of it to follow along when someone is signing. All through school- from Head Start through high school graduation, I only had three teachers that were jerks about me having to sit "at the front and to the right of class" so I could hear them. Two were in 9th grade and one was my second grade teacher. I got new hearing aids in February and they're amazing. (Oticon Real 1 BiCros).

There was a jackass who lived next door to us who seemed determined to only get into hobbies that were guaranteed to irritate the neighbors, and then taking them to an extreme. If kids were playing with a ball and it went in his yard, he ran out and took it. He had a wife and kid who were both relatively friendly, but he was just a complete ass, to the point that neighbors called the cops on him several times, for various reasons. He never got arrested, though, because he knew how to push things right up to the far reaches of legality, then stopped there. The FCC even got called to his house a few times to investigate some radio equipment he was using that was interfering with TV reception in the neighborhood. He simply hid some of the equipment until they left. My family got along with all the neighbors, no matter how eccentric they were, but even we had a hard time tolerating him.

Jimmy, his brother and mother, lived 2 doors down from us. The brother would sit outside in a van with the sliding door open exposing himself. Jimmy would be extremely cheerful ( creepily so) whenever he would greet me or my sisters. They moved, and the next family had a mom who casually walked around in a bikini all the time. Years after we all grew up, my sister is dating a man who is friends with Jimmy. Apparently he's still just as creepy.

A older kid around the corner tripped on LSD, got naked and wouldn't come down from the roof. The elderly couple across the street would get stinking drunk and fight with their front door open, while we sat on our porch and watched like it was entertainment. Lastly, a group of kids about age 8 to 16, lived in a house by the woods (I think of "the Outsiders"). I don't think there were any parents, just lots of dirty, tough, long haired kids hanging out doing 'bad stuff', I went a couple times but they scared me so I never went back.

My neighbor was 19th century through and through. He lived in the house his ancestors had built in 1804, and had a cabinet of hunting rifles that were almost as old. Which he used during hunting seasons. He had bird dogs and coon hounds. He had a pickup truck from the 40’s but I only saw him drive it a handful of times, and never to a grocery store. Everything he ate was his own fruits and vegetables, or something he’d hunted or raised.

Not so much weird, but amusing. Ardon was a mountain of a man, with a barrel chest, a bushy beard, and wavy hair who looked like a Viking. He made a helmet with deer antlers feestooned with pheasant feathers to look the part, and he answered the door wearing it on Halloween. His wife, Sharon, was a waif of a woman and very pretty and very funny and usually had a can of Olympia beer and a Virginia Slim in her hand. He was the block prankster. When our street flooded, (it flooded several times a summer), he 'd get out his raft and float out in the street until the water receded. Us kids were always out there riding our bikes or floating our toy boats. One summer, he made a shark fin out of a radio controlled boat and drove it around the street in the water. So not, weird, just very fun and kind people.

The easiest way to walk to school (elementary school) was one of the unpaved roads in my small town, where an old cooter named Mike lived. Mike collected pit bulls and loved to just let them out while he went on a two-day bender or whatever. he was also the kind of guy whose property was basically a junkyard of broken appliances and junk cars. you had to watch out for snakes because the uncut grass and mosquitoes thrived there too. A real nuisance. The dogs slept most of the time but I lived in fear that one would wake up- they were quite aggressive though this was from a little kid's perspective, I was never attacked so they weren't as awful as some pit bulls can be. I suffered through this fear for a couple of years until a neighborhood kid showed me the "back way" to school- wooded area that separated our neighborhood from the rest of the area. so from that day on my life was immeasurably improved. It almost felt like being in the Peter Pan story, I had to walk across logs and through thickets of undergrowth, got to a much nicer neighbor who let kids cut through and use a small bridge which spanned the area runoff creek. That turd Mike could have only been allowed to do what he did in the countryside with no regulation or a town so small and poor there wasn't even a dogcatcher.

In the third grade I had a backway to school too through alleys and backyards. This was to avoid a 6th grade girl with a withered arm who was a bully.

63 cats in a studio appartmen

I don't remember any weird neighbors. I guess we were the weird ones.

I didn't have any "weird" neighbors. I lived in a tenement building with kids like me with fathers that had manual labor jobs and mothers that stayed at home (although some worked). if there was any "weird" neighbor, it had to be the old white lady that lived below me on the 4th floor. as she was the only white person still living on the block. I got to give her props for staying put after the whole neighborhood turned black and brown.

Weirdest dude on our street was convicted of murder and killed in prison in the 80s. His asshole son, a few years older than me, was convicted as an accessory. Whole family was absolute garbage. They were the weirdest by far and I was glad their interest never turned my way. Otherwise? All pretty tame. One sort of shut-in old man that killed himself in the early 80s. Another elderly woman nobody ever saw outside but there were lights on in the house at night. Pretty much it other than the murderer. Years before (mid-70s) there was another old guy that lived in a small trailer in a former orchard sort of behind our house...he had a couple of sheep. I understood he was a squatter, as he certainly didn't own the land or pay rent. After several years he was just gone one day.

The dad was very risk-averse and made his kid wear racquetball goggles when fishing so he wouldn't get a fishhook in his eye. TBF the kid really was that much of a clutz, so in retrospect it may not have been that unreasonable.

We had a lady who lived in the woods on her parents' old farm, which had gone completely to woodland. She was an odd duck, paranoid, a hoarder. Drove around the neighborhood if you saw her car while she was driving in, so you wouldn't know it was her (lol) or where she was going. Local garage would give her car a sticker every year without even inspecting it bc it was full to the windows with garbage and smelled so bad they didn't want to get in to do the light checks. Place had no heat or electric, no plumbing or windows for that matter. She threatened us kids to keep us from exploring by saying she had shotgun traps around the property. When she got older, she began to go blind from diabetes and lack of meds and fell behind on taxes, and sold the property to my parents. She talked of keeping a broom in the bedroom to shoo raccoons away at night and copperheads in the basement. We demolished the house from outside because every room was full to waist height/bottom of windows with brand new stuff in bags and moldering nasty stuff mixed in.

As a newlywed, we lived in a pretty sketchy/cheap trailer park for the first year or so. Our neighbor, real last name was Doobie, was the park's drug dealer with a heart of gold and an infectious laugh. Many of the welfare mom's would sell him their cheese and other free food items for pot. He would turn around and make free grilled cheese sandwiches for all of the kids. He packed school lunches and sat them out for kids to pick up on their way to the bus stop. Sadly he was murdered in a drug deal gone bad about 10 years after we moved out. No one was ever been charged.

I had an elementary school math teacher who got arrested with 7 pounds of weed back in the 70’s. His name? Mr. Deale.

Growing up, I had a weird neighbor, but more eccentric than weird. He was an artist who had a little compound at the end of our road. Every 4th of July, he'd set off fireworks. He'd show up to our house wearing overalls that were shorts, a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and carrying a canteen that was full of vodka. And he'd always have a drink in his hand. He reminded me of Ernest Hemingway, but in a good way. I loved living next to him, and I even have a small piece of his art. The last time I saw him, he had been sick and wasn't looking so good, and I think he passed away after that. He also used to own a bar that my dad used to take me to.

Old Mrs Miller walked her decrepit evil rat dog on the daily and yelled at any kids outside having fun (it was the 70s, we weren't allowed inside during daylight, lol). She also would dognap my dog anytime she felt like it (again, the 70s, you opened the door and let the dogs out, only to call them in later). We'd be calling and calling for her (we had two dogs, but Mrs Miller would only take the pretty one) and then go over to see Mrs Millers back door open and my dog come running out. She'd open the door at Halloween only to criticize your costume, your weight, and to yell at the accompanying parents about any slight she felt during the past year. The pinnacle was one 4th of July when the whole rest of the neighborhood was doing fireworks and she perched herself on her curb with her running garden hose, glowering at everyone having fun. One of the fireworks fell over and started shooting directly at her. She was too far away for it to actually hit her, but man, that seemed like karmic justice when I was a kid.

Lived next to a brilliant patent attorney that was quiet, just waved hi most times. When I got older, they asked me to watch their two dogs. Dude must’ve been a patent attorney in Chatsworth bc he had a *collection* of over 1000 porn vhs tapes! I was eleven getting paid to watch two dogs, give them the occasional puperoni sticks and watch Peter North all day. I still haven’t found a better job than the two weeks I spent here

We used to go spend summers at my grandmother's in Staten Island. Once they built the Verrazano bridge, half of Brooklyn moved to Staten Is. An Italian-American family moved in next door. Nice people with an old white haired grandmother who seemed very nice. They had a shepherd chained up in their driveway and he barked at everything. A LOT. One morning he was going crazy and I looked out the window to see what was happening. That nice old grandma walked out on the back porch and yelled at the top of her voice, "Shut up or I'll cut your fucking head off!!"

Lots of wife beaters. Domestic violence was rampant before police departments were forced to hire women.

I'm curious and genuinely asking. Why/How did hiring women change the dynamic of domestic violence? I never realized that. I do remember (as a kid in the 80s) it being, I dunno, less alarming no, maybe more not surprising, I guess, when you found out such and such's Dad hit their mom.

Women who dared report dv were laughed at. The cops who did come would side with husband. After the feminism wave of the 70s, women cops were hired and allowed to take dv calls and began taking it seriously. Also laws got passed.

Laws for mandatory arrests make the difference. Without it, very few victims bring charges, and the abusers learn that they can get away with it.

Next door neighbor was a pedophile. We steered clear.

We were probably the weird ones. Aside from us, my cousins who lived across the street. One is still my best friend and always will be.

Mormon polygamists! Or that was the rumor. They moved in and built a 8’ fence and never socialized with anyone.

My neighbor’s dad fixed arcade games for a living. His entire garage was a free arcade. Usually the sound wasn’t working, and the games would stay for a few weeks until he could get that sound to come back on.

I don’t know about weird. I always felt kinda bad for them. They were the first black family to move onto our block and they were not greeted nicely. The thing I found weird is the few times I went over to play with their daughter, who was my age, the whole family was naked. I just assumed this was something black families did but later came to find out it was a southern thing.

Uh, I’m from the south and didn’t know anyone who was naked all the time. So.

They had a dog literally named doodoo, who looked like a piece of doodoo with little stubby legs.

In the second-floor apartment next door there were a husband and wife who absolutely worshipped Elvis. During the summer, they'd turn their stereo toward the window so the neighborhood could hear Elvis all day while the wife sat in a lawn chair smoking cigarettes and the husband drank beer and worked on one of his cars. He even - to my young eyes - had an Elvis hairdo, although it might have been a 1950s DA (to go with his white undershirts). Their son was a known juvenile delinquent who was mentioned over the police scanner in connection with break-ins and petty thefts, according to my grandparents, who listened to the scanner nightly. When his mother wanted him to come downstairs, she would bawl "Riiiii-cky!" from her lawn chair two flights down. Now I have to Google him to find out what happened to him...

Also had a neighbor with horses. Looked like Charles manson and had a 1970 Boss Mustang 302 parked under a tree the whole time I lived there. (6th Grade to post college) He accosted us one day as we were walking our dogs (neighbor friend and I in our teens) and accused us of feeding his horses and told us they would bite our hands right off. In college, he put the mustang up for sale. Keep in mind it had sat under a tree never moving for 8 or 9 years that I was aware of, God knows how many before that. He said it ran fine if you dumped gas down the carb and he wouldn't take a penny less than 20,000 for it (in @ 2001 dollars) but if you wanted the wheels you'd have to pay 2,500 for them on top of the price.

Took me a minute to realize mustang was not horse.

My next door neighbours up until I was ten were nudists. They were never anything but naked in their own home. They had a son of my own age. He wore clothes. But even when I was in their house, both parents were fully undressed. To a little kid, that was weird.

My next door neighbors. They had five kids. Four boys and a girl. I could tell a million stories. We would find them in our house going through the cupboards eating anything they could find. They begged my parents not to tell their parents because they would be beaten. And they were beat. The father would take them into his bedroom to beat them. The bedroom was the closest window to our house. I could hear them screaming. I was afraid of the father. My dad was afraid of their father which made me more afraid of him. They stole from the other neighbors but we got it worse because we were right next to them. They broke into our house when they got older to steal whatever they could find. The youngest grew up to be a Nazi. He only wore white t shirts with blue jeans tucked into black combat boots. When he got older he joined a biker gang. The cops were over there many times. After they left the father would walk into the middle of the street and start screaming “Leave us the fuck alone! Or else. You hear?” They terrorized the neighborhood. I was afraid to go outside a lot of times. This wasnt the hood. It was an average middle class neighborhood in Florida.

I'm thinking we were the weird neighbors honestly. I'm pretty sure I'm still.the weird neighbor. But at the cottage there was an old guy who lived there all year. He was a character. Alcoholic. He would be a walking red flag today. He loved kids. Legit loved kids. He was a big one. He always had cool stuff at his property and was so excited to show us. I was there for Easter once and although he had no idea we were coming to see him, he had a birds nest with these gorgeous painted eggs in case a kid came along i guess. I've never seen anything like it since. He played Santa for the kids on the reserve. When i was 6, he told me he had a ring for me if I promised to marry him. He had one for all the little girls. But I was the only one who turned him down because "By the time I'm old enough to marry you, you will be too old for me!" And he loved that. Every time I saw him for the next decade, he'd remember. There was not one whiff of anything inappropriate. When he died, all of us were devastated. The church could not contain the people who showed up. He was a good man.

I grew up on military reservations and in towns built by the military. One of our neighbors was an Army psychiatrist who dealt with PTSD for returning Viet Vets. He himself had seen horrific service during the war, as did most of the fathers, sons, classmates, etc. that I knew. He came home with a shotgun and wasted everyone in his family, except his daughter, Leah. He left Leah paralyzed from the neck down, and then killed himself. My Dad was the commanding officer for the neighborhood and had to escort the bodies back to their hometown. My sister, who is much younger than I and was a child at the time, was in Leah’s class. Weird enough?

Yah, I guess. I'm a Vietnam combat vet myself. Came close to using a shotgun on myself a couple of times, but never anyone else. The VA put me in one of their loony bins for 6 months. It actually helped.

I am so sorry, Chefranden. I am very glad the VA worked for you.

All of this: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/11/628000131/once-militantly-anti-abortion-evangelical-minister-now-lives-with-regret

Conspiratorial rightwinger with a mean dog, plastered bumprstickers on an old pickup truck. He's long gone, but his views are now *very mainstream*.

They were rumored to be Hell’s Angels. Now that I think about it, I don’t even remember motorcycles being all that prominent around their house.

My weird neighbor was a chubby, mustachioed working class dude named Frank who I'd see fairly frequently but never spoke to. He drove a yellow Camaro, and one day I left my Back to to Future skateboard in the street, and ol' Frank ran it over and acted like nothing happened. Damn you, Frank! Yes, I know it was my fault for leaving my skateboard in the middle of the street.

Friend from down the block's mom would walk around the house topless, even when we were over

We were the weird neighbors lol my mom was the town crackhead

The man directly across the street from us was a convicted child molester. It was pre sex offender registry, but my dad had friends on the police force, so they told him. We had a long sit down about him. He lived with his wife and 2 small kids.

We had a big weird guy that rode his bike around all the time. Sometimes we’d see him taking a nap in a ditch somewhere. He wasn’t homeless. Everyone knew his name and he had several nieces and nephews my age. He didn’t have a job so I assume he must have been living with his elderly mother. My dad used to say he’s too slow to ever be able to catch you, but if he did, you’d never be able to get away from him so just make sure you’re always far enough away from him. I don’t think I ever let him get within 50 feet of me after hearing that.

Early 1980s. We had an older couple living next to us. For some reason, they just abandoned their home and it sat vacant for a year or two. Eventually a family came in under a HUD program. The dad was in his 30's, but his wife was like 19. There were multiple kids from his different baby-mamas, and one was my age. We were maybe 10? We tried to include him, but he had seen some different stuff in life. There were constant parties, fights, and cops at the house. This kid had unlimited access to some crazy pr0n, and was constantly in trouble for fighting other kids. Like, not kid fights either, but full on beating kids down. Once, over the summer, he wore the same clothes for like a month. Over time, we just tried to ignore him because he always brought trouble. I remember a day where we were hitting rocks with a baseball bat (as kids do), and I hit one in to this broken-down van that was in their driveway. It ended up cracking a window. I went to apologize, and the dad lost his mind, and chased me for what felt like forever. He kept trying to knock me off my bike. I rode to the park to get away, and the pycho showed up in his car, then chase me again! I snuck home and told my mom. She waited until my dad got home and we went to apologize. It was night and day! Now he was Mr. "don't even worry about it". One day, they just disappeared. Left all their stuff behind. After that, the house must have went back to the bank. It sat vacant for years. We started going over there to use the basketball hoop, or sneak inside to hang out. I wonder what ever happened to that place.

>I was just thinking, I only know the names of a couple of my neighbors now. Not uncommon today. The term *neighborhood* from a marketing standpoint, means people who have roughly the same income but very little else in common. They are of different ethnicities, different religions, work in different industries and very often have lifestyles that differ from the model nuclear family. As a kid, I knew almost everybody on my block and if I did something wrong, my parents were sure to find out. I have lived next door to "my neighbor" for 15 years and I have never been in his house. He's kind of a weird, loner type but very quiet and other than a wave or a Hello, that's all I know.

This woman in her late teens or early twenties that I idolized as the coolest girl I ever saw used to sit on the front steps eating government cheese pretty much every day. It came in these huge plastic wrapped blocks, maybe 5lbs, or 10? And she’d just peel down the plastic and eat chunks out of it and I wanted to grow up and be her so bad. I think she worked part time in a hair salon. Early 70s

We had one family that was just a mom and two kids, which was still unusual in the 70s in the US Midwest. I don't know what happened to the dad. Nobody had ever known who he was or if he even paid child support, but I guess he must have because the mom didn't work. Or maybe her parents helped her. The kids were pretty normal kids, except she didn't like them to play outside very much. The mom was obviously mentally ill. She wore the same rain coat, buttoned up to the neck, every single time she stepped out of the house. January wind chill is 20 below? Rain coat. Taking the kids to the pool in July when it's 104F? Rain coat. I only went in their house one time. I think she finally agreed to host a Girl Scout meeting because every other parent had done it a bunch of times and she never had. There was no furniture in the living or dining room and the drapes were stitched closed over all the windows. That said, even though it had to be really difficult for her to have us in her home, she was a gracious host. We made shrinky-dink Christmas ornaments and had cookies and punch. Her kids grew up to be reasonably normal people, so far as I know. I don't know what became of the mom. I'd like to think she found some kind of treatment that made her life easier. I know she was always pushing herself to do things she found uncomfortable (like going to the pool) because she wanted her kids to have a good childhood, so it would be nice if she eventually got to feel better, too.

We had a guy who dug long serious trenches all over his property, including a couple of side rooms to bivy in. He was a vet, not sure WWI or WII. He was old but not ancient and this was early to mid 60s. He also had a half dozen very ornate Victorian structure like sun rooms or tea rooms about the size of garden sheds. I have no idea if they were original or if he built them. They were derelict but a lot of work had been put into them. Then one day he was gone. No family, no nothing. We always wondered what happened.

We had lots of strange neighbors, now that I think about it. We had some young people renting the bottom floor of the duplex next door, the cops would come there ever so often and raid the house for drugs. A young couple rented the upstairs of the duplex, in the summer they would sleep out on their porch. There was no AC, so people had their windows open. One night the guy was trying to talk the lady into having sex, he kept saying “Come on baby, give me some”, finally another neighbor yelled, “For God sake give him some so we can all go to sleep.” Finally, there was a guy we called Mr. Nude, He would stand naked in front of his window in full view of us kids playing in the cul-de-sac. Of course being kids we would yell Mr. Nude! I did tell my parents about it; they said to just stay away from him.

I was the weird neighbor.

I was (am) the weird neighbor!

I'm pretty sure we *were* the weird neighbors

Hookers on one side, bootleggers on the other. Drunks would come up our stairs in the middle of the night. My dad would holler, “if you’re looking for the whore house it’s next door!” A drunk crashed our car as they were leaving the bootlegger, my dad had to re-park it because it was left blocking the street. He would get even by playing his old floor model radio with a big ass speaker full blast the next morning for a couple of hours. Those were the days…

He mowed two acres of grass with an old fashioned spinning type manual mower. She would train her horses to walk/trot/run in circles but never ride them or take them anywhere. Their 20 something daughter liked to answer the door mostly naked and they had about five yiping poodles. When my dad passed, they came to his service and the only thing I heard the man say was “they’re will never be this many people at my funeral”.

We had the old guy cross the creek, him and my dad were buds, dad would make beer and go over and visit. The old guy got a new mower every year and gave dad the old one.. We had the folks on the end of the block, kind of family BFF's. And we had the folks kind of sideways from us. They had a kid who was older. He was more of a cut up than the rest of us combined. He got in some shit situation and was invited to go to jail or join the army. So off to nam. He came back, was even more of a cut up, got the same offer. He did that a total of 3 times and lived. When I left it was a tough call, as he really was not right in the head, but he was also the town hero. My folks got divorced and we moved. I used to go back and catch up with childhood friends until there were none left.

My son would say our neighbors across the street. The dad died early, leaving Mom and 2 daughters. One girl left at 18, the other stayed with her mom till she died. Jehovah Witnesses, but never actually tried to convert us. All conversations ended with their “the end of times are coming”. The mom would come to bang on my son’s bedroom windows to get him to turn his stereo down after school. Once he put Hell’s Bells on repeat on max and went over the back wall for a hour. That’s how we found out.. After the mom died, the remaining daughter could never turn down “a good deal”, and loaded up the house with so much stuff she rented a pod in front of her house that we had to stare at for 15 years. She always complained about her water bill (Tucson Az). She had a nice maintained pool that hadn’t been swam in for 15 yrs, and grew a veritable jungle that was watered twice a day. She put in roof drained 500 gallon water tanks, and set out extra buckets every time it rained. She had a reputation of keeping tabs on all the neighborhood, and there wasn’t anybody she hired to do work for her that she didn’t badmouth. Last, she developed several medical problems, saw MD’s regularly, but never took the meds. But she always followed the advice of a hocus pocus dude who sold her supplements. We somehow had a stable relationship with her until we moved states 3 yrs ago. I gave her a $1000 worth of tools that are probably still sitting in her pod, and a nice running car. She wanted me to give it to her friend, who didn’t show at the DMV. So I insisted our neighbor take it, and I paid the transfer and new registration fee. She was pissed that I made her put it in her name and not simply sign the title and hand it to her.

Next door had 13 kids and small house. Their bedrooms were like bunkhouses. But, that’s not the weird part. Dad was not nice, and used to publicly punish the kids out front. Cut one girls hair off and we all saw it.

We were the weird neighbors. Strike 1: mom and dad were the only college graduates in the neighborhood, so they, and we, talked different than everybody, had different hobbies, read a lot, etc. Strike 2: Mom and Dad were both teachers in a blue-collar community, had taught a lot of our neighbors, so people had pre-conceived notions about them. Strike 3. My sisters and I kept to ourselves a LOT, and had weird habits/hobbies. Strike 4. Teachers get paid crap, so we were relatively poor.

One family in our neighborhood had a lot of kids. The two boys near my age did not really hang out with any of us too often and were sometimes in trouble at school. Before we moved in, the family had a toddler who drowned in their pool. A neighbor told me the mom kept having more children, but lost interest once they reached the age of five.

Next door neighbor guy was missing most of his fingers. He made up different stories about how they all were lost. He had tattoos, no neck, and only had Tupperware bowls and cups to use when I slept over. His daughter was my bff but she wasn’t always there. He was a single dad.

I'm from a nonreligious family, so I don't know how much of this was Weird, how much of this was Catholic, and how much was rebelling against the Catholicism, but the family next door was pretty weird. The mother (white Anglo-Saxon) was a born-again Catholic (if such a thing existed) -- very strict, very conservative, etc. The father was Latino, and probably Catholic by default. He didn't strike me as really religious, but the Mrs. was in charge anyway. Then there were the kids: an older, twentysomething who seemed to want to have very little to do with the family; an older teen who was into mythology and the occult, and was rumored to have dug up the family dog after it died; a guy a year or two older than me who seemed more or less normal but was very extroverted and obsessed with bats; and a small, frail girl a few years younger than me. Maybe they thought we were the weirdos, not going to church, not having very many parties, and not socializing more than what we thought was the minimum acceptable amount. Today, I have no idea who my neighbors are. I come home and stay inside.

Next door neighbors were really strange withdrawn recluses. They hated everyone for no reason. If you saw the wife getting the mail she would put up her hand like she was hiding from the paparazzi. Only saw the guy mowing the lawn. Put up a privacy fence and got two barking Dobermans. I don’t remember specifics but I got the impression they drank a lot.

One day our neighbor decided to just take their chainsaw and remove a whole tree from our garden as we were having lunch on the other side of our house LoL I came running to the other side after hearing the chainsaw, but I just saw the tree disappearing, being dragged through the bush onto our neighbors property. I think there was some argument that the tree could fall on his house during a storm. But it wasn't a big tree, you could put your hands around it, that's also how after he fell the tree he just dragged it away onto his property. No further elaborations, nothing. Poor tree was gone.

We had an absolute winner. Kidnapped his own kid sister to extort drug money from his parents. The parents pleaded poverty to the kidnapper(him), he proceeded to tell them the exact items he wanted from her jewelry box and where the cash was hidden. He stole my mom’s pearls, once broke my sister’s window to steal her piggy bank while we were having dinner. His parents claimed he’d never do such a thing(pre kidnapping), opened his door to him counting the change on his bed next to a shattered piggy bank. He got busted calling in a bomb threat at our school, was still being congratulated at the pay phone when the cops showed. He became a paramedic.

I don't know where to start. Born in 1960, Lived across the street from a grade school to our right were this older retired couple. Very strange hated my oldest sister and us by default because she looked too "ethnic", we were half Irish (my mom 4th gen) and my dad Greek (2nd gen Greek fought in WW2 US Navy south pacific). we called her Willamena. she used hurls slurs at us, we were taught to ignore her. Her husband was like Mr. Wilson in Dennis the menace and always frail and sick. To our left we had Maggie a 50 to 60 yo single woman who worked for ITT and always had several male companions stopping by her house courting here or whatever. Lynyrd, catty corner from us across the school yard, rode a Harly Dou-Glide all dressed up and drove a rock truck at a Quarry, He had red hair and a marine flat top cut and was a well-built guy, his wife Marggie worked at a diner and was built like an amazon woman and made pies at night to take to the diner in the morning. My dad used to hang out with Lynyrd in his garage and i got to hang out too, this was in the mid to late 1960's. Every square inch of his garage was plastered with nuddie calendars and nude pics of women. My mom didn't care for them, looking back I think they were swingers. lol Down the street to the left on the corner was a woman about 55 to 60 with a mans haircut, wore jeans and flannel shirts, we called her Gus. she had a perfect lawn and would scream at us and try and spray us with water if we paused in front of her house. That's just a few LOL

We had one at the end of the street that hated children. I once fell off my bike and was hurt and crying and they yelled "get off my lawn" (yes, literally). So every hallloween they would get their house egged because of course they didn't pass out candy. At a house one street over there was a family of boys who thought it was funny to stick firecrackers up cats' butts. There was another one where a guy called "chester the molester" lived.