Whether you live in the city or out in the country, you are going to have neighbors, and to the extent possible, it is important to get along with them. Unfortunately, some neighbors are just awful and impossible to put up with.

What would you do if your neighbors were always causing you problems, even though you don’t think that you did anything to start the conflict?

That is what happened to the family in this story, so once they hit their breaking point, they started doing everything they could to get revenge. They are proud of what they did, but in reality, it really just caused teh conflict to escalate, hurting everyone in the process.

Oh it’s a neighborly day in the neighborhood…

Like most of you, I’ve had my daily dose of a jerk neighbor that I’ve had to deal with for quite some time. This is a series of small petty acts of revenge that eventually lead up to one giant one. Here’s a little background:

Living out in the country can be very peaceful.

I live out in the country in the midwest. I love it out here. It’s peaceful, quiet, comfortable.

I live with my parents and two younger siblings on a farm. We have horses.

This is the type of thing you just can’t do in the city.

On my land, which is fairly spacious, I have two horses that are regularly in my pasture, grazing. To the left of my property is a 50ft wide, rectangular shaped bit of land that runs the length of my property and belongs to a family friend.

This friend gives us written permission to graze our horses on that land when the grass in the pasture is low (this comes into play later.)

Clearly, this person does not like his other neighbors.

The neighbors in question, let’s call them Dan and his wife Bovine Bertha (a pretty visually accurate description for her) live on the other side of this 50ft stretch of land.

We sold these people the land they live on and that was pretty much the end of our contact with them. They pretty much avoided contact with anyone.

Even the kids in that family are horrible. This can make it difficult to try to get along with them.

Their kids rode the bus with my siblings. Turns out, their kids were (attempting to be) the biggest bullies on the bus. In a small, tight knit community, that doesn’t happen.

Was this the start of Dan and Bertha’s issue with us? The fact that my brother refused to allow their children to be jerks? Possibly. I’ll never know.

Let’s take a look and see what these people were doing.

But soon after school started, so too did Dan and Bertha’s random attacks on us.

At first, it was mild. They placed a car battery in our side yard, then called the cops claiming we had trash everywhere and were littering.

What a weird thing to do. And it would be difficult to prove that it wasn’t their battery.

Of course, the sheriff drives out, sees the car battery. Disposes of it and issues us a warning. We go on with life. When they get no reaction from us, they move up.

They started calling the police and complaining about noise. This would happen maybe 1 – 2 times a week.

They would have to be very loud indeed to be causing noise issues, given how much land they have.

A sheriff showing up at our door and asking what was happening. Of course, we were confused, because like I said, we were pretty quiet people.

Then again, we live out in the country. I could scream at the top of my lungs in my house, and nobody outside would hear it…even if they were on my own property.

It is starting to seem like their neighbors are obsessed with them. This is getting sad.

This went on for a while. Petty phone calls to the police station about random things that weren’t actually happening. Eventually, the police stopped coming. The whole “Boy who cried wolf” thing.

This is where the fun starts. Now that the police have stopped responding, we can have a little more fun.

The neighbors just keep escalating to try to get a reaction.

Fast forward through winter. Of course more reports were made, but nothing came of it. Spring time hits. I’m training my horses.

Who should show up to my house but the ASPCA and an officer. They had received an anonymous report that I was beating my horse senseless (I was in a 70ft wide round pen with nothing in my hands. I was making my horse run in a circle…that’s it.)

It would be very obvious that the horse is not being abused. The neighbors are simply wasting the ASPCA’s resources.

They looked over my horse, went through all of my feed.. I mean these people tore my barn apart. What they were looking for, I don’t know.

It was embarrassing. I give lessons, and lost three clients that day because they saw animal investigators on my property and pulled their children out of my program.

I would be angry as well. The neighbors were just being annoying, but now they are causing some serious problems.

Now I was upset. They of course found no signs of abuse. Came back twice more to randomly check and left me be. Where does the revenge begin, you ask? Oh, it’s coming.

As we get into summer time, Dan and Bovine Bertha start having lunch parties, get togethers, etc. They loved to show off their pretty farm house to their city friends.

The neighbors really should have expected some type of retaliation. Even this is pretty mild, though.

So, we found that every time people came over, just happened to be a beautiful day and a great time to start up every tractor, mower, etc. that we had and make sure it was working properly.

We even had a backhoe and my brother would just shake the bucket back and forth as fast as possible “to make sure it didn’t stick.”

Oh, what a shame, their friends don’t want to come visit anymore.

Eventually, people stopped coming to visit them. The few occasions they still did turned out to be the perfect occasion to blast the Mr. Roger’s theme song.

Nothing should cheer a neighbor up more than hearing “OH IT’S A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.” as loud as we could make it blast.

While satisfying, it is not surprising that the neighbors decided to escalate things. This is why feuds with the neighbors are rarely a good idea.

Then things took a turn for the worse. They didn’t back off, as I’d hoped. They took it a step above and beyond.

I had a dog, he was a beautiful black puppy.

Oh no. This goes way beyond any type of petty dispute now. They are actually killing innocent animals.

They poisoned him with antifreeze. After that, my sister’s birthday rolled around. I came home from shopping to find a cop in the neighbor’s driveway and my younger horse in that 50ft gap I mentioned. Just grazing.

I walked up to her, took her mane in my hand, and she followed me like a puppy to the pasture. I put her back in and that was that.

They know exactly how the horse got out. It could have been seriously injured.

I walked my entire fence, looking for where she got out, but found nothing. Then I realized I didn’t have to unlock my gate to put her back. My padlock was missing. Someone had let her out.

The next day, my mother was arrested. My mother, who has never had so much as a SPEEDING TICKET was arrested and thrown in jail!

What the heck is that type of charge? It is surprising that the police would actually arrest her since there would obviously be no proof.

You can be as annoying as you want to me and for the most part I can ignore you; but you NEVER mess with my animals or my family! She was arrested on an “animal at large” charge. Long story short, the case was thrown out and she was released that day.

Now I’m irate. Since then, they cut a whole section of my fence out and disposed of it, leaving a gaping hole, they’ve stolen my horse grain, they’ve done all sorts of other little things. Why? Dunno.

Why doesn’t she just call the cops if they are destroying her property and stealing her stuff?

So, I went into full crazy neighbor mode. I was done. I took every opportunity to be as annoying as possible each time they were outside.

For months, I would uselessly wield a chainsaw if they went outside, start my dad’s semi and just let it run. We even borrowed a friend’s antique fire truck and would randomly start the siren at all hours of the night.

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Well, now they are giving their terrible neighbors justification for calling the cops. This is not a smart way to handle the situation at all.

Basically, we were the worst neighbors you could imagine. Trash magically found it’s way into their fenced in backyard. Every huge snake I could find made it’s way to their screened in deck.

Finally, they attempted to sell their house. Attempted.

Honestly, they should have done all they could to make the property look great and encourage the sale.

They were trying to sell a double wide trailer on 5 acres of land for 200,000. Then, after two weeks, when they had no bids, blamed us and said because we had an ‘unsightly property’ nobody would move in next door.

I found the site on which their house was listed and left a review as someone who had toured it about nasty smells in the carpet, stains on the walls, bed bugs, etc. You name it.

Now this person is just shooting herself in the foot by preventing her awful neighbors from moving.

Their house was removed from the site a week later. Whenever someone would come to look at the house, my sister would play with our other dog, and get her to bark as much as she could. (She’s a tiny dog.. you can imagine how annoying this is. But she only barks when you tell her to ‘Speak.’)

You guessed it… nobody bought the house. I was planning on making their lives hell.

Well, at least they are finally gone.

They had a fight over something. Probably not a great idea posting about it. She confronted Dan about it. They got divorced. They lost the house. (they were selling it because they couldn’t afford to keep paying.)

Dan now lives with his mother, and nobody has heard from Bertha in months.

Mess with my family, and I’ll mess with yours.

While it is clear that the neighbors were horrible, this person seems just as bad. The old saying of ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ really applies here. If she hadn’t kept escalating things, the neighbors might have calmed down after a while.

I don’t think that this person has anything to be proud of here, and I’m guessing that whoever the next neighbors are, she will have problems with them, too. Let’s see what the people in teh comments have to say about this disturbing story.

This commenter says that they would have lost their mind. It seems that this is what happened, and it only made things worse.

I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have gotten a camera put up very early on in this story.

This is what I was wondering as well. The cops should have done more to put a stop to this feud before it escalated so much.

There is no doubt that the neighbors were worse, but that doesn’t excuse what these people did to antagonize them.

This commenter thinks they showed restraint. The killing of the dog is inexcusable, but it really only happened because these people kept escalating the conflict.

Everyone in this story acted poorly. It is no surprise that things just kept escalating. If they had just talked things through, this could have been avoided.

If you enjoyed this post, check out this story about a man who was so upset about dog messes in his yard that he involved the whole neighborhood in the solution.