In terms of caring for your mental health, having a safe and comfortable home to return to day after day is a really important thing. Because it’s vital you have somewhere you can relax and switch off for a while, where you can rest and recuperate after work or school, and where you feel safe to be yourself. Because if you’re always feeling on guard or like you can never fully relax, your brain and your nervous system spend every waking hour working extra hard – and every sleeping hour if you don’t feel safe at night either.

So it’s no wonder that the family in this story are sick of their neighbours, who comprise drug addicts, alcoholics, guys with noisy car engines, and one elderly neighbour who steals water, wrecked their lawn, and tried to intimidate a kid recently. Eventually, things got so bad that they had to call the cops – but now they’re wondering if they’ve done the right thing after all.

Read on to find out why.

Neighbour harasses me and my family and hates me ignoring him

So as the story goes, we have multiple neighbours who are jerks and today one finally snapped. We’ve lived on this street for about fifteen years now and not long after, two neighbours in particular have always mistreated us.

One is a heavy drinker and has yelled at my younger siblings before when they were playing outside, but my parents told him to back off and eventually he went quiet.

Our neighbours across the street are drug addicts but at least they don’t bother us.

The one dude who lives there revs his car engine non stop almost all day because he’s always getting high and has to constantly be doing something.

Let’s see who this recent problematic neighbour was.

Anyways, the neighbor of the subject is our next door neighbour.

In the past he broke into a neighbour house that was still for sale, and not long after the owner came home not knowing he was inside, and she totally freaked finding him in there (she had every right to) and called the cops and got him arrested. That was years ago, but he hasn’t changed since really.

Not many months ago he came into our yard without my mom’s permission (I accidentally let him back there because he said he wanted to “look at the fence”) and he abused my mom’s plants and bushes in doing so, so she yelled at him to get out, he argued and protested back, but eventually left.

Ever since that falling out, we have just ignored him and not associated.

But the neighbour really doesn’t like being ignored.

He now tries to make himself noticeable by coming outside whenever we’re outside, making loud breathing noises to get attention, and even staring at us over his fence.

He will even haul his baby granddaughter up over his shoulders to look over our fence and antagonize our little dog just so we’ll come outside and be forced to deal with him.

Just today, I was ignoring him like I normally do, riding my bike and minding my own business, when he comes up to me and harasses me and accuses me of being rude by ignoring him, AND that I’m being racist. We’re literally both white.

His logic of arguing is so twisted up he’s just throwing random excuses to guilt me into feeling like I’m at fault. I simply said “I have a right to ignore you don’t I?” To which he’s all like “w-w-well y-yeah but you can’t be rude to me!” Or something like that.

Yikes! But this neighbour’s behaviour got even worse.

I just rode off as he was still yelling at me and eventually after my lap of riding I returned home and told my mom.

He then came to our door and we didn’t answer, to which he began to repeatedly ring the doorbell and pound on the door like a total psycho and was yelling at me to come outside.

If I remember correctly, his words were something like: “come outside and deal with me if you’re a real man,” just trying to provoke me.

Right before this I had opened the door and yelled at him to get the hell away, but he was extremely insistent and refused to leave.

So they had no choice but to call the police.

Of course after that we called the cops and he went and hid in his house.

My grandpa came over and he suggested we don’t tell the policeman to go over there and talk to him because it might “add to the situation or cause him to get violent,” but I think some law enforced threat would make him realise what he’s doing is wrong.

He has also been stealing water from our elderly neighbor (which she may or may not already know of) but I didn’t tell the officer. After the policeman left, he took off running and we haven’t seen him since.

What should we do next? He doesn’t seem like the violent type (being a near 70 year old man with no violent records (that we know of).

Honestly, this sounds like a really unpleasant neighbourhood to live in, and it’s a shame that these kids are having to grow up with such tumultuous neighbours.

It seems like ignoring one another would have absolutely been the best way for these neighbours to deal with each other, and the mom was right to try that and encourage the kids to do so too.

Because that made what the man did next even more inappropriate.

Let’s see what the Reddit community made of this.

This person encouraged the family to keep a record of the neighbour’s unhinged behaviour.

While others explained that he shouldn’t be given the benefit of the doubt because he’s old.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an artist who made sure to leave the walls of her home blank and boring before moving out, even though they were covered with gorgeous murals before then.

Meanwhile, this Redditor pointed out that the adults should be dealing with this.

Awkward neighbours can make your life miserable, and it sucks that this family is stuck with so many of them. And this elderly neighbour is behaving so inappropriately, especially since the garden incident. If your neighbours are ignoring you, that’s a sign that they don’t want to communicate with you – it’s something that should be respected, not constantly pushed. But given the fact that this neighbour steals water from another neighbour, it’s easy to see that general etiquette isn’t his strong point.

Absolutely the family were right to get the police involved in this, and the fact that this seems to have scared him away says a lot about this man. He must have some kind of paranoia or a guilty conscience to be hiding after the cops were called. Sure, a wellness check might establish whether there’s anything else concerning going on with him, but this shouldn’t be this family’s responsibility. They just want a bit of peace.