As important as where the house you want to own is located, are the neighbors you might end up living amongst for many years to come. What happens, though, if your longtime neighbor begins to display senseless behavior and you are stuck there because you cannot afford another home or the real estate market takes a nosedive such as it has in this tanked out US economy?
I experienced a dreadful ordeal with an unbearable neighbor and would not wish this scenario on anyone. I cannot fully tell the tale (though this is lengthy) or portray the agony a neighbor put my husband and I through, in this one article, but this is basically the gist of the story of being forced to move out of a home and neighborhood we both loved very much.
I will refer to this woman as, Susan, who had three children, two sons and a daughter, who were 7, 11 and 13 at the time. Susan was starting a new life after a nasty divorce. She bought the house next door to my husband (who was my fiancé then) and appeared to be a nice enough lady, although a tad odd in her behavior. Susan was extremely smart and had a fabulous job in a medical lab.
The first couple years went by uneventfully, but then Susan began doing all sorts of strange things. One of those things was her obsession with filling her small yard with more and more and more plants, trees, shrubs and bushes. Every spring, she planted and planted and everything grew and grew year after year, until her house all but disappeared in a jungle of vegetation.
Susan also covered her only two front windows from the inside with some type of insulation, which I thought was bizarre because there was now so much tree and shrub growth blocking her windows, I knew she could not see outside from in the house. Her outdoor front step light burned out one night and she never replaced the light bulb from that day forward. For years, the family would awkwardly fumble in the dark to get the key in the door.
The neighborhood, located on a dead-end street, was very quiet, warm and friendly. Just about everyone on the street was a life-long resident and one of our neighbors were on their fourth generation growing up in the same house.
My husband had owned his home there for 24 years and was considered the baby of the neighborhood. Susan was not very friendly with other people on the street. Although everyone was cordial to her, most said they did not care for her at all.
On a Downhill Slide
By now, Susan had so much vegetation blocking her house, yard and driveway; in winter she had no place to dump her ton of snow while shoveling, without putting it on everyone’s property or in the street, which is against the law. One day during a blizzard, my neighbor down the street called and told me to look out my kitchen windows to see what the lady next door was doing.
When I went to the windows, there was Susan, carrying one shovel full of snow at time from her driveway, walking out to the street, over to my house and dumping it all behind my car. I was so appalled I was speechless. I called my husband on his cell and told him what Susan was doing and he was irate. He was only minutes from home and said he would take care of the situation.
When he pulled down the street, Susan was just dumping another load of snow behind my car. My husband jumped out of his truck and asked her what the heck she was doing with her snow? Very calmly, she said she was putting the snow in the road and “what’s it to you anyway?”
My husband pointed out that she was clearly putting the snow in our driveway (behind my car no less) and besides…even if it was the road that is against the law. Susan told my husband he was harassing her, but she stopped bringing her snow over to our yard and proceeded to shovel the rest of her driveway into the road.
To make this part of a very long story short; the city highway department constantly warned this woman about dumping her snow in the street, but to no avail. The cops issued warnings and she blatantly ignored them. Susan also continued to put her snow on everyone’s property and behind my car. It was an ongoing and absolutely tiresome battle. At this point, we no longer even spoke to Susan. It was an extremely uncomfortable situation.
After that tedious winter with Susan and her horrid behavior, I noticed in the spring she was taking over more and more of our property on the driveway side in front our home. She began to squeeze her car past a small garden I tended, in order to park her vehicle in a ridicules place in her yard, right up close to her house, where there was barely an inch of room to speak of.
I decided to put up some short fencing (8 inches high) around that part of my garden so she would not run over my beautiful flowers and a mammoth cluster of gorgeous wild Iris that I babied each summer. When I got home from work one evening, I noticed my little fence was lying on the ground…so I fixed it and went about my business.
A few days went by and on my way to my car in the morning, I saw the fence was down again and I stopped to fix it. When I got home that night…my fence had been pulled out of the ground and tossed a couple of feet from the garden onto my lawn. When I told my husband about the fence, he thought it was the neighbor and said he would fix it for me the next day because it was raining at that moment.
It was still raining lightly in the morning when my husband went out to fix the fence. I was doing dishes and watching him through the kitchen window. At the same time, I saw Susan flying down the road in her car. Instead of pulling into her “real” driveway, she screeched her car to a halt right behind my husband (I started running for the door because I thought she was going to run him down and he had his back to the road).
She jumped out of her car, screaming like a mad woman, that the fence was in the way of her “new” driveway and with my husband standing there; she ripped my fence out of the ground and threw it into the road. My husband grabbed the fence from the road and began to put it back in the ground again while yelling at her, saying she was crazy and she needed get off our property and to leave our stuff alone.
As he continued with the fence, Susan screamed and cussed and was jumping up and down in our driveway, having a total meltdown. I was watching the two of them, but making my way back to the house to grab the phone because I knew I should call the police and let them handle Susan. By now, other neighbors were on the scene, thank God, to witness exactly what took place.
My husband was bent over pushing the fence into the ground and just as I came back out the door, I saw Susan take a running start and full force she kicked my husband (who’s a big guy) in the back of the knee, which buckled and he fell on the ground. I was dialing 911 as I watched this unfold. My husband got up and hurried toward our house, using every ounce of composure he could muster, to keep from going off the deep end.
I was on the phone with an emergency dispatcher and he could hear Susan still screaming like a lunatic and he said an officer was on the way. I relayed this to my husband and when Susan heard me, she jumped into her car, speeding down the street dangerously at about 55 MPH. The most bizarre part about this…she headed to the police station and wanted my husband arrested.
A kind and patient officer came moments later and spoke to all the neighbors about the incident. As he was speaking to all of us and taking witness statements, he was informed Susan was at the station causing quite a ruckus. He said he would let us know what was going on, which he did by coming back to our house that evening.
We were quite surprised to learn, Susan, had been arrested at the police station by this officer when he went back to the station to hear her side of the story. He informed us he gave her chance after chance to calm down, but she apparently went berserk on him and after all was said and done, he, as a police officer, filed the assault charge against her because of witness statements.
My husband really did not want to do that to her…he just wanted her to leave us alone. Her behavior in the police station pretty much summed up what really took place earlier and it was out of our hands. My husband and a neighbor were called to appear and would have to go to court, which did not happen for seven months.
In the meantime, we started looking at real estate property because I could not live there any longer. We were heartbroken and all the other neighbors begged us not to move. It was a sad situation, but there was way too much tension and I saw no alternative.
To end this very long story, we moved out of the house we put so much money, work and love into and two months later, assault charges were dropped against Susan because her attorney promised the judge she would be selling her house and moving out of the neighborhood within six months, which she did. Go figure!
We never went back, though, and continue to rent our home there to family. The neighborhood is just like it use to be and a nice couple bought Susan’s real estate property. Once again, it is a great place to live.
