20. He basically stalked me for over a year.

“My last neighbor basically stalked me for over a year.

Dude moved in to the house next door with his elderly parents. Right off the bat shit went wrong. The first night he moved in, it’s the middle of the night (like 1am) and someone starts knocking on my door. Not strong knocks like it’s an emergency but these light taps. I, of course, did not fucking open the door. The next morning at around 10 there are more knocks, same light taps, and this time I do answer it and it’s my new neighbor. He introduces himself and I ask him if he was knocking the night before and he admits it. I politely ask him to not come to my house so late again and he agrees.

Cue the next year of my life.

The dude continues to show up randomly in my yard. Pretty much every single time I went outside this dude would leave his house and come over to mine. It was like he would wait on his porch, watching my house, just to see when I’d leave it. I’d go out to check the mail and he’d come over. I’d go out getting ready to go somewhere and he’d come over. I’d go out and would be working in my garden, happen to look up, and he’s standing there. Sometimes he just walked over, stood in the middle of the road, and stared at my house or me not saying a word; most of the time he just hung around silently and made the barest attempts at conversation, mostly asking if I had a boyfriend (I lied and said I did), making me incredibly uncomfortable. I told him multiple times to basically leave me alone, starting by being polite and eventually just telling him to fuck off outright. He’d act like he listened and understood but he kept doing the same shit. It got to the point where I didn’t even want to leave my house or answer my door (he still kept knocking, occasionally, and it sounds utterly stupid but even inside my house I’d sometimes just get this ‘feeling’ that someone was standing around just outside even though I had no knowledge whether that was true or not).

Then he started showing up at other places I was at.

It’s a small town so I thought at first, okay, maybe it’s a coincidence, you’re being paranoid, but it became very clear soon enough that the guy was following me. I’d be at the grocery store and he’d come around the corner. I’d be at the gas station and very soon he’d pull up next to me, not even getting gas but just parking there and watching me while I filled my car. It happened too many times and his behavior was too odd for it to just be happenstance.

Throughout all of this happening I was telling people about it. I told our mutual landlord the first time this dude knocked on my door in the middle of the night that I liked my privacy and didn’t like that kind of crap. I told him again after the guy kept showing up in my yard. My landlord basically promised to talk to the dude and tell him to leave me alone after that. Then after I complained to my landlord that the dude was stalking me outside of the neighborhood, too, he told me that he’d talk to the neighbor again and that if anything else happened then he’d kick the guy out. I also have a close friend whose husband is a cop and talked with him about everything and he basically told me there wasn’t shit that could be done unless the guy outright threatened me or otherwise damaged my house/property. He told me the best thing to do would be to move out or to keep talking to the landlord and hope that he’d kick the dude out.

As it turns out, the landlord eventually did kick the guy out but not for anything that he was doing to me–dude apparently couldn’t pay his bills and was several months behind in rent. The whole family got ousted, they left, and according to my landlord they apparently totally destroyed the house in the time they were living there. Holes in the walls, the floors, literally hundreds of empty liquor bottles in the basement, needles on the ground in the yard, burnt foil all over the place. They also left their pet dog behind when they moved out, locked in the house and half-starved and would probably be dead had the landlord not found him.

Landlord ended up taking him to court over damages and unpaid rent and I have no idea where they moved but I haven’t seen the guy since. I now have a new neighbor who I barely ever see and wouldn’t know I had if I didn’t see his car come in and out or occasionally see his dog hanging out on his porch and I can’t tell you how much I prefer it that way.”
—PM_ME_A_GOOD_RECIPE