5 Of The Worst Neighbors Of All Time

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We can pretty much guarantee that you have a neighbor-related horror story. Maybe yours were constantly fighting in their yard, throwing loud and wild parties, or turning their home into their own personal junkyard.

Whatever the case may be, there’s no doubt that people can be pretty inconsiderate when it comes to the people living around them. However, we bet your terrible neighbors will pale in comparison to these monsters that others had to live next to.

The neighbor who was eventually banned from his own home.

Stefan and Lucy Ward had no idea what they were getting themselves into when they moved into their new home in County Durham, England.

Their new neighbor was a former Hell’s Angel member, David Constantine, who ended up harassing them to the point that a judge actually ordered him to sell his own home within six months so the Wards could get some relief.

As the story goes, Constantine became upset with the Wards shortly after they moved in because Stefan refused to help Constantine take his motorcycle to a garage one day, though he did offer to help on a later date. The damage was already done, however, and Constantine set out to make them pay for not helping him—he banged on the couples’ walls in the early hours of the day, cut down their hedges while they were on vacation, and set up a barbed-wire fence while they were at a carnival.

It all came to a head when Constantine falsely accused Stefan off attacking him with a knife, which lead to Stefan’s arrest. Police later found out the truth—that Constantine had injured himself—and he was banned from his home and ordered to sell it.

The man who actually treated his neighbors pretty well.

The thing is, he did it with their money.

In 2015, a Spring Hill, Florida, man named Anthony James David decided to take his new neighbors to a Tampa Bay Buccaneers football game. The couple, Bill and Melissa Callahan, were thrilled and quickly agreed to spend the day with their newfound neighbor and friend. However, they probably wouldn’t have agreed so quickly if they knew that David had actually stolen their credit card and used it to pay for the outing. “As it turned out, looking at our credit card statement,” Bill said, “we had financed the entire day.”

Hand holding credit card
Ales Nesetril on Unsplash

Unfortunately, David had spent a whopping $2,969.38 before they realized what happened, buying everything from flowers to food and even $750 worth of legal services. David was arrested and charged with fraudulent use of a credit card, grand theft, dealing in stolen property, and 10 counts of theft of personal identification information. It’s not nearly his first time getting caught with deception, either—in 2008, for instances, he was charged with practicing medicine without a license and delivery of a controlled substance.

The woman who booby-trapped her own neighborhood.

No, not in a fun, Home Alone-like way, either.

Jeanne Wilding of Bottomley, West Yorkshire in England, began to argue with her neighbors after one of her clematis flower plants began to grow out of control and into her neighbors’ yards. From there, she embarked on a “rampaging campaign of anti-social behaviour, acts of hatred and acts of pure evil” against residents of her neighborhood, council representative James Ward said.

So, what did that campaign involve? It’s hard to decide where to begin. She would find dead animals, oil, nails, and shards of glass to put in her neighbors’ driveways, and point CCTV cameras at their houses while she did so. At night, she would blast offensive music in the and shine floodlights into her neighbors’ windows, and was even said to have damaged cars in the neighborhood. In total, her neighbors reported 259 incidents between July 2004 and November 2005. Some of those neighbors sought therapy for depression in the wake of her harassment.

In addition to being heavily fined, Wilding was sentenced to 15 months in jail by a judge who called her a “deeply disturbed woman.”

Wilding later claimed that her neighbors were the offenders—she said she found broken bottles around her home and trash thrown into her garden. The neighbors had already been hostile to each other before she got there, Wilding claimed, but had come together to antagonize her because of the incident.

“I have had a hell of a time and I have been branded a professional trouble-maker. I’m not,” Wilding told The Independent. “I’m a boringly respectable woman. It is difficult for me to understand what is going on in their minds.”

The man who set his neighbor’s house on fire because of grass.

Some people take their lawns pretty seriously, and Phillip Rodger Bennett of Cartersville, Georgia, is one of them.

One day, he decided he had enough when it came to the overgrown lawn of his neighbor Marty Corbitt and decided to publicly confront him. Corbitt clearly wasn’t too worried about the ordeal, however, and went back inside his home to watch television while he cooled off after the spat. Bennett, on the other hand, apparently thought that Corbitt would immediately start to mow his lawn after the confrontation and became so enraged that he decided to take things further.

Bennett kicked down Corbitt’s door and told him to get outside. Obviously confused and very alarmed, he grabbed his phone and called 911, all while Bennett was grabbing gas cans that he would later pour all over his neighbor’s home and ignite. “I ran back to my little girl’s room, grabbed her, ran out the back door over to my neighbor’s and watched the house burn,” Corbitt said. After briefly going on the run, Bennett was arrested and charged with arson (obviously), cruelty to children, reckless conduct, and a bevy of other things.

The man who made his neighborhood a racetrack.

There’s driving down a neighborhood street too quickly, and then there’s this.

Michael Carroll of Norfolk, England, had just won approximately $14 million in the lottery. Unlike most people, who might buy a huge yacht or just put the money into their bank account, Carroll decided to not only buy a gigantic estate, but turn the backyard into a racetrack. Did we mention he kept it running all 24 hours of the day?

Car driving on racetrack
Alexandria Bates on Unsplash

As if the noise from all of the cars wasn’t bad enough, Carroll often shot off emergency flares and industrial-grade fireworks over his neighbors’ houses. One nearby family actually had to cram their entire house into one bedroom because it was the only place where they could find some semblance of peace and quiet. By the time Carroll sold his property, it was in complete disrepair:

His neighbors’ suffering only ended when Carroll went broke—sometime in 2012 he admitted he was living off unemployment and had become estranged from his wife and daughter. As of 2013, however, he managed to get back on his feet and started working at cookie factory.

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