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People Share The Trashiest Halloween Costumes They've Ever Seen

If Mean Girls has taught us anything, it's that any costume can have a sexy version. Mario and Luigi, carrots, and even Barney the Dinosaur have been given the "sexy" treatment. And believe it or not, they can get trashy sometimes. Who would've thought?

u/Rusty_Walnut asked: We're coming up on the spooky season. What's the trashiest/most eye brow raising "sexy" costume you've ever seen?


Noodles?

I found a "Sexy Can" costume once in a knock off Halloween store. It was a garbage can, obviously styled off those grey metal ones. The lid was a hat. The rim had "Sexy Damage" to show off boobs.

This same "Sexy damage" was spotted all over the costume to show off various patches of skin. The weirdest thing was the wig of fake noodles that came with it.

bandafantasia

Who said cockroaches can't be sexy?

Giphy

Actually went to a party where this was the theme, some of the highlights were: sexy balloon, sexy plague doctor and sexy plague victim (couples costume), sexy mitochondria, and sexy cockroach.

eleventacles

mmm yeah baby make some of that ATP for me

oh your electron transport chain is so hot mmm

ShreddedCredits

Best response ever.

A friend and I had a competition one year to see who could pull off the dumbest sexy costume... She made a mean 'Sexy Dumbledore'.

Ramalina96

Sexy Dumbledore would definitely be the head master.

DeeHaas

But like....why tho?

This one isn't sexy but it happened at work and was so baffling that this guy got a suspended from work by HR

We were told NOT TO WEAR COSTUMES. We were simply not allowed. No big deal, we're all adults and it's a professional work environment. Some of my coworkers dared another absolutely stupid coworker to wear one anyways. This guy really wanted to wear a costume anyways. He comes in the next day dressed as a Vietnamese rice farmer.


Doesn't sound so bad. Sam is Vietnamese anyways, and it sounds like a culturally enlightening experience to see how a Vietnamese rice farmer looks. Only Sam came in wearing his business work clothes and the only thing different was a yellow piece of paper cut out in the shape of a mask with two slants drawn where the eyes should be. He also made a hat out of newspaper. He was laughing so hard for the first few hours of the day and we were laughing too but only because we were all completely thrown off by what we were seeing. He didn't need a mask at all, let alone a yellow one.

Needless to say, he got fired shortly after for doing other stupid s**t.

SuSu0801

ALWAYS too soon.

Giphy

Right after Steve Irwin died, a guy I know went as a stripper version of Steve, and his girlfriend was a sexy stingray. It was too soon.

InfinitePizzazz

My brother got a stuffed animal stingray, got clothes to fit the Steve Irwin look, then showed up at the party with the sting ray attached to his chest and bloody spot on his shirt where it was attached. He reprised the costume two years ago.

EDIT: I remember now, he decided to do the costume after the South Park Hell on Earth episode.

kpud075

Um....

I worked at a brokerage firm back in 2002 when the post 9/11 tech bubble market had gone all to hell. Like down 40 or 50%.

One of the admins came to work as a beauty queen. Her sash said, "Ms. NASDAQ."

She wore a torn sequined dress, run laced stockings, had fake blood all over her, a black eye, a couple teeth blacked out, disheveled hair, and a broken tiara.

I cannot explain why I found it so incredibly sexy. I guess because it fit her personality and sense of humor so well.

I cannot for the life of me remember her name, but I sure as s**t remember that costume.

stupidlyugly

Woof.

My work used to do a costume contest for Halloween every year. People always wore business appropriate costumes. Until one year a guy wore a skimpy and tight "slutty catwoman" outfit with his balls hanging out and d**k

Then he threw a big fit when they wanted him to change. That was the last year they allowed costumes.

diiejso

I'm shook.

Giphy

Super low effort, but one year I dressed up as the Greased-up Deaf Guy (from a couple episodes of Family Guy). I literally bought and wore only a pair of white briefs and a tub of Vaseline.

Col_hessenfeffer

If you actually committed to greasing your whole body up I wouldn't call that low effort.

igotbigballs

Nope.

My old co-worker dressed up as a slutty Adolf Hitler. Yup... tiny mustache, olive drab uniform top (with red swastika armband), an extremely short olive drab skirt, fishnet stockings, black boots with stilletto heels, and an olive drab military hat. It was... horrible.

Unfortunately, she was hot and everyone kind of wanted to bang her so...

The_Dark_Dualist

That's just plain extra.

My dad once dressed as a priest and put what was supposed to be the tail to a sexy devil costume under the robe of his costume so it looked like he had a huge red-tipped boner.

He said he got some nasty looks from people walking down the street where all the bars were that halloween night. And yes, he was completely wasted.

Nahdudeurgood

Houses, condos, apartments, and townhouses all have one thing in common: neighbors. They come through the walls, over the fence, and even from above and below. They’re like zombies, but instead of eating your brain, they are intent on making your every waking moment a nightmare—and in some cases, sleeping moments as well. From noises to noxious odors, from parking to out-of-control pets, these tales of neighborhood nastiness serve as a warning before you sign that lease.

1. Urine Trouble

I moved into a run-down apartment in a building that was occupied by basically the worst people in the area. It was a pretty rural small town—a lot of junkies and lowlifes, etc. I moved there because I don’t have a driver’s license and I needed to live close to my new job at a café as there are no buses in the area—except school buses—and it was relatively cheap. I quickly learned what a mistake I'd made.

One night when I came home from work, I met two of my neighbors by the entrance to the building. These two were living wall-to-wall with me, and I had listened to their drugged-up saturnalias more than once. They started following me up the stairs, not saying a single word, just following me. I rushed inside and locked the door, when they started hammering at it.

They were yelling, hammering their hands at the door so hard I thought they would break it. I yelled back at them: “What do you want?? Leave me alone!” Their answer stunned me. They stopped their hammering and the man said, with a fragile voice; “We were just wondering if we could borrow your pee for a drug test tomorrow.” I not-so politely declined and told them to get lost. I didn’t live there for much longer, I’ll tell you that.

DoodieMcWiener

2. It’s Raining What?

This was in an apartment building. The upstairs neighbor’s dog peed on their patio and it dripped down onto me while I was sitting outside reading. I yelled and ran to shower, and when I texted them to ask them to take their dog out to pee in future, their response made my blood boil with rage. They said it wasn’t their dog and it must have blown over from somewhere else. Blown over? From where?

ClubWithAJungleTheme

3. Pot Calls Kettle Black

radio player lotPhoto by Alexandre Debiève on Unsplash

When I was living in a small apartment, my neighbors always cranked up their music to 11—like very, very loud—and left it there until something like 7 am. Maybe later, but that's when I would leave for work. It was so loud that I couldn't hear my own TV over it. My neighbors and I would bang on the door but they would never open the door.

It was like trying to sleep at a festival. Then at some point, I found out they often left for a bar across the street, but would just leave the music on. When I found this out, I started pulling the breaker for their apartment. It worked for a bit, but they would just come back at 5 am and turn it back on. It was reported by heaps of people, but nothing was ever done. Then I came up with a genius plan.

While they were gone out as usual one night, I jammed their lock so their keys wouldn't work anymore. When they couldn’t get in after coming back from the bar, they had to get the property manager and he heard the music blasting inside. After a couple of times of that happening, they were evicted. Hmmm...maybe I'm the bad neighbor in this story.

time_to_reset

4. The After After Party

My neighbor’s son used to go out partying all week, bring his friends back, and then party at his place until 5 or 6 am. The issue? He would party upstairs in his bedroom—music blaring, yelling—and it was right next to my bedroom. If it was just constant noise, I could sleep through it, but not that. I was running on no sleep and had to be up at eight to go to work.

I was getting in trouble at work for being exhausted and no one believed it was because my neighbor wasn't letting me sleep. It was terrible. So, after trying to talk to the jerk, we posted a note through the door. His mom worked nights so when she got home, things went crazy. The note was reasonable, as we asked them to move the after-party downstairs because we couldn't sleep through all the noise.

We didn't intend for his mom to get the note. Wow, she was so mad. When my alarm went off an hour or so later, he was angrily yelling that it wasn't fair that my alarm woke him up every day. Yes, an alarm going off once or twice before work was totally unreasonable, while his music blasting all night wasn't. The parties stopped, though.

Zanki

5. Grand Theft Auto Neighbor

When I started my first job post-college, I was thrilled to live by myself for the first time in my life. I had this beautiful one-bedroom apartment in a solid part of town. Everything was great until six months later, when new tenants moved in next to my unit. I had a package go missing (a phone case). Amazon had posted a photo of it at my door, so I thought that it was just a fluke.

Then it happened again, and again, and again. The office wouldn’t accept packages, so I had to get my items delivered to friends’ places instead, which was wildly inconvenient. The local authorities didn’t care in the slightest when I reported it, so I just figured I’d deal with it. Fast forward a few weeks, and the situation escalated.

I come home after being gone for less than an hour, to see that my doorknob and front door were scrapped up and the knob was barely hanging on. Long story short, I had been parking in plain view of this guy’s window, so he was able to tell when I was home. I am 100% convinced he tried to break into my place, and that me coming home early interrupted him.

I googled his name after I moved—got it off a package at his door—and found that he was a convicted felon with charges that include grand theft auto, domestic assault, drug dealing, and an attempted break-in.

Ladyringo

6. Wait, What About Tenille?

a man smoking a cigar and drinking a glass of winePhoto by Daniel Gregoire on Unsplash

I have a few stories from the same neighbor, let’s call her Linda. Linda would often have men outside the apartment building that she locked out screaming her name. But the best story regards a boyfriend Linda had who insisted my roommate and I call him "The Captain." About a week after meeting him, we came home to a wedding announcement for Linda and "The Captain."

Yes, his name was The Captain on the announcement. But there was one final, delicious twist in store for us. Exactly one week later, The Captain was taken away by officers outside our apartment building for public intoxication at 2 am while screaming "I've made a huge mistake. I hate you, Linda! A huge mistake! I'm ruined!" I wonder what she did?

katartsis

7. Grandma Girlfriend

I used to live in a horrible apartment with paper-thin walls. The people next door were a woman who looked like she was in her 70s and what I thought was her 30-something grandson. They would yell at each other all day, constantly blast their TV, and the smell of their smoke would waft through into my apartment and make the place absolutely reek.

The worst was at night when the two of them would, well...be very loud in bed. So this was the first clue that they were not grandma and grandson like I’d assumed—at least I really hope not. Every night for an hour I heard their creaking bed banging against my bedroom wall and the old woman moaning like a stuck pig. Nightmarish.

I also think the guy kept track of my schedule and watched for me because whenever I came home or went out, even when I took out the garbage, he would be there outside his place, trying to chit chat with me while staring at my body and being completely gross. I lived there a year, but it felt like ten.

Thin_Host

8. This Trash Didn’t Fall Far From The Tree

I had some neighbors below me years ago. It was a mother and her son, plus sometimes his ex, and sometimes their kids. I feel terrible for the kids, because the adults were the trashiest people. The place reeked of pot 24/7, they would park their vehicle on the grass as they were at the back of the building, and they drove everybody nuts with how loud they were.

I once recorded audio of the mom and son fighting where he was screaming and very graphically describing how he was going to kill her. I saw a guy in the building across from us also on his balcony subtly recording in case it escalated. The fight ended when his ex showed up either with or for the kids, and they started arguing instead. At one point she screamed that she had crabs and then drove off. It was absolutely wild.

Ta5hak5

9. Garbage Battle

green plastic bags near wooden wallPhoto by Edward Howell on Unsplash

We had some neighbors that used to leave their garbage out in plastic bags the night before garbage day—instead of putting it in a bin. Around here, that's just ringing the dinner bell for raccoons and other critters. Sure enough, come morning there's garbage strewn all over the neighborhood. What the raccoons and skunks didn't spread around, the wind picked up the slack.

Some of the people on the street kindly approached the guy and asked him to put his garbage in a bin. He told them to get lost. Thus began the Battle of the Garbage. It was so, so satisfying. Every morning of garbage day some people on my street would collect all the half-eaten and rotten trash from their lawns and toss it back into the dude's backyard.

Next, he would collect it, then dump it back on their lawns. Or cram it into their bushes. People started finding half-eaten burritos and candy wrappers in their mailboxes. The street started to look like a slum. The authorities were called. Health inspectors. City by-law enforcement. Each side was calling in whatever authority they could muster to get their enemy in trouble.

The dude and his family—amazingly his wife seemed perfectly pleasant—lasted about eight months then moved. Every once in a while I find a random margarine lid or piece of styrofoam in my hedge, and my mind goes back to those dark days of the garbage battle.

kor_hookmaster

10. Neighbor Under Surveillance

My wife and I were happy to move into our new house in the summer of 2019. The neighborhood seemed really nice and we were excited to meet the neighbors. The first two families we met—neighbors on either side of us—warned us about the people renting the house directly behind ours. Apparently, they had been known to cause trouble and blow things way out of proportion, bordering on paranoia of everyone around them.

We kept this in mind but had no issues for the first six months or so after moving in. Their house sits on a hill behind ours, and so overlooks the majority of our backyard due to the elevation change. Well, one night (morning, technically) at about 3 am we wake up to ring notifications from our phones showing video from our front doorbell. When we realize what it is, our blood runs cold.

There’s a man standing barefoot in a sleeveless shirt on our porch POUNDING on our front door. We give it two or three minutes just watching him on the app, thinking maybe he’s intoxicated and has the wrong house—essentially giving him the benefit of the doubt. But then we start to hear him say “come out you two, I’m gonna mess you up” etc. and he leaves the porch and starts to head around the side of the house towards our backyard.

Considering we had no idea who this was, my wife now immediately calls the local detachment for officers to come by, as I move out of our bedroom towards the external doors to look and listen for any attempt of a home invasion. At this point, our neighbors directly behind us throw a HUGE spotlight into our backyard from theirs.

We’re thinking, okay cool they know something’s up and they’re trying to help us out by shedding light on our backyard. Officers arrive several long minutes later and knock.We explain the situation and they head out back to look around and get the scoop from the neighbors with the spotlight. Well, the officer comes back with the news that really shocked us.

It turns out that the spotlight neighbor was the one on our porch, and he had jumped our fence into our backyard and then went up into his yard and then threw the light on. He told the officers that several nights prior, I had let my puppy out into MY OWN backyard in the middle of the night and, because I was in my boxers, he said that I was “trying to expose myself to his family.”

He then followed this up to the officers with “evidence.” This was the most chilling part of all. This evidence consisted of videos he had taken THROUGH OUR WINDOWS of my wife and me inside of our own home doing totally normal things like chores, watching TV, etc. Nothing inappropriate or scandalous—not that it would have mattered anyway, since we were in our OWN HOME.

Because of the elevation difference, if they went out of their way they could technically slightly see through our closed blinds due to the angle…so they had been filming us for no reason at all and expected the officers to see this as reasonable? The constable came back in and my wife was devastated. It was a huge breach of our privacy of course and totally unfounded accusations as we had never done anything to anger these people, we hadn’t even met them.

The officer told us “just don’t worry about it, if he tries something again just give us a call,” which wasn’t the most comforting at the time. They moved out a few months later without any additional issues, and my wife and I celebrated like it was a holiday when we saw the moving van in their driveway.

NoWaythisIsTaken

11. Here Today

I lived in an apartment with a lot of rotating tenants. An elderly lady moved in across the hall from me and promptly started hoarding. I started to figure it out when her porch started to fill up with odds and ends furniture including, but not limited to, a roll-top desk. She also yelled at me once for taking her key out of the front door and putting it in the mail slot.

Anyway, after a couple of weeks, I started to realize I hadn’t seen her in a while and started to smell something real weird. Then I found out the dark truth. Turns out, she had passed and no one knew about it for a week—hence the smell. Her family came and cleared out all her stuff about a week after that.

According_height_866

12. Deadbeat Daddy

men's white topPhoto by Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash

I rented a flat with an ex and the upstairs neighbor was an absolute nightmare. This was a deadbeat dad who had his kids every weekend and left them screaming all the time. He'd blast music until sunrise every day even when he had his kids. I got the council involved, nothing happened. I got child services involved, nothing happened.

He used to argue every Sunday with his ex about how he wasn't paying child support. They'd argue right outside our door—we were on the ground floor. The guy was unemployed, owed the landlord a lot of money, and only left his flat to get groceries or drugs. He then had the nerve to get angry at me when my cat meowed loudly...once.

jenjudges

13. Kids Running Wild

I had some really crazy neighbors once. The matriarch nailed all of the windows shut in their house, then removed the doorknobs and installed several deadbolts. This was to keep her grandkids home and everyone else out while she was at work. Child welfare stopped by and somehow they were okay with this—which really floored me.

While she was at work, the kids were able to get one window open without her knowing, and they would usually leave during the day and make it back before she got off work. This went on for quite a while and eventually, there were maybe a dozen young adults living there too, and they all used the window as the main entrance.

The window, unfortunately, bordered on my driveway, and was mere feet from my house. All hours of the day, people would be out there, wiggling in and out of the window. People got tired of being cooped up and major fights broke out. I regularly heard bodies hitting walls or furniture or fists. I heard yells of "well, stop threatening and get your pistol already!"

I have PTSD, and it was just day after day of trying to keep myself calm. The kids had a pneumatic BB revolver, a lookalike handgun, and one morning shot up my neighbor's car. She left to work at a hospital early in the morning, before first light, and didn't notice. When she shut her car door, all the glass fell out the windows.

Later in the morning, the same kid shot out a window in the school across the street. But what happened next was even worse still. My husband and I were outside planting flowers and my husband felt a sudden pain in his shoulder. Sure enough, the kid had shot him. The authorities arrived and the kid just kept on shooting. They called the mother, who had to unlock all the deadbolts.

The officers took away the kids' rifles, and dragged them outside so they could be cuffed and taken away. The youngest was maybe nine. Since no one confessed or ratted, and the officers weren't sure which of the three did it, they were released and not charged. Thankfully this act of physical aggression against my husband got them evicted.

But the eviction just started another wave of bizarre behavior. After tearing up the house, including breaking all the windows and ripping out the electrical boxes and punching random holes in the walls, the kids went to the landlord's house with their lookalike handguns and shot up the windows in her house. Again they were taken away, but being juveniles, no repercussions.

A couple of weeks later, her vehicle and garage were firebombed, but no one was charged with that. I'm so glad they are gone. I live in a wonderful neighborhood—not rich by any means, but the most awesome people—but it's hard to enjoy the community with that going on next door. I hope they somehow find some peace with this life.

raisinghellwithtrees

14. Dog Gone Shame

The neighbor’s dogs got into my backyard and attacked my dog. My dog ended up okay, but it was a long recovery and he still doesn’t walk right. He was and is the happiest dog ever, so to see him on the ground covered in blood was the worst thing ever. The dogs were able to get through because their kids had taken a plank out of my fence—they didn’t have a fence.

I left a letter on their door explaining the situation. They showed up at my door to tell me that it was my fault for not having a stronger fence and that they wouldn’t be paying any medical bills. After a lot of them yelling and me calmly explaining why they actually would be paying, they eventually complied. They did build a fence, backwards, with the flat side facing them.

They are also extremely loud, have chickens that escape on a regular basis in our suburban neighborhood, and are overall scummy people.

Wolf97

15. Leave Well Enough Alone

cars parked on side of the road during daytimePhoto by Jonathan J. Castellon on Unsplash

A guy in my neighborhood owned six cars and kept them all parked on the street in a very congested block of apartments. He spent hours tending to them, and they somehow always looked rustier when he was done. If a leaf landed on one of his cars, he would accuse the neighborhood of intentionally placing leaves on his car to annoy him.

Vampilton

16. Battle Of The TVs

I once lived in an apartment building with little better than paper for walls. You could clearly hear the next-door neighbors' conversations, them doing it in bed, walking up the stairs, etc. For some reason, they thought it would be totally awesome to install a surround sound system and affix the speakers to our shared wall. It was not awesome.

The TV was so loud that it literally shook the wall, and we couldn’t hear our own television unless we turned it up ridiculously loud in return. The neighbors did not respond kindly to our request that they place the speakers elsewhere (or at least turn the bass down)—it ultimately ended with authorities being called on them.

We called them after the guy got super angry at being asked again to turn it down and started pounding on the wall and screaming about how he was going to mess us up. They finally got evicted when he threatened someone at the management office on some other matter.

dalek_999

17. No Remorse

I live in a rural area and my neighbor was a real jerk. The dude was on drugs, cheating on his heavily pregnant wife with another addict, just completely out of his mind. It ended in unimaginable horror. My husband had a dog and this guy set out cat food (he doesn’t have cats) just so Scrappy would go to his porch. The guy then chased our dog into our front yard and shot him in the ribs.

Sadly, the dog didn’t pass immediately—he suffered. I could’ve strangled the neighbor right then and there, even as a little 110-pound female. It still infuriates me. He didn’t even show a bit of remorse.

Automatic_Judge7910

18. A Curse On You And Your Cars

gray mercedes benz suv on brown dirt road during daytimePhoto by HAMZA YOUNAS on Unsplash

On our street, there really is only parking on one side of the street—the garages and driveways for most of the houses weren't meant for cars, but this is another rant. The parking is on our side. The people across the street from us at one point had a car for each member of the household. To make matters worse, the daughter was a terrible driver so she needed at least two parking spaces.

This means that one family requires seven parking spaces! The best space to park is in front of my parents' house especially in winter as my parents would shovel it all out for easy access—this family never helped to shovel even though they would complain if we didn't shovel out enough. So, if my parents were out, this family would fight to claim my parents' place.

This family calls us the evil neighbors now, because one day my parents were away and the daughter and son-in-law were visiting in their brand new SUV. Of course, they parked in my parents' spot. Cue freak windstorm which destroyed their car and the mom's. Apparently, it was my parents' fault as we had obviously cursed them!

Monkeymonkey150

19. We Saw Eye To Eye

We lived next door to this old man who sat in his front yard blatantly just staring at us with binoculars. He only did it when my parents weren't home. When my mom confronted him he claimed we were lying. We weren't. So one night we hear a noise outside, and my mom pulls up the blind to find herself eye to eye with this old man trying to look into our window.

tsim12345

20. Ding-Dong Neighbor

A bunch of things happened with my ding-dong neighbor. She had a large dog that hated my older, smaller dog. One day her dog ran into my yard and bit my dog. She did apologize for this one, and it didn’t happen again. The same neighbor dumped her lawn clippings into my backyard, and I had to ask her to stop and clean up her mess.

She decided to build a fence. Of course, she didn’t get a survey, so I paid for a survey of my property. She’d started building her fence three feet over on my property. I had her stop and remove the fence. She was angry and never rebuilt it. I painted my house. She painted her house, same color. I bought a new car. She bought a new car—same color, same configuration.

There's other minor stuff, but that's enough. Odd person. Very odd.

The SquirrelWithin

21. Not Avon Calling

man standing in front of lighted carPhoto by Eugene Triguba on Unsplash

I had a neighbor a few houses down who kept to himself. One day he was turning onto our road and I happened to be behind him. Some kids were cutting across his yard so he stopped to yell at them and I couldn’t go around so I was stuck. He then started backing up, but I had only a little room before backing into a very busy road. He then hit the front of my car.

He started yelling at me. I was maybe 18 at the time and was legitimately terrified. I was able to make it down the block to my house, called my mom and she encouraged me to make a report. The officer came, was super kind and offered to go to the house of the man who hit me to get his insurance information. The man refused to answer and the officer made a report and called to check in later in the afternoon. I thought it was over, but it only turned more horrific.

That night the neighbor ended up taking a firearm and pounded on a few neighbors' doors, presumably looking for me. The officers were called and quite a few of them responded. They could not find the man so they had everyone on our street shelter in place until they could find him. Officers ended up finding him under a boat in his backyard.

I don’t know if he was committed or what, but he never was back at his house and his family sold it a few months later.

Hawt4teach

22. Neighbor Flung Cat

I had a 17-year-old cat, which I loved so much. She was my mother's cat and I got her when my mom passed. So anyways, one day the cat disappears. After a few days of not seeing her, I posted on Facebook about it and it was shared a lot. One day, I was getting into my vehicle to go to work and my young neighbor—about six or seven years old—shyly came up to tell me something.

She said that she saw my other neighbor throw my cat over her fence into the kindergarten playground. We live very near the elementary school. I spoke to the head custodian and he said there was indeed a dead cat on the playground. So my neighbor is so far off her rocker that she'd rather throw a dead cat into an area where young children play than dig a hole or do the noble thing of telling me what happened.

tbdzrfesna

23. Snack Attack

Some just straight-up rednecks move into my neighborhood. They turned the shared side yard, which was legally ours but shared because we weren't necessarily using it, into a lumber yard/playground where they dug a massive pit for mud wrestling. No kidding—mud wrestling! The youngest kid got stuck in the mud pit up to his head and they couldn't get him out for hours.

They also just wanted the full neighbor experience without putting in any effort themselves. It was like they'd moved from some hillbilly commune where you could just demand things of your neighbors. Every day when I got home from school, the three youngest kids would bang on our door until we gave them snacks. One of them, when denied snacks, came back and broke our glass door with a hammer. But that was just the beginning.

The second oldest kid (there were six in total) had an old A/C air handling unit in the backyard that he was allowed to hit with a sledge hammer when he got angry. He got angry often and at some pretty irregular hours. I ran into him at a bowling alley years after they moved away/got kicked out/went bankrupt. He had giant scars all over his back, chest, and arms—he said he woke up in the middle of the highway on Halloween night, all cut up.

tmptsitwm

24. Hose Was Neighbor’s Breaking Point

person holding black dslr cameraPhoto by Steve DiMatteo on Unsplash

My mom, dad, and I moved into a condominium when I was about 14. When we first moved in, we met Trina, our downstairs neighbor. Trina was an older woman (60s) taking care of her mentally challenged grandson who was my same age but mentally a six-year-old with minimal language development. Trina seemed sweet and welcomed us to the building.

We had a few small issues with Trina, but we decided to keep them to ourselves. You see, she smoked A LOT, like three to four packs a day, and the smell would overtake our house. Also, the grandson would scream a lot in the early morning but nothing serious and we never said a word. We were all friendly enough and life was fine.

About two years after moving in, my mom bought a portable hose to water her outdoor plants and clean the balcony off. This is when the trouble started. Trina lost it when my mom washed the patio for the first time: just water, no chemicals, just rinsing the dirt off. Trina promptly started threatening my mom’s life for doing this.

She then complained to the condo association every single day for years. She started to burn small fires in a coffee can under our windows in an attempt to smoke us out. She once saw my bedroom window was left open and literally flooded my room with her hose. She would call the authorities on every single noise we ever made. Eventually they fined her $50 for wasting their time.

A couple of years later I became pregnant. Yeah, I was very young, just 18 at the time. So my boyfriend moved in and we had the baby and decided to raise it together. The neighbor told my boyfriend that I had a revolving line of men, and I was unsure who the father was, but chose him because he was nice. This was, of course, completely fabricated.

She continued with her nonsense for years and years. Once she was driving down the driveway while I was getting my then two kids into the car. She literally tried to hit my oldest son with her car. I had to physically pick him up and throw him out of the way. When the authorities came she denied everything so nothing happened.

She harassed my family for years to the point where the condo association had to have private meetings with her and my dad, which nothing ever came of. The condo association was just as fed up as we were. Three years ago my mom passed suddenly. When the neighbor realized my mom was no longer around, her response made my blood boil.

She laughed and told my dad and my kids that my mom deserved to die. She was an awful, awful woman. She recently had a stroke. We don't know if she is still alive or in a home but my dad, who still lives there, says it's nice to be free of the constant harassment.

ambersavampire

25. What Can I Say

I lived in a three-story apartment building on the middle floor. The bottom floor was basement apartments. It was a very quiet building and a lot of people were older and lived there 10 years or more. Then this weird creepy jerk moved in below us. He would play music loud all night and I had to be up for work at 5:00 am.

I wanted to complain, but he wouldn't answer the door so we could ask him to turn it down. So I had to jump up and down until he heard it. He also had angry girls banging on his door screaming for hours. He was home but just wouldn't answer. One of the girls ran out and poured nail polish all over his car. That was actually a good day.

His apartment was in the basement, but he had a huge window that was right next to the stairs to get in. The guy never closed the curtains and you could see directly down into his living room. There he had built a swing with intimate play stuff hanging on it. I had to explain what it was to everyone that came over—even my mom.

Then one day an officer knocked on my door. He looked kind of embarrassed because he was holding about 20 pairs of women's underwear. He asked me to pick out mine. Three of them were mine and the nice officer told me to throw them away because the downstairs neighbor had been wearing them. Turns out he’d taken them from the laundry room

I guess the upstairs neighbor was walking in the building and saw her underwear hanging on the swing and called it in. So they took him away for taking our underwear. The landlord evicted him while he was behind bars. He was so angry that he was getting evicted, he went and bought a bunch of sand and covered the whole apartment in sand.

He then turned the air conditioning all the way up and left it. Of course, this was after he’d switched the electric back into the landlord's name. He was a nightmare neighbor.

truisluv

26. Kid Caught In Crossfire

One of my neighbors almost shot me when I was a little kid. I was playing in front of my apartment building when my neighbor got into an argument with one of these other guys from down the street. I wasn’t sure what exactly the problem was, but my neighbor didn't like it, so he pulled out a pistol from his front pocket and fired a couple of bullets.

A stray bullet flew right past my face, and it came really close to hitting me. My mom’s friend from the next floor down grabbed me and pulled me inside to safety.

Cubsfan630

27. Dog Owner Acts Like A Dog

woman hugging a dogPhoto by Wade Austin Ellis on Unsplash

My current neighbor, let’s call her Kitty, is a woman I‘ve known vaguely on social media for a while. But now that she’s my neighbor, I’m seeing a different side to her. For example, last month, she fostered a dog. She saw me cleaning my porch and asked to come over with her dog, and—wanting to be friendly—I said sure. So she comes over and puts her dog in the backyard.

So, I made a couple of drinks even though she was already half hammered. I finished making the drinks and went to let the dogs inside—her foster Husky and my lab mix. Unfortunately, her dog climbed my five-foot fence and ran into the street and got hit by a car. Luckily he was ok. I offered to pay whatever she needed and drove her to the vet.

She proceeded to scream profanities at the vet. I then took her home while the pup was getting stitches. She promptly walked into my house, drank every ounce of booze left in the entire kitchen, and rolled around on the floor with her crotch exposed to my husband. She then asked him to drive her to the store for more booze. Now I avoid her like the plague.

MeeMaul

28. Surrounded By Sound

My partner and I shared a split house with a couple; they were upstairs and we were downstairs. They said they knew that the noise insulation was low and asked us to let them know if it was ever too loud. We texted maybe 10 times in two years to turn down their TV at 3:00. Their TV was directly over our bedroom. On the final time we texted them, they snapped back HARD.

They talked about how awful it was for them and how much they tried to please us with the situation. They went on to complain about how they even stopped using their surround sound system. I mean, who needs a surround sound system in a less than 500 square foot uni? At 3:00 am no less. On top of this they constantly moved and, on one occasion, broke our stuff in the basement storage to the point we eventually stopped using it.

They frequently put shoes in the new dryer to the point it melted rubber on the back. They then broke said dryer by overstuffing it and leaning heavy equipment against the door so it'd stop popping open. They also "accidentally” took our packages from us on several occasions and filled up the other shared space we had with their own stuff so we couldn't use it.

honkdogs

29. Sweet Mustang Revenge

My neighbor poisoned my dog—sadly, it didn’t survive—so the night after we moved out of that neighborhood, I went back and took my revenge. The guy who’d done it was restoring a Mustang and I thought that was the perfect way to get back at him. I spray painted the car, super glued the wipers to the windshield, poured a gallon of bleach in the gas tank, and super glued the gas cap and door shut.

im_herenow_what

30. Door Opener Opens Man Eyes

white wooden doorPhoto by Dima Pechurin on Unsplash

The first apartment I lived in, I had a neighbor that would try opening the door. I didn't hear it myself because I worked nights. I came home early one night—around 2 am—and he was trying to get in through the apartment door. We had a huge argument and he stopped doing it after that. I'm guessing he thought it was just my two female roommates living there, because he never tried anything after he knew I was there as well.

It kinda opened my eyes, at the time, to the sort of nasty stuff that women have to deal with.

frontal_pin

31. It’s A Chicago Thing

One time, I came in to visit my Gramma in Chicago for Christmas. I was looking for a parking spot near their house but the only one available had a lawn chair right in the center of it. I moved the lawn chair to park a little down from her house. I mean, who leaves a lawn chair in the street in wintertime, right? So I just put it on the sidewalk so someone could pick it up if they wanted it.

When my uncle saw what I’d done, he hustled out in just his socks to tell me to park way down the street in front of an empty lot, and then he very carefully put the chair back exactly where it had been. I had no idea (at the time) just how close I’d come to getting shot that day. You do not mess with the winter lawn chair in Chicago.

EatsCrackers

32. Said Hi To Wrong Neighbor

After the polar vortex a few years ago, the mail finally came—the sub zero temperatures froze the snow in a way that mail couldn't be delivered. So, I was basically in my house for a week and just so delighted about the mail and seeing another person outside that I said "Hello" to a neighbor I know better than to talk to. I got way more than I bargained for.

She immediately burst into tears and started telling me about how she found out something horrible about her boyfriend. I should mention that she is around 50 years old and dates the kind of guys who use her for a place to live. Anyway, she’d just found out that her boyfriend rurbbed one out into her coffee every morning. Um, but really.

She found out because she was spying on his phone and he texted a friend saying he did it. Right around this time, her big dog burst through the front door and before she could finish saying, "He won't hurt you" the dog bit me in the stomach—luckily it didn't draw blood. I kindly excused myself and went back into my home to regret ever leaving in the first place.

tbdzfesna

33. Ask Me No More Questions

black and yellow rooster on brown slabPhoto by Dušan veverkolog on Unsplash

I have these neighbors who are always asking for things. Like for my wifi password. Or asking us to buy more security cameras to point at his house. They also ask if I would watch out for their chickens—including roosters that are not allowed. They just keep asking for everything. The only thing he didn't ask for was permission to put an animal trap in our backyard. That he just did.

emmaleth

34. I Guess We Were The Bad Neighbors

I used to live in a bad part of Queens, NY until about 2004. The house that we owned there had been owned by my family since the early 1900s. It was known throughout the surrounding area as my family’s house—kind of famous I guess. Unfortunately, not everyone in my family were good people. Some of them were involved in gang life.

My siblings and I weren’t allowed to play by the windows, so we wouldn’t end up in the crossfire of a gang battle. The deciding factor of us leaving that area was when someone broke into our neighbor’s house, mistakenly choosing the wrong house and asking where OUR family was, looking to settle some issue. My parents decided it was time to leave.

bigoopsieenergy

35. Sleepless In The Suburbs

I was living in the burbs, and there was a house that let their dog bark all day. Another house would party until 3 am and the people living behind us would throw their dirty diapers into our backyard. The party house and the dog barking house made me miss so much work. Nothing like calling your boss and saying "I can't drive to work because in the last three days I have had four hours of sleep".

BOOdle

36. I’ve Been Watching You

white and brown long coat large dogPhoto by Pauline Loroy on Unsplash

This was almost 10 years ago when my husband and I were still dating and we moved into our first apartment together. There were four buildings of apartments within walking distance of each other and my run-in was with someone in a neighboring building. We had a dog and I was the regular dog walker, because my husband worked all different shifts and I didn’t.

So, one day, I was coming back from a walk with her when this guy comes out of one of the other buildings. He starts walking towards me very directly, pitching a fit about the fact that I’m walking my dog. He says he’s seen me just leave her poop on the grass and just walk away. I can assure you this was an absolute lie, 100%.

He says he sees her squat all the time and I just keep walking. I was dumbfounded. I said, “My dog is a female, that’s how she pees.” He then just continues going on and on and on and at one point says, “I’ve been watching you...” And again, I’m dumbfounded and I just go, “You’ve been WATCHING me?” I remember going back to my apartment and calling my husband at work and just crying because I felt so scared and alone.

We had been at that new place for only one month so we had 11 more to go at that point. We talked to the managers and they were absolutely no help. They said yeah, they knew who we were talking about, he’s had multiple complaints against him and they think he sells drugs. Oh, and if he does that again, call the authorities.

Calym817

37. Mind Your Own Business

My current neighbor runs a small business practice out of her home. She had her customers park on my yard—easement, technically—despite the town telling her she couldn’t. And despite all the times I told her to stop. She never stopped until one person parked facing my house, two feet from my “no trespassing” signs. I called the authorities.

I filed a complaint against the customer and never saw that car again. But she didn't stop, she only got more bizarre. Then she tried to lease my front yard. When that didn’t work, she tried to buy my house while we still lived in it. She told the contractors that they could access her yard through ours, so they dumped loads of gravel and sand in my front yard as their storage area, and a cement truck tore 18-inch ruts in my yard.

A tree on the property line was infested with termites and a huge branch fell on a mutually owned fence. She demanded we pay to have the limb removed because it was damaging the fence, which was actually quite horribly dilapidated. She didn’t want us to cut down the tree because of the shade it provided her back patio, which was installed at the expense of my yard.

2020onrepeat

38. Screams Heard Through Concrete

We lived next door to a group of "night women" and shared a bedroom wall with one of their bedrooms—this was in a condo building. We would be woken up at regular intervals each night by obnoxious, dirty movie-worthy screaming. It even came through our concrete walls. Forget leaving a window open in the summer. It was too noisy,

Apparently, the building was known for it, but we had no idea before moving in. The neighbors had a whole system in place. Their pimps would wait down on the street and flag the next gentleman caller to enter after receiving payment from the satisfied customer. They had at least five units rented in the building for this purpose.

The authorities knew about the setup but preferred them in a building rather than on the street so they wouldn't do anything about it. The condo board and building manager also knew but never brought it up during official meetings so it wouldn't be recorded in the minutes and tank the property values. Really wish WE had known about it.

LowFlyinLoafLion

39. Bad Neighbor Begets Worse

white and black American pit bull terrier at daytimePhoto by Justin Veenema on Unsplash

Our first apartment together we lived in an upper of a house. The lower had a family with a few kids in it. “Great,” we thought. “No crazy parties or anything like that.” A few weeks after we moved in, the flies started showing up. Our apartment was full of gnats and flies by the end of the first month. We had just scoured the whole place, weren’t leaving food out, could not figure out for the life of us where they came from—until we saw them coming out of the vents.

The family got evicted a few months later. The landlord showed us the unit, and we all beheld the horror. There was dog poop and rotten food covering the floor. Piles of garbage everywhere. The place was a total gut. They ended up listing the unit at a higher price to make up for refinishing. “We should get some better people in now. The place looks nice,” we thought. Our apartment was finally bug free.

We didn’t actually see the next family that moved in. They arrived while we were gone on a weekend trip and they immediately covered every window with sheets. Then a weird smell started filling our apartment. It was acrid and off. We closed the vents (again) and figured they were probably still cleaning as they settled in.

Then the garbage started piling up outside and the overnight noise began. It sounded like they were bowling in the basement. Plus, there were so many plastic jugs overflowing the recycling. There were no sounds during the day, at all. My husband worked night shift at the time and the nights were long and full of weird sounds shaking the whole house. Like at 4 am: “let’s build a pyramid” noise.

After a week or so of this, my husband politely knocked on their door on his way home from work, hoping to introduce himself and ask them to keep the noise down. No answer. He tried for a few days and even on the weekend and at different times. No one ever opened the door. A few days later a note was taped to our door. Its contents chilled me to the bone.

The note said: “People upstairs, don’t bother us and we won’t bother you. If you ever step on our porch again, I’ll call the authorities. Mind your own business. Don’t mess with me. GAZ Chicago” We almost immediately started looking for a new place to live, luckily moving pretty quickly after.

saltandAsh

40. Ambulance Visit Is Just The Beginning

The very first night my wife and I moved into this townhouse, an ambulance was called to the house. It turns out that our neighbor had pushed his girlfriend down the stairs. We heard the fight and saw the ambulance come. After that, every night at around three in the morning he’d start banging on our walls waking us up, yelling at us to be quiet. We were always asleep.

I confronted him when I finally saw him, and things got heated. He was actually quite crazy. Later he threatened to hurt my wife. We moved out after this threat on my wife’s life. The authorities wouldn’t do anything about it.

Hobbit_Feet45

41. Stuck In The Middle With You

Many, many years ago, I rented a little house with the girlfriend I had at the time. The neighborhood seemed pretty nice. On one side of us lived an elderly couple, and on the other side my worst nightmare. She was a dealer with six children and three boyfriends. In addition, this neighbor liked her music at full volume.

So, here’s how it went: The elderly couple would hear the music noise coming from the dealer's house and call the officers to my place because it was so loud they thought it was me. The officers would pull up and wake me—I wore earplugs—and then go to the dealer's house and then the dealer would think I had called to complain about them.

The dealer ended up losing her electricity due to unpaid bills, so she came over while I was at work and plugged extension cords into my outdoor sockets. She then got mad and threatened to shoot me when I unplugged them. We had to move in with my mother as an emergency stopgap because my landlord thought I was making it all up.

Thriftyverse

42. Not A Petting Zoo

gray cat standing in two feetPhoto by Marko Blažević on Unsplash

My neighbor tried to sue another neighbor because their cat scratched her kid’s arm and part of his face. In the cat's defense, the kid had walked over—when the cat was curled up and resting—and picked it up by its tail and attempted to sling it like a slingshot. That was when the cat scratched the kid. Can you really blame the cat?

Next she tried to claim that my dog bit her kid. Admittedly, my dog did growl at the kid, but only after he repeatedly slapped him on the butt and hind legs. The said bite marks she claimed were from my dog sure looked to me like they came from a human, possibly from my neighbor’s own mouth. Did she actually bite her own kid?

whatnameisnttaken098

43. That Blowed Up Real Good

So back when I was about five years old, we had some neighbors next door who were basically hoarders of everything. There were car parts out the wazoo in their yard that leaked all kinds of stuff. I am pretty positive that it was this leaked stuff that made my cat sick and caused its passing. But the real story here is actually about the neighbor’s son.

So, basically, they had a kid who was around 18 that was always in trouble: shoplifting, fires, whatever basically you could get in trouble for around that age in high school. One day he decided to light a fire near an 18-wheeler tank filled with gas that they had in their yard for some reason. You can probably see where this is going. So yeah, one night at 2 am, it blew up. Authorities came and took him away. They moved shortly thereafter.

Bapponukedthe_jappos

44. Hissy Fit Over Scared Cat

I was living alone in a first-floor studio apartment in a city where I knew basically nobody. The neighbors above me had two toddlers who would run from one end of the apartment to the other from 6-8 am every morning. They weren't that bad, though. The woman across the hall—a senile, intolerant, elderly, shut-in, cat lady—HATED me.

This woman banged on my door to tell me to "quiet down" every evening. After the first four or five times of this, I knocked on her door and explained that I wasn't the one making the noise, and even pointed out that the yelling and music she was complaining about was coming from her upstairs neighbor, obviously, as I was standing right in front of her.

She was so sweet and kind and said "oh my mistake!" and let me know that we would be friendly from then on out. But after that, it was like that conversation never happened. She started to literally hiss at me if we ever crossed paths on the stairwell. She would leave notes on my door saying "stop scaring my cat" and "I know what you did" and "I've alerted the authorities."

One time, I had my long-distance boyfriend over for the weekend, and when she saw us driving out of the parking lot together, she threw the trash she was carrying to the dumpster at my car and called me a very unkind name. Well, that was enough for me to finally tell my landlord about what I was experiencing with the situation.

He let me know that she struggled with mental health issues and, unfortunately, there was nothing he could do about it. That this wasn't the first he had heard of her, and I would just have to put up with it. I lasted five months before moving out. My landlord charged me a giant lease cancellation fee.

like_so_cute

45. Bird-Brained Idea Worked

pink flamingosPhoto by Stephane YAICH on Unsplash

When I was growing up, my rear neighbor, Janet, and my mom were both going through rough divorces at the same time. My mom mostly kept to herself at first. Janet did not take that approach. At first, Janet’s complaints seemed frustrating but reasonable. We had dogs and a fenced-in yard in the suburbs. When the dogs were left outside too long, they barked.

Janet filed a noise complaint. Again, quite reasonable. But then Janet started filing noise complaints any time she saw the dogs outside. So, my mom started keeping them inside more. Next, Janet filed complaints when she could hear the dogs barking inside, or when she heard someone else’s dogs, or really just whenever she felt like it because this wasn’t about the noise it was about Janet feeling a sense of control over something during an out-of-control divorce.

Eventually, the authorities must have told Janet she had to stop calling them, so she started calling animal control instead. It got to the point where animal control knew what was happening, and would come to our door to make small talk with my mom just to file their report. They told her, though, that as long as the calls happened they had to at least come out.

That’s when my mom had a feather-brained idea. Whenever animal control showed up, my mom would buy a two-pack of lawn flamingos and put them in our yard. She was a teacher, so she got up early. When she did, she’d take the flamingos and make them stare at Janet’s front door. Then she’d get home earlier than Janet, and move them around just like normal decor.

Whenever Janet made a call, my mom bought more flamingos. And whenever Janet made a call, a bigger and bigger flock of lawn flamingos stared her down when she left for work. To make it more mysterious, the flamingos would be casually mingling when she got home. I can only imagine what she must have thought. One would have to think she questioned her sanity, both because of the movement and the incremental growth.

By the time it got to 12 or so lawn flamingos giving her the hundred-yard glare, she made the connection. Janet never called animal control again after that.

mister_sleepy

46. Housewarming Went Cold

This dude had just moved in across the street and threw a housewarming party. There was loud music all night until someone called the authorities and they shut it down. I finally got to bed around 2 am. I then woke up at 3:30 am to this same dude going door to door demanding to know if it was the person living there who called the authorities.

KermitTheFraud92

47. Blair Cat Project

I had a neighbor in an apartment complex who would sit in her car in the parking lot and blare Christian gospel music, which in and of itself wasn't the worst. But later we discovered a plastic bag hanging in a bush next to our window facing her unit, and found a cat skeleton in that bag. We called the apartment manager, who said, "I think I know who it was."

We then saw the manager knocking on the Christian’s door 15 minutes later. We were a little spooked. We never found any more bones, but we'd catch her staring at our unit a few times. We moved after the lease was up.

Damhnait

48. Stop Moving The Invisible Furniture

a close up of a mattress on a couchPhoto by Stephen Andrews on Unsplash

This horrid individual lived in the apartment right below my husband and me. It went from constant complaints, to him calling law enforcement on us multiple times to him leaving threatening messages on our car and front door. When we first moved in he was upset with the landlord for renting above him—left plenty of unpleasant notes and interrupted quite a few times when we were talking to the landlord.

When we moved in we only had a mattress and no other furniture, but he kept calling the landlord and saying that we were moving furniture around at 2 am and had our TV at full blast. After the eighth complaint in two months of us still moving around furniture and TV being too loud, we finally showed our apartment to the landlord. It revealed the truth.

We literally didn't have a TV and still only had our mattress. Then the neighbor started leaving notes on our car telling us to keep it down and he even put in writing, "There needs to be NO noise after 10 pm or else I'll call the authorities." We usually didn't even get home until after 11 pm and we were respectful to make sure we kept things down because we knew that not everyone had our work schedule.

So, we tried keeping it down even more and there were so many instances when we'd be eating dinner or cuddling quietly, or even sleeping and he'd be banging on his ceiling/our floor. After a few months, he started calling law enforcement and it got to the point where even they told him to stop calling about a noise complaint because it's a landlord issue and every time they came they never hear anything.

The last time they showed up, I was asleep and my husband ended up talking to them and explaining everything. They suggested that we file a harassment complaint. Then he started leaving threatening notes on our car and front door, and we kept hearing our doorknob jiggle. This is where it turned terrifying. He claimed that he and a friend had sat outside our apartment for two hours and listened to all the noise we were making.

He then said that he knows where we park our car so we’d better start parking it somewhere else if we didn't want it to get damaged etc. We kept the notes and made copies for the landlord and let him know that this was what we were dealing with. We were just keeping him in the loop before it got even worse. The last complaint was when he ran outside to the landlord.

He was screaming that something needed to be done about us because he heard our bed squeak the night before and how dare he rent to some crazy college kids who are partying and doing it all night. The landlord finally told him to stop being a bitter old man. Then this crazy neighbor of ours—who’d made our lives so miserable—took a total 180 turn and we found out that he had decided to sue the landlord and was moving.

Suddenly the neighbor kept offering us rides when one of us was walking. He stopped complaining and leaving notes. Our doorknob did, however, keep jiggling and turning at around midnight. Whenever we would check on our door we'd hear someone running down the hall as we'd approach our door. He eventually moved away and shockingly we haven't gotten a complaint from any other neighbor in the last three years we've lived here.

2baverage

49. SWAT’s Happening?

We moved into an apartment complex and the neighbors right next door on our landing made our experience there extremely uncomfortable, to put it lightly. Two weeks after we moved in, 20 armed officers showed up and breached the neighbor’s door. The officers said they couldn’t locate the person they were after and that’s all the info we got on the incident.

Through our shared wall, we once heard a man shout, “If you don’t stop doing that, I swear to god I’ll punch you again.” And then: “Do you want me to punch you again?” This shouting was followed by a child crying. We called CPS but then we were afraid because we were the only ones that could have heard—so they’d know it was us who called.

Very often, we’d see strangers at the neighbor’s doorstep. When they’d knock on the neighbor’s door we’d hear a child next door answer, and then shout something like, “Mom, so and so is ready.” I’d like to believe she was just giving haircuts or something—technically still against lease agreement—but based on the types of people showing up at the door, it seems unlikely.

We were exiting the apartment at the same time as the neighbors, and their four-year-old child fell all the way down the concrete stairs to the ground level. We were horrified and moved to help. The mother stepped in and ignored us, yelled at her crying and definitely hurt child. They then quickly got in their car and drove off.

We moved after a year and never looked back. But I do think about those kids and I feel sad knowing that so many children are in abusive situations, raised by incompetent parents who were likely raised in the same terrible cycle.

nasamarine

50. It Came From Above

I had an upstairs neighbor who let their dog do its business—number one AND number two—on their balcony. I'm guessing this was going on for a while, as I started to notice a brown viscous substance leaking on my potted plants on my balcony. It wasn't until it rained that I could smell that it was dog excrement and urine. I basically had dog sewage raining all over my balcony from that night it rained.

I spent a ton of effort making my balcony a nice little oasis with nice lighting, plants, outdoor carpet, and furniture. I eventually got him evicted because it kept happening.

drumsareneat

Three people spying through the bushes
Carsten Carlsson/Unsplash

You know those people that you try so hard to like because they're a friend of a friend or a coworker you see every day and with whom you have to maintain civility but they just make it so difficult for you?

On the surface, it's easy to see why some people are less manageable to be around, while it's more difficult to detect in others.

All it takes is one bad tendency or idiosyncrasy to write a person off for good.

Keep reading...Show less
Even The Dead Have Their Secrets
Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

One thing to remember: Even the dead have their secrets. These Redditors unearthed the unimaginable while looking through their dead relatives' belongings. From hidden letters to disturbing keepsakes, these discoveries range from heartbreaking to absolutely earth-shattering. But as touching as some of these stories are—some things are better left forgotten.

1. All Sorts Of Fun

After my grandfather’s funeral, the family went back to sort through his house where he had lived with his girlfriend who we called grandma. There was a safe that no one could open, so I was tasked with the joy of rifling through my grandpa's disorganized desk. After what felt like hours, I found the slip of paper.

My uncle and I opened the safe and found a few manilla envelopes with important documents like birth certificates as well as a snub nose with two boxes of ammo. It was nothing that surprising until I looked down and saw two plastic bags tied together sitting at the bottom of the safe. My curiosity got the better of me.

I opened it. It was full of toys adults used for pleasure. I laughed so hard, showed my uncle and my brother, but kept it from my mom. I asked my grandma if there were any more pieces in the house. She said one was in my grandpa's nightstand drawer. Not thinking, I looked inside and found another revolver and bullets.

Something in me said to do a more thorough search, so I rifled around a little longer in the drawer. Big mistake. I found a few more “bullets” if you catch my drift, just loose, hanging around the drawer as well as a packet of lube that looked like it was from the ‘70s. When I discovered the silver vibrators, I yelped.

Right after, I jumped up and ran like a moron to the bathroom and washed my hands for five minutes straight. I should not have touched those. Every time I think of him, I think of that and laugh.

meatcube

2. Room To Rummage

Two years after my mother passed, my father sold their house. My wife and sister cleared out the house, my brother-in-law got the garage and workshop, and I took on the yard. I thought I could get it done quickly and go on to help the others. Nope. Mom had been using the yard as her own little landfill for two decades.

I found more than thirty metal poles hidden in the woodpile. Between that, the rolls of chicken wire, the bed frame, and the section of guttering she had dragged home, there was almost a whole ton of metal. There were paint tins, a cast-iron kitchen set, an assorted cutlery set, most of a bike…It took us four weekends.

I_throw_socks_at_cat

3. Rough Split

brown cardboard box on white surfacePhoto by Christopher Bill on Unsplash

I sorted through my friend’s belongings before his family arrived and removed what they didn’t need to see. I found a box filled with personal journals, newspaper clippings, receipts, and other documents that showed just how off the skids he was after his divorce. I was aware that his wife had run off with another man.

And I knew he went through some months of anger, depression, and drinking. I did not know he wanted to hurt her or that he had hired a detective agency to track her down across the country, travel there, contact her employer and others to attempt to destroy her professional reputation, and other vindictive shenanigans.

Voc1Vic2

4. Once Upon A Time

When my grandma went into a nursing home, I helped my dad clean out her house. She had a lot, so we found some neat stuff. Tucked away at the bottom of a drawer was a fancy little box, much nicer than most things she owned. There were a few things in it including a folded newspaper clipping of a woman and a little boy.

They looked just like her and my dad. My grandma had a really mysterious past. We assumed they were probably some sort of relatives and moved on. A couple of years later when she passed, and we finally found out more about her family. The picture was of her mother, my great-grandmother, and my grandma's first son.

It turns out that she had a husband and two little boys when she was young who she left and never spoke of again. The only trace of them we found in all of her things was that one little picture.

NenDeshiri

5. A Mixed Bag

My mom was the youngest of four girls. Her third eldest sister was in a fatal car accident when she was eighteen and my mom was seven. My grandfather, a strict and overprotective father, got up in the middle of the night and realized she wasn’t home. He had gone out and found her in the ditch a mile down the dirt road.

It was a tragedy that quietly affected him for the rest of his life. I was close to my grandpa and spent a lot of time with him. He lived a very fulfilling life. He was born on a dirt floor and worked his way into an independently wealthy life. He was a strict man with strong religious beliefs and always very generous.

He especially loved children and was known for having a pocketful of candy to hand out during church. He was very positive and joyful, but he was also very melancholic about people’s final days. He read the obituaries daily commenting on the people he had known from town. Then he lost my grandma, his bride of 56 years.

Less than a year later, two of his siblings passed within a month of each other, which left my grandpa and his youngest sister the last of eleven siblings. Within a year of that, he lost his dog who he’d had for over ten years. Grandpa never talked about depression and still found joy in his church and his grandchild.

But he occasionally made comments like, “I know my time will come when it is supposed to, but I’d be okay if I don’t make it to my next birthday.” He passed very unexpectedly in his sleep about two years after Grandma. My mom was their caretaker so had a hard time being in his bedroom, so I helped prior to his funeral.

We found a small tin box on top of his headboard. The box was stuffed full of newspaper clippings almost too full to close. Inside were the newspaper clippings from the obituaries of childhood acquaintances, his siblings, and my grandma. It seemed it was a collection of life events from the people who he’d cared about.

There was a picture of my newborn, several obituaries, the invitation to my wedding, a newspaper clipping that covered when my grandfather had run into my uncle’s church to warn everybody when a fire had started, the announcement of my cousin’s wedding, the obituary of the boss who’d given him his first job, and so on.

The box was stuffed with over 30 years’ worth of memories in the form of small photos and newspaper announcements. At the very bottom of the stack, we found something so harrowing, it's unforgettable. We found the clipping that began this whole collection: My aunt’s obituary, and her high school science fair ribbon. As we put everything back, it just painted a depressing picture.

After the loss of my aunt, life kept on. For several years, grandpa’s box was full of happy mementos of the important events like graduations, weddings, grandchildren, but those happy moments were slowly replaced by the obituaries of former colleagues and acquaintances, to childhood friends, and eventually more family.

Even the moments that brought him joy in life were surrounded by the grief of loss in the end. I think it had just brought some clarity on his state of mind throughout his life. One of the most remembered quirks that my grandfather had was always telling us how much he loved us. It showed his deep appreciation of life.

omnipotentalbatross

6. Liquid Assets

grayscale photo of wooden chair near windowPhoto by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

My friend is an only child, so when her mom passed, I thought I could help out clearing her mom’s place. Her mom hoarded a lot and was in her 80s, so it was a lot. My friend wasn’t in the room whenI found something pretty nasty: A 40-year-old jar full of lube in some old trunk. I knew how old it was because she was divorced in her 40s.

My friend told me that her mother never got over the failed marriage. I didn’t get it at all but quickly tossed the glass container in the garbage bag before my friend came back. I never told her about it or that it had separated into layers.

RIII-XStitch-NHBS

7. Papa Don’t Preach

We were going through my grandfather’s things after he passed and found letters between him and my nan from when they were young. Nan was only 14 when she got pregnant, and my grandpa was 16. She was sent away somewhere to have the baby while her family kept insisting that they put the baby, my father, up for adoption.

In the letters, my grandparents talked about how much they loved each other and how they were fighting to keep the baby. Grandpa was working extra hours to save money and then spending his free time building furniture for their future home. He wrote about how the boys at work made fun of him for being under my Nan’s thumb.

But he wrote that he didn’t care what they said because of how much he loved her and their unborn baby. These letters really helped my dad feel like he was wanted. While he was growing up, he felt like he had ruined their lives.

groovyghostpuppy

8. Secret Baby

I do estate sales for a living and have found plenty of weird things. But the one that sticks out in my mind the most is when we found a fetus in a jar. It was hidden in the back of a bathroom cabinet. I assume it was from a miscarriage. The couple was in their late 80s. There was no telling how long it had been there.

scribbling_des

9. Throw Me A Bone

black and white line illustrationPhoto by Kier in Sight Archives on Unsplash

When my grandma passed, I helped my mom clean up before her brother could get over to do his part. My grandma had been widowed for about 10 years at that point, lived in a senior apartment complex, and was pushing 90 but still very full of life, so it wouldn't surprise me if she'd had a few trysts with other residents.

I was cleaning out her drawers and came across some leather bondage stuff. Like, some serious stuff that I don't even know what it was for but could assume what its purpose may have been. I hesitated on pulling more out of the drawer because it was personal, plus I didn't really need the mental image of my grandma's kinks.

My mom saw me pause and looked at what I was holding, which was a harness-type thing, and asked what it was. I told her I wasn't sure, and my mom assumed it was a strange dog walking harness to help the elderly have more control. To this day I don't know if my mom knew what it was, I'm too scared to rehash that memory.

But she and I both definitely knew that my grandma hated dogs.

kokopelli687

10. To The Bitter End

My parents had a very difficult marriage. They married in the 50s, and my mom was mostly Catholic so divorce, while often discussed, was never actually accomplished. They fought, sometimes physically, and he was often and very publicly unfaithful to her. After they both passed, I was sorting through some of her things.

I found this fancy Mother's Day card, which my father had given her. He even wrote a short affectionate message, which was very unlike him. It was dated when I, their only child, was two. My father had actually worked for a greeting card company, so it was elaborate with its own little box. Then I looked underneath it, and my heart broke for my mother.

There was a letter dated around the same time. It had been read and reread so many times, folded and refolded so many times, that it was literally falling apart, and I almost couldn't decipher it. It was from a would-be lover of my mother's deep in discussions of how she could leave my father just begging her to do it.

I put it back where my mother hid it. I had a lot of thoughts about it, but I knew it was probably a rewarding jolt that my mother got from hiding a love letter behind one of my father's bombastic and totally foolish attempts to hide what a jerk he was.

randompoint52

11. Bits Of Everything

My grandfather passed from simple old age. It was sad to watch because the man was smart and still all there. My aunt who had lived with him took a month out of the country to be out of the house that her father had lived in since he was 30 and where she took care of him when his body started giving up a few years ago.

When she came back, she invited the family over to help her clean out his room and the other belongings he had around the house. The room held many strange things. My grandfather was born during the Depression and raised on the idea to never trust the bank with the majority of your money. We found almost $53K in bills.

They ranged from the early ‘60s to about the mid-'90s. They weren’t big bills either; there must have been at least $20k in $1s and $5s. This was in addition to investments, property, and what he had in his bank account. My aunt gave me his 1937 Buffalo Nickel because she knew I collected coins and thought I’d like it.

In pristine condition, the nickel is now worth close to $5K. There also was lots of junk. My grandfather had kept every single card that he got for birthdays and holidays since 1983. He was also an artist and had many little drawings and sketches he’d done over his life; one of which won a contest to be a brand’s logo.

We also found a lot of random stuff like sealed records from off bands from all different decades. There were probably 30-40 hand-sketched women on pretty much everything from napkins to paper to canvas. One cool thing that we’d found was that he had a lot of finely hand-crafted pipes, some of which he had made himself.

_Deshocker_

12. Life Enhancement

woman in white and red floral tank topPhoto by Jonatas Domingos on Unsplash

We were about to finally sell my grandmother’s house after nine years since her passing, she received a letter from the company that insured her chest implants. It said that her warranty was set to expire that year. It’s crazy that the sweet old lady who baked pies was actually rocking a silicone rack the whole time.

rtisdell88

13. Shred Of The Past

My great-grandfather never talked about his experiences when he fought in the trenches. One item we had on our glass-top coffee table was a German dog tag. No one in our family knew the origin. We don't know how my great-grandfather acquired it. Once I grew up, I majored in history and really enjoyed archival research.

So, I decided to research the tag and hope to reunite it with his family or a relative of some sort. After my research, we learned that it was a German soldier who had not only survived despite taking a hit but also being as POW all while under 20. I have personal information as to who his parents were but none on him.

PresentHamster

14. Bye Bye Birdie

My family decided to move to Chicago, so my grandparents could live with us. But it was 2008, and our house wasn’t selling. My mom and I moved anyway and rented an apartment while my dad worked at his job in NY and stayed in our house. He’d visit for a week out of the month. He passed unexpectedly after about 6 months.

Without his income and the house not selling, we decided to move back. I was back first, so I was the first person to go to the house since my dad was last there. The weirdest thing was that there was literally nothing in the fridge except an unopened bag of birdseed. I have no memories of either parent feeding birds.

I also don’t know why a man who was supposed to be living there and didn’t know his life was going to end, did not have any food in the fridge. I assume he must have been staying at a hotel or something, but he was very fiscally responsible, and we didn’t have any spare money at the time.

rschultz1794

15. Saw You Coming

turned on red Psychic Reader neon signPhoto by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash

I have a really unique name. Like I’ve never in my life heard of someone else with my name. My mother-in-law was very into spiritual mediums and psychic readings. After she was gone, we were going through her things and found a bunch of journals where she had kept notes about her various readings and other experiences.

On the very first page of one, she had written, “your guardian angel’s name is [my name].” The weirdest part is that she never told me even though I had been with her son for 15 years.

lulu-bell

16. Got To Go

My grandma was a known hoarder, and the first two months after she had passed, we had to clean out dozens of sets of fine china, a pie holder with a recipe for Armadillo pie printed on it, a plate with all of the presidents’ faces on it up to Nixon, a boxy suitcase with creepy porcelain dolls, and hundreds of pictures.

We found kitchen appliances too from the 50s and electrical tools that no longer work. We were barely able to clean the bathroom and the kitchen in a week. It was hard to see how sick she was from a unique point of view and throwing away things that were really valuable to her, but it was something that had to be done.

CrazyGracie17

17. Dumping Daddy

We had to go through my mom’s things years after she was gone. My dad was crazy and wouldn’t let us sort through anything after she’d passed. Four years later, he told us he was getting married the next day and then dumped all of her personal items on the table. Anything left by morning was going straight to the trash.

There were heirlooms from her parents and grandparents, her engagement ring, old letters. Everything. Going through it, I found letters from my dad to my brother telling him that he needed to ask Jesus for forgiveness for making my dad angry enough to hurt him. There were letters for my mom apologizing to my father.

She apologized for being sick and saying something “mean” to him explaining that it could be god testing her. Just two hours changed my view of my father forever and not for the better. It broke my heart to think of my mom being sick with cancer and thinking she deserved punishment for asking my dad to be at home more.

Dice_to_see_you

18. If Walls Could Talk

assorted greeting cardsPhoto by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

My grandfather wasn’t really in our lives. He mistreated my grandmother while they were married. After they divorced, he moved across the country and became a truck driver. Growing up, my mom never saw him except for one time. He was sober, and they didn’t bond much because she admitted his dry humor made it difficult.

But when my sister and I were born, she made an effort to send him pictures and Christmas cards. Over the years, he never reached out, so we just assumed he didn’t care for us. It didn’t matter; we were closer to his brother. So, when he passed, my mom went to help his brother sort through his things. It blew her mind.

Every single wall was covered in our baby photos and cards that we’d sent him throughout the years along with others from my aunts and uncles. It broke her heart because she thought for her entire life that he hated his past or just disliked us. She realized that he probably didn’t know exactly how to interact with us.

Angel12279

19. Remembering What’s Important

This happened to one of my best friends. Her father hadn't really been around since she was a kid because he deeply struggled with addiction, but she never expressed any hate or anger towards him. After her father overdosed, my friend was offered an opportunity to go to his house to look through some of his belongings.

She found a pile of journals; I'm talking years and years and years’ worth of writing inside them, and almost every entry mentioned something about her. Despite all these years of silence, there wasn’t a single day that he wasn’t thinking about her.

_visioelectri

20. Just Call Me Daddy

I helped an ex clean out her stepdad's house in the early 1990s after he suddenly passed. This was the man she had considered her father. He and her mom married when she was very young and she never knew her bio dad. He’d been the most amazing husband and father. He never treated her differently than her half-siblings.

He doted on her mother only to lose her five years before he passed. We went to his house to go sort his things out. My ex and I were in his hobby room that was full of radios, small electric motors, model trains, and other stuff like that. Then her younger sister came running down the stairs with something to tell us.

She had been in the guest room and found a box of naughty toys, leather straps, along with a photo album from the 70s and 80s. The album had pictures of him and her mother at swinger parties and of people who she knew as aunts and uncles partially clothed with white powder in lines in front of them.

Most of the photos corresponded with her and her siblings’ birthdays. That was a pretty fun day.

Permalink

21. Supervisory Officer

man kissing his fingerPhoto by 青 晨 on Unsplash

When my dad passed peacefully but unexpectedly, we were in his apartment the next day just closing things down and waiting for the landlord to ask when we could move his things out. I was looking for some documents in his closet when I bumped his bathrobe and heard this crinkling noise. So, I reached inside the pocket.

And then I pulled out this huge bag of weed. This really wasn’t a big surprise to me. But it’s notable because standing next to me was an officer who was there to ask some questions to file a report. This was almost 20 years ago and way before even medical marijuana was acceptable. I just stood there and stared at him.

I sheepishly said, “uh...this is not mine. I assume that's obvious." To his credit, he said, "if you put it back until I leave, I didn't see a thing. You guys are dealing with way too much already." I don't remember his name, but that cop will always have my respect. And that's how I "inherited" about 2 ounces of weed.

relativex

22. It’s All In Your Head

My oldest uncle was depressed, paranoid, and mentally ill. After he took his life, my mom went to clear his house where she found multiple dictionaries in different languages. He worked as a park guardian in Paris so he learned many languages to help tourists. He even had a complete collection of all Alexandre Dumas books.

He may have been terribly alone all his life, which drove him to madness. But from what we found, I’d like to think that he also traveled all around the world, and in time, in his mind.

CosmicMaiden

23. Anti-Climatic

My uncle had all his VHS tapes with my dad when he moved away. My mom was tired of storing them for him, so she put them in a garage sale. None of them were marked with anything except for numbers. My uncle was kind of weird in a creepy way–never married, no kids, never dated, basically a loner and just, well, weird. Well, my mom sold them to older ladies at the church.

Mind you, this was a strict Baptist church where she was a Sunday School teacher. These ladies were excited to see what was on them. My mom warned them, "now those are my brother-in-law's tapes, so I don't know what’s on them." Later, my brother came home from work. He found out what she’d done and asked if she had really sold my uncle’s tapes.

Mom told him she did. My brother freaked out and told her that the tapes were of some serious adult, non-Baptist church-friendly content. We still laugh about it until this day.

AngelFox1

24. One For The Gallery

assorted-color paintsPhoto by russn_fckr on Unsplash

My great-grandma was an artist; we have beautiful paintings by her and a few other pieces of her artwork. She also liked drawing with pastels. I decided to get a pastel framed for my dad as a Christmas present. Its frame had broken and the picture had become exposed. So, her signature had gotten smeared in the process.

Well, when the person helping me got the picture out of the frame, we gained back a lot of the picture. It completely transformed the artwork. We also found out the smeared signature wasn't the original. The frame had been built around the picture and ended up covering the original signature! My dad was really excited.

It was the coolest thing to discover, and I'll never forget the look on my dad's face seeing her signature.

TheSheWolf222

25. Treat Yourself

My grandfather had major heart problems most of his life. He had to take nitro regularly, and his case was even discussed in a medical journal. The doctors told him that he should completely quit drinking but a "nip" here and there would not hurt him. After he passed, we were helping with renovating the spare bathroom. That's when we found something strange.

We discovered a hole underneath the bathroom vanity. In the hole was a wooden cylinder with a lid that my grandfather had made. There was a bottle inside, and written on the inside of the lid was the reminder that my grandfather wrote, "remember, just a nip unless it's a hard day, then take 2." Grandma had no idea about it.

imunclebubba

26. Fresh Eyes

After our family friend’s patriarch passed, the family was left to shut down his automation business. My dad had worked for him for decades, so I was familiar with the business. I was assigned the owner’s desk. Everything in sight was either shredded or thrown away. As I went through his things, I slowed my pace a bit.

Some things stood out more than others. Thankfully, I managed to find an important notepad that looked empty. But when I randomly flipped through it quickly, I found writing in it. These notes ended up being the passwords to huge business accounts that his widow needed. She was so thankful that I found these passwords.

Chances were anyone else would have just thrown these papers into the shredder. I also found cheques for thousands of dollars that everyone had assumed he already deposited. I'm still proud of finding these things. I'm glad I was responsible for clearing his desk when no one else could bring themselves to clear it out.

Pierogi_is_Plural

27. Menagerie Of Memories

a group of objects on a tablePhoto by Andrea Greenway on Unsplash

At my step-grandma's house, everything was kept–bags, papers, books, clothes, 1960s tinned meat, kettles, etc. The number of animals that she had was insane. I mean she had 6 dogs, 20 odd cats, 3 tropical fish tanks, 2 axolotls, and a whole room full of birds. But sorting out the “special” cabinet gave me the creeps.

It was full of all these little china glass animals she collected, old teddy bears, the usual creepy stuff. She’d also kept her previous dogs’ puppy teeth, collars, and nail clippings. I wasn’t impressed when I found them. My step-dad just said, "oh, those are mum’s favorite dog’s teeth," like it was completely normal.

petallthedoggosnow

28. My Favorite Thing

I lost my father when I was about to turn 12 years old from a brain tumor and cancer in his bone marrow. After he had the surgery for the tumor, he had no hair, and he had this massive stitching on his temple in the shape of a horseshoe. I was fine with it until he showed me that it sank in when you pressed down on it.

That was when I became a little bit uncomfortable because I thought it hurt him even though it was numb and he was perfectly fine. I thought he was just pushing on his brain and hurting himself, and I was 9 then and couldn't see it any other way. The next time I saw him a week later, he asked me a disturbing question. He asked if I was scared of him.

I swallowed my slight discomfort with it, crawled on the bed with him, hugged his head, and responded, "nope! You're my Daddy, and it's unconditional! You're stuck with me forever!" I didn't realize how much of an impact that had made on him because four years later, I found a printed-out packet titled “Backup Speech.”

Apparently, if I had told him that I was afraid of him, he had a 6-page speech about the importance of love and how not to judge someone's looks. To be honest, the only reason I was uncomfortable with it was because I used to watch my older brother play video games that left me with nightmare fuel from the ages of 4-10.

He even kept almost all of my terrible 6-year-old drawings in his work desk. He was a wielder, and once told me his work buddies saw the drawings and proceeded to become overgrown teddy-bears looking at them. They were these big, bulky men with wielding masks, going, “aww,” at a bunch of stick figures with no clothing.

The other things in his desk drawer were his wedding ring, his journal with all of the reasons he loved me and my brother, a picture of him from high school, and every single photo that he'd ever taken of me and him together. I was always my dad’s favorite. My brother stopped visiting him when he heard he had cancer.

Only the neighbors and I ever visited him after that. My brother knew our father liked me more and kept me in his will while he got nothing. He only liked me more because I didn't leech off of his gaming console, which he only had to relieve his stress, and actually spent quality time with him doing things and bonding.

Smol_Asexual_Potato

29. Way With Words

My family and I moved into a new house when I was 12. An older woman who passed from cancer a few months before had owned the house, and her adult sons had come in and thought they'd taken everything of hers. But they gave us one of their phone numbers just in case we later came across anything important they’d missed.

My brother's bedroom had this beautiful built-in desk, and I was helping him put some books in the drawers. There were some empty file folders in the back of one, so I pulled them out, and surprisingly in some of those folders, I found paper. They were all poems. I think I counted 40 poems, all written on a typewriter.

I brought them to my mom who called the son to ask if he wanted them. His mother had been a writer, and she'd previously written a book of children's poetry. She had mentioned that she wanted to write a book of more personal adult poetry, but then she got too sick to do it. So, the poems we found had been for the book.

We gave the poems to the sons who ended up publishing what they had, and my name was included in the "thank you" section for finding the poems.

Live_in_the_now

30. Timely Union

person in white long sleeve shirt and black pantsPhoto by Nina Hill on Unsplash

My sisters and I were quite surprised when we were going through my mother's things after she passed. My mother had been married before my dad and had two children with him. She ended up losing her first husband and met my dad. We found an old wallet with an obituary for her first husband listed with his wife and kids.

Except it was dated five years after my parents said they had been married. There was no way she was divorced as a strict Catholic, but that still wouldn't explain why she was listed as his wife. It stayed a mystery for another decade before losing my dad. Our brother refused to tell us, respecting our parents' wishes.

We found their wedding certificate and my mom and dad were married about five years after they told us they had. It was a secret they kept from us for over 40 years.

ThisIsNotMe_99

31. Just An Example

My sister was going through our late grandmother’s purse and came across a birth announcement for a little girl we’d never heard of. The parents were listed as my aunt and uncle. She thought she’d uncovered some deep family secret about an infant who had passed, but then we actually did the math, and it was impossible.

The child could not have existed at all because the listed birth date was just a few weeks off from my aunt’s son. The pregnancies couldn’t have had possibly both happened. So, we asked my mom about it. She told us that it was just a birth announcement prototype that my aunt had printed up while she was still pregnant.

They filled in the birth date as the due date, signed it with their names, and randomized the not-yet-known information such as the baby’s gender, name, and weight. So, the little girl in the birth announcement never even existed, yet my eccentric grandmother carried the card around with her anyway for whatever reason.

kabea26

32. Recorded History

My father passed after being extremely ill. He had a rough life since the government had liquidated the business he treasured and his friends took his money. His family was especially rude to him, taking his car money and trying to separate our family. For a month, he was abroad for treatment, and I was using his laptop. I found a word document that stood out to me.

When I clicked on it, I was surprised to find the story of how he met my mother, but it was addressed to my children. I was about 15 at this time and didn’t have any. Reading on, there were documents proving everything that happened and all the wrong people had done to him. I never told anyone about it since I was too young and didn't want them to be upset.

Soon after he passed, my mother found it. We intend to finish the word document and go after the people who wronged him in his life. May he rest in peace.

IIXPurpleQueenXII

33. Too Late Now

a pen sitting on top of a cheque paperPhoto by Money Knack, www.moneyknack.com on Unsplash

My father went to university later in life, graduating in his late 40s. Dad was brilliant, talented, but prone to avoidant behavior. He complained about finding work after graduation and blamed it on age discrimination. Sorting through his stuff after he passed, we found a job application for a substitute teaching gig.

Stapled to it was a cheque for $50 from his brother dated several years before. That puzzled us, so we called my uncle. Someone told my dad about the job, and he kept pushing off applying with one excuse after another. Finally, he claimed that he couldn't afford the background check. So, his brother wrote him a cheque.

We were looking at the still-unsubmitted application complete with the uncashed cheque.

chuckmckinnon

34. After The Beep

The previous owner of the house I bought had passed without an heir. He’d been in a relationship with someone who took a few things before the bank foreclosed on it. The electricity and phone line had still been active, and there was an answering machine with a bunch of messages–mostly bill collectors and junk calls.

But then there were calls from people who had been concerned about his whereabouts. The weirdest thing was probably the audio cassette that had the same house’s address for both sender and receiver; it was some kind of self-help tape. There were all kinds of things that were messed up, and I'm convinced it was haunted.

Ambien0wl

35. Going Through A Lot

A few years after my father-in-law passed, my husband, his younger sister, and I had to move my mother-in-law and my husband’s disabled sister to a care home and clean out their hoarded house. So much was just accumulated trash. We found all kinds of stuff and some actual nice things that had rarely or never been used.

The biggest unpleasant surprise was finding family heirlooms that had been ruined by neglect, like the framed photos of my husband’s father’s family that were taken some time at the end of the 1800s. They had been mounted on wood that had rotted and been stored in their attic where mildew and animals had destroyed them.

We also found other, luckily preserved, photos of my husband’s grandmother as a young woman that he had never seen before. We brought a lot of the stuff to Goodwill, left a ton on the curb for bulky trash that other people took first, and ultimately salvaged only a new refrigerator and one plastic tub of smaller items.

MinimalistFan

36. I’m Having My Baby

woman holding her prenant tummy during daytimePhoto by freestocks on Unsplash

There had been a family rumor that my grandmother's younger sister, my great-aunt, had actually been her half-sister. We found my grandmother's mother's obituary who was young when she got cancer. In it, her children were mentioned as those who had been left behind, but my great aunt had not been included in that list. That pretty much verified the rumor.

The story is that my great-grandmother had an affair with a foreigner, which would have brought great shame to the family. So, my great-grandmother gave birth and raised the child as if she were her own without telling anyone about it.

LWrayBay

37. Act Casual

When my grandmother was 5, she fled from Germany to Canada with her mom and brother when it was no longer safe. Grandpa had passed a few years before my grandmother, and we went to go through their things. Well, we found an old box that was full of paperwork from Germany like official travel documents and other papers.

After a moment of panic, we realized that was just how it was then. My great-grandfather had joined the resistance in Germany, which put him and his family in great danger. He sent them a letter that said they were being watched and needed to leave inconspicuously; he told them to act like they were going to the store.

He had set up an escape plan that brought them to the European coast where they got on a ship to Canada. They left without any of their things and without knowing if my great-grandfather was okay. They didn’t hear from him for over a year. Later, he sent a letter saying he was doing okay and he was coming to join them.

Siha117

38. Quarter Centuries

When my grandma passed, we were working on cleaning out her house and found a large glass jar full of quarters. Each coin had a label on it with her handwriting. One of the coins was a 1972 quarter labeled “Aug. 5, 1972 - arrived in the US.” She’d saved a quarter with the year of every milestone since coming to the US.

She had a quarter for the date they bought their home, when they bought their first car, when she got her first dog, and many other major life events. My aunt has the collection now.

xoxomaxine

39. Hats Off

selective focus photography of woman facePhoto by Jonathan Farber on Unsplash

I was cleaning out my grandmother's house to get it ready to be sold. In the basement, I found a footlocker in the corner and opened it. There was a blanket on top, a few bibles under that, and then another blanket. When I lifted the blanket, I found two dark, semi-shiny triangular shapes about 9" by 4" at the widest. I picked one up, and it was much lighter than I thought it would be.

For a second, I thought I was holding a crow. I took the "crow" over to the light and found that it was a folded cloth with a shiny black wooden lattice woven into it. As I started unfolding it, I realized it was a bonnet that women in the 1800s wore. The weird thing was that wrapped up in the bonnet were six or seven old photographs printed on tin of individual men and women dressed very well and posing for photographs.

I checked the other bonnet, and it held several more pictures. Then I showed them to my mother and my aunt, and they had no idea who they could be. We've since shown them to various family members, some of whom grew up with my grandmother, and no one has any idea who is in the photographs or why grandma would have them tucked away in bonnets in the basement.

stanley_leverlock

40. Got Jokes

My grandma couldn't face sorting through my grandfather’s belongings so decided to sort through the cupboards in the kitchen, organizing items like tinned food and baking ingredients just to make it feel like she was doing something productive. I decided to help her, and we ended up having a really good laugh doing it.

We had found some dried yeast packets with an expiration date of 1981, and taped to them was a note from my grandad that said, "I knew you hadn't cleaned back here – 1998." It was just typical of him to still make us laugh from beyond the grave.

Montana-13

41. Really Paints A Picture

Last year, we lost my aunt unexpectedly, and I helped clean out her house to get it ready to sell. She’d lost her long-time boyfriend a year earlier. They were both about 40 when they passed. The biggest unexpected find was her stairwell covered in their paintings. I don't think anyone knew that they’d painted so much.

I even found a picture of her at a painting competition with one of the pieces. Most of the paintings were Halloween-themed, but there were also some fantasy stuff and landscapes pieces. Everyone ended up taking them, and many were given to other relatives. When moving some basement furniture, we found a weird brown envelope.

It'd been taped behind a shelf. Inside was the paperwork for my uncle’s arm-wrestling league. At some point, my dad was trying to use her printer, but it came up with an error. So, he opened it and found a tablet sitting in the paper tray. It was the 3rd one we found with nothing on it. Her house was also in disrepair.

We did not expect that because she’d always taken pride in it. It wasn’t very clean with a lot of junk everywhere. The carpet had big holes, likely from the dog that she’d given away. We think she was depressed after losing my uncle and just stopped caring because we knew she could have afforded the upkeep of her home.

Darth_Yarras

42. Fishing For Gold

gold-and-silver-colored pendant necklacePhoto by Alex Chambers on Unsplash

My grandmother had a lot of costume jewelry that my aunt wanted my sister and me to go through to choose what we wanted and toss the rest. It was in a fishing tackle box that I found her 100% not-costume-jewelry gold chain anklet. My aunt didn't realize it had made its way there because my grandmother wore it every day.

She surely would have worn it until her last day, and we suspect one of the hospice workers removed it after she passed and stored it where they knew her other jewelry was. I have worn it every day since then, and it's a really great memory of her. I now have a few of her handmade wicker baskets and her quilts as well.

carlsbarks

43. No Keepsakes

My mom is a little crazy and lives in her childhood home where her mother lived until the end of her life. Grandmother was a spendthrift, and my mother is a packrat. I spent a month clearing out and refurbishing the house while she was away. I threw away a lot of junk of my grandmother’s who had been gone for 20 years.

Most shocking was the closets full of department store bags and boxes that were all empty. Something else I found was a treasure box of heirlooms from my great uncle that I smuggled to my uncle who was close to him. He had been looking for it for years, and my mom never let him look for it. She thinks she still has it!

But the strangest and most memorable thing was a locked wooden chest that had been in my bedroom for years and later my brother's bedroom. Always heavy and useless and locked. Well, I went through the whole house and found every single key in that place. No key to the locked chest. So, I resorted to just sawing it off.

All I found was a little girl's dress, which was probably my aunt's first communion dress and my grandfather’s old paperwork.

spammmmmmmmy

44. What’s In The Bag

We didn’t know what made my 25-year-old brother lose his life, but we knew how his body was found. We’re flipping through his clothes, his jars of protein powder that smelled like vomit, and his song lyrics along with bills to various clothing places. Well, my older sister opened up his wallet and found a small baggie.

It honestly looked like some flour had been in there. And we were doing this at 2 AM with the funeral service happening in the next few hours. My mom started to panic. My older sisters were on and off crying, and my younger sister just sat by herself with her headphones blasting. I sitting there watching dazed and sad.

Then I told them what I thought it looked like, but my mom disagreed. We then got into a brief argument over what to do with the baggie – whether we should turn it over or throw it away. We eventually decided to give it to my brother’s rehab director who tested it. It came back inconclusive.

blenneman05

45. Our Place

woman in black and white jacket standing beside brown wooden wallPhoto by A n v e s h on Unsplash

I went through my grandfather's photos when he passed and saved anything that I found interesting or personally memorable. My favorite find was the pictures of the time he tried male modeling in the ‘80s. He looked sharp! He also had a lot of great vacation photos from the 70s of him riding his bike around the country.

I also found an album from Gatlinburg, TN. It meant a lot to me because I got married in Gatlinburg and go back to visit once in a while. I’d just gone there for my anniversary before my grandpa passed, so seeing him at the same landmarks as a younger man and comparing them to my recent memories brought him back a bit.

uselessinfobot

46. Setting Sights

I was helping my father go through some things in what we both knew was possibly his last few weeks or days. He had some pictures of my mother who’d passed a few years earlier, which wasn’t surprising, but it was one of a strange oriental building. He asked me to bring it over and then told me why he kept that picture.

It was what he could see while he was losing his virginity…to my mother, thankfully. But still, it’s an odd thing to tell your son before you’re gone.

moon_monkey

47. From A Different Point Of View

Both my father and I were born when our mothers were well on in life and considered too old to successfully bear more children. So, there was a considerable age gap between my grandmother and myself; we were born 102 years apart. The family knew that grandma had long had a fascination with the First Duke of Wellington.

It was mainly because one cousin had married into a minor branch of the Wellesley family. We knew also that when Nan was younger, she’d been unusually well educated, and because of her remote family connections, had once wanted to become a historian. But she was discouraged by her parents from such a "mannish" pursuit.

And then she married my country-gentleman grandfather. And for two decades, she was responsible for keeping a house full of children, hunting dogs, and fishing rods organized. We knew that she had never managed to get her work published. There was not even an article in any of the many periodicals of the Edwardian era.

After passing in 1960, we found a collection of short manuscripts written in her distinctively spidery, Spencerian hand that was in a box under her bed and under a stack of magazines. Some were in German and French, both of which she was fully fluent. A few in Spanish were all dated in the late 1870s and the early 80s.

Once we puzzled through the English ones, we slowly realized Nan's scribblings were actually the first-hand accounts of old veterans who had fought for Napoleon! When we had some volunteer language students from the local university translate a couple of the French and German essays, we found they had the same content.

She had mentions of specific units, senior officers, and battles. A few of which we were able to align with information from Encyclopedia Brittanica and books about the conflict, so her papers appeared to be quite authentic. None of the veterans' transcripts dealt with grand designs, patriotic thoughts about the fight.

They were deeply personal and touching stories about being conscripted; holding comrades as they breathed their last breath, seeing their units obliterated by cannon fire, having their ships sunk from under them, going on forced marches, being starved and exhausted, and escaping through the occasional cache of spirits.

There were also thanks to God for keeping them safe, and some were full of despair after making their way back only to learn that their family and property had vanished or that their home village was now under the nation they had just ceased to fight. It seems that she had been a precocious young woman in her twenties.

She had done a couple of tours of some old soldier's homes and hospitals on the continent interviewing old veterans and gathering from all sides of the conflict. Perhaps she was hoping to put them together and have it published. But it seems that she never got beyond her early research because too much time had passed.

Because by the time she could, she had finished being a wife and a mother, and there were no more sources. After much consideration, a few of us kept a few of our favorites as memorials to our remarkable grandmother, and the bulk of her papers were donated to one of the UK's national museums, which they gratefully accepted.

theartfulcodger

48. Soft Stuff

black plastic bagPhoto by Sven Brandsma on Unsplash

When we moved my grandmother into assisted living, we found that her closets were stuffed full with sets of decorative pillows – the kind in pairs for couches. She just had garbage bag after garbage bag for no explicable reason. She only had one sofa with one set of pillows, so it wasn't like she was using any of them.

Consolatio

49. Same Feelings

My grandmother had divorced my mom’s dad back in the ‘70s. While Grandpa had a live-in girlfriend, Grandma never dated. I’m not sure if she ever tried to, or if she just didn’t want to date again. After losing her, Mom and I prepared with her siblings the house, furniture, and other items to be sold for an estate sale.

I was browsing on Grandma’s computer, and a banner ad showed up for a dating site. It wasn’t any regular site; it was a lesbian dating site. Banner ads only come up based on search history. I occasionally think of it these days, especially as I am a woman married to another woman. How would Grandma have taken the news?

ExtinctFauna

50. Grandma’s House

Since I was very young, my father lived halfway across the world, and my mother didn't let him see me. She also got together with a psychopath who loathed me. My childhood was truly terrible to the extent that my intrusive thoughts began before my age was in the double digits. My two grandmothers were a total lifeline.

And without them, I really don't think I'd be alive. I ended up in a children's home when I was 14. When my maternal grandmother passed, my uncle found a folder with my name on it. Inside were letters between her and my other grandmother. They were conspiring to make sure that I had at least some positivity in my life.

They had been arranging with each other who would invite me to stay with them next. Those letters were truly beautiful.

teasus_spiced

51. The Unspeakable

black pen on white book pagePhoto by Grianghraf on Unsplash

I found my grandmother’s diary from when she was a teenager. It outlined her leaving school and having a relationship with her married boss, my grandfather, while his wife was in a hospital in her last days. It shattered the pedestal the family put him on. We found it, and then it disappeared. No one spoke of it again.

Eternium_or_bust

52. Hide And Seek

My dad and his cousin cleaned out the house that belonged to their aunt and uncle. They never had children of their own but loved all of their nieces and nephews and their kids. They were the sweetest people who lived full lives. My dad found a cardboard box hidden in the rafters above the garage while he was cleaning. What he found in there shocked him to his core.

Apparently, my great-uncle had a second family with two sons that nobody ever knew about. We read the letters from his other woman begging him to leave my great aunt, lots of school pictures, and some other tokens. We don't know if my great-aunt ever knew about it or not. My great-uncle was always a little flirtatious with women, but nobody ever expected this.

He flirted the most with his wife and loved her more than anything. I thought stuff like this only happened in the movies!

lavitaebella113

We've all made mistakes.

Most of the time, these mistakes don't have major consequences in our lives, such as putting salt in our coffee instead of sugar, or taking a wrong turn and adding a bit more time to our journey.

There are some mistakes we've made in our lives, however, which we spend nearly every night regretting and giving anything to go back in time to change.

Perhaps the most unnerving thing about these mistakes though, is that we didn't even begin to think we were making a mistake at the time.

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