Unless you live alone in the woods like a hermit, you’re surrounded by people every single day. And no matter how private your life might be, everyone still sees and hears snippets of their neighbors’ daily routines.
In a very entertaining online thread, internet users opened up about the most bizarre things they witnessed their neighbors do when they thought they were alone. We’ve collected their oddest, funniest, and even most surprisingly wholesome stories to share with you. And, yes, mowing your lawn while there’s a massive thunderstorm raging around you is just the tip of the iceberg!
#1
Neighbor lady every night at 7 pm, went on her front porch and yelled “Yabba Dabba Do!” At the top of her lungs.
Turns out she was calling in her 3 cats Yabba, Dabba and Do.
Absolutely made me smile every time I saw it but people who didn’t know thought she was bonkers.
Image source: DragonflyMomma6671, AydinovKamran
#2
Growing up my neighbor did something that always made me laugh. He had an old riding lawnmower that always backfired when he turned it off. He got used to the timing of the backfire and would do a double finger gun shooting motion at the exact time of the backfire. He passed away many years ago but he was always a very god neighbor to us and my father always spoke well of him. When my father passed away last year, the neighbors daughter came to pay her respects and I told her that story and she had no idea, it was really nice to give someone a new story of their father.
Image source: bama83, halfpoint
#3
My neighbor used to practice salsa dancing with his vacuum cleaner every Thursday morning around 6am. I could see him through the kitchen window doing full spins and dips with that poor Hoover – guy had some serious moves though
The dedication was actually pretty impressive, he never missed the Thursday sessions.
Image source: Little_Ad6736, The Yuri Arcurs Collection
There are very few truly ‘perfect’ neighbors out there in the world. And unless you’re incredibly lucky, the odds are that you’re surrounded by other regular human beings, with their fair share of pros and cons and quirks.
If a neighbor is genuinely bothering you with their behavior or noisiness, the first thing that you should do is talk to them in person, Reader’s Digest suggests. Often, people don’t even realize that there’s an issue or that they’re doing something wrong.
However, if you can’t resolve the misunderstanding, either text them or email them next so that there’s a written record of your dispute.
But if your neighbor is being unreasonable, for instance, screaming at the top of their lungs every single morning, you might have to escalate further.
#4
Neighbour cutting his grass in the middle of a massive thunderstorm. Like, the biggest storm that season. Just out there. Push mowin’ his lawn.
Image source: Ankylowright, korneliialutso
#5
He was clearing his roof from snow. He even wore a harness and was secured by a climbing rope.
… that rope was held by his wife who was standing on top of the roof and weighs like half his weight.
I dont know if that was intentional but to me this looked like a “if you die I want to die as well” situation.
When I talked to him about it a few days later he basically said his wife insisted on him being secured so he agreed to “this nonsense” to “make her calm”.
Lovely couple, still married, still alive, lol.
Image source: Wundawuzi, wirestock_creators
#6
I live in a condo complex, and for one summer, every day around 430-435ish, a woman driving a small Honda civic would honk her horn furiously for about ten seconds or so, stop her vehicle, and then she would roll down her window and let out a primal scream before driving off at a normal pace. I always felt as though it was directed at one of my neighbors, but never knew which one.
Image source: EzoffohGUS, fabrikasimf
You might want to ask for a mediator, like another neighbor or a friend, to step in as a semi-neutral third party. That way, you can talk about the issue in a more objective manner. And yet, if that third party isn’t able to be impartial, you might end up with even more conflict on your hands.
Alternatively, you could bring the problem up with your homeowners association. If the issue is serious enough, escalate it to your local HOA board.
Meanwhile, if your neighbor is breaking the law or if you feel threatened, immediately reach out to the authorities.
And if that isn’t enough, get in touch with a lawyer who specializes in neighborly disputes.
#7
My friend told me this story- they had a nice neighbor fella growing up who would regularly use substances and transform into an orchestra conductor on his back patio late at night. He’d get really into it, from the quiet lows to the dramatic highs amongst each pretend instrument section. Then, completely drenched in sweat and once the song completed, he’d take a bow and retreat indoors. She said it was the funniest thing to watch.
Image source: Shhhh-Im-Asleep, videokvadrat
#8
I discovered my neighbours are into pup play one night when I went to take the bins out at 2am and saw them going for a walk around the cricket oval across the road.
Lovely couple. Well behaved puppy.
Image source: FormalMango, Channel 4 Entertainment
#9
I live in an apartment complex and one of my neighbours whistles nursery rhymes while walking around late at night. Normally wheels on the bus. I can’t be sure but I think he does it just slightly too slow so you can’t tell why it’s creepy but it really is, especially at 2 am. I do know him, and he’s nice, I think he just babysits his grandkids a lot. I do keep an eye on the local news in case the only lead is that the suspect whistled nursery rhymes when leaving the scene. I would be straight on that stuff.
Image source: RedditJustTheOnce, AnnaStills
What are your neighbors like, dear Pandas? What are the weirdest, silliest, oddest things you’ve seen them do when they thought that nobody was looking? What was the creepiest moment?
On the other hand, what bizarre things have you done, only to later realize your neighbors saw you? Tell us all about it in the comments at the bottom of this post!
#10
Saw a neighbor a couple houses down walking in their back yard while talking on their phone and then just flip out and start flailing their arms and run then spin and run again.
saw them a few days later and they said they had walked through a big spider web and that was the reason for the episode.
Image source: potatochainsaw, zoosnow
#11
She left for work and came home 9 hours later.
The bizarre part is this woman had a baby around the same time we had our first baby. I was home playing with my 5 month old in the yard. I could hear the baby next door crying until mom got home.
I called CPS and reported my suspicions. Mom went to jail and the baby was put in foster care. Turns out this is the 4th time mom had a kid taken and put into foster care. Since it was an infant I do know that mom was sentenced to several years of jail time. I don’t know how long she served.
Image source: MontEcola, RDNE Stock project
#12
Not a neighbor, but my mom and I watched my 18 year old cousin outside of our grandmother’s house playing in the flower bed with a toy farm tractor and wagon while making engine noises. He finally looked up and saw us, quietly got up and left, and it was never mentioned again. And no he’s not “slow”, just apparently caught up in a moment of childhood joy.
Image source: False_Ad_555, cookie_studio
#13
Go to their car to fill up their cup. I’m assuming their alcohol was stashed there.
Image source: Afraid-Passenger658, freepik
#14
I saw my neighbor literally vacuums his driveway not blow leaves.. every Saturday that is made of concrete.
Image source: TenderRompz, Flowo
#15
It’s been a while, but one of our neighbors (a woman in her 40s) had an affair with a 17-year-old pizza delivery kid and was super open about it. Her kids would leave to walk to the school bus and he’d show up 30-60 minutes later and stay ’til around 1:45 in the afternoon. She’d walk him out to his car with nothing on but a robe, usually very loosely tied, and they’d make out for a bit before he got in and drove off.
When her husband found out, he was pretty chill about it—no big arguments, nothing noisy, just informed her he was filing for divorce. The kids all wanted to stay with him, so he told her he was asking for the house, and that’s when it got weird, because she didn’t want the kids, but did want the house. She came around to all our houses and yelled at whoever opened the door about how she was being kicked out and would lose her really nice house, and how we’d been unfair by snooping. I’m not sure how seeing something in the middle of the street is snooping, but whatever.
Image source: Serebriany, Mizuno K
#16
I live near an elderly couple on the spectrum, and one day I come home from dropping my son off at school and running errands, and the wife is standing on my deck, right next to the living room, looking into my house like she’s waiting for something. My partner was home at the time so I was confused why she was just standing there, he would have answered had she knocked. I go to greet her, and she starts listing off every pattern of colors from our Christmas tree, how many times each color appeared, and at which part of the tree. We got black out curtains that same day lol.
Image source: kevinsfamouschilipot, NastyaSensei
#17
We were having an outdoor birthday party for my niece at my parents house.
Neighbor was peering through a hole in the fence like in a cartoon.
It was not a loud party. She was three. Not even any music playing. There he was with his face to the wood until my aunt crept up along side and squeezed a bottle of water through the hole in the fence.
He yelped and grumpily head into the house.
Jim you’re a weirdo.
Image source: Popadicklikatictac, hanrongw
#18
That neighbour was meeee…
I sleep naked. One morning I was woken up by terrible racket in the garden so I quickly put on my dressing gown and went out to find our small dog Bradley barking and chasing a screaming blackbird fledgling, slightly too young to easily take flight. Mum blackbird had joined in, chasing Bradley and threatening him with all kinds of beak related violence if he was to touch one feather on her baby’s head.
I joined in the pursuit, trying to get hold of Bradley, and my sloppily tied dressing gown belt very quickly gave up the unequal struggle.
Picture the scene – young blackbird, small scruffy dog, adult blackbird, middle aged woman with her dressing gown flapping open, all yelling at the tops of our voices…
Eventually baby bird ran under the hedge, I scooped Bradley up, mum blackbird went after her baby with one final squawk in our direction, and I turned towards the house.
It was only then that I realised what a grandstand view my poor neighbours must have had of the whole performance.
It was days before I could look them in the eyes again.
Image source: batty_61, freepik
#19
Not me but some friends of mine.
They bought a house with a pool in the backyard. After a while they became suspicious that someone was using it whilst they were at work so they set up a couple of security cameras. It wasn’t very long before they caught the culprit…… The very old man who lived next door who would appear shortly after they left in the morning, completely naked, equipped with his own inflatable raft and proceed to float around on it for a few hours.
Image source: TinnitusWaves, freepik
#20
My neighbor (woman in her 60s) has OCD and possibly Tourettes. She has a fixation about her yard and can’t have even a single leaf on her lawn for any amount of time, but she will spend hours at a time out there picking them up one by one rather than dealing with them more efficiently. She also doesn’t like to be observed by others, so she does a lot of her lawn care after dark. Not an uncommon sight to see a headlamp bouncing around her yard at midnight while she picks up leaves one by one and places them into a bucket.
Anyway, one night last summer I was putting my 6 year old to bed when we heard grunting and swearing and weird ripping noises right outside his bedroom window, which is a shared space between our houses. My son was terrified and thought it was a monster. Nope, just our crazy neighbor, who’d decided she also couldn’t tolerate OUR leaves or the weeds growing on the side of our house, so she waited until after dark and took it upon herself to rip them out with her bare hands and dump them in a heap on our front lawn. Fun times! She also purposely lit her willow tree on fire last fall. A beautiful old tree that had been there for decades but just had the audacity to drop leaves on her lawn.
Image source: mintedbadger, prostooleh
#21
I went out for a cigarette at 3 in the morning to find my 82 year old neighbor wandering around her yard with a flashlight. She had pink rubber gloves, kitchen tongs, and a full gallon size freezer bag, of what I thought was dirt. I asked if she was okay and why she was out so late. She joins me for a cigarette and proceeds to tell me all about her slug hunting adventure. That bag was full of slugs, lol.
Image source: Grande68, Lennart Wittstock
#22
Older neighbour across the street when I was in University would walk to the edge of the road, lean her head over her next door neighbour’s driveway, pull a hair brush out of her pack and brush her hair onto the driveway.
Image source: racer_24_4evr
#23
Changed the bird feeders naked. That particular neighbor was in her mid 70s.
Image source: Cigaran, Connor kane
#24
The other day, I saw a dad loading up the family mini van with kids. He was wearing a shirt and tighty whities. I had to do a double take to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. Sure enough, no pants lol maybe he just had a crazy morning with the kids?
Image source: Ambam3434, wayhomestudio
#25
Watched my trashy neighbors have a screaming match and one of them angrily skate away on rollerblades.
Image source: cheestaysfly, freepik
#26
This occurred in the Winter in Michigan when it was dark as night before school. i went out to the bus stop when I was in middle school, i was probably in 6th or 7th grade. It was right in front of my house and my next door neighbors had a nearly identical house just flipped around.
He was sitting in the front room, light on with the curtains open which I knew to be the den in our home. The neighbor was a pastor or some man of the cloth, he was sitting in a recliner or chair buck naked. He noticed that I had just spotted him from the bus stop across the street and he ran out of that room and up the stairs. I don’t recall him speaking to me from that day til they moved away.
Image source: Character-March-3287, shajeelahmed
#27
TRUGGER WARNING: When we first moved into our house, our neighbors across the street introduced themselves. They were nice enough, but there was always something off about the husband. He was almost overwhelmingly nice, but also extremely full of himself. But he helped my husband fix our lawn up and let us borrow his mower a couple of times while we saved up for our own.
A few months into living here, we started hearing him yelling at his wife and kid a LOT, very loudly. He would also get extremely drunk and sit in his car for HOURS talking to people on the phone and yelling. He had the police called on him multiple times, but nothing ever happened to him until he started drunk driving. He ended up running his car into another neighbor’s car parked in their own driveway. I saw it happen, and ran across the street to let his wife know. All she said was “God dammit it.” She put her kid in the car and drove away, and he got arrested (after resisting) right in his front lawn.
Wife ended up moving out with their kid, but the husband continued to live there for a few months. Ended up getting fired from his job, lost his license (but still drove one of the cars around), and would stay holed up in the house for weeks at a time drinking. His wife would come by every few days to feed her animals that she couldn’t keep where she was staying (her mother’s small apartment) and would stay on the phone with a friend the whole time.
One day we heard the police beating down their front door. They had to use a battering ram, and the wife came stumbling out covered in blood head to toe. The husband had made it seem like he wasn’t home by hiding the car on another street, and attacked her when she came to the house. He stabbed her in the stomach, chest, and face. She had to be air lifted to a hospital a couple hours away, and he barricaded himself in a closet. It took the police over an hour to get him out of the house, and he was crying and begging to be taken to the hospital (she gave 1 good jab in his arm while defending herself).
She is ok (physically), and he is still sitting in jail awaiting sentencing. He was offered a plea deal for 16 years, but he refused it. Their house still sits unoccupied.
Image source: takethepain-igniteit
#28
I live in a sketchy neighborhood.
I once watched two random dudes use a can of spray on hair with each other. Apparently they had hot dates or something.
Image source: ToothFairysPliers
#29
Scream at a crow for cawing. Bro leaned out his 2nd floor bedroom window to shriek at a crow. The crow did not care.
Image source: stirwise
#30
A long time ago when I was in high school, I managed to take this girl I really liked up to this cabin in a little mountain lake town to stay with my family. We snuck out to my car one evening to hang out and get some privacy, overlooking this serene little night-time mountain street, with people’s porches flickering. Very romantic.
Suddenly the neighbor across the street, directly in front of us, slides the window open, sticks his bare butt out, and rips the most absurdly loud and disgusting fart that echos down the entire street. Then slams the window shut. We died laughing.
Image source: JunglePygmy
#31
Of course I didn’t see him, but I heard him fart so loudly that the whole house could hear him….
Image source: No-Guarantee-7530
#32
We saw ours sneaking out the front window holding a pair of wire cutters.
Image source: furmama2004
#33
My apartment complex in college overlooked the back yard of a frat house. Parties all the time. But this one time it rained really heavy and like a dozen guys came out and started doing pushups shirtless. I don’t know if they were pledges or what. My gay self just watched in amazement.
Image source: Otherkin
#34
Lawn shower. Picture a hairy, round, bald man having a shower from the hose in his underwear on the front lawn. Idk if he thought no one was watching or not, but it was seen and my eyes haven’t been the same since.
Image source: Complete_Gene
#35
I was the weird neighbor, when I was about 10 I lived in a wooded and rural place. There were pastures, cows and houses mostly and a lot of woods mostly between properties. I would frequently trespass because I was exploring and I mostly had it in my head that my neighbors wouldn’t care because I was a child.
One day, I had gotten lost, an event that only happened once, but I knew i was way further north than I’d ever been and a road used by semi trucks was to the west. So I headed west until i could hear the road and then went south, knowing I would soon recognize where I was. However I came upon two men, one old and one young, with a tractor and trailer just working the land clearing the brush. I tucked myself down into some growth and watched for a bit, calculating a path around them (the whole area was tall grass and stick like trees) and I almost made it. On the other side of them were my woods, familiar. Right before getting out of their sight, I had popped up to look at them and the young guy and I made direct eye contact. I immediately dropped and scuttled off. I still think about him lol. Just out there helping dad or grandpa and this little girl with wild hair and probably dirty just popping around like a prairie dog and then disappearing into the woods. I hope he’s OK lol.
Image source: tallandred48
#36
Not one of my neighbors, but me. I have a tendency to drink from a mason jar. So for years, I’ve been drinking water from a mason jar. The neighbors thought I was drinking moonshine all the time.
One advantage: they thought I was bonkers, so most of them keep their distance.
Image source: EddieKroman
#37
I was out in my yard, and the guy next door was in his garage, yelling at someone. It sounded like a fight where he was loud and the other person wasn’t. It took me a good few minutes to realize he was yelling at the radio. Which was on a Christian station.
Image source: theyarnllama
#38
Full karaoke performance… in complete silence… with headphones on (lol)
I once saw my neighbour absolutely belting out what I assume was an emotional 80s ballad, but he had noise-cancelling headphones on. No music audible. Just dramatic hand gestures and power stances in total silence. It was oddly wholesome. Made me realize everyone has their weird decompression rituals.
Image source: Signalbridgedata
#39
Kissing his windows or licking, still not sure what he was upto and I pretended I saw nothing, never asked about it.
Image source: anon
#40
One time when I was 16 I had my first real date. When I went to my car I realized I had locked both my phone AND keys in my car. I walked to my neighbor’s yard to get some help. My neighbor was a sweet and hard working man who led a good life. He was also the most eccentric person I have ever known. He was sun bathing in his boat (his boat was dry docked in his driveway with no water for miles near us) wear nothing but a speedo and sunglasses. I explained what was happening and said “Could you help me break into my own car and maybe call my mother?” And he immediately said yes and got up. So my 60ish year old neighbor showed me how to break into a car using a coat hanger all while he was wear nothing but a speedo in my front lawn. He has long passed since then but I hope he knew how much good he put into the world, even if he was a little weird. I don’t believe in an afterlife but if there is one he is one of the first people I would like to see and thank.
Image source: AnonymousBoiFromTN
#41
My neighbor got the paper every morning in his boxers and slippers, or boots, depending on the weather. I lived next to him for the first 18 years of my life. Rain, shine, or deep snow, he was always in his boxers. He was a named partner at a lawfirm too and about 50 years older than me. If you happened to be outside at the same time as him paper routine you’d get a wave and a hello. Lol.
Image source: PracticalCandy
#42
I saw my neighbor climb up on his roof to spray a hornets nest and then get attacked by said hornets and almost fall off his roof. He was swatting at them and moving erratically. Then he just disappeared. His wife and (grown) kids were on the ground watching him so I knew he had other eyes on him. Twenty minutes later he appeared in the back yard with large red welts all over his head and face.
Image source: Fluffy_Path7559
#43
Watering her plants in heavy rain, and on a separate occasion using her leaf blower in her driveway while we were in the middle of about a week of 40+ mph winds.
Image source: JijiSpitz
#44
My sister’s neighbor is a elderly lady and she cuts her grass with regular hand scissors, I’m talking bent over for hours on end just chomping away!
Image source: Clear_Whereas_3957
#45
Steal my 30 year old aloe plant that my grandmother gave me off of my front porch. I told his wife in front of him that I would rather not look at my video camera recordings of the thief. He returned it later on that day.
Image source: lynivvinyl
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