List your neighbor nightmare.

[Spike89]

26. Sad mentally ill man next door

When he moved in, my wife and I were actually relieved, his recently deceased mother had used the house as a rental and the tenants were very loud (a son played the trumpet, poorly) and high maintenance (lots of late night police and ambulance visits). At first the new guy was pretty OK for a neighbor, he kept to himself mostly, but he did drink a lot.

After about 6 months, he went into rehab for his drinking. He returned about 6 weeks later looking 10 years older. He began hanging out in his front yard loudly asking no one in particular where his truck keys were, then coming over and asking my wife (who works as a writer in our home) for help finding his keys. A caseworker had taken the keys--he'd lost his license (the reason he went to rehab), but he refused to listen/believe it.

Within a few more weeks, he began loudly conversing/wailing/crying in his front yard (right outside my wife's office) that someone had kidnapped his daughter (she was grown and in the military). He also would loudly chant the status of the neighbors on the other side of him, as well as our status "Bill and Jan are home. Spike89 is at work. EugeneLiberal is at home." He also began coming to our door and asking for rides up to the store, to a bar, to the bank, etc. I took him to the store and the bank a few times, but the caseworker asked me not to do it because he was on a tight budget and was buying beer and overdrawing his accounts.

Annoying so far, then he began peeking into the neighbor's windows, chanting about what they were doing "Bill is watching TV! Jan is sweeping!" and would repeat this for hours. Eventually, they filed a complaint and the police finally convinced him to stay away from their windows. He immediately began peering in our windows when I was at work, telling the world whatever my wife was doing--we had to call the police also.

It all sounds so harmless, but none of us could go out our front door without the guy making a beeline for us to tell us about his missing keys, kidnapped daughter, or the latest domestic chores being done in our houses. This went on for a couple years. Then, he died--choked on a banana while drunk on some beer he'd somehow scored.

His caseworker was in despair, she'd been trying to get him into state-sponsored care, but there was no money/space available. I felt immense relief and guilt for that relief. He has a pain-in-the-ass, but basically a harmless old man. His ex-wife and her husband came a few weeks later to fix up and sell the house for the daughter. They basically told us he was a horribly violent and abusive drunk who'd lost all visitation rights with his daughter decades before and had alienated every family member long ago (turns out he had a brother and father both living within a mile who never visited him).