Everyone has at least one horror story about some douchebag neighbor, and if you don't it might mean you were the douchebag.
Whether it's an obnoxious couple having a screaming match at three in the morning or some old guy that stinks up the entire apartment building with Ben Gay and curry, the archetypal asshole next door can make our lives miserable with an array of time tested dick moves. However, you have never truly felt the black flames of the Neighborhood Inferno until you've lived in close proximity to one of these balls of skullduggery.
#7. Michael Carroll - The Racetrack Neighbor
Everybody probably has at least one person living in their neighborhood that spends every waking moment in their driveway loudly perfecting the performance exhaust on an old Mustang GT while listening to Whitesnakeat an unreasonable volume (note: any volume louder than "off" is unreasonable for Whitesnake). Michael Carroll in Norfolk, UK, upped the ante by building an entire demolition racetrack in his yard.
Judging by this photo, Whitesnake was probably involved.
Carroll was the perfect storm of bad neighbor--a 20-year-old convicted criminal who won over $14 million in the lottery. Rather than putting the money away in the bank, Carroll invested his money into a Norfolk estate, which he promptly turned into a 24-hour manslaughter-scale bumper car ride.
The dust and noise generated by his gearhead boner monument were so bad that the family next door had to start living in their bedroom, the last somewhat-quiet place in the entire house. Imagine if instead of worrying about dodging piles of crap your neighbor's dog left on your lawn, you had to dodge old Thunderbirds with hastily applied custom graphics rocketing through the air at 70 miles-per-hour.
"Hey guys? Can you stop for a minute so I can get my newspaper?"
Besides prolonged exposure to a cancer-tastic cloud of automobile fumes and enough noise pollution to constitute a war crime, Carroll's neighbors also enjoyed the occasional thrill of potentially fatal fire hazards whenever the $14 Million Asshat felt like launching industrial grade fireworks and emergency flares over other people's houses.
Some homeowners did try to talk to Carroll about maybe not being such a massive dickpenis, but it's hard to negotiate with a man whose hobbies include wrecking cars and attacking his own sister with a samurai sword. However, we're fairly certain that cookouts at Carroll's house are stupefyingly awesome.
#6. Charles Hart - The Great Wall Neighbor
They say good fences make good neighbors.
This is especially true if your neighbor is a Tyrannosaurus.
Based on that, Dennis Hawes of Fleetwood, England should have described Charles Hart as the greatest neighbor in the history of professional neighboring, instead of as a psychotic bastard who built a 16-foot high wall between their two properties.
"Go ahead, complain some more. I can totally make this wall higher."
The trouble started for Hawes when he decided to build a sun terrace on the roof of his house, which according to Hart was less of a terrace and more of a penis-peeping voyeur deck. So, in order to protect his privacy (and apparent perpetual backyard nudity), Hart took the reasonable step of erecting a two story concrete wall right along their property lines.
Evidently he needed to protect the secret identities of his gas grill and patio furniture.
Hawes is of course partially at fault here. Even if he didn't plan to spy on Hart, he at least could have given Hart some time to express concerns about his privacy, because we've all known some asshole on the block that suddenly started having trucks come in to pour concrete for a new pool without giving anyone else a heads up. Although, it's not like Hawes threw the terrace up overnight, so Hart probably had more than a few occasions to point out his privacy concerns before tossing up the Great Wall of Irrational Paranoia like a suburban Dr. Doom.
#5. Paula Bolli - The Shitty Neighbor
When it comes to neighbor feuds, dropping poop on each other's property is a time honored tradition, whether it be direct deposits on the lawn from a pet's buttchute or flaming bags placed on the doorstep. It's what community is all about, really.
However, there are times when this admittedly gets out of control, like in the case of Gus and Lucille Midura of Mariners Harbor, Staten Island. The octogenarian couple's neighbor Paula Bolli took about 60 cubic yards of horse manure and dropped it on her own front and side yard just to piss them off, a plan that we argue could have spent more time in the development process.
"So... so why didn't we put the manure on their yard?"
There had been bad blood between the Miduras' and Bollis for over two decades, which somehow escalated to the point of two dump trucks full of noxious animal shit. It's natural to assume that they had to deserve it somehow, like by strangling Bolli's entire family with a used condom or something, but according to the other neighbors the mountain of manure gambit literally came out of nowhere, unlike the army of rats that quickly showed up to feast on it.
Neighborhood spite is a powerful thing, just ask any guy who leaves the rusty car in his front yard specifically because he knows his neighbors hate it. But Bolli is clearly a cut above because she's willing to live in the center of a metropolis of shit-eating rats just to piss off a couple of old people.
#4. Jeanne Wilding - The Obstacle Neighbor
Picture that one person on your block that goes all out for every holiday, throwing up elaborate decorations and annoying inflatable licensed characters in their yard every time there's a date with bold text on their calendar. Now imagine instead of decorations it's a minefield full of sharp and dangerous objects, instead of their yard it's yours and instead of "every holiday" it's "every day." You have now imagined Jeanne Wilding.
The folks lucky enough to call themselves her neighbors enjoy a life of constant surprise and professional stunt driving, because some of Wilding's many antisocial hobbies include littering the local roads with animal carcasses, shards of glass, nails and animal crap, which she also diligently spreads on people's lawns. She also blasted floodlights into a neighbor's home like Samuel L. Jackson in Lakeview Terrace.
"I SEE YOU, MOTHERFUCKER."
We're assuming that Wilding's neighbors probably sleep with semi-automatic machetes under their pillows just in case Jeanne completely loses her shit one day and decides to litter the roads with human corpses instead of just dead animals.