The Oddest Couple
I moved into what was supposed to be student housing. It was a normal house with locks added to all the rooms to make them separate with a shared kitchen, etc.
I shared my kitchen/bathroom with two other people downstairs, and there were about eight other people living on the upper floors. There was a weird couple who lived above me. The guy looked to be somewhere in his 40s or 50s, with a handlebar mustache and very long black hair.
The woman looked to be somewhere in her 70s. I thought she was his mother at first, but apparently, they were a couple. She had trouble getting around and would often be sitting outside the front door in her wheelchair puffing away.
It didn’t take long after I moved in for things to take a bad turn. When I moved in, I had cleaned up the whole garden. I was hoping to chill in it when the weather was good.
I started finding smoke butts and other little things tossed in it, but there were a bunch of different balconies facing it, so I couldn’t exactly accuse anyone unless I caught them in the act.
One day, while I was studying, I heard a crunch in the garden, so I went to check it out. There was a whole garbage bag sitting by the door, and I could still hear people rummaging around on the balcony directly above me.
By the time I actually got outside, they were already inside and ignored my yells, so I threw the garbage bag back onto their balcony.
This finally got them to come out, only for them to complain that I had all this space that I wasn’t doing anything with, so why shouldn’t they be allowed to store their garbage in my garden?
I told him to take a hike, and if he did it again, I would call the authorities. He immediately backed off. A day or so later, I invited some friends to hang out at my place for the first time. We were just talking, playing some video games, not exactly being loud, but not super quiet either.
Around 9 o’clock, the banging on the ceiling started. At first, we thought someone was doing some late-night home improvements or something, but the banging came every time someone laughed a little louder.
Apparently, they expected us to stop talking after 9 pm, which didn’t seem reasonable, but I was willing to discuss it. I rang their doorbell tried to see if they would come to the balcony, but they just kept banging on the floor. This became a recurring theme over the years.
About a week after the first garbage incident, I was sitting on my bed, reading, when I heard a splat in the garden. Again I went to go and see what it was, and to my surprise, I found a whole roast chicken there, with all the bones and some of the meat eaten off. I called up to my upstairs neighbor again.
I clearly heard him moving around, but he once again ignored me. So, I lobbed his chicken back through his open balcony door. He came out mad, but I was already way angrier at having to explain to him again how throwing trash into my garden was not okay.
According to him, this wasn’t trash—it was edible food. He’d just had part of it for breakfast, and being the animal lover he was, he liked to share it with the cats of the neighborhood. This also explained why the stray cats in the neighborhood liked to pick my garden for their fight club.
I explained that food scraps attracted all kinds of unwanted things and were even more of a pain to clean up, so if he really wanted to help animals, he should either adopt a couple of cats or go help out at an animal shelter. The next thing I knew, he called the authorities.
Then, one afternoon, I came home from school and found a chicken running around in my backyard. I confronted the neighbor, and he immediately confessed that he had taken my advice.
He said he always wanted chickens, but since he didn’t have enough room on his balcony, he decided to keep them in my garden instead. I told him I was having chicken that night, and in 15 minutes, I would decide if I needed to go to the supermarket to get it or if it would be fresh.
In the meantime, I told him, I would leave the front door and the door to the garden open. I heard him fumbling around in the garden a couple of minutes later, and he finally stopped throwing stuff down there. Eventually, the old lady got sick and had to be moved to the hospital.
He stopped paying rent, so they were forced to move. Apparently, their apartment was a scene straight from Hoarders. There was garbage stacked to above head height, in some cases to the ceiling.
While trying to clean it out, they had discovered all kinds of junk, including phone books from thirty-five years prior. I would regularly hear some of the workers run out onto the balcony and dry heave from the smell. It took them two weeks to clear everything out.
Story credit: Reddit/Pandam4n