Terrifying Neighbor
In October 2020, my husband and I were renting in a duplex where my father-in-law owned the half we lived in, and a separate family (an adult daughter acting as a caregiver to an elderly mother) owned the other half.
We brought our son home from the NICU in August, and towards the end of September, the caretaker neighbor started to pound on the shared wall if she could hear him cry.
The pounding escalated over the next two months. And then it took a cruel twist. The younger caretaker neighbor bought a megaphone to yell through the wall and threatened to “rip us apart.” She called us child predators, and she’d yell threats until 3 or 4 in the morning. The authorities were called multiple times, but nothing could be done about it.
One officer told us “The threats don’t mean anything if you don’t actually do it.” The elderly mother hadn’t been seen in several months, but requests for wellness checks were brushed off. The general advice I got was that as renters, we couldn’t do anything. It was also suggested that this was reasonable behavior, since the crying baby was probably really annoying.
Eventually, we moved in with my grandmother for our safety. This was after the neighbor busted a softball-sized hole through the shared wall to scream at us, and occasionally just stare at us. But the outcome to this was almost indescribably wild. See, the smell that came out of the hole was awful. We should have known something was up then.
Our security cameras also recorded her coming to my son’s nursery window at around 2 am almost daily, just staring and holding her cat. It took until the end of January for the authorities to be able to enter her property.
When they arrived, they discovered that the elderly mother had been deceased since at least June, and the daughter had the corpse dressed in her Sunday best, rotting in a deadbolted bedroom.
The news article said the mother passed from natural causes. The daughter was taken to an inpatient psychiatric facility. Story credit: Reddit / peachesnglitter