The Family Next Door
When I was a teenager, we lived next door to this one family that seemed off. One day, the father knocked on our door and told my parents they hadn’t had power for a long time.
They begged us to let them run an extension cord to one of our outside outlets for the day so that their young kids could have cold milk with their cereal in the morning.
My parents agreed to let them use our outside outlets for that day only. They ended up keeping their part of the arrangement and they disconnected the cable in the evening. But then, a week later, they caught us completely off-guard—they hooked it back up again without us noticing.
A month went by, and our electricity bill was basically double what it normally was. My parents headed to the backyard and found their cable still plugged in. They yanked it out and confronted the father.
At first, he only peered through a crack in the door, but my stepdad eventually got him to open up after pointing out that he was concealing a firearm. My stepdad demanded an explanation as to why the cable was plugged into our outlet, and the father just mumbled incoherently.
He then shut the door and locked it. The family was living in a duplex, and their neighbor, who shared the building, came around and asked us what was up. My parents explained the whole story and how they were planning to call the authorities.
Turns out, the guy they were speaking to was a former chief and he had friends in the force. He offered to make the call, and several cop cars arrived.
The father and mother were both incarcerated. But the most surprising part? It turns out that they were running a lab inside the house. The kids—a boy and a girl—were also malnourished.
They were immediately put into foster care. No other bad neighbor has beat this high score yet. Story credit: Reddit / Naleid