The New Medication
My boyfriend and I moved into a “nice and quiet” neighborhood about six months ago. We chat with a few of our neighbors here and there, especially while walking our dogs, and are friendly when we encounter anyone, but we mostly keep to ourselves.
Showing up at someone’s door with a basket is just in the movies, right? Two weeks ago, I got out of the shower and heard my boyfriend talking to someone in the entryway.
I peeked out and saw him nervously talking to a woman. I had just taken my glasses off, so I was extra blind and didn’t recognize her. I assumed because she was standing inside our house that my boyfriend knew who she was and carried along getting dressed in our bedroom.
I have never been more wrong in my life. A few moments later, my boyfriend shouts out to me and asks if I know what’s going on. “No, I thought you were going to fill me in on what’s going on”.
The woman is chiming in now with short cryptic phrases like “Oh really? You don’t know who I am? You should know exactly why I am here”. I have severe anxiety, so my mind was already starting to race and I was trying to place this woman’s face.
She seemed vaguely familiar, but in the context and confusion, I couldn’t place her. My boyfriend keeps asking her who she is and she gives no indication of who she is or why she is there, but keeps insisting that we know what’s going on. He finally asks that they step back outside to talk.
I can’t believe the woman’s reaction. She reaches behind her and LOCKS THE DEADBOLT with a smirk on her face. I thought things were about to escalate, so I start looking around for something to grab.
When I see nothing, I just shout for my boyfriend to quickly open the door himself so she can just leave. He follows her out of the door while she is still rambling. As soon as they step outside, I realized who she was. She is a neighbor!
Her backyard is diagonal to our backyard, and I see her from afar here and then while walking our dogs, but she never comes anywhere near, smiles, waves, or even makes eye contact. Now I’m even more confused, wondering if our dog had dug a hole under the fence and she came to chastise us, or what?
My boyfriend comes back in and I ask how the heck that all started. He said he didn’t have the slightest clue who she was, or why she was here. I said, “she must have given you some kind of reason for you to let her in the house”. His next words chilled me.
That’s when he said, “I didn’t let her in…she rang the doorbell, I started to answer the door and she pushed in and shut the door behind her”. I felt panic flooding my brain. What did we do?
Did we offend her in some way? I decided to text my neighbor whose backyard directly faces ours and asked how well she knew her next-door neighbor, and gave them a brief summary of what had just happened.
She responded quickly that a few years prior, the woman fell and cracked her head open and had gone through multiple brain surgeries since. Good neighbor said loony neighbor was never the same since, but “friendly”. Not in the list of adjectives I would use to describe our interaction.
She offers to give us looney’s husband’s phone number, or suggests that her husband could talk to looney’s husband in the morning. I accepted both.
I had never even seen her husband so didn’t want to call out of the blue with something like that, but figured it would be nice to have his number just on the off chance that anything else out of the ordinary ever happened. Boy, we had no idea what our future actually held.
The next morning, Good Neighbor texts me that Looney Husband was extremely apologetic. He explained she had a seizure earlier in the week and started new meds that caused confusion. He said he would take care of it, and that he was so glad we had informed him.
I kept thinking that her behavior did not seem like someone who was disoriented, or confused…she seemed paranoid and hostile, but I still felt sympathetic towards their situation and decided to write it off as a weird evening.
Two days later, I get out of a meeting at work and saw someone ringing my doorbell three times. My doorbell records a short clip each time it’s rung. When I saw the footage, a shiver ran down me.
It was her. In each clip, about 10 minutes apart, she would slam the doorbell, then huff and puff and pace around, visibly upset we had not answered the door. She was peering in the windows near our door. In one clip, she glared directly into the camera for about 20 seconds before hitting the button.
So creepy. I texted my boyfriend and sent him screenshots, but we were both working, and after all, she was just ringing the doorbell. Maybe she had come to apologize, but was just not a pleasant person?
Three hours later, my boyfriend was on the way home and I was still at work. She’s back at the door. Waiting, pacing, stomping her feet. (Have you never heard of a 9-5?!) I warned him in case he was close but she ended up leaving. She came back 10 minutes later, though.
He was right around the corner, so he drove straight to THEIR house and her husband was outside. My boyfriend told Looney Husband that this is getting a little weird and we would appreciate if she would stop patrolling our front porch.
The husband said he’d take care of it and they had a doctor’s appointment coming up. 9 pm rolls around. I decided to take my dog out for a quick stroll. No more than two minutes after I leave, I see the notification that someone rang our doorbell.
No. Freaking. Way. Yep, it was her. So I started screen recording. I thought SURELY my boyfriend would not answer, but he did. It turned into chaos. She tried to rush towards the open door and he quickly stepped out on the porch and shut the door, which upset her.
She said, “Don’t even TALK to me” (again, you rang OUR bell). She continues rambling that she knows everything that’s going on. She says she’s hearing all sorts of things from our house, and he needs to let her in so she can see everything we’re doing, and know everything that’s going on.
He jests that he was just folding laundry, which really set her off. She started cursing him out, calling him a liar, and insisting she must come inside. She must know. My boyfriend tried to tell her that he understands her situation. Still, he said, there’s no need to get hostile. This set her off even more.
Looney took his sympathetic statement as an admission of guilt that we really were spying on her. He offers to walk her back to her house and she curses at him some more and then storms off. I had him text the husband the video. We wanted him to see that it was not just confusion.
There was something more serious going on. He said he was on his way home from work and would, you guessed it, “take care of it”. We never heard back from him. We were going out of town the next morning, so we had two days of peace. We came home and for a few days, a little more peace.
Maybe we all just needed a few days of space for things to settle, right? Wrong! The last incident had been nine days ago. Today, I’m at work and I see the doorbell alert. I knew in my gut what was happening. It was her again. I tried to open the video, but the signal in my office is atrocious.
I was anxious, so I kept an eye on the activity log. All of a sudden I start seeing things pop up… “Front door open”….“Front door shut”….“back door open”….“back door shut”….”front door open”…“front door shut”…and so on.
I quickly called my boyfriend to see if he had come home from work early. My heart sank at his response. He said no. I told him that someone was in our house, and we needed to get home. I was mainly worried about our dogs.
At one point, Looney had made a weird comment about our dog, and we had also just gotten a puppy. Puppy was crated, but I was worried a door was open and our other dog would be wandering loose, or worse. I sped home and ran in the door.
No dog running to greet me and no puppy in the crate. I start shouting for them and racing through the house, shouting all throughout. I felt like the house was spinning. I was sobbing uncontrollably when I thought I heard a faint jingle.
I sprinted for the backyard, and there they were. I have never been more relieved but was still terrified. It had to be her. Was she still there? What had happened? My boyfriend got home, and I tried to load some of the doorbell clips again. The first two were unavailable.
But when the clips from about an hour later loaded, I gasped. We saw …paramedics. Paramedics banging on our door and trying to get in, and at some point, they came inside. Who let the puppy out of the crate?! Could not tell you.
Apparently, when the fire department comes to your home they don’t leave a notice or anything? One of the only things I could hear in any of the clips was, “She’s gonna flip again when we call her back”.
Who is SHE?!? You guessed it…Looney Neighbor. We called the fire department and they told us she had called to report someone inside of our address was collapsed from a seizure.
I’m not sure if she’s just trying to make our life a nightmare at this point, or if she was just trying to find a way to get into our home. My boyfriend went to talk to her husband and he was still extremely short with responses. He was also not taking it any more seriously.
I called the non-emergency line and they sent an officer out. The officer was not remotely helpful. He had gone to talk to the Looneys first, and then gave us the same lines about “she’s trying new medication”. “He’s going to call her doctor”.
I 100% understand how stressful that kind of stuff can be, and I truly do feel bad for them. BUT, I am also scared for our safety. Every incident has escalated, and nothing has changed. I asked about filing a restraining order, but I knew this was a long shot since they live close.
I asked if there was anything that could be mandated about her being supervised, or getting a caretaker. Her husband is a firefighter so she’s completely alone for long stretches of time and is always walking around the neighborhood alone.
The officer told me not to hesitate to call again if she comes back…that was it. Story credit: Reddit / (Exact_Radio_4524)