This happened in November of 2023. I (36M) live in an apartment building with rather thick walls between apartments. From 2017 when I moved in until May of 2024, I had a neighbor on the other side of the wall that I'll call Tee (60sF).

Tee was nice when I first moved in, but at some point within my first year of living here her husband left her. No idea why, but ever since that day, Tee became an absolutely annoying nightmare. She would slam her door any time she went in or out of the apartment. Literally every single time. The doors of our apartments are very heavy, thick metal and I promise you it does NOT take that much force to close them securely.

She also started "stalking" my partner and I around our apartment. It took us a bit to catch on to this, but she would always play country music (which I despise) at full volume on what I think must have been a bluetooth speaker that she bought from hell itself. If I opened the sliding closet door in the hallway of my apartment, she would move the speaker to her closet, which is on the opposite side of the wall. If I went into the bathroom and started the shower up, she'd move it to her bathroom on the other side of the bathroom wall. (Our apartments are basically mirrored versions of each other.)

If my partner and I laughed at something on TV or talked at just normal volume, she would pound on the wall and yell. Sometimes my partner and I talk to each other while we're in the bathroom together, brushing our teeth, putting on deodorant, getting ready for bed, etc. One time I heard her yell at seemingly no one "Oh great! They're in the bathroom again!" We didn't wanna get too paranoid but it really felt like she was following us around.

She would also sit out front of the apartment building and chain smoke, letting the smoke waft into my windows during the summer, which forced me to keep the windows closed. We live on the second floor and we don't have central AC in this building, and the smell started coming in from the window AC unit after a year or two because she started smoking directly below it.

I work night shifts and one day as I was walking out the door, she was sitting outside and asked all sweetly "Where you goin' this late, honey?" I was trying to be polite to her and I just told her "Oh, I'm heading to work. I work nights for (company name)." I thought maybe we could get along, but after that day she began blaring her music at exactly 8:30am every morning when I got home, thus making it hard for me to sleep. We did call our landlord multiple times, and he had a few talks with her, but that only made her worse.

There's so much more I could get into, like her daughter and her baby niece coming over at all hours of the day and having the LOUDEST conversations, the time she was screaming at someone on the phone in the hallway outside my apartment door, and the time she threw her poor cat out of the second floor window then got pissed when we tried to feed it so she installed an automatic door closer on the back door to stop us from letting the cat in. But you get the idea. Now, on to the revenge.

It was November of 2023. I usually stop at a grocery store right by our apartment in the mornings when I get off of work, and one morning the week before Thanksgiving I stopped in to grab a few necessities. For some reason, Tee was there doing her Thanksgiving shopping at 8am in the morning. I didn't want to cause a scene when I saw her in the aisle so I just put on a fake smile, said hello, and went about grabbing my toilet paper, cat food, and a few snacks to pack in my lunches for my overnight shifts.

I'm not sure if she did it intentionally, but Tee got to the register right before me and started unloading her dozens of groceries onto the belt. Keep in mind, all I had was like 5 or 6 things and I just wanted to go home and sleep. This grocery store has self check-outs, but for reasons I still don't understand to this day, they've been permanently blocked off since covid. This early in the morning they only have 1 cashier and 1 lane open so all I could do was wait while Tee took her sweet time chatting with the cashier and intentionally not looking at me.

While I was standing there, frustrated and tired, I noticed that Tee's debit card had fallen onto the floor because of the way she'd set her wallet down. The card was sort of half under the big rack on one side of the aisle that has all the candy on it. I realized that if I took a step forward to put my stuff on the belt then I would almost naturally step right on top of her card. So, while she chatted and took her sweet time, talking about how great this turkey she was buying looked and how this spice was gonna go great with that spice and her daughter was just gonna looove this boxed stuffing, I took a step forward, put my foot on her card, leaned forward to grab a divider for the belt, and scooted her card completely under the rack. The gap was maybe half an inch at best, so unless someone got down and pressed their face to the floor to look under it, you couldn't tell the card was under there.

She goes to pay and oh no, she can't find her card! After a few minutes of digging around in her purse and checking her pockets, she finally tells the cashier that she must have left her card at home and can they please hold onto the groceries until she can come back to pay for them. It'll only take her a few minutes. The cashier puts her cart off to the side, Tee leaves, I buy my stuff, and I finally head home.

For the next hour I forced myself to stay awake and listen through the wall as she yells at her daughter over the phone, saying that Thanksgiving is ruined, she can't find her card, can someone help her pay for the groceries, the turkey is gonna go bad if it just sits in that cart at the store all day, etc.

When I woke up later that day I could still hear her ranting and yelling, this time to her daughter, who was there in person now. I don't know what Tee ended up doing but I asked the cashier the next time I saw her and she told me that Tee never came back for her groceries, so I effectively ruined her Thanksgiving. I know this because she complained very loudly about it for the next month to all the other neighbors.

As a final note, she moved out in May the following year and my partner's best friend ended up moving into that apartment. When I was helping our friend move in, we decided that now that we had access to the apartment we wanted to see just how loud my partner and I were really being. I stayed in what was once Tee's apartment and the others went into my apartment and yelled, laughed, and played music at full volume. I could BARELY hear a peep, and they were giving it their all. We tried talking in the bathroom, running the shower, flushing the toilet, etc and we pretty quickly realized that for us to be hearing Tee's music and her yelling etc, she had to have been yelling at the top of her lungs and playing that demon-bought speaker at ungodly levels. It's truly unreal, because to this day we can hardly hear each other unless we actually put our ear to the wall. It kinda creeps me out to think that Tee was standing in her apartment with her ear to the wall all the time, but there's literally nothing else that makes sense. Tee was 100% insane and I hope I never have a neighbor like her ever again.

EDIT: A few people have asked about the cat, so I'll put that story here really quickly. One night in December my partner and I came back from an evening Sheetz run. As we went up the steps to the apartment we found a cat sitting on the landing. Poor thing was shivering and cold and immediately came up to us to be petted. We already own 2 cats and our apartment is only a 2 bedroom so we couldn't take in this poor third kitty. She was OK to be petted but she'd get squiggly if I tried to pick her up so it was hard to move her into a carrier or something. We put out some food and water and made a little bed for her and we stayed out in the hallway with her. After a few hours we went inside to eat our now-cold food. When we went back out the cat was gone.

We propped open the back door of our building so she could go in and out at will and we saw her one other time coming in for food. We were calling and texting people trying to find a home for her before the next snow came in and we were considering how to arrange our room so she could stay in our apartment without interacting with our cats. But then Tee started closing the back door of the building very loudly any time we opened it. Even at 2am once. I asked her to leave the door open because we were trying to find a home for a stray cat and she told us "Oh, that's not a stray. She was my cat. Little bitch bit me so I threw her out the window haha! Leave that door closed though please honey, it's getting chilly."

My brain legit took time to process that and I just walked away. Next day Tee was up on a ladder installing a door closer on the back door "with the landlord's permission, so that damn cat doesn't come back in here." We found the cat going into the apartment building next door and a nice couple there said they'd been feeding her but they couldn't get her into their apartment because she didn't like being picked up and they weren't sure if she belonged to someone. We explained the situation and they said they'd adopt her since it was gonna snow soon and they didn't want her out in the cold. No idea how they got her into the apartment but a few days later I saw her in their window on my way to work. I still see her even to this day, so thankfully she found a good home!

TLDR: Nightmare neighbor yells at us at all hours of the day and night, throws her cat out a window, and is generally unpleasant. I saw her drop her debit card while she was doing Thanksgiving shopping with a cart full of food and I scooted the card under the candy rack. She ended up not being able to buy the food and it ruined her Thanksgiving.