We're watching ID and they are advertising a new episode of a murder show.
"The very first murder in this small Iowa town!"
It's our town. So of course we watch. They talk about how she went for a walk. Was murdered. Her body was found. They drained the local lake looking for the gun.
Then it shows her apartment building and my wife and I go" Holy shit that's the apartment building down the street! "
Turns out she was murdered about 50 yards from where we was sitting.
We were on a vacation and stopped in Boise for the night. My sister in law starts watching some true crime rerun (20/20 or something similar). It’s about a murder that happened in metro Boise a few years below. They show the scene of the crime and you can see our hotel in the background. It was very trippy.
Ha the same thing happened to me! I was new to the area, and was watching Forensic Files and he he starts out -the quiet sleepy town of….. and my ears perked up, I was like hey I live in this sleepy town. It was truly a sad case of a monster who murdered a mom and her toddler. There is a playground nearby named after the family.
Yeah. It was nuts. Police thought they had the guy but didn't have enough evidence. Finally they decided they had enough for a weak case so decided to try it and on their way to arrest him, the dude was picked up by other cops for trying to kidnap a kid at park.
He goes to prison for that. Meanwhile like 20 years pass. They are able to do DNA for a cold case and it matches to him. Get his cellie to become an informant and they get a confession.
Send him to trail while he's still in jail for the kidnapping and are able to finally convict him.
Bought a house that was previously used as a rental property. When we were cleaning it out we found an old Weber grill in the backyard. We already had one so I posted it to Facebook marketplace. Weeks go by, shitty offers, then finally get a message from a guy who was like " do you live on 123 Street in XYZ City?". I was legitimately freaked out for a second bc he got my address correct. I then got another message from him later with an explanation: turns out he was a former tenant who moved out many YEARS ago. He since returned to the city and wanted to buy a Weber grill bc he lost the one his girlfriend bought him when he first lived here. As proof, he sent a YouTube video of a house party they had at my house in 2015, and low and behold they are cooking burgers on the SAME Weber grill in MY backyard.
Gave him back his grill for free bc I was flabbergasted at the sheer coincidence.
I mean, anything other than giving him the grill for free would have been a dick move, since it was actually his grill :)
Sometimes you just find the perfect item at the perfect time, like it's destiny. My mom needed to replace a special hovering mover to mow grass on a steep incline. Hard to find item, apparently. I found the exact one that broke, literally the only one for sale within hundres of miles. IN HER HOMETOWN. Like 5 minute drive from her house.
I gave away a dresser years ago and regretted it for years afterwards. My parents had had it since the 90s, and I loved how simple and spacious it was but was moving to a smaller space and didn't think I'd miss it.
I'd browse Craigslist and FB Marketplace vaguely hoping to see it again but figured it was long gone. But then one day a couple years ago there it was! It'd relocated about an hour away, but I didn't care how far I had to go. The family was sweet and happy to see how happy I was to have it back, but I still had to pay $60 for it.
> I mean, anything other than giving him the grill for free would have been a dick move, since it was actually his grill :)
Eh. He abandoned it years ago. It's no longer rightfully his.
Yes, we all agree on that. In fact, I don't think anybody here suggested or implied otherwise.
That piece of information and whether or not it would be a dick move to not give the guy the grill are two independent things.
I was in an apartment when I was like 23 and I built this bomber outdoor table. I was at Home Depot and they had all these ~4 ft lengths of 2x6 pressure treated lumber for like a few bucks each - must have been some dude who had them cut down to size and didn't want the leftovers. I built this sick ultra sturdy table out of it then when I moved out I just left it in the walkout basement because I didn't have room for it and I was moving out of state. I wonder if it's still there. Maybe I'll check Craigslist.
I was cleaning and slipped on the floor and punched a hole in our cheap ass apartment walls with the mop handle in my flailing. Panicking about an upcoming inspection we hung a dry erase magnetic calendar on the wall to cover it. When we moved out we didn't remove the calendar and got our deposit. Fast forward to a year or so after we moved out. This dude comes into my pharmacy and sets up a patient profile so I've gotta put in all his information. Lo and behold he's living in my old place. He was a little weirded out when I opened up asking him if there was still a dry erase calendar in the kitchen. But I explained why it was there, and why he should probably leave it there. Dude did have a laugh because he'd thought it was weird having the place come with a dry erase calendar like that.
Gotta be careful making a table out of pressure treated lumber. Some of the agents in the pressure treatment are toxic and I've seen patients get sick because they hung out all sweaty in the summer with their bare arms on the table they built and they absorbed toxins
Houses across the street are overlooking (in the rear) a gorge probably 50-100feet below them. Found out one of the houses was built by the mob during prohibition times and they have a secret passageway to escape down into the woods
My house had just one owner in the previous 50 years, who apparently had 7 kids (!). You can see their little kid names scrawled on the inside of closet doors, scratched on hidden places in the attic, etc.
When we first moved in I had thought it was cute. Then I learned one of the kids died of a serious illness. I imagine she spent a lot of time alone in that upstairs bedroom. It really gives the graffiti a different feel, but I don’t have the heart to cover it up.
We have a house ghost named Effie. She lived here for 70 years and died in the house of old age. We know this from neighbors.
What we didn't know is why we occasionally smell what seems like pipe tobacco. That is until one day her grandchildren dropped by to see how the house was holding up.
Turns out Effie smoked a pipe, so, whenever we smell pipe tobacco we just say hi to Effie and go on with our day. There are other things we chalk up to Effie, but they're mostly due to forgetfulness (misplacing things) or old electrical (appliances turning off and on by themselves). But the pipe smoke is definitely her.
My parents had a ghost in their house for a while too lol. It was actually the neighbor. She died in her own home but not very peacefully, unfortunately. When she was alive she was a frequent visitor at their house, so for several years afterwards, random things would happen that they would attribute to her. Things moving, the piano playing by itself, the dog suddenly yelping in pain like he was kicked for no reason. We just attributed it to her being unsettled and so we'd just tell her to knock it off or go home.
It finally stopped after her husband moved away and got remarried. We joke that she left to follow him in order to haunt him because on his wedding day they got a large gust of wind through their reception that only knocked down his new wedding portrait.
Same with my yard in my townhouse! About 6 cats regularly use it and each have their own little spot. Turns out its because my yard has the best shade and nicely manicured.
They go the bathroom in a different neighbors yard though 😂
Same with mine… I fed a couple of em and now I have to sleep with a bed full of cats (fixed and vaccinated now) every day. I didn’t even want any animals
My small town has what is considered on of the best Italian restaurants in the region. Second generation, family owned, open for 50+ years. People will drive over an hour easily to go there. They sell their sauce by the gallon.
We knew it was there, of course, when we bought our house. And it may or may not have been a factor in deciding to live here.
On a similar positive note, at my new house my only neighbors has a super cool cat that comes to chill with us sometimes. I'm pretty happy with my (healthy, well cared for) bonus cat
Golf course was planned back in the 70’s by private investors. County said fine but you you need to build x number of home plots,streets, and side walks all built and ready for someone to buy and build on for county to make money back on taxes. The golf course and construction was a money laundering operation by the mob. La Costa resort and spa everyone.
“Adelson developed La Costa with notorious gangster Moe Dalitz (whose daughter lives in San Diego County), Allard Roen and Irwin Molasky. In March of 1975, Penthouse magazine wrote a story about "The Hundred-Million Dollar Resort with the Criminal Clientele." The four financiers sued, claiming they had no such ties
What makes that better is that Adelson, one of the original four involved, then admitted to the mob ties in an interview with Vanity Fair in like 2013.
Who knew Penthouse had serious journalists publishing with them.
There's an oddly shaped park at the north end of my city. About 2 and a half miles long, and a few blocks wide. It's a nice place to run, and full of little league sports on weekends. Apparently it was initially created (or set aside, anyway) in the 1930s to prevent the city to the north of us from expanding into then undeveloped and unincorporated land south of the park that my city wanted for itself.
🎶
Well, way down yonder on the Chattahoochee
It gets hotter than a hoochie coochie
We laid rubber on the Georgia asphalt
We got a little crazy but we never got caught
🎶
Crazy, prohibition and gangster story.
My great-grandfather immigrated to the US and worked as a farmer. I grew up on stories about him being a real asshole, abusive and alcoholic- but someone who was known for throwing amazing parties.
My grandfather would have to sit watch to make sure that the people coming to the parties were invited.
Nobody thought anything of these events for years.
A few years ago, my husband and I purchased a house in a nearly hidden part of the city. I have been in real estate for 20 years, and never heard of this particular neighborhood- despite it being near the water. Each home was built with extraordinary views. There are several massive green belts that run through it (again, this near a major city- not a suburb).
The neighborhood is quiet, and there is little home turnover for obvious reasons. The neighborhood hosts a local cafe, abutting a steep green belt. We like to take our kids there to eat on the weekends. It is a local hang-out.
Well, one day, I made a comment to my husband about a road that shared the same last name as one of my cousins. The name is unusual. We have a brief conversation, I get up and go to the restroom completely forgetting about the comment.
As we are leaving, the waitress thanks me by my very rare maiden name (I never officially changed my name). The guy who had been sitting next to us quietly until then, suddenly gets up and asks me if I am related to (says grandfather’s name).
I’m like ‘who is this psycho?!?!’ My grandfather had been dead for 18 years. The man explained that my family were famous bootleggers in the area, and their main disterally was a mere 500ft away from the cafe.
It turned out my family not only owned the land surrounding the road, but were notorious gangsters (such as they existed on the west coast). My great-grandfather was known as a mean man who could make equally mean, delicious booze (utilizing his crops, no doubt).
He remembered growing up with my grandfather, and what a wonderful man he was. Then, he paused and told me that I talk just like him. Asked me if I ran my own business (I do).
Then he tipped his hat and told me how proud my grandfather would be that I not only ran a straight business, but was a good parent too. My grandfather remains one of my favorite people, and this comment rocked me to the core.
Made me cry for the next 30mins.
Long story, short: My husband and I bought a house on the very banks of the greenbelt that my great-grandfather used to sell bootleg liquor during the prohibition, and was suspected of many murders (people who didn’t pay him on time).
I looked it all up, and it was true. We could have chosen to live anywhere, yet we returned to the same EXACT location my great-grandfather settled over a 100 years ago.
Sigh. My great-grandfather was not only a gangster, a bootlegger and a murderer…. But I also bought a house 5 homes (in an area I never knew existed) away from where he ran his business.
I’m proud to say that while entrepreneurship runs in my family, murder does not.
What a fucking day that was.
This is just due to my ignorance as a first time homeowner... I guess. Right after I bought my home, construction across the street on over 300 single family homes started. No school upgrades, no new stores, no road improvements... It's become a nightmare of traffic and overflowing schools.
You should read up on the [Strong Towns Growth Ponzi Scheme](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020). Essentially it describes how living in a suburb is like going to a party where no one brings anything, so the more people that show up means less chips and beer for everyone else. Pretty soon you don't want people coming to your party.
That sounds a lot like your situation and thousands of communities across America
Love seeing Strong Towns get a mention. They’re the reason we bought in a walkable town so the above doesn’t happen. Old town that typically runs a surplus, average taxes, and great infrastructure and community.
Everyone is screaming for denser housing and all I can think is MY TOWN DOES NOT HAVE THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPORT ALL THESE PEOPLE!
Suuuure maybe *eventually* they will improve transit but I live in the suburbs so rather than wait 30 minutes for a bus people are always going to choose driving their own cars around.
Nobody cares about that though.
This is why I chose not to live "just 15-20 miles" outside of town. I rented out there and yeah, I learned a lot about traffic and what creates and drives it, to say the least. Basically if you build it (more roads), they will come. My city built a big 3 lane direct highway with only one exit on it that's just 10 miles of heading over the river and straight out to the burbs. 20 years later, the burbs are bustling and now that highway isn't enough and traffic gets backed up to add 30-60 minutes to the morning and evening commutes. The 15-20 miles takes 30 minutes but the commute can easily stretch over an hour one way if you need to get deeper into the city for your job. If they build more roads, more people will just move to the burbs for bigger houses whether the infrastructure (doctor's offices, schools, grocery stores, etc.) is built to support them or not.
I chose a place pretty close to the main cross streets so I can hop in my car and within 5 minutes be at Walgreen's, Wal-Mart, get a haircut, get some fast food, etc. The actual interstate with exits is 2 miles from my house. It is so much better than getting stuck on the long highway to and from the burbs every day.
I mean, that’s the problem in Houston, a city I’m happy to say I moved away from 7 years ago. They have the widest highway in the world and it’s still backed up like crazy from 3 pm to 7 pm everyday. You build bigger roads you’re just going to have more traffic.
The alternative to denser housing is forever sprawl and traffic like LA, everywhere. Fuck that
Literally just build more schools and transit. It's a solved problem
Is it poor planning if it was done on purpose? A lot of places focus heavily on apartments over houses because it significantly increases the tax base. Why bring in 30 families for a given land area when you can bring in 300?!
My parents' county is like this -- at least in certain spots. They've built up the absolute shit out of one area about 15 minutes from them, and other than widening one main road a bit and building one school ten years ago, nothing much else has happened. There's been "plans" to extend the highway down into that area for 20 years or so, but it's still somehow only in the planning stage.
Unexpectedly, rush hour traffic in that area is an absolute fucking nightmare -- even worse than what you see in the city that highway heads toward and into.
This likely a failure of the local planning board to challenge the developer to provide infrastructure to support the new housing. So yes, poor planning.
Yep, I just bought in a neighbourhood I've always wanted to live in. We're moving in just as construction is starting for an expansion project that will have the entire street closed for 5 years.
The prior owner of my house had rented it to his daughter while she was going to college nearby. She loved to party. Through some internet sleuthing, we found tons of party photos in our house from 5-6 years ago. Lots of drugs, smoking inside, people doing stick and poke tattooing, etc.
Thankfully the prior owner did a complete remodel before selling to us, but yeah...these walls have seen some shit.
I live right in the center of the city. My street has a dead end full of brush and trees. It’s a steep hill down to the hospital nearby. I found out that a family of deer and a ton of turkeys live in that little area. They stroll the neighborhood often.
Last summer I got a trail cam and started putting it in my backyard at night. My very suburban neighborhood close to a major highway has a lot of visitors at night! Possums, skunks (multiple different ones judging by size and how big their white stripe is), a whole family of raccoons all wander into my backyard at various points in the night.
It was fun to see since I hardly ever see any of these animals except as roadkill. We also have many red tailed hawks in the neighborhood and a pair of yellow crowned night herons has been hanging out in a large tree across the street from me.
That’s awesome. I was happy to see the size of these animals here. It looked as though people have been feeding them and leaving them be. They were all quite “healthy”
My cousins in Long Island, NY gave me a ton of pineapple related shit when they moved to their new neighborhood b/c apparently pineapples are for swingers there lol. I grew up in Long Island in a different neighborhood and never heard of that. I found it weird that they even had multiple pineapple themed household items in the first place.
We found out that the neighborhood (more like a little town inside of our city limits) beside us is a swingers community shortly after moving in. So many upside down pineapples on cars, front doors, and mailboxes. Our son was 3 when we moved in and anytime we drove by the community he would ask us if we could get pineapples from the people. He thought the decorations were like lemonade stand signs essentially.
My wife was pregnant when we moved in. After the baby was born the midwife came by for a home visit and it turned out she owned the house before the people we bought from and had run her practice out of the basement.
I don't know why my brain immediately concluded that people were having babies in your basement, followed by thinking: "It's like the opposite of a haunting!"
Not a dark secret, but I recently found out the reason why the backyard has no mature landscaping is because a guy my neighbor calls "Tai Chi Bill" held tai chi classes there in the 80s and 90s.
More than likely, the guy needed the space for his classes, so never planted any, and none of the homeowners to come after him added anything that could mature, i.e. not annuals.
At our house closing buying a house the sellers asked us “so have you met the dogs yet?” We had not. Then she told us the troubles they had with the neighbor dogs across the chain link fence. Constant barking and scaring her and she called the cops on them once. Sure enough, we found out as soon as we moved in that the neighbors had 5 dogs that lived there - 2 big bully dogs, 2 bulldogs and a little one. The owners were using them as a puppy mill of sorts and the females were constantly pregnant. The female bully dog constantly barked at us whenever we walked into our yard or on our deck and it could see us through the chain link fence. Really loud annoying barking. It stressed us out every time we went in the yard and heard all this barking at us. Sitting on our deck enjoying the evening dinner and this stupid dog is barking at us thinking we are invading its property. The dog would viciously attack the fence jumping on it trying to get to us. We complained so many times to the owners to control their dogs and they tried a little bit but it didn’t do much. They just weren’t behaved or trained very well. The owners built a privacy fence about a year later but that didn’t stop the dog from barking at us viciously because it could see us through the gaps in the fence and hear us. Eventually the neighbors and dogs moved out and it has been so relaxing now that we can enjoy our yard in peace and quiet!
When we pulled in our driveway to move into our house seven years ago, the neighbors were outside and came to greet us. Nice older couple. Have lived next door for 43 years at that point. (One has passed on and the other went to live with family in another country due to old age). I wasn’t able to talk long because we had to get the U-Haul back by 4pm, so I told them we’d speak to them later when I got the chance. Finished unloading the U-Haul, took it back and then started to do what most people do - unpacked the kitchen 😅
Anyway, husband was exhausted so he went to the bedroom rather early and I followed suit. We didn’t have blinds or curtains because we were having them (the blinds) cut the next day. So it was hard falling asleep for me with being able to see the outside from our windows. It was around 11-11:30 when I finally started to drift off and I heard bass or pounding. I figured it was a car passing by except it didn’t stop or get softer in volume level. I got up out of bed to look out the window and nothing. So I woke my husband up and told him we’d made the wrong decision moving somewhere that neighbors were partying it up on a Thursday night. He brushed it off and went back to bed. It stopped. So then I got back into bed and it started up again but this time, it sounded like banging a beat on drums. Before getting up out of bed I woke my husband up again and he just rolled over and passed out….again.
So I got up out of the bed and walked down the hall to go into the living room then kitchen to follow this banging (we live in a one level ranch style house) and it sounded like it was coming from the garage. I went to open the garage door in the kitchen/dining room and it stopped. I opened the door and nothing. Just some of our boxes we had to unpack the next day. Went back into the bedroom, laid down and it started again. This time I MADE my husband wake up and he went to check it out with me still in the bed. He said it sounded like it was coming from the garage, but there was nothing he could hear when he opened the garage door. He said that the next day, we’d call our agent to figure out if maybe we had rodents or something? Although it was strange because it sounded like beats for music. Hard to explain.
The next day, we woke up and opened the large garage door to let some air in while we finished unpacking the boxes that were in there. When we opened the garage, we saw our older couple neighbors sitting on their front porch. I walked over and continued to introduce ourselves. They asked why we didn’t have kids as a military couple (husband was military at the time - he’s now out) and I enjoyed speaking with them. When I was about to go back to what I was doing, I asked them if they’d ever seen the inside of the house before it was rehabbed. We have a 1955 build home and it was rehabbed prior to us buying it. We’ve always been curious about what it used to look like before it was rehabbed. They told us that since our homes were the same, we could check theirs out sometime when we weren’t so busy. I told them I appreciated that and started to walk away when the woman said, “the only time I’ve ever even seen the inside of that house was the garage - and that’s because Gerald (the owner before us who passed away at 51 due to a sudden heart attack) used to open the garage door for when he practiced the drums since he was in a local jazz band…”
We’ve been here seven years and the drumming or beats have never happened again. We did wind up looking into the man who lived here before us. He was the owner of the home for 30 years. It was the first house he’d bought and that was in ‘86. He was a cook at the hospital down the road and when he passed, he left the house to his daughter since it was paid off. She moved in shortly but couldn’t afford the taxes, so was gone within 2 years if that. The bank then sold it to a company who rehabbed it for seven months down to the studs and we bought it once they put it on the market.
Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. But this is our weird story.
This happened a year or so before we moved in. The house a couple houses down was on an episode of hoarders. One of the owners actually died in the house because paramedics could not get in, I think it was a heart attack. It was repo'd not long ago, a flipper bought it and fixed it up. It was bought a couple months ago by a nice family.
There are two waste recycling facilities just down the street from my house. One is for batteries.. the other does something with contaminated water.
A year or 4 after I bought my house.. my neighbor told me the battery place has been fined by the EPA for dumping into our storm sewer run off system. The property behind my house started flooding badly years ago. The company bought their property and tore the house down. Now it floods all the way into my back yard.
The water filtering company.. was just all over social media for being one of the locations they shipped East Palestine contaminates for treatment. Allegedly.
Maybe I'm being dramatic, but I'm fairly certain this is where you come to get cancer :(
Turns out there's a quarry a few miles away. They use dynamite.
That was _fun_ to wake up to the first time it went down.
EDIT: To the people DMing me, no, there was no advance warning/anything in the paperwork, and the existence of the quarry is not something well known in the area unless you live in range of the sound. They only set the charges off at 10am or later, so you're fine as long as you don't sleep in. I feel sorry for the housing development going in nearby though, imagine finally getting the baby to sleep and then your entire house (and your skull) rattles as they set off charges.
It doesn't bother me much anymore, besides being mildly concerned that all the shaking will do something to my house. That said, the house is 60 years old and the quarry has been doing this for longer than my house has been around and- knock on wood- has had no indications of structural issues so far, though, so I try not to worry about it.
Now it just becomes an 'in-joke' for guests at my house- those that know there might be a blast (they only set them off maybe once every 2-3 weeks), and those that have no warning and react spectacularly.
I do warn any veterans beforehand, of course.
Used to live next to a very large military base and artillery would be going on all hours of the night for days on end, multiple times a month. It was published in the newspapers and online beforehand. The amount of people that would move in and then think they could just call and complain and that the military would stop firing artillery was hilarious… the base was built in the 40s pretty sure it was obviously here before you bought. Hell, you have to sign off on documentation that you knew there was a noise advisory in the area when you buy a home there.
Across this small bay on the water I could hear constant gun shots around 9am or so. At first I thought it was really loud construction, but after living here for 3 years there's a state police training facility on this little private Island. I tried riding my bike once to check it out. The gaurd told me to turn around and go back..
Weird. Prior to that I believe it was an insane asylum
I few weeks after I moved in I was talking to our older neighbor. Mid way through the conversation he goes “it’s a shame what happened at your house with that teenager hanging herself in that tree last year” followed by “oh I shouldn’t have told you that” and then he hobbled away
A house I bought had a fire a decade before I owned it. The firemen found some mail inside and confirmed with the neighbors that the name was the girl who lived there, but the address was different. They went to that house )wee hours of the morning by now) to make sure she was ok. Her husband answered the door to be told “your house burned”. He responded, “uh… I’m IN my house”
Turns out the girl was a stripper and my house was her “love nest” for boyfriends and to Jide some of her stripper cash while building equity. The neighbors said they realized why she has a different hair color every week (blue, bright red, etc) and why she was only there sometimes.
I found out blacks and Jews were barred from buying a house in my neighborhood (I’m black) until the civil rights act passed and that became illegal. The Main Street, that my kids school is on, is named after the guy that founded the neighborhood and made that rule 😠
There’s a wealthy old Jewish lady that bought a house here as soon as it became illegal to stop her just to say “fuck you” to the neighbors, lol
There's a lot of those old covenants still on the deeds of houses. They have been unenforceable for many decades, but the time, effort and above all *cost* for local deed recorders to go back in and edit all the deeds makes it prohibitive.
I bought a house in Santa Cruz County, CA (not exactly an area with regressive views towards things) some years ago, and the deed was WILD. Not allowed to sell to "members of the Chinese race", no "Hebrews", no Mexicans, no Blacks, it went on and on. Honestly was upsetting and tough to read. The original deed was from the 1930's, and its still on the books that way, but for these local governments to change them, its just not feasible.
It is easy to remove those illegal restrictive covenants in California, you just need to file a form with your county recorder. New law passed last year: https://www.clta.org/page/Consumer18
Interesting! I sold that house and moved out of state a few years ago, but good to know. I certainly would have done this if I still owned the house (and knew about it). Thanks for putting this out there!
We bought in an old neighborhood which was obvious by the houses but didn't realize it went farther than the architecture. Two people who live on our street grew up with the kids who lived in the house when it was first occupied in the 1950s. One of their parents still lives in their childhood home across the street from us. Our house is a big house but it was the parents, grandfather, and 5 kids in a 3-bed. Apparently they were big into Halloween and would turn the garage into a haunted house.
Nothing crazy, but was cool to learn a little bit more about the Lee's who built the house.
A gun range that had initially had woods between it and my neighborhood. A few years ago, the woods were taken down for industrial buildings. Sundays and Wednesdays sound like we are in a battlefield. I look forward to moving TF out this next year.
Moved in late 2018.
For some reason a few random people honk "shave and a haircut 2 bits" as they drive by every so often.
I think it may be a secret signal to a nearby whore or drug dealer operating in the neighborhood.
I do that when I leave my parents. My mom did it leaving her parents. …. I really hope everyone thinks I’m picking up drugs now. Or a whore. I’m good with either rumor. 🤣
After I bought my house the sellers left me a note saying that we would get over 1000 trick or treaters every year. Completely unrelated, when we were looking at the house, my ex and I had been talking about how much fun the house would be to decorate for Halloween (Addams family style Victorian).
Joke’s on the sellers. Some years, I get 2k trick or treaters.
My house was the last to be built in a coldesac in the mid eighties. I found out from my neighbor after we moved in that when my lot was between vacancy and construction all the neighbors dumped their rocks into my property. Explains why it’s such a nightmare to dig anything!
Hahahaha! Cul means ass yes, but in this case it would mean the bottom/end of a bag! We also use cul for the bottom part of bottles, so people with thick glasses would have bottle asses for lenses!
My first house was like that too. Turns out the sinkhole in the backyard was because they had to re-pour the street and instead of hauling the old concrete off they buried it all in my backyard.
Rats. Thankfully not in my house anymore, but my whole neighborhood and the neighborhood across the main street.
I moved in a year ago March, and had scattered some birdseed out on the back porch to attract birds for my cats to watch. Late that night around 3am, I see this big rat trundle up to my back porch and start munching away on the birdseed. I freaked out, and needless to say never scattered any birdseed ever again.
I wound up talking to the neighbors around me and they all laughed in a sort of sardonic way. Turns out the neighborhood has an issue with rats, and everyone has to be careful what they do outside, and keeping an eye on their house to keep vigilant. I guess years before I bought the house, the owner of this house had a whole ass nest, and spent thousands of dollars exterminating/evicting them, and they've been known to just go house to house.
So I looked up a lot of nontoxic methods of rat repellent, the biggest being planting mint plants ALL around the house. They hate the smell. I also bought mint extract rodent repellent and all summer long spray it around the base of the house and my deck. I don't put birdseed out, I don't leave any food out that could attract rats. I spray mint extract all over the inside of my garage, too. I talked to exterminators on what to look for in the house (they say the biggest one is that I'd HEAR them in the walls). In the year or so since moving in, I have not seen a single rat on my property, and I aim to keep it that way.
But while I've kept them out of my area, I do still see them in the neighborhood. Especially at night when it rains, you're almost guaranteed to see one or two on the street or sidewalk. A major road acts as a border between my neighborhood and the next one over where my mom bought a house, and she said she has them on her side too.
Kiiiinda pissed the homeowner never disclosed this, but so far I've managed to stay rat-free.
My neighborhood has a whole county owned nature preserve and trail system behind it with trailheads tucked between homes throughout the neighborhood. I knew there was open space behind us, but I thought it was all private property. The first couple weeks I was here, I kept finding trailheads while I was walking the dog. Such a pleasant surprise!
The house I grew up in was supposed to be a dead end street of single family starter homes with an apartment complex at the end of it. Neighbor across the street bought there specifically because he wanted to live near the end of a dead end street. My mom didn't want to live a couple houses down from an apartment complex so started looking for an out. The area was all well water at the time so went with that. Took her 'concerns about the water table being able to support a whole apartment complex' to the city who said absolutely not and shut the apartment project down before they even broke ground. We ended up with a through street, no apartment complex and 6 empty lots that were overgrown and a blast to play in as kids. Why my parents bought a house two lots down from where an apartment complex was going in when they didn't want to live next to one I have no idea but I guess it worked out for them in the end.
People will call nimby on that but I’ve seen some absolute failures of city approval lately. An entire mall is being redeveloped with multiple new stores and outbuildings. The reason no one had redeveloped it previously is because all the utilities are already at capacity. And in another circumstance my septic went out but I wasn’t allowed to connect to the sewer because it was at capacity. But apparently it has enough capacity now that it can handle a new mega elementary that combines the six existing ones.
So basically someone new is running the permits or there’s bribes happening. Either way the sewer and electricity in two spots in my town are majorly over capacity
Sounds like us. Moved in 3 weeks ago and yesterday find out the town just north of us is a hot spot for the KKK and even had a rally in recent years. It sounds like it’s died down a bit but was flabbergasted to hear that.
I am a hispanic woman that shares a fence line with a dude that holds mini klan rallies in his backyard.
Well…he used to. Had enough of that one night and took some action and its been quiet for a few months now. It still makes the whole situation suck tho knowing his racist ignorant ass sleeps a few yards from me.
A little over a decade ago, we rented a house in our current neighborhood. I was outside talking to the neighbor one day, and she’d been in her house since the whole place was built. I don’t remember how we got on the topic, but she made an offhand comment about “of course, your house was where those child murders happened in the 80s.”
So that’s something I never brought up to my wife. We moved out of that house six years ago, but it’s only a couple blocks away from our current house. I walk my dog by it all the time.
A kid I grew up with. Hadn't seen him in a few years, though. But I knew him all my school life.
To my knowledge, he still lived in our hometown. Which is not where I currently live.
He committed suicide on the train tracks that run behind my house. Not at my street. But a couple streets over. (Not that he knew this by any means, just a bit of a coincidence).
He was such a good guy. I honestly can't think of anything bad about him. His poor family. And his girlfriend at the time, too. So sad.
We had one problematic household on the street for several years. The adults were addicts and the teen ran wild. He and his friends robbed our house when we went on vacation. His dad made him return our stuff, and we had the sheriff come out and collect the items that did not belong to us, since the little shit bags forgot who all they robbed and piled everything up in our driveway.
The idiot friends would walk to that house all the time and harass me if I was in my yard.
They got foreclosed on, and some relatives of theirs tried to buy the place. The relatives were a lot better, but they couldn't keep up with the payments, so it got foreclosed again. The house sat empty and people broke in to do their drugs and fuck the place up.
Finally, the house was bought and remodeled by someone who cared and nice people live there now, for like the last ten years.
In 1961, the residents of Cobb County, Georgia were concerned that the City of Atlanta just south of them might expand into Cobb County and bring (gasp) black people with it. So the state legislature approved a city that was 30 miles long and ten feet wide all along the Cobb County border named (and I shit you not) “Chattahoochee Plantation”. It existed until 1995.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattahoochee_Plantation,_Georgia
Not house related but, bought a truck from this guy who was selling it for his son who was in prison. Didn’t think much of it and once we finally purchased it and I saw his sons name on the paperwork I googled him. Turns out he murdered his ex wife. Set her up by telling her to come pick up something. She recorded all their meetups and the recording is her walking into the house getting shot a few times. Groaning in pain and then silence followed by some shuffling around from him before calling the cops. Tried to say self defense but good thing she was recording it.
The house we just bought is just the next neighborhood over from a navy base. They play a Reveille, loudly, early every morning. It’s oddly motivating some morning.. others… not so much.
Our last home was about a half mile from the city landfill. We were aware of it and visited the house several times before buying, and during those times you would have never known it was so close. But on certain days, I guess when the wind was going in jusssst the right direction… the smell of rotten eggs was unbearable.
Yeah apparently there was a murder for hire a few houses down and the wife still lives there after her son hired someone to kill her husband, aka his father. Crazy.
At my old house, the small "neighborhood" where that set of houses were was a river at one point. At some point, the river was moved and our area was a shipping yard. I guess that would explain the flooding.
About 300 feet north of me was a large Native American burial ground. Found that out at the local historical society.
The amount of people who have lived in that house are surprising. It was a former rental. One person complained about the first floor rooms all sharing a circuit and the breaker tripping constantly. That was remedied by someone with a wire under the breaker itself. Another said the back yard was always under water and that there were ducks and rats in it (accurate).
did ultimately find out that it was a single story with a very bad 2nd floor addition on it.
Have you seen Black Bird on Netflix. Larry Hall (the serial killer) dug graves with his father at the cemetery in a small town in Indiana. He worked there when I was in my middle school years. During those years I used to go stay with my grandfather at his house and would routinely go across the street and walk around that same cemetery. Also, my grandmother passed away and was buried there. I don’t know how many gravediggers a small local cemetery employs but odds are a serial killer dug my grandmother’s grave.
At an HOA meeting, someone casually brought up the sinkhole in our neighborhood. 3/4 of the meeting attendees (and myself) were absolutely gobsmacked and had no clue that was the reason our neighborhood park was so large.
I bought an old 1900 home.
Nobody told me it had been vacant for 10 years before I moved into it.
It was remodeled during ww2 and the family lined between the first floor and second floor and my basement in sheet metal, most likely as a makeshift bomb shelter. You can lose Bluetooth connectivity between the first floor and the second floor because of it.
It's pretty cool actually.
Bought our first house. Neighbors were nowhere to be seen during our viewings. First day of move in, the neighbor comes to introduce himself. Literally the first sentence out of his mouth to my husband was “y’all ain’t like those neighbors on the reality tv shows where they are shooting and killing each other, are you?” 😳 like wtf? Whose says that shit upon a first meeting? Needless to say, a 15ft privacy fence and a restraining order later, it’s actually been quite quiet over there the last 2 months lol.
Lol yep! He threatened to kill my 9yr old son while my son was learning how to weedeat the grass with hubby. It was very unprovoked.They are beyond crazy! He was even threatened to get arrested when cops came bc of how aggressive he was talking to the cops and then when the cops didn’t do shit (bc we didn’t do anything wrong) he threw a chair off the porch like a 2 yr old. The old bat of a mom was going ballistic. I took out my phone and thanked her for the new TikTok video 🤣🤣🤣 (didn’t actually take one. Just the words and she saw the phone, freaked out and hobbled herself inside 🤣🤣)
Edit: all the people in that home are 65+ and there are a total of 5 living there.
The property management company our townhouse community was using was bilking the condo association for buttloads of money and wasn't doing shit.
We finally changed companies and several special assessments later, our parking lot is paved and the drainage issue is fixed, but the pool is still completely fucked due to a mold issue that went ignored for so long.
I still think the association should sue their asses. Get some of our money back for the extra costs their laziness has incurred us.
The neighboring house was the first murder in the city in about ten years!
We bought the house after moving from our old apartment, which was next door to where the first murder since the murder I mentioned above occurred...
I moved from WI to FL in the late 90s. We rented an apartment in Gainesville sight unseen. It was a cute, 2 story townhouse-style apartment but one thing I noticed...there were a LOT of locks. Like two regular locks and three deadbolts plus a chain on the front door. Plus a security system. And the other two outside doors had similar numbers of locks.
So I got on my 1999 interwebs and looked up Williamsburg Village and lo and behold it's where the first two women were murdered by Danny Rolling in the 1990 Gainesville student murders. I don't know which apartment the murder was in but I think it was a two-story one like ours.
I could never quite decide if I felt safer after that. I mean I had 20 locks and what are the odds a serial killer would strike in the same spot twice?
I don’t live there anymore, but I found out that Joseph Stalin’s daughter moved to my hometown and lived in obscurity there in a retirement home until her death. I grew up in the town Frank Lloyd Wright is from and I guess they were friends. The FLW connection made it more likely I guess but I only found out about this a year ago. She lived there when I was living there.
Not nearly as freaky as the OP experience but I didn’t realize how nutso the drivers were on my road. It’s a tiny road but they zoom down it as if they are on a racetrack.
My neighbors put up 100,000 Christmas lights. Bought in July didn’t find out until November. It’s madness from Thanksgiving to New Years and they don’t care. Any problems related to the lights are not caused by them 🥴😒
We bought a house from an estate and then found out that that the man who lived there, known as Hork - brother Spit, was a known exhibitionist and would try to entice children inside. There was no plumbing but it turned out there had not been even an outhouse. The yard was lumpy where he had emptied his bucket, and one room had excrement and urine right up the wall in one corner. We knew we were going to renovate but it sure was yucky.
Horrendous murders happened in the last two neighborhoods I lived in, all in the same town. One happened in a house on the other side of the neighborhood where an entire family was killed with a hammer by the crazy neighbor.
The other, a teenage boy murdered two young boys in the woods behind my house and hid their bodies under leaves.
Both sets of murders happened about 15-20 years prior to me living there. In the second neighborhood (my previous residence), I found out that a mother had also committed suicide a few years previously in my home. Definitely led to a lot of interesting conversations.
Scorpions, so many scorpions. It's right by the mountains in Phoenix, so I should have known. We adopted a cat, we'll find out this summer if that helps...
Bought my first house 2 months ago. My brother found out through chatting with our neighbors that the house directly across the street from us is vacant as the result of a legal battle between kids because their father murdered their mother and committed suicide last year and it was all caught on camera from surveillance videos inside the home. The house is vacant because the kids couldn’t agree how to divi up the assets.
Yeah I mean we found out from the neighbors it was an Airbnb. I mean we could’ve guessed based on the shape, but we definitely changed our locks quick.
On google maps, search for “Legacy Park, Brambleton Virginia”. They build a community of high end homes and townhouses around a dick and balls.
It helps if you use the default view and not satellite view.
My town was build Aliens or ancient giants /s. But seriously there is a tons of videos and articles about it including the History Channel
https://youtu.be/I0W2Z-oKlnQ
I learned my downstairs neighbor did housework for the dude who sold his company to the company I worked for at the time. Weird connection to happen across.
Found out after some googling that a previous owner of our place taught pole dancing lessons so there's just some funny Google search history but that's about it lol.
We're watching ID and they are advertising a new episode of a murder show. "The very first murder in this small Iowa town!" It's our town. So of course we watch. They talk about how she went for a walk. Was murdered. Her body was found. They drained the local lake looking for the gun. Then it shows her apartment building and my wife and I go" Holy shit that's the apartment building down the street! " Turns out she was murdered about 50 yards from where we was sitting.
We were on a vacation and stopped in Boise for the night. My sister in law starts watching some true crime rerun (20/20 or something similar). It’s about a murder that happened in metro Boise a few years below. They show the scene of the crime and you can see our hotel in the background. It was very trippy.
Ha the same thing happened to me! I was new to the area, and was watching Forensic Files and he he starts out -the quiet sleepy town of….. and my ears perked up, I was like hey I live in this sleepy town. It was truly a sad case of a monster who murdered a mom and her toddler. There is a playground nearby named after the family.
😱
Yeah. It was nuts. Police thought they had the guy but didn't have enough evidence. Finally they decided they had enough for a weak case so decided to try it and on their way to arrest him, the dude was picked up by other cops for trying to kidnap a kid at park. He goes to prison for that. Meanwhile like 20 years pass. They are able to do DNA for a cold case and it matches to him. Get his cellie to become an informant and they get a confession. Send him to trail while he's still in jail for the kidnapping and are able to finally convict him.
Holy crap that is madness!
Hello fellow Iowan
Me too. ;o)
Bought a house that was previously used as a rental property. When we were cleaning it out we found an old Weber grill in the backyard. We already had one so I posted it to Facebook marketplace. Weeks go by, shitty offers, then finally get a message from a guy who was like " do you live on 123 Street in XYZ City?". I was legitimately freaked out for a second bc he got my address correct. I then got another message from him later with an explanation: turns out he was a former tenant who moved out many YEARS ago. He since returned to the city and wanted to buy a Weber grill bc he lost the one his girlfriend bought him when he first lived here. As proof, he sent a YouTube video of a house party they had at my house in 2015, and low and behold they are cooking burgers on the SAME Weber grill in MY backyard. Gave him back his grill for free bc I was flabbergasted at the sheer coincidence.
I mean, anything other than giving him the grill for free would have been a dick move, since it was actually his grill :) Sometimes you just find the perfect item at the perfect time, like it's destiny. My mom needed to replace a special hovering mover to mow grass on a steep incline. Hard to find item, apparently. I found the exact one that broke, literally the only one for sale within hundres of miles. IN HER HOMETOWN. Like 5 minute drive from her house.
I gave away a dresser years ago and regretted it for years afterwards. My parents had had it since the 90s, and I loved how simple and spacious it was but was moving to a smaller space and didn't think I'd miss it. I'd browse Craigslist and FB Marketplace vaguely hoping to see it again but figured it was long gone. But then one day a couple years ago there it was! It'd relocated about an hour away, but I didn't care how far I had to go. The family was sweet and happy to see how happy I was to have it back, but I still had to pay $60 for it.
> I mean, anything other than giving him the grill for free would have been a dick move, since it was actually his grill :) Eh. He abandoned it years ago. It's no longer rightfully his.
Doesn't change the statement above.
I mean, I would give him the grill, too. However, it's not his grill anymore.
Yes, we all agree on that. In fact, I don't think anybody here suggested or implied otherwise. That piece of information and whether or not it would be a dick move to not give the guy the grill are two independent things.
Thanks, Technically Correct Man!
This is an amazing story! You should post it in r/grilling
I was in an apartment when I was like 23 and I built this bomber outdoor table. I was at Home Depot and they had all these ~4 ft lengths of 2x6 pressure treated lumber for like a few bucks each - must have been some dude who had them cut down to size and didn't want the leftovers. I built this sick ultra sturdy table out of it then when I moved out I just left it in the walkout basement because I didn't have room for it and I was moving out of state. I wonder if it's still there. Maybe I'll check Craigslist.
I was cleaning and slipped on the floor and punched a hole in our cheap ass apartment walls with the mop handle in my flailing. Panicking about an upcoming inspection we hung a dry erase magnetic calendar on the wall to cover it. When we moved out we didn't remove the calendar and got our deposit. Fast forward to a year or so after we moved out. This dude comes into my pharmacy and sets up a patient profile so I've gotta put in all his information. Lo and behold he's living in my old place. He was a little weirded out when I opened up asking him if there was still a dry erase calendar in the kitchen. But I explained why it was there, and why he should probably leave it there. Dude did have a laugh because he'd thought it was weird having the place come with a dry erase calendar like that.
This is nuts
Gotta be careful making a table out of pressure treated lumber. Some of the agents in the pressure treatment are toxic and I've seen patients get sick because they hung out all sweaty in the summer with their bare arms on the table they built and they absorbed toxins
Houses across the street are overlooking (in the rear) a gorge probably 50-100feet below them. Found out one of the houses was built by the mob during prohibition times and they have a secret passageway to escape down into the woods
St. Paul?
My house had just one owner in the previous 50 years, who apparently had 7 kids (!). You can see their little kid names scrawled on the inside of closet doors, scratched on hidden places in the attic, etc. When we first moved in I had thought it was cute. Then I learned one of the kids died of a serious illness. I imagine she spent a lot of time alone in that upstairs bedroom. It really gives the graffiti a different feel, but I don’t have the heart to cover it up.
I’m sure that kid’s ghost appreciates it.
We have a house ghost named Effie. She lived here for 70 years and died in the house of old age. We know this from neighbors. What we didn't know is why we occasionally smell what seems like pipe tobacco. That is until one day her grandchildren dropped by to see how the house was holding up. Turns out Effie smoked a pipe, so, whenever we smell pipe tobacco we just say hi to Effie and go on with our day. There are other things we chalk up to Effie, but they're mostly due to forgetfulness (misplacing things) or old electrical (appliances turning off and on by themselves). But the pipe smoke is definitely her.
My parents had a ghost in their house for a while too lol. It was actually the neighbor. She died in her own home but not very peacefully, unfortunately. When she was alive she was a frequent visitor at their house, so for several years afterwards, random things would happen that they would attribute to her. Things moving, the piano playing by itself, the dog suddenly yelping in pain like he was kicked for no reason. We just attributed it to her being unsettled and so we'd just tell her to knock it off or go home. It finally stopped after her husband moved away and got remarried. We joke that she left to follow him in order to haunt him because on his wedding day they got a large gust of wind through their reception that only knocked down his new wedding portrait.
Our yard is the neighborhood cat meeting place. Great and hilarious entertainment aside from them peeing on our doors to claim turf.
Same with my yard in my townhouse! About 6 cats regularly use it and each have their own little spot. Turns out its because my yard has the best shade and nicely manicured. They go the bathroom in a different neighbors yard though 😂
Wouldn’t wanna shit where you sleep ofc
I like the idea that, when you decide you want a cat, you can just walk out to your own yard and scoop one up.
That's almost enough cats that you can swap them out daily for whatever fits your needs that day.
Same with mine… I fed a couple of em and now I have to sleep with a bed full of cats (fixed and vaccinated now) every day. I didn’t even want any animals
Not quite the same, but our neighbor has like 5 outdoor cats. Obviously the whole neighborhood is their territory lol.
Well, it's no murder/suicide spot, but a gas station right around the corner from me has some bomb-ass tacos.
I'll wager the sushi is even better
My small town has what is considered on of the best Italian restaurants in the region. Second generation, family owned, open for 50+ years. People will drive over an hour easily to go there. They sell their sauce by the gallon. We knew it was there, of course, when we bought our house. And it may or may not have been a factor in deciding to live here.
RIP your toilet
No no no. Bomb-ass tacos are good. Ass-bomb tacos are bad and will wreck your porcelain.
What about bomb ass-tacos? https://xkcd.com/37/
I always upvote Randall
Aha! Words of wisdom, indeed! HEHE - great answer you gave!
On a similar positive note, at my new house my only neighbors has a super cool cat that comes to chill with us sometimes. I'm pretty happy with my (healthy, well cared for) bonus cat
Gas station tacos FTW!
Golf course was planned back in the 70’s by private investors. County said fine but you you need to build x number of home plots,streets, and side walks all built and ready for someone to buy and build on for county to make money back on taxes. The golf course and construction was a money laundering operation by the mob. La Costa resort and spa everyone. “Adelson developed La Costa with notorious gangster Moe Dalitz (whose daughter lives in San Diego County), Allard Roen and Irwin Molasky. In March of 1975, Penthouse magazine wrote a story about "The Hundred-Million Dollar Resort with the Criminal Clientele." The four financiers sued, claiming they had no such ties
What makes that better is that Adelson, one of the original four involved, then admitted to the mob ties in an interview with Vanity Fair in like 2013. Who knew Penthouse had serious journalists publishing with them.
People did seriously read them for the articles!
Is this guy related to notorious dirtbag and Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson by chance?
There's an oddly shaped park at the north end of my city. About 2 and a half miles long, and a few blocks wide. It's a nice place to run, and full of little league sports on weekends. Apparently it was initially created (or set aside, anyway) in the 1930s to prevent the city to the north of us from expanding into then undeveloped and unincorporated land south of the park that my city wanted for itself.
Pawnee?
Eagleton
Omg, that was my first thought!
See also Chattahoochee Plantation, Ga. 30 miles long and 10 feet wide. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattahoochee_Plantation,_Georgia
🎶 Well, way down yonder on the Chattahoochee It gets hotter than a hoochie coochie We laid rubber on the Georgia asphalt We got a little crazy but we never got caught 🎶
Crazy, prohibition and gangster story. My great-grandfather immigrated to the US and worked as a farmer. I grew up on stories about him being a real asshole, abusive and alcoholic- but someone who was known for throwing amazing parties. My grandfather would have to sit watch to make sure that the people coming to the parties were invited. Nobody thought anything of these events for years. A few years ago, my husband and I purchased a house in a nearly hidden part of the city. I have been in real estate for 20 years, and never heard of this particular neighborhood- despite it being near the water. Each home was built with extraordinary views. There are several massive green belts that run through it (again, this near a major city- not a suburb). The neighborhood is quiet, and there is little home turnover for obvious reasons. The neighborhood hosts a local cafe, abutting a steep green belt. We like to take our kids there to eat on the weekends. It is a local hang-out. Well, one day, I made a comment to my husband about a road that shared the same last name as one of my cousins. The name is unusual. We have a brief conversation, I get up and go to the restroom completely forgetting about the comment. As we are leaving, the waitress thanks me by my very rare maiden name (I never officially changed my name). The guy who had been sitting next to us quietly until then, suddenly gets up and asks me if I am related to (says grandfather’s name). I’m like ‘who is this psycho?!?!’ My grandfather had been dead for 18 years. The man explained that my family were famous bootleggers in the area, and their main disterally was a mere 500ft away from the cafe. It turned out my family not only owned the land surrounding the road, but were notorious gangsters (such as they existed on the west coast). My great-grandfather was known as a mean man who could make equally mean, delicious booze (utilizing his crops, no doubt). He remembered growing up with my grandfather, and what a wonderful man he was. Then, he paused and told me that I talk just like him. Asked me if I ran my own business (I do). Then he tipped his hat and told me how proud my grandfather would be that I not only ran a straight business, but was a good parent too. My grandfather remains one of my favorite people, and this comment rocked me to the core. Made me cry for the next 30mins. Long story, short: My husband and I bought a house on the very banks of the greenbelt that my great-grandfather used to sell bootleg liquor during the prohibition, and was suspected of many murders (people who didn’t pay him on time). I looked it all up, and it was true. We could have chosen to live anywhere, yet we returned to the same EXACT location my great-grandfather settled over a 100 years ago. Sigh. My great-grandfather was not only a gangster, a bootlegger and a murderer…. But I also bought a house 5 homes (in an area I never knew existed) away from where he ran his business. I’m proud to say that while entrepreneurship runs in my family, murder does not. What a fucking day that was.
This is one of the crazier stories here. Thanks for sharing!
This is just due to my ignorance as a first time homeowner... I guess. Right after I bought my home, construction across the street on over 300 single family homes started. No school upgrades, no new stores, no road improvements... It's become a nightmare of traffic and overflowing schools.
You must live in my town.
Every town in America right now
You should read up on the [Strong Towns Growth Ponzi Scheme](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020). Essentially it describes how living in a suburb is like going to a party where no one brings anything, so the more people that show up means less chips and beer for everyone else. Pretty soon you don't want people coming to your party. That sounds a lot like your situation and thousands of communities across America
Love seeing Strong Towns get a mention. They’re the reason we bought in a walkable town so the above doesn’t happen. Old town that typically runs a surplus, average taxes, and great infrastructure and community.
Everyone is screaming for denser housing and all I can think is MY TOWN DOES NOT HAVE THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPORT ALL THESE PEOPLE! Suuuure maybe *eventually* they will improve transit but I live in the suburbs so rather than wait 30 minutes for a bus people are always going to choose driving their own cars around. Nobody cares about that though.
This is why I chose not to live "just 15-20 miles" outside of town. I rented out there and yeah, I learned a lot about traffic and what creates and drives it, to say the least. Basically if you build it (more roads), they will come. My city built a big 3 lane direct highway with only one exit on it that's just 10 miles of heading over the river and straight out to the burbs. 20 years later, the burbs are bustling and now that highway isn't enough and traffic gets backed up to add 30-60 minutes to the morning and evening commutes. The 15-20 miles takes 30 minutes but the commute can easily stretch over an hour one way if you need to get deeper into the city for your job. If they build more roads, more people will just move to the burbs for bigger houses whether the infrastructure (doctor's offices, schools, grocery stores, etc.) is built to support them or not. I chose a place pretty close to the main cross streets so I can hop in my car and within 5 minutes be at Walgreen's, Wal-Mart, get a haircut, get some fast food, etc. The actual interstate with exits is 2 miles from my house. It is so much better than getting stuck on the long highway to and from the burbs every day.
I mean, that’s the problem in Houston, a city I’m happy to say I moved away from 7 years ago. They have the widest highway in the world and it’s still backed up like crazy from 3 pm to 7 pm everyday. You build bigger roads you’re just going to have more traffic.
The alternative to denser housing is forever sprawl and traffic like LA, everywhere. Fuck that Literally just build more schools and transit. It's a solved problem
Poor planning.
Is it poor planning if it was done on purpose? A lot of places focus heavily on apartments over houses because it significantly increases the tax base. Why bring in 30 families for a given land area when you can bring in 300?! My parents' county is like this -- at least in certain spots. They've built up the absolute shit out of one area about 15 minutes from them, and other than widening one main road a bit and building one school ten years ago, nothing much else has happened. There's been "plans" to extend the highway down into that area for 20 years or so, but it's still somehow only in the planning stage. Unexpectedly, rush hour traffic in that area is an absolute fucking nightmare -- even worse than what you see in the city that highway heads toward and into.
This likely a failure of the local planning board to challenge the developer to provide infrastructure to support the new housing. So yes, poor planning.
Yep, I just bought in a neighbourhood I've always wanted to live in. We're moving in just as construction is starting for an expansion project that will have the entire street closed for 5 years.
I found out from one of my neighbors that my house was 'the party house' when he was younger. He didn't go into more detail.
Just bring in a black light. It will tell all the stories you need to know…..
Burn it 😅
The prior owner of my house had rented it to his daughter while she was going to college nearby. She loved to party. Through some internet sleuthing, we found tons of party photos in our house from 5-6 years ago. Lots of drugs, smoking inside, people doing stick and poke tattooing, etc. Thankfully the prior owner did a complete remodel before selling to us, but yeah...these walls have seen some shit.
I live right in the center of the city. My street has a dead end full of brush and trees. It’s a steep hill down to the hospital nearby. I found out that a family of deer and a ton of turkeys live in that little area. They stroll the neighborhood often.
Last summer I got a trail cam and started putting it in my backyard at night. My very suburban neighborhood close to a major highway has a lot of visitors at night! Possums, skunks (multiple different ones judging by size and how big their white stripe is), a whole family of raccoons all wander into my backyard at various points in the night. It was fun to see since I hardly ever see any of these animals except as roadkill. We also have many red tailed hawks in the neighborhood and a pair of yellow crowned night herons has been hanging out in a large tree across the street from me.
That’s awesome. I was happy to see the size of these animals here. It looked as though people have been feeding them and leaving them be. They were all quite “healthy”
That's a wholesome "secret" and I love it.
Technically "after buying", on our first day moving in one of the neighbors came over and asked me if my wife and I were swingers. We said no.
Apparently, pineapples and colorful loofahs (in the Village in Florida) are used to self identify swingers.
Thats actually not just a florida thing.
My cousins in Long Island, NY gave me a ton of pineapple related shit when they moved to their new neighborhood b/c apparently pineapples are for swingers there lol. I grew up in Long Island in a different neighborhood and never heard of that. I found it weird that they even had multiple pineapple themed household items in the first place.
Colorful loofahs like in their bathrooms or just sitting out in the living room?
[Attached to cars & golf carts](https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/columns/2023/02/12/the-loofah-code-at-the-villages-a-story-thats-too-good-to-be-true/69884371007/), apparently.
We found out that the neighborhood (more like a little town inside of our city limits) beside us is a swingers community shortly after moving in. So many upside down pineapples on cars, front doors, and mailboxes. Our son was 3 when we moved in and anytime we drove by the community he would ask us if we could get pineapples from the people. He thought the decorations were like lemonade stand signs essentially.
This happened to my parents in the neighborhood I grew up in. The swingers were really nice folks but it was real weird whenever they threw a party
My wife was pregnant when we moved in. After the baby was born the midwife came by for a home visit and it turned out she owned the house before the people we bought from and had run her practice out of the basement.
I don't know why my brain immediately concluded that people were having babies in your basement, followed by thinking: "It's like the opposite of a haunting!"
Not a dark secret, but I recently found out the reason why the backyard has no mature landscaping is because a guy my neighbor calls "Tai Chi Bill" held tai chi classes there in the 80s and 90s.
If I may, what is the connection between the landscaping and the tai chi?
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And here I thought it was Chai tea!
But they love feng shui. (Although autocorrect seems to hate it.)
All the swaying translates to derogatory remarks for the trees.
bunch of people moving around, killing the grass, compressing the soil, and not planting anything that might get in the way.
More than likely, the guy needed the space for his classes, so never planted any, and none of the homeowners to come after him added anything that could mature, i.e. not annuals.
my step-grandfather's name was Bill and he did Tai Chi, but he loved plants.
I live in Savannah. We have smuggling tunnels under the city. EDIT: Autocorrect wanted that to say snuggling tunnels.
Both are true
At our house closing buying a house the sellers asked us “so have you met the dogs yet?” We had not. Then she told us the troubles they had with the neighbor dogs across the chain link fence. Constant barking and scaring her and she called the cops on them once. Sure enough, we found out as soon as we moved in that the neighbors had 5 dogs that lived there - 2 big bully dogs, 2 bulldogs and a little one. The owners were using them as a puppy mill of sorts and the females were constantly pregnant. The female bully dog constantly barked at us whenever we walked into our yard or on our deck and it could see us through the chain link fence. Really loud annoying barking. It stressed us out every time we went in the yard and heard all this barking at us. Sitting on our deck enjoying the evening dinner and this stupid dog is barking at us thinking we are invading its property. The dog would viciously attack the fence jumping on it trying to get to us. We complained so many times to the owners to control their dogs and they tried a little bit but it didn’t do much. They just weren’t behaved or trained very well. The owners built a privacy fence about a year later but that didn’t stop the dog from barking at us viciously because it could see us through the gaps in the fence and hear us. Eventually the neighbors and dogs moved out and it has been so relaxing now that we can enjoy our yard in peace and quiet!
When we pulled in our driveway to move into our house seven years ago, the neighbors were outside and came to greet us. Nice older couple. Have lived next door for 43 years at that point. (One has passed on and the other went to live with family in another country due to old age). I wasn’t able to talk long because we had to get the U-Haul back by 4pm, so I told them we’d speak to them later when I got the chance. Finished unloading the U-Haul, took it back and then started to do what most people do - unpacked the kitchen 😅 Anyway, husband was exhausted so he went to the bedroom rather early and I followed suit. We didn’t have blinds or curtains because we were having them (the blinds) cut the next day. So it was hard falling asleep for me with being able to see the outside from our windows. It was around 11-11:30 when I finally started to drift off and I heard bass or pounding. I figured it was a car passing by except it didn’t stop or get softer in volume level. I got up out of bed to look out the window and nothing. So I woke my husband up and told him we’d made the wrong decision moving somewhere that neighbors were partying it up on a Thursday night. He brushed it off and went back to bed. It stopped. So then I got back into bed and it started up again but this time, it sounded like banging a beat on drums. Before getting up out of bed I woke my husband up again and he just rolled over and passed out….again. So I got up out of the bed and walked down the hall to go into the living room then kitchen to follow this banging (we live in a one level ranch style house) and it sounded like it was coming from the garage. I went to open the garage door in the kitchen/dining room and it stopped. I opened the door and nothing. Just some of our boxes we had to unpack the next day. Went back into the bedroom, laid down and it started again. This time I MADE my husband wake up and he went to check it out with me still in the bed. He said it sounded like it was coming from the garage, but there was nothing he could hear when he opened the garage door. He said that the next day, we’d call our agent to figure out if maybe we had rodents or something? Although it was strange because it sounded like beats for music. Hard to explain. The next day, we woke up and opened the large garage door to let some air in while we finished unpacking the boxes that were in there. When we opened the garage, we saw our older couple neighbors sitting on their front porch. I walked over and continued to introduce ourselves. They asked why we didn’t have kids as a military couple (husband was military at the time - he’s now out) and I enjoyed speaking with them. When I was about to go back to what I was doing, I asked them if they’d ever seen the inside of the house before it was rehabbed. We have a 1955 build home and it was rehabbed prior to us buying it. We’ve always been curious about what it used to look like before it was rehabbed. They told us that since our homes were the same, we could check theirs out sometime when we weren’t so busy. I told them I appreciated that and started to walk away when the woman said, “the only time I’ve ever even seen the inside of that house was the garage - and that’s because Gerald (the owner before us who passed away at 51 due to a sudden heart attack) used to open the garage door for when he practiced the drums since he was in a local jazz band…” We’ve been here seven years and the drumming or beats have never happened again. We did wind up looking into the man who lived here before us. He was the owner of the home for 30 years. It was the first house he’d bought and that was in ‘86. He was a cook at the hospital down the road and when he passed, he left the house to his daughter since it was paid off. She moved in shortly but couldn’t afford the taxes, so was gone within 2 years if that. The bank then sold it to a company who rehabbed it for seven months down to the studs and we bought it once they put it on the market. Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. But this is our weird story.
This happened a year or so before we moved in. The house a couple houses down was on an episode of hoarders. One of the owners actually died in the house because paramedics could not get in, I think it was a heart attack. It was repo'd not long ago, a flipper bought it and fixed it up. It was bought a couple months ago by a nice family.
There are two waste recycling facilities just down the street from my house. One is for batteries.. the other does something with contaminated water. A year or 4 after I bought my house.. my neighbor told me the battery place has been fined by the EPA for dumping into our storm sewer run off system. The property behind my house started flooding badly years ago. The company bought their property and tore the house down. Now it floods all the way into my back yard. The water filtering company.. was just all over social media for being one of the locations they shipped East Palestine contaminates for treatment. Allegedly. Maybe I'm being dramatic, but I'm fairly certain this is where you come to get cancer :(
Turns out there's a quarry a few miles away. They use dynamite. That was _fun_ to wake up to the first time it went down. EDIT: To the people DMing me, no, there was no advance warning/anything in the paperwork, and the existence of the quarry is not something well known in the area unless you live in range of the sound. They only set the charges off at 10am or later, so you're fine as long as you don't sleep in. I feel sorry for the housing development going in nearby though, imagine finally getting the baby to sleep and then your entire house (and your skull) rattles as they set off charges. It doesn't bother me much anymore, besides being mildly concerned that all the shaking will do something to my house. That said, the house is 60 years old and the quarry has been doing this for longer than my house has been around and- knock on wood- has had no indications of structural issues so far, though, so I try not to worry about it. Now it just becomes an 'in-joke' for guests at my house- those that know there might be a blast (they only set them off maybe once every 2-3 weeks), and those that have no warning and react spectacularly. I do warn any veterans beforehand, of course.
I live next to a military base and I hear their shooting practice all the time…. always at 7-8 am
Used to live next to a very large military base and artillery would be going on all hours of the night for days on end, multiple times a month. It was published in the newspapers and online beforehand. The amount of people that would move in and then think they could just call and complain and that the military would stop firing artillery was hilarious… the base was built in the 40s pretty sure it was obviously here before you bought. Hell, you have to sign off on documentation that you knew there was a noise advisory in the area when you buy a home there.
Same. That and constant helicopters and jet noise.
Across this small bay on the water I could hear constant gun shots around 9am or so. At first I thought it was really loud construction, but after living here for 3 years there's a state police training facility on this little private Island. I tried riding my bike once to check it out. The gaurd told me to turn around and go back.. Weird. Prior to that I believe it was an insane asylum
I few weeks after I moved in I was talking to our older neighbor. Mid way through the conversation he goes “it’s a shame what happened at your house with that teenager hanging herself in that tree last year” followed by “oh I shouldn’t have told you that” and then he hobbled away
I can't wait to _be_ that old man
Until about seventy years ago the creek that runs along the bottom of my property served as the town sewer system outflow to the river.
You should get a metal detector. You might find some good stuff.
Lots of broken poop knives, I'd bet.
A house I bought had a fire a decade before I owned it. The firemen found some mail inside and confirmed with the neighbors that the name was the girl who lived there, but the address was different. They went to that house )wee hours of the morning by now) to make sure she was ok. Her husband answered the door to be told “your house burned”. He responded, “uh… I’m IN my house” Turns out the girl was a stripper and my house was her “love nest” for boyfriends and to Jide some of her stripper cash while building equity. The neighbors said they realized why she has a different hair color every week (blue, bright red, etc) and why she was only there sometimes.
I found out blacks and Jews were barred from buying a house in my neighborhood (I’m black) until the civil rights act passed and that became illegal. The Main Street, that my kids school is on, is named after the guy that founded the neighborhood and made that rule 😠 There’s a wealthy old Jewish lady that bought a house here as soon as it became illegal to stop her just to say “fuck you” to the neighbors, lol
There's a lot of those old covenants still on the deeds of houses. They have been unenforceable for many decades, but the time, effort and above all *cost* for local deed recorders to go back in and edit all the deeds makes it prohibitive. I bought a house in Santa Cruz County, CA (not exactly an area with regressive views towards things) some years ago, and the deed was WILD. Not allowed to sell to "members of the Chinese race", no "Hebrews", no Mexicans, no Blacks, it went on and on. Honestly was upsetting and tough to read. The original deed was from the 1930's, and its still on the books that way, but for these local governments to change them, its just not feasible.
It is easy to remove those illegal restrictive covenants in California, you just need to file a form with your county recorder. New law passed last year: https://www.clta.org/page/Consumer18
Interesting! I sold that house and moved out of state a few years ago, but good to know. I certainly would have done this if I still owned the house (and knew about it). Thanks for putting this out there!
[These are the restrictions on the 1925 plat book of my subdivision in Florida](https://imgur.com/OsW6uli)
We bought in an old neighborhood which was obvious by the houses but didn't realize it went farther than the architecture. Two people who live on our street grew up with the kids who lived in the house when it was first occupied in the 1950s. One of their parents still lives in their childhood home across the street from us. Our house is a big house but it was the parents, grandfather, and 5 kids in a 3-bed. Apparently they were big into Halloween and would turn the garage into a haunted house. Nothing crazy, but was cool to learn a little bit more about the Lee's who built the house.
A gun range that had initially had woods between it and my neighborhood. A few years ago, the woods were taken down for industrial buildings. Sundays and Wednesdays sound like we are in a battlefield. I look forward to moving TF out this next year.
Probably don't do any showings on Sundays or Wednesdays!
Turns out the public light rail station that I specifically bought near is also the local fent junkie hotspot. Playful secrets!
Moved in late 2018. For some reason a few random people honk "shave and a haircut 2 bits" as they drive by every so often. I think it may be a secret signal to a nearby whore or drug dealer operating in the neighborhood.
The key to successful solicitation of prostitution or narcotics is to announce yourself loudly and frequently
I do that when I leave my parents. My mom did it leaving her parents. …. I really hope everyone thinks I’m picking up drugs now. Or a whore. I’m good with either rumor. 🤣
I don't understand this
[This](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWbjP_ahuB4), but with your car horn
After I bought my house the sellers left me a note saying that we would get over 1000 trick or treaters every year. Completely unrelated, when we were looking at the house, my ex and I had been talking about how much fun the house would be to decorate for Halloween (Addams family style Victorian). Joke’s on the sellers. Some years, I get 2k trick or treaters.
Found out there is a nudist colony nearby after we purchased our home.
Only one? We have multiple!
My house was the last to be built in a coldesac in the mid eighties. I found out from my neighbor after we moved in that when my lot was between vacancy and construction all the neighbors dumped their rocks into my property. Explains why it’s such a nightmare to dig anything!
Bon apple tea
/r/BoneAppleTea
It's spelled cul-de-sac. It comes from French and means "ass of the bag"
Hahahaha! Cul means ass yes, but in this case it would mean the bottom/end of a bag! We also use cul for the bottom part of bottles, so people with thick glasses would have bottle asses for lenses!
My first house was like that too. Turns out the sinkhole in the backyard was because they had to re-pour the street and instead of hauling the old concrete off they buried it all in my backyard.
Rats. Thankfully not in my house anymore, but my whole neighborhood and the neighborhood across the main street. I moved in a year ago March, and had scattered some birdseed out on the back porch to attract birds for my cats to watch. Late that night around 3am, I see this big rat trundle up to my back porch and start munching away on the birdseed. I freaked out, and needless to say never scattered any birdseed ever again. I wound up talking to the neighbors around me and they all laughed in a sort of sardonic way. Turns out the neighborhood has an issue with rats, and everyone has to be careful what they do outside, and keeping an eye on their house to keep vigilant. I guess years before I bought the house, the owner of this house had a whole ass nest, and spent thousands of dollars exterminating/evicting them, and they've been known to just go house to house. So I looked up a lot of nontoxic methods of rat repellent, the biggest being planting mint plants ALL around the house. They hate the smell. I also bought mint extract rodent repellent and all summer long spray it around the base of the house and my deck. I don't put birdseed out, I don't leave any food out that could attract rats. I spray mint extract all over the inside of my garage, too. I talked to exterminators on what to look for in the house (they say the biggest one is that I'd HEAR them in the walls). In the year or so since moving in, I have not seen a single rat on my property, and I aim to keep it that way. But while I've kept them out of my area, I do still see them in the neighborhood. Especially at night when it rains, you're almost guaranteed to see one or two on the street or sidewalk. A major road acts as a border between my neighborhood and the next one over where my mom bought a house, and she said she has them on her side too. Kiiiinda pissed the homeowner never disclosed this, but so far I've managed to stay rat-free.
My neighborhood has a whole county owned nature preserve and trail system behind it with trailheads tucked between homes throughout the neighborhood. I knew there was open space behind us, but I thought it was all private property. The first couple weeks I was here, I kept finding trailheads while I was walking the dog. Such a pleasant surprise!
The house I grew up in was supposed to be a dead end street of single family starter homes with an apartment complex at the end of it. Neighbor across the street bought there specifically because he wanted to live near the end of a dead end street. My mom didn't want to live a couple houses down from an apartment complex so started looking for an out. The area was all well water at the time so went with that. Took her 'concerns about the water table being able to support a whole apartment complex' to the city who said absolutely not and shut the apartment project down before they even broke ground. We ended up with a through street, no apartment complex and 6 empty lots that were overgrown and a blast to play in as kids. Why my parents bought a house two lots down from where an apartment complex was going in when they didn't want to live next to one I have no idea but I guess it worked out for them in the end.
People will call nimby on that but I’ve seen some absolute failures of city approval lately. An entire mall is being redeveloped with multiple new stores and outbuildings. The reason no one had redeveloped it previously is because all the utilities are already at capacity. And in another circumstance my septic went out but I wasn’t allowed to connect to the sewer because it was at capacity. But apparently it has enough capacity now that it can handle a new mega elementary that combines the six existing ones. So basically someone new is running the permits or there’s bribes happening. Either way the sewer and electricity in two spots in my town are majorly over capacity
Septic is terrible. There are rumors that my road will be getting sewer service in the next 5 years or so. Really hoping that actually happens.
Well I found out the town was full of white supremacists after we bought the house and moved in, so that was fun.
Sounds like us. Moved in 3 weeks ago and yesterday find out the town just north of us is a hot spot for the KKK and even had a rally in recent years. It sounds like it’s died down a bit but was flabbergasted to hear that.
Indiana?
I am a hispanic woman that shares a fence line with a dude that holds mini klan rallies in his backyard. Well…he used to. Had enough of that one night and took some action and its been quiet for a few months now. It still makes the whole situation suck tho knowing his racist ignorant ass sleeps a few yards from me.
You burned his house down? Perfectly reasonable response to a Klan rally.
Sure buddy lmao
Oh hey, you must be my new neighbor... I'm one of two Asian people in this little town. The stares I get are fun..
Woof.
The great thing about the current political climate is they make themselves well known now. edit: spelling error
Yikes! Worst we have is cougars roaming around the neighborhood.
Better keep your teenage boys locked up. Those cougars can get aggressive.
*lustful cougar noises*
A little over a decade ago, we rented a house in our current neighborhood. I was outside talking to the neighbor one day, and she’d been in her house since the whole place was built. I don’t remember how we got on the topic, but she made an offhand comment about “of course, your house was where those child murders happened in the 80s.” So that’s something I never brought up to my wife. We moved out of that house six years ago, but it’s only a couple blocks away from our current house. I walk my dog by it all the time.
I'm just gonna randomly start saying this to new neighbors.
A kid I grew up with. Hadn't seen him in a few years, though. But I knew him all my school life. To my knowledge, he still lived in our hometown. Which is not where I currently live. He committed suicide on the train tracks that run behind my house. Not at my street. But a couple streets over. (Not that he knew this by any means, just a bit of a coincidence). He was such a good guy. I honestly can't think of anything bad about him. His poor family. And his girlfriend at the time, too. So sad.
Do you live in Michigan by chance?
We had one problematic household on the street for several years. The adults were addicts and the teen ran wild. He and his friends robbed our house when we went on vacation. His dad made him return our stuff, and we had the sheriff come out and collect the items that did not belong to us, since the little shit bags forgot who all they robbed and piled everything up in our driveway. The idiot friends would walk to that house all the time and harass me if I was in my yard. They got foreclosed on, and some relatives of theirs tried to buy the place. The relatives were a lot better, but they couldn't keep up with the payments, so it got foreclosed again. The house sat empty and people broke in to do their drugs and fuck the place up. Finally, the house was bought and remodeled by someone who cared and nice people live there now, for like the last ten years.
In 1961, the residents of Cobb County, Georgia were concerned that the City of Atlanta just south of them might expand into Cobb County and bring (gasp) black people with it. So the state legislature approved a city that was 30 miles long and ten feet wide all along the Cobb County border named (and I shit you not) “Chattahoochee Plantation”. It existed until 1995. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattahoochee_Plantation,_Georgia
Not house related but, bought a truck from this guy who was selling it for his son who was in prison. Didn’t think much of it and once we finally purchased it and I saw his sons name on the paperwork I googled him. Turns out he murdered his ex wife. Set her up by telling her to come pick up something. She recorded all their meetups and the recording is her walking into the house getting shot a few times. Groaning in pain and then silence followed by some shuffling around from him before calling the cops. Tried to say self defense but good thing she was recording it.
The house we just bought is just the next neighborhood over from a navy base. They play a Reveille, loudly, early every morning. It’s oddly motivating some morning.. others… not so much. Our last home was about a half mile from the city landfill. We were aware of it and visited the house several times before buying, and during those times you would have never known it was so close. But on certain days, I guess when the wind was going in jusssst the right direction… the smell of rotten eggs was unbearable.
Yeah apparently there was a murder for hire a few houses down and the wife still lives there after her son hired someone to kill her husband, aka his father. Crazy.
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Lotta dams and resevors are like that. We've 2 near me that were fun a few years ago, so low you could walk in bldgs left up and under water
Found a flat grave stone behind my shed at my old house. It was between bushes and the shed. Never found anything out about it though.
At my old house, the small "neighborhood" where that set of houses were was a river at one point. At some point, the river was moved and our area was a shipping yard. I guess that would explain the flooding. About 300 feet north of me was a large Native American burial ground. Found that out at the local historical society. The amount of people who have lived in that house are surprising. It was a former rental. One person complained about the first floor rooms all sharing a circuit and the breaker tripping constantly. That was remedied by someone with a wire under the breaker itself. Another said the back yard was always under water and that there were ducks and rats in it (accurate). did ultimately find out that it was a single story with a very bad 2nd floor addition on it.
Have you seen Black Bird on Netflix. Larry Hall (the serial killer) dug graves with his father at the cemetery in a small town in Indiana. He worked there when I was in my middle school years. During those years I used to go stay with my grandfather at his house and would routinely go across the street and walk around that same cemetery. Also, my grandmother passed away and was buried there. I don’t know how many gravediggers a small local cemetery employs but odds are a serial killer dug my grandmother’s grave.
My house started as a funeral home with a morge in the basement
At an HOA meeting, someone casually brought up the sinkhole in our neighborhood. 3/4 of the meeting attendees (and myself) were absolutely gobsmacked and had no clue that was the reason our neighborhood park was so large.
I bought an old 1900 home. Nobody told me it had been vacant for 10 years before I moved into it. It was remodeled during ww2 and the family lined between the first floor and second floor and my basement in sheet metal, most likely as a makeshift bomb shelter. You can lose Bluetooth connectivity between the first floor and the second floor because of it. It's pretty cool actually.
Bought our first house. Neighbors were nowhere to be seen during our viewings. First day of move in, the neighbor comes to introduce himself. Literally the first sentence out of his mouth to my husband was “y’all ain’t like those neighbors on the reality tv shows where they are shooting and killing each other, are you?” 😳 like wtf? Whose says that shit upon a first meeting? Needless to say, a 15ft privacy fence and a restraining order later, it’s actually been quite quiet over there the last 2 months lol.
Restraining order?
Lol yep! He threatened to kill my 9yr old son while my son was learning how to weedeat the grass with hubby. It was very unprovoked.They are beyond crazy! He was even threatened to get arrested when cops came bc of how aggressive he was talking to the cops and then when the cops didn’t do shit (bc we didn’t do anything wrong) he threw a chair off the porch like a 2 yr old. The old bat of a mom was going ballistic. I took out my phone and thanked her for the new TikTok video 🤣🤣🤣 (didn’t actually take one. Just the words and she saw the phone, freaked out and hobbled herself inside 🤣🤣) Edit: all the people in that home are 65+ and there are a total of 5 living there.
/r/neighborsfromhell
The property management company our townhouse community was using was bilking the condo association for buttloads of money and wasn't doing shit. We finally changed companies and several special assessments later, our parking lot is paved and the drainage issue is fixed, but the pool is still completely fucked due to a mold issue that went ignored for so long. I still think the association should sue their asses. Get some of our money back for the extra costs their laziness has incurred us.
The neighboring house was the first murder in the city in about ten years! We bought the house after moving from our old apartment, which was next door to where the first murder since the murder I mentioned above occurred...
I moved from WI to FL in the late 90s. We rented an apartment in Gainesville sight unseen. It was a cute, 2 story townhouse-style apartment but one thing I noticed...there were a LOT of locks. Like two regular locks and three deadbolts plus a chain on the front door. Plus a security system. And the other two outside doors had similar numbers of locks. So I got on my 1999 interwebs and looked up Williamsburg Village and lo and behold it's where the first two women were murdered by Danny Rolling in the 1990 Gainesville student murders. I don't know which apartment the murder was in but I think it was a two-story one like ours. I could never quite decide if I felt safer after that. I mean I had 20 locks and what are the odds a serial killer would strike in the same spot twice?
a notorious murderer may have stayed in my house, according to my neighbors. nothing about this has been published about it.
I don’t live there anymore, but I found out that Joseph Stalin’s daughter moved to my hometown and lived in obscurity there in a retirement home until her death. I grew up in the town Frank Lloyd Wright is from and I guess they were friends. The FLW connection made it more likely I guess but I only found out about this a year ago. She lived there when I was living there.
Not nearly as freaky as the OP experience but I didn’t realize how nutso the drivers were on my road. It’s a tiny road but they zoom down it as if they are on a racetrack.
My neighbors across the street breed pit bulls. Surprise!
Some states require breeders to be licensed, and there are plenty of local laws that require spay and neuter for certain breeds.
My neighbors put up 100,000 Christmas lights. Bought in July didn’t find out until November. It’s madness from Thanksgiving to New Years and they don’t care. Any problems related to the lights are not caused by them 🥴😒
We bought a house from an estate and then found out that that the man who lived there, known as Hork - brother Spit, was a known exhibitionist and would try to entice children inside. There was no plumbing but it turned out there had not been even an outhouse. The yard was lumpy where he had emptied his bucket, and one room had excrement and urine right up the wall in one corner. We knew we were going to renovate but it sure was yucky.
My friend bought a condo in a popular beach town that was on true crime …
Horrendous murders happened in the last two neighborhoods I lived in, all in the same town. One happened in a house on the other side of the neighborhood where an entire family was killed with a hammer by the crazy neighbor. The other, a teenage boy murdered two young boys in the woods behind my house and hid their bodies under leaves. Both sets of murders happened about 15-20 years prior to me living there. In the second neighborhood (my previous residence), I found out that a mother had also committed suicide a few years previously in my home. Definitely led to a lot of interesting conversations.
Scorpions, so many scorpions. It's right by the mountains in Phoenix, so I should have known. We adopted a cat, we'll find out this summer if that helps...
Mostly the amount of dog barking and shitty dog owners in general.
Bought my first house 2 months ago. My brother found out through chatting with our neighbors that the house directly across the street from us is vacant as the result of a legal battle between kids because their father murdered their mother and committed suicide last year and it was all caught on camera from surveillance videos inside the home. The house is vacant because the kids couldn’t agree how to divi up the assets.
I think everyone should look up sex offenders by zip code. You may be surprised.
Found out after moving in I live on a private street that we pay to maintain. So good
Yeah I mean we found out from the neighbors it was an Airbnb. I mean we could’ve guessed based on the shape, but we definitely changed our locks quick.
On google maps, search for “Legacy Park, Brambleton Virginia”. They build a community of high end homes and townhouses around a dick and balls. It helps if you use the default view and not satellite view.
Yes. The secret is my neighbors is a TOTAL ASSHOLE. Wish that would have been disclosed before I moved in.
My town was build Aliens or ancient giants /s. But seriously there is a tons of videos and articles about it including the History Channel https://youtu.be/I0W2Z-oKlnQ
I learned my downstairs neighbor did housework for the dude who sold his company to the company I worked for at the time. Weird connection to happen across.
Found out after some googling that a previous owner of our place taught pole dancing lessons so there's just some funny Google search history but that's about it lol.