Let's Not Meet Again

Neighbor From Hell

I grew up in a neighborhood that didn't have many kids. There were only some teenagers across the street who would humor me sometimes and the two sisters next door.

At a glance, their house looked normal enough. A playhouse, a swingset, and an inflatable pool during the summer.

The older of the two girls, we'll call her Jill, was my age, while her sister was two years younger than us. We'll refer to her as Mary. You could tell when they were playing outside that maybe they weren't the best kids to be hanging around with, but when they're the only options for friends, you kind of have to make do.

Jill and I were pretty close, but she would get angry for no apparent reason and end up shouting at me. I'd never really had any other friends, though, so I just assumed it was normal. A few times, she would push me into the spiked part of her chain-link fence, and I would wind up with bruises all down my back.

But that was far from the worst of my problems.

Jill had her anger issues, yes. But it was Mary who really concerned both me and my parents. More than once, I'd found things in their house that belonged to me, that had been locked in my shed. Or worse, in my house. Even taken out of my own bedroom. Lucky for me, my mom was really careful about this kind of stuff, and always wrote our last name on things so you would only find it if you were looking. So I managed to get most of it back.

It was summer, and I was about nine when my mom was cleaning the tank we kept my hermit crabs in, so I had them outside in a small travel tank. Seeing me outside, Jill and Mary asked me if I wanted to come play. I'll admit, I was kind of a showoff back then, and felt this was a perfect opportunity to boast about my neat pets.

Jill had had plans to go have lunch with her grandmother, so Mary and I were left alone. She'd always given me bad vibes, but as a kid, you tend not to pay very much attention to that. That was when my mom called over the fence and said that she had to run into work for about an hour, and I had to go with her. Mary offered to look after my hermit crabs while I was gone, and being the stupid kid I was, I agreed.

When I got back, there was only one crab in the tank. The other, Mary claimed, had run away.

In case you don't know, hermit crabs aren't exactly the fastest pet out there.

It wasn't until about two years later that we were playing hide-and-seek, and I found the mutilated corpse of a hermit crab in their garage, lying next to the shell which had clearly belonged to mine. Along with remains of the latest cat they had buried.

As the years went on, things only got worse. My cats were both allowed outside, and one day we found one with a belt around her neck. I wanted to pretend it wasn't Mary, but there were only so many glittery purple belts in the town.

There are a lot of toads around, and when you're a kid in the 90's, finding one is the highlight of your week. Especially for Mary. An avid Brittney Spears fan, she was known for standing on her front porch and singing along to Toxic for hours on end. Once, we found a toad in my mom's garden. We had some tent stakes left outside, and Mary decided to help herself to one. What I saw still haunts my memory.

She took the toad and stuck the tent stake down its throat while it was still alive, using it as a microphone. I begged her to stop, but she only sang louder as though to drown me out. Eventually she got bored and took the stake out, noticing the blood on the end.

She said that this meant that the toad was dying, so she proceeded to bury it alive. My dad came out then, having heard my pleas. When he realized what was going on, he told her to stop, that she couldn't do that to an innocent animal. To which she replied, "I'll do whatever I want" and stomped on it.

They moved out when I was in high school, and a new family lives in their house. They're nice; A couple with two foster kids. The little boy just turned five, and we sometimes pay him to come over and leave some food on the porch for the cats when we go away for a weekend.

When they first moved in, my mom was quick to try and make friends. I've always had pretty bad anxiety issues, so I wasn't very pleased when she made me, too. I happened to mention the last people who lived in the house, and noticed that my mom seemed to get a little uncomfortable at this.

When we went back inside, mom sat me down. She said that since I was older-- Sixteen at the time-- and it didn't seem like it would be a problem anymore, she had something to tell me.

Turns out, when I was really little, Mary had actually been one to bite. This didn't surprise me much. I remembered it a bit, and there are lots of kids that do that. But then she went on to ask if I remembered the incident with the shovel. I told her no, honestly wondering what the hell she was talking about.

When I was about five, Mary three, she had found the spade of a broken metal shovel somewhere, probably in their garage. I'd been playing with Jill in their yard that day, and mom was shocked when she heard me screaming in terror, especially because I was always a quiet kid. When she looked, she saw Mary chasing me around, trying to slam the shovel over my head. We didn't know it at the time, but I have a blood pressure condition which makes me get dehydrated extremely easily, and I was on the verge of losing consciousness by the time I finally screamed for help. She also told me that only a couple months prior, she'd run into their mother at the store, where she'd informed my mom that Mary had been sent to a home for mentally ill children, and that when she had lived at home, she had kept a steak knife under her pillow in case Mary ever threatened her.

I'm not sure why I didn't remember the shovel incident, be it because of my young age or trauma. But I do have vague memories of it now that my mom told me, and now that I'm older, I'm less confused and more horrified as I think of all the pets that they had that died seemingly out of nowhere. I can remember at least two hamsters, four fish, a dog, and six cats, one of which had seven kittens, one of which survived to young adulthood. There were probably more, but I try not to think about it.

I'm in college on the other side of the state now, but every so often I'll see a post on social media from Jill. She never mentions her sister, but according to their mother, Mary still asks about me sometimes when they go to visit her. Sometimes when I'm at home, I'm afraid I'll look out the window and see her face, despite my bedroom being on the second floor. I flinch every time someone pretends to throw something or take a swing at me, and hearing even joyful, playful screams makes my heart race.

I'm a neuroatypical psychology major, so I hate to paint mentally ill people in a negative light or make them out to be subhuman monsters meant to be feared. I know a lot of people who suffer with mental illness, and they are some of the kindest, gentlest people I know. But every so often, there's one that breaks that pattern and lives up to all the ablest stereotypes you can think of.

So, former neighbor who probably caused my paranoia, let's not meet.