I’m not a vengeful person so I’ve never done anything to retaliate against even my worst neighbor (who was a drug dealer, wife beater, & attempted murderer), but I did get some sense of schadenfreude from karmic retribution. He had a major heart attack & they had to cut him wide open leaving a huge scar. He also developed Parkinson’s and has been too unwell to come around and steal from me anymore. I also made sure the police knew his correct address (he kept fraudulently listing mine so they would come around harassing me & trying to intimidate me thinking he was hiding in my house).

I also got a chuckle when my horse broke loose (from where my neighbor had cut my fence to come steal from me) and got into his yard & busted in to his feed (and likely knocked over his drug barrels) & he called me freaking out at 3am. I don’t think my “apology” sounded even remotely sincere.

I suppose the closest I came to revenge was when he had left his dogs tied up in MY yard— 20 dogs (he did dogfighting) without my permission & one of them got loose at 4am. They would bark all night & the one was running loose & they were pit bulls. I called the neighbor at 4am & told him to come get his damn dogs out of my yard. (I forgot to mention that he was formerly a deadbeat tenant who we evicted & months after his eviction he still hadn’t removed his derelict vehicles, trash, dogs, pigs, & sheep. We were ok with the pigs & sheep being there until he go ta barn up since we didn’t want them to be moved somewhere without shelter, but the dogs were a nuisance and were trained to kill cats— this was before we found out he did dogfighting & realized how much he’d stolen from us— and he continued to steal from us for YEARS afterward).

Another minor revenge was we hired a handyman who my neighbor feared for some reason. Guy hated wifebeaters and hated my neighbor. Neighbor kept stealing our trash cans even though we put our name on them. So I mentioned it to the handyman who offered to go retrieve the trash cans for me. Apparently he scared the shit out of my neighbor just by showing up & told him not to touch our trash cans again.

I wouldn’t call it sneaky, but as a child about 6-yrs old, I had a nasty neighbor who was a school teacher who treated kids like garbage. Apparently she kept finding mud clumps in her swimming pool and assumed it was thrown from our yard. It wasn’t me & I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she alleged my 2-yr-old brother had done it. I had seen him throw dirt at the fence, but don’t know if he ever got anything over. One day I was on my swingset that my father had built minding my own business when she started shouting at me about mud in her pool. Not my problem. I ignored her. She then started demanding to know who threw it in. I said I didn’t know. Then she blamed my brother & told me that I better make sure he stops doing it. I told her I wasn’t his keeper & to take it up with my parents if she had a problem. She then threatened to hit me if I didn’t prevent him from throwing it. I don’t remember my exact words, but I basically told her to piss up a rope. She lost it. Nearly busted our gate down before she managed to get the latch, charged over to me and violently grabbed the chains on my swing & tried to hit me. I jumped off, ran inside the playhouse (Dad built us a playhouse with a door that split so it had a top part & bottom part). I jumped over the bottom door & slammed the upper door shut in her face & latched them both. She pounded on the door and ordered me to come out so she could hit me. I slipped out the trap door (my dad was awesome) & made a bee line for the sliding glass door on our back patio. She grabbed me by the arm, I spun around and kicked her in the shin as hard as I could and stomped on her foot. She let go & I ran into the house and locked the door while she was still yelping about her foot. I stuck my tongue out at her and closed the curtains. I think my mother was in the living room listening to music so she didn’t hear any of it. I watched through the window as the bitch limped back to her yard. I casually mentioned what happened to my father when he got home from work. I could tell he was upset but he tried to minimize his reaction. He was in law enforcement so he still had his gun on him when he went to go talk to her. I don’t know what he said, but she never spoke to me again. She sometimes glared at me, but never said a word.

I think the best revenge was my father’s childhood revenge on a nasty lying neighbor. She had bratty kids who killed neighborhood pets, stole from other people’s yards, and were generally awful. Meanwhile she acted like she was wonderful & moral & thought my father was just the worst. She constantly filed false police reports, called the cops claiming he was selling drugs from the basement (when he wasn’t even home) & so forth. She would pull what I guess now is called SWATting. So, my father went around gathering up all of the dog & cat turds he could find in the neighborhood, put them in a paper bag, stuck a pin in the doorbell so it would continuously ring, and set the bag on fire. Neighbor came out to stomp the fire & got a shoe full of crap.

Update: My wifebeating neighbor got colon cancer and died. One could say karma got him in the end.