The most aggressive and ridiculous neighbourly battles of recent times

If you’re lucky (or live on Ramsay Street), good neighbours become good friends. If not, there are myriad ways to irritate your neighbour. And vice versa.

From the passive aggressive to the aggressive aggressive to the downright ridiculous, here is a roundup of some of the weirdest neighbourly battles of recent times.

“Who wants to hear my terrible neighbour having extremely loud sex,” tweeted Pennsylvania woman Stacey Ritzen in January this year, attaching a 20-second audio file purportedly featuring her neighbour’s high-pitched bedroom antics.

The writer and blogger, who was working from home and shared an office wall with said neighbour, went on to live tweet the entire raucous encounter. She even uploaded a photo of a school bus parked outside, which had given rise to her suspicions that the bed buddy was a bus driver.

The Daily Mail’s headline writers spared no adjectives when the story made the news, declaring: “‘It sounds like someone is being murdered!’ Woman live tweets neighbour’s horrifyingly loud sex – and even includes AUDIO of her blood-curdling screams of ecstasy.”

“I think this is a sign that I need to move,” Ritzen’s concluded.

Live tweeting neighbourly antics is a relatively new phenomenon but lascivious acts have been getting neighbours offside from time immemorial.

Tweet: Stacey Ritzen

In deliciously fitting twist, a Texas man sued by his neighbour for operating a swingers club from his home last year was named Randy Scott Carter (Randy, geddit?).

The lawsuit alleged Carter had advertised his home in Cresson, Texas on the Naughty Neighbours website with an ad boasting of parties in a “unique, upscale, private home”.

The neighbour, Chase Patterson, told USA Today that dozens of visitors had arrived at odd hours of the night.

“Mass amounts of traffic, people at the front gate that don’t know each other. Definitely not a family reunion,” Patterson said.

Closer to home, in the outer Melbourne suburb of Pakenham last year, neighbours were so upset by regular swingers’ parties, the organisers were forced to shift the get-togethers to another suburb.

Daily Mail Australia quoted an anonymous organiser as saying: ‘Am I happy that a secret has been maliciously made public by closed-minded undersexed residents who were obviously insulted by the non-receipt of invitations… not particularly.”

In 2013, Buzzfeed reported on a strip club entrepreneur named Alan Markovitz, who bought a home in Michigan next door to his ex-wife, then proceeded to erect a bronze statue in honour of her and her new boyfriend.

The artwork? A giant middle finger – conveniently spot lit by night, in case they missed it during daylight hours.

Photo: Lenka Tuohy

A giant statue might be an eyesore, but at least it doesn’t block the entire view. This was the case for Wellington couple Peter and Sylvia Aitchison, whose neighbour erected a four-metre-high fence that completely blocked their sweeping water vista.

After a year-long dispute during which the Aitchisons forked out hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, in January the New Zealand Environment Court ordered the neighbour, David Walmsley, to dismantle the structure. Walmsley had argued the offending structure was a children’s fort.

When you couldn’t even be bothered pretending your behaviour is anodyne, there’s always the option of a spite house. Built specifically for the purpose of annoying neighbours or planning authorities, spite houses often cut off road access, light or views. The parcels of land on which they are built are sometimes so narrow that spite houses have a reputation for looking strange.

One of the most colourful recent examples is a house across the road from the Westboro Baptist Church, an organisation known for its hard-line homophobia and picketing of military funerals.

A non-profit group called Planting Peace bought the house and had it painted in rainbow colours, naming the building Equality House. It was completed in 2013.

In an email to TIME, the church said: “We thank God for the Sodomite Rainbow House!”, claiming it helped bring attention to their message.

Finally, disgruntled neighbours in Poland exacted impressive revenge on an unlicensed young hoon they claimed had terrorised the neighbourhood with his hair-raising driving.

In 2012, Zbigniew Filo’s souped-up white Ford Escort was found about six metres in the air, atop a willow tree.

“I get the message,” Metro reported him saying. “But I think it was a bit harsh.”

The Rainbow House was bought and painted by Aaron Jackson, directly across from the Westboro Baptist church. Photo: Getty, Mark Reinstein