Some people have excellent relationships with their landlords. Others, not so much. It’s understandable to have doubts about tenants being able to take care of the properties they’ve invested so much time and money in, but some actions can be seen as a little too far. From the invasion of privacy to the untimely presentation of an eviction notice, these former tenants share the most ridiculous things their landlord has ever done to them.
All stories have been edited for clarity.
“I Didn’t Think Anyone Was Home”
“When my husband and I decided to move in together we chose his apartment as it was less expensive and included more amenities. This was because his uncle was the landlord. He and his wife lived on the first floor of a two-family house and we were on the second.
We had our own staircase from our very own front door which was excellent for me because I like to think of myself as a fairly private person. The back stairs, however, were sort of shared. One evening, I came home from work early because I had a terrible headache. I got migraines and the only thing that helped was a dark, quiet room. I usually fell asleep while trying to get rid of a headache.
My husband was still working so the place was totally quiet. I got up in my dark unit and headed to the kitchen. As I was crossing the dining room I hear sounds from the kitchen that terrified me. Someone was in my apartment! I snuck over to the door of the kitchen and realized that it was my landlord.
He hadn’t seen me. It looked like he was rummaging through the drawers in my kitchen. I told my boyfriend about it when he got home a little while later. Needless to say, he was alarmed and a little confused.
He confronted his uncle and he said, ‘I didn’t think anyone was home. I was looking for a takeout menu.’
That may very well have been true, but my husband addressed his odd behavior and told him that it was odd to wander into other people’s apartments. We moved out shortly after when we bought a house. I couldn’t shake the idea that he could come in wherever he wanted. It was all too creepy for me.
He might have been family but I hardly knew the man. Looking back, I wonder if I overreacted. I still say no.”
“This Woman Was Genuinely Insane”
“This woman was genuinely insane…
When I was moving from New York City to Utah, I rented a basement apartment. I was on Social Security for multiple health conditions but received more than enough to cover my expenses. My landlady came down every day to harass me and told me she was going to raise my rent if I didn’t find a job because I was using the utilities. After two months I was able to procure employment, but things only got worse.
She would enter the apartment whenever I was not home and turn on the lights and the stove, but never admitted to it. Then she threatened to raise my rent because I was running up her electric bill. One day I decided to catch her in the act. I took a vacation day and hid in my room with the lights off and locked the bedroom door. Within moments she came into the apartment. I held my breath as I watched her go through all my cupboards and slammed them shut while loudly complaining about me. As I suspected, she turned on the stove and left all the lights on. When she left, I went to Walmart and bought new doorknobs and locks, then replaced them.
She did not like that. For revenge, she started excessively flushing her broken toilet, which was right above my bathroom. When I came home, I had to deal with urine and feces puddles to clean every day. Since I was saving money to move out, I stayed silent and kept cleaning it up. However, nothing could have prepared me for what she did next.
Even though we had our issues, I still decided to bake her a cake when her birthday rolled around. She was nice about it and thanked me, but about a week later she knocked on my door and kindly asked if she could enter to talk to me. I complied and opened the door, but what a big mistake that was.
She was extremely under the influence and out of her mind. To my horror, the landlady burst through the doorway to attack me. She declared that nobody was as nice as me in the face of adversity without having an ulterior motive, then she was determined that mine was sleeping with her husband!
She was swinging at me with one hand while pulling my hair with the other. She even tried to choke me but was unsuccessful because I used my brains to outmaneuver her. Realizing she could not get me at arm’s length, the lunatic woman tried to DROP KICK me! Yes, she suddenly thought she was Hulk Hogan! I jumped back and she landed on the floor. She wound up breaking her foot with that stunt, then started spreading rumors that I am violent and attacked her.
Of course, I moved out after that. After being in the apartment for a year, I took all the money I saved and bought a house. I was grateful that I did not have to deal with a psychotic landlord ever again.”
Bitter Landlady
“I had a landlady who collected my rent but didn’t pay her mortgage.
I came home from work one evening to find cops at the property putting a letter on the front door from the court with a twenty-four-hour notice to get out.
Needless to say, I was pretty shaken. They explained that they had actually been to the property on two previous occasions and there were other notices he had posted but they had been ignored. One cop explained I needed to fill out a document attached to the notice and take it to the court as soon as possible so I could get extra time to figure out my next move.
The landlady was in denial over the whole thing and said someone was playing a joke and I still had to pay the rent. She had been removing the notices from the door thinking no one could actually make her comply. The next day, I came home to all of my stuff in a pile in the garage. Nothing was neatly placed. The house was ransacked and my items were in a pile, and my furnishings were bashed with what looked like a hammer.
I appeared in court and got a week’s extension to get out. I had to take her to court for the damage to my property and won five thousand dollars. The landlady never paid the money so I took her to court again so and requested that her wages be garnished. Which I again won. I tried to move on from the situation after it was settled, but things only got much, much worse.
She started harassing me by phone and stalking me at work. She would appear in the parking area and yell obscenities at me. One evening she even threatened to murder me. I reported her disturbing behavior to the police and I ended up getting a restraining order against her. It didn’t take long for her to break it by coming to my place of work again and damaging my car by slicing and dicing it with her keys and smashing the windscreen through. She was caught on camera doing it. I made an insurance claim for the damage to my car and then they took her to court. I had to file yet another police report.
She then got arrested for breaking the restraining order and I had to go to court for that.
She ended up going to jail.
After that, I moved out of the area so she didn’t have any chance to bother me again.”
Red Flags Flying
“I rented a studio apartment on the second floor of a place close to the hospital I was working at. The hospital itself had apartments for students and employees but, there was a wait to get in. I applied and was thankfully selected.
The first month I went to pay rent, the landlord was on the phone but he still wanted me to come in. I respectfully declined and stayed in the hall. The place was cluttered with his things. The most memorable belonging of his was a large three or four-foot picture of him with a woman in a wedding dress whom I never saw the whole time I lived there.
He was arguing with someone on the phone about why he could not see his wife and was very irate. He wouldn’t take my check while on the phone. When he finally got off the phone he called my attention to the picture. I told him I would leave the payment for rent in his mailbox so as not to disturb him. Red flags were flying from that first encounter.
I started to find things moved in my place. The coffee or sugar bags that I normally left on the counter were mysteriously placed on the top shelf and fell when I opened the cupboard. My underwear drawer contents were messed up and not folded. Numerous times I opened my door to find him in my place and he would visibly jump and say he smelled smoke or noticed water leaking from the window. He would be in there when I would bring my friends over to show them my place. This was all without notice I should add.
He then told me that I had to let him know every time I had a visitor. Their name, relationship to me, and how long they would be there for fire regulations. A friend of mine came over from working evenings at a hospital around midnight. She buzzed me and I came right down to find her curled up in a ball in the corner with this landlord inches away from her head talking a mile a minute wearing only shorts and sneakers.
When he saw me, he jumped back three feet from her and casually asked me, ‘Hi. How’s it going?’ all while avoiding eye contact. She said he was cleaning the mailboxes with Windex when she buzzed. He intimidated her. My friend never came back and told me to move. So did anyone else who encountered him while visiting me. My landlord really creeped me out!
One month I was running late for work and forgot to place my check in the mailbox. At one in the morning, I got a call from my job to call my landlord. He had called them repeatedly demanding to speak with me about the rent. I didn’t call him but upon returning home in the morning, my answering machine with a one-hour tape was full. After listening, I immediately called the police.
He basically said the following:
‘My rent is due.’
‘Where is the rent, it’s late.’
‘You are going to be evicted.’
‘You are going to be evicted with ruined credit.’
‘My brother was a big-time doctor in the hospital you work at and he going to get you fired if you don’t pay up.’
‘You’re going to get fired and I am going to see to it that you will never be able to get a job at another hospital.’
‘You’re never going to work as a nurse in Canada again.’
You get the picture. This is still the first day of the month.
While on the phone with the police to claim harassment, they listened to the messages with a smirk. Their response left me completely stunned. The cops nonchalantly told me he was technically threatening my answering machine and not me. Then they simply advised me to move and left.
I finally got into the hospital complex apartments and gave my notice. I asked for help from my family and friends to move my bed so I could feel safe. My boyfriend, his brother-in-law, and my father came to move the heavy things and furniture to my new place while I was at work. I had given them my keys. They moved a load and upon returning, the landlord was in there. He wanted to know who they were and wouldn’t tell them who he was and why he was there. They all told him to leave and at that point really believed me and so decided to move all my things at once.
Then my landlord called the police.
They separated everyone and the landlord was in the hallway screaming I hadn’t paid rent for months. My landlord shouted in the halls that I was a tramp and a pig and a lot of other things. The policeman who questioned my movers asked for proof that they were there legitimately. My father showed his driver’s license and we both had the same last name. The landlord was then whisked away from my apartment.
He came back and said more obscenities about me and called the police again. Different ones came the second time and the landlord was again instructed to move along. He again tried to contact the Department of Nursing demanding to speak with me. They told me to call him already so that he would leave them alone. I refused to call him. He finally stopped.
I went with a friend to clean the apartment and was locked out. The landlord tried to keep my damage deposit and was claiming damage to the apartment. He also stated I had damaged the windows by moving while moving my things. The landlord said I ripped the doors off the cupboards, fridge, and stove. He then claimed that I broke all the mirrors and light fixtures and kicked and punched holes in the walls. I went to the main rental office and they retrieved my damage deposit for me.
After that, I never saw or heard from him again to my relief.”
Total Violation
“We had been renting an apartment for about seven years and had a couple of rent increases but it was always just before or just after an upgrade so we didn’t mind. The rental agency was great and responsive until the owner of the building, unfortunately, sold it to some crazy people who wanted to do their own management.
We had already put in a notice that we were going to be moving out because we had just bought a new house, and the notice was given to the old rental company a few days before the old owner sold to the new owner of the building.
Because we had been renting for so long we were just on a month-to-month arrangement. The new owners wanted us to sign another lease. We were already paid through our departure date so it made no sense. The woman was extremely persistent in getting us out of there.
She came by every morning and walked around the apartments looking inside and then opening them claiming, ‘Oh I keep forgetting which ones are the empty ones.’ That was a complete lie as all of them were occupied.
She allowed her child to urinate on the walkway outside my apartment one morning and then tried to say the stench was bad and that I wasn’t cleaning up after my pet. At the time, I thought maybe my neighbor’s dog had peed outside my apartment because it was a puppy and very rambunctious so sometimes it just got excited. I didn’t even have a pet. Once I found out what really happened, I felt my stomach flip.
I came home one evening to find her sneaking out my back door. I went around the side of the building where I knew she would come out and asked what she was doing or what she was looking for.
She said, ‘Oh, I was just on your back porch. I didn’t go inside.’ I told her, ‘I just pulled up in the parking lot. Why are you telling me you didn’t go inside?’ Then I told her, ‘Let’s go look at the back door.’
It was ajar, and I have those slide locks I lock every day before I go to work. The slide was undone. It gets worse.
About a week before we were moving out, we had a friend come and help us move some of our belongings. He and my husband were moving a dresser and my husband tripped down the last step and the dresser careened into the wall, knocking a huge hole. Our friend was a contractor so he was planning to come by a couple of days later and fix the hole. I got to work and about five minutes after I got there, she called me and said she would be deducting the cost to fix the hole from our deposit. There was no way she could have known unless she had gone into the apartment just after I left.
I asked her how she even knew about the hole and she started stammering. She said she had evidence that I could not refute and emailed me a video. I was floored. Somehow she had a video from inside my apartment showing the hole. She shouldn’t have been there anyhow without notice to me, with no emergency, but I asked how she got the video and she admitted that she had gone inside. I ended up confronting her in person and I showed her my previous lease and statutes from state landlord-tenant law that said what she had done was not permissible.
She said that ‘where she came from’ it was usual to put security measures on properties. I told her, I ‘appreciated her concerns’ but there would be a problem if I found a camera in my house. She got so red in the face that I thought she would burst. I told her she needed to leave immediately, but that’s when she said she was calling the police.
I told her that was great because I would tell them everything and ask if they could search my house for her camera. They arrived about fifteen minutes later. I told them I suspected someone had been in my apartment without permission. She contended she was permitted to be there since she was the landlord. I told them she had planted a camera somewhere and was spying on us. They found the three cameras and took them in as evidence of a stalking complaint.
They caught her coming into my house no less than twenty times in two weeks and looking through my belongings. One camera caught her kicking my neighbor’s dog.
She ended up getting charges for harassment, stalking, and animal cruelty.
Her husband tried to keep up the heat by threatening us to keep the deposit. He tried to file eviction papers, but we were already moving. I decided just to go along with his little game. I went to court and showed our notice given to the previous rental company by certified mail, my closing documents for the purchase of our new home, videos of us moving into the new house, videos of every single moment of our moving out of the old place, photographs of every room and everything we cleaned as well as over four hundred pictures that I took of every corner, baseboard, cabinet, corners of the back porch, and receipts for the drywall patch where our friend fixed it. I presented receipts for the paint we used to repair any scuffs, and the videos of his wife going into our house as part of the official police report. Not only were we entitled to our deposit, but we also got treble damages and a restraining order against them. It was glorious.
They tried eviction proceedings against two other neighbors who prevailed as well due to video evidence captured of her sneaking around all the time. Two more losses in court and they packed up their stuff on their little run-down truck and got out of town. Someone else bought the property at a tax sale because they never paid the taxes.
Special thanks to my friends in the legal community and the local government that kept me informed.”
Sharing Is Caring
“We rented the bottom half of a large old house from a woman who was absolutely the worst landlady ever.
Since we had two bedrooms and the upstairs only had one, we paid more in rent. The first upstairs tenant had a dog and was a really nice guy. He paid his rent on time and went out of his way to avoid our landlady.
After we were there six months, he moved and another man and his daughter moved in. He was a nice guy, and we got along just great. After just one year of dealing with the landlady, he moved out. The third tenant was a female on disability with two dogs.
I had a washer and dryer and was told I had to share them with the upstairs neighbor, or I couldn’t use them. I was working full-time, and so was my child. Therefore, we were gone quite a bit. The upstairs neighbor would use my washer and dryer five days a week for at least twelve hours a day, even doing laundry for her friends. She was watering the neighbor’s yard while they were on vacation all on the landlady’s dime. Yet, the landlady blamed me for using too much water and raised my rent twice in a single year, but not the other tenant who was actually using the water.
The place failed the yearly inspection, and the landlady literally screamed and jumped up and down in the front yard at the inspector. The next year, he sent someone else out to inspect. The neighbor upstairs ‘accidentally’ sent a text to my child, talking about her illegal substance dealing. I told the landlady and was promptly told what she did upstairs was her business. During the winter, my apartment had no heat in the bedrooms. The guy that cleaned the furnace said the furnace needed repairs which we never got.
The final straw was when I got rid of my washer and dryer to avoid yet another rent increase. The upstairs female was furious and for over a year, would scream at me about it. I told her it wasn’t in my lease that I had to supply her with a washer and dryer.
The landlady came with her handyman and cemented over the drain in the basement, so when it rained for a week, the whole basement flooded and wiped out the upstairs furnace and both water heaters. Six months later, the landlady was still coming up every single day and had someone put in a new drain. The drilling would start before the crack of dawn and end at nine at night. The landlady didn’t hire professionals, so the work was never done according to the code and would have to be done over and over again.
After seven years of putting up with craziness, we bought a house and moved!”
Do What Makes Them Happy
“I’m still upset about this even though it happened over a year ago.
Before I begin there’s something you should know. At the time this all went down, my firstborn daughter was borderline autistic. She hadn’t been officially diagnosed but she definitely showed signs of autism. One of them included a fear of loud noises.
We had just gotten a new neighbor below us. She had been knocking on our door a few times and complaining that we were being too loud. The problem was she had something to say even if the floor creaked just a little. The floor always creaked, whether it was because my kids were sitting on the floor playing with cars or by just simply walking across it. I was getting pretty annoyed by her constantly complaining about something that was beyond my control.
On this particular day, my three youngest kids were napping, my son was watching tv and my oldest was listening to her Frozen CD and dancing. It was a good day for her and I was so proud she was expressing herself and having fun instead of tip-toeing around or having a meltdown.
She wasn’t jumping or anything just swaying back and forth with a look of pure joy and attempting to sing ‘Let It Go’ softly. I remember I was doing dishes and I had just glanced at her and smiled feeling so proud.
Then all of a sudden someone pounded on my front door so hard the door shook and someone yelled, ‘Keep it down for goodness sake!’
My daughter screamed bloody murder. She was terrified. She ran and hid under my bed. I yelled I was calling the cops and went to comfort her. The cops showed up and I was still trying to coax her out from under my bed.
I yelled for them to come in and they came into my room and saw me holding the hand of my sobbing and terrified child. I told them what happened. Another cop came in and told me he had talked to my neighbor and she said we were constantly banging on our floors disturbing them. I told them that she was lying. It was a case of he said she said so nothing happened and the cops left.
I called my landlord and she said she would come by to get my story. When she did she completely took my neighbor’s side. I was astounded and asked, ‘What am I supposed to do? Keep my kids on the couch twenty-four seven?!’
‘If it makes them happy,’ was her nonchalant response.
I couldn’t believe my ears. She obviously didn’t care! After that, my neighbor did the same thing daily over every little noise. I couldn’t take it anymore. My poor baby became too afraid to leave her bed because of her fear of encountering the ‘monster door.’
We moved two weeks later. My daughter is still terrified of doors and hides every time someone knocks.”
Unstable Landlady
“I lived in an apartment connected to horse stables. The owner stayed in a house on the property. I helped maintain the stalls and also boarded my horse there. The owner ended up selling the property to an unmarried couple. I stayed in the apartment but immediately saw the new owners would be a problem.
One day I went to feed my horse and noticed a very expensive tub of feed supplement worth three-hundred dollars was missing. I looked everywhere but couldn’t find it.
I asked the female owner if she had seen the tub and she said it was infested with bugs so she threw it away. I knew she was lying but couldn’t prove it. For a little while, I let it go.
The old owner stayed in contact with me after he moved and one day I told him about the missing tub. I told him everywhere I looked and he asked if I looked in an outbuilding located on the property. It was the only place I had not checked. I went to look and found the tub hidden behind some boards.
I also found things moved around in my apartment after I came home from work. That prompted me to immediately move out.
The thieving woman ended up getting thrown from a horse and almost died from a head injury.
About a year later, she died from an aggressive cancer.”
Come Right In!
“My first wife and I rented from an older woman that had several duplexes around her house while I finished college. Being early twenties and just married we were often engaged in what just married young couples do.
This woman would come over at random times and demand we let her in to talk about whatever had a burr under her saddle at that particular moment. If we didn’t immediately open the door for whatever reason she would use her pass key and barge in.
As you can guess, this led to hurried scrambling on more than one occasion. We always knew it was her so there was no question of meeting ‘the intruder’ at the door with a weapon. But one evening before either of us could get disentangled the old biddy knocked about twice and started in the front door.
I managed to jump up and run to the door just as she cracked it open and slammed it shut practically on her nose! That stopped any further sudden intrusions but pushed us to the ultimate decision to move as soon as our contract came due again.
I still wonder if the old lady got her jollies perhaps by walking in on young couples unexpectedly since there were quite a few like us living in her complex.”
Lowball
“After we had moved out, a landlady tried to make us pay fifty bucks for a twenty-five dollar toilet seat. The reason for the price discrepancy? She felt we should pay for the gas to go get it!
She also tried to have us pay for normal wear and tear such as the re-painting of the bedrooms and the stair handrail. In addition, she tried to charge us for some kitchen cabinets that became unhinged prior to us moving out that we had already reported, but they had not been repaired.
They just needed to be hooked back on, no actual repair was required. Her husband replaced four-floor tiles in the kitchen. Afterward, she wanted to charge us as if she had contracted out to have them replaced.
There were a few things we accepted responsibility for. Overall, she tried to get ninety percent of our two thousand dollar deposit. I balked.
We only owed no more than eight hundred bucks. I looked at the rental agreement, and it said nothing about using money from the deposit to pay for things requiring attention at move-out. I pointed this out and said we can go to court and I would request all of the deposit back, plus she would have to pay court costs. She finally conceded.
This was their first rental property, and it sure showed.”
