One movie plot Hollywood has never tired of using is the Bad Neighbors or Neighbors from Hell theme. You know the story: Couple finds dream home, couple meets neighbors, neighbors turn out to be loud or obnoxious or crazy or psychotic or any combo of the four.
Years ago I built a nice house on a half acre of land on a rural road. Our property was a twenty-minute drive over a mix of unpaved and paved roads to the beach, and had majestic green mountain views, and no neighbors within earshot. Within a couple of years that changed, as the parcels on either side of us were purchased and homes were built. On one side was a couple from the main town 14 kilometers away.
On the other side, a successful South American businessman and his growing family. The local couple moved in first. Working mainly on weekends, they had built a small, simple wood frame cabina. On the other side, a modern house of concrete and steel and glass, and all of the daily noise that came with ongoing construction. The work crew lived on the property in zinc shanties and had occasional boisterous Friday night parties.
Early on, our relations with the local couple were friendly enough. The husband was humble and spent the days away at his job, while the wife stayed home. We had also built a simple, unpainted concrete block structure as our ‘starter’ house, so we were on equal and modest footing with our shelter. But we soon expanded, adding on a larger adjacent structure, then painting and finishing both. During this time we received visits from two different arms of the local government.
First was the municipality, having received a call that we were building without a permit. We showed them the permit. Later, the health department came by because of a complaint that, since we had no gutters (they went on last), rainwater was spilling from our roof onto neighboring properties. We actually had to defend ourselves by filming during a downpour to prove otherwise. We suspected our neighbor (the wife) was behind this, but had no way to prove it.
Meanwhile, on the other side, the businessman and his family had us over for dinner during their first month in their new house. We soon reciprocated. We all got along fine. Our problems with them began on weekends. The businessman and his family had another residence in the San Jose area and typically left on Friday and returned Monday morning. A caretaker came by to feed their five large dogs, all of whom growled and barked periodically throughout the weekends. One would bark at something, and the rest would join in. They might bark for 15 seconds—or 15 minutes. This was not the worst of it.
My neighbor had installed a sensitive alarm system, which blasted out several times each weekend. Not once was the alarm due to a break-in. A fly settling on the window seemed enough to trigger the system. The businessman was always apologetic about the alarm, but in the four years we were neighbors, the problem was never resolved. We lived with the reality that at any moment during the weekend, the shrill siren of the alarm would shatter our nerves for a minute at a time.
Our local neighbor escalated our one-sided feud in the meantime, occasionally verbally harassing my wife and young daughter. We learned from friends in the nearby village that she routinely made wild accusations against us. We later found out that one of her hobbies, so to speak, was bringing legal actions, and that she had even sued members of her own family.
By now, we had listed our property for sale, ready to exit the strange situation in which we found ourselves; our beautiful, idyllic house in the campo had become something of an inferno. We got the property sold, and the very day we were cleaning out the last possessions in order to turn it over to the new owners, a court representative arrived with a document: A demand with a strange series of accusations brought by our neighbor. We went to court a few days later, denied the accusations, and (legally) refused to give our new address a couple of hours away so that no further demands could be issued. Case closed.
Several years passed. We were visiting the nearby town, and my wife talked me into making our first trip back to the old property. The new owners had added a pool and enclosed the perimeter of the property. The businessman’s house was being rented out, and the dogs were nowhere to be found. And the humble wood frame house of my neighbor from hell was abandoned. The roof was gone, and the wooden frame had been mostly stripped clean. The sight did not give me any satisfaction. It was simply the final reminder of a long-closed chapter in my Costa Rica life.
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Don Mateo
