Only twice, but one was a doozy.
We were living in Michigan at the time. We'll call him Blake, 'cause that was his name. He was a miserable old man who had gotten "into it" with just about everyone in the neighborhood. He was well known by the police, both by the fact that he constantly accused neighbors of doing things and was accused by neighbors of doing things.
When my late husband would come out on warm summer evenings (6-ish) to sit and softly play classical and folk music on his acoustic guitar, Blake would come out in his back yard with an accordion and not play it, just stand there at the fence and squeeze it back and forth discordantly. He wouldn't even be out in the yard when my husband started playing. He'd keep it up until my husband went in.
He unmercifully tortured the elderly couple on the other side of him, even though they were the nicest people in the neighborhood, loved by everyone. He would incite their nice tiny dog to bark at him, then complain to the police.
He hated anyone parking on the street in front of his house, so one day he painted a pretty impressive "no parking" area on the street, stripes and all, that covered the entire length of his property. When the police came and said he had to remove it, he told them WE had done it. The police didn't buy that, of course, and said he could either sand-blast it off or the city would do it and charge him for it. He reluctantly did it but still maintained that we were responsible for it.
He never parked in his driveway because he was afraid the pavement would crack but he constantly complained to us that our bushes that divided our front yard from his driveway were "too tall" as he couldn't see over them. The city had an ordinance that bushes that were by driveways couldn't be more than 35 inches tall and we kept them lower than that. Nevertheless, he was constantly out there with a yardstick and would call code enforcement anytime he found a leaf that was sticking out over the 36 inch limit.
He once came out and screamed at me as I was walking past his house. Apparently, I was "looking at his front porch." I guess I wasn't allowed to swivel my eyes in his direction.
I could go on for quite a while more, but the apex of the problems happened while we were on vacation. Apparently, someone came by one night and spraypainted "dirty words" in red all over the side of his white siding that faced our house. Of course, he called the police and said we had done it. We hadn't, of course. The police knew that we were on vacation (they liked you to register that with the station so that they would keep an extra watch on your house) and told him so. He countered that we had paid someone to do it for us.
He got laughed out of the station because there were only several dozen other suspects in the neighborhood when you came down to it (people he had tangled with). By "coincidence", our daughter's swing set was sprayed with red paint shortly afterward in the middle of the night. Hmmm, wonder who did that?
The only other incident was in Florida when the neighbors on either side of us were warring and we were caught in the middle. We were friendly with one side and civil with the other side. Both sides did things to each other (but not, thankfully, to us) and the police were often called. When we were asked by the police if I had seen what happened, but I was always blind and deaf. I seeee nothing.....I hearrrr nothing.....I knowwww nothing..... It was 50/50 with them and I WAS NOT GOING TO GET INVOLVED.
