The Neighbor Who Lost It

I'm going to write a long-ass piece of shit.

I lived in an apartment in a PIK high-rise (I still have it, but I'm planning to sell it next year). The neighbors seemed fine — on one side an elderly couple, whose only noise is the muffled sound of the TV in the evenings; below, a family with three kids plus a dog; but on the other side, hoo boy...

A woman of about 35 lives there. A round-faced dwarf with a fake tan on her face and bad skin, with thin hair and a creaky voice. Basically like that meme "Slavic women — when copro no longer does it for you." At first she seemed adequate to me, polite. No family, no kids. Lives "with her mom" (more on that a bit later) — in short, a perfect neighbor, it might seem. As I first thought.

The first signs of batshittery began when she started complaining in the building chat that someone was stomping around her in the evenings and at night. Then she started pestering me in DMs, first with a complaint that "my dishwasher running at night bothers her" (sure, the soundproofing in PIK buildings is poor, but not to the point where you'd hear it, and besides, our kitchen is far from the living rooms thanks to the layout). To which I, naturally, decided not to start shit, and said: "Okay, if it bothers you that much, I'll run it in the morning." Then it got worse. She started complaining that the sound of a cabinet opening in the morning bothered her (so you understand, anon, the cabinet opens practically silently), and that I "loudly move a chair in the kitchen." That's when I started to realize I was dealing with a nutjob, and in a gentle way asked her either to demonstrate the audibility in her place, or to go fuck herself.

Then the batshittery started to take a sharp turn. One day, coming home from work, I discovered that the door to the apartment vestibule had been taken off its closer, was wide open, a draft was blowing through the building, and it was basically "come in, whoever wants to." I asked in the building chat (after that incident, by the way, I swore off joining that shit and don't recommend it to anyone) who did it — silence. I shrugged, hung the door back on the closer, tightened the bolt, and went on my way.

A couple of days later I see the door propped open with some shit-covered piece of wood and again wide open. Besides that, I talked to the elderly neighbors about "some nutjob keeps opening the vestibule door and there's a draft in the hall," and they were also baffled as to why anyone would do that.

I, naturally, threw the piece of wood into the elevator hall, closed the door, and then someone knocks on my door. I open it — there's this dwarf standing there and she starts screeching:

- Raaaaah, who threw away my piece of wood????
- Hello. Me. Why the fuck did you prop the door with it?
- Do you know you have no right to touch my piece of wood! It's my property! I'm going to call the police on you!

At the last part I just burst out laughing and couldn't stop, so the conversation ended there. A bit later, we and the neighbors found out the reason she was opening the door — she didn't like the smell of the neighbors' cooking, all of them at once, in fact; she literally shit into the chat that "It smells of your awful porridges and fried meat, raaaaah, it's like I live in a cafeteria!" And that's despite the fact that her own apartment constantly reeked of fried onions, shit, and garlic.

If you think that's where her weirdness ended — hell no. She disliked absolutely all the neighbors around her, and especially the family below me. Even though I'm a person quite sensitive to noise, they lived pretty quietly overall — yes, sometimes the kids ran around, but like, half an hour to an hour during the day, otherwise they didn't play any music or TV. But she constantly imagined they were walking around and moving things, and as soon as 23:00 came, she'd put on heels and start furiously stomping them on the floor. The kicker is that completely different people lived below her, and when they came to her asking, "What the fuck is this about?", she declared that "Your neighbors on the side are keeping me from resting, so if you don't want me stomping, talk to them!"

Sometimes she stopped recognizing me or my spouse. When I was standing in front of the door looking for my keys in my pocket, she once peeked out from behind her door and said a completely unhinged phrase: "What, they're not opening? Well, never mind, the owner will come soon, he'll open it..."

But you'll ask why I saved the story about the mother for dessert? Oh, that's where the mystical batshittery of the highest grade begins. From the moment her psychosis started manifesting, I noticed that she had completely covered her entire panoramic balcony with light-blocking film, and on the windows, instead of the usual curtains, a heavy blackout roller blind appeared. I never once saw light from her windows, only tiny uneven little flames, as if she lives without electricity and exclusively by candlelight. I never saw her mother, and moreover, I never even heard her, and in her absence, no one was moving around the apartment or making any sounds.
My pets always identified her unmistakably as soon as she entered the hall; both cats would run to the door and start growling deep in their throats, and their fur would stand on end. At first I chalked it up to some odd smell or gait of hers. But literally a year ago I came to that apartment for a week with my dog, and she behaved in absolutely the same way. As if the animals felt hatred and fear toward her.
And the strangest thing. Somewhere before her batshittery began, I sometimes heard at night a heavy breathing with wheezes, seemingly coming from her apartment. From the moment she lost it, the breathing stopped. My imagination paints a completely strange picture, but I think that either the mother never lived with her, or lived a couple of days and then left, or her body is still decomposing in that apartment.

Now I sometimes read the building chat and see how, during a flare-up, she starts pouring curses at the neighbors, sometimes thinks someone lives in my apartment (and I moved out like three years ago), and I quietly crack up at it.

Anyway, that's the wall of text. Now I'm thinking, lol, should I mention in the sale listing that "a batshit witch will live next to you," or not? On one hand, if I write: "Very quiet neighbors," that would probably be true. But on the other hand, silence isn't always equally beneficial...