This is a story from my childhood. My best friend had some really weird neighbors, they were constantly walking through the woods on the edge of their 20-acre property to spy on what all their neighbors were doing. The edge of their property that was by my friend’s house was a good 3-minute walk from their house, but they would routinely go out of their way to walk over at near dark hours to make sure nothing had changed on my friend’s property during the day.
There was a small chicken wire fence that separated the property so the dogs couldn’t wander off but it provided no visibility blockage at all. One day I was playing in the yard with my friend after dinner and we heard some snapping branches in the woods. We hid behind a tree in my friend’s yard and watched to see what kind of critter was making the noise (we have bobcats, coyotes, bears, and deer) just to eventually see both of her neighbors come out of a large bush they had been hiding in. They had to have been there the whole time we were out there because we would have heard them come out and enter the bush. So they were squatting in there watching us for nearly an hour.
We ran in and told my friend’s dad about it. He was obviously livid, and the next day all the dads from our school in the grade we were in came out and put a tall fence up along the whole property line. However, instead of building it upright against the existing chicken wire, which was technically on my friend’s property – they left a 3 ft gap between the two fences.
In this gap, they dumped a bunch of blackberry vines that they had cut back from elsewhere on the property. Now if you’ve ever dealt with blackberry bushes, you know they grow fast, tall, and entwine themselves in everything in their path. Not to mention they are prickly as hell and a pain in the ass to get rid of. So in a couple years, these blackberry bushes were as tall as the fence and created a prickly barrier that was constantly trying to take hold in the spying neighbor’s yard.
The neighbors complained many times and even offered to remove the bushes themselves, but since the bushes weren’t on their property they couldn’t do anything about them. My friend’s dad expressly forbids any damage to the bushes that were on his property. So for the last 20 years, these neighbors have been having to battle to keep the bushes off of their property every spring, and are still paying the price of being creepy assholes to children.
Credit: petty revenge
