Cloud of dust rolling across his property. Photos of the dust on his car and in his garage. Heck, even the dust cloud caused by the horse can chop off the rider.
You guys like to create something that is horrible, clearly.
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Clearly. And I’d call that slander - which is against the law.
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Watching something interesting going on at your neighbor’s house is one thing. But if you hate dust, and park yourself within a few yards of the supposedly aggravating activity, THAT is creepy!
Wonder what this guy would do if someone pulled in front of his house and sat obviously watching him all day?!
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Wow. Pot meet kettle. Calling people nuts and slanderous for misreading/mistaking a comment? I was coming back to apologize for being wrong and the personal attacks had begun.
I DID take the original comment the wrong way, and for that I apologize to the other people commenting.
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A guy parking on his own property is “creepy.”
Let’s just think about this.
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I must be creepy then because I have watched so many riding lessons in my life and I hate the dust when the ring is not watered properly. But there I stood, watching and coughing while doing that ‘go away dust’ arm waving thing.
I do agree that this old guy should have asked nicely about doing something about the dust instead of getting grumpy about it.
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Good. Let’s hope the OP was as reasonable when she reported this poor guy to the police.
And if I sound aggravated, it’s because I am. I HATE shit like this. It ruins lives, and there’s no excuse for it.
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I didn’t say he was a pedophile. I said we did not know what in his mind. The same action could mean totally opposite things and that he may have just moved closer and be sitting in his truck because the wind was making it dustier.
He could also have a respiratory problem and the dust is more a problem for him than he has let on.
It is amazing how much dust we get in the house during a drought, simply because there is no grass where there usually is grass.
If he is enjoying watching the lessons and can no longer see them then invite him over for an hour or so every so often. It always helps to have eyes on the place if a horse needs help.
As a woman living on her own for the past couple years, I trust no one off the bat pretty much. A few weeks back I called the police because there was a man that knocked on my door and didn’t leave. He was in a regular old sedan in business casual clothes walking around my property taking photos after I didn’t open the door. I rent in a very rural place and no one would hear me if I were screaming bloody murder.
Ends up he was with a landscaping company my landlord had to come out and do a quote. Normally she tells me when someone is coming out for something like this, but this guy thought the appt was at 10 am and it was at 4:30 pm.
I felt a little bad the guy got badgered by the sheriff but I don’t regret calling. I would be severely uncomfortable if a neighbor was watching anything I do on my property unless we had good rapport.
I had a neighbor stalk me shortly after college so I take no chances and tend to no assume good intentions. I didn’t get the police involved early enough and my dad nearly leveled the guy in the street, and my dad is not a guy that would nearly level someone in the street.
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I do too, and also from the other side. I have a 70 year old neighbor who made my life a living hell for the first 8 years I lived here. It started with me parking tractor implements on my side of a shared fenceline in the back field where our 2 properties meet, which blocked his mowing crew from being able to access the 20 feet x 250 feet area of MY field they were mowing. I assured him that we would be mowing our yard, including that area, and thanked him for mowing it up until that point while the house sat empty before it was sold. It escalated to ‘small’ things like my grass clippings going through the fence into his field (barely an inch long), the smell of horse manure being overpowering (he lives 3 houses/large lots away from me), and the way I had put my fence up. It escalated within a year to me finding metal rods and wires thrown onto my electric fence all along our shared fenceline to ground it out. Then I started having horses get out and get into his yard on a regular basis. Hubby and I fixed fence, tried to defuse the situations, tried to be good neighbors. Brought in topsoil and fixed the hoofprints in his yard, along with the mole damage he already had, seeded the areas, etc. Gritted my teeth, smiled, and did my best to politely get through the lectures about why I should just get rid of the horses because I worked too much to have the time for them, he never saw me riding them, it was too much work on me, etc.
Then the lawsuit threats started. Lawsuits over his loss of enjoyment of his property. Lawsuits over the damage done to his property. He had lived here for 50 years by golly and things were done a certain way. Phonecalls all hours of the day, from 5am to 10pm. Watching my house and our comings and goings. Calling the police on me for the repair work/grass seed I did 18 months before not growing the way he liked. Pushing for me to be arrested for criminal mischief. Harassment of a lady with a phone number similar to mine when he couldn’t reach me by phone immediately. We finally broke down and talked to a lawyer and showed all our evidence/photos/video from over the years. Lawyer advised us to refuse to take care of anything else and if he called the police again to let them know that it was a civil matter and he would have to sue me. At lawyer’s advice we had the police advised neighbor to cease contacting me and harassing me the next time he called them. So then his elderly mother (90’s) and brother (also in his late 60’s) started calling me and complaining.
Last year we had a company come in a re-fence our entire property. It’s like Fort Knox now. He harassed me while we were stringing the new lines and lectured me on personal aspects of my life. We went 4 months without an incident and then I had a horse out in the middle of the night. AGAIN. No fence down, gates all closed, no idea how he got out until we found apples near the back gate nearest his property. We have had to install security cameras, chain all the gates with huge chains and padlocks that can’t be cut, and tiptoe around our own property for fear of drawing the next round of wrath. Nothing we have done has worked and we finally had to realize that it wasn’t us. It was him. All of our other neighbors have no complaints and have had no suggestions when we asked them what we needed to do differently to make sure we weren’t impacting them in a negative way.
I’ll admit that this experience definitely colored my thoughts while reading this thread.
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It sounds to me like OP is trying to address the dust and privacy issue and pretty quickly too. I don’t blame OP one bit for putting in a call to the police. Its weird to me the neighbor is threatening OP and straining the “relationship” that was established (him watching lessons and OP being ok with it), and then continuing to come around like normal. That’s super weird to me and I don’t trust weird.
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Im so sorry you went through that, bad neighbors are literally the worst.
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I’m guessing you have never been stalked or harassed by a man before.
If I parked in my own driveway at night and stared into my neighbor’s house would it not be creepy because I’m in my own driveway? Come on now.
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Actually, I have - which is one of the main ways I know that this man is doing nothing of the kind.
You’re simply inventing all this - for what reason I don’t know, but it’s hardly “feminism.”
How can anyone other than the man himself actually know what his intentions are when he parks at her property line? That’s preposterous, not even the OP can really know. He might not be meaning anything by it but the optics are not great when you’re suddenly watching someone you threatened a lawsuit on.
And somehow I knew you were going to pull the “actually I have” bs. 
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You must psychic.
How lovely for you. 
I have too and there are a lot of red flags flying for me. It’s unfortunate, but I think it’s better to play it safe than to give the benefit of the doubt for too long. That’s what happened to me and I ended up basically living in fear for a good few years until I moved. If this guy is harmless, great, no harm no foul. If he becomes unhinged, better to have that a call into the police now. No harm there either.
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I’m certain you could make your point without swearing in almost every post.
You’re acting like it’s a virtual dust storm. You have no idea if there’s even any dust making it into his garage at all, or if he’s just complaining to complain. He’s parking his vehicle on her property line to watch lessons, why isn’t he worried about the dust then? Should she create a dust free property just so a neighbor can watch riding lessons? You don’t know a single thing about the OP, how she runs her business, or how much dust there even is but you’ve decided that she’s the one at fault.
There she was minding her own business on her own property, following every law that she knew about, and now she’s being hung up to dry as if she’s deliberately ruining this man’s life with her dust storm.
My next door neighbor once turned me in because the lock I put on my gate was “shiny” and made her feel “unsafe in her neighborhood” She wrote letters, filed complaints, taped notes to my front door. What I did on my property was a huge issue for her. You know what I did? Not a damn thing. Well, eventually I bought a horse farm but that’s besides the point.
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So what exactly are these “red flags” telling you - that he’s stalking the OP herself, or that he’s a pedophile, or what? Maybe both?
@Red_Barn Dunno! Could be a multitude of things or nothing at all, but it’s not behavior I’d be comfortable with. If I were in her shoes and the neighbor came up to me early on and ASKED if it was ok to watch lessons because he really liked horses or something like that, at least that would be an invitation to establishing some kind of neighborly relationship. I feel like you generally can get a decent read of people when you interact with them. This guy just loiters around and sounds like a dick. Definitely wouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt in my book. Conversations do go two ways and I also would have approached him myself early on and tried to be neighborly to see what his deal was.
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