The Crazy Landlady Story

When my kid was one year old, we moved cities. We were already tired of moving but this was to be the last one for a while; we were going to a more relaxed, more family-friendly city where we could really settle down. We’d combed a lot of listings and found a place better than we’d expected to within our budget – at the time we were not yet on the socialized housing waiting list for our new city, and had to rent private-sector. We were excited to have found a two-bedroom place with a big living room and even a small garden, in a really nice location. When I contacted the landlady I made sure to explain that we were looking for somewhere we could stay for at least several years. This would be the third move since I’d become pregnant, the first being when the apartment we were subletting was flooded out with sewage by squatters in the attic and the second being when the landlord of the house we rented next suddenly decided after a few months that they were selling it, and we opted to leave the ensuing chaos. Now, the tiny apartment we’d been able to find after that had turned out to have a serious ventilation problem and everything we owned had suffered mold damage. We were ready to get out of that crowded and expensive city altogether.

The landlady seemed very nice, was charmed by our kid, and agreed to a contract for two years with intention to extend. She said she and her boyfriend wanted people to live there for at least five years, maybe ten, and someday her then-nearly-teenage oldest daughters would take it over.

The problems, and her true colors, began to show almost immediately after we moved in.

The house, which we learned later had been a gift from her parents, who lived next door, to her and her ex-husband when they married, had been divided into several apartments. We had the entire ground floor, by far the largest apartment and the one that connected to the tiny garden (which it turned out her parents shared with us). The upper two floors were occupied by students and amounted to studio apartments. When we moved in, we arranged (as one does) to have our cable, which provided service not only to our entertainment devices but also saw to our telephone and internet connections, migrated. When the technician came out he said that, as was common in older areas, the connection box was a mess of very old cables and splices and explained that it was a requirement of his job that he clean it all up and install a newer cable capable of handling modern data loads. Great, right? Not so right.

Two hours later I had the landlady at the door in a screaming fit, livid that I had “shut off cable to the entire building” and what the Hell did I think I was doing. I explained that I hadn’t done a single thing, that the technician who came out to migrate our cable had replaced the outdated old cable and cleaned everything up as per his job specifications. She went completely nuts, shouting into my face that she had been splitting the single cable connection to all of the above apartments and now they didn’t have cable anymore and I needed to call the technician and “make him put it all back”. I stood my ground, obviously, pointing out that when we moved in we had transferred the cable going into our house into our name as one does, and that if the people upstairs had been illegally getting free cable from her she would have to arrange that again herself. She switched tacks and made nice, saying she understood why I was "confused" and that her father would “just pop by soon” to re-tap the cable and splice it into the other apartments. Excuse me? I made it very clear that he absolutely would not: we were not willing to watch our quality of connection go down just so we could illegally provide free cable to a bunch of students we’d never even met. She stormed off to “call them herself and make them fix it”, and that was (in retrospect, surprisingly) the last we heard about that.

Rent was paid in cash but we were smart enough to get receipts, so that at least never became an issue. Things went on all right for the first few months. It was a hectic time – my husband was dealing with health problems and troubles at his work, we had a toddler, I was in school. The location of the house was fantastic: it was a ten minute walk to the supermarket, a ten minute walk to the train/bus station, a ten minute walk to a playgroup where we made friends we still have now, well over a decade later. Across the street and canal was a park where dogs could run free, so exercising the Great Dane was easy and enjoyable. The garden was small and too damp and dark, but it was a place to get outside in some privacy if the landlady’s parents were traveling, as they often were. But then everything went wrong.

At first, we were sympathetic and tried to work with her. Her ex-husband, it turned out, wanted the house. His name was still on it, alongside hers. According to her (not the most reliable person to take information from, true, but her parents later backed her up on this one) he was going to sue her to force her to sell him her half on the grounds that she didn't live in the house but instead lived with her boyfriend and mob of neglected daughters in a perfectly nice house elsewhere. To prevent this, she was going to move back in and would have to break our contract.

We’re pretty stubborn people, because we have to be, but we’re also compassionate and understanding and this sounded like a real mess for her, so we talked it out and agreed with her that if she found us a similar place for the same rent or lower, and paid the moving costs, we would go. Seems pretty straightforward, right? Yeah, that’s what we thought too.

During the next couple of months the landlady would come by a lot, at random without an appointment, to talk airily non-stop and swan manically about, discussing what color curtains she would get or what shade she'd paint the walls, measuring doorways and criticizing our furniture. We asked her many times about how it was going finding us a new place, but she brushed us off and eventually I spoke to her parents, who had always been friendly toward us. The very next day she suddenly announced that she had found us the perfect place and we should come see it right away, so we agreed to an appointment, and while my husband was at work the next day, my toddler and I went to see this “perfect” home.

The house turned out to be considerably smaller than ours, sported a huge gaping hole with no railings at the top of the stairs (remember, we had a toddler), did not have a garden, was in a considerably more run-down part of town, and in the end turned out to cost more than 400 Euros above the rent we were paying, which was already stretching our budget to its most extreme limits. The landlady turned up with two of her daughters, the 10-year-old and the 13-ish-er, whom she made stay outside on the street, and dragged us through the house rapidly, talking non-stop and barging into occupied rooms, then literally pulled us down the street to the agent overseeing the rental, who turned out to be her sister. When I politely refused to take the house, she commenced to pitch a screaming fit in front of her sister and kids, who acted like it was absolutely par for the course. My husband and I were terrible people. We wanted her ex to take the house “and everything” away from her. We were ungrateful after she went to so much trouble to find us the perfect house which was only a “teensy” bit more expensive anyway so we could take our elitist, snobby attitudes and shove them right up our asses.

At some point during this rant the landlady had worked her way to being between everyone else and the door. My toddler, who had been farting around with a toy on a chair by the window, plumped to the floor and walked toward the door, which was open. The landlady saw this, and paused briefly to gape at my kid, who she just watched walk past her right out the door toward traffic. By this time I had hurdled the desk that was in my way and caught up just outside the door. This the landlady reacted to by pitching a vitriolic fit at me for “daring” to “try to leave” before “we had settled this”. I think it must have been the look on my face then that prompted the sister to lunge between us, take the landlady by the arm, and explain in the tones one uses to an overwrought three-year-old that she should maybe go have a nice cup of tea across the street while she herself talked to me. She made it sound like she was going to talk sense into me, so the landlady accepted this state of affairs and repaired to the cafe opposite.

As soon as she was gone, the housing agent whirled around and started apologizing to me for her sister, telling me she’d always been “unstable” and they all did their best to look after her but that recently she’d become “downright scary”. I, clutching my kid, made no move to sit down or leave the doorway, which she clearly found unsurprising. She explained that it was obvious that the house was not appropriate for our needs and that she resented her sister's misleading her as well as me. That was when one of the landlady’s daughters, who had been hiding behind a potted plant, suddenly ran out the door and into the cafe where the landlady was glaring at us through the front window. The sister exclaimed, “Oh for fuck’s sake! She left one of her little spies in here! There’s no telling what she’s going to tell her we said. You go home, I’ll try to deal with this.”

That's when things started to go really bad. The landlady, incensed at our ingratitude and impossible demands, stopped “looking for a place for us” and started coming around every day to ask when we were leaving. If I reminded her of our deal and our signed contract, she would scream and carry on about how ungrateful we were, that she had bent over backwards for us to find us a new place, and that it was our own picky, entitled attitude that was causing all the trouble. Somewhere in there the temporary fix job she turned out to have done on our toilet broke down, and we informed her that the whole apartment now smelled like sewage and she needed to get someone out about it. She flat out refused, telling us that horrible people like us didn’t deserve toilets and when were we moving out? Obviously I consulted with the local applicable legal department, and called a plumber myself and had it billed to her. Her parents then found her circling the house pounding on all the windows and the front door, shouting, and managed to get her away. They convinced her (correctly) that her legal standing in all this would go down, down, down if she kept harassing us like that. She backed off – but not really.

A few days later she came to the door, all sweetness and sugar, and said she had solved our problem for us. Obviously skeptical, I inquired as to her scheme and it was this: we would take the "perfect" small, dangerous, unacceptable house in the bad part of town and she herself would pay the extra 400+. I explained that I didn’t really like the idea of signing a rental contract with her, and she replied oh no no no, nothing like that, how silly. We and we alone would sign the rental papers, and she would just give us 400 in cash every month. Ummm… no. Not a fucking chance. Having a babe in arms and experience with narcissistic sociopaths with tendencies to histrionics, I kept it polite and made noises of thinking about it, got her the Hell out of my house, waited an hour, and left her a voice mail that we were uncomfortable with this idea and would not be going through with it. Fast forward a day, and I had her parents at the door asking me to come over for some tea. Obviously uncomfortable with the whole thing, they asked if I would be all right with signing a contract with them to provide the extra 400 Euros a month. While trying to frame a polite utter refusal, I said some things which then brought to light (surprise, surprise) that she hadn’t informed them of our other reasons for refusing the house, and they sadly agreed that it was an obvious no deal and let me go home again.

I honestly don't know how it would have all turned out had her parents not shortly thereafter left the country to visit family for a few weeks. It probably would have been a much better scene, and definitely less violent. As soon as their car pulled away, the landlady moved into their house, whether with their permission or not I don’t know. She started coming to the door while my husband was at work and leaning on the bell. I ignored her. Eventually, I disconnected the bell. Once, she managed to spot me coming home from the supermarket (I was sneaking into my own home from a variety of directions by that point) and tried to follow me into the house. I shut the door in her face and she stared bellowing that it was her house and she could come in whenever she wanted, which was not true (I always inform myself of my legal rights when there’s a conflict). I was in the little foyer where my front door was, next to the stairs to the upstairs apartments. When I just kept walking away toward my door, she went berserk and kicked in the glass panel at the bottom of the main front door, showering the inside with broken glass. I just went on inside. It was her own door! When she left, I went out into the hallway and cleaned up the glass, duct-taped a piece of cardboard over the hole in the front door, and left a note for the students saying that the landlady had broken it herself and they'd need to ask her when she planned on fixing it. 

This is also when I got the police involved. We have a thing here called a neighborhood agent; they see to conflicts that haven’t gone far enough to go to court, incidents that aren’t punishable by jail time, that kind of thing. So far the landlady hadn't done anything “punishable”, so this agent ended up just dropping in to tell her to leave me alone every time she harassed me, and then again an hour later when she harassed me about calling the police on her. We did try one instance of “mediation”, but it simply consisted of the agent asking me for my side, which was then interrupted every two sentences by the landlady screaming, “Don’t lie, you ungrateful bitch!” until eventually she stormed out. The one time she actually faced a consequence for any of her behavior was the time a neighbor knocked on the window to ask if we were missing our bicycles. We were. This neighbor, it seemed, often had the landlady, whom she didn’t much like, over for tea because she felt sorry for her. It had started a few years before when she’d found the landlady’s daughters outside in the snow without shoes or coats and decided that she needed some local moral support. At these sessions, my husband and I had of late frequently been the subject of rants, so when in the night she had seen the landlady throwing two bicycles into the canal she figured they might be ours. The police came out, the bikes were retrieved, statements were taken, the neighbor endured an excoriating diatribe about abandoning friendship for the sake of ungrateful pieces of elitist trash, and their tea sessions came to a close.

While the landlady lived next door we were terrified. Our kid’s bedroom had windows onto the garden and she was often skulking back there, peering in windows, rattling doors. If she threw a rock through there it could be very serious. Also she was living in a house that shared a wall with ours and we didn't find her particularly... safe... regarding things like accidentally setting her kitchen on fire, nor were things particularly quiet. Obviously, we were looking for a new house, any acceptable new house, to get away from her insanity, but we weren’t giving her the satisfaction of letting her know that.

Another major incident – the worst one – occurred when she and her boyfriend hid just inside the door of the parents' house until I opened my door. This incident, while shocking and horrible, did give me just about my only note of real satisfaction throughout this ordeal. We’ll get to that. It’s a petty gloat, but a gloat nonetheless. This time, I had my kid on my hip as I opened the front door. The landlady’s boyfriend immediately hit the door with his full weight, slamming it into, oh so luckily, my side instead of my toddler. Had it hit my kid an ambulance would have been required, but instead, this dumb-ass hit me. While he did it he was screaming, “YOU ARE GOING OUT OF HERE NOW!” He was an arrogant, sexist douchebag and it had obviously never occurred to him (despite my very competent daily wrangling of a 55-kilo, exuberant young dog) that I might be strong. Sure, he hit me very suddenly with the weight of a grown man at speed… but horses do that stuff all the time. I reacted as my lifetime of experience dictated, and instantly threw my own weight back against the door. I had better purchase and he was an idiot, and also surprised, so it ended – and this is the satisfying part – with his hand trapped in the door. He had to drag it out, skin stretching, ligaments and tendons and bones popping through the compressing wooden door and jamb painfully, and it took a lot of seconds. When he finally got his hand back and I got the door slammed to, I watched while I sobbed into the telephone to the police as he staggered around outside holding his hand clutched into his doubled over body while the landlady berated him as incompetent and stupid, and beat him with her purse. Days later he was still favoring his purple, swollen hand and he never attacked me again. Unfortunately, this also the police deemed “not punishable”, but they did “speak to him”.

There’s not a lot more to tell. We continued to sneak in and out of our home and stay out of the garden, me waiting by the window in the evenings, scanning for my husband coming home for work and for potential interference, phone in hand and half-dialed to call the police if anything went down, walking the dog in secret, hiding in our own home, until her parents came back and discovered the trashed, disgusting mess that had been made of their house, and kicked her out again. I helped clean up. It wasn’t much later that we found somewhere to go and got the Hell out of there.