Sarah
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
I switch colors kind of every day. Love it. It's so cute.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
Yeah, it is. We are expecting freezing rain tonight.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
So it's about 4.11 right now. 4.30, it'll probably be pitch blackout.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
It's not really for me either, but I suffered through it for some of the other benefits of this place. That's fair.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
I do. Yeah. Sorry. Don't break it. I'm very nervous. Oh, don't be nervous.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
I just opened my Instagram and like literally first post was Dax. Then it was Monica. Then it was armchair. I'm like, yeah. This story happened in March of 2017, but the background goes a bit before that. So I was living in an apartment. I had been there about one year. It was just me and my dog.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
And one day I'm out for a walk a few streets away and a man came running up to me and he introduced himself. He said he had just moved in across the hall from me and he recognized me. So he wanted to come say hi. And that was fine. It was like a couple streets over. So that was a bit weird. But for the next year and a half, there was no issues. He was neighborly. I'd run into him occasionally.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
He'd pet my dog. He'd say hi through the door to my dog sometimes. I didn't know much about him, but I did pick up a few bits over time. So he was in his late 40s. I don't think he worked. So I do believe he was on like a social assistance program. And he had formerly been an engineer, which is just something that came to the back of my mind for later.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
He had mentioned an out-of-town boyfriend, and he'd sometimes be gone for a few weeks at a time to go visit him, but I never saw the boyfriend come our direction.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
Ottawa has a million people, although it's a spread out city, but the area I was in was fairly dense. Anyway, so then fast forward to about six months before the event in March, and I am starting to notice some odd behavior and it continues to escalate over the next several months. So like one thing, like his hair was perfectly normal and it started to get just wilder and wilder.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
And like by the end, it was just bleached blonde and completely unkempt and crazy and
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
oh wow i started to notice that i was running into him more frequently and then it ramped up to being like almost every time i left my apartment that i'd be running into this guy it felt suspicious i'd go out and then he knocked on his window to like wave to me through the window i was just starting to feel nervous it's now early february and i had mentioned to my mom like i
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
I think I might start looking for somewhere else to live. I'm just getting like a bad feeling, but wasn't super urgent about it. And then one night in early February, there was an incident in the hallway. I was in my living room and the walls are like paper thin. So I could hear everything in the hallway and the police showed up. It was not a peaceful situation. Lots of yelling.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
I could hear physical struggle out there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
And at one point, he started doing a religious chant in like a foreign language. And it sounded almost like speaking in tongues. Oh, God. Oh, wow. He was like white French Canadian. Yeah. So for about half an hour before the police did take him away, and I was leaving for a trip the next day and would be gone for a week. I was like, okay, when I get back, I'm looking for an apartment.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
But then when I came back from my trip, he was nowhere to be seen. So I definitely had like a sense of relief about that. But I also kind of lost my sense of urgency. A small aside, during this period that he's away, I was also talking to the office of men about another issue. And she had asked me about him one day. And so I started telling her what I'd been noticing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
And she told me that she actually had to start screening her phone calls because of him. Because he had been calling her 20 to 30 times a day. Oh, no. March 1st, he came back and I just had an immediate sense of dread. Like, oh, why did I waste this time? And he was away and not get out of here. And again, I took my dog out, got in and I went in as quickly as I can. So I shut my door.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
But then 15 seconds later, he knocked on my door. Oh, fuck. And I knew he had just seen me come in, so I like answered it. But he was coming to apologize for the incident that had happened in February.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
And he explained to me that his nurses had been changing his medication and it had been setting him off and that he had made comments about self-harm, which is why the police had showed up that night. And he had been in the mental health hospital in Ottawa. But then he proceeded to say, if anything happens again, please don't call the police on me. Please call the medics instead.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
But he then proceeded to go on about a birthday party he wanted to throw in May. It was going to be his 50th. And he wanted to rent out my apartment to do that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
So that he'd have his apartment and my apartment. Oh my God. And I was like, well, no. And then he's like, well, it's fine. You can lock your bedroom door.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
It's fine. He's super pushy about it. I'm like, we'll talk about it closer too. But full well in my brain, I'm like, I'm not going to be here anymore.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
Then March 3rd, I was out at a concert with friends. I was not driving that night. I had parked at my friend's house and she was driving and driving me home after because the next day I was going back to her place anyways for a birthday. So I didn't have my car that night. The potential was there for me to drink, but I was not drunk. I had two drinks over the course of many, many hours.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
By the time I got home, it was almost 2 a.m., maybe 1.30. So again, my dog had been by himself for a few hours. So I go let him out. I'm coming back in, and he comes out of his apartment. So he kind of blocks me from my way in. And he was very, very clearly high on something. He was super giddy and high energy, jumping around. He was going from topic to topic.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
At one point, he started serenading me. Oh. It was just wild. Like, I didn't even know what to do. And then he drops on me that earlier that day, he had been planning to bomb the building. Oh!
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
He was telling me, and then he shows me sitting right in his doorway the supplies he had bought to do it. Oh, my God. The thing that sticks out in my mind is, you know, those propane canisters that you'd use for like a torch. They're kind of narrow, about a foot tall. There was about a dozen of those.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
And again, remember, he was an engineer, so he probably had to know how to do that. But he told me then he had changed his mind because he heard my dog whipper and decided he didn't want my dog to get hurt. So that's what made him change his mind about it and that he was going to return the supplies the next day.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
At some point during this whole conversation, he heard... handed me a stack of journals. There was like six or seven of them. And he asked me to hang on to them. He said, you can read them, but please don't give them to anybody, especially not the police. And then finally, another neighbor on our floor came out and was like, why the hell is there a conversation happening at 2am?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
So I then slipped into my apartment and locked the door. I had no car. So I completely panicked. I read a couple of pages of the journals and then I slammed them shut. I was like, this is too invasive. I can't text my sister and be like, do you still have a spare room? And then I just shut down and went to bed. I was like, I don't know what I'm going to do.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
So then the next day I was just blocking it out. And my friend came over, I finally told her and she's like, we need to have get you out of here. You need to call the police. But my concern with calling the police was that I'm going to call them. They're going to deem him not a threat.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
He's going to know that I called the police on him when he three days ago just told me, please don't call the police, call the ambulance. Yeah. I have to get my ducks in a row and then report it. But they talked with sense into me like, what if next time nothing stops him? There is other families in here. So I packed up a bag, took my dog, left, called the police.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
And they did exactly what I expected. Showed up, deemed him not an immediate threat. And then left. I'm done here. I'm not. living in this apartment anymore. Luckily, I have good parents who live nearby. So I was able to go there and I emailed the office admin again, be like, remember our conversation about this guy? This is what happened. I don't want to live here.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
I'm paid for the month of March. Can I just break my lease at the end of it instead of the regular 60 days we have to give in Ontario? So they let me out of it. My parents and my brother and sister and one of my friends came, helped me load up my whole apartment in two hours as
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
quickly as we can while we were there he did knock on the door and ask if i was there my dad and brother answered i was there but they said i wasn't he said i apologize i hope she's not moving because of me then he asked for his journals back and we passed them out the door that was the end of my bomber neighbors did you ever find out anything more about this i mean the notion that someone else just moved in i know across the hall i really hope he got
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
some help and was able to get stable medication or something. I'm glad these programs exist that some people who need help can get social assistance on housing, but I never want to live.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
the part i was like well he did have the materials and again i was like maybe that's on me that i waited not quite 24 hours but 20 hours maybe the supplies had been removed by the time the police showed up but i know he was known to the police obviously he had been taken in by them three weeks prior we're frustrated with this also imagine how frustrated the cops are there's nothing really they can do they just got to keep responding to these people but there's a whole protocol probably everyone is extremely frustrated
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
Right. He hadn't actually committed a crime yet. You're allowed to own those propane cylinders and whatever other materials.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
Yeah. This time he decided, oh, he likes my dog and he didn't want him to get hurt. But I'm like, what about the little baby that lives upstairs?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
Oh, scary. Yeah, it's kind of my thing, though, shutting it out and ignoring it for a while.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
I'm not quite in Tallmakers, but I do now have my own house in a suburban area.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Armchair Anonymous: Crazy Neighbors
Thank you. Monica, I just finished reading your day one gift guide, and you're such an incredible writer. Oh, thank you. And Dax, I saw the little mouse that you drew.