These Petty Revenge Stories Are Proof That Spite Is An Art Form

“This story is about me, but I’m not the one who carried out any revenge; that honor belongs to a friend of mine. We’ll call her Mary. I am from a pretty rough area of a city known for its gangs and violence in the Midwest (you can take a guess where), so, as you might expect, I didn’t have very much growing up. Several years ago, when I was in high school, I made some not-so-great decisions, mostly dressing somewhat revealingly and making myself popular with boys.

I didn’t exactly sleep around, but I was attractive enough and had a good number of guys interested in me, especially the football players, because I was a cheerleader and was present at most games. One in particular, we’ll call him James, was a little more aggressive than some others about wanting to become more intimate with me. He was a linebacker, around 6 feet tall, and built like a brick wall (wide shoulders, tall upper body, muscular) compared to me, a decently fit but not exactly strong 5’1 girl.

More than once, James had tried to get me to go out with him or stay at his place, but I wasn’t interested.

He really didn’t like that and would frequently demean me, calling me a derogatory name like “immoral person” or “promiscuous person” after being rejected. Eventually, after a victorious game, he and some of my other friends convinced me to come to a party later that night with the other football players. I had never really partied before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I got caught up in the moment and played drinking games with James and a few others. That was my mistake. After a few rounds, he convinced me to go to a room with him and forced himself on me. Even after I told him to stop, he essentially manipulated me into remaining silent while he proceeded. I don’t remember the exact events super well, but I do know that afterwards I left the party crying and was driven home by Mary.

Afterwards, I felt disgusted and ashamed of myself for letting myself get into that position. Luckily, I had friends to support me and help me get through it. I wanted nothing more than to forget it and move on, but a few others felt differently. After a few days of him bragging about having been with me, I thought he had people convinced that I had caved and decided to give him a chance.

What I didn’t know or remember was that Mary had taken pictures showing my bruises from him holding me down and recorded me talking about what had happened on the drive back. She had secretly been showing his friends proof that I had been assaulted and was planning to destroy his life. A few weeks after the incident, James was jumped by several of the people I thought were his friends and was later rushed to the ER with a broken nose, a few broken ribs, a cracked hip, and several bruises after a game. At the same time, his car had its windshield smashed in and its tires slashed and spray-painted pink. When he was released from the hospital, his parents disowned him and kicked him out onto the streets after Mary proved to them that he had assaulted me.

James dropped out of school after being kicked out of his house and, from what I know, slept in basements and spare rooms of the few friends willing to take him in. He couldn’t hold down a job and was fired from his last one, which I believe was a retail position, for harassing a female coworker. The last I heard, he was still job hunting and living in his grandparents’ basement.”

“I live with my mom. She’s quiet, keeps to herself, and never bothers anyone. A few months ago, our new neighbor decided to report her to the city for having an “illegal shed” in the backyard. It was total crap. The shed’s been there for years and has full permits. An inspector came out, checked everything, and left without saying a word.

But the neighbor was smug and proud. He thought he’d scared us. So I did a little digging. It turned out that his brand-new pool was way too close to the property line and had been illegally built over a utility basement. I reported him, attached photos, and quoted city codes.

Two weeks later, the city ordered him to either move it (impossible) or fill it in. He lost the whole thing, $40,000 down the drain, literally. Now he gets to look at our completely legal shed every day while standing over a pile of dirt where his pool used to be.

Mom sleeps great now.”

“I, 18M, was in my junior year of high school. I’m not going to get into it, but I ended up in the mental hospital after a very bad time. I had lost one of the only family members who accepted me for being gay, and the only extracurricular activity I had was theater. The theater director treated me like the mom I never had until it came time for shows, at which point everyone was told how worthless we were. Not to mention, I had been bullied relentlessly because I was gay and in Oklahoma, of all places.

I came back from the hospital medicated and ready to finish high school.

Some background: I had spent my whole high school career trying to become the president of the drama club. I was the only one to be inducted as a thespian as a freshman, and I was practically ready to be the next president. The votes came in, and I lost. I would have been okay losing to my Ben (fake name) until I found out that they had been telling everyone that I was unstable and informing people that I went to the mental hospital for substance use. I have never used substances, or used any substances for that matter. What’s worse, when I confronted my theater teacher about it, she told me “everyone has a right to free speech” and then proceeded to tell me that maybe I shouldn’t have even reached out for help since this would have prevented my loss in the presidential race. Not to mention, the police raided my car, my locker, and even my house. My parents thought I was on meth or something since the police kept coming to my house. At the first police visit, they quite literally busted down our front door. I even got beaten up in the parking lot of my work because a known substance user didn’t believe that I didn’t have anything on me. I almost got fired from my one source of income because of this ordeal. All because he made up this lie and everyone believed it and started talking.

I was fuming, and I found out the top ten colleges for Ben, and emailed them all the screenshots of what he had said about me.

His plan was to attend mostly liberal arts colleges, and he had even received thousands in scholarship money. All of them rescinded their acceptance when they received the proof. Correspondence was very slow between me and the colleges (it took them forever to confirm that these screenshots weren’t doctored in any way), but by the time it was confirmed, most of the application deadlines had passed. He hasn’t been able to get into college. I feel slightly bad as I found out his mom was a special ed teacher, and hearing this actually informed Ben that when he turns 18, he will need to find a place to live on his own. He has nowhere to live and no future plans.

Don’t make fun of people’s mental health, or make up lies for the purpose of winning. I haven’t talked to anyone in the theater group since. All of them considered me a substance user, and I became a pariah. I feel a little remorse, but not enough.”

“Obligatory “found this subreddit because of the click” real quick. This happened in January, but the district attorney called me two days ago with the update.

I’m a wheelchair user because of a fainting disorder (severe POTS for those wondering). I came home from work to see a car parked right under a “No parking fire lane” and on the sidewalk. It blocked the way into my apartment, and I had to leave the wheelchair in my car. I started taking photos of the car because this had been an issue with the owner for months.

My landlord had told me to get photos of it and email them to him every time she did it after I mentioned it in passing.

While taking a photo, the owner came out of her apartment to scream at me. I stayed calm and tried to walk into my apartment. She got in my face to continue screaming, and by reflex, I shoved her back. She then grabbed me by the throat and began to punch me. After a minute, my neighbors and roommate, who were having a smoke, came running and got her off me.

Police were called, paramedics showed up because my neck was bleeding (she had acrylic nails), and I ended up going to the ER because I had a syncope episode while the paramedics were there.

I decided to press charges, thinking I’d just get an aggravated assault or something. I made sure that they got her while she was home because I knew she had a gun on the wall despite being a convicted felon.

When the police went to arrest her, they found that the car was stolen, without insurance, she didn’t have a license, there were used needles all over the apartment with her 8-year-old child, and the gun, which was also marked stolen. The child is in foster care, and she is in jail without bond. The DA said that her child recorded it (she apparently told her to) and it was already ruled as assault because of the overwhelming proof, plus the 7 counts of assault she had gotten in the past 5 years.

Had I gotten her nailed with it outside her home, she would have only gotten probation since she was a parent, but now she lost her kid, her home, her car, and is going to be in jail for about 30 years or more, depending on what the state charges her with for the substances.”

“In the year 2003, the company I was working for closed down, so I sought out new employment. I was a machinist by trade, with a great reputation, so it took me less than a day to get a job. We will call the new place Spiral, because of the specialized tools they made. Anyway, I started out as one of the operators. The place was owner-operated, meaning the owner was there daily. He had a floor supervisor who was actually pretty nice. After I had been there around a year, the owner and supervisor had a falling out and the supervisor left.

For whatever reason, the owner—we shall call him Rick—told me I was in charge.

A little back story on Rick: He was in his 60s and had started the company out of his garage. He ended up buying a huge chunk of land and turned it into an industrial park, all while in his 20s. By now, he was one of the richest guys in the state. He was also the biggest jerk I had ever met. He treated every employee like garbage, except for me and one other guy. If we dared to talk to each other during work hours, he would scream at us.

My promotion kind of financially trapped me. Rick would have no problems talking to me though, and he was the braggy sort of rich guy, while paying us the bare minimum.

During our talks, I learned that he cooked his books. You see, the industrial park was owned by an entity that he created, while Spiral was owned by another. He would always make sure that the park entity charged Spiral enough in rent that it looked like the company was barely staying afloat. He also bragged that he had taken a bunch of industrial waste and buried it on his property at home because it cost so much less.

He made my life heck over the next decade, always keeping my pay just high enough that I could not afford to leave, while treating me and my guys like crap.

I ended up with a 95% turnover rate on employees; I am not exaggerating. We ended up having to go to temp agencies and, towards the end, even they refused to send me people.

I had to do some careful wording, but my duties ended up swelling to the point where I convinced Rick to let me say I was the Plant Manager. This right here was huge. I have no degree from college, but I now had a title and the experience.

I started to look for a job in earnest, and after six months, I found one for a lot more money, with benefits—yeah, Spiral had none.

Now, over my time at Spiral, I had seen everyone who gave them notice be told to leave on the spot, and the company that hired me insisted I give them the two-week notice. So I said I would, but I didn’t.

At the end of my last day, I sat at my desk and sent an email to the head of OSHA and the state’s EPA office—two men that I had gotten to know well. I filled them in on all of the violations that Rick had disclosed. I also sent an email to the state’s attorney about the books. I left my keys on my desk with a paper under them that simply read “I quit.”

I never found out if the state’s attorney went anywhere, but the contact at OSHA let me know the company ended up with $150,000 in fines for some willful violations, and the guy from the EPA dug up half of Rick’s property before he admitted to where he buried the waste.

Last I knew, he ended up in jail.”

“One day, I received an email from a hosting provider telling me that attacks were being launched from our server, and I needed to look into it. I found that there was indeed a hacker on our server. He was using an app to anonymously control his bot network, among other things. I looked at the app he was using and discovered that it was an open-source project. I then downloaded the code for this backdoor, modified it to log everything to a file, and replaced his app with my honeypot version.

Over the next six months, I collected every scrap of information I could on this guy.

I then used that information to take over many of his online accounts, including his main email account. That was the account where he had registered all of his services, so I was able to issue password reset requests for everything he owned. I gained control of six other email accounts, two dozen IRC accounts, his social media page, his relationship profile, numerous websites, and the backup site he used for his cell phone. I have his phone number, his mom’s number, and his partner’s number. I know his address, his birthday, the schools he went to, even his favorite foods and music.

After I took every single online account he had ever had away from him, I sent a nasty email to his ISP in an effort to extort yet more information from them.

In that email, I said some very unkind things and threatened to publicly embarrass him if I didn’t get the information.

The hacker disappeared immediately after that. I have looked for him at times over the last fifteen years since and he has not resurfaced. The laws concerning insults to public figures are not to be trifled with. The prison term for such an offense is 15 years.”

“One day I was on my evening walk with my dog, and we came across a small dog standing in the middle of the street, shaking. Its hair was matted, it had mange, was ridden with fleas, one eye was swollen and sealed shut with mucus, its nails were so long that it was walking on the back of its paws, it was malnourished, and it was quivering. I was shocked.

I called my wife to bring me a blanket and to come pick us up. While I was waiting, the door of the house in front of us opened, and out came a disheveled-looking older man.

He started calling for the dog to come inside. I absolutely lost it. I screamed at him, asking if it was his dog, and he replied that it was. I asked him why it was in such bad shape, and he said, “She’s sick and won’t eat.” I yelled at him that there was no freaking way in the world I was letting him take her back inside. The shouting match lasted long enough for a few neighbors to come outside. (Who later told me he had another dog in the house.) Eventually, my wife pulled up, and I wrapped the doggo in the blanket and went home.

I looked up the name of our local no-kill shelter, but they were closed until the following day.

My wife and I decided to call her Sally. I gave Sally a bath and went and bought some wet food since she wouldn’t eat dry kibble. She devoured it. I set her up a nice sleeping area in the garage for her to spend the night.

The first thing in the morning, I took Sally to the shelter and called animal control and told them what happened. They went to check her out, took a statement from me, and ended up at his house, confiscating his other dog. Unfortunately, Sally was put down due to the horrible shape she was in (she was also very old).

Here’s where the revenge begins.

This old jerk’s house was on the route I took to walk my dog twice a day. My dog liked to take a dump about two houses before we reached his. Perfect! Now I didn’t need to carry bags of crap all the way back to my house! I started tossing them on his roof twice a day. At first, he would climb a ladder around once a week to get them down, but eventually, I broke his will to do that. This went on for about a year before I moved. His roof was covered in crap bags.

I also printed out flyers with his address and pictures of how I found Sally and put them in all the neighbors’ mailboxes.

I live across town now, but every couple of months I ride by and toss a bag of dog crap on his roof to let him know I’m still thinking about Sally.”

“15 years ago I had a partner that I’d been with for 6 years. He moved to another city for work, while I finished my studies and then I would move there too. He was apartment hunting, subleasing in the meantime. He came home almost every weekend and during Christmas and New Year’s. He found an apartment in January and invited me up to show it, and I prepared to move up; looking for a job, looking for new furniture, etc.

Late February I told him it’s time to terminate the lease on the apartment in our hometown, when he suddenly broke up with me.

I was shocked and very sad. He collected some clothes and his very expensive PC, which he’d built from scratch. It was his baby.

Two weeks later, he updated his profile pic on social media to him and another woman kissing! Obviously, they hadn’t been together for 2 weeks. I called him and called him out on it, and he admitted to having met her 2 months ago. He was at the airport to travel abroad with his buddy for the weekend, so we didn’t talk long.

That same evening I decided to tell the new partner. I managed to find her on social media and wrote her.

She didn’t believe me at first, of course. But I sent her texts, pics, I described their apartment in detail (well, her apartment, as it turned out). When I sent her a private part pick he’d sent me with their bedroom clearly in the background, she said, “Okay, enough, I believe you.”

She told me they’d been together for 8 months, not 2. She’d been in Africa for 2 months, in December and January, which would explain why he was able to be with me for 2 weeks over the holidays and why he could invite me to see the apartment. We wrote a lot.

He’d sent us the exact same Valentine’s Day text. He’d bought us the exact same Christmas present, etc., you get the picture. After comparing notes, it was time for revenge. She cut up all of his clothes and left them in a pile on the floor. I told her about the PC and advised her to tear that jerk to pieces. She hacked it with screwdrivers and hammers, and every piece was beyond saving.

When he came home on Sunday, she tossed him out with nowhere to go, but not before showing him all of his possessions obliterated.”

“Well, the time judge gave my aunt to pay what she owed me came and went, but she didn’t make any payment at all, so we legally had to push the case into legal collection. Cops went to her house, but she “wasn’t there” (she was in her house, but didn’t make any noise), so cops had to leave and get a search permit to enter to look for her. They found her inside; she had sold everything she owned and was ready to illegally leave the country to not pay anything and start a new life abroad.

When they were apprehending her, she attacked the cops; she actually clawed the eye of one, causing permanent damage and adding multiple charges to her file. She was taken to court again, this time for more crimes in addition to not making a payment by the deadline that the court had set last time. I’m not sure if I can legally list all the things she was charged with, but in the end she got 18 years and 9 months of jail time with no chance of parole until the 15th year. And yes, since she had sold everything to leave the country, the court took the amount she had to pay us (recalculated to today’s tax numbers and exchange rates) before putting the rest of the money into an account that her son would get when he is 18.

As for her brat in the first post, I had mentioned that when her husband divorced her, he got custody.

Well, the kid’s personality was so bad that he took him to a psychiatrist, who decided that, because of my aunt’s crappy parenting, he was showing personality issues. He is now in a pre-military boarding school for troubled kids, which he hates completely.

As for the money, I would love to say I used it to get the parts necessary to remake that kit, but I had to put it in a savings account. The government recently changed border tax systems, so the previous money became a substantial amount with the new numbers, quite hilariously so. As much as I would love to spend it all on gunpla, I have to think about the future, so it’s going to stay in a savings account, getting fatter by the day until I graduate.”

“This is a story from my childhood. I lived in a small suburban neighborhood in the ’90s. We had two dachshunds that we kept in a backyard fence, and three cats that just roamed our 1/8 acre corner lot in my subdivision. Of the three cats, “Magic” was the matriarch. She was a big, fat, black cat that didn’t really run from any neighborhood cats or dogs.

Our neighbors across the street had a pit bull that they would let roam the neighborhood. It was never aggressive towards me or my friends, but it also was NOT a friendly dog.

We just stayed away from it when playing in the woods.

One day, that pit bull charged my cat while I was playing in the yard. It began to whip its head back and forth, shaking Magic, and I ran in to get my dad. We didn’t have a gun for home defense. My dad kept a four-foot-long galvanized steel rod that was about an inch thick next to the door, though. I’ve never seen him move that fast. He was on that dog in about five seconds flat. I remember seeing him strike the dog probably three times before it let go of Magic.

My dad said, “Come here, Doxie, we are going to the neighbor’s house.” He was angry and shaking.

When I got closer, I could see that the dog’s skull was completely smashed. You could see blood and grey matter; it was gnarly. Its eye socket was also smashed. He picked up the dead dog and walked with me to the owner’s house. The man answered the door and said, “What did you do to my dog!?” And my dad said, “The same darn thing I’m going to do to you if this happens to one of my kids.”

They never got another dog. We never saw them again, and they moved about a year later.

Edit –

I might be lost.

I felt that the nature of dragging the bloody dog back to the owner and threatening them with the same for killing the cat was revenge, but maybe not.

I also always get these comments about “animal cruelty” and being a psycho or something when I’ve posted this story on Reddit before. I don’t think you all understand how much this marked me. I focused on facts in this post, not feelings, because the feelings are very painful. It was 30 years ago now, and I can still remember very minute details of the scene, and I remember going on a roller coaster from being terrified that I was going to die, to being scared that my dad was going to die, to being scared and saddened about Magic and the dog, to being scared about confronting the parents, and then to a deep mourning for my favorite cat (even to this day, it’s the best cat I’ve ever had.)

Not sure why you expect this to be some kind of morality tale; it’s just what happened.”

“So my old boss (beloved by all) left the company last year. While they were trying to find a replacement, upper management decided that the person in charge of another department should be our boss (for the time being, of course). This person, let’s call her Dina, does not have a single iota of what anyone on this team does. Nor does she want to learn what we do. Fine, whatever—just let me do my work, get my money, and leave me alone.

This issue comes in when she suddenly decides that we are disrespecting her with everything we do.

Not early enough to a meeting (15 minutes is her “latest earliest”)? DISRESPECT! Have to step away to use the restroom? DISRESPECT! Take your PTO that’s offered by the company? DISRESPECT! Finally, I had enough and started documenting every instance (with proof and witnesses) in a massive Excel sheet. At this point, sure, it’s annoying and I’m passively looking for new work, but I’ve dealt with worse.

The breaking point for me came during my Yearly Review. This is the first and (hopefully) ONLY time I’ve ever been put on a PIP plan. I was told repeatedly that I was lazy and disrespectful (despite SEVERAL clients providing positive feedback and me working until 22h most nights).

However, I kept quiet and towed the line until I had a new job. Then, I let the floodgates open.

Now, something important to note is that while our former boss was great, we weren’t all going to quit in solidarity with her. But me? Well… that’s a bit of a different story. In addition to my job, I also worked to make my coworkers’ jobs easier too. I was kind of the “glue” holding that entire team together. So when I quit, everyone else on my team did as well. And what did our team do, you might ask? Well, we supplied a service that brought in the majority of the revenue.

With no one to supply the service, the business would head towards bankruptcy.

Back to the story, when I put in my resignation, I decided to include the spreadsheet to provide further insight as to why I was leaving. And to top it all off, I decided to BCC the CEO. He and I are pretty close, and he’s told me on multiple occasions that he would do anything to keep me employed there. When he found out about Dina’s antics, he held true to his word. He asked if he should fire Dina. Now, Dina may be a jerk, but she has young kids and I’m not a jerk.

So I told him no, but if anyone else leaves because of her, then he should rethink her employment.

Well, my last day came and went…and the rest of the team submitted their resignations, effective immediately, citing disrespect from Dina specifically. With no team to manage, the CEO decides that Dina no longer has a place at the company and fires her with no severance. How do I know? Dina decided to spam call me for several days. But my new fancy job is at a law firm, and I was able to get one of them to draft up a cease and desist. I haven’t heard a peep since, and now I’m just enjoying my new gig, Dina-free.”

“My very good friend made some slightly dumb mistakes and sent some pictures to someone whom she reasonably thought she could trust, not knowing much more than his first name, his screen name, roughly where he lived, and the type of work he did. He is not in our country, but had indicated that he would be traveling for work near us shortly, and they had made some plans to meet. And when she noticed some red flags and backed out, the dude threatened to publish these pictures online. I am, incidentally, an attorney.

So, after some searching later and gathering up any pictures he had sent her that could possibly identify him, his online handle led me to a TikTok page, which led me to an Instagram page with his name on it.

That led to a LinkedIn page with his place of work, which matched a picture he sent in a branded polo he was wearing.

Some more searches provided me with the email addresses of the CEO, VP of HR, the operations manager, and the public relations manager.

I just fired off an email on behalf of my client, including the screenshots of him threatening revenge, snippets of the conversation showing that username while he sent the exact picture of him wearing his company’s branded apparel, links demonstrating how I know it’s him, along with pictures he had sent her of his motorcycle with the license plate visible, as further proof of his identity.

I also included screenshots of him discussing a workplace incident that were time-stamped, along with pieces of dialogue discussing how he had physical intimacy with an ex at his place of work, and discussing plans to have physical intimacy with her in his office as well.

I also included a picture he sent her showing his work laptop with his entire Outlook calendar, along with proprietary information (which he sent to “prove he was busy”), as well as other pictures he had taken of his workplace with non-consenting employees.

I further informed his employer that I will be forwarding all this information to their local law enforcement, and since he had indicated that he would be traveling to the United States soon, I will also forward this to the local office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as these threats constitute a federal crime because my client is a US citizen on US soil.

So, should they continue his employment and proceed with their plans to send him to the United States for work, I will ensure, on behalf of my client, that federal law enforcement is waiting for him on arrival.

I will do so, as one of the assistant US attorneys for this region is a law school buddy of mine. Since I have his license plate number, I know where he lives and will be contacting his local authorities tomorrow. You silly jerk, thinking you were hiding in anonymity and that you could threaten my friend? It took me 45 minutes to destroy your life.”

“I live in Turkiye, and as you know, the southeast region of my country was wrecked by a couple of giant earthquakes a year ago. My city was the epicenter, and while the house I lived in with my family wasn’t destroyed, a lot of shelves got knocked off, and one of them was the one where I kept my Gunpla kits. Out of all the kits I had, only one survived—a MG The O that was heavily customized. I had built it with my grandfather, who passed away a few years ago, so I was ecstatic it survived.

A few months after everything had calmed down, my mother called her relatives for dinner, which included Aunt B. (not for jerk, her name does start with the letter B). She came alongside her son, who is 8 and is an entitled brat. While the adults were drinking coffee, this little brat barged into my room and demanded to play with my computer, which I refused since I was editing a video for my college society and had the camera on. Well, the brat went back crying to her mother, who came and started yelling at me. While I was dealing with her, her little brat climbed onto my desk, took my model kit, then immediately dropped it and stepped on it. The rest was just yelling, me swearing at them up and down and telling them they were going to pay for it, with her calling me a weirdo for still having “toys” and saying that she wasn’t going to pay for crap. At first, my mother was not inclined to make her pay in order to keep the peace, but when she realized that it was the kit I made with my late grandfather (her father), she was angrier than I was and went out for blood.

We took the case to a friend of ours who is a lawyer that specializes in in-family cases, and they told us that since my camera caught it all, we would definitely win it, but it was better to come to an agreement out of court in a settlement since it would be cheaper.

I pulled out a price list of the kits I needed to make an exact replica of the one that was destroyed, and it came to just about 1k USD, which is about 25k-27k TRY with the exchange rate. Well, she refused, so we took her to court. She pulled all kinds of nonsense to not pay and delay, but the judge ended up making her pay 1650 USD, plus an order for her to pay any border taxes on the replacement kits, alongside the court and lawyer fees. It completely ruined her savings, and her husband, who was already waiting for a chance to divorce her, took it. When it all ended, she had nothing, and even lost her brat’s custody to her ex-husband, and she not only lost the down payment she had for a house but lost all her savings and didn’t get alimony from her husband.

Am I happy her life got completely ruined?

No, not really. Do I feel sorry it happened? Not in the slightest. She and her crotch goblin messed around and found out, it’s that simple. I feel bad for her husband, though; he is going to be the one trying to make that brat into a normal person, and I don’t envy it in the slightest.”

“Get ready for a wild ride, folks. This is the story of how my battle with a neighbor over my beloved garden led me to transform his pristine yard into a swamp, and in the process, I became a local legend. It all started when I moved into a new house, which came with a small but charming garden. Gardening quickly became my passion, and I spent months turning that space into a blooming paradise, full of flowers and a few veggies. My neighbors seemed to appreciate the view, all except one: let’s call him “Grumpy Greg.”

Grumpy Greg was the kind of guy who took too much pride in his perfectly manicured lawn, the type that looks more like a golf course than a yard.

He despised my garden, calling it “untidy” and “an eyesore” that attracted pests. I tried to reason with him, offered to keep it more contained, and even suggested setting up a small fence. But no, Greg wanted it gone.

One morning, I woke up to find most of my garden destroyed. Flowers were uprooted, veggies trampled, and my small birdbath smashed. I knew it was Greg. No proof, but who else would it be? I was furious and heartbroken, but then inspiration struck. I remembered Greg’s one true love: his flawless lawn. I did some research and found the perfect, most diabolical yet completely legal revenge.

I bought hundreds of “water retention crystals,” the kind meant to help soil retain moisture for plants. Except, I wasn’t planning on using them for their intended purpose.

Under the cover of night, I went to work, spreading these crystals all over Greg’s precious lawn. These tiny crystals are harmless, but when they come into contact with water, they expand, holding many times their weight in water. And wouldn’t you know, the forecast predicted a week of heavy rain starting the next day. The rain came, and the crystals did their job too well. Greg’s perfect lawn transformed into a squishy, waterlogged mess.

Every step taken on the grass felt like stepping on a waterbed. The lawn mower got stuck, and the yard had become the neighborhood’s newest swamp. Greg was livid, blaming everyone and everything for his misfortune, but he couldn’t prove a thing. It took weeks for the effects to wear off, and by then, his lawn never truly recovered.

In the meantime, I rebuilt my garden, even better than before. Neighbors who learned about the ordeal (and Greg’s role in destroying my garden) came to help, bringing plants, seeds, and even a new birdbath. My garden became a symbol of the community, a place where neighbors would stop by to chat and admire the flowers.

As for Greg, he became a lot less grumpy, especially after I casually mentioned how “unpredictable” gardening can be and how it’s “important to have good relationships with your neighbors.” He got the message loud and clear.

So, that’s the tale of how I turned a bully’s yard into a swamp and, in the process, united our little community. Sometimes, a bit of creative thinking (and a whole lot of water retention crystals) is all it takes to stand up to a bully and come out on top.”

“My very first year in college, I was at a party and got to talking with an acquaintance/classmate of a friend. I was, and still am, pretty personable, and so people tend to feel comfortable opening up around me even if they don’t know me well. And that’s exactly what happened here. We were both decently intoxicated, but this girl was definitely more intoxicated than I was. For whatever reason, we got on the topic of wild/stupid things we did when we were younger.

She then proceeded to tell me this story. I remember it so vividly. Her wording wasn’t the most coherent due to her state, so much of this is a paraphrase.

So, a few years prior, when she was in her mid-late teens, she had a cat. This cat was her best friend and had helped her through some very dark times in her personal life, you get the picture. Well, one day, her cat unfortunately got out, ran across the neighbor’s dog as they were (presumably) out for a walk, and the dog snapped and mauled the cat to death. The dog, apparently, was known for displaying aggressive behaviors but had never actually bitten anyone, and the owner was extremely defensive of it and pretty much blamed the girl because “that’s what happens when you have an outdoor cat,” or whatever.

The girl is, understandably, completely devastated and distraught; her family either wouldn’t or couldn’t afford to take any sort of legal action at the time, so she decided to take matters into her own hands.

The exact details were kind of hazy, though. From what I could gather, she apparently blended together a bunch of ground meat with some sort of weed killer, stuffed it inside a hen carcass for good measure, waited until it was dark, and threw the whole thing over the neighbor’s backyard fence. A short time later, the owner was pounding on the door to her house, screaming that their dog was dead and they knew it was her that did it.

She vehemently denied it, and I guess because she was both a minor at the time and there was technically no way they could prove it was her, nothing ever ended up coming of it, and she never told anyone in the neighborhood or in her family about what she had done.

I was in complete shock when she wrapped up. I left the party not long afterwards for unrelated reasons, and only saw her briefly a handful of times after that before I moved campuses. So I never really got any more info from her; I don’t know if she even remembers telling me the story. I have very conflicted feelings about it.

Knowing what I know about herbicide poisoning, that dog almost definitely did not die a peaceful death, and the lack of even the barest shred of remorse in her voice was chilling. I’m about as pro-revenge as you can get, and I can’t say I haven’t had some pretty freaking messed up revenge plans in the past, but gosh darn. I’m very glad I never knew her well enough to get on her bad side.”

“Okay, this story took place a long time ago, in the summer of 1969. I was about 12. I had an early morning paper route in my neighborhood. One of the first things that I bought with my earnings was a brand new ten speed bike. It was silver with red trim. I was really proud of it, and I took very good care of it. I also used it to deliver my newspapers in the morning.

One of my customers was often leaving for work around the time that I got there.

I always made a point of parking my bike well off to the side while I went up to deliver his paper. This particular morning, while backing out of his driveway, he turned too soon and too sharply and backed right over my bike, ruining the front sprocket and derailleur.

He stuck his head out the window and asked

“Is it okay?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Well, that’s what you get for leaving it behind my car,”

Then he drove off. I walked it home, crushed and upset. I felt helpless against this adult who clearly had no intention of doing anything about it, and I didn’t know what to do.

My hurt, frustration, and powerlessness gradually turned to anger.

I stopped delivering his paper when he complained. I told my supervisor that I was delivering, but he just liked to complain. So ultimately, it wasn’t held against me.

But the real revenge was yet to come. He lived on the main route through the neighborhood that all the kids took to go to the local 7-11 and other places. His mailbox sat on a steel fence post loosely set into the ground. That summer, I got in the habit of pulling it up and throwing it over the fence into the cemetery across the street, maybe once or twice a week. It was fun and mischievous, but it still didn’t satisfy my need for revenge.

He had 3 large “frond” shrubs in his front yard that would grow to 6 or 8 feet over the course of the summer and then begin to die back.

They were several feet apart, with nothing else close by. One August evening, I threw a lit match into one on my way home from the 7-11. I never heard anything else, but on my route the next morning, it was just a burnt husk in his front yard. Over the next couple weeks, I did the same to the other two. I was beginning to feel a bit satisfied.

But one morning, on the way home from delivering papers, I had an inspiration. I saw that the side window of his garage was open. Now, I knew that what I was considering was taking it a bit too far.

But I was an impulsive kid, and I thought tit for tat was fair. Back in the day, everybody carried road flares (aka emergency flares) in their cars. So I climbed through the window, found 2 flares, lit them, and stuck one right under/behind each of his rear tires, then climbed out and high-tailed it home and went back to bed. I did not go back to see what happened, and I stayed away from the area for several days. I knew that I’d ruined his tires. I never saw the result, but I didn’t care. And I never did another thing to him.”

“I was an adjunct professor at a college. One of the students didn’t seem to take a liking to me and tried to get me fired by making false accusations that I had pinched and caressed her hair.

I did not take this lightly — I could’ve been fired and faced criminal charges.

This student was on a scholarship that required her to pass all units by her second attempt — our college also requires a minimum attendance to pass a unit. This was her second attempt at this unit as she had attempted and dropped out of another course before (which also had this particular unit in its syllabus).

An eye for an eye, right? I ‘accidentally’ forgot to mark her name down when taking attendance, even if she was there.

A few weeks later she was gone. I was confronted by her friend that she had lost her scholarship and was now living out of her car because of my carelessness in taking attendance.

Little did they know.”

“I lived in a large village as a child. The village contained 4 shops, a post office, 2 pubs, a church, a primary school, and a really old grade II listed school. The Victorian school had been used as a library when I was a small child, but then it was bought by a local business owner.

Anyone who lives in the U.K. knows there are very strict rules regarding what you can do with a grade II building. The number one rule is that you cannot do anything with it without planning permission.

But this business owner thought he was above the law and knocked the school down one day without consent.

The council gave him a huge fine at the time, but that was only the start.

I audited the planning office last year and came across the file on this plot of land. In the past 40 years, the owner has submitted 11 plans to build on the land and has been denied every time. There is a note outlining the first offence and legal documents reminding planners that no building will be permitted on the land for the next 99 years. The owner knows this, but he keeps trying. There are notes on many failed legal actions taken.

There is also a caveat that if the land is sold, all new applications will also be denied to the new owners.

I also saw a recent request for the owner to repair the fencing and clean up the site as it was a health and safety issue, and he will be fined if he does not comply.

So the owner is now left with a plot of land he cannot build on, and he cannot sell it because nobody in our area wants land on which you cannot build.

I also noticed that the same business owner was building houses in the same borough, and the council came out and made him move the footings of all 12 houses because they were not quite in the position agreed by the council planners.

It must have cost him thousands.

The moral of the story is that people may not have long memories, but local government does.”

“On mobile, and this is a story from when I was a kid, so apologies for the formatting and not having complete details.

My family was looking for a large house and found the perfect one back in the early 2000s. When my dad talked with the owners, they had agreed to getting some plumbing fixed on the house before we moved in if we moved all of their stuff into the 2-car garage so it would be easier for them to move. There were also several things to be repaired—a pool to clean and a ton of landscaping to be done.

My dad did the repairs and used his army of offspring to do all the landscaping, pool work, etc. The house was looking amazing compared to before, and we were a week from moving in.

Now, to this day, I do not know why my dad did this, but he had paid a CASH DEPOSIT. There was no paper trail, and the owners decided to take advantage of this. A few days before we moved in, the owners told my dad they weren’t moving their stuff out of the garage or doing the plumbing fixes that were needed to use any of the bathtubs or showers in the house.

He could deal with no garage and pay for the plumbing fixes, or he could screw off. No refund of deposit if he didn’t like it. They even said they were thinking of moving someone else in because the house value was more with all the fixes we had already done.

My father asked to turn in the keys we had been given the next morning because this was all told to him at 8 p.m. on a weekday. With no paperwork yet signed, there was nothing binding my dad to the house and no cameras or security system. He had just been screwed over a few thousand dollars by the owner, and it was maybe two weeks to Christmas.

His gift that year was going to be giving each of us kids our own rooms for the first time.

Cue revenge. He brought all of us kids over to the house for a little party. Each kid was given their own special bit of destruction. Someone was shoveling sand into the pool, my brother with anger issues was told to punch out every hole we had patched up in the walls, the smaller kids were told to rock the banister on the stairs until it broke, and I was told to rip out the landscaping we had done and make a path of it all over the stairs. Every single thing we had fixed or improved was taken back by very creative and energetic children.

While all this happened, my dad and stepmom went through everything in the garage from the owners and took anything they could give to family, pawn, or sell. There were high-value collectibles, jewelry, and a computer that my dad gave to us for Xmas.

The next day, my dad told the owners he had put the keys in the garage with its door open that night for them. He then unplugged the phone, and we never heard from those people again. Was it legal? No, not on either end. Did we have a good Xmas? Yes. Was it fun destroying the place? Yes, I actually made a very tasteful carpet of hedge branches, tore out our flowers, and used some sand and pool gravel on the actual carpet of the house.

I did post this elsewhere before, but it got taken down for violating a rule.

I am the OP for that post as well as this post.”

“Back in 2019, I had just moved my long-term partner into my house due to a series of poor life choices on his end. It had been a rocky relationship for most of its duration, but I was young and dumb. I believed this was him wanting to commit and truly start our lives.

By early 2020, we were engaged. I was a full-time university student, the sole caretaker for my mentally disabled mother, and taking care of the house and our pets. He worked a standard 40-hour-a-week, minimum-wage job and refused to help with any aspect of life.

I found out on Christmas Day 2020 that he had been unfaithful and had “forgotten to tell me.” He was planning on leaving me, but he had informed everyone except me because he was failing to secure a new residence (apparently his casual partner didn’t like him enough to let him move in).

At this point, there was very little love lost, and I expected that he would be moving out within the coming weeks. Fast forward three entire months, and his “search” for a living place was nonexistent, and he was acting more and more entitled. Clearly, by this point, he is an unwelcome freeloader who has taken up residence in my living room.

I was about to secure an eviction notice to get him off my couch.

He began swiping on his phone with the volume loudly on. I told him not to do that in my presence, as it was highly insensitive to do in my home when he could do it in private. This continued, so I told him I would get intimate with one of his friends. It was said in a moment of anger and was more of an empty threat at the time.

However, I am known for seeing goals through to their completion. I messaged the guy who was supposedly my ex’s best friend and the best man for the wedding. It turns out he didn’t even consider my ex a close friend, and my ex had treated this guy terribly previously as well.

We bonded over our terrible experience, hit it off really well in general, and started seeing each other. I was upfront about what the catalyst for me to reach out to him was. After 2 years of seeing each other, we were married on April 2nd. He watched me graduate with that bachelor’s degree my ex disliked; I’m halfway through my master’s, and my husband works in a specialized, steady field that supports us. Last I heard, my ex got kicked out of his dad’s house, never was able to officially see his side chick, and has not made any choices to better his life.”

“My crazy, antisocial, elderly aunt lives in the mountains of West Virginia. My aunt is a mean, bitter old woman who was suspected of shooting and killing her ex-husband, but the cops could never pin it on her.

Years ago, she bought a small home on some land that borders the land of another family in a small, narrow, isolated, forested mountain valley. The other family had been living there for a long time, and they just wanted to be left alone, like most people who choose to live in a remote mountain location in West Virginia.

My aunt bought chickens and started to let them run around, unfenced on her property, and the neighbors’ dogs were very interested in those chickens.

The chickens would roam around and go over onto the neighbors’ property.

One day, without warning, she killed her neighbors’ dogs for killing one of her chickens, and only one of the dogs was killed on her property. The other one was shot dead in the neighbors’ front yard.

The neighbors had small kids and they loved those dogs. My aunt walked over with a shotgun and told the neighbors that they had better never get another chicken-killing dog or dogs again, or else she would kill them too. The neighbors did not take kindly to her killing their dogs, and her actions with the shotgun, waving it around and threatening them, were over the top.

But they did not call the cops, knowing that my crazy aunt, who had a reputation for being violent, was unlikely to be arrested, and if she were arrested, she would just quickly be released from jail and be back.

So a couple of weeks later, when my aunt went into town, her home’s back window was broken, and a bottle of burning oil and gas was thrown into her home.

By the time the fire department finally arrived, the home was a complete loss, and every dog and the possibly ex-husband-killing shotgun and firearm my aunt owned, along with all her other worldly possessions, were incinerated. The home was a total loss, along with the chicken coop, etc.

The neighbors didn’t see anything, and the sheriff’s department couldn’t prove anything; my aunt had a long list of enemies. She didn’t work and was too poor and lazy to have homeowner’s insurance. So she had to move, and her son eventually bought her a cheap, run-down trailer in town.

Those of us who knew my aunt figured she got what she deserved.

The moral of the story: don’t mess with a mountain man’s dog.”

“This is my grandfather’s story. It would have occurred sometime in the early 1960s. My grandpa comes from a very remote part of my country, even in the 60s they lived in a log cabin without a phone or electricity. He lived with his 3 brothers, his sister, his father, and his mother. It was a violent household; my great-grandfather was a heavy drinker. My grandpa, his siblings, and his mother were accustomed to beatings. The culture of the time was to accept this as a harsh reality of the remote and difficult lives that were led so far from civilization.

My great-aunt was the youngest of the siblings, and as my grandpa and his brothers grew into young men and began working, she was left at home and began to take on the role of housekeeper, as my great-grandmother was often ill.

She would often use her bad health as an excuse for not stopping what happened next. My great-grandfather began assaulting my great-aunt at some point, most likely before she had even begun puberty. It continued for years, as the brothers all moved out and she was left completely alone. My grandpa says he truly did not know; he worried for his sister, receiving the brunt of the beatings, but he didn’t know about the assault. I hope that’s true.

When my great-aunt was 13, she became pregnant with her father’s son. The night my grandpa found out, he and his brothers snowmobiled out from town, and since none of them owned a gun, they had to use shovels to beat their father to death.

The ground was frozen solid, so they burnt him, which also helped to destroy the evidence, I suppose. Although I’m not sure anyone ever questioned how my great-grandfather had died, these were very different times.

My great-aunt’s son is afflicted with genetic issues. He can barely see, and he only has a single functioning kidney. But he is happy and has healthy kids in their 20s now. My great-aunt drank herself to death in the 80s, as did my great-grandmother, so I never met them. My grandpa told me all this when he was intoxicated, as he has also become a heavy drinker. So has my dad.

The generational trauma of my family is thankfully now broken with me and my siblings, but this revenge murder, this disgusting hurt, was really just another sad piece of a puzzle of mistreatment that started long, long ago.”

“This happened a few years back. My dad found out he was severely allergic to some kind of shrub in Central Texas (Fort Hood) after he was transferred there. As a result, he was restricted to office work and prohibited by Army doctors from outdoor duties.

His West Point graduate commanding officer was a hyper-warrior kind of dude who detested soldiers who did not want to train 24/7. Unfortunately, he thought my dad was milking his allergies in order to avoid being a “real soldier.” My dad was also married and my mom was pregnant with my older sister, a situation that infuriated the captain because #reasons.

The CO never, ever missed an opportunity to humiliate my dad by questioning his manhood, doubting his commitment to protecting the Constitution, and disparaging his duties, etc.

The CO would call him out in front of the company or debase him in front of higher HQ staff. He would call the house at 6 AM on Sunday and order dad in for nonsense reasons, anything to irritate him. In short, he made his life a living nightmare. (FWIW, the First Sergeant loved my dad’s work performance and said so privately.)

When my dad got orders to leave active duty, which enraged the CO, he found out that the CO had received orders for an assignment that was a notch needed to guarantee promotions as well as other plum jobs. Dad decided to tamper with his official records before leaving.

As company clerk, he had full access to unit personnel files, orders, etc., which meant he also had keys to the building as well.

This was during the pre-digital, pre-computer era. The night before my dad was to get out, he took all of the captain’s personnel folders and mailed them separately and anonymously to various posts around the globe, knowing full well that it would take weeks to deliver them to geographically unrelated unit mailrooms around the world that might or might not open the packages in order to return them.

It just so happened that the unit was in the field for a two-week exercise on the day my dad left, which meant a skeleton crew would man the phones and mow lawns until they returned from the field. No one was the wiser for weeks.

One of my dad’s old poker-playing sergeant buds wrote a few months later telling him that the captain went ballistic, that the missing files seriously damaged the jerk of a captain’s career prospects since some of the files were lost in the system; therefore, the coveted assignment orders were canceled and the entire personnel record had to be reconstructed manually by the Department of the Army. My dad said it was a teaching moment for the cruel jerk that you should never tamper with your unit clerk, because even chairborne rangers know how to seriously wound enemies, foreign and domestic.”

“Years ago (roughly 2010) when I was doing pizza delivery, I delivered on campus. Pretty standard procedure: call the customer and wait in the parking lot.

Buddy comes down, hands me money, takes the pizza, and walks away. Then he starts to run. I look in my hand, and one of the $10 bills is ripped in half, and the $20 is horribly counterfeit. The dude’s already back in his dorm, and his pass is activated, so I can’t even get in. ... Click here to continue reading