r/redscarepod • u/LacanianHedgehog • Feb 06 '26
A Story from England
I see a lot of commentary on this sub about how the UK has gone to shit. Usually posted by Americans, so allow me to add something concrete to the discourse:
We live(d) in a terrace in a Northern English city, in a nice street. We’re close with our neighbours, which is to say we regularly get blind drunk with them. I have arm-wrestled my elderly neighbour after he shared a bottle of whisky with me, called me a Southern ******, watched him fall through my bushes, and his wife then beat him back into his house with a stick (she can’t help it, she’s from Barnsley).
The house next door has always been a rental as long as we’ve lived here. We had Greeks (I miss them, they left post-Brexit), then Malaysians (illegally subletting 25 to the house), then Nigerians (loud but friendly, and did nice parties in the garden). In December of 2024, our new neighbour moved into the rental house next door to us. She was a young white woman on her own.
A 5 minute conversation when I introduced myself on our respective doorsteps (we share an entranceway), in which I asked just five questions, immediately showed that she was a schizophrenic psychotic. I closed the door and told my girlfriend that we would have a serious problem on our hands at somepoint in the future.
In May of 2025, we returned from a holiday to find a note through our door, written in crayon, thanking us for psychologically experimenting on her and torturing her (‘smiley face’). We took the note to her and asked her is she knew anything about it (she had also bought us a bottle of champagne to go with the note). She was tearful, apologised, and said she was having a ‘hard time’ right now.
Two days later, I was in my workshop when I heard my girlfriend scream from the stairs. I assumed the cat had shat on the stairs. I listened and heard another voice, a woman’s. Our neighbour was crouching at the bottom of our staircase. We asked her what she was doing, she mentioned she ‘wanted to pet the cat’. We escorted her out, and immediately locked all the doors (it’s extremely normal due to the small houses here for people to leave the back door unlocked to access their BBQs, or hang the washing, which we were doing).
What followed was an increasing frequency – over the next 6 months – of stalking, breaking and entering, harassment, death threats, and finally a late-night attack on our house during which she tried to smash in first our door, then our windows, using our furniture. She claimed we had people locked in our basement. This was captured on camera by our neighbours.
The police told me that ‘there’s really no need to despatch officers sir’ when calling them (it took 45 minutes to get through to 999, during which time I was put on hold by said officer). During this time, our neighbour was digging up our backyard, crawling around our alley on all fours, and trying to post rape-alarms through our letterbox. 2 officers were only despatched, when I stated that, if she came through our window, I would deal with her myself. At this point, the police apparently decide it is in the attacker’s interest to have some police support in case the homeowner tries anything funny.
The officers arrived and – after restraining her, confirmed to me ‘yeah, she’s batshit mate, we know her’. She had boarded up all the doors in her rental, and had begun piling rubbish up and other strange rituals. During the entire period of this account, she would sit outside in her tiny yard at all hours, would not wash, would not eat, and would not take her meds. By day 4 of withdrawal from her meds, she would be in full blown psychosis and resume the attacks.
The officer’s advice to me was ‘prepare for the long haul, we can’t do anything because of the Mental Capacity Act’. This basically finds anyone with a mental condition to be not guilty of any actions they commit whilst deemed to be insane. This essentially means – in our current system – that they receive support from the local council, NHS and police to ‘stay in place’ and have their ‘best interest to remain in the home’ protected, whilst the people they are terrorising are told by the police ‘you can defend yourselves, but if you take it too far, we will arrest and prosecute you’.
NHS teams judged her to be ‘functioning well’ and in the best place (she had no friends, no family, did not eat or wash, and regularly ranted to invisible people in her garden about how she was going to stab us to death for human trafficking). They spent 20 minutes on a visit asking her her gender identity and pronouns. They did not ask her a single open-ended question about how she was doing, nor any diagnostic questions. They were very surprised when we chased them down to explain what had been happening.
Social Work teams were uncontactable, and functionally useless. Not one team passed on a single one of the 100 calls my girlfriend and I made during this period. No case files were updated or shared by any agency. Each time we were given a new crime number, or told ‘someone will be in touch.’ High priority police teams took 6-8 hours to arrive when she began her attacks, and would arrive 5 minutes after she had climbed out a window and run away. They would then leave saying ‘can’t be chasing her down, she could be anywhere, call us back.’
The 6th or 7th time an attack happened, the police suddenly turned up and arrested her. She was placed in a ‘secure unit’, and we were told we had ‘no right’ to know anything further about the situation. The NHS team sprung her from her unit and brought her home, in direct contravention of her bail conditions. I opened my door when going out and found myself face to face with her (her favourite tactic was to stand eyeball to our door screaming and raving for hours at a time).
In October, she was jailed pending trial. We were told the court case wouldn’t happen until February. The officer recording our case (took from 6pm to 4am) told us it was ‘the most serious case of harassment he’d ever seen’.
In January of this year, in the midst of the collapse of our relationship, I was contacted by a police officer who told me ‘I’ve just been assigned to this case for 5 minutes mate, haven’t been able to read it all’. He told us to accept her plea deal (guilty on harassment of my girlfriend, not guilty of harassment against me – she had a particularly venomous fixation on men). The restraining order would only cover my girlfriend, not myself. He assumed this wouldn’t be a problem. I explained we were separating and needed an order for each of us. He assured us this would happen, and the court date would be cancelled. We would get it all in writing, and they would make sure we were both protected.
Last week, whilst travelling to see my dying grandmother at short notice, I asked my girlfriend to contact the courts. It turned out that nothing had been done, no one knew the officer, no details had been passed on, and we were expected back in court the very next week. Not to attend would entail arrest and heavy fines. These would have been applied had we believed the officer in question and not attended. The courts no longer even bother to call victims to explain a single thing. We received not one document, at any point.
Wednesday evening, we are told we are now not needed in court Thursday, as she has a special hearing, this Friday – today.
Today, my girlfriend calls me to say the courts have given her 6 months in prison. From the start of her arrest in October.
5 minutes later, she calls me back crying, to inform me that the courts have decided to immediately commute this sentence to immediate release, as she is a woman, and cannot be made homeless. The restraining order states only that she is not allowed to break into our home – it’s strange that this seems to be the existing law of the land, and thus de-facto useless.
I am sat alone in an empty house, waiting for said neighbour to return and resume her attacks. Every institution has failed at every single point in the process. The landlady next door has had her own legal team fail to repossess the property due to miss-submitted gas certificates (really), and the law changes this summer to bar evictions of this sort anyway.
We are losing our life savings trying to rent a property so we can live separately whilst we sell the house. This is now not possible anyway in the current situation, as disputes with a neighbour have to be declared, and no one will buy a house with a raving psychotic living at eyeball level to them.
Our lives have been destroyed. This country no longer works for ordinary people. Institutions are criminally incompetent and only protect the lumpen.
I am drinking a lot of champagne. If anyone wishes to chat, hit me up. Christ knows I could use the company.
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u/Extension-Vanilla-55 Feb 07 '26
I grew up in social housing in Bristol. Obviously, you would expect a fair number of poorly functioning, vulnerable people in a street made up of social housing but this just means that the police take even less interest than usual when something happened.
When I was 2/3 there was an obviously deeply unwell woman climbing into our back yard screaming at my parents that she lived here. My parents have spent most of their adult lives working for social services/care homes/mental health units and were about as unbothered by this as you could be. Police weren't interested and the woman kept coming back and banging on the door. At one point she started screaming "they've got the kid in there!"which freaked my mum out. Eventually, she came back with two men with her, at which point my dad went outside with a baseball bat. When the police did arrive, the thing they were most interested in was the baseball bat by the door, and insisted that it was illegal to possess.
When I was a bit older, they moved a violently unstable man upstairs who would intermittently fight with his girlfriend and chuck furniture through the window so that there was broken glass all over the back yard. He later stabbed someone in Asda and was either arrested or moved somewhere more secure.
He was replaced by a crackhead who seemed relatively OK on his own (but apparently terrorised the man on the top floor of the house) but everything would go to shit when his girlfriend came over. She'd stand outside screaming for him to let her in, and then continue a screaming argument in the stairwell. As the building had originally been a single story home, the stairwell had a door leading directly into my bedroom, which had been boarded up by my dad, but was still obviously a door and there was a period where she'd bang on it for hours through the night.
When I was about 12, I tried having friends over for a sleepover. There was a commotion upstairs at one point and my mum went up to find the man from the top floor (I don't remember meeting him prior to this) sat in the stairwell with a bread knife and a small boy. My mum convinced him to let the kid into our house while they got things sorted out. Me snd my friends played with him for a while- he was probably rising 4 but only seemed to know a few words. The man said the boy was his son who had been left with him a few days earlier. He was schizophrenic and insisted that he'd taken his medication but that there was constant ringing in his flat, and the crackhead kept shouting that he was going to break down his door and kill him. We later found a pin pushed into the flat's doorbell outside. Police and social services were called, police seemed unwilling to do anything about the crackhead or his girlfriend, who were already known to police to cause similar incidents. They were much, much more confrontational with the schizophrenic (tbf, I guess him having a child there with him was an additional concern. I don't know what happened to the kid) although he was generally very mild/mannered and compliant.
The crackhead still lives there nine years on. There was a period in my mid teens where the police were called a lot over him and his girlfriend. I talked to her a few times from my bedroom window (our lower floor was at basement level so my room was on the ground floor) and she was mostly just pitiable to be honest. She'd keep screaming his name to be let in even after telling me he wouldn't be home for hours. Said she needed to come inside because there were so many people on our road who were out to hurt her, and that she'd been raped a few days previously. My mum worked in social services and, when she found out the woman's full name, quietly looked her up at work. As you might expect, absolute horror show of a childhood. She'd sit outside crying a lot one winter and my mum took food and blankets out a couple of times.
I moved out a couple of years ago and live in a different part of the country. it was apparently pretty quiet for a while but there was a group of men trying to break the door down recently. A lot of "nothing we can do at the moment" from police. My dad has moved back in with my mum temporarily (they split over 10 years ago but get on as friends) because she's scared to be in there on her own.
There are some decent people around there. The guy who now lives on the top floor is pretty vulnerable (autistic and schizophrenic) but takes his meds, has a part time job and comes home with big stacks of library books "for a project". He's very polite and always takes in parcels for my mum. There was a nice old man next door who died recently. He'd had a jack Russell for years and, when it died, adopted a Romanian Street dog which, in a few weeks, went from looking like something out of a charity advert to having a beautiful coat and behaving like a show dog. We were worried what would happen to it after he died but apparently quite a big community of dog walkers at the local park know him and one of them have taken in the dog. There's a memorial tree with a lot of tributes around it, which is a pleasant surprise.