good and bad neighbors essay

Essay on Good Neighbour

Students are often asked to write an essay on Good Neighbour in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Good Neighbour

Introduction.

A good neighbour is a great blessing. They can make our life comfortable, secure and pleasant. Living beside such good neighbours makes life enjoyable.

Qualities of a Good Neighbour

A good neighbour is friendly and considerate. They respect your privacy but are always there to lend a helping hand. They keep their surroundings clean and do not cause any inconvenience.

Importance of Good Neighbours

Good neighbours make a neighbourhood a better place to live. They help build a sense of community, provide support during tough times and bring joy to everyday life.

In conclusion, good neighbours are important for a harmonious living environment. They can make our lives happier and more fulfilling.

250 Words Essay on Good Neighbour

A good neighbour is a priceless treasure, offering a sense of community, security, and mutual understanding. The importance of good neighbours cannot be overstated, especially in an increasingly disconnected world.

Characteristics of a Good Neighbour

A good neighbour is respectful, considerate, and helpful. They respect boundaries, both physical and emotional, and understand the importance of privacy. They are considerate, ensuring their actions do not disrupt the peace and tranquility of the neighbourhood. However, their most defining trait is their willingness to help in times of need, be it a minor inconvenience or a major crisis.

The Role of Good Neighbours in Community Building

Good neighbours play a crucial role in community building. They foster a sense of belonging and camaraderie, creating an environment of mutual support and cooperation. They contribute to the overall well-being of the community, promoting harmony and unity.

In conclusion, good neighbours are an integral part of our lives. They add value to our existence, offering support and companionship. They help create a community that is vibrant, inclusive, and harmonious. In the grand scheme of things, good neighbours help us realize that we are not alone, that we are part of a larger whole, and that together, we can overcome any challenge that comes our way.

500 Words Essay on Good Neighbour

The concept of a good neighbour.

The concept of a good neighbour is not merely a person who lives next door. It extends far beyond physical proximity and encompasses a wide range of social, emotional, and moral aspects. A good neighbour is a vital component of a thriving community, contributing to the overall quality of life and societal harmony.

A good neighbour is defined by several key qualities. Foremost among these is respect for boundaries. This implies not only physical boundaries but also emotional and psychological ones. A good neighbour understands the importance of privacy and avoids intruding uninvited into others’ lives.

Equally important is a sense of community. Good neighbours actively participate in community activities, fostering a sense of belonging and unity. They are not isolated entities but integral parts of the community fabric, contributing to its vibrancy and vitality.

A good neighbour is also reliable and supportive. They offer help when needed, providing emotional support in times of crisis and practical assistance in daily life. This reliability creates a safety net within the community, fostering mutual trust and cooperation.

The Role of Good Neighbours in Society

Good neighbours play a significant role in shaping society. They contribute to the social capital of a community, which is the collective value of all social networks and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other.

Neighbourhoods with high social capital tend to have lower crime rates, better child development, and higher educational achievement. Good neighbours, through their actions and interactions, contribute to this social capital, enhancing the overall quality of life in the community.

Good Neighbours and Personal Development

On a personal level, good neighbours can significantly influence one’s development. They can serve as role models, demonstrating values such as respect, empathy, and cooperation. Interactions with good neighbours can also help develop social skills and emotional intelligence, crucial for personal and professional success.

The Responsibility of Being a Good Neighbour

Being a good neighbour is a responsibility that comes with its rewards. It requires effort and commitment, a willingness to invest time and energy in building relationships and contributing to the community. However, the rewards are substantial, ranging from a safer, more supportive environment to a more fulfilling, meaningful life.

In conclusion, the concept of a good neighbour extends far beyond physical proximity. It encompasses qualities such as respect for boundaries, a sense of community, and reliability. Good neighbours contribute significantly to society, enhancing social capital and influencing personal development. Being a good neighbour is a responsibility that comes with substantial rewards, making it a worthwhile pursuit for all.

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My Neighbour Essay | Short and Long Essays on My Neighbour for Students and Children in English

October 01, 2021 by Prasanna

My Neighbour Essay: In My Neighbour Essay I want to define that neighbours are the people or a family living next to your house. The neighbour is the closest one in our sorrows and joys. Single families have to face many such situations in which they are in need of their neighbours. My Neighbour essay highlights that Neighbours are more than relatives because they are ever ready to help in our bad times and good times.

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Long Essay on My Neighbour 700 Words in English

Blessed are the family having good neighbours in their surroundings. For the single families whose relatives are far away neighbours are the next family to help them in any situation.

I remember the very day when I stepped into this colony with my husband. My husband was an employee in a Bank. Everything was new and all were strangers to me and I was the same for them. Today is the period when no one trusts a person sooner. At that time Mrs. Agrawal was such a kind hearted lady who helped us from the very first day. She lives next to our flat. I still remember her sweet smile when we entered our flat. I was newly married so I didn’t have much experience handling the home chores and my in-laws couldn’t join us due to their health issues. I was so nervous but it was mrs. Agrawal who helped me at each and every stage. She used to make food for us till I had set up my kitchen. Also she gave me many useful tips to arrange the house. I could see my mom in her.

Mrs. Agrawal lived with her only son as her husband died of sudden cardiac arrest. She also has two daughters who are married. Her son is also very kind-hearted and always ready to help anyone. They are a very well-mannered and cultured family. They are strong believers in God. Mrs. Agrawal is also an educated lady who has completed her M. A. in english. And her son is a successful chartered accountant. She is a very sensible woman. As a single woman she had managed her house very well. She had taught good values to her children. She gets up at 5 am early in the morning, goes for a walk and does some light yoga.

Then after completing her pooja rituals she does her home chores. She does her maximum work on her own. She keeps her house so neat and tidy. She manages everything so well that she is never empty with any stuff. Even if I need any food stuff urgently she is the only lady I think of and my need is always fulfilled. She lost her husband so soon when her kids were so small but then also she stood firm to train her children and provide them with the best life. She had led a very struggle full life. Mrs. Agrawal is really an inspiring woman for others. I too get encouragement from her. She is ready with a solution to every problem.

Whenever I am in a dilemma I run towards her to seek help. Even my husband respects her and appreciates her. We have good bondings now. They are just like a family to us. They are part of our happiness and sorrows. Because of her and her family we never miss our families. They also treat us like a family. We are so lucky to have such a neighbours cum family. I always wish her good health and lots of happiness.

Short Essay My Neighbour Essay 300 Words in English

Good Neighbours are the blessings for everyone. Neighbours make life easier if they are supporting, caring and ever ready to help. We are in need of neighbours many times such as when we are out of our house for vacations or any other occasions they take care of our house. If we are in need of something urgently or we are in any problem they are the first one to help us. They are the one who are closer to us next after our relatives or you can say they are closer than our relatives as relatives live away from us while they reach us within that period neighbours are already there to help us. My neighbour essay highlights the qualities of a good neighbour.

Here in my neighbour essay I would like to describe some qualities of my neighbour. I am blessed with a very kind-hearted and supporting neighbour. They are like a family to me.

My next door neighbours are Mr. and Mrs. Bhatiya. Mr. Bhatiya is a very generous middle aged person. He is living with his wife and his two sons who are studying abroad. He is a government employee who works in the MSEB department. He has a simple but attractive personality. His wife mrs. Bhatiya is also a very hard working lady. She does all the house chores on her own. She cooks delicious food. Whenever she makes any special dish she will surely offer it to me. They both are very helpful in nature. They have a good reputation in society.

Whenever I need any kind of advice I always like to approach them as they are experienced people. Also I am invited by them to festivals and special occasions. We are a family now.

It is very important to keep a good bond with our neighbours as they are the people nearby us. They are the first people to help us in our thick and thin times. I feel so destined to have such good neighbours.

FAQ’s on My Neighbour Essay

Question 1. Why is it important to have good neighbours around us?

Answer: Good neighbours make our life more easier and comfortable as they are there to help us in any situations. Good neighbours make us feel secure when we are away from our house. Neighbours are the first person nearby to call for help in any case of emergency. Aslo a good neighbour should respect your privacy and he/she should not interfere with your private life.

Question 2. What are the 5 qualities of a good neighbour?

Answer: A good neighbour is a blessing for the society. A good neighbour must have following qualities :

• Be generous
• Be peaceful

Question 3. What are the basic responsibilities of being a neighbour?

Answer: Some of the basic qualities of a good neighbor are as follows:

• A good neighbor should maintain a good social relationship in the society.
• One must keep the surroundings neat and clean so that your not a problem for anyone.
• Have a pleasant conversation with your neighbours, respect their privacy, don’t go personal.
• Don’t play loud music ori television which causes disturbance to your neighborhood.
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My Neighborhood Essay

500 words my neighborhood essay.

As humans , all of us live in a society are bound to a neighbourhood. It is an essential place which has a great impact on our lives. So much so that it does determine where we are in life and how we are doing. It is a fact that if we are not happy in our neighbourhood, we will not live peacefully. Through my neighborhood essay, I will explain about my neighbourhood and the reasons why I love it.

All About My Neighbourhood

I live in a great neighbourhood. It is wonderful because it offers us a lot of facilities. The green park near my house makes the area much more beautiful. Similarly, the swings in the park ensure the kids get to play cheerfully all day long.

Moreover, my neighbourhood also has many other bonuses. A grocery store adjacent to the park makes sure people get all their needs fulfilled without having to go far. All my neighbours buy their things from that grocery store only.

The owner also lives in the same area so he is very cordial with everyone. The grocery store saves everyone a long trip to the market and also their time. The park in my neighbourhood remains clean at all times.

The maintenance team makes sure they clean and sanitize it from time to time. It allows my neighbours to sit and relax in the evenings and take walks in the morning. The clean and fresh air gives everyone a great experience.

Why I Love My Neighbourhood

Apart from the top-notch facilities available in my neighbourhood, we also have amazing neighbours who make our lives better. A good neighbourhood is not made of facilities only but good people as well.

I got lucky in this case because my neighbours are very sweet. They help in maintaining the peace of the area so everyone lives in harmony. I have seen very often that if there is an emergency at anyone’s place, everyone rushes to help.

Similarly, we also organize events from time to time so that the whole neighbourhood gathers and enjoy themselves. I have a lot of friends in my neighbourhood with whom I play.

Most of them are my age so we meet every evening to cycle together and play on swings. We also go to each other’s birthday parties and sing and dance. The most favourite thing about my neighbourhood is definitely the residents.

I always notice how we never let any poor person go back empty-handed. My neighbourhood also organizes a donation drive every year. In this, each family donates clothes, toys and other useful commodities for the needy.

Thus, we all live together as a large family. Even though we live in different houses, our hearts are bounded by the same love and respect for each other.

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Conclusion of My Neighbourhood Essay

All in all, a great neighbourhood is important to have a good life. In fact, our neighbours prove to be more helpful than our relatives sometimes. It is because they live nearby so they are most likely to offer help in emergency situations. Similarly, my neighbourhood is very clean and helpful, thereby making my life happy and content.

FAQ on My Neighborhood Essay

Question 1: What is the importance of a good neighbourhood?

Answer 1: A good neighbourhood is important because it helps in providing a safe and secure atmosphere . When people live in good neighbourhoods, they lead happy lives and spread joy around.

Question 2: Why must we keep our neighbourhood clean?

Answer 2: It is important to keep our neighbourhood clean because it will create a hygienic and serene environment. This way, everyone will be able to enjoy outdoors and it will also prevent any diseases.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Neighborhood — World neighbors and neighborhood today

World Neighbors and Neighborhood Today

• Categories: Countries Neighborhood Relationship

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Published: Jan 4, 2019

Words: 1200 | Pages: 3 | 6 min read

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Essay Samples on Neighborhood

Impact of gang and minority injunctions on the neighborhood.

It wasn’t long ago that I was introduced to the legal term of injunctions. I grew up in a working poor predominantly Hispanic neighborhood in a town West of Sacramento called Broderick. It was one of those small towns (or barrios) where almost every family...

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Observing the Changes in My Neighborhood

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Why Neighborhoods are Being Reshaped Into Mixed Communities

Involvement in Neighborhood and Voluntary Associations, Block Social Cohesion (BSC), density of adults versus children and racial concentrations are established predictors or indicators of neighborhood Sense of Community (SOC) (Chipuer & Pretty, 1999; Ohmer, Walker, & Pitner, 2014; Sampson & Graif, 2009; Sampson, Morenoff, &...

South Asian Perspective on the Importance of Neighborhood and Neighbors

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Best topics on Neighborhood

1. Impact of Gang and Minority Injunctions on the Neighborhood

2. Observing the Changes in My Neighborhood

3. Why Neighborhoods are Being Reshaped Into Mixed Communities

4. South Asian Perspective on the Importance of Neighborhood and Neighbors

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Neighbors are the people who live near us. In your opinion, what are the qualities of a good neighbor? Use specific details and examples in your answer.

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• Consideration
• Friendliness
• Sociability
• Helpfulness
• Supportiveness
• Trustworthiness
• Reliability
• Responsibility
• Accountability
• Understanding
• Cleanliness
• Conflict resolution
• Cultural awareness
• Respectfulness
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The Art and Science of Being a Good Neighbor

Should you be closer to your street-mates, or do good fences make good neighbors? Here's what the research says.

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One day when I was about 9, my mom received a frantic phone call from our next door neighbor, Mrs. King, who wasn’t home at the time. She had been trying to reach the babysitter who was watching her daughter, and no one was picking up. Could my mom go over to the house to check on them? We ran over and found them — fortunately unharmed — locked in a closet by a burglar!

We didn’t socialize with the Kings regularly, though occasionally I played with their daughter. (She had an amazing wardrobe for her Barbies.) But we knew we could count on each other for everyday help and emergencies. Our interactions with our other next-door neighbors were less dramatic — I babysat their two little boys. My parents’ friends, the Lawrences, who hosted an annual holiday open house, were a few doors down. The rest we knew by sight to smile at and wave.

Interactions like these in my 1960s childhood in suburban New York informed my behavior as an adult. I like to know my neighbors, even if just casually. But this type of relationship may be waning: According to a 2018 Pew Research Center study, a majority of Americans surveyed (57 percent) reported that they knew some of their neighbors ; only 26 percent say they knew most of them. And while about two-thirds of respondents who knew some of their neighbors felt comfortable leaving a set of house keys with them for emergencies, social get-togethers were pretty uncommon. Of those who said they knew at least some of their neighbors, a majority or 58 percent say they never socialize with them. Interestingly, rural residents were more likely than suburban or urban ones to know all or most of their neighbors, though they weren’t more likely to interact with them.

According to those who study human relationships, there are primarily two types of social ties — “ weak” ones , like, say, your loose connection to a local barista, your kids’ teacher, etc. and strong ones, like your closest friends and family. Dr. Marissa King, professor of organizational behavior at Yale School of Management and author of Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Behavior , s ays neighbors represent a particularly interesting category spanning the two different types of ties. “For about a third of people the neighbor relationship is very strong and for about a third of people it’s absent altogether,” she says. And yet neighbor relationships represent an essential part of our social fabric and can have an enormous impact on how happy we are living somewhere, she adds.

And yet neighbor relationships represent an essential part of our social fabric and can have an enormous impact on how happy we are living somewhere, according to Dr. King. Positive relationships, she says, can increase mental health and feelings of wellbeing, while negative ones can decrease them.

Not surprisingly, after a year-plus at home in which many of us might have seen our neighbors more frequently than close pals, some people have indeed grown closer to them. “Generally, we tend to like people more the more we see them,” says Dr. King. “During the pandemic, we all turned more inward, relying on those closest to us socially and physically, and for some that included neighbors.” People come together with those in close proximity for a sense of community during periods of stress and to get through adversities, Dr. King continues. “COVID-19 is an adversity just like hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters.”

A more recent 2021 study —“ Your Neighborhood Before and After COVID ”— done by Buildworld in the United Kingdom, confirms Dr. King’s observations across the pond. Thirty-one percent of those surveyed said they had gotten to know their neighbors better since the pandemic began, with almost one in five saying that it made them feel better about those living near them. And more than one in three house dwellers (and 26 percent of those living in apartments) reported growing closer with their neighbors during this time.

Meet the Neighbors

Elise Biederman, who lives on a suburban New York cul de sac with about 10 other families, is one person who grew closer to her neighbors during the pandemic. And while they were friendly before, COVID-19 brought their relationships to a whole new level. “We bonded and are now connected more than ever,” she explains. “We went through uncharted territories together.” Everyone was outside a lot more with their kids and dogs and a neighborhood text chain sprang up to keep everyone connected, alerting members to grocery runs or inviting everyone outside for cocktails. Any minor annoyances over the years, Biederman says, have been far outweighed by the positives of living on such a close-knit street.

Lisa Ellis also lives in suburban New York and loves her neighbors. Her block — friendly before — also became even closer during the pandemic, via a text chain and socially distanced outdoor gatherings. One neighbor gave Ellis a key to their backyard fence saying, “Our pool is your pool.” Ellis says she feels blessed. “You don't get to choose your neighbors.”

Good Housekeeping ’s Parenting and Relationships Editor Marisa LaScala says that, in the first apartment building she moved into in Brooklyn, residents giving each other space was the norm, but a friendship found her anyway. She had never interacted much with the other residents until one of them emailed her and her now husband, who both freelanced writing movie reviews at the time. The neighbor, who enjoyed their reviews, recognized their names from their mailbox, emailed to say he thought they all should be friends. “It’s 14 years later and we still are,” LaScala says.

But not everyone has been so fortunate. One woman we spoke with in the Cleveland area lived in an apartment complex for many years, but that changed when new neighbors moved in upstairs. While she gave them a warm welcome, things quickly deteriorated when they routinely flouted leash laws, failed to pick up their dogs’ waste and cursed at her after she approached them about it. Another neighbor threw lit cigarettes off her balcony and onto hers. She eventually moved out, into a house. “We’ve had almost no dealings directly with any neighbors here,” she says, “which is fine by me.”

And when Sarah Ratliff moved into a new suburban California housing development, her next-door neighbor greeted her with several disparaging, racist remarks, not realizing Ratliff is Black. After a particularly tense interaction, Ratliff decided to keep her distance — but things didn’t get much better. The couple now lives more happily on an 18-acre farm in a remote community. “We decided that that was the last time we'd live next to people,” she explains. “We've never had problems with neighbors here since we have a ¼-mile distance between us. We know everybody and can call a neighbor a mile away for help.”

Jamie Beth Cohen has had great neighbors and awful ones. When she bought a townhouse in a community near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, she had a terrific next-door neighbor, especially important as their homes shared a front porch and lawn. But when the neighbor sold, a new neighbor who didn't care for the Cohens from the get-go moved in; she complained to Cohen that her husband had scowled at her. Things really hit the wall over a snow removal issue, when the neighbor screamed at her husband in front of other neighbors, calling him lazy. But when Cohen asked her, “Can we talk this through?” her response was, “I don’t need to talk to you.”

Fortunately, that neighbor eventually moved and was replaced by a couple with whom the Cohens are more compatible. “During the pandemic, we were able to sit outside socially distanced and chat on our front porch,” Cohen says. “They’re not our best friends but the fact that we have no bad blood between us is huge. And we help each other out.” The experience really drove home for her how much of an impact the negative situation had had on her own mental health. “I didn’t realize how traumatized I was until she moved,” she explains. “I would feel a tightness in my chest every time I pulled into my garage.”

And sometimes a situation that initially looks like it could be problematic turns out to be unexpectedly positive. “A neighbor who I initially found somewhat off-putting turned out to be amazing,” says Christina Adams of Laguna Beach, CA. A chain-smoker who often carried around a can of beer lived in an apartment building next to Adams’ new house. A professional chef, he began dropping off beautifully presented gourmet dishes for Adams and her husband. From there, the two bonded over food and cooking, sharing meals and talks and developing a special friendship. “We would never have crossed paths socially and I never would have had this wonderful opportunity to get to know him if he didn’t live next door,” she says.

Fostering Positive Neighbor Relationships

Developing a positive relationship with a neighbor is much easier than turning around a negative one, says Dr. King, so it pays to start off on the right foot. Understand that “small early investments, like smiling, waving or chatting, may make a big difference later on,” Dr. King says. But do try to gauge your neighborhood’s general “feel.” For some city neighbors, in particular, there may be an unwritten understanding that people living in such close proximity should respectfully leave each other alone.

But if your neighborhood feels like one in which interaction is welcome, consider “simple friendly actions — like walking over to introduce yourself and making eye contact. They can be quite powerful in making a good first impression,” adds Amber Trueblood, LMFT, a licensed marriage and family therapist. Welcome new neighbors by dropping off something small like some cookies or a list of your favorite local service people. Include your contact info.

If you’re the new neighbor, consider putting notes in nearby mailboxes introducing yourself, your kids and pets; share your contact info.

Invite your neighbors over for coffee or drinks. Even if the plans don’t materialize, it sets things off on the right track. But understand that some people want more privacy than others and may wish to be left alone — so do respect their wishes.

Be the neighbor you’d like to have. A note to your immediate neighbors giving them a heads up about the date of a big party, noting when the music will stop, is a considerate way to address any concerns about noise or traffic. If it’s a more casual event, consider inviting them to stop by.

And remember that no one likes when a visitor pops in or shows up unannounced. A quick text or phone call (“Want to walk the dogs together?” or “Can I borrow some eggs?”) maintains everyone’s privacy.

Repairing Negative Neighbor Relationships

Negative relationships tend to spiral from one negative interaction, says Dr. King. It may start with a barking dog — and pick up speed from there. So how can you stop the downward spiral?

Consider writing a note or asking if you can talk. “Someone has to have the humility and willingness to be the person to reach out in a difficult situation,” says Dr. King. “You don’t have to like each other, but you do have to be civil to one another.”

Neighbors are often taken for granted, Dr. King adds. It doesn’t take that much effort to turn around a problematic one but it requires being present. “Asking how someone is doing, offering help or listening to someone for two or three minutes when you bump into them may be all it takes.”

If someone seems rude or inconsiderate, it's very unlikely the behavior is directed at you, observes Trueblood. “Remind yourself that you have no idea what is going on inside someone else's home,” she says. “Take a breath, find some compassion and reach out with genuine care to see if you can resolve any misunderstandings or miscommunications.”

Try to focus on the positive. “Often, with difficult neighbors, we focus on the one or two things they do — or don't do — that drive us crazy,” says Trueblood. “Try to focus on any way they are good neighbors.”

Do respect each other’s boundaries and set your own, suggests Dr. King. “The absence of boundaries can be quite draining, as with a neighbor who asks for help all the time just because you are right there.”

If the situation is very negative and it takes up a disproportionate amount of your time and emotional energy — and you’ve tried to repair it — sometimes it’s best to let it go and focus on more positive ones, says Dr. King.

Freelance journalist and essayist Laurie Yarnell created the popular “Embedded in the ‘Burbs” for NBC’s iVillage. In addition to Good Housekeeping , her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Journal News, HuffPost, MSN, Yahoo, Merriam-Webster, Maria Shriver’s Sunday Paper, Town & Country, Esquire, Westchester Magazine, Hudson Valley Magazine, and Grown and Flown , among others. Yarnell has been interviewed on Today, WNBC-TV's News 4 U, Channel 12 News, the ChickChat radio show, and Doctor Radio on SiriusXM. She holds a BA cum laude in Social Relations from Cornell University and a Masters of Counseling from Boston University, both of which help inform her work exploring contemporary trends in interpersonal relationships. A resident of suburban NY, she is mom to 2.5 Millennials and two Labs.   

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Essay on My Neighbour in English for Children and Students

Table of Contents

Essay on My Neighbour: Good neighbours are a blessing. They help each other in the hour of need and share joys and sorrows. Having a good neighbour makes life much more joyous and pleasant. It also makes us feel secure. This is especially true for people living away from their families.

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Long and Short Essay on My Neighbour in English

Here are essay on My Neighbour of varying lengths to help you with the topic in your exam.

We have given both long and short My Neighbour essay to help you with the topic in your exams as well as competitions.

All the essays are well worded by an experienced English content writer and able to fulfill your requirement; so, you can choose any one of them as per your need:

Short Essay on My Neighbour (200 Words) – Essay 1

It feels safe, secure and pleasant living in a neighbourhood surrounded by helpful and positive people. The family living in my neighbourhood is full of life. There are six members in their family – grandparents, parents, and two kids. Every member is cheerful and helpful. We have been living in the same neighbourhood for almost a decade and our neighbours have become an important part of our life.

There have been several incidents during these years where they have proved to be of great help and support. I remember the day I was alone at home with my grandmother. My grandmother was doing some household work when her ankle twisted and she fell on the floor. She was unable to get up on her own. I was just seven years old at that time and could not help her stand. I was almost in tears.

I called my neighbours and they immediately came for help. I was really thankful to them. This is just one incident. There have been numerous such incidents wherein they have helped us. Our family also supports them whenever they need any help. Last year, when their house was getting renovated, we invited them to stay with us for a few days.

We have seen various highs and lows in life together and hope our bond stays intact for years to come.

Essay on My Neighbour (300 Words) – Essay 2

My neighbour is the best neighbour.

Introduction

We live in a nuclear family. My father works in an IT firm and my mother is a teacher. I do not have any siblings nor do we have any relatives in the city. We visit my grandparents and cousins only during the summer vacation.

I felt quite lonely when we shifted here initially. However, I soon met Meera, my new neighbour. I was overjoyed to know that she was the same age as me. We were both eight at that time. I got along well with her from the very beginning. We connected very well and I started feeling really better. I was no longer lonely or sad.

Our Bond with our New Neighbour

Just like I became friends with Meera, my mother got along well with her mother. Meera’s mother is a housewife. My mother and she often have evening tea together. We look forward to such days as it allows us to play at each other’s place. We get a chance to play with different toys and games.

On other days, we go together to the park. We play different outdoor games, take swings and enjoy a lot. We also joined the same summer camp during our last vacation. The camp was for three hours daily during the weekdays. We indulged in many activities such as art and craft, dance, music and board games during this time.

Both of us enjoy art and craft work. We prepared many craft items together even after we returned from the summer camp. During the vacations every year, we also visit the malls together. It has been three years since we have been neighbours and it has been a lot of fun.

I am really thankful to God for giving me such a good neighbour. Meera is simply the best. Her family is also very friendly. I am glad that our mothers are also friends with each other.

Essay on My Neighbour (400 Words) – Essay 3

Importance of a good neighbour.

Our neighbours are one of the first people we can approach during an emergency situation. Those who have good neighbours live with a feeling of security. On the other hand, those who do not connect well with their neighbours can have a hard time during their hour of need.

We Need Good Neighbour

Here is why we need good neighbours:

• Good neighbours support us during crisis. They are there to help us in case any kind of problem arises.
• They are warm and friendly so we can confide in them in case anything bothers us. It is a good way to lower our stress and burden.
• They fill the neighbourhood with positivity and make it a better place to live.
• A neighbourhood surrounded by good neighbours is safe for the kids.
• Elderly people are treated well and do not feel lonely if they have good neighbours.
• Good neighbours are always there for each other. They are sensitive to the needs of one another.
• Good neighbours celebrate festivals and other special occasions together. The joy doubles when people celebrate such special days together.
• Children who grow in warm and friendly neighborhoods are likely to develop a pleasing personality. They also learn how to share and care.

Neighbours during Earlier Times

Even though it is important to know our neighbours well and maintain a cordial relationship with them, people living in the cities do not make an effort to do so. They usually blame their hectic lifestyle for this. This is quite unlike the people belonging to older generations.

In earlier times, people gave a lot of importance to their neighbours. They made an effort to bond with their neighbours. Their neighbours were an integral part of their lives. They often invited their neighbours to their place. They met regularly during the evening hours. The elderly men in the neighbourhood sat down together post lunch to chit chat. They enjoyed each other’s company until late evening and returned home only around dinner time.

The elderly women went together to the temple during morning or evening hours. They also sat down in the neighbourhood park to chat with each other. The kids, on the other hand, played together for hours. The women in the neighbourhood often went together to the market. They helped each other with household chores. They all lived as one big happy family. This tradition continues in the Indian villages even until today.

We must be good for those living in our neighbourhood if we want to be treated the same way. Our life becomes more enriching and wholesome in the company of good neighbours.

Essay on My Neighbour (500 words) – Essay 4

My experiences with my neighbours.

We live in a society. There are eight families on each floor. There are several floors and many towers in society. This makes it a big neighbourhood. The residential welfare association of our society is very active. They make sure we all celebrate various festivals together. Big events are organized at different festivals. This brings all the neighbours close and helps them bond well. I have had some really good experience living in this neighbourhood but some incidents have not been so good.

Some Good Experiences with My Neighbours

We are on good terms with most of the families living on our floor. My parents understand the importance of maintaining a cordial relationship with the neighbours and thus make an effort to bond with them.

One of the lady living on our floor is very good friend with my grandmother. They both visit the temple during the evening hours. During winter afternoons they sit in the park and knit. My mother often invites her home so that the two elderly ladies can spend time together.

I also have two very good friends in my neighbour. I go with them to the park every evening. We play together as our mothers sit and chat with each other. We also visit each other’s place to play. I feel great to have good friends in my neighbourhood especially because it makes the vacation time a lot more fun. My parents are working. They both go to work in the morning and return only by evening. I stay with my grandparents during the day.

Since they are old they cannot play with me. But they do allow me to call my neighbourhood friends home or let me go there for a few hours after I study for some time. The company of my neighbourhood friends makes my vacations super fun and exciting. I go swimming and cycling with them during the evening hours. The mother of one of my neighbourhood friends accompanies us as we go for such activities.

We exchange gifts with our neighbours on the occasion of Diwali and New Year. We also have lunch or dinner together to celebrate these occasions.

Some Bad Experiences with My Neighbours

While some of our neighbours are really sweet and stand by us in our good and bad times, unfortunately, we also have some troublesome neighbours. We have had our share of bad experiences when it comes to neighbours. Three girls have rented an apartment on our floor. They often play loud music during the late evening hours. This disrupts our sleep. We also have a hard time studying during this time.

We have requested them to keep the volume low many times. But it seems like they do not bother about others. Another one of our neighbours is quite weird. It is a family of four – two kids and their parents. We have tried to approach them and be friends with them. However, it seems like their parents want them to maintain distance from us. They often behave rudely and do not bond well with anyone on the floor.

It is great to have good neighbours. However, not everyone has this privilege. I am glad to have some really nice people in my neighbourhood.

Long Essay on My Neighbour (600 Words) – Essay 5

My memories with my neighbours.

We need to relocate to a new place every few years because of my father’s job. It is difficult to adjust to the new atmosphere. It takes time to adapt to new surroundings and people. However, we have been lucky so far when it comes to neighbours. We have always had good neighbours.

The Old Lady in Our Neighbourhood

We shifted to Lucknow when I was five years old. I really loved that place. We stayed there for three years and I made some really fond memories of that place. I loved our single storey house with a small front lawn, I loved the delicious delicacies of the place, I loved our weekend excursions but most of all I loved my family’s bonding with the old lady in our neighbourhood. Her name was Mrs. Shukla who’s son was preparing for the JEE from best IIT coaching of Lucknow .

She stayed just next to our house and we connected with her very well. I have a faint memory of her coming to our house on the very first day we shifted. She prepared tea and snacks for us and welcomed us to the neighbourhood. We felt at home at once. She sat in her front lawn and knitted sweaters during winter afternoons. My mother often joined her to learn some knitting techniques. She once knitted a small blue sweater for my doll. I was overjoyed to receive it.

Many times when my parents went shopping, they left us at Mrs. Shukla’s place. She took very good care of us. Her grandchildren visited her during the summer vacations. We looked forward to that time as we got along really well with those kids. We often invited them to our place and played all day long. Many times, we also went to their place and it was great fun.

The Punjabi Family in Our Neighbourhood

When I was eight years old, we shifted to Chandigarh. It is a beautiful city. It is very well planned with lovely houses and surroundings. We rented an apartment in a good locality. The atmosphere of the place was quite pleasing and so were our neighbours. Our next door neighbours were a Punjabi family. It was a joint family. There were a total of seven members in the family. Their daughter was almost the same age as mine and I got along really well with her. She often came over to our place during the evening and we played for hours.

Sometimes, we went together to the park to take swings and play badminton. She had two brothers who were older than my brother but very friendly. They always called my brother to play cricket with them. My brother looked forward to playing with them. My mother also became very good friends with their mother. They both went shopping together. They often exchanged recipes and chatted for hours. The two years we spent in Chandigarh were really fun. It would not be wrong to say that the Punjabi family living in our neighbourhood made it even more fun.

The Gujrati Couple

I also cherish the one year we spent in Indore. I was eleven years old when we shifted to this city. It was quite different from the cities I had lived in earlier. A Gujarati couple lived in our neighbourhood. They had bought an apartment close to ours just a few days before we shifted.

So, even they were busy unpacking and decorating their place at the time we shifted. The place was as new to them as it was for us. So, the lady often went out to explore the nearby places with my mother. She cooked delicious curries and often gave us some portion. I loved her warm and friendly nature. Her husband was also very polite and helpful.

Good neighbours enrich our childhood experiences. I am glad we have had some really nice ones. I hope we continue to meet such beautiful and helpful people in the future as well.

Frequently Aksed Questions on Essay on My Neighbour

How can i write about my neighbour.

To write about your neighbour, mention specific qualities or incidents that stand out, like their kindness, helpful nature, or community involvement. Share personal experiences that highlight their character.

What makes a good Neighbour essay?

A good neighbour essay should discuss qualities like friendliness, respect, and helpfulness. It might include examples of supportive incidents, community participation, and ways neighbours contribute to a harmonious living environment.

Who are Neighbours in simple words?

Neighbours are people living near one another. They are often residents of the same area or community, sharing the neighbourhood and possibly local amenities.

What is the role of a neighbor?

The role of a neighbor is to contribute to a peaceful community. They offer help, support local activities, respect boundaries, and maintain friendly relations with others nearby, enhancing communal living.

Who is a true neighbor?

A true neighbor is someone who exhibits compassion and consideration, irrespective of the physical proximity. They extend help when needed, showing empathy, and actively contribute to creating a supportive environment.

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The Meaning and Origin of ‘Good Fences Make Good Neighbours’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library , Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of a well-known expression

Here’s a question for you: who first wrote the line, ‘good fences make good neighbours’? Although it was the American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) who first used that particular wording, the sentiment, expressed in slightly different (though only very slightly different) words, is considerably older. So where did ‘good fences make good neighbours’ originally come from, and what does it mean in the Robert Frost poem in which it appears?

Then, in 1815, almost a century before Frost, H. H. Brackenridge wrote in Modern Chivalry : ‘I was always with him [i.e., Thomas Jefferson] in his apprehensions of John Bull. […] Good fences restrain fencebreaking beasts, and […] preserve good neighbourhoods.’

In both of these earlier examples, as in Frost’s ‘good fences make good neighbours’, the meaning of the expression seems clear enough: having a clear boundary between your house and your neighbour’s, and respecting that boundary, helps to keep the peace between neighbours, and thus good relations between neighbours are partly dependent on fences as a marker of said boundaries.

How many neighbours have fallen out over some Leylandii that has become overgrown, intruding on another person’s garden? How many neighbours have fallen out over an extension that has been built, blocking out some of the sunlight into the next-door neighbour’s house? And so on.

‘Good fences make good neighbours’ pithily expresses the need to have clear boundaries between properties, as well as the need for neighbours to respect these boundaries, if relations between neighbours are to remain amicable and ‘good’.

But the meaning of Frost’s ‘good fences make good neighbours’ is not quite so clear-cut when we examine and analyse his use of this phrase in the broader context of his poem. Frost is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. And yet he didn’t belong to any particular movement: unlike his contemporaries William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens he was not a modernist, preferring more traditional modes and utilising a more direct and less obscure poetic language.

He famously observed of free verse, which was favoured by many modernist poets, that it was ‘like playing tennis with the net down’. His work may appear conversational and direct, but it is often misinterpreted by people determined to take it at face value, thus missing the subtleties and ironies of his work, or taking certain lines out of context.

‘Mending Wall’ is a poem about two neighbours coming together each spring to mend the wall that separates their two properties. The speaker of the poem reveals to us in his chatty and familiar manner that, while he and his neighbour fix the wall, it becomes clear that the speaker isn’t convinced by the need for a fence dividing their two properties. When he asks his neighbour what the purposes of the dividing wall is, all his neighbour can do is parrot an old piece of wisdom his father used to say: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

The neighbour clearly shares the view expressed by Rogers and Brackenridge in those much earlier wordings of the sentiment. In other words, having clear boundaries between ourselves and others leads to healthy relationships between neighbours because they won’t fall out over petty territorial disputes.

But ‘Mending Wall’ is frequently misinterpreted, as Frost himself observed in 1962, shortly before his death. (However, he also refused to tell anyone what the ‘secret’ meaning of the poem really was.)

It’s worth noting that it is Frost’s neighbour, rather than Frost himself (or Frost’s speaker), who insists: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’ But as the first line of the poem has it, spoken by Frost (or his speaker) rather than his fence-loving neighbour: ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’.

For the neighbour, the hand-me-down proverb from his father is enough wisdom for him to live by: it’s always been said, as far as he’s concerned, that ‘good fences make good neighbours’, so who is he to question such a notion? By contrast, Frost’s speaker can’t resist questioning or probing the matter.

Nevertheless, it’s a nice piece of irony that it is only really through ‘mending wall’ – mending it in order to retain it – that the speaker and his neighbour come together: the wall may keep their properties apart, but it also brings them together as they ‘meet’ in order to mend it.

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8 thoughts on “The Meaning and Origin of ‘Good Fences Make Good Neighbours’”

For me this stunning poem throws into question the entire concept of frontiers and other forms of territorial division; and, as I remember from somewhere, Frost himself hinted likewise. I find the poem drives me to develop the rationale supporting property/territory separation. There are copious answers to the question, “Why do you wish to separate your property from mine?” My favorite ones are: “So you can’t see what I’m up to.” “To prevent your occupants from influencing mine.” “Delineation.” “To keep my demography pure.” “To prevent outsiders from pinching my precious property.” ….and so on. All wrapped around the concept of fear and suspicion of outsiders.

I thoroughly enjoyed your treatment of the theme, Thanks

Thanks for this comment, and I agree completely. Frost handles these various possible reasons for demarcation with real skill, refusing to be too direct or, worse, reductive in exploring/suggesting them. Such a thought-provoking poem.

When Frost’s poems were on the exam syllabus, my students were convinced it was an allegory about the Berlin Wall until I explained that the poem was written many years before. All the same, the poem is a fitting comment on the builders of walls and a tribute to Frost’s insight. Is that Mexican wall Trump started still going ahead? An “old stone savage” indeed!

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5 tips on being a kinder neighbor and fostering a sense of community

Diana Opong

Janet W. Lee

Do you know your neighbors? Like really know them? Their first names, the types of cars they drive, what holidays they celebrate? If you ever get locked out of your house, could you go to your neighbor's to grab a spare key?

According to a 2018 Pew Research study , roughly a quarter of adults under 30 report that they don't know any of their neighbors.

But there's a sense of comfort and safety that can come with knowing them — and building a safe and caring community is a valuable way to stay connected to the place you live.

Learning how to be a kind neighbor is a skill that's good to learn at a young age, and Chris Loggins knows all about that. He's the supervising producer of the animated children's show Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood from Fred Rogers Productions. "The show is for two to four year olds and it is directly inspired by Mister Rogers' Neighborhood ," he says.

"In each episode, there's a strategy song. Each of them has a catchy tune and easy-to-remember lyrics that help kids develop important social and emotional skills."

We spoke with Loggins and other community building experts about ways we can strive to be kinder, more caring neighbors. While many of these tips are for young people, they are also applicable to the parents and adults in the room.

Get to know your neighbors

It may seem obvious, but getting to know your neighbors is the first step to becoming a kind neighbor. Get out of your comfort zone and make an effort to learn their names and what they do for work. And if you feel comfortable, let them know that you're there to help, if they ever need another hand.

Loggins shares that after a recent move, his new neighbors helped him and his family feel welcome by making sure that his family had things set up. He emphasizes that it doesn't take a lot of money or a grand gesture to be an active neighbor. "You don't have to show up with a fresh apple pie or anything like that," he says. It's truly as simple as saying hello, introducing yourself and asking an open-ended question.

Make small kind gestures a daily practice

Daniel Tiger welcomes new neighbor Jodi Platypus to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.The animated children's show Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood is directly inspired by Mister Rogers neighborhood, which ran on PBS from 1968 to 2001. Courtesy of Fred Rogers Productions hide caption

Daniel Tiger welcomes new neighbor Jodi Platypus to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.The animated children's show Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood is directly inspired by Mister Rogers neighborhood, which ran on PBS from 1968 to 2001.

Another way to take care of your neighborhood, and to show your neighbors that you care, is by making small acts of kindness a daily practice. This can be cleaning up litter or even cleaning up after the pets on your block.

Use the skills and resources available to you — maybe you aren't a baker, but you have an amazing garden. You can ask your partner or kids to help you pick flowers from your garden to give your new neighbor a bouquet. Remember, every small gesture counts.

Remind yourself that being connected feels good

It can feel so easy to just go home, close your door and turn on the TV without having to make small talk, but connecting with others is worth the effort. As nerve-wracking as it is, reaching out to new people can actually boost your mood in the long run. According to an article by Emma Seppälä , "social connectedness ... generates a positive feedback loop of social, emotional and physical well-being."

Accept The Awkwardness: How To Make Friends (And Keep Them)

And if you take the first step, your small acts of kindness can encourage others to pay that kindness forward — making even more people feel good.

Marta Zaraska , who is the author of Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100 , shares that once in 2013, "there was an instance in Winnipeg at a local Tim Hortons, where one driver decided to pay for the meal or the coffee of the driver behind him at the drive-thru. And that driver was so grateful, he decided to pay for the driver behind him." According to reports on this incident, the chain of kindness went on for more than 200 drivers!

Meet and engage with different people

Encouraging your kids to get out there and engage with your neighbors is important, but it isn't always easy to balance this with conversations on safety and the so-called stranger danger. Like every parent, Zach Norris , who's the executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, Calif., had to work on this with his daughters.

"We need to call into consciousness that this idea of the so-called bad guy and the way in which the so-called bad guy has been leveraged in ways that actually make us less safe," he says. "Most often, harm is done by people that we know. And that includes for children who are some of the most vulnerable folks in our society."

Being told you can't trust the people around you doesn't exactly inspire community, and children pick up on that. One way to combat this stranger danger outlook, he says, is by reaching out of your comfort zone and engaging with different people in your neighborhood alongside your kids.

Norris, for instance, takes his daughters to events where they hear from "amazing leaders who are incredible and empathetic, and also who are formerly incarcerated, who have committed some acts that may have caused harm, that they have made amends for. And I think those are some of the experiences that we expose them to that I think helped them to understand safety in a more dynamic way," he says.

Check your implicit bias

Looking out for your neighbors is an important part of being in a community. But before you go all "neighborhood watch" on someone, if something is making you feel unsafe, Norris suggests you take a deeper look at the power dynamics at play: Why do you feel like someone doesn't "fit in" your neighborhood? Why are you inclined to call the police on someone?

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Remember to check your bias, and ask yourself why you feel uncomfortable and unsafe, rather than putting the blame on your neighbors.

When asked what someone should do before calling the police on someone in their neighborhood, Norris advises asking themselves whether another person is being "actively harmed."

Getting to know your neighbors and taking care of your community are valuable ways to feel safer in your neighborhood. Actions speak louder than words, and your attitudes towards marginalized and vulnerable people also set an example for your kids. So be mindful of the different people in your community and actively remind yourself to treat everyone with respect and care.

The podcast portion of this story was produced by Janet W. Lee, with engineering support from Patrick Murray.

We'd love to hear from you. If you have a good life hack, leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at [email protected] . Your tip could appear in an upcoming episode.

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Handling Troublesome Neighbors

The best solution to neighbor-neighbor conflict may simply be moving..

Posted March 4, 2021

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The list of ways that urban neighbors can get on each other's nerves is long. It might be misbehaving dogs, loud music, intrusive surveillance, tacky lawn ornaments, political signs, or bright lights at night. Handling those conflicts is tricky.

A high level of conflict among neighbors is generally a lose-lose proposition and the relationship is likely to deteriorate over time as arguments and new sources of friction add fuel to the fire.

The Hunter-Gatherer Solution

The problem of troublesome neighbors is ancient. Even in small hunter-gatherer communities, social conflict was a recurrent problem. Many of these spats involved marital infidelity .

Hunter-gatherer societies were flexible, and individuals who were unhappy in one group could be accepted in another community. When bitter conflicts arose, hunter-gatherers resolved them by one person moving.

In settled societies, moving is a more complex matter because so many of our activities, from work to education to friendship , are tied to the place where we live. In the world of social media , this is certainly changing but few people are ready to swap a Zoom chat for a real-world interaction with real physical contact.

In settled communities, neighbors are often home at the same time, put out their garbage at the same time, mow their lawns and shovel their driveways.

Inconvenient as it may be, we sometimes choose to avoid disagreeable neighbors. In one of my homes, I stayed clear of a nasty neighbor by turning my back door into the front door and approaching the house from a rear lane. She may have noticed the pattern and established her position as a bad neighbor by turning me in for running a fictitious illegal daycare center. A bashful inspector from the Department of Child Services knocked on my door to check out the claim.

While this event is amusing, it has a darker side which is that people who have weak social networks often latch onto their neighbors as though they were family.

Conflict among neighbors often has a fairly trivial pretext but escalates if the irritant is not resolved.

Negotiation

In many cases, neighbors causing a nuisance are oblivious to the problem. Who wouldn't love their dog who nevertheless is a chronic barker and whines all day while the owner is away? If the owners deny that there is a problem, it cannot be remedied. Even if they did, they are unlikely to do anything about it.

Some problems are easily addressed. Most reasonable people will turn down their music if asked politely. They will understand that people who must rise early for their work need to sleep.

How they are asked is the key and the more indirect the approach the better. Instead of even mentioning the music, a person might say, “I have to get up for work at 6 in the morning, I like to be in bed by 9.”

Even this level of intervention is risky. The neighbor might take umbrage and declare that they can make as much noise as they want in their own backyard.

This attitude fuels escalation. The aggrieved person waits until 10 o'clock in the evening and calls the police. This is generally a mistake because an annoying neighbor has been turned into a bitter enemy who is not going away and is unlikely to reform.

Where there are serious problems of illegal conduct, such as drug dealing, there are various legal remedies, from police action to public nuisance lawsuits brought by a group of neighbors. Yet, such problems often persist. If the drug dealer owns the home, they are not going away. If the landlord evicts them, they can occupy another house on the same street. Establishing that drug dealing is occurring requires an undercover operation that is difficult, dangerous, and expensive. Often, the most that police do is to increase neighborhood surveillance.

The Litigious Neighbor

There are civil remedies for neighbor nuisances but these rarely produce positive results. Even with the law on their side, the aggrieved neighbor who brings a civil action is stepping into a minefield of unanticipated consequences.

The most obvious is that they unleash the litigious beast in their neighbor. The fallout extends from getting turned in if their sidewalk is not shoveled in winter to being cited for minor infringements in city building ordinances, or even having a home extension challenged for code violation.

When we are at loggerheads with our neighbors, we generally cannot simply pick up and move to a new community after the manner of hunter-gatherers.

Prevention is the best cure and every casual contact is an opportunity for building rapport that forestalls conflict. This sort of diplomacy is harder for apartment dwellers whose neighbors may be more temporary.

So, love thy neighbor! Otherwise, moving is the only good way of solving conflict, as our remote ancestors realized.

Nigel Barber, Ph.D., is an evolutionary psychologist as well as the author of Why Parents Matter and The Science of Romance , among other books.

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5 Qualities the Best Neighbors Tend to Have

5 good-neighbor qualities and etiquette tips.

Your neighbors play a big role in your community and quality of life—they can be the reason you happily pull into your driveway after a long day or quickly close the garage door behind you. With that much at stake, it's important to know good neighbor etiquette and qualities so you can be one yourself and set an example for others in your homeowners’ association (HOA). Read on to learn the top five qualities of good neighbors and tips for meeting new neighbors.

Five qualities of good neighbors

Here are the top five qualities of good neighbors. When you strive for these traits, your fellow community members will do the same.  

1. Good neighbors are friendly.

Friendly neighbors are kind to current neighbors and welcoming to new ones. They introduce themselves, maintain relationships, and are approachable. They also enjoy being social in their community and encourage others to do so as well.

2. Good neighbors are helpful.

Helpful neighbors are always there to lend a hand. They stand ready to assist whenever someone requires support, whether it's borrowing an egg, keeping watch over their home, or collecting mail during a trip. These neighbors are people you can count on in various situations.

3. Good neighbors are trusting.

Trusting neighbors have their neighbors' best interests at heart. They treat their neighbor's home and family as their own. They also keep their word and follow through when asked to do something.

4. Good neighbors are respectful.

Respectful neighbors grasp the importance of boundaries, showing concern for their neighbor's time and personal space. They also acknowledge the preferences of those who value minimal interaction and prefer communication only when necessary. Being respectful involves maintaining tidiness, understanding limitations, and adhering to community rules.

5. Good neighbors are considerate of noise.

Noise is one of the most common complaints about neighbors in the U.S. Responsible neighbors, who are considerate of noise levels, play a pivotal role in fostering quality relationships within a community. Their willingness to adjust noise levels when a neighbor might be disturbed or uncomfortable demonstrates their accommodation. The most effective approach is to communicate proactively, informing neighbors in advance and working together to reach mutually agreeable solutions.

Tips for meeting new neighbors

Many people choose to move into an HOA because of the sense of community. As an existing resident, you have a part in extending the hand of friendship to those moving in and building a warm and inclusive community. Let's explore some tips on how to greet and connect with new neighbors, making them feel right at home from the very start.

1. Formally introduce yourself.

Creating a welcoming atmosphere establishes a channel for communication between you and your neighbor. Consider extending a friendly gesture, like a welcome gift such as a treat (be mindful of allergies) or a plant, within the first few days of their move-in. You could also encourage your community to start a welcome committee to facilitate this.

2. Keep introductions brief.

If you find that your new neighbor isn’t open to conversation, keep your meeting brief and to the point. This will prevent your neighbor from feeling uncomfortable or pressured to have a conversation. If they suggest it isn’t a good time to talk, wish them a quick and warm welcome. You can reassure them that you’re more than happy to come back another day or at a time that works best for them.

3. Let them do the talking.

Being a new neighbor comes with a lot to think about, especially when settling into a new home. When conversing with them, give them the space to share and respect their time—they might be swamped with tasks or not available for a chat. Let them know you’re there to answer any questions.

4. Exchange information.

Providing your neighbor with your information is a great way to keep in touch and start the foundation of a strong relationship. Give them your phone number or email address and any other contact information they may find helpful. For example, if you see that your neighbor has young children, you may share a list of contacts for a local babysitter or carpool.

5. Accompany them to HOA meetings.

HOA meetings are an excellent place to meet new people, voice opinions, and get involved in the community. Going alone can be intimidating, so offer to go to an HOA meeting with your neighbor. While they should’ve received a packet of governing documents at move-in, as a new HOA member, they may have questions about the structure and operations of the HOA.

TownSq: The App Loved by Neighbors

The next time your HOA asks how to improve relationships and communication between neighbors and staff, suggest an HOA software like TownSq. This all-in-one platform not only gives you the chance to voice your suggestions and thoughts, but it also keeps everyone updated on the latest community news. And with the communications suite, neighbors can do so much more than just chat on the forum with fellow residents. Click here to learn more about the many features TownSq has to offer!

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Learn How to Calculate The Churn of Your HOA Management Company

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How to Be a Good Neighbour

Last Updated: April 30, 2024 Approved

This article was co-authored by Saul Jaeger, MS . Saul Jaeger is a Police Officer and Captain of the Mountain View, California Police Department (MVPD). Saul has over 17 years of experience as a patrol officer, field training officer, traffic officer, detective, hostage negotiator, and as the traffic unit’s sergeant and Public Information Officer for the MVPD. At the MVPD, in addition to commanding the Field Operations Division, Saul has also led the Communications Center (dispatch) and the Crisis Negotiation Team. He earned an MS in Emergency Services Management from the California State University, Long Beach in 2008 and a BS in Administration of Justice from the University of Phoenix in 2006. He also earned a Corporate Innovation LEAD Certificate from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 2018. wikiHow marks an article as reader-approved once it receives enough positive feedback. In this case, 87% of readers who voted found the article helpful, earning it our reader-approved status. This article has been viewed 564,025 times.

Getting along well with your neighbors makes your community a happier and safer place to live. The key to being a good neighbor is clear and consistent communication. Introduce yourself to your neighbors and then stay in contact over time. Try to be courteous by keeping your noise levels low and your yard well-maintained. If you want to go above and beyond, you could even participate in a neighborhood association or watch.

Things You Should Know

• Always be respectful and considerate of your neighbors. Keep your yard clean, follow any noise regulations, and put your trash out at the right time.
• Make an effort to get to know your neighbors. Introduce yourself if you've never met before.
• Deal with any issues face to face in a calm, respectful way.

Being Respectful and Considerate

• For example, to maintain a lawn space, talk with your neighbor about rotating mowing duties each week.

• If you can’t do this maintenance on your own, consider hiring a professional lawn service.

• Most waste companies have very particular policies regarding what types of trash they will pick up and how it must be set out. For example, it may not be enough to simply place large branches by the curb of your house. You might need to cut and tie them into bundles.
• Following the local trash rules also helps to cut down on the presence of pests and vermin, such as mice.

• Let your neighbors know that they can come talk with you if your pets are ever bothering them. For example, you might say, “If you ever hear my dog barking too much in the evenings, just let me know.”
• If you are walking in your neighborhood, practice common courtesy by picking up your pet’s poop, too.

• If you live in an apartment complex, the leasing company will usually provide you with a list of community rules, which usually includes a statement about noise.
• Go ahead and lower your noise level if you even think that you are being loud.
• Use what you know about your neighbors to determine what is appropriate, too. For example, if you know that the person next door works nights, then take that into account and adjust your noise levels accordingly.

Getting to Know Your Neighbors

• For a more informal approach, say hi to your neighbors when they (or you) are outside walking their dog or working on their lawn.
• When you first meet your neighbor you might say, “Hi! I’m Fred Thompson. I live 2 doors down from you and just wanted to come over and welcome you to the neighborhood.”
• You can also give you neighbor any friendly local tips, such as what time the garbage or mail carrier stops by.
• A welcoming gift can be anything from a friendly card to a basket filled with local foods or produce.

• For example, if your neighbor is going out of town, they might ask you to watch over their home. Then, when you take a trip, you can ask them to return the favor.

• For example, a community association could work together to put on a local street festival or even small dinners.

Communicating Openly with Your Neighbors

• For example, to give yourself a few days to think everything over, you might say, “I understand where you are coming from, but I need to consider how to fix it on my end. Can we talk about this over the weekend again?”

• This doesn’t necessarily apply if you feel as if the safety of you, your family, or the neighborhood is at stake. In those situations, you might want to reach out to local officials for assistance.
• Avoid gossiping about any issues with your neighbor to other neighbors or people in the community. This only creates additional problems.

• The same goes for any other large, loud gatherings, such as ongoing construction.

Conversation Help

Expert Q&A

• After a special event, such as the birth of a baby, it never hurts to give your neighbors a small, thoughtful gift. [6] X Research source Thanks Helpful 3 Not Helpful 0
• Mind your own business about personal matters. Do not gossip. Thanks Helpful 11 Not Helpful 2

• No matter how much you try to establish a friendship with certain neighbors, it might not always happen. In these scenarios, try not to take it personally and instead focus on living next to one another peacefully. Thanks Helpful 14 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.houzz.com.au/ideabooks/33771067/list/everybody-needs-good-neighbours-10-ways-to-keep-the-peace
• ↑ https://www.housing.vic.gov.au/getting-along-neighbours
• ↑ https://www.fix.com/blog/guide-to-being-a-good-neighbor/

About This Article

To be a good neighbor, do your part to clean up any shared spaces, like the lawn of a duplex or the hallway of an apartment building. You should also try to follow noise regulations in your area and stay quiet during times when most people are sleeping. Additionally, if you've just moved in or gotten a new neighbor, introduce yourself and offer a small moving-in gift, like a card or a gift basket. Also, try to do favors for your neighbors whenever you can, and don't be afraid to talk to them in person as soon as possible if you encounter any problems. For more advice, like how to get to know your neighbors better, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Good Ghosts and Bad Fathers: The Story of a Haunting, a Kidnapping, and an International Incident

Helen vogelsong-donahue finally escapes her bogeyman.

I was being hunted.

Each night, Mom locked our doors and windows like she was closing a restaurant in a bad part of town. Every lock checked twice, every night a gamble. While other five-year-olds were asleep, calmed by cassette tapes and their mothers’ voices, I was awake. What if tonight was the night he’d finally break down the door and kill me? Kill us all?

I imagined myself as the last to go, powerless to help Mom and my brother, Simon, as he hacked them into bloody bits before turning the axe on me. An axe, of course, was the most powerful murder weapon, and a necessary one: how else would he get inside the house?

Insomnia followed. I’d wait until everybody was asleep, then creep from my bed through the dark to the second-story window overlooking the road and—more importantly—the county jail on the other side. It was a grim, beige building—an austere and functional structure where decades previously—before a fire burned it to the ground in the 1950s—there stood a fortress-style prison studded with decorative turrets and watchtower battlements, the location of countless 19th-century executions, where criminals were hung from gallows in the courtyard and buried in unmarked graves, just a few steps away from the cemetery that stretched into the dark.

Sometimes, the blinds would be up at the jail, allowing me a glimpse into the strange world of corrections. The cops were usually eating donuts and, if I was lucky, watching television: Beavis and Butthead, The Simpsons —late-night cartoons too adult for me to watch. I tried to make sense of it: The police, the criminals, the fear on Mom’s face, the fear that he would find us.

Why were these men locked up, I wondered, while he was allowed to roam free? “They’re in there because they’ve done something bad,” Mom had explained once, studying my puzzled face as the inmates helped shovel snow from our sidewalks. Worse than him? How bad could they be? 

I took some solace in knowing the police were only 30 feet away. Not that they’d ever been helpful—they hadn’t managed to stop him before—but I figured if he showed up here, the cops across the street would hear the heavy footsteps, the jiggling of doorknobs, the thwack of the axeblade in the night.

When I did manage to sleep, I had night terrors; my body would launch upright from bed and my throat would release a cry loud and terrible enough to wake Mom and Simon. She’d tell me my eyes were open during these parasomniac events, though I was otherwise unresponsive. I never remembered anything, though I wondered if I was witnessing something in that sleep state; that the screams were a warning that he was back.

Please keep us safe , I’d say, imagining them as invisible defenders, rising through the swirling mist like my own personal army.

I later discovered this was why we lived next to the jail. “I hope you’re enjoying the house,” I heard Grandma tell Mom: “I know it isn’t much, but it was the safest place we could find.”

When Mom was at work, Simon and I stayed with our grandparents on the family farm, a few miles outside of town. Grandpa would take me out for strawberry ice cream, to the lake, or on agriculture-related errands, often to check on the rabbits in the barn he’d built, or on farm-to-farm deliveries. I was terrified of any man who wasn’t Grandpa, cowering behind his legs as ancient farmers introduced themselves with calloused hands. Even when they were tender, I felt uneasy. But Grandpa kept me safe, with my little hand clasped in his, on walks through town, or through the woods behind the farm.

On the farm—where the occasional crack of a bullet in the distance was commonplace, especially during hunting season—Mom had the freedom to practice firing her gun, a 10-inch .357 Blackhawk revolver so long she’d bought a big purse in which to carry it. We never saw her shoot it, but she told us she sometimes used watermelons the size of human heads as targets. “In case he comes back,” she’d say, “I need to know how not to miss.”

At home, we did arts and crafts with empty cans that once held cheap nonperishables like chicken noodle soup, mixed veggies, and Vienna sausages. Strung together by twine, tin hugging tin, like metal hands across America, we’d attach the braided ends to the lifts of the first-story windows. If the Bogeyman were to enter, the cans would dance and clap their steel hands loud enough to wake us. Mom would then reach into her nightstand, where Grandpa had built a secret compartment for her revolver.

We tried not to talk about him. I didn’t know his name, just that we were in danger, and maybe always would be. To me, he was just the Bogeyman. And I’d spend the next two decades looking over my shoulder, waiting for him to return.

I was also being haunted.

When it rained, the boy in the basement came out to play. Simon and I called him Thomas. He didn’t like the rain the same way we didn’t like the basement: a damp, dark cellar that jerked cats and dogs into a frenzy at the top of the stairs, hissing and howling at the unseen below. Thomas often let his presence be known, but he was particularly demonstrative on rainy nights. Lights flickered, doors creaked and slammed, and I wondered if Thomas thought that if he shook the house enough, God would spare us the deluge of Pennsylvania thunderstorms.

When the clouds gathered, and the first drops started to speckle the brick in the backyard, I’d wait for Thomas to arrive. Sometimes the TV would turn on, flipping through channels, or a kitchen cabinet would fling itself open, or the faucet would run. I liked seeing Thomas display his powers. Maybe those powers would protect me.

The cops next door were supposed to make me feel safe, but they didn’t. I saw ghosts everywhere, and to me, they were our guardians. In addition to Thomas were the spirits from the cemetery across the street. There, spread across twenty acres, were thousands of Bellefonte’s deceased: Civil War soldiers, wrapped in a ring of graves called the Soldier’s Circle; three notable Pennsylvania governors; nearly one hundred unmarked infant graves referred to as “Babyland”; and a gorgeous inventor, suffragist, and WWI special agent named Anna Wagner Keichline, who was also Pennsylvania’s first woman architect.

Mom, brother, and I would take long walks through the graves, and occasionally, Mom would point to one and have us try to read the epitaphs, sounding them out the best we could. I felt a kinship with the dead. I learned words and names and spoke to the buried soldiers. Under my breath, I’d request their help. Please keep us safe , I’d say, imagining them as invisible defenders, rising through the swirling mist like my own personal army. I decided if the Bogeyman ever showed up, they’d put the cops to shame.

It must have been one of these soldiers I’d seen standing watch over the house, garrisoned in front of our backyard’s converted carriage house with his hands clasped over the pommel of a long cavalry saber. I’d watch him from the kitchen, looking out the big glass door that opened into the backyard. I told Mom about him, reporting on his sentry duty. Nobody besides me could see him and I didn’t know if he could see me.

Kids see ghosts, they say. Or they have imaginary friends. When we’re young, our beliefs aren’t yet limited, distinctions not yet made. Even those who are frightened by the idea of ghosts like hearing about them. They exist in every culture, pervade every language. The idea of an afterlife allows us to bypass the existential dread of living, to imagine our deceased loved ones in pastures among the clouds, silently but diligently guiding us along our individual journeys. Tall tales keep the dead alive, because nobody wants to feel alone in the universe: human beings need ghost stories to survive, and every story is, in some sense, a ghost story.

Here’s mine.

The Bogeyman was sitting in front of us.

I was four. And there he was, seated on a gray couch right in front of me, arms wide open. The Bogeyman. Would he disappear if I closed my eyes tight enough, as he often had in my dreams? Not this time. How did he find us? He was confident—arrogant even—and collected, smiling down at me, always so certain that he could trick me this time. Why was he smiling if he was there to kill me? His eyes seemed black and empty. He offered me toys stuffed in plastic shopping bags. I declined, although I badly wanted them. Mom could not afford many toys, and these were nice ones—baby dolls that cried real tears and an Easy Bake Oven that promised perfect brownies in 15 minutes.

The bogeyman looked like a malevolent marionette, his mouth tugged into a grin by an unseen puppeteer. It was a forced expression with no emotion masking a desperation to control. I knew he believed that if he could deceive me, he’d win. So, I hid with Simon under the table, gazing down at the floor. If I met his eyes, I would turn to stone like in my Greek mythology books, or worse, start to believe him. I kept my eyes down, staring—down, down, down— until the stiff, tufted carpet became just an orange blur.

When I finally looked up, he was gone.

That wasn’t the only time I saw the bogeyman. Every so often he’d come to this place, calm, devious, waiting for the moment to strike at us all. Again, I’d look down until he disappeared. This was how gazing at the ground became a habit, one that annoyed Mom and teachers, who yelled at me to watch where I was walking. “You’re gonna get hit by a car, Helen!” But my eyes fixated on my shoes, the sidewalk, the wooden floors. Down was safe. What if I look up and there he is again ?

When Mom remarried, we left Thomas behind. Only a few streets over, our new home was much bigger, and for me it felt like a fairytale castle. A three-story Victorian with a big, tiered backyard and the ruins of an old carriage house in the back lot where sunflowers bloomed every summer.

The ghosts found me first. I’d smell perfume on the landing of the stairs, or smoke, strong and pungent as though blown through a pipe in the old drawing- turned-computer room. Late at night, when the rest of the house was asleep, I’d hear parties downstairs. Glasses clinking, music, and muffled laughter. I’d jump from bed to investigate, thinking it rude my parents would have a secret, late-night soiree without inviting me. But when I got to the banister, I saw only darkness. Once, I heard a woman crying downstairs, howling so much I thought it was the family cat being eaten alive—until I saw the cat run right past my doorway as the weeping continued.

The adults never seemed too afraid of the cabinets slamming or lights flickering. So, neither were me and Simon. Naturally, we feared what our mother feared: that the Bogeyman would find us, despite having moved; that he was out there right now, in the dark, looking in; that we were marked; that we were in danger.

I dreamed of a balding man with a graying beard standing in our drawing-room, puffing a pipe in a double-breasted jacket and gazing out the bay windows that overlooked the front yard. I dreamed of him so often I suspected he was there in the house with us and wanted something. I wondered if the affluent gentleman of my dreams wasn’t the same person who started speaking to me and Simon a few months later. The voice we heard was always friendly, and sounded close but far away, like he was speaking underwater. The volume varied, but he always asked the same thing: Where’s the book?

“Did you hear that?” Simon whispered. It was the first time we heard him. We were frozen in place, too afraid to drop the Beanie Babies we were leading into battle on his bedroom floor. Tom was on a business trip and our mom was outside doing yardwork.

Where’s the book? the voice repeated.

Simon and I exchanged a look. He was the big brother, and knew that came with check-the-house-for-ghosts duties. He tip-toed around the house in his bare feet, peered down the staircase, called “Hello?” from the foyer.

“Nope, no one here.”

“Maybe it was one of our Beanie Babies,” I suggested. We howled with laughter, imagining General Patti the Platypus talking to us.

When our mother came in through the back door, we ran downstairs to tell her the news.

“He just wanted a book,” Simon explained, trying to clarify that the Bogeyman was not in the house, just a harmless ethereal bookworm.

We called him the Book Man. Mom always listened intently to my ghost sightings and made sure I never felt disbelieved—but sometimes she couldn’t help but find it funny when her five-year-old daughter would charge in and declare yet another spectral visit. Once, when I was convinced I’d heard a baby crying in the night, I came downstairs the next day and accused Mom of secretly giving birth to a new sibling—the only semi-logical explanation I could think of—and she doubled over laughing. This time, she listened to our story with a smile. Most families moving into a century-old house, only to find it full of ghosts, would flee. But for us, ghosts were not the problem. Nothing haunting the corridors inside the house could be as dangerous as what Mom said was outside.

“Well, as long as he’s not back,” she said. “I don’t care who hangs out in this place.”

The spirits of the house were interacting with me, they wanted my recognition. And while it was clear to me the ghosts knew I could hear them, it wasn’t enough: I wanted to see them, too. My power was growing, I was sure, because I was the only one experiencing most of our new home’s activities. What visual proof I could garner would solidify my status as Helen, Communicator with the Dead , through which I’d help protect myself and my family from the danger lurking just outside.

We weren’t living across from the county jail anymore, a fact I became more and more aware of as I lay awake at night listening to the walls and pipes expand and contract around me. The thing about old houses is they breathe , their walls alive with energy. I imagined the ghosts in our home as part of the energy, clicking and whirring around us like parts of a machine as we slept. They were the hands on the grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs, the engine of the house. The ghosts were necessary.

One such night, when I couldn’t sleep again—this time, not for the usual reasons, but because I’d accidentally swallowed a marble—something miraculous happened: The ghosts finally showed themselves to me. Always the catastrophizer, I was lying in bed paralyzed with fear over the marble, when suddenly, a night light illuminated the lavender wall opposite my bed.

Flush against the paint was a hand shadow, the kind I imagined kids might make at sleepovers. It began with simple shapes: a dog, a sheep, a rabbit. Then the shadows multiplied, transforming my room into a wondrous menagerie. I watched in awe as elephants, camels, and men in cowboy hats paraded across the room. They grew more elaborate, shifting into dragons, unicorns, and phoenixes rising from the ashes. It was so stupendous—such a marvel—that it took far too long for me to notice no arms were attached to the hands.

Still, I was suspicious. I got up, mid-performance, to investigate the window beside my bed. Though not quite a skeptic in my youth, I figured what was happening was one of two things: the ghosts in my house were finally interacting with me, a sign perhaps of mutual respect, or someone was playing a trick on me at two in the morning. Expecting an “aha!” moment, instead, when I peered out the window to the house next door, the entire place was dark, and all the blinds were drawn.

The dance of the shadow puppets continued, whirring around the spotlight and morphing into creatures I thought impossible to replicate with one’s hands. It felt like it went on for hours. I was unafraid. The event was an adventure, a profound comfort—and, as I drifted off to sleep, a lullaby.

In my head, I was in constant negotiation. You protect me, and I’ll never let anything terrible befall this house . If neither of us could do anything about our current circumstances, the ghosts and I may as well have each other’s backs. The house was my safe haven, a sanctuary that, by fate, I’d stumbled into as its caretaker. My being there was kismet. I was just a living visitor. I respected the house. So much so that I’d often remove the small, gilded mirror from the downstairs bathroom wall and walk around just admiring the ceiling, the architecture of the home that’s taken for granted when you’re not looking up. Which, of course, I never was.

“Ghosts are just people who are dead,” I told my pre-kindergarten class as we sat cross-legged on the carpeted green floor of the casket room at the Victorian Crematory. Our daycare instructor had left something behind at her apartment—something she apparently desperately needed—and dragged us along with her in an attempt to find it. The caveat was she lived at the borough’s only funeral home. She led us up the street from the YMCA to the crematory in buddy-system, attempting to make the trip educational once we arrived by giving us a tour of the cremation room, in it a big, silver machine that charred dead bodies to such a crisp the funeral director could scoop up the chalky ashes and return them to their families in a decorative urn.

I was scared—the air in the funeral home reeked of chemicals and all-purpose cleaner, which only confirmed the amount of death around us—but I was also intrigued. I’d only lived with ghosts; I’d never seen a dead person before. I was realizing fear is fun when you feel safe: I loved hearing the wood creaking and pipes clanking in our house in the dead of night, listening to Mom read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark to Simon and me, watching The Nightmare Before Christmas every Halloween, and, now, taking field trips to spooky locations.

In the casket room, Miss Kristy asked us if we had any stories we wanted to share about death. I did not, but every other kid seemed eager.

“My uncle died skiing,” a kid called Joel said excitedly, explaining how his uncle had run head-first into a tree and BAM, lights out! Miss Kristy looked stricken. She tried to change the subject. The well-varnished caskets gleamed under the lights.

We left the Wetzler funeral home, but it did not leave me. An obsession with death—and the dead—was growing.

At school, they called me Ghost Girl because of my constant testimonials about the supernatural. I regaled everyone with vivid accounts of what I’d seen floating down the stairs, or what I’d heard going bump in the night. I didn’t care if anyone believed me: I felt special. No one else could see the ghosts.

In the dead of night, with the proverbial chains rattling in the attic, I became more relaxed and at ease. My comfort with what frightened others released some of the anxiety about what really frightened me. Fear is fun when you’re safe, but we were still not safe. The Bogeyman kept coming back. He was a constant dread, a low hum that came in through the walls, a chill in the floors.

But the big Victorian house, whose ghosts frightened the neighborhood kids, welcomed me as the ultimate refuge.

I declared to myself that I would live there for the rest of my life. I was a spooky little child making promises. I’d never let the red paint on the front door chip, or the ornate white gingerbread trim rot off the gabled roof. I’d stand like an apparition in the dormer windows. I’d water the poisonous foxgloves, pick the weeds from the carriage house ruins, and leave food out for the stray cats. I’d reupholster the tapestry cushions and dust the walnut fixtures, which I’d polish with olive oil and white vinegar twice a month. This house would never fall into disarray like the one down the street, the one that Simon and I would dare one another to approach—the abandoned one with the peeled pink exterior and broken windows.

I whispered to the house, alone but content, watching life come and go through the neighborhood. Socially, I was a strange case, with a house as my best friend. I was barely school-age, and already a goth in spirit. I longed to be feared. I was still living by the cemetery when I decided I wanted tattoos and piercings after seeing a girl with jet-black, box-dyed hair and eyebrow rings dressed in black walking through the graves. Her fingernails were long and streaked. Her steel toe boots sat on a four-inch wedge. Her delicate fingers, shining with silver rings, ran along the headstones. She wore a dog collar, a leather strip viciously spiked. She looked like someone no one would like. I’d never seen anyone so beautiful in my life.

At school, my reputation as Ghost Girl grew. Classmates were intrigued. They’d see me drawing goth girls and spooky cryptids—three-headed beasts, ghouls, and vampires—in my notebooks all day, and sometimes I’d hear them talking about me.

One day, a kid at recess approached me nervously, like he’d been dared to. I thought he’d want to know about the ghosts, or make fun of my unibrow, or stand there frozen and then run away.

Instead, he asked me a question:

“Aren’t you the girl who was kidnapped?” I didn’t want to admit it. But I did.

He had a smile on his face, the glee of having discovered something taboo, unfamiliar, and, most incredibly, true. Then he added:

“By your father?”

I really did not want to admit this. But I did.

I was used to this question. Because it was true.

I didn’t know his first name, or where he lived, or where he’d lived with Mom, or why she’d loved him, or how she could. I didn’t know if I was a mistake, if she’d wanted me, or if she’d only wanted Simon and I’d been an unfortunate accident. I always felt like one. I didn’t know if I reminded Mom of him or if she saw his face in mine when she looked at me. I barely knew his face myself.

Mom grew up bookish and carefree, an artistic child who, like me, didn’t know her biological father. By her tweens, she was well-read in Shakespeare and Chaucer, which she preferred to boys and clothes, hair or makeup. She majored in English at Penn State and backpacked across Europe before deciding to pursue graphic design.

She was in her mid twenties when she met my father. They both lived in the same apartment complex. She worked in advertising, illustrating campaigns for airlines and fast-food chains, and he was a cabinet maker on a student visa from Iran for dentistry. He was only a few years out of compulsory military service.

It was 1987 and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s grim scowl was often on the 6 o’clock news. But my father was handsome and disarming. And persistent. He brought her flowers and called up to her on the second floor whenever he walked by. He had a nice smile and spoke broken English. He was handsome and well-liked. Until they knew him.

It’s hard to imagine now, but theirs was a swift romance. Mom, who hadn’t dated much in her twenties, was naive to his charms. They were engaged within a year, and he conceded to a marriage at an Episcopal church rather than a mosque. The reception was, by all accounts, awkward—on one side, rough and tumble Pennsylvania-Dutch and on the other, Tehran natives, many of whom could not speak English. She gave birth to Simon in 1989, then became pregnant again with me less than a year later.

The marriage quickly turned abusive. My father isolated Mom, for control. He refused to let her talk to her parents and intercepted mail from friends. Outsiders were a threat. He became physically abusive. Mom would call the police, but he would charm them too, warding off the authorities, always with a story about a hysterical and jealous wife who kept bothering the poor police, who surely had better things to do. But his abuse of Simon eventually brought Simon to the pediatrician, where he was diagnosed with “failure to thrive.” There, the doctor issued a stern warning to Mom and said he’d call Child Protective Services himself if she didn’t leave my father for good. She’d been plotting an escape in her mind for some time, but this pushed her into motion.

It was in the middle of the night when she quietly gathered up Simon and me, slipped out the door, got us into her gold Toyota Camry, and fled. She stopped at a gas station around the Mason-Dixon line and dialed home to tell her parents we were on the way. When Mom arrived, my grandmother later reported, she barely recognized her.

My grandfather was out of town when we arrived, so Grandma called the neighboring farmers to put them on alert. She thought my father was likely to follow. She was right. Later that night, one of the farmers called with the news that he’d spotted the bright lights of a car penetrating the elemental darkness of the Pennsylvania countryside. By the time my father arrived, he was greeted by a phalanx of farmers, shotguns in hand. While Mom huddled inside, my father growled and fumed and was eventually told by police to leave. He took the car, and we remained safe in Grandpa’s study, among the toys and books and trinkets that smelled like home.

Mom filed for divorce, and in the midst of the custody battle that had her driving back and forth from Bellefonte to Fairfax, Virginia for weekend visits, my father entered the Iranian Embassy in DC—cute baby photos in hand—asking that Simon and I be added to his passport. They obliged. Mom realized something was wrong when she called his house for three days and no one answered.

She knew where we’d gone—he’d threatened to take us to Iran many times before. She’d told the police about his threats to no avail. My father had instead convinced the judge to allow unsupervised visits, a testament to his charisma. And then, we were gone. It was August 12, 1991, my first birthday.

Mom—32 and penniless—began a letter-writing campaign, and placed posters she’d assembled by hand in local businesses urging people to call their representatives. They did. Mom petitioned her senators. Local news covered her plight. Somehow, she convinced the FBI—though she doesn’t remember how she got through the door of their Fairfax office—to create a case for us and assign an investigator. Sometimes my father called from Iran, offering to let her speak to us. Sometimes he asked for money. The FBI tapped Mom’s phones, but the calls couldn’t be traced.

After months, our kidnapping had become an international incident. There were negotiations with lawyers and government officials. Switzerland got involved. That’s how you know you have an international incident on your hands. My father actually despised Iran and probably didn’t really want to be a real parent, so he negotiated, using us as bargaining chips. Eventually, an agreement was reached, and we were returned on November 18, 1991. It was Thanksgiving Day. This is why my family always celebrates two Thanksgivings—the one on everyone else’s calendar, and another on the date of our return.

Astonishingly, the Iranian government granted the United States permission to extradite my father, as long as he was exempt from prosecution. An immunity deal. He returned to Virginia, where, after the six months he’d spent on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, my father’s record was cleared, and he walked free—and straight into a new custody battle with Mom.

He had no interest in winning. It was a battle of spite. En route to our heavily supervised visitations at the Centre County Children & Youth facility, we had a police escort. Our mother was not allowed to be present, so a social worker would accompany us as we were forced into a windowless room for our monthly, court-mandated hour with Mr. Z.

I didn’t know any of this, of course. Simon’s first memories are in Iran, but I was too little. I don’t remember my father from that time at all. All I knew was the mysterious entity Mom called Mr. Z., who I thought of as the Bogeyman. He was an intimidating, lingering presence in our lives, the thing that kept me awake at night, hiding under the covers. In his physical presence, I trembled, trapped in dread, turned in on myself. In his absence, I had nightmares about him.

Once, I’d had a string of dreams for months where I’d been buried alive, unable to speak, move, or see. I sensed darkness, muck, the writhing of earthworms. Like so many graves I’d walked above in the cemetery, I was in the ground. And I could hear him laughing. I woke to skulls dancing around my room. And the Bogeyman was there, amid them, dripping with wet mud and crawling bugs. And then he vanished, and everything was calm.

Sometimes, he would send us birthday cards, which Mom intercepted. During our visits, he always plied us with toys and sweets, which we knew to reject, because our mother made sure to remind us before going in that the Bogeyman was a liar.

It was during one of those strange moments, trapped with him, that I recognized my first lie. I was trying not to look at him and not eat the candy strewn about the floor, when Simon broke the silence, and looked up at him angrily. “You kidnapped us,” he said. I didn’t quite understand, but felt protected by Simon’s uncharacteristic display of fierceness, the most confrontational I’d ever seen him, before or since. The Bogeyman looked back at his children, incensed. “I did not kidnap you,” he said, forcing a smile and through gritted teeth.

“Your mother did.”

After the kidnapping, Mom was destitute. She’d left behind everything she had, and that wasn’t much to begin with. She took on substitute teaching, but that wasn’t enough. We had no furniture, and ate all our meals on the floor, a perpetual grim picnic. Our clothes were all donated. Our gifts were wrapped in newspaper, and our Halloween costumes were made of cardboard.

Eventually, Mom got sole custody of us. After the fact, Mom learned my father tried to hire someone to kidnap us again; a cousin of my father had called Grandpa to warn him, and he informed the judge. This is why our meetings were reduced to hourly supervised visits. For years, my father clung to some rough semblance of fatherhood, aware if he slipped up and failed to contact us for six months, Mom could petition to overturn his parental rights. He sent Simon and I birthday cards in the mail every year—though Mom intercepted them—and checked in for visitations occasionally, until the meet-ups grew further and further apart. Eventually, he stopped visiting and sending cards altogether, at which point Mom argued in court that his parental rights should finally be revoked. She won.

Though life became relatively normal Mom’s revolver was always nearby. And every time me or Simon moved schools, she’d turn up with a dossier on my father, a collection of clippings, court documents, and photos, explaining that a man named Naseem Z. may appear and claim custody of us, and if he did they were to act fast.

Sometimes Mom tried to pretend not to be scared by Mr. Z. anymore, but then I would wander over to the neighbor’s house to play with her Airedale terrier and eat freshly baked scones, and stroll back a half hour later to find Mom and Simon screaming my name from the porch. On this occasion, she was crying, and Mom does not cry. I hurried inside, shaken. As I went upstairs to my room, I felt the ancient, sturdy banister and admired the domed newels of the staircase. The sun scattered shapes on the stairs.

When I felt unsteady, I would sit quietly in my room and listen for my ghosts. They were always there for me. And I for them. I loved their murmurs, whispers in solidarity. After all, the true threat was the real world out there, not the spectral bustle inside. Downstairs, as Mom recovered, I pressed my ear to the walls, calming myself in the hush of my beloved haunted house.

Eventually, we moved. Mom’s new husband Tom got a better paying job in Texas, and so we left our Victorian house. It had been years since Simon and I had our murky encounters with Mr. Z. And we’d long since known that he was the Bogeyman, and the Bogeyman was our father. But now, any rustling we heard outside in the night was just the stray cats we fed on the back porch. No axes came through the door. The Bogeyman never made it inside the house. I mourned the loss of the Victorian house, and its vigilant ghosts, the only thing that made me feel safe, and special. The day we left Bellefonte, I put my hand to the house’s old damask wallpaper and promised one day I’d be back.

In our new life, I felt uprooted, unnerved. We landed in a new and decidedly un-haunted home in the Dallas suburbs. The place I’d grown up was a tiny, beguiling town, with history, rimmed with stone architecture and mossy mountains. We moved into a flat, sterile landscape, the fastest growing municipality in the country, an array of prefabricated chain stores dropped into the dusty plains. I’d been frolicking through a century-old house filled with friendly ghosts, and our new house in Dallas was a charmless box. We were no longer a short drive to Grandparents; they were now a plane ride away. I mourned the place we’d left behind. I was 10 and it felt like I had gone to another planet.

Not long after that, my grandfather was diagnosed with stage four cancer. He was just 60. I felt like we were being punished for leaving the Victorian house behind; no longer safeguarded, we were exposed.

By the time we flew back to Pennsylvania to see my grandfather, he was withered and frail. He looked so small and bony in his new body, his skin jaundiced to such a yellow that I was afraid he might stain the white hospital linens. He was cursing a lot, and it was kind of fun to hear a pastor curse. Shit, fuck, damn! Grandma didn’t want to leave his side. She always smelled wonderful, like her handmade soaps of lavender and lye, but now she looked exhausted, her thick, gray hair pulled up in a lazy ponytail. Mom kept pushing her out of the hospital and into the car, back to the farm: “You need to eat, mom.” Grandpa wants to eat, but can’t. Solid foods were off the menu. “All this jello,” he scoffed. “So much fucking jello.”

By this point, I didn’t even know what my father looked like. This was part of the fear. I was at new schools, where no one knew our small-town lore. Would I recognize him if he approached me? Would I be an easy mark? Would I not see him coming? Or worse, would I see him at last and realize that he looked just like me?

I quickly re-established my Ghost Girl reputation in middle school. I hadn’t seen a ghost in a while, which was distressing—I was worried I’d lost my power—but I thought about them all the time. I wanted to seek them out, so I decided my career goal was to be a paranormal investigator. For a school project, I presented an enormous research report on the supernatural—intelligent hauntings, residual hauntings, ghost photos, orbs, wisps, spiritualism of the late 1800s, infamous debunkings—and explained my professional aspirations to bemused classmates. I carried around a camera, hoping to glimpse unearthly beings in my photos.

Among the kids, I was popular. I didn’t fit in anywhere exactly, which allowed me to sort of fit in everywhere. I floated between the popular kids, was the only student staffed at both the school paper and yearbook, hung out with a group of mostly skaters outside of school, and had a permanent seat at the alt-kid lunch table, where corpse-painted goths, spikey punks, furries, scene kids, and fluorescent ravers coalesced at the only outdoor picnic bench.

In each group, I was the weird one. I was accepted, but still felt like an outsider. I wasn’t white, for starters. I didn’t look like the other kids. But I dressed like them. My goth style was still unrealized; I couldn’t buy my own clothes, so I dressed in whatever Mom bought, and she bought what the other kids had, so I wore high Y2k tween style: hoop earrings, miniskirts, tiny necklaces adorned with silver bows. Besides, you couldn’t quite go full goth anymore, because even in the alt world it wasn’t quite cool. The skater boys wouldn’t go for it—a key consideration for me. I looked like everyone else, but talked nonstop about my macabre interests, which they all thought were cute.

They didn’t understand how deep it ran. I became obsessed with death, the grotesque, black magic rituals, and cults. I scoured the Internet for tattoos I’d get someday, and shoplifted books about serial killers. I’d visit websites with infinite scrolls of crime scene photos, or step-by-step instructions on how to conjure—or exorcize—demons. I got my hands on a Ouija board so I could communicate with the dead. In particular, I wanted to talk to River Phoenix, my dearly departed crush, for whom I had built a shrine in my bedroom.

Growing up with a theologian for a grandpa presented challenges. I believed in ghosts, but I couldn’t wrap my brain around a man in the sky demanding to be worshiped. Even for me, a believer in leprechauns, the concept of God felt so silly.

When my grandfather got sick, that spiritual confusion turned to anger. My grandfather was my first real father, the man who raised me and showed me that men could be kind and good-hearted, and here he was in a hospital bed, fading away, his eyes receding into their sockets, his body wilted to half its size. Meanwhile, my actual father was free to roam the earth, tormenting women and children for fun.

I will never understand how a presence so big could be taken so quickly. Grandpa was the adhesive that held our family together, the central dependable force. He was a farmer, a carpenter, a musician, a theologian, a doctor of psychology, and an ordained Lutheran minister. And then one night, Mom brought me and Simon into the family room to tell us he was gone.

At my grandfather’s funeral, I tried to hold it together. Images of us flashed through my mind: the sound of his voice reading bedtime stories, and scripture; eating strawberry ice cream holding hands; his hands full of tadpoles in the farm’s stream; his honking sneeze, and the hanky in his back pocket; the sound of his piano echoing through the house.

After the funeral, I told Mom I didn’t believe in God. She said, “Well, then you can’t believe in ghosts either.” A conundrum. Maybe so, I thought.

One night three months later, I felt a hug from above and an affectionate whisper, “I love you, sweetie.” It was indisputably Grandpa’s voice. I was wide awake, laying in bed listening to music. The moment the words entered my ears and I felt him, he was gone. Startled but unafraid, I lay almost paralyzed by surprise, then ran to wake up my parents, who sleepily shared in my delight. It felt like a kindness from beyond the grave and a reminder that maybe my powers hadn’t disappeared—but for the first time ever, I doubted myself. Wrecked with grief, I lacked my previous confidence as Ghost Girl. I flirted with nihilism. Maybe there’s nothing to believe in. With my grandfather gone, I thought, it was easy to think that we’re all just alone.

That’s when the sleep paralysis started.

It happened every night as I was falling asleep: I couldn’t move. I’d try to wiggle a toe, any toe, move a finger, try to break free. But I was trapped. My eyes were closed but I could see the room and myself, as if viewing my own body. I’d see the bed levitate. I’d hear someone whispering: Helen . Shadows danced around me in the darkness, claws gripped my comforter and yanked it from me. I’d see myself escape the clutches of these claws, gasping for breath, checking my pulse to make sure I wasn’t dead. Gathering my comforter back around me, I’d lay in the dark, praying it would cease. But it would go on like this, until my body collapsed from exhaustion. I’d wake up shocked that I’d slept at all.

Sleep terror is a physiological phenomenon, and always harrowing, but mine was chronic and hallucinatory. It felt paranormal. I rarely slept. I saw people hanging from the ceiling fan, mutilated bodies on the floor. I told my parents—by now, Tom was easing into “Dad,” and they were together becoming my “parents”—and they took me to a series of baffled doctors.

I was so afraid of going to sleep I’d try to stay up all night on the phone with friends, like the kids in Nightmare on Elm Street . The doctors evaluated me for conditions like schizophrenia and narcolepsy, all negative. I was prescribed antidepressants, benzodiazepines, mood stabilizers, and muscle relaxers. Nothing worked.

The doctors either believed I had some mystery disorder immune to medication or thought I was making it up for attention, something they’d hint at once Mom left the exam room. I read later that the reason victims of sleep paralysis see shadow people, hear screams, and feel pain is the flood of serotonin, which creates hallucinations by activating panic in the brain. But I figured I was possessed. Maybe it was all my dabbling with spells or the time I spent browsing demon conjuring tutorials in online paranormal forums.

“I think I need an exorcism,” I told Mom one morning. She was amused. I was serious. For a year, I’d repeat Hail Marys to myself in the dark. We weren’t catholic, but I’d read that demons were afraid of Hail Marys. The prayers never worked. If God was real, he wasn’t listening. More proof.

My parents were at the top of the stairs, discussing something serious. Simon and I quietly listened, always wondering if we were in danger. My parents believed someone was trying to find us and were considering hiring a private investigator. Even after moving across the country, and then several times more, the fear followed us.

By now, Simon had his driver’s license, and when he drove us to school, he was always looking in the rearview window, suspicious that we were being followed. Every car that got too close must be tailing us. Simon drove as if in evasive maneuvers. When he ran a red light accidentally, it felt strangely exciting, like we were bank robbers.

I was now a teenager, and embracing my full fashion destiny: a mullet of black, box-dyed hair with streaks of pink and purple, a Trainspotting t-shirt, Union Jack Doc Martens, FCUK skinny jeans I’d bought overseas. As with many teenage aesthetics, mine was composed of various finely graded sub-specialties: ’77 punk, post-punk, hardcore, with a touch of scene. Even still, I couldn’t shake the preppies. In my junior year, my outré style got me voted Best Dressed Senior. I remained popular.

I rebelled. I detested authority, turning into a smartass who harassed teachers, stole and destroyed school property with abandon, and spent a lot of time in ISS. I developed a new persona as a boy-crazy shock jock with abrasive style and a vulgar personality. It drove Mom crazy.

The envelope came in the mail, addressed to Simon. Inside was a check, signed by the same hand, for $1,000. “For your birthday,” the card read. He’d found us.

It had been years. The shadow fell over us again. As we’d feared. Maybe it was inevitable. “It means he has our address,” Mom said. At first, my teenage instinct was glib. “Just cash it!” I said. “Free money!” Simon giggled. I mean, neither of us had ever seen that amount of money before. “No!” Mom hissed. “If you accept anything from someone like him, you will never, ever be free.”

Simon tore up the check.

Simon and I were less than a year apart, but we were not close. Once we outgrew our Beanie Babies, and playing video games together, we rarely spoke. At school, we were grouped together as the “kidnapped children,” and we resented it. We knew things about each other we couldn’t speak of, and the result was that we never talked at all. But now our father had reared his head. We were reunited in our fear and hatred of him.

“He probably hired someone to find us,” Simon said. I thought of my father marauding out there, hunting methodically, closing in. After the check showed up, my parents got a new alarm system, bought more guns, and alerted the police. When Simon would drive us to school, we were both skittish, turning our heads at any sounds, and talking about what we’d do if our car was suddenly boxed in by a Bogeyman ambush. Would he shoot us? Seemed unlikely. Would he try to abduct us again? We were too big. “One thing’s for sure,” Simon said. “It would be a really stupid reason to drive all the way to Texas.”

A few weeks later, I was on MySpace, seeking out fellow serial killer enthusiasts and coveting the tattoos of Suicide Girls with long, racoon-tailed hair whose profiles were full of animated flames and skulls, when there was a surprise message in my inbox. “Dear Helen, my beautiful child,” it began. My heart sank. I tried not to read it, as if the words were a dark spell to avoid. It was long. The sender’s name was Naseem Z.

No longer confined to my parents’ computer room for online exploits, Simon and I both had our own desktops, situated across from each other. Simon was behind me, puppeteering a Level 70 Paladin in World of Warcraft, his chief interest in life. I flicked the back of his skull. “I can’t talk,” he said. “Check MySpace,” I said. It was an odd request. We weren’t even friends on MySpace. He paused WoW, and logged in, and there it was, a message from Naseem Z. to “my beautiful child.” Simon froze. “Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” Simon said. “Just delete it.”

This was typical in our family, where we were taught to cope with feelings on our own, even the everlasting dread of our father. Maybe this was meant as protection, to act like that was all in the past in the hopes that it was. But it wasn’t. Emotionally, I was left to my own devices, which were my aesthetic armor, ghoulish obsessions, and sarcastic wit. But these were defense mechanisms, not therapy. And it felt like a shocking incursion, a deep strike at our hearts, to find his name there, in our inboxes, in our computers, in our bedrooms, alongside our adolescent explorations and chatter with friends. We deleted the messages without reading them and hoped that would be the end of it.

There were no new messages on MySpace, but some time later, my parents received a summons. “He’s suing them for ‘hiding us,’” Simon explained, incredulous. “As if they are blocking him from knowing us.” We eavesdropped on more consternation from my parents at the top of the stairs. Whispers about lawyers, more courtroom appearances. Would we ever be rid of him? One day, at dinner, Mom handed Simon and I each a document.

“What is this?” I asked.

“It says we are not hiding you from your father. It says that you don’t want to see him.”

“Is this because of the lawsuit?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s a testimony to the court. Read it and sign if you agree.”

We didn’t need to read it. Simon started rummaging through the junk drawer for a pen. I held the document. There had already been many proceedings, custody awards, successful adjudications in Mom’s legal battles with him. But that was in her name and these documents were meant to be our own testaments, our first opportunity to put up a fight ourselves.

Not long before this, I’d found a folded piece of paper in an old recipe collection Grandma sent Mom. It was a family tree, dated back to the 19th century, and the first name I recognized on it was my great grandmother’s: Helen Vogelsong. I’d always thought that this was also my name. But what I saw instead was Simon and Helen Z., Children of Laura and Naseem. My stomach dropped at the strange discovery.

Growing up, I had loved calling myself Helen Vogelsong the Second—the fanciful sound of it, the delightful generational echo—but there, on the yellowing paper, was my real birthname, and within that name was inscribed the horror of our lives in black and white. Now, I was holding a new document. And my own pen. I could correct the error in that old family tree. Around the dinner table was my new family, Simon and me, the children of Laura and Tom, whose legal name I’d been given years before. “I’m sorry,” Mom said, looking at us with a distress that implied she always would be. There was nothing to be sorry for.

Simon handed me the pen, and I signed: HELEN DONAHUE.

I was 22 and had finally transformed completely into the girl I’d seen in the graveyard all those years ago, down to the leather o-ring choker. The latest ink scrawl on my ribcage read Fuck Forever . There had been no word from Mr. Z. for years, not since he’d sued my parents back in 2006.

Until he found my Facebook and saw my appearance: the tattoos, the black hair, that choker strapped around my neck like a dog collar. “You have let our daughter become a whore,” he wrote in a vicious letter to Mom. He attacked her for letting me run around Brooklyn covered in tattoos: “How could you let this happen?” He said I would burn in hell, compared my life to the perversions that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

At first, his reappearance after a half decade sent me into a tailspin: What if he has my address and shows up? After all, I was on my own. My parents couldn’t protect me every day; Simon couldn’t sweep my apartment for bogeymen. But the vitriol in that letter was in fact the last time we heard from my father directly. He was apparently so repelled he never contacted me again. Ironically, the tattoos I wore like armor fulfilled their purpose. They scared off the Bogeyman for good.

That Christmas, at a family reunion, I told my grandmother how after Grandpa died, I used to poke around the Pennsylvania farm house, hoping to sneak up on his spirit playing piano or chopping wood. Whenever we talked about Grandpa, she listened like she was hearing a sermon. “He visited me once,” she said, her hands gently folded. “I wanted to go with him, desperately. But he wouldn’t let me.” I told her I had never found Grandpa at the farm, but he had come to me once in my bedroom. It was a few months after he died. Grandma got misty-eyed. “He was your first father,” she said. “I know,” I said. And then I was crying. “There’s no guidebook for how to raise kidnapped kids.”

Mom had also encountered Grandpa, in her case in a dream. I was 15, and he told her that I would experience several years of suffering—which I did —but that I would be ok. And now we could talk about it, three generations of women all protected by the same ghost.

On a trip back to Pennsylvania, Simon and I visited our old houses. We drove Grandma’s car to our first house, the one across from the jail, the one where our mother locked up every night against the Bogeyman and Thomas came out in the rain. We checked out the cemetery where we used to take walks. I imagined the scene narrated by David Attenborough: see the adult siblings as they now walk across the graves they once pirouetted over with abandon. Children no longer, they are forced at this moment to reconcile with their traumatic past. I couldn’t believe we used to live here.

We went to the Victorian house, where on the porch there was a multi-colored chalk sign in child-like chicken scratch that said: STAY HOME! STAY SAFE! The paint was chipped; the pond we’d dug as kids was filled in. The yard was overrun with weeds. Easter decorations adorned the door. It was autumn. Here I was, visiting the house as an old friend… In the end, it turned out OK to be old friends.

I had done some research and discovered that the Victorian was once called the Hayes-Hicks House. It was purchased in 1875 by a prominent Irish doctor who lived and worked there. He had written a book, a medical reference he used in his downstairs practice. Simon and I figured this must have been the book our ghostly gentleman was asking for. Where’s the book? 

The gingerbread trim was gone from the dormers. I peered inside. I could see doilies, antiques, and ceramics, the kind elderly people collect. We knocked. No one, dead or alive, was home.

The last thing any of us heard about my father was in 2016, when I got a frantic message from a woman on Facebook. She wanted to know why Mom had left my father. She’d been told he was rejected because he was Iranian, that we had mistreated him. She said she had less than 12 hours to get the truth: he was in jail overnight for beating up her teenage daughter and would be released in the morning. Wary of any contact relating to my father, I asked her for proof. She sent over the police records from earlier that day. She also said he’d been threatening to kidnap their two children: two twin boys, not much older than Simon and I when we were taken. I told her the truth. I told her to run.

I realized then why we hadn’t heard from Mr. Z in years. The Bogeyman had moved on to another family. He was haunting someone else.

I used to wonder about the nature of ghosts—spiritual remnant or self-deception?—now I think more about the nature of ghost stories. Whether the supernatural is real or not, ghost stories have always been with us. They clearly serve a purpose. Ghosts float through folklore, and rattle chains throughout literature. There are spirits in the bible, Torah, and Quran. From Gilgamesh to Goosebumps, ghosts make their appearances. Sometimes they carry a message. Sometimes they are the message. But the ghost story is always meant to tell us something about ourselves.

These stories have many tropes. Mine starts with one: troubled family moves into new house which turns out to be full of ghosts. That usually means the family, terrorized, either fights the evil forces, or flees, led by the heroic patriarch. But for me, the ghosts were a comfort, and the evil was my father.

Everyone has a ghost story of some kind. Real or metaphorical. If you’re not haunted by ghosts, you’re haunted by lost family, lost love, broken friendships, tragedy, disaster, regret. For me, it’s all of the above. In my ghost story, the material world was the scene of my dread, and the paranormal world offered protection. I learned that the Bogeyman is real. And yet, I survived.

Who are your ghosts?

You are someone’s ghost too, you know.

_____________________________

This essay was originally commissioned by Epic Magazine ; with editing contributions from Joshuah Bearman and Gina Mei.

Helen Vogelsong-Donahue

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