“I’m standing here with a universal remote in my hand.” It was the voice of the owner of the house about twelve feet to my north—the north mobbing house, as I would come to call it. My fingers froze on the tuning dial of the receiver.

These were the earliest months of the mobbing, when the experience of finding the sounds of the neighbors’ voices on my devices and at my windows was its most compelling. These were the months when the phenomenon of being mobbed was unfamiliar and most likely to overwhelm me. It was during these months when by their voices, the mobbers—who sounded uncannily like my neighbors—made themselves known, declaring me to be the “Village Idiot” and using sound to send hoax after hoax my way.

Combining their proximity to the windows of my lakeside home with methods of accessing the speakers of the devices in my environment, these would-be “neighbors,” who would soon tell me they were “mobbing” me, made sound a platform for criminal harassment.

The “harassment tracks” that were put on my devices included no end of insults as well as threats, and as the months went by, increasing attempts to persuade me to relent and vacate my home. A keynote insult that the mobbers seemed to give special meaning was uttered again and again, day-in and day-out as the mobbing began and throughout at least the first year of the mobbing. I was the “Village Idiot.” The use of such an insult was curious to me, and not only because it is archaic. On at least one occasion before the street-side harassment escalated to the criminal, the nasty neighborhood watch lady of the northeast had stood in the middle of the street with her twenty-something tenant and a few of the tenant’s friends, and nastily asked her gaggle, “Don’t you think she’s the Village Idiot.” With the appropriate cattiness, the younger women agreed and the prattle continued on.

Every mob needs a “Village Idiot.” Perhaps this insult is the first stone cast by people of their ilk to run off those who stand outside their domain. Perhaps the thinking behind such tiresome and tawdry efforts is that their victims will be shamed by the low-brow opprobrium and cut-and-run, vacating their properties for the speculators who want them.

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In the months and years since the opening shots of the mobbing, having so far survived an onslaught of insults, threats and hoaxes, I’ve come to believe that the purpose of these utterances is terror. The mobbers seek to cleanly, silently and constructively evict a legal resident by terrorizing them out of their home in a clandestine manner.

This is a “white glove” crime, at least, that is the intention. Note that my use of the term “white glove” comes from another moment early in the mobbing, when the “mob” included the disapproving voice of an elderly woman who called me “slatternly” and warned that if I did not “get out,” I would soon be visited by a “white glove” inspection from the City.

The bullying and the terror of constant neighbor abuse is intensified and yet obscured by the abuse of civil process, including nuisance complaints and anti-harassment orders. Those who report the crime are punished by the mobbers’ coordinated complaints that they are in fact harassing the mobbers. Further, the illegal utterances of the mobbers are made secret by novel forms of sound conveyed by ventilation, radio transmissions, and directional speakers.

Only the victim is intended to hear the abuse. Neither written for others to read, nor said for others to hear, the incessant verbal abuse is intended to leave no trace, to be subject to no forensics.

The proximity from which the mobbers criminally harass is cloaked in the intimacy of neighbor relationships. Real estate mobbing as I have been mobbed in this house-flipping enclave where legal tenants are harassed and real estate replaces civic leadership, makes clear that the neighbor relationship is a privileged relationship in which proximity becomes our greatest vulnerability.

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The mobber’s threat of a universal remote control  might have just been that. It became one of many threats that led to me conclude that for criminals who would “mob” their neighbors out of their homes, the nature of the threat is less important than whether their victim believes it.

I remember my landlord once telling me that developers would “do anything.” With the same lack of discrimination, perhaps real estate mobbers will say anything. For them, there’s probably little difference—apart from what for them is probably the thrill of getting away with utterances that would land others in prison—between telling their victim, “I’m standing here with a universal remote in my hand,” or “There’s a bomb in your car,” or “We microwaved your head! Soon  you’re going to be dead!”

From the perspective of the mobbers whose threats are more a matter of style than content, the difference is semantic. The only utterance that matters is the one that brings the victim to her “friction point,” the one that induces the victim to leave her home.

Nevertheless, whenever they can elicit fear, suppress or provoke, the mobbers win. When I gave up the use of my own remote control and covered the infrared sensors on the television and the stereo with black duct tape, the victory went to the mobbers.

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One of the first times I met the owner of the north mobbing house, he commented that he hated seeing “that blue light” of the television illuminating the interior of house after house along the street. When I told him that I watched television, he slyly admitted that he’d seen that same blue light reflecting on my windows.

Accustomed to the careful maintenance of privacy in closer quarters, I noted the unusual interest of this trollish man, who would soon begin to openly trod on my rights and intrude on my every privacy. His was the voice I later heard say, “Don’t give her any quiet,” as I gardened in my front yard. And if I recall correctly, his was also the voice that later warned, “We’ve got every inch of your house mapped out in GPS coordinates.” This intrusion, among mounting intrusions and incursions, was emblematic of this man who would not be ignored, this man who has a taste for bullying.

This comment of his about the “blue light,” I would come to see as another opening shot of the mobbers of northeast Seattle to make me feel uneasy, not only in relationship to them, my new neighbors, but in my home, a house they sought to “turn over.” Like the cops the mobbers would later declare they were in nighttime harassment into my house, they played “good cop-bad cop” with the owner of the south mobbing house making nice with the renters down the street (whose lot he didn’t want) even as the nasty neighborhood lady who would soon share his snarky chum attorney as they tried to finish the job on me, began to go after the couple. I’ve noted this sort of divide-and-conquer strategy in the approach to property acquisition repeatedly in this neighborhood. Now, even as my own situation has entered the courtroom and I am assailed as “paranoid schizophrenic” by real estate bullies for attempting to report the criminal harassment, houses up and down the street continue to be flipped and an elderly man who cannot care for his own interests and lives in an old house just a few doors down from me is, I’m told, the latest target of a potential adverse possession lawsuit. The would-be petitioner is apparently a builder who last year or thereabouts, was sued by the City of Seattle for cutting into the foot of the hill and in so doing, into the properties of the home owners west and north. With the city street to the east, and with fights already on three fronts, there are no other borders across which the developer can dig in this manifest destiny and mission.

I have since wondered whether some builders assume that they can get away with more when they build next to a home that is not owner-occupied. Around the time the builder purchased the lot, the house that bounded the lot to the north was occupied by a couple who believed he supported their tenancy.

These dynamics, the dynamics of the neighborhood mobbing that has afflicted me in this northeast neighborhood that I’ve called “the street of dysfunction,” form the exoskeleton of the psychopathology that afflicts my neighborhood.

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This post is already long enough, and though it is more a prelude than a part, it does document some events that haven’t made it into other blog entries. I’ll dub it part 1 and publish it. As you can probably tell, I’m in some trouble here. I’d like to keep your interest.