50 Of The Most Ridiculous Things Ever Done Out Of Spite

It’s a strange fact that two of the world’s most famous sneaker manufacturers had their origins in one small German town, Herzogenaurach. Not only that, but Adidas and Puma were run by two brothers, Rudolf and Adolf Dassler. The pair had started out working together but then had a major falling-out in 1948 and went their separate ways. The feud continued even after death, with the two brothers being buried as far apart as possible in the local churchyard.

A son should always respect his mother. Right? Well, it seems that nobody had revealed that moral imperative to Thomas McCobb of Phippsburg, Maine, back in 1806. He believed that his mom, in league with a step-brother, was out to swindle him out of his rightful inheritance. They bought a fancy house in the city. But to spite them McCobb retaliated by building an even grander mansion nearby.

Dave Carroll played guitar with Canadian folk-rock band Sons of Maxwell. And something happened in 2008 that really got his goat. While he was on tour, clumsy United Airlines baggage handlers broke his cherished instrument. Carroll wasn’t a man to take this lying down. He recorded three songs under the title “United Breaks Guitars.” Then he put them on YouTube where they got 4 million views in under four weeks.

In 1993 the massively successful musician Prince decided that he was no longer, well, Prince. Instead, he would be known by a symbol which wasn’t even a word. It was a stylized mixture of the biological signs for male and female. His reason? The performer was furious with limits on releasing material that his record company tried to impose on him. So he wrongfooted Warner Bros. by simply refusing to be the same person any more.

When in 2016 renowned British artist Anish Kapoor gained exclusive rights to Vantablack — said to be the blackest black pigment ever created — fellow artist Stuart Semple was not pleased. So he perfected what was claimed to be the pinkest pink ever seen. Anyone could buy this — except Kapoor. Semple went further, creating Black 3.0. Again, Semple announced that anyone could purchase it. As long as they weren’t called Anish Kapoor.

St. Mary’s Church in the north-eastern English village of Gainford has a 40-foot column looming over it. It’s a memorial to a local worthy called Thomas Edleston, who once served as its vicar. It’s also a symbol of the pique felt by the Edleston family when the church refused their request for a memorial to the man of cloth in the St. Mary’s graveyard. The enraged family erected the column hard against the cemetery wall on their own land simply to annoy the parishioners.

Marino Crescent in Dublin, Ireland, is a handsome Georgian terrace built in the late 18th century. But before the houses were constructed, Lord Charlemont was happily ensconced in his grand mansion Marino House, which had pleasing sea vistas. But, infuriatingly, the new three-story terrace blocked his views. This was apparently a deliberate act by the developer Charlie Ffolliott. Charlemont had made life as difficult as he could for the builder, so Ffolliott responded by blocking his views.

Back in 2003 a Michigan man called Alan Ralsky earned the title of “Spam King.” This was back in the early days of the internet and Ralsky was sending millions of spam mails every day. But some angry recipients tracked down his home address. They signed him up for multiple junk mail offerings — physically delivered to his mailbox. Hundreds of pounds of junk began arriving for him every day. Sweet and richly deserved vengeance.

In 1900 Thomas Cobden-Sanderson and Emery Walker set up the Doves Press in a fine house by the banks of the River Thames in London’s Borough of Hammersmith. It printed beautiful books using a unique typeface. But the partnership between Cobden-Sanderson and Walker hit the rocks amid disagreements about money. Cobden-Sanderson became so embittered that under cover of darkness he made several trips to throw all the unique metal letters — over a ton of them — off Hammersmith Bridge into the Thames.

In 1878 railroad tycoon Charles Crocker bought a lot on San Francisco’s Nob Hill planning to build an impressive mansion. He was determined to get rid of the modest home of one Nicholas Yung, annoyingly set at the corner of Crocker’s property. But Yung, an undertaker, would not be bought out from his house with its spectacular views across San Francisco Bay. So Crocker erected a 40-foot fence, completely blocking Yung’s views and much of his light.

The eagle-eyed will spot a tiny triangle measuring just 25 by 27 inches on a sidewalk in New York City’s Greenwich Village. This strange artifact dates back to when a new subway line was being hammered through the Village. Some 250 homes were earmarked for demolition, including a house called the Voorhis. The owners fought City Hall over the demolition order, but lost. Yet an apparent error in measurements meant that a tiny patch of land still belonged to the Voorhis owners. And that’s what’s covered by the triangle.

The German city of Bonn sits on the Rhine, and the waterway is crossed there by the Kennedy Bridge. The road above leads to Beuel, but it seems that the good folks of that town weren’t always on the best of terms with the residents of Bonn. There had been arguments about the funding of an earlier bridge in the 19th century, and the Bonn citizens apparently still remembered this spat when Kennedy Bridge was built in the 1940s. So a statue of a man mooning Beuel was added to the new bridge!

Think about a Ford and you’ll likely imagine a conservative family car. A Ferrari, on the other hand, conjures up images of a roaring, high-performance beast. But in the 1960s Henry Ford II decided that his company should match Ferrari. Ford’s first notion was to buy a majority share in the Italian company. There were negotiations, but Ferrari pulled out. Jilted, Ford was furious. So he decided to go head-to-head with the Italians. Thus was born the Ford GT40 which went on to beat Ferrari in the classic Le Mans race in 1966.

Robert Ansell liked to bring Christmas cheer to his neighbors in Ross Township, Pennsylvania. He did this by putting on a spectacular show of brightly lit models and seasonal motifs in his front yard. But in 2005 some local residents complained about extra traffic attracted by the spectacle. More than a little annoyed by the complaints, Ansell modified his display. Now Santa was relieving himself in front of a large sign enlivened by a reference to Ross Township that included a choice obscenity. That showed them!

Although the Astors had truckloads of money, it seems that familial goodwill was in rather short supply. This was exemplified by the ill-will between two cousins, John Jacob Astor IV and William Waldorf Astor. In an act calculated to infuriate John, in 1893 William demolished his massive mansion in Manhattan and replaced it with the even-larger Waldorf Hotel, featuring no fewer than 13 floors. John retaliated by razing his own nearby home and building the Astoria Hotel. It had 17 stories.

By all accounts, Robert Rochfort, who lived at Belvedere House in Ireland’s Westmeath in the 18th century, was not a pleasant man. And he surely cemented that reputation when he built a structure that came to be known as “The Jealous Wall.” This three-story tall Gothic monstrosity was strategically placed so that Robert would be shielded from sight of his brother George’s neighboring mansion Tudenham Park. Complicated family affairs had irreconcilably alienated the siblings.

Back in 2008 a man called Rhett Davis, a resident of Hooper, Utah, fell out with his neighbor who complained about dirt and flies. But the dispute had some unexpected consequences. Davis decided to isolate himself from his neighbor by building a fence between the two properties. Not necessarily that spiteful. But he chose to construct the barrier with three wrecked autos jammed nose-first into the earth. Hooper had a name for his bizarre fence — Redneck Stonehenge.

It seems that the splendidly named Zipporah Lisle-Mainwaring likes to get her own way. So when her neighbors opposed her development plans for a house she owned in the wealthy district of Kensington in London, England, she had a trick up her sleeve. In a painful clash with the discreetly conservative décor of her neighborhood, she painted her property with gaudy red-and-white candy stripes.

It’s fair to say that Luo Baogen has a stubborn streak in his nature. He came to international attention in 2012 when images of his lone home in the middle of a broad new highway went viral. The 67-year-old farmer of Wenling in Zhejiang Province, China got into a dispute with his local town hall about compensation for his home. Eventually, he relented — but not without a handsome financial incentive.

There’s a strangely isolated home in Newbury, Massachusetts, that goes by the name of The Pink House. It dates back to 1925 and was the product of an acrimonious divorce. The wife demanded that her husband build a replica of the marital home for her. But she didn’t say where it should be. So the bitter husband built her the pink abode in the most desolate spot he could find, right in the middle of a salt marsh.

There’s one monument in New Orleans’ Metairie Cemetery that soars above any other. It’s the Moriarty Monument, an 80-foot tall column topped by a cross. It was erected by Daniel A. Moriarty, who’d arrived in New Orleans as a penniless immigrant from Ireland. He became a prosperous citizen but was always regarded as an outsider by the city’s great and good, something he bitterly resented. So to get one up on the New Orleans blue bloods, he built this towering monument to commemorate his wife Mary.

By common consent, one of the greatest songwriting duos ever was the partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. But the two Beatles did not always enjoy a harmonious relationship: in fact, in later years they exchanged bitter words. Lennon went as far as to commit his vitriol to song in the shape of “How Do You Sleep?” The lyrics included the withering line, “The sound you make is muzak to my ears.”

This story of spite takes us back to classical antiquity. In the year 480 B.C. Persian leader Xerxes was in the process of invading Greece. To do this he needed to cross a narrow stretch of sea, the Hellespont — now called the Dardanelles — so he built a couple of bridges. Then a storm blew up and swept the crossings away. An enraged Xerxes beheaded his engineers, but he didn’t stop there: he also punished the uncooperative sea by lashing it 300 times with a whip.

Lord Byron attended Trinity College, Cambridge, before he found fame as a poet in the 19th century. But he was intensely annoyed by a college regulation — no dogs were allowed in lodgings. Okay, no dogs. However, there was nothing in the rules about bears. So he went out and bought himself one and kept the animal in his rooms at Trinity.

When Viking invaders arrived at the monastery of Coldingham on the North Sea coast of southern Scotland in 867, a shocking spectacle awaited them. Determined to preserve their sacred chastity, the nuns had cut off their noses so that the attackers would be repelled by their appearance. Infuriated by this show of resistance, the Vikings torched the monastery with the nuns inside.

The well-named Skinny House is sandwiched between two properties in the North End district of Boston, Massachusetts, at 44, Hull Street. Its four stories are just 10 feet wide and 30 feet deep. The eccentric home is said to be the result of a family feud. One sibling returned from the Civil War to find his brother had built a capacious home on jointly owned land. So he built the Skinny House to block his relative’s views.

Carbisdale Castle, a.k.a. The Castle of Spite, was built in 1905 in the Scottish Highlands for the Duchess of Sutherland. When her husband the 3rd Duke died, his family contested the terms of his will. They’d never approved of the Duchess and wanted to limit her inheritance. A compromise was reached: the Sutherlands would build a castle for the widow, but it had to be outside their lands. She chose to build it on a nearby hill where it was clearly visible to the embittered family — not what they’d had in mind.

Built in the Argentinean city of Buenos Aires in the 1930s, the Kavanagh Building’s 33 stories combine modernist and art deco styles. But it’s more than a stunning example of retro architecture — it’s a tower with a story. Corina Kavanagh was wealthy, but not a scion of Argentina’s upper class. She fell in love with Mercedes Castellanos de Anchorena, but his blue-blood family nixed their relationship. So she built the Kavanagh Tower, which blocked the aristocratic family’s view of their own mausoleum. Nasty.

An unassuming brick tenement house once sat in New York City’s midtown Manhattan. But there was something very strange about this property: its dimensions. With a street frontage of 104 feet, the building had a depth of just 5 feet. One Joseph Richardson threw up the bizarre building in the late 19th century after a dispute with a property developer. The developer wanted Richardson’s strip of land, but the two parties couldn’t agree a price. So Richardson built his tenement hard against the developer’s property, entirely blocking its light.

In the late 19th century Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie had at least two things in common: they were both extremely successful and fabulously rich. Indeed, the two men had worked together for a time, building their highly lucrative steel business. Then it all went wrong between them with an irreconcilable split and a bitter lawsuit. But in 1919 Carnegie was very ill and wanted to make peace. He sent Frick a note asking for a meeting. Frick’s response? He said “Tell him I'll see him in Hell, where we both are going.”

Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein reserved a special kind of hatred for his enemy President George H.W. Bush. Hardly surprising, since forces led by America had trounced Saddam’s army in the First Gulf War of 1991. Saddam took his revenge on Bush with a mosaic. A portrait of Bush was laid out on the lobby floor of the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad. This meant, naturally, that everyone entering the building had to walk across President Bush’s face.

This story unfolds in Cambridge, Massachusetts, back in the early part of the 20th century. One Francis O’Reilly owned a diminutive strip of land in the city. He wanted to sell it to one of his neighbors, but he wouldn’t play ball. So in a fit of spite O’Reilly built a tiny little house — just to fill the space and annoy the neighbor.

In 1963 Ferruccio Lamborghini, whose company built tractors, had a Ferrari sports car. But he wasn’t happy because the expensive auto kept breaking down. He complained directly to Enzo Ferrari, whose response was less than friendly. Legend has it that he said, “Let me make cars. You stick to making tractors.” Lamborghini’s reaction? He, too, began to build high-performance cars, sparking years of bitter rivalry.

This wafer-thin house was built in the Lebanese city of Beirut in 1954. With good reason, it’s known as The Grudge House. The abode was built because two brothers fell out over land they’d inherited. The wedge-shaped property is 13 feet deep at its widest and just 2 feet at its narrowest. It overlooks the sea, which means the house right behind has its views entirely obscured. You’ve guessed it: one brother owned the property to the rear and the second built The Grudge House to annoy him.

The Collinsville Historic District is a neighborhood of pretty, 19th-century clapperboard homes in Canton, Connecticut. It wasn’t always as peaceful as tourists find it today, though. Back in the 1800s an angry butcher lived on the district’s River Street. He’d fallen out with one of his neighbors and specially built a thin house simply to act as a wall between him and the offending party. Later, apparently seeing sense, the butcher’s son demolished the offending property.

A certain John Hollensbury owned an elegant house built in 1830 on Queen Street in the Virginian city of Alexandria. But there was a fly in the ointment: Hollensbury’s home had an alleyway that ran up the side of the property. Worse, the good citizens of Alexandria could not be persuaded to stop using it as a thoroughfare, often driving their carriages along it. But Hollensbury had the solution. He built a house right in the alley. At 7 feet across, it was just wide enough to block the passage entirely. 

Captain Avery Brown built his graceful home in the Cape Cod style in 1812 in Mystic, Connecticut. Then he had the misfortune to have a man called John Fellowes buy the plot adjacent to his home. It seems that Fellowes was not a pleasant man. Local lore has it that he built his Greek Revival mansion with the express intent of blocking Captain Brown’s sea views. There’s spite for you.

You can still find the Sam Kee Building on West Pender Street in the Canadian city of Vancouver today. Chang Toy built this bizarrely narrow structure, with a ground floor about 5 feet deep, in 1913 after he’d fallen out with local officials. He had bought a plot in 1903 but city hall took a substantial section from him to widen West Pender Street. That left Chang Toy with just a strip of land, so he demanded compensation. When that was not forthcoming, the enraged businessman went ahead and built anyway.

In the 19th century, the lands of Bosnia and Herzegovina were ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The imperial rulers started a major building program in the city of Sarajevo, and one of the projects was the construction of a city hall. That required the destruction of many homes, but the builders hadn’t reckoned with one local called Benderija. Refusing to move, legend has it that he was eventually bought off with a pouch stuffed with gold coins. Plus, the authorities agreed to take down his home and rebuild it precisely as it had originally been at an alternative site.

The Miracle House in Freeport, New York, was built in a single day in 1902. It was thrown up by builders working for John Randall. His haste was explained by his opposition to plans by city hall to build an extension to a street which would have brought it right in front of his land. Randall maintained that this would devalue his property. He thwarted their intentions by building a house on a triangular-shaped plot, right in the way of the proposed development.

There was nothing personal with this narrow spite house; just a need to keep people at bay. The original home owner of one of the adjacent homes was tired of strangers invading the alleyway, which was a part of his property, so he took the extreme of building walls to block the way for those pesky pedestrians.

Before the house was built, this tiny plot of land was scoffed at by the other neighbors. Only one man, Newton Rummonds, believed in the 10-foot wide plot, and, wagering his $100 debt, he bet that he could build a proper home. When the reveal of the beautiful little home came, the man not only had a fantastic home, but was debt free!

Seattle resident Edith Macfield truly knew how to stick it to the man, refusing to sell her small home despite pressure from developers and an entire city popping up around her. As the neighbors sold out to big industry developers, Edith said "I'm staying home." Today, the little home is surrounded by the big city, still threatened by developers.

Sometimes the backstory behind a spite house isn't completely known, or there are multiple sides to the story. Take this tiny shotgun house that looks too narrow for anyone to occupy. Some say it's the work of an angry divorcée; others say it came from quarreling neighbors. Either way, it recently sold for just shy of half a million dollars!

An iconic landmark in the small town, Adamsville, Rhode Island, still stands today, in spite of its awkward position. No one knows for sure the true reason for its construction, but ironically enough, the reason might not have been out of spite at all, but instead to acquire water from a terribly placed water well.

Steal a man's property and he'll make you pay, legally of course. After the city of Alameda, California, took a large portion of his open land to make a street in the late 1900s, Charles Froling built this home to both irritate the city and block the view of one neighbor who supported the construction. Nothing like neighbors becoming close!

Sometimes, spite can be used for good. This colorful home was the original owner's pride and joy, but not just because of what it stands for, but also where it stands. Protesting against homophobia, the rainbow-painted home was built across the street from the Westboro Baptist Church. Today, it's a center for anti-bullying initiatives.

You'd think with a name like the "cake house", there'd be a more wholesome story. The real, and terribly sad, story is that it was made in protest against state authorities, who took the home owner's foster grandchild in the 1960s.That might not be the full story though - the child is said to have been his. Why the “cake house” is still standing, we haven't the slightest idea.

Some spite houses are on another level. This lone home in China stood strong against developers' plans to build a parking lot, contributing to a steadily growing trend of homeowners going to crazy lengths to stay put.

This quite awkward looking Manhattan home was built on land belonging to the wife of an eccentric billionaire. When developers refused to pay more for the space, the billionaire swore to make a home that blocked the developers’ apartments. No more than five feet wide, the design managed to fit eight apartments comfortably.