Neighbor insists vibrations/noise are coming from my place
I (F26) live in a condo and my upstairs neighbor (female, probably in her 50s or 60s) has repeatedly complained about “constant vibrations” and noise supposedly coming from my unit. The problem is… there is no such thing that could be causing this.
The first time she approached me was shortly after I moved in (~3 years ago). She told me my TV was too loud past 10 PM on a Saturday and said she could feel vibrations in her wall. I was honestly shocked because I barely had anything set up yet, and I keep my soundbar at an extremely low volume. After that interaction, I basically tiptoed around my own condo for months because I didn’t want to come across as the inconsiderate new neighbor. This was also my first purchased home, so i was pretty sad that it felt like all my sounds were being closely monitored. Our walls/flooring are no where near paper thin or poor quality either and i have carpet floors, which i know helps with noise.
A few months later, she came down again while I had two of my girlfriends over. She complained, once again, about noise right around the time of our town quiet hours (10/11 PM on weekends). Since then, I haven’t really had people over because I didn’t want more issues or feel anxiety about simply laughing and watching a show with my friends.
Since then, she has also come down to tell me to stop slamming my door and i kindly told her it was the neighbor below me who is doing this (it's quite loud, but not often enough that i care).
Then this past January, she came down..holding our printed HOA rules...and told me she’d been hearing and feeling vibrations in her floor for months. She specifically said she thought it was "100% caused by my fans or an air purifier in my condo". Pretty specific thing to accuse someone of when she has no idea what i do and don't have in my place. She was decently polite, even though it was a strange interaction. I told her multiple times i had nothing running of this capacity to be causing such a disturbance. She mentioned it was “starting to drive her crazy.” I told her i had nothing running like this besides a fan at night and if this problem kept up, to come down and talk to me again. I even told her she could come in and see for herself, which she responded "I'm not doing that!", as if i was crazy for trying to show her I'm not the problem here. During this chat, she also brought up hearing drilling one week, which was true — my boyfriend had installed two light fixtures for me during the daytime. I believe she brought this up thinking that i'm a renter and i'm not allowed to be drilling in walls. What she doesn't know is that i own the place. I know from research online, that she is renting.
Fast forwarding to this month (May 2026), my boyfriend had already been living with me for almost a year, and we are genuinely very quiet people. We don’t host people/parties, don’t vacuum late at night or early morning, barely even use the TV, and we literally keep our microwave beeper turned off because we both hate unnecessary noise ourselves.
Things escalated recently this past week. She stopped my boyfriend outside while he was leaving for work. He simply said a friendly “hello” to her, and she immediately started yelling at him saying that we “need to turn our fans off” and that we were “violating the law by creating an unlivable environment for her." I overheard and saw the interaction from inside my condo on my ring camera and was honestly shocked by how aggressive it was, especially because this was basically the first time she had ever interacted with him. Just really gross entitlement behavior.
What’s confusing is that after her earlier complaints, I told her multiple times to please let me know if problems continued. I never heard from her again for months, so I assumed things were resolved. Then suddenly she’s acting like we’ve been continuously disrupting her life this entire time on purpose.
Meanwhile, over the past several months, I’ve regularly heard extremely loud banging or heavy objects being dropped from her unit, often in the exact same spot. I never complained because after our first few interactions, I just wanted to avoid conflict and contact with her. But after the way she spoke to my boyfriend, I’ve honestly started wondering whether some of it is intentional frustration being taken out on us.
Another factor is that she appears to almost never leave her condo. I mean maybe once every couple of weeks from what I’ve noticed. So part of me wonders whether she’s become hyper-aware of normal condo/building noises and vibrations (pipes, HVAC systems, neighboring units, structural sounds, etc.) because she’s home 24/7.
We recently spoke to a few other neighbors, and multiple people told us they’ve had negative interactions with her too, complaints about doors closing, carrying furniture upstairs, normal living noise, etc. So now I’m realizing what type of person this really is.
Since the incident with my boyfriend, we’ve tried knocking on her door twice to calmly talk things through, but she never answered. I ended up leaving her a polite note explaining that I have genuinely tried to respect her concerns, but there is truly nothing in my condo that should be causing ongoing vibrations like she describes. I also explained that I don’t want us living in a hostile environment where neighbors are yelling at each other. I told her she was welcome to reach out if she wanted to discuss things further, but I never heard back. I did see her taking out the trash the other day as i was getting out of my car, and once she saw me and my boyfriend, she just stopped in her tracks and starred at us. It genuinely creeped me out bad.
At this point, I’m considering contacting the HOA just to formally document everything and ask whether there could be some other building-related source causing these vibrations because I'm tired of being afraid of seeing this lady and scared of the next time she's going to come downstairs to complain about something. Being that i've seen that she has been renting this unit for 4 years now, and i've owned for 3 years here (as well as lived here), is there anything you all would suggest i do, if anything at all i guess? Just getting ready tired of all these interactions one after another.