5 People Who Held Grudges Well Past the Point of Sanity

So we guess the moral of this story is that if you've ever, at any point in your life, visited Milwaukee and accidentally bumped into a stranger on the sidewalk while there, immediately install an alarm system in your home, because that stranger might have been Matthew Mundschau.

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"When I was 6, you passed me on the street and waved with your left hand. Here comes the pain!"

The Kern and Bensch families of Munich don't actually remember what started the lengthiest neighborly pissing contest in the history of ever, but their earliest court filing was over the placement of an elderberry bush, so let's go with that. What followed was a 14-plus-year spat that escalated out of control, leading to many, many other legal disputes, with accusations ranging from trespassing to disturbing the peace to all-out assault with "clubs." At some point during all this, Eugen Kern decided to erect a 12-foot-high fence along the property line to separate the two families.

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An exploding poison fence.

Of course, since walls are basically useless without armed guards to man them, this did little to stop the cross-border hostilities. So Kern, a former electronics technician, installed security cameras in trees, which he monitored from a command center in his house at all hours like a hobbyist security guard/psychopath, or psychoguard, if you will. Glass windows were boarded over because they kept getting broken. And don't forget the motion sensors. Or the concrete barriers. Or the freaking barbed wire.

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"I just don't understand why our property value keeps dropping."

The Kerns accused the Bensches of attacking the fence with chainsaws. The Bensches accused the Kerns of purposely sowing grass and weeds in their garden like they were some kind of asshole fairies. They purposely flooded each other's yards. Anonymous phone calls (and presumably plenty of unexpected pizza deliveries) were made. They even engaged in psychological warfare by blasting music in their neighbor's general direction until the wee hours of the morning.

Oh, and did we mention that they lived in a duplex?

Via Google Maps

Yep, that's the fence running right down the middle.

H. Beatty Chadwick and Bobbie Applegate lived the classic American love story: They met, fell in love, got married, realized they despised each other and engaged in lengthy and bitter divorce proceedings. The divorce settlement required Chadwick to fork over $2.5 million to his ex-wife, but Chadwick insisted that he had lost all his money in a bad overseas investment.

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"OK, so I bought Jackie Chan's hair. Nobody ever said I was a smart man."

His ex-wife's lawyers, however, called bullshit and presented evidence that Chadwick was just hiding the loot in foreign bank accounts. The judge agreed with her and, after Chadwick continued to insist he didn't have the money -- presumably by turning his pants pockets inside out and shrugging enthusiastically -- jailed him for contempt until such time that Chadwick decided to cave and pony up the dough.

That was in 1995. Chadwick parked his ass in prison until 2009, simultaneously setting the world records for both the longest contempt of court sentence and the longest continual bird flipped at authority.

Via Delcotimes.com

"Eh, whaddaya gonna do? 99 problems and all that, right?"

Now, we don't want you to think that he was somehow wrongly accused -- Chadwick appealed to any court that would listen to him that he totally didn't have the money, but every court upheld the original ruling, including the Supreme Court. Twice. Chadwick's own lawyer believed he had the money, claiming that his client should be released because "There's something to be said for letting Beatty out the door and following him. Nothing else has worked." Even the "Free H. Beatty Chadwick" blog gracefully skates over whether or not he actually had the cash, stating that it's not about the money.

In 2009, a judge ultimately ordered that Chadwick should be released, because imprisoning him was "clearly having no effect." And so the 14-year grudge match finally ended, with the world champion title going to H. Beatty "Grudge Master" Chadwick. No word on whether he called up his bank the very next day to make a just completely obscene withdrawal, but we're going to go ahead and assume so. He earned it.

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"My first act as a free man? I'm going to burn $2.5 million on my ex-wife's front lawn."

The 1972 Olympics basketball gold medal game was a classic before it even started. The Soviet Union played the underdog United States in probably the most remarkable Olympic game in history.

Via Icehockey.wikia.com

OK, fine, second.

In the final six minutes of the game, the U.S. worked its way up from an eight-point deficit to a one-point deficit. Then, with just three seconds left, a USSR player fouled U.S. player Doug Collins so hard that he knocked him the fuck out. But Collins quickly recovered, and with the coach telling him that if he could walk, he could shoot free throws, he nervously approached the line knowing that if he made those two shots, the U.S. would be in the lead.

Real athletes laugh at petty injuries like decapitation.

Collins easily sank both shots, putting the U.S. up 50-49 with a mere three seconds left to play. The seconds ticked down, and the U.S. took the gold! Only, wait a minute, that's not right -- what actually happened is that the Soviets tried to call a timeout during Collins' second foul shot. For those of you who don't know, you can't do that in basketball, so the ref signaled to simply play on, and so they did ... for two seconds, until a second ref recognized the timeout with one second left, because the Soviet coach ran onto the court, also known as another foul that for some reason wasn't called.

"Sir, you cannot come out onto the c- is that a sword? Sir, you cannot have a sword here."

But the bullshit storm didn't subside there. There was only one second left on the clock until William Jones, head of the International Amateur Basketball Federation, told the scoreboard officials to set it to three seconds ... even though he had absolutely no authority whatsoever to do so, which he later openly admitted.

So now, with triple the amount of time left, the Soviets got the ball and the game restarted. A Soviet player hurled the ball down court and missed, just as the buzzer went off. The Americans had won their unprecedented eighth gold medal in a row!

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STDs didn't exist in 1972, which is why roughly half of Generation X was conceived that night.

Only, wait a minute, that's still not right ... officials then decided that, oh shit, they never reset the clock to three seconds. So there were still a mere three seconds left to play -- two seconds of which had already been played, twice. In the confusion of getting the players back onto the court again and one last questionable call by a ref just for good measure, Russian player Aleksandr Belov promptly went in and pulled a quick layup for an official Soviet win, 51-50.

Needless to say, the U.S. team was less than pleased with the result. So much so that they didn't even bother to show up to the awards ceremony to accept their silver medals.

Because nothing says "Go fuck yourself" like a large, awkward empty space.

In fact, they still won't accept them to this day, 40 years later. It's been so long that most of the medals have been lost -- they found some of them in the basement of some dude's house, but the rest were presumably pawned for coke and prostitute money long ago. But it won't matter anyway, because the players will never get them.

You see, in order to get the medals, it has to be a unanimous decision among the team. And even though many of the players have reluctantly said they would accept the silver, there are still a few holdouts -- most notably Kenny Davis, who was the captain of the team. As it turns out, Davis is so determined never to accept his silver that he put a clause in his goddamn will for his family to never, under any circumstances, accept a silver medal for the 1972 Olympic basketball game. And so the rest of his team will never get one either, not even over his dead body.

So yeah, burying him in this casket was probably in poor taste. [subtitle]The City of Osceola, Missouri, Will Never Forgive Kansas [sic][/subtitle]

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In the years leading up to and including the American Civil War, skirmishes erupted along the border between the free state of Kansas and the slave state of Missouri, cumulatively known as Bleeding Kansas. The Kansas "Jayhawkers" and Missouri "Border Ruffians" would frequently attack each other's cities and generally act like assholes because, you know, war.

Via Wikipedia

Also known as "The State of a Thousand Fonts."

One such raid occurred in September of 1861, when a bunch of Kansas Jayhawkers descended upon the little town of Osceola and looted the shit out of it before burning it down and executing several pro-Confederate civilians. It was admittedly a dick move, but again -- war. A couple years later, the war ended, everyone was forced to admit slavery was bad and people slowly began to let bygones be bygones. Except, that is, for the people of Osceola, who have never been able to let it go.

Prior to the raid, Osceola was a booming metropolis of approximately 3,000 people. After the raid, the population and local industry was decimated and has never really recovered -- in 2010, the census counted a mere 947 residents. According to the Osceolans, this long lack of prosperity is solely because of those Jayhawker pricks. After all, it's not like any other Confederate city that burned to the ground ever managed to rebuild itself to prominence.

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Just look at this shithole.

In the fall of 2011, 150 years after the raid and well over a century past the point that any reasonable human being should have given a flying rat's ass, the Osceola city council passed a resolution demanding that the University of Kansas Jayhawks stop using a symbol of "domestic terrorists" as their mascot. KU replied that bears and tigers have both killed people as well, and that their boot-wearing avian mascot would be very difficult to confuse with a terrorist.

Via Wikipedia

Dear Lord. It's like someone crossed Osama bin Laden with a poorly drawn bird.

But Osceola had totally anticipated their smart-ass response and had included a rubber-glue clause in their resolution: Since the "arrogant and uppity" Kansans wouldn't admit the error of their ways, Osceola stated that Missourians should stop spelling Kansas and KU with a capital "K" because "neither is a proper name or a proper place." That should finally heal the wound, right?

When he's not digging up the hatchet, Chris writes for his website and tweets. You can reach Xavier on Facebook or email him at XavierJacksonCracked@gmail.com.

For more amazing tales of assholery, check out The 7 Most Insane True Stories of Neighbors from Hell. Or discover the 6 Classics Despised by the People Who Created Them.