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Houses built for one purpose: to make the neighbors miserable

Ellsworth Toohey
Jul 14, 2026
∙ Paid
Rhododendrites / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikipedia)

A spite house is a building put up to punish someone — by blocking a neighbor’s light, ruining a view, or planting a permanent monument to a grudge in their sightline. America has been building them for centuries. In 1716, sailmaker Thomas Wood built the ten-foot-wide Old Spite House in Marblehead, Massachuse…

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