By Olivia Bensimon

Animation: Curbed; Photos/Videos: Getty

The apartment next door had been empty for a while when Harold and Elena Joyce first heard voices. It was early February 2025. Harold went to investigate, worried it was another squatter — the building had dealt with a few. From the hallway, Harold could see a group of what appeared to be young Hasidic men setting up an air mattress in 2B. It was, they said, for a friend who needed a place to crash.

It was a few weeks later that Harold and Elena heard the smoke detector in 2B going off. Calls to management went unanswered, so Harold called 311, which referred him to the fire department. When firefighters broke down the door, they encountered a mostly empty unit, save for the air mattress. Harold got a text from his landlord’s son the next day: “Your neighbor from next door complained you broke into his apartment.”

It was around the same time that Harold began to receive prank calls — dozens of them a day, at all hours. “Is this Jacko? Harrod?” a man with an accent said on the phone, in a March call the Joyces recorded. “You have the girls that you rent out, right? You rent them out hourly or nightly?” Something else about this particular call alarmed the Joyces: ” He used my first and last name,” Harold told me.

Harold and Elena, both in their 40s, had lived in their second-floor loft at 56 South 11th Street for 16 years. Elena is an artist and Harold, “a nice Jewish kid from Long Island,” as he put it, is a co-founder of a whiskey distillery. They had two kids, 12 and 8. Their lives, for the most part, were uneventful but perfectly nice.

Then came the middle-of-the-night “wellness checks.” The police would arrive at the Joyces’ door, saying they were responding to anonymous 311 complaints of fighting and screaming. The second time it happened, at around 3 a.m. on a May morning, Harold recorded his interaction with the cops. “Our apartment?” he asks, his voice groggy from sleep. The person making the complaint had been specific, the officer said — the anonymous report had even included a photograph of a drawing on their door from one of the couple’s kids. Harold messaged the landlord’s son, asking for security footage of the hallway to see if anything suspicious might turn up. Harold wasn’t allowed to access that footage, the landlord’s son told him, unless it was for an official police report.

For months, the Joyces had been gathering evidence of what they saw as targeted harassment: the spam calls, the 311 reports, and the random wellness checks — all of which seemed to coincide with the mysterious neighbor’s arrival. (And all of which would find its way into a lawsuit the couple would file in Kings County Supreme Court by the year’s end.) But no matter how many times they called their landlord, no matter how egregious each incident seemed to them, they say they got little more than a shrug in response. Which, after a while, started to feel strange, too.