My Soulful Life: A Monster Moved in Next Door

This is my fourth attempt at this letter.

This is the latest of many personal dispatches on culture, healing, and spirituality from a dual Canadian-American living in Thailand. Find popular free essays here and access the rest of PERFECT HUNGER (including The Practice and Link-Ups) by upgrading here:

You guys.

This is the fourth time I’ve started this letter. My emotions have run the gamut this past week—propelling me from blind rage to uncontrollable sobbing to feeling like I’m losing my mind.

Maybe fourth time’s the charm? Anyway, here goes.

Image of me by Brian Limoyo

As regular readers know, my partner and I live in a small rental house tucked down an alley in Chiang Mai. It’s a very Thai, very working-class neighborhood, and we’re the only farangs (Western foreigners) who live here.

We love it. But.

Our landlords rent the adjoining house through Airbnb. Sometimes that’s fine. Other times, it’s awful. The best days are when it sits empty (which happens a lot right now during rainy season).

The guests are usually foreign tourists—some quiet, just keeping to themselves or exchanging quick hellos. Others go full Thai holiday mode: blasting music, gaming at all hours, slamming doors drunkenly. Most stay less than a week, gravitating towards flashier, more touristy parts of the city.

This time? The situation is different. Much different.

Late last month, a middle-aged Westerner and his elderly mom moved in. They’re here through late June, rarely leave the Airbnb, and are making me batshit crazy. (This is seriously the most batshit situation we’ve experienced here, so bear with me. At the end, you can tell me your theories.)

We met them briefly the day they arrived: They were checking in as we were coming back from the market. He was tall, loud, chatty, and quick to explain he was here with his mom. She was short, shy, and scurried inside.

I recoiled right away from his energetic “exuberance” (to put it politely). As an introverted, socially awkward, extremely soft-spoken female under five feet tall and barely a hundred pounds, I’m finely attuned to a particular type of person who interacts with me as though I’m a child, shows no hint of listening, and bulldozes me aside—taking up all the space with their voice, their obliviousness, their energy. After fifty years of practice, I pick up on this vibe immediately. My instinct is to get away lest I encourage it (because giving an inch will always encourage it). So I let Randy make small talk while I went inside.

Sure and soon enough came the TV blaring at all hours, the booming phone calls, the slamming doors, the stomping footsteps. Annoying and disruptive? Yes. But for tourist farangs? Not that unusual.

Then it got weird.

Beyond the standard-issue, Western tourist cacophony, we quickly became acquainted with The Machine. In his room—just a paper-thin wall away from where I sleep and work—something thumps in a booming, regular rhythm:

THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP (pause) THUMP THUMP THUMP (pause) THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP.

It vibrates through my wall, my desk, my bed, my bones. On and on, day and night, whenever he’s in his room (which is most of the time, while his mom stays downstairs and is so quiet we go days without hearing her).

After two sleepless nights, we knocked on their door all casual and warm: Heeey. Just wondering whether you’d noticed the thumping. His response: “Oh, it’s keeping you up.” (A statement more than a question.) “I heard it when I was at another house today too. It’s not me. Want to come check my room?”

This was suspicious for multiple reasons. First, he barely leaves the Airbnb. Even for meals, they have take-away delivered at least three times a day. Second, the thumping only stops when he does leave—or when food arrives (offering a brief pause while he eats). When he goes back up to his room or returns from being out—sometimes during the day, sometimes well after midnight—we hear him moving large furniture (like a bed or large dresser), then the thump-thumping resumes.

At our increasingly frantic prompting, our landlords asked too. Is it a game? A medical device? A portal to another dimension? Again, he played dumb. “Not me. Go up and see.” They looked and found nothing. (I suspect it’s hidden behind whatever furniture he moves upon coming and going.)

THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP (pause) THUMP THUMP THUMP (pause) THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP. Again and again… for hours on end.

In desperation, Randy and I took to banging on the wall—after which, it would stop immediately and we’d hear him adjusting what sounded like wires… then, minutes later: THUMP THUMP THUMP (pause) THUMP THUMP THUMP THUMP.

We kept complaining to our landlords. The landlords kept asking nicely (but remember: he’s an Airbnb guest, they want a 5-star review and his money—which is a lot of money for them, a young family in Thailand). After a few days of complaints, inquiries, and wall banging, he actually turned it off for 24 hours.

But that’s when the screams started.

Not words. Not sentences. Just aggressive, distressed animal screams that could be heard down the alley. Monster sounds, as loud as a human could possibly manage. For hours and hours, spaced minutes apart—unpredictable, unhinged, completely unnerving.

I’ll share Randy’s next email to our landlord verbatim, because, yes, I KNOW I SOUND CRAZY:

“This is very bad. I do not feel safe leaving Dana here alone - and especially if I go over there and say something to him.

He is screaming ‘animal sounds’ - very weird - I’ve only seen this in the severely mentally ill.

And of course, if you send someone or come over yourself, there’s no guarantee that he won’t just stop.

He will make the sound and then minutes can go by before he does it again. And then maybe he’ll take a break for a few hours. It is very, very odd.

It is greatly disrupting our eating, sleeping and getting work done.”

Two more things that feel important to mention:

1. His bedroom balcony is feet from my own. There are no locks on the sliding doors, and earplugs just aren’t an option. For one, I’m on high alert and want to hear if he crosses over during the night and tries to get in. For another, they don’t block the screams and actually intensify the thumper’s vibration.

2. When the phone rings or the landlord knocks? Instant charm. Warm, cheerful, outgoing, normal. More than anything, I think that’s what kills me: how effortlessly he lies, how easily he flips, how unhinged I sound when he’s cosplaying normalcy.

So here we are, fourth try at this letter.

Want a peek at the cutting room floor?

The first version was fueled by panic and rage—adrenaline and fury flooding my body. In full transparency, that’s my baseline response to loud noise without end. I’ve moved at least ten times in the past ten years, usually fleeing man-made machine noise.

But this? This was the universe cranking the volume way past eleven.

Which brought me to version two: tapping into the fear at the root of my anger. Fear of being unheard and unbelieved. Of a physically large white man who flips on the charm like a switch. Of needing to fend for myself, my cats, my sanity. Of, despite knowing the truth, being cast as crazy. Of, deep down, questioning the truth—suspecting I am crazy and somehow responsible.

Then version three: written while sobbing—sliding, after sleepless nights, into my much younger self. The version who was and remains haunted by things that are loud and beyond her control. The version who was and remains desperate to be heard and believed. The version who knows, really and truly, when something isn’t quite right.

Each of those discarded drafts told a story and shared a truth. Each would have led you to see me in a specific light while neglecting the rest. None would be complete—writing never is, though we often forget.

Which brings us to today: moving through tears to laughter, embracing the absurdity and the universe’s wry sense of humor… feeling as though I’m still learning (and spectacularly failing) some cosmic lesson. It’s like part of me knows I’m being tested, while another part feels like the boy who cried wolf—except now the wolf is right here, literally howling outside my bedroom.

And here, now, after cycling through rage, fear, sobbing, and laughter, I feel something else growing. Something that brings serenity as it expands. Something that no doubt sounds trite but feels true.

Call it shared humanness.
Call it an internal compass.
Call it compassion.

Whatever I call it, it feels elemental. Like relief. And it sounds something like this:

However this guy justifies The Machine, the screams, the slamming, the furniture dragged at midnight, the denial and lying…

No one who’s content and at peace acts like that. In one way or another, he and his mom must be suffering massively.

I’m not saying this to absolve him. I’m not gaslighting my own feelings and very real fears. But seriously. What kind of life is that? Being a grown-ass man spending your Thai holiday hiding a thumping device? Choosing between non-stop thumping that rattles the walls and devolving into animal shrieks that go on for hours? Knowingly distressing and scaring your neighbors?

Hopefully you get where I’m going with this. Strip away my triggers, forget me as “main character,” and the whole thing is just objectively tragic and sad. No matter what’s going on with this guy, he’s not really a monster. And people don’t get how they are for no reason.

What lives underneath?

In Chinese Medicine and in my Buddhist practice, grief—feeling into the sadness of something—helps us access compassion. It also douses the flames of anger—hopefully enough to keep them from consuming us and to let us see more of the truth. Including the human behind the harm. Including what’s actually fueling our angry reaction. (Spoiler: it’s almost never the immediate context.)

For me, what’s underneath my rage is deep-rooted fear, a sense of injustice, profound grief, amorphous self-blame, and shame. Also an instinct to survive—and to protect those I love and those who are helpless (in this case, my cats).

So, I’m sitting with that. And I’m writing to you, as best and as honestly as I can in this moment, from my various versions—which, trust, are still cycling through fury and fear.

But I’m also asking: What might it be like to be him? What might he be feeling? What, across the course of his life, led to this outcome?

I can’t know the answers, and I’m not going to let my guard down, do anything unsafe, or engage with him further.

Still, what makes us human is to connect with our hearts and make space for all of it. Otherwise, the monster is us. Otherwise, we become what we fear.

Time for your theories.

No advice, please. Trust: we’ve run the options. I don’t want to cause trouble for our landlords—they’re doing their best and have been so good to us. And just “calling the police” doesn’t work the way you might expect here in Thailand.

I’m weighing pulling from my savings and taking the cats to a hotel until late June—hunkering down, letting this pass. (It’d come to around $700, which is a lot for me as an unplanned expense. Otherwise, I’d have done it way sooner.)

But theories about The Machine? Gods, yes. Please share. Even as I sob, tremble, rage, and eventually land on compassion, the Observer in me is riveted. (And knows this makes for rich practice and one hell of a story.)

I’d also love to hear where and how you’re connecting with your heart—and what we share as humans—especially when touching into that place feels the hardest.

I’ll be eagerly awaiting your responses… and I’ll send any updates next week, along with the WHAT’S NOURISHING ME and WHAT I’M HUNGRY FOR sections of My Soulful Life.

​​That follow-up will be for paying subscribers. Upgrade for full access here:

With love,
Dana

Note added June 8, 2025: After publishing this letter and seeing some of the comments come in, I realized I feel very uncomfortable inviting theories about what’s happening with any specific individual. Please feel free to share your thoughts about what The Machine might be—but let’s hold off, from here on out, on speculating about any specific person (whom none of us actually knows). I’m sorry. I’ll speak more to this in the follow-up post coming later this week. Thank you. ❤️