We moved into an apartment in an old house, where the landlord lived on the main floor and there were 3 apartments above. We were directly above. The floors were wood and apparently not too quiet. We received about 10 noise complaints from doing things such as 'heavy walking', opening/closing drawers, accidentally dropping things, and our cat jumping off counters.
I eventually called the LL to try to figure out a solution and he straight up blamed us, my wife specifically, for not knowing how to walk quietly. "Toe-heel, not heel-toe..." I explained to the LL that walking, using the kitchen, etc aren't extraordinary and there's not much we can do about them. Things escalated and our relationship with the LL turned very sour. He continued to torture us with complaints about noise, to the point where he once texted us to stop at 2:45am when neither of my wife, myself, or my cat were even in the apartment.
One night, he started blaring his bassy stereo system at about 11:00 at night (as he'd done a few times before over the last 6-8 months) but this time we also heard extremely loud shouting over the bass which was was shaking our entire apartment. We thought him and his girlfriend were fighting. We knew him to be a little crazy and her to be quiet and timid so our minds raced with the possibility of what might be going on. We started hearing loud thudding noises, 2, 3, 4 times. It sounded like someone or something was getting thrown into a wall. We called the cops at this point to report it. They came about 10 minutes later and we listened in on the conversation.
Apparently he was alone, very drunk, and had bloodied his knuckles from punching walls or something. He convinced the police that nothing was wrong and he was just drunk, and they eventually left after about 10 minutes. About 5 minutes after they left, he turned his music back on and started shouting again. We put our ears to the ground to listen and hear what we could hear and it turns out that his anger was now (if it hadn't been all along) directed at us. He was shouting obscenities and threatening to evict us (behind our back of course as he didn't know we could hear). After a few minutes of listening to how drunk, angry, and violent he had become, we decided pack up and jet to my parents' house for the next month until our lease ran out. I remember that I was fearing for our safety because we had to cross a few feet in front of his door to get pustule, so I grabbed a steak knife to ward him off if he decided to try anything. We got away safely. I could go on, but this is already really long. Sorry for the book.