Camp of violent vagrants terrorizes family in New Hampshire

Your dream home has become a place of nightmares.

A New Hampshire family is being terrorized by a homeless encampment that has sprung up behind their historic home, leading to violent clashes with the vagrants, according to a report.

Robin Bach and her husband spent years restoring their 19th-century dream home in Concord to raise their two children, ages 8 and 11—but they were plagued by the campers who lived in the woods behind the palatial estate.

They have received death threats and heard gunshots and screams from beyond the tree line. A swing set in their backyard, purchased in 2020 during the pandemic, stands untouched by their frightened children, who only play in the front yard.

“I can’t even use my yard. My kids can’t go out there,” Bach told the Concord Monitor. “I want my kids to be independent and comfortable going outside and playing, but they’re not going to.”

“It’s never been worse. It’s never been worse.”

Since Bach bought the house in 2018 with big plans to renovate and start a family, he has called the police 37 times, according to police records seen by the newspaper. Six calls were for an inspection of the area, six more for disturbances, domestic violence and trespassing.

During one of their first summers in the house, Bach’s husband found a man sitting in their backyard whom they had previously seen loitering in the woods near some tents. When he asked the man to leave, the intruder threatened to shoot him.

The man returned several times until Bach obtained a restraining order against him – and police officers took him away in handcuffs while their young children watched, she told the Concord Monitor.

In another incident, she was teaching her son to do laundry when they heard chilling screams from the warehouse of someone yelling, “Get away from me, get away from me,” which prompted another 911 call to police.

A dumpster fire behind a neighbor’s home two doors down prompted blazing fire trucks to race into their street to put out the blaze, the outlet reported.

When Bach requested a quote to install a chain-link fence around her property, she was discouraged to learn it would cost $50,000, she told the Monitor.

“I can’t afford to clean up. I’m not physically able to,” she said of the trash visible from the house. “So the trash stays there.”

When she moved in, the camp consisted of just one or two tents, but it has now grown to about half a dozen as New Hampshire experiences one of the largest percentage increases in homelessness in the country, according to the newspaper.

The warehouse on Bach’s property presents a particular challenge because it borders property and railroad tracks owned by the freight railroad company CSX.

The Concord Police Department can issue a restraining order at any time, but CSX also has its own police unit that will scour the area and make arrests.

The police are managing to clear the camp, something they have done several times before, and have tried to connect residents with local programs to help them find permanent housing. But that is the extent of the city’s intrusion on private property, and the garbage is left lying around.

And after police evict the campers, they simply return within a few days, Bach told the Monitor.

“We have a pretty big homeless problem,” Barrett Moulton, deputy patrol officer and police liaison on the city’s homeless committee, told the news agency. “They’re going to be somewhere.”

“It’s like Whack-a-Mole,” Bach repeated. “You can’t just ask them to leave, they’ll go somewhere else. You have to give them a place to go.”

Bach understands that squatters need help and stability behind their home. She recently spoke with a man who has a day job and tries to keep the area around his ten clean.

She and other local leaders believe one solution would be to set up a special campground for the homeless in the city, where much-needed resources and assistance could be concentrated in one place.

“Here you can pitch your tent, there are toilets and garbage containers,” she said. “They’ve come here and told them a million times to go away, but they won’t go away.”

The Supreme Court ruled last week that homeless people can be ticketed and fined for camping on public property. In this landmark ruling, cities across the country are likely to take legal action against homeless people.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, about 650,000 people in the United States were homeless last year, up 12% from 2022 and the highest increase since records began in 2007.