Ever had the feeling that there was someone else watching? That another person, be it an authority figure or even someone close, was going to extreme means to keep track of your every move? Well, these people also had this feeling and their reasons were not so far fetched.
The following stories come from those who did not smile when they found out they were on a candid camera and revealed what was captured to Reddit. Warning: these stories might make you more cautious to watch your back more often. You're welcome.
At Least He Realized The Error Of His Voyeuristic Ways
“I went to college with a guy who dropped out after two quarters and never deleted him from my Facebook friends. A few months ago, he messaged me for my email address and sent over a bunch of pictures of me and my now husband back from college, as well as some funny videos and stuff.
‘Oh, wow! Thanks!’ I replied. ‘Were you just holding onto these all this time? Ha ha ha.’
He told me that he just found an old hard drive that had stuff from then on it, and since my now-husband and I are married and stuff, he figured we would probably like having the photos.
‘Oh, and don’t worry,’ he added, ‘I deleted the videos of the two of you making love.’
‘Uh… How did you have those kinds of videos of us?’
Apparently, now-husband and I didn’t always lock his dorm room door before knocking boots. As he was now-husband’s neighbor, he would just crack the door open and videotape us.
‘But don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I now realize that wasn’t cool to do and deleted the videos.’
Yup. That happened.”
Sticking It To The Boss
“A female co-worker of mine got a talking to about how she was violating the no tattoos’ policy in our office. She argued she did not have any visible tattoos. The manager claimed he knew for a fact she had a tattoo. Her only tattoo was on her left hip, which is not visible with office clothing.
That’s how we found out our manager had put cameras in the bathroom and changing room illegally.
He was dumbfounded when HE was the one who got fired and then prosecuted. He got two years probation and the company paid my co-worker a $50,000 settlement. She put it down on a house.
As it turned out, our manager was not a pervert, just a control freak. He kept logs of who used the bathroom and for how long and whether or not they were actually doing their business. Somebody found a big file with all of his data in it. The notes are hilariously weird: ’10/15 – 5:17 pm – Jones. Again. No phone. 9 minutes. Third time today. Speak to him about fiber.'”
Look Out For The “Bush Boys”
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“One night, I was with my high school girlfriend. We were in her room with the light on and the door open per her parents’ instruction. She turned the light off to show me this glow in the dark thing.
She had one of those fake windows that just looks like a window frame that you hang on the wall. It had some little plants and stuff on it. When the light went out she happened to look over at it and saw a small red light. Knowing it should not be there, she went and pulled out a small hidden camera. She left it on the kitchen table that night. The next morning, it was gone and no one ever said anything. Eventually, her parents told us that they thought that I might have been one of the government people who was spying on them.
To provide some background information, my girlfriend’s mother and stepfather met because he was her dealer. They continued to do speed and were extremely paranoid.
That night, they told me that I had gained their trust and told me all about the people watching them. Apparently, they would hide in the bushes and watch their house and would secretly medicate them as a government test on poor people. They used to make my girlfriend and her sisters watch hours of footage of the bushes in front of their house that they had taken the night before. Also, some of them were ninjas who could not always be seen. They were concerned I was one of them, initially.
There never seemed to be any danger, really. They were never aggressive and most of the time were seemingly normal. I doubt they were lying to me. Apparently, from time to time, they would accuse each other of cheating on the other with the ‘bush boys,’ so I get the impression that the paranoia came and went.”
Move Over, Norman Bates
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“When I was 15, I was living with my dad at the time in a large house with my siblings. There were three bathrooms, but I only really ever used the one next to my room. This bathroom used to have one of those pole things going from the tub corner into the ceiling that had trays on it. I cannot really remember why we took it out, but we did, and they only patched the hole it left in the tub. The hole in the ceiling was left there.
Years went by and I suddenly started feeling weird when showering. It was like an itch in the back of my brain. I kept disregarding the feeling, thinking it was ridiculous that a stranger would crawl into our attic and put something up there. I imagined a whole headquarters set up up there and laughed it off.
Eventually, curiosity got the best of me. I hoisted myself up and did my best to look directly into the hole, but I couldn’t see anything. It was too dark. I was not about to go into the attic myself because it was in the closet of someone else’s room and that would be weird, right?
More time went by, and long story short, one of my siblings, who is not blood-related, confessed he had set up a camera up there to film me. He felt he had become obsessed with me.
I was very depressed and severely low on self-esteem at the time, so I welcomed his affection and worship, at first. We are not blood-related, and there was a lot of sneaking around. He never hurt me physically or emotionally, aside from the whole creepy surveillance, and thought I was the world. Eventually, I realized this was a horrible thing we were doing, so I ended it and he was crushed. We never talk now, but before it all we had a great relationship. If I could take it all back, I would.
It has royally messed me up. Now, whenever I feel like I’m being watched, I tell someone. No matter how crazy it seems. I also refuse to use anyone else’s shower until both myself and my significant other have inspected it.”
A House With A Bizarre History
“My husband and I bought our house from a pretty weird guy. We never actually met him, but his real estate agent described him as a ‘grand entertainer.’ I think that actually meant ‘hosted constant swinger parties.’
There were giant mirrors all over the house, lights that changed colors when you walked under them, and a drawer full of various brands and sizes of rubbers. When we were doing the inspection before closing, we found a bunch of turned-on webcams scattered throughout the house. We unplugged them as we found them, but probably not before he saw and heard us making fun of him.”
As If Palm Pilots Were Not Weird Enough
“My mother’s boyfriend put a Palm Pilot in my room when I was in the sixth grade to watch me do God knows what. I was sitting on the ground in front of my mirror. With the way my desk was positioned, I could see it from the mirror. I noticed something that looked like the lens on his Palm Pilot. I went over and moved some stuff that was covering the actual Palm Pilot. I noticed he covered it enough so just the lens was visible. I was so young and stupid that I kinda froze and did not know what to do.
I heard him walking up the stairs. He came into my room. He started petting my cat that was on my desk. I was watching him from my mirror and I saw him grab the Palm Pilot. I heard him pressing buttons when he was walking back downstairs. I should have taken it, but I was more scared of what would happen if he noticed I took it.
I did tell my mom. However, she never believed me. This crap ensued for another seven years. She was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s when I was in high school so I blame it partially on that. My mom’s boyfriend was just strange from the get-go. I think he brainwashed her or was secretly poisoning her.
He never got what he deserved. He never did jail time. My dad went to the cops a few years later for something else he did but, once again, nothing ever came of it. I hope he suffers the worst death imaginable. I could write a book on it all.”
The Signs Were Too Obvious!
“We were never able to prove it but, to this day, we still think we were being watched.
About 8 years ago, I shared a first-floor apartment in a converted one-family house with two roommates. The landlord lived above us. Almost immediately after we moved in, I started noticing that whenever I got ready to take a shower, I would hear the sound of someone getting up above me, followed by footsteps in the general direction of our bathroom.
At first, I chalked it up to coincidence, but I tested the theory by ‘fake-showering.’ I would get undressed and put a towel on like I was about to take a shower, and the footsteps would immediately start. If I didn’t go to the bathroom, they would stop. CREEPY.
I had my male roommate, who was knowledgeable in construction, inspect every corner of my bedroom, which had been converted from a dining room, for cameras, recording devices, etc. He didn’t find anything suspicious. He did, however, find the fact that I had mirrors in my built-in cabinets a little disconcerting because there was no way to find out what was behind them. Again, CREEPY.
One night, I was home alone and I heard a loud crash. After some searching, I found that the light fixture installed IN our shower (as in, pretend you’re showering and look up – that’s where the light was instead of in the middle of the ceiling) had fallen and crashed into the bathtub. Of course, I started freaking out. Then, I started getting sick to my stomach.
This is it, I thought. I’m going to find a camera and my worst fear will be confirmed.
There was no camera and nothing in the broken light fixture. My roommate came home and inspected the broken pieces and fixture still in the wall. He found nothing suspicious. Just a very poor DIY electrical job.
April rolled around. We had the heat off for several weeks, but could still hear the radiators ticking and heat still coming out. My roommate inspected. It turned out that we had been paying for the basement tenant’s gas and electric since she moved in. We went upstairs to confront the landlord. We noticed that one of his computer monitors was displaying a live feed of our front porch.
OK. So, maybe it’s a security measure… or maybe he’s keeping track of our movements.
A few days later, I went outside and pretended to make a phone call while I walked the perimeter of the house. I was meandering around the yard and the front porch, stopping every so often so it looked like I was picking at a piece of paint or playing with a window pane, but I was really looking for cameras. I found one in the yard attached to the floodlights on our back porch and another by the steps to the basement apartment. Again, it could have been a security measure. But, still CREEPY.
There were a bunch of other little things that, on their own, weren’t alarming, but when put together seemed very suspicious. Such as the time the landlord asked my female roommate about a guy I was seeing or the time he nearly demanded that we use the yard more often, saying that he got the grill for us to use.
‘Why don’t you ever use it?’ he would ask. ‘Why don’t you ever go back there and lay in the sun like young kids are supposed to do?’
Or, the time he came downstairs to ask if we needed anything only a few minutes after we realized we were out of eggs, but only after we had already started mixing brownie batter. There were just too many coincidences with that creeper. We ended up moving out 2 months early. To this day, I’m still convinced that he had cameras set up.”
What Was Wrong With His Brother?
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“My brother had quit middle school for a couple of months. He claimed his throat closed up and that he was very weak to the point at which he couldn’t walk. There was something definitely wrong with him. We took him to the hospital where doctors prescribed him a bunch of medication and said he had a ton of diseases.
Two months of being in the hospital passed by and he finally came back home. We had bought him a walker to help him get around the house. One day I was taking a shower one day when heard a massive crash outside my door. I got out and checked on it only to find that my brother had fallen face first into the wall with a whiteboard and a couple of boxes. He had a few head wounds but, luckily, nothing too severe.
Yet my dad felt something fishy was up. He set up a secret camera lodged into a piece of our furniture looking out towards our living room. The tape recorded about one hour and 30 minutes of my brother walking normally and doing all the things he would normally do when we weren’t around.
When my father checked the tapes he was peeved. He showed my mom when she got home. He wanted to wake up my brother and give him a good yelling to quit the act. My mom had told him not to, in hopes that if there was in fact something crazy driving him to do all these things, he would come out and say it so we could help him out.
My dad showed my brother the video. Within a month after seeing the video, he went back to school. It took him five years after to tell us all that the reason he did all these things was because he was being bullied a ton at school for his weight problems.
All I can say about him now is that the bullying he received in middle school did take a toll on his academic record. He himself feels that he struggles with making connections with people. He did, however, lose 70 pounds, became a manager at a chain restaurant, and is on his last month paying for his culinary education. I’m proud of him and, in all, I’m very happy he never chose to take his own life.
However, if I’m ever doing anything, I wonder if my dad may be watching me.”
A New Level Of Stalker
“Years ago, my boyfriend at the time and I were looking at random videos on his phone once when I noticed he was skipping over a couple videos. I asked him what the skipped videos were. He started acting really suspicious and defensive. I finally made him let me see the phone. We lived together at the time, so it was not like we had been dating for three weeks or something and I was being paranoid.
When I saw the videos, it took me a while to recognize that the woman’s body moving around on the screen was mine. It turned out that he had been secretly recording me in my bathroom and closet where I would use the bathroom and change clothes for a bit. The videos were actually pretty old, from when we would have been dating for about four to five months or so.
We broke up not too long after that.”
They Sure Taught That History Teacher A Lesson
“My seventh and eighth-grade history teacher was arrested and convicted for recording female students changing for mandatory costumed history reports in the office adjacent to the classroom.
He was caught when one female student spotted the lens protruding from a hole in a trash bag on a shelf in the very cluttered office. She, at that time, waved into the camera saying ‘Hey Mr. Gagnon!’ without realizing anything weird about the situation. It spread quickly. About two days later, some 500 videotapes and various large garbage bags filled with girls underwear were found behind the school in the dumpster.
This was in 2000 at Nashua Catholic Regional Junior High School. The principal retired shortly after. We received a day of access to counselors in the gym the day after the story broke. Other than that, the scandal was largely buried.
Yay, parochial schools.”
Mother And Father Know… Too Much
“Growing up, both of my parents were fairly dysfunctional. My father was an abusive addict and my mother an emotionally unstable psychological abuser. They have been divorced since I was very young, but were forced to share custody. They also hated each other more than anything.
When I was about 7 or 8, my father and stepmother were interrogating me one weekend about what my mother was doing (who were her friends, was she dating anyone, where did she work, where did she go, etc.). I was getting very emotional and trying to avoid looking at them. That was when I noticed a red light in the bookshelf that was facing me. I started to cry and asked my father what it was. That only made him angry and violent. I would see that light more than a few more times over the years.
All of my phone calls were recorded by both parents until I was a teenager. I realized this one night when I begged my father to allow me to call my mother. I insisted on being alone in the room as I called her in order to have some privacy (something that was rare for me). After talking to my mother and hearing her hang up, I stayed on the phone for a little to avoid going back to my father. About a minute after my mother hung up, I heard another line click off.
For years, I thought it was only my father exhibiting this behavior, but a few years ago I was in the attic at my mother’s house digging around some old stuff. I found an unlabeled box filled with tapes and a recorder. Out of curiosity, I put one in, only to find my voice on it. All of the tapes were of my phone conversations over the years with various people.
My parents aren’t very healthy people.”
Don’t Trust Teddy
“I was babysitting for a toddler. He was pointing at a stack of VHS tapes on top of the TV set. There was a teddy bear sitting on top of the stack. I noticed that it was abnormally heavy when I went to pick it up to get a video. I did not really think anything of it until an hour or so later, after I had put the kid to bed and was watching TV.
I picked up the bear again. I noticed that its eyes were mismatched. One of them was a camera lens and one was a button. I put it back down and tried to ignore it. I never said anything to the parents about it.
The next time I went over to babysit, the bear was gone.”
This Is Why Family Locker Rooms Are For Families
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“A child predator was recording me getting dressed from under the stall in a family locker room at the local pool. I noticed because I realized that, as I moved around the stall, the guy next to me moved the bag he had set on the ground. When I looked over, I realized he had a camera tucked in there.
I was a kid and did not really know what to do. I just got dressed and told a lifeguard. The lifeguard told, who I assume was, his supervisor. They went into the family locker room, knocked on the stall the guy was in and asked him to leave. So, he did.
He probably recorded dozens of other people. It was a busy day. They didn’t confiscate the tape or anything.”
“Please Don’t Touch My Computer, Dad”
“From middle school until about when I got my new laptop for college, my dad had a program called Spector Pro installed on my computer. Back in middle school on the main computer I used, I noticed a little red square in the notification area in the right corner. When I clicked on it, it just prompted me for a password, so I gave up. I think they have since updated the program so this square does not even show up there. I found Spector Pro on my high school laptop in the processes list on the admin account that I didn’t usually use.
Later on, my dad had left the program’s window open. I found out that he had all my passwords to everything, copies of every email and instant message I had sent or received, a video of everything I did, keystrokes, and more… It was really uncomfortable. The company claimed that the program was mainly some kind of child predator deterrent, but the extent that my dad used it to track my activity freaked me out, especially when I was in high school. There was no reason for him to be tracking me so closely either. I was a good kid and knew how to smartly navigate online, even when I was fairly young, so there definitely was no need for concern about that kind of stuff.
In the frequently asked questions for the program on their website, it warned that using it for ‘adult children,’ among other people, could get you in trouble with the law. Although I was in middle school when it started, he never stopped using it until he had to. I set up my new laptop myself so he could not install it there. I don’t think he ever realized that I knew he was tracking me the whole time.
A lot of trust was lost for me, too, once I realized that software was there. I felt particularly uncomfortable because of the fact that, had I been two to three years older, the legality of that program’s use and the extent to which he tracked my activity would be highly questionable. It made me think about what difference those two years would have made, as a teenager trying to figure out where she stands as far as independence and privacy goes. It was definitely a learning experience.”