People do bizarre things when they think they aren’t being watched. But as it turns out, these things are not always as private as you would hope.
Here, 24 security guards reveal the most bizarre thing they’ve ever seen on a security camera.
1. I do security for a large retailer. There’s this guy who comes in all the time and just rearranges stuff. He’ll put books in boxes and stack candles, stuff like that. Kicked a pair of socks underneath a fixture once. He’ll rearrange something, stand back, and look at it with approval. Like he’s fixing up the store to completely random standards.
Never steals but one time he came upon a take out drink cup that someone left on a shelf and, no hesitation, just picks it up and downs it. Had me laughing pretty hard.
shakazulut
2. I work on CCTV over a large town centre. The other day I swore I saw a chap carrying a large fish (no bag, no water, just there in his arms) we zoomed and followed, definitely holding a massive fish. Where the hell has he pulled it from? It’s 11pm on a Thursday night. He’s not wet either so the pond/stream that runs through the park isn’t the source. We followed and notified police, who arrested both and released the fish into the stream of the park after they chucked it on a car bonnet.
Turns out the little jerks had slashed a temporary tank which was currently holding over 50 fish, 45 of which died from where they decided to empty the tank where the pond was being cleaned and pumps replaced. Glad I spotted him even though the police were making several puns and jokes over the radio about fish.
charliebaggins
3. An extremely intoxicated man ripping off his clothes until his pants were around his ankles, then began doing karate moves and screaming. We after a few minutes of this display, he put his clothes back on and then started dancing with a traffic cone he’d found.
4. I was a security guard for a couple of years in college and worked for two different companies. At one of them, I didn’t have a fixed post. Instead, I would just be called in to sub for people who were out sick or on vacation, meaning I never knew much about the places I was working.
One night, I get called to work at a large corporate campus that served as the headquarters for two companies and the state farm bureau. On this campus, there is a pond. In this pond, there were often a bunch of horrible Canadian geese.
On this particular shift, I was working with one of the regular guards at that location. He went out to do his rounds and left me to watch the security cameras. This is well after hours, so nobody should be in the parking lots except the cleaning crew. I notice a small car pull into the executive lot, and an old man gets out. He walks to the trunk and pulls out a giant plastic tub (story continued on the same page…).
He tips the whole thing over and it has to be at least 30 gallons of dog food. He gets back in the car, drives to the other side of the lot, and waits. Soon, all these jerk geese swoop in and start eating the dog food. Old guy watches for a bit, then leaves. The entire time, I’m recording the camera feed and taking still pictures, confused as hell.
I grab my work phone and call the other guard. I explain what I just saw and he excitedly yells “OH CRAP! YOU CAUGHT THE GOOSE GUY!”
Apparently, this guy had been regularly coming to feed the geese every night. The longer he fed the geese, the more of them showed up. They had been damaging the grass on the property, shitting everywhere, and attacking employees for months. But nobody could ever catch the goose guy in the act, or get a license plate number.
The weirdest thing was, there were plenty of public parks close by with plenty of geese for this guy to feed. I have no idea why he chose the executive parking lot of some company as the ideal goose feeding location.
whitecollarredneck
5. Fellow employee who was accused of smoking marijuana on shift (no drug use policy) and vehemently denying it, pounding his fists on the table, screaming at us, threatening legal action; directly after the meeting he went outside, around the corner, lit up a joint right under a camera. There were a shit load of blind spots outside but he went right under one of the cameras he spent 40 hours a week watching.
MZM204
6. We had a female security guard who was often late for the night shift. It was a Friday night and two of us were eager for her to show up and we were watching the cameras for any sign of her truck. Her truck drove up and parked and just idled. WTF? We wanted to go home already.
We zoom in and see a guy sitting in the drivers seat, obviously not her. Check the plate – definitely her truck. What’s going on? Suddenly we see her head shoot up out of the guys lap. Oh jeez. She gives him a kiss and comes inside as he drives off.
We turn to each other and I say to the other guy “shut up and never speak of this to anyone”. This guy was a douche bag and would bully everyone but me, so I had to stop him. Nobody deserves to be mocked for a common sexual act, even though it was in a somewhat inappropriate place. She was just being a good girlfriend to her guy I guess.
He just nods. She comes in, says Hello, other guy hurries out without a word.
I give her the shift report and I’m about to leave, and she says “Hey man, have you got any mints or some gum?” it took everything in my power not to crack, I managed to say “no… Goodnight” somehow.
MZM204
7. I did video surveillance for about 6 months. The most bizarre / disgusting thing I saw besides the typical break-ins was, a woman stick a laptop down her pants, walk out the front the door and come back for more. About 3 hours later, employee found out 3 or 4 laptops were missing.
8. Was doing a camera demo for my boss; After a small accident, he decided he wanted something better than Vaseline-filtered blobs of grey, so I spec’d out a replacement system that used rather cheap Chinese made cameras and a expensive, purpose built DVR system.
He didn’t believe I could actually get cameras for $50 a piece that didn’t suck or that the software I wrote even functioned so I ordered one camera and set it up on the loading dock as a demo.
I was in his office, showing him how it worked and making some adjustments to the image quality displayed in his browser when one of the employees walked into view (story continued on the next page…).
Boss: Hey, that’s Dave! I can actually tell who it is! Hi, Dave!
A few seconds later I’ve adjusted the JPEG compression settings and asked him to refresh.
Boss: That does look better.. Wait, what the heck is Dave doing? It looks like he’s peeing on the wall.
A moment later Dave did a little shake, turned, and fought with his zipper. He wasn’t even finished when the warehouse PA boomed to life.
PA: Dave, please stop using the loading dock as a urinal.
The boss hung up his phone and looked proud of himself.
technos
9. There was an employee who opened the store, walked around eating junk food for a bit and sat down and thought about what he would do next for about half an hour. He simply sat still for about 30 minutes before unplugging the DVR and making off with several computer components as well a couple laptops. Weird part is, soon thereafter he went rock climbing and slipped, on the way down he hit a rock and popped his eye out of his head. He called the owner asking for forgiveness and if there was anyway he could pay for what he stole.
Odd… to say the least.
Boogeynomanners
10. So I have a shop and it’s part of a multi-unit building. Noticed this lady almost everyday parking at the far end where I couldn’t see her with the cameras after she pulled in. She would walk from her car to the dumpster at the other end of the building she could have pulled right up to, and throws out a couple bags. Like almost everyday. It was an older lady, 50-55 nice grandma type sweater and pants always nicely put together, jewelry, etc. I thought maybe it was a friend of the landlord that was told she could use the dumpster. I dunno. So we decide on a Tuesday if she comes after the garbage men we will investigate. And we did. She threw out a Mcdonald’s bag with wrappers in it and a Walmart bag with human feces in it.
Yeah. Major wtf.
opiape
11. I managed an office building. The designated smoking area was the loading dock. We had one of those pole ashtrays with a big base that you dropped your butts in. I’d come in some mornings and the thing would be open. I checked the video and found it was 2 guys and 2 girls about 15 years old. As soon as the sun went down they would run up on the dock, open the ash dump, pull out the longest butts they could find and light up. As I left one evening I dropped a couple of full cigarettes in the thing. The video showed them open it up, grab the smokes and start jumping up and down like they hit the lottery.
printerbob
12. So, I used to work in an apartment complex. We had a pool and a gym area, and we had cameras all around to check up on things.
Well, one day, we are just scrolling through the camera footage from the day before, we usually never check it but we were looking for something little. I can’t even remember what it was, because what we ended up finding was so much worse. So we’re scrolling through, and our pool closes at 9 pm so there’s not supposed to be anyone in there till 5 am the next morning.
Well we see a lot of activity in the timeline around like 2 in the morning, so we go there to check it out and BAM immediately in perfect view of the camera are… (story continued on the next page…).
This guy and girl having sex on the floor like nobody’s business. We just sat there in shock. Eventually we scrolled through to try and see who he was and we watched him finish, both of them get up and get dressed, and walk into separate bathrooms without saying anything to each other.
So, he had gotten a hooker, SOMEHOW got into the pool (dunno how cause you need a card to get in and it was blocked cause of the time), did the dirty with her on the floor, right smack dab in view of the cameras, and left.
We finally found out who it was and my manager had to call him and tell him to never do that again….it was quite a fun time.
linguistudies
13. Nuclear security here. We’re on a river. Our cameras have some decent zoom capabilities and we have seen a few couples get it on on the shore on the other side of the river. The most interesting thing I think would be the deer and the coyotes. A pack of coyotes chased a deer around on the frozen river until it fell in the water right next to our intake. Well it froze to death with just the neck and head sticking above the ice. The coyotes lost interest but a mother and baby bobcat would come over every night and chew on it. The wildlife is definitely the best part of our nights usually. That and Netflix.
grumpywarner
14. Guy who sucked at driving the forklift crash it numerous times into product, the walls and the best was when he drove a fork through a garbage bin. He spent maybe five minutes jerking the thing around trying to shake it off, then ten or so minutes trying to catch the side of it in a doorway so it would slide itself off and kept smashing into the wall randomly. Then eventually come guy comes into frame and yells at him, then takes like 10 seconds to pull it off the fork with his hands.
billbapapa
15. Women on night shift taking coffee break right on the factory floor, sitting in a circle playing poker or something else, and doing shots of alcohol.
billbapapa
16. I used to work for a pizza place. The most bizarre thing I ever saw was… (story continued on the next page…).
The most bizarre thing I ever saw was the mascots randomly moving around at night. It was very strange, and got scary when they seemed to decide to move towards my office every night. This happened about a week before the place closed down for good due to sanitation issues.
Skyman2000
17. My brother used to work for a pawn shop that was super small. I mean no larger than 500 sq feet in the actual shop (not counting the storage). He showed me camera footage of a rather large woman going down the tool aisle and shoving several loose tools in her vagina and then walking out. They didn’t pursue charges as they didn’t want to touch the tools.
tff_silverton
18. Used to review overnight footage for a hotel in FL. One night around 3am a couple decided to have sex in the maintenance stairwell. Random dude sneaks up on them, wet willies the man’s butthole, bolts and proceeds to just leave the hotel. Wasn’t even a guest.
19. I work for management in a shopping centre and a few weeks ago a cleaner spotted human feces on the floor outside of a shop. We looked back on the cameras and the shit had fallen out of the pants of an elderly man. He didn’t even flinch. Just kept walking and out it came. It was sad because he was clearly incontinent but there was a little bit of humour to it too.
friendsb4lovers
20. Not a security guard, and this wasn’t first seen on camera, but was caught on camera and then watched multiple times. Happened when I worked at a fast food restaurant (story continued on the same page…).
When I worked fast food, there was a guy who ordered whatever and as we were handing his food out the window, a shoeless kid ran in between his car and our takeout window and snatched his bag of food. We got the guy some more of what he ordered plus complimentary ice cream and we were all just astounded at what happened. My one manager starts laughing from the office because she happened to see it on camera from in there and she was replaying it. By the next week, every employee had seen it and the district supervisor had even watched it on a surprise visit. Like I said, not really caught on camera but we had the ability to watch it over and over.
csoup1414
21. I saw a guy scoping out the place to see if he could rob us. He was checking the burglar bars, the alarm, the cameras and the register. I was the only manager/storefront employee there, so it frightened me because I’m a short, thin girl and knew that I wouldn’t be able to stop him if he were to try and attack me to get to the register. After a good 10 minutes of checking the shop out, he left and never came back.
bishbishbishbish
22. Used to work at a court as overnight weekend security. One night around 1am a man came up and started wiping stuff on the front door. We thought it was ashes from the cigarette garbage things outside. When my partner went outside to tell him to leave, we discovered he was wiping his crap all over the front door. The worst part is he only noticed when he turned around and grabbed the door handle to come back in.
HSharpest
23. My first real job was for a local grocery company in IT. As part of this, we sometimes were pulled into security investigations. One of the stores was missing a large volume of cigarette cartons. So, the security guys set up some hidden cameras in the stocking area to try to catch the culprits. We did not catch the thieves but saw two guys engaging in some mid-day car fornication.
JoeMojo
24. I work at Target.
A woman took her pad out of her panties, and put it on the shelf in the milk fridge. Had to call someone to handle that…
ALWAYS_TELLING_LIES