34 Times Surveillance Cameras Captured Pure Nightmare Fuel

Often, when you walk into a public space with surveillance cameras, signs warn you that you’re being recorded. You might assume that people behave themselves knowing this, but reality often tells a different story.

We’ve gathered stories from people who work in surveillance, answering questions like: “What’s the most unexplained or creepy thing you’ve seen on video?” From injured strangers to unexpected animal visitors, the footage can be bizarre, eerie, and downright unsettling. Keep reading, and next time you spot a camera, you might think twice.

Discover more in 49 Times Surveillance Cameras Captured Pure Nightmare Fuel

Click here & follow us for more lists, facts, and stories.

#1

LPO here. I see crazy stuff all the time. One of the creepiest things I have seen was a string of toys moving on its own down an aisle. It was like a duck with smaller ducks. Of course, I had to investigate. When I zoomed in, I was surprised to see that they were real ducks.

#2

Had a game camera out once and I had a neighbor who would just walk through my property (I didn’t care, the place is pretty and there’s no back fence) But I kept having sheep go missing so I set out a camera.

The camera caught my neighbor walking by, then like 30 seconds later a mountain lion walked by it stalking him. It apparently never attacked as he was fine, but he had no idea how close he was to that thing.

#3

Didn’t have a job in security, but when I worked at Sears in high school there was a theft in my department and the LP team pulled us into their surveillance room to interview us.

While they were asking me questions, I kept being distracted by all the monitors. Right above the guy asking me questions, I saw a small tv that had 16 smaller screens and realized the cameras were in the dressing rooms.

I didn’t see anyone in there at the time and the guy interviewing me saw me looking. He turned to the console and turned that monitor off real quick. Super creepy if you ask me.

TL;DR Sears has cameras in their dressing rooms.

#4

I edited together the footage from the security cameras outside Pulse before, during and after the shooting. Though there were many sad and/or disturbing things to be seen, the strange one was a wounded man that appeared out of nowhere.

He waved his hands for help and he cops came over and carried him to safety. I tried numerous times to rewind to find out where he came from, but he was just there or he wasn’t. He didn’t crawl to where he had gotten, he just appeared.

He looked like he made it out okay.

#5

I don’t work in surveillance, but have a home security system.

I left for work one morning, walked out my back door, got in my car, and pulled out of my driveway.

The moment I left the driveway, a homeless would-be burglar, came out from hiding on the side of my house and tried to open my back door. When he found it locked, he reluctantly wandered off after looking around a bit.

Never would have known if it wasn’t for cameras.

Makes you wonder what goes on without your knowledge.

#6

Obligatory not a surveillance worker, but I used to manage a retail swimming pool store and we had a nice koi pond in the side yard. I chiefly cared for it, feeding the fish and cleaning out the leaves/filter, etc so I named all the fish and grew to care about them. Then one day I was walking through the side yard to get to the back office when I noticed there were no fish in the pond. It’s not a big pond, maybe a foot or two at its deepest and 7′ long. It’s not like they were all hiding! I at first thought someone hopped the fence at night and stole the fish – koi are expensive after all. So I reviewed the security footage from the night before to try and catch the cretin who did this. And at 6am I caught him.

A giant heron with a 6′ wingspan came down and helped himself to some lox for breakfast. Man I felt sad. Luckily one of the fish survived, he later came out of some hiding hole in the wall. He was named Subway because he was about a foot long. We bought more fish to keep him company and I made a rock cove covering over half the pond so they could flee in case the dam heron came back.

#7

I used to work security at a college dorm and I once witnessed one of the doors on a washing machine slowly open itself and proceed to tear itself clean off of the machine. Told my boss this ‘creepy story’ and showed him the video and he made me review camera footage for the rest of the night to find out who broke the machine despite the fact that he watched it break itself.

#8

Game cameras set up to watch our trap line caught a man in a purple hoodie stopping in the middle of the trail, standing there for several minutes, then continuing on the trail to the next camera while being followed by three large raccoons. Five cameras, same thing at each one. Man, raccoons.

No idea who the guy was, or why he apparently walked his raccoons on private property in the dark.

#9

Work as a doctor in a hospital in the UK, was on a night shift that was particularly quiet and some of the nurses were sitting around telling this story:

A young doctor was running to a crash call. Our hospital is a giant L shape, with the front entrance being at the bend. A woman stopped him and asked him which way the exit was. He directed her and kept running. When he got to the patient, it was the woman who asked him for directions. She died.

Apparently it got caught on the CCTV — that that doctor stopped mid-running down the hallway, and gestured toward the exit while saying something to no one in particular.

#10

I worked in a maximum security prison for awhile. I was assigned to central control one night, which is where the camera screens were.

One of the cameras was for the classifications room. I glanced at it and there was an inmate in there. This was super odd because it was two in the morning and nobody was supposed to be in there. Everyone that had keys to that room went home at 5.

Anyways, so this inmate is just sitting in there doing nothing. I got the sergeant’s attention and told him someone was in there, and gave him the spare key to the room. He went to go check it out with a couple of other people, but by the time they got there, the room was empty. They searched for like 15 minutes but there was definitely no one in there.

#11

We have security cameras at my house. One night around 12am-1am, heard this loud crash. Go to look out front and our car is smashed in. Apparently what had happened was our neighbors girlfriend was celebrating her 23rd at her friends. Afterwards, she decided she was gonna drive across town to stay at her boyfriends. Two houses away, she slammed head on into the only car on the street. The cameras caught the car being pushed backwards and you can see her drive off, then drive past and then the third time, she stopped. 23 years old and was arrested for her third DUI.

#12

Not surveillance but a home security footage.

I had been living with my godparents at the time. It was around 6 PM and my godfather gets back from work and asks why there is blood near the pool in the backyard. I had been in the room right next to the pool the whole time so I had no idea what he was talking about.

We pull up the security footage and it shows a man jumping the fence in broad daylight, cutting himself with the barbed wire, and looking for ways to get into the house through the back.

I was maybe 10 feet away from him at one point and did not hear a thing. Scary to think what could’ve happened if a window was open.

#13

I used to work at a place which required to be manned 24 hours a day. Reason being is that I handled sensitive documents/files and if somebody needed this information in the middle of the night I would have to fetch it for them (or confirm that I have it).

Anyways, security is kind of tight. Bars on windows, multiple locked doors to get to where I am. They would give me work to do during the night, but underestimated how quickly I could get it done. So like most nights, i finished my work in like 30 to 45 minutes and pulled out my phone and played games / Netflix browse reddit (since nobody else is in the building at night).

So now it is getting to be the last third of my shift when all of the sudden I hear a door close. I look to the security camera and see someone walking down a hall towards my room. At first I thought it was just somebody that came in (ridiculously) early, so I turn around and wait for them to come in. But nobody came in, and the hairs start rising on my back. Now, this isn’t a really big building so I figure I’ll find the guy wherever he is and start checking offices and storage rooms but come up empty handed, however i do see that a fire door had shut. I go to try and rewind the camera, but the digital recording is password protected and i don’t know the password. Anyways the whole thing freaked me out, the way the person was walking down the hallway, like a determined walk right to where I was.

So, I sit with my spine tingling for the last couple hours of my shift and finally people start coming in, my replacement shows up and I tell her what I saw and at this point I figured I must have imagined the whole thing. I’m told to go home and the manager and girl who replaced me would look over the camera. After getting home I call my manager and ask what was on the camera. So they said that the video showed the fire door closing but then the video froze for about an hour, the next thing it records is me reopening the door.

#14

This happened a few years before I started working at my current job. The elevators in my building go down to the first and second basement. Late one night, one of our security guards spots a group of people heading into the elevator at Level 4. He thinks it’s curious because nobody is supposed to be in the building after midnight, so he keeps a close watch on all the lobby cameras to see which floor the group alights at.

The doors open at Basement Two, but nobody comes out. The second guard scurries down to the elevator doors while the first guard keeps his eye on the cameras to make sure no one has left. When the second guard gets to the basement elevator, he looks puzzled and searches around. He comes back to the guard station to confirm that it’s empty.

Putting the building on lockdown, the two guards spend the rest of the night combing the building together but they were unable to find anyone or anything. They decide to call the police, who review the footage and see the same thing. In the end, the sighting was still unexplained but my workplace decided to stop being cheap and install security cameras in the elevators too.

#15

I have cameras on my front and back doors that send video to my phone when they detect movement. I was out of town and woke up to seeing several police officers walking around in my front and back yard. I called my neighbor to find out what had happened and found out that someone had crashed their car through my back fence, which borders the highway.

#16

I used to work overnights at a hotel, and would monitor the security cameras. They would detect motion and a little indicator would blink when motion was… well, detected. Anyway, it always gave me the creeps when I’d hear the elevator ding… I’d run out to the lobby to great the guest to make sure they didn’t need something or whatever, and nobody would get off the elevator. I’d watch the tapes and see the motion indicator blinking on a floor, then see the elevator open on that floor, then see the elevator open on the ground floor and the motion indicator blink on the camera down the hall. Gave me the heeby jeebies.

Also one time I was in my office in the middle of the night and it sounded like someone banged on the door with the side of their fist. Just one single SLAM. You can see me reacting to it on the video–my head whipped to face the door where the sound came from, then immediately whipped around to stare at the camera to see who was outside my door. There was nobody there, and none of the motion sensors had picked up anything. Not fun finishing the rest of that shift.

#17

About a year ago, I had cameras installed around my house, initially to catch mail thieves. One morning after noticing my back gate ajar, I reviewed the footage from the night before. I watched as a would-be burglar at 3am pry open the gate and creep towards the living room. He suddenly stopped and started backing away when he noticed I was home and awake. (I was actually just a few feet away in the living room with the blackout curtains closed) He must have spotted light peeking out at the bottom of the curtains. The motion-activated lights kicked on as he simultaneously ran out the back gate and into the woods behind our yard. I was awake transitioning to a midshift – and ironically had a table full of guns as I disassembled them for cleaning after a day at the range. It’s probably good that I didn’t see him or hear him that night – we both would have freaked out.

#18

I used to work part time doing surveillance work for an art gallery. I went in horribly sick one day because I worked on a contract and had to meet a quota for so many hours, otherwise I’d have to make it up elsewhere (which was borderline impossible for me because I only had free time on weekends, when they were closed).

So, here I am with a fever and a trashcan, dripping sweat and staring at these screens when, all of a sudden, on the lower gallery, I see this black, oozing mass creeping across the floor. It just kinda slithered across the brick, up the wall, pooled into a perfect circle in the middle of the room. Then, it stood up into this weird, enlongated shadow person with spindly arms and no eyes, “looked” up at the camera, then very rapidly melted back into the floor and bolted toward the hallway that led to my desk.

I screamed. Then, I threw up.

Also, no, that thing wasn’t really there. I was just way sicker than I thought; it was a fever hallucination. My boss came in and sent me home shortly after she came to see if I had died, and I actually still use that weird, gangly thing my brain came up with as a motif in some of my art. Haha.

#19

I posted this not long ago for a similar question, but here it is again as it’s the strangest thing i’ve come across in my place.

I work for a security company, we install and monitor CCTV on construction sites.

One night (about 2am) our response officer gets a call from the monitoring station to say there’s a guy walking around one of the buildings under construction. They described him as tall, dressed in all black with his hood up, but couldn’t see his face because he had his back to the camera.
He wasn’t stealing or vandalising, just wandering around (usually homeless looking for shelter).

So the response goes to investigate. When he gets there there’s nobody around, so he asks the station to check the camera covering the way in/out of the building to see which direction he went, but there’s nothing. He does a full patrol of the site and there’s no trace of anyone.

The only other way for this guy to get out was to shimmy down scaffolding and he could be hurt so the response officer asks the station to do a check on all of the camera footage through the night to see if there’s any sign of him leaving. Nothing.

The next day we ask the station to send over the stills from when they initially picked the intruder up. He’s not on any of them. Just footage of our response officer walking around.

We were pretty freaked out talking about it in the office and it was laughed off as the monitoring officer being sleepy and seeing things, except the cameras we use have IR beams and they only alert the monitoring station when someone breaks them.

#20

OK, this is more stupid than unexplained, but it was unexplained until the footage was reviewed.

Brother’s In-laws own a pub. One night, all the alarms start going off. This is unusual because if you were breaking into a place, and the alarm goes off, you would quickly grab something and run away. For all of the alarms to go off, you would have to have a whole bunch of people running amok through the pub or one person who doesn’t care about the alarms.

He calls the police and races to the pub. One of the front doors has been smashed to pieces. A giant rock is lying on the floor. One of the bar areas has been disturbed. A lockbox is missing. The pub appears to be empty. He stands outside the door so no-one else can get in.

The police arrive and do a sweep. Nothing further is found. They review the footage to find:

Drunk man staggers up to door, carrying a giant rock. It does not take a big rock to smash a glass door. The rock was bigger than a basketball.

Man holds rock above his head and throws it though the glass door. He casually steps through the smashed glass; alarm sounds but man does not appear to notice or care.

In no particular hurry, drunk man walks behind the bar, opens a fridge and pulls out a bottle of cider. He drinks it and leaves the bottle on the bar.

He then starts looking around for money and finds a lockbox with a couple of thousand dollars in it for a footy tipping competition.

He puts the box on the bar and grabs a bottle of Jack Daniels, before casually strolling out into the night holding the bottle and the lockbox.

The police found him at the railway station. He was asleep on the bench with the money from the lockbox in his pocket. Next to him was a bin containing a broken lockbox and an empty bottle of Jack Daniels.

I can only assume this criminal mastermind thought he was pulling off the heist of the century in his drunken stupor.

EDIT: I should point out that to this day they have no idea where the giant rock came from. The pub is opposite a park which does not appear to have any landscaping rocks and the nearest house would be over 150m away. It took two people to remove the rock.

#21

I’m a private investigator, I once followed a guy who brought a Chucky doll the size of a child into his car almost everywhere he went and strapped it into a child seat. He was in his twenties. I had the case as I was hired by his ex wife in regards to custody, so that’s why he had the car seat. The only reasonable reason I could come up with was to fake out cameras in a carpool lane but he never used one when I followed him.

#22

I have a home security system with a camera that watches in the living room. I saw my cat and my dog both sitting together in the dogs bed.

The cat hates the dog. I think she was possessed.

#23

My personal trainer once told me that the security cameras once caught an intruder who, honest to god, fell through the ceiling of the gym and swiped an iPod belonging to the gym or one of its staffers, I don’t remember which. Whoever the burglar was, he really went through a lot of trouble to swipe only an iPod.

#24

I was house sitting in a huge house and set up a canary camera near my bedroom. I had an uneasy feeling someone else was in the house with me so I set up the camera just to make sure no one came near my room. In the middle of the night someone approached it from behind and turned it so it faced a blank wall. Then a few minutes later turned it back the way it was before. It tripped the canary and I got a notification on my phone. I saw it and searched the house thoroughly the next morning and never found anything. Needless to say, I slept with my door locked the rest of my time there.

#25

So this doesn’t have anything to do with surveillance, nor videos, but a story that my dad told me that scared him, and he was never able to explain.

Back in the 90’s my dad and I live in a 2 story house, I had just started walking. My bedroom and crib were on the 2nd floor, down the hall from my dad’s room. One morning, he woke up and went to say bye to me before leaving for work. When he got to my room, he noticed I wasn’t there. He went back and looked to see if I was in their bed, I wasn’t. In a panic he started searching around the house.

After awhile, he noticed that the front door and screen door had both been unlocked and left open. As he went outside, he heard me bawling my eyes out. He finally found me, in the back of his lifted Ford truck.

He told me that he has never been more scared, and hated to think about how I got there.

#26

This was on my home surveillance system. There was a home invasion robbery near me, so after the cops came (and arrested the perps) I checked for surveillance footage.

There’s me, taking out the trash. Less than ten feet from me, the two cars (a total of six criminals) made a u-turn in front of my house before committing the crime.

So the criminals literally drove past me, then drove up the street to do a robbery. They broke in the back door of a house, two teenagers were home alone. The kids hid and called the cops. Nobody got hurt, cops arrested all the crooks.

#27

I frequently spend nights alone in a building by myself, sorta not really watching a camera feed.

Really haven’t seen anything weird, but I did get a chuckle this one time. It was spring, and apparently we had some kind of fruit-bearing tree on the property. Some suburban mom pulls into the lot, jumps out of her minivan, and looks at the tree. She sends a text on her phone, and starts picking fruit off the tree.

Within 30 seconds, there were five more suburban moms in the parking lot. Then eight. Then ten. They brought a ladder. That tree was STRIPPED in four minutes flat, and they all jumped back into their cars and disappeared. You could have gone to the bathroom and missed the whole thing.

#28

I dunno about creepy but definitely horrible. I was security at a company that makes electronic parts for space shuttles and military planes. We had PTZ camera’s that scanned not only the outside of the building but that could also be used to check out traffic on the highway. There was this one incident where one truck driver hit a parked (he had broke down) deadheading truck driver at about 70mph. Impact Killed the sitting driver and busted the conventional Cab all over the road, truck and body parts were picked up By the first responders. PTZ caught it all….that was about the creepiest most horrible thing I have ever seen on the PTZ cameras at work.

#29

I manage a conveniece store, and since getting one more person to just look at security feeds will just cost me more, I just assigned myself to look at it regularly. I noticed a kid at the candy section at around 1pm just staring at the goods. 1:30, kid still staring. 1:40, kid you’ve got to be kidding me.

I went and checked if the camera feed is paused or having an error. Nope. Maybe the camera itself is having a problem, but nah, just saw one customer passed by. Had to call the cashier to wave at the camera. YEP. Totally working. So I told the cashier to ask the kid if he’s okay.

Cashier said “What kid??? It’s just noon don’t joke around boss”

Had to lie and say “I almost got you haha”. I don’t want an employee quitting on me because of these things. I restarted the whole security system, when it came back, no kid in sight. I just passed it as some weird bug or whatnot because I stay alone at the second floor when the store is closed. I dont want myself quitting on this business.

#30

As per expected i don’t work in surveillance…but was shown a video online of home surveillance footage. the footage shows a man accessing the property and crouching his way up to a window on the ground floor which happened to be a bedroom of a woman. He looked through the window for about 20 minutes before leaving. IIRC he done this on more than 1 occasion.

Just a video online but still pretty spooky if you ask me.

#31

Last week we had to call the cops when my girlfriend’s cellphone was stolen off the porch of our apartment which is a room sectioned off on the first floor of an old mansion with a fenced in balcony/porch.

Officer asked to see surveillance tapes and the maintenance guy let us come along and watch to help with time frames and narrow down the footage.

Unfortunately we never saw the person who took her phone. Right about the time we expected to see someone grab the phone, however, we did see a man (not a resident, there are four of us and we all know each-other) who appeared to be running from something frantically and at full force **enter the only door of the building and never leave even after over 24 hours of footage.**.

#32

I left my truck in neutral and it rolled down a hill and crashed into a tree. The guard told me the next week he and his co-workers watched me chase it trying to stop it. It sounded like they enjoyed the video. :-(.

#33

It’s not what I saw on the monitors, but what I didn’t see.

You see, I’m a security guard at a distribution warehouse. Sometimes I have to work the graveyard shift.

During this time the only people on the premises is me, and a rare truck driver bringing in a late load.

Our guard shack is concrete, with sliding glass doors on the sides (no locks) and big windows in front and back.

Sometimes when I’m the only person on the premises, I’ll see a reflection of someone walking past the shack in the windows or the doors.

Every inch of this shack and the yard is covered by security cameras. No one has shown up on the footage when I see these reflections.

It’s not a reflection of me, as I’m usually sitting down.

And yes, this might seem familiar; I’ve posted this story a couple of times before.

#34

We recorded thousands of miles of High resolution video for a test drive we were doing. Saw some stuff on the night drives. Most were probably animals. However there was one that was a black mass about 7ft tall just kind of hovering on the side of a road. The cars were stopped on the side of the road to check something. All of a sudden the thing darted across the road towards one of the cars but disappeared before it reached it.

You Might Also Like: 15 Celebs Who Are Secretly Really Buff