“Smile, you’re on camera!”
When you walk into a business and are greeted with a sign stating this message, you might do a quick glance around the place to see if you can spot the camera. If you find it, you might give it a wave or a wink and then carry on with your shopping. Most of the footage captured on these cameras is likely to include customers roaming through the aisles of a store checking items off their grocery lists, pumping gas into their cars while showing disgust for the high prices, or picking out the perfect snack and beverage combination before continuing on with their road trips. These tapes are overwhelmingly filled with mundane activities.
Occasionally, however, the people responsible for reviewing security camera footage are caught off guard by unexpected and shocking events that they wish had never occurred in the camera’s view. Below, we’ve gathered some of the most unsettling and upsetting stories of scenes caught on CCTV that have been shared in this Reddit thread, and they might make you appreciate your own job even more, if it doesn’t include reviewing security footage.
Be sure to upvote the stories that you find most disturbing, and let us know in the comments if you have ever had to view security camera tapes for a living. Then, if you’re interested in even more of these creepy stories, you can find another Bored Panda article on the same topic right here.
#1
I’m a little late to the party, but here goes.
I am a correctional officer on the night shift, so my job involves a lot of watching cameras and performing cell checks. One night, I’m sitting in my office around 0300 and some movement on the CCTV catches my eye. I look up and there is this big dude walking through my jail, looking like he was on a mission. The only way into the jail is through the booking room right next to my office, and I was 100 percent sure nobody had walked past me. So my mind starts racing. Did I leave a cell door unlocked? Has a violent inmate escaped? Our cameras are old and the halls are dark at night, so I couldn’t see many details on the guy. Just that he seemed to be scoping all the other inmates out as he made his way through the cell blocks.
As I’m trying to process all of this, I see him suddnely stop and change direction, starting bee-line straight to my office. With no time to do anything else, I jump up and run over to the door, and get ready for the fight.
I waited for what felt like an eternity for this guy to bust my door in, with a full-on adrenaline rush. But he never showed up. I glanced back at the cameras and he was gone, disappeared into the aether.
After scratching my head for a minute, I went to review the footage. That’s when I realized that there was a glitch in our camera’s playback that had caused a half-hour delay, and the guy in the video was just me doing a cell check and heading back to my own office. Never been more relieved in my life.
Image source: Ercfrnss, Matthew Ansley
#2
So many of these will give me nightmares so I’ll throw one in the mix that I never want to forget.
A year back I was working at a hostel and we have security cameras throughout the building. Watching the footage from the camera in the kitchen. It is about 2 am and a very drunk guest walks in, grabs some snacks. and accidentally drops an empty bottle on the ground. He then proceeds to kick it up into the air then kick it again in air, where it flys across the entire length of the room perfectly into the recycling bin. In his drunken state he threw up his hands, ran around in a circle clearly in shock at how amazing he is. Then after looking around he noticed there was noone their to see it. After that he looked visibly depressed and stumbled back out of the kitchen
Image source: xXxwiskersxXx, Kampus Production
#3
I worked as a security guard for a pharmaceutical company. I monitored a bunch of equipment/door alarms as well as cameras.
There was a customer service center in one of the buildings on campus, and the customer service reps tended to be young/attractive. One woman in particular was spectacularly so. She was constantly fending off creeps. Like, people would come to the front desk of a secured building to try to find out where she worked.
I often followed peoples movements out to the parking deck after dark upon request because lots of people were creeped out by the remoteness of it.
There were several nights when I would see guys suspiciously waiting around when her shift ended. I would escort her out, and the security officer at the desk would tell me the guys would leave as soon as they saw me walk out the front door with her. It made me really appreciate how f*****g creepy and scary guys can be around women and made me wonder just what they were intending to do if she was alone.
Image source: tumorrumor
#4
Worked as a harbour master a while ago. Had to check the marinas cameras after a boat was abandoned at our docks. I was looking for the owner. I looked on the tape from the boats first night in the marina. The man who had sailed the boat in was standing on the end of his boat for 2 hours, barely moving. Then at 1:30am he just walked off the back and dropped into the water. He never came back up. Never found his body. Freaky.
Image source: anon, Maël BALLAND
#5
I used to do asset protection for a Walmart in a very heroin addicted area. The creepiest thing was seeing how fast someone would go from completely normal to absolutely out of it in the span of a year because of the drug. You could build a timeline of their demise through CCTV pictures and video.
One man in particular really stood out to me. The first time I apprehended him he was very polite and intelligent. Just stealing to get his fix. A year later and the fourth time I caught him he was basically a shell of a man. He tried running from me and I looked him right in the eyes and said “I know you, Gary Last Name, please don’t run.” The look on his face of someone knowing him who he couldn’t even remember will always stay with me.
Image source: ell98584, Mike Mozart
#6
Not a security officer, but I work in a teaching hospital, and (with permission,) we record surgeries so the interns/residents/attending can review them for Monday Mornings, (basically, meetings where you have to explain what went very bad or very good in the surgical theatre.)
Well, I’m reviewing this one tape where something happened with the anesthesia during the procedure, and had an attending not caught the error, the patient would have definitely left in a body bag. We had to full on stop the surgery, give this poor dude Narcan and crudely sew him up and go back in the next day.
Turns out, one of the interns was skimming narcotics – and as a result was high – and dosed the fentanyl in **milligrams instead of micrograms**.
F**k that intern. And yes, he lost his license.
Image source: kaaaaath, Vidal Balielo Jr.
#7
I used to work Loss Prevention for a big box store.
We had a lady get arrested for public indecency and I was asked to investigate.
I had to follow her backwards from the point of arrest and it was a trip to say the least.
She arrived at the store swerving and nearly hitting several cars.
She entered the store with 2 young children, both of whom are mentally handicapped.
That lady literally dragged those kids around the store, slapping them and tugging at their ears/collars if they didn’t obey.
At some point she just abandons them in the clothing section, walks through the back doors (to the break area) and I’m assuming she thought it was the bathroom because she proceeds to pull down her pants and sh**s all over the fire exit door. She pulls her pants up (without wiping mind you) and goes back to the floor like
Nothing happened. Someone saw what she did and followed her.
Luckily there’s an officer in the store at the time and quickly approaches her when the associate tells him what she did.
Needless to say, she was definitely high and/or drunk and was arrested.
The scary part is, she did not mention those kids not one time.
It wasn’t until I reviewed the tape that I saw they were just still waiting by the shopping cart completely oblivious and afraid to move.
Child services was later called and I still think about those kids often.
Breaks my heart to think about the b******t those kids must still be going through.
Image source: codfish88, Dale Cruse
#8
Was watching cctv footage of a parking deck, and on the ninth level there’s this guy sitting in the middle of the deck, banging his head on one of the pillars. All of a sudden the guy just stops, and runs to the edge. Without stopping or jumping, he flings himself over the edge. I immediately call dispatch and told them what had happened. Few days later I was offered counseling for those events
Image source: Behby_Goose, Jose Espinal
#9
Not necessarily creepy, but I work on security for a popular UK supermarket and came into work one day to find a note asking me to burn an incident off the cameras onto disk. It was something from the car park he previous night, so I figured we’d had a shoplifter in or an accident in the car park, but no, it wasn’t anything as pleasant as that. We’d had a situation where a couple (older white gentleman and youngish Asian female) had been in-store and the night security guy just thought they were acting a bit funny, so he follows them round store on CCTV in-store to see if anything went on. Nothing really happens during this time, though the guy seems to become more and more aggravated.
They go outside having purchased their shopping to pack it into the car boot, when a clear argument occurs between them. He suddenly turns round, kicks the empty trolley across the car park and then smacks her full force in the face outta seemingly nowhere. She recoils in pain, a bit more shouting takes place but she seems to dutifully take her seat in the passenger seat despite what just took place.
During the process of burning this to disk for the Police, since our security guy had called it in as an assault, I had to rewatch the moment where he hits her over and over again, but watch helplessly as she seems to calmly get into the car of the man who just assaulted her. Long story short, she was a mail order bride who was trafficked here and as well as assault he got done for people trafficking, so a pretty wholesome ending to an otherwise awful story.
Image source: cjas1999
#10
I work in a retail store, and for a while I worked security here. Watching the security cameras wasn’t technically my job, but we were consistently short handed in that department and the manager was grooming me for promotion, so I got to fill in and watch the cameras occasionally. One day when we were reviewing footage from overnights, we saw this teenager calmly set down his shopping basket, take off his hat and glasses, and just charge at a wall. Hit it head on. He did this two more times. When he was done, his face was a bloody mess, and he put his hat and glasses back on and just left. Weirded me right the hell out.
Image source: Agnol117, Dean Hochman
#11
Was once working in a backpackers hostel on reception and had to monitor the CCTV for the building while on shift, we had them in all of the corridors but not the bedrooms or bathrooms (obviously). Anyway, a stag group come to stay and the groom is having a heated drunken conversation in one of the stairwells with his (I assume) best man. The argument lasts perhaps 15 minutes before the groom pushes the best man against the wall and the two embrace in the most passionate 10 minute make-out session, fueled with extreme groping and saliva exchange. Shortly after they disappeared into one of the bathrooms together and with a sigh I left the desk to go and interrupt their little session for the sanity of our other guests. I still wonder if the groom ever married his bride (he’d shown me a photo of her earlier in the day) or if he ended up with his ‘bestfriend’..
Image source: WritingFromABasement, Ketut Subiyanto
#12
Saw a chicken walk up the side of a tree at 2am.
Image source: anon, James Wainscoat
#13
When I worked as a security officer it was my first week on the job I watched my boss and another officer try to talk a guy off of the top of our parking structure. Didn’t work watched him jump off and land next to an employee who was coming in for her shift. Guy hit the ground so hard it exploded the belt right off of his pants. I will never forget watching that.
Image source: Blumpkin_MCStuffins, Nate Isaac
#14
I used to do IT support for a company that had a lot of heavy machinery moving around inside a big warehouse type area. This giant front end loader would scoop up material and dump it into a hopper. Along the sides of the floor were these huge concrete barriers, (I’ve heard them called Jersey Barriers and Mafia Blocks, but they are about ten feet tall) and this one guy’s life was ended when the front end loader inadvertently scooped the base of the barrier and landed on one of two guys walking shoulder to shoulder through the plant.
I was tasked to review the footage, then make copies…six of them, to be exact…and then ensure that the footage worked and was self-executable and able to be run from a usb stick. So I had to watch the footage of this guy get killed over a dozen times.
I, too, was offered counseling for just watching the video.
Image source: shotgunsmitty, Rich Howard
#15
Creepy then funny. I was a property manager at a giant apartment complex for a year. Part of my job was to take complaints that came in during my off hours, review tapes to see what the cams caught, then address the problem. We got calls for people f*****g in the spa a lot. On the video: a young couple was doing the biz in the spa in just about every position. I recognized them and got the form out to issue the warning when the maintainance supervisor says hold on, he zooms all the way in and across the property, he could see a woman we all knew sitting on her patio smoking a cigarette watching. We thought, oh man shes enjoying the show. Then we notice theres the glow of the cig and a second glow, a small red light. She was taping the whole thing with a handi cam. She was a pastor at the local church who was always telling us how bad we were for allowing smoking and drinking on the property. She recommended multiple times that we update our rules to align more with the moral teachings of the church.
Image source: Frank-Wrench
#16
The closest to a horror movie IRL thing I’ve ever seen:
Some of the patient rooms in our hospital on the “psych” floor have cameras to help monitor patients so they don’t move around too much or hurt themselves since they are often confused etc.
Obviously the “night vision” low light camera makes everything look creepy. One night a phlebotomist came running out of a room totally freaking out.
We looked at the camera footage to see what had happened. Patient was an old lady. Video shows a dark empty room, the phlebotomist walks in and sees that the bed is empty and thinks they must have moved the patient. At that point as she turns around the door swings and standing behind the door looking at her what I can only describe as *pure hatred* in her eyes is the patient, naked, with her long hair down to her waist.
The phlebotomist was scared as anyone would be. She finally managed to say “Mrs. Shelby I’m from the lab and I’m here to draw some blood, is that OK?”
And the patient just said “**No. GET OUT.”**
Phlebotomist didn’t need to be told twice.
We walked over to the room and the old lady was back in bed sleeping as peaceful as could be, never remembered a moment of it.
Image source: moby323, Erkan Utu
#17
Worked at a hydro power plant in NC. The top was a walkway with a 30 foot drop off the back. Drunk group of guys is playing around on the edge, we see them on the cams, we call the authorities. In the time between, one of them falls.
The thing is the water on the back side is being pulled into the dam. He falls into the penstock. We think he’s dead, the 30 foot fall, getting sucked under water, through the cage, and out. We go out to find the body, and we find him, coughing and bruised.
Image source: Neven87
#18
I’ve seen footage of a kayaker get taken out by a swan.
Not creepy – just hilarious
Image source: Forgetful8eight
#19
I work in the corporate office of a big security company. You might say I watch the watchers. Most people don’t know that CCTV control rooms almost always have a camera watching the operator. When something goes terribly wrong or terribly strange, I get to see the footage. The world is full of weird, but two events come to mind.
We had an employee who worked overnights monitoring CCTV. She stopped making timely log entries, so we looked in on her. She was spending much of her night having an animated conversation with one of the tv monitors. According to her, her mother talked to her through it every night since she died.
Image source: whatsamatterhorn, Seth Sawyers
#20
While on a nightshift I saw someone sat on a bridge, looked away to call the police, looked up and they were gone, spain the camera down and saw a spatted mess of human, now that’s one thing I won’t forget in a hurry and really want to
Image source: Blueeyedfoxie, JULIO NERY
#21
Was a security coordinator for a large electric company and had access to like 80+ facility’s CCTV infrastructures. Was doing maintenance check on some random train station at like 3 AM, panned a camera as far to the right as possible to check that it was functioning, and this dude was on all fours eating a deer in the middle of the tracks. Watched him for like 10 minutes and went to get the other guy on shift, when I came back, the dude was gone. Rewound it, and the dude stopped munching on the carcass, wiped the gore off his face, and walked into the woods like he didn’t have a care in the world.
Read all the comments most asked questions and answers that I noticed:
Where did this happen? Iowa
Why did you just stand there like a dumb a*s? Was late at night at a middle of a long shift, also didn’t really process wtf was happening. Kinda forgot I had someone else in the office that could come over and see wtf was going on.
What was he wearing? Was kinda hard to tell, as the CCTV was basically filming at the end of its effective view, looked like he was wearing some kinda heavy outer wear, like something you would work outside in the winter with. It was late fall, so nights would dip into the 30s.
Pics or it didn’t happen. Part of the job was a very restrictive NDA, as in you can’t bring any sort of recording out of the facility. I wasn’t even allowed to bring a note pad with my nightly notes out of the office. Plus this was before most people had decent cameras on their phones. We still were using film cameras to do most documentation.
Image source: Nissir, Jeff Cleary
#22
One time there was a spider on the lens. It was big… it stayed there for like 3 days.
Image source: simplerthings
#23
Not me, but at a hospital where I used to work on graveyard shift. Security guys kept seeing this homeless guy enter the parking garage elevator around the same time each evening. They realized that they never see him come out again. He doesn’t reappear on any of the parking garage floors, nor into the sky bridge leading from the parking garage into the hospital, or anywhere else. So they talk to day shift, and all the guys review some of the past week’s morning footage together. They see the guy leaving around the same time every day. This had only been going on for a few days when they noticed it. Anyhow, maintenance was called in to inspect the elevator, and it turned out that the guy had been sleeping up on top of the elevator itself. Apparently he had a stash of food up there and everything. It was interesting and sad at the same time.
Image source: Ghost_of_a_Black_Cat
#24
I was working at pub in Sydney and watching the CCTV when I saw a guy continually cross and uncross his legs while playing a poker/slot machine. After a few minutes he walked to a corner of the room, took a s**t and proceeded to go back to playing his machine. Talk about being addicted!
To answer some of your questions, this kind of thing is not rare. Mostly it’s people pissing themselves. These machines are evil and designed to get people addicted and that results in some people not being able to pull themselves away, even to use a bathroom. Finally, thank god I’m a manager, but telling someone it was their job sucked.
Image source: walko2232, cottonbro
#25
My time to shine! My first job out of college was working for a bigas** security company (think worldwide big). I was doing Electrical engineering and security system design for them.
One of the first assignments I had was assisting in writing a report about a security system for a nuclear storage facility we had designed that had been infiltrated by nuns (no joke).
Basically, the facility got invaded by octogenarian nuns who started covering the nuclear storage facility in blood they had conveniently provided in water bottles. The footage was…..jarring…in quite a few ways.
Image source: GlastonBerry48, Morgaine
#26
Worked security in one of the larger financial buildings in downtown Toronto a number of years back as a control room operator. The complex has hundreds of cameras monitoring the inside and outside of this building and I spent most of my 12 hour day and night shifts just people watching. It is honestly pretty amazing what people do when they don’t think they are being watched (a lot of parking lot sex on weekends for example).
During a night shift, I have witnessed someone walk through the PATH system (underground tunnel system connecting many Toronto buildings) covered in blood with an eye popped out, someone eating their own toenails, some following others while discretely touching themselves, etc.
One of the weirder creepy ones though was a man walking through the building in the dead of night (before lock ups) slowly, carrying a single balloon. That one got to me.
Image source: WarCarrotAF
#27
Left my dog to have do some chore in backyard and came back to find my 8 month old Dog dead in my yard with blood oozing out of her mouth was too shocked with what happned and as i loved her so much.
After 2 days when i felt stable I Looked at my home security camera and saw footage of her being run over by car and how she came to my frequently used chair trying to find me and collasped there in the yard….
Damm those ninjas cutting onions again……
(Sorry english is not my first language)
Image source: boyz_zones, Thirdman
#28
This was around 1997. In college, was a traffic reporter in a largeish city. I worked in a studio with live video feeds from our cameras all over the city/region. One Monday afternoon another reporter came running in & yelled “turn camera #7 to the underpass by (big football stadium)!” A man & woman were going at it big time over the hood of his truck. After about seven minutes, they took a break, & he got sandwiches & beer out of a cooler in the back. After snacking, they went at it again.
After about a half-hour one of us suddenly remembered that one of our TV affiliates had started linking the video feeds on their website.
Image source: Tweetystraw, KoolShooters
#29
Security guard currently for big pharma plant. Watched a guy make out with a barrel of some unknown chemical in the dispensing room.
Couldn’t bring myself to report it.
Image source: Dark_Shade_75, No Revisions
#30
I watched a homeless looking teen receive a handful of cash from a man before pulling down his pants and pooping in front of him.
Image source: BaconJellyBeans
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