These days, there are security cameras almost everywhere. Every time someone leaves their home to go to the grocery store, drive to work, or just walk around their block, they are likely to be caught on at least one security camera, maybe many. They are in streetlights, on building corners, inside of stores, looking out from ATMs, and in many other places, some of which no one suspects at all.
And there are people watching those cameras too. It shouldn't surprise anyone that sometimes the people looking at the camera feeds witness some strange, disturbing, and downright creepy things! The stories on this list are from people who have seen something so strange on their security camera footage that they just had to share it with the world.
Don't forget to check the comment section below the article for more interesting stories!
#1 Blew Her Belt Off
When I worked as a security officer, I watched my boss and another officer try to talk a guy off of the top of our parking structure. It didn't work and I watched him jump off, landing inside a dumpster. Luckily, our parking structure was only two stories high, so he didn't get too hurt. However, the guy hit the dumpster so hard his belt exploded right off of his pants. I will never forget watching that.
#2 The Little Victories
I was working at a hostel and there were security cameras throughout the building. I was watching the footage from the camera in the kitchen at about 2 a.m. when a very tipsy guest walked in. He grabbed some snacks, then accidentally dropped an empty bottle on the ground. He then proceeded to kick it up into the air, causing it to fly across the entire length of the room and land perfectly into the recycling bin. In his tipsy state, he threw up his hands and ran around in a circle, clearly in shock.
#3 Just Stopped Everything
I was watching CCTV footage of a parking deck and on the ninth level, there was a guy sitting in the middle of the deck, banging his head on one of the pillars. I immediately called for help because I had a feeling the guy was in some trouble. Security was able to calm him down and bring him inside, where he explained he had just lost his job.
#4 The Worst Day To Be The IT Guy
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, and this one worker's life was ended when the front-end loader inadvertently scooped the base of the barrier and dropped it on him as he was walking through the plant. I was tasked to review the footage, make copies (six of them, to be exact) and ensure that the footage worked. I must have watched the incident on film over a dozen times.
#5 Beating The Wall With His Face
I work in a retail store. Watching the security cameras wasn’t technically my job, but we were consistently shorthanded 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 the overnights, we saw this teenager calmly set down his shopping basket, take off his hat and glasses, and just charge at a wall. He 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. It weirded me out.
#6 Random Burglary
I used to work IT at a university, and last Easter we had a break in. We found the footage of the guy going in at 2 p.m., then leaving at around 3 p.m. without really taking anything. Fast forward to 7 p.m. when the guy came back in. He was walking around the auditorium till 6 a.m. the next morning. In that time, he proceeded to strip into his underwear and steal six full bags of random items.
#7 The Things Left Behind
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 backward from the point of arrest and it was a trip, to say the least. She entered the store with two young children, both of whom were mentally handicapped. That lady literally dragged the kids around the store, tugging at their ears if they didn’t obey.
At some point, she just abandoned them in the clothing section. She walked through the back doors to the break area and I assumed she thought it was the bathroom because she proceeded to pull down her pants and go all over the fire exit door. She pulled her pants back up and went back to the floor as if nothing happened. Someone saw what she did and followed her.
Luckily, there was an officer in the store at the time. He quickly approached her when the associate told him what she did. Needless to say, she was arrested. The scary part is, she did not mention those kids once while she was being arrested. 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 Protective Services were later called and I still think about those kids often.
#8 Movement In The Night
We had security cameras installed on the property whilst we were living in South Africa. We had a monitor set up next to the bed so we could see what was happening on the four cameras without having to get up out of bed. One night, we heard something, so we turned on the monitor. We saw nothing unusual. I was ready to go back to sleep but, my partner thought something was off about one of the cameras.
"Does this camera look like its pointing in a different direction slightly?" she asked.
"No. Same as always," I replied, before rolling over and going back to sleep.
She wasn't convinced, so she started watching the recordings. True enough, the footage showed some dude prowling around on the property. The camera caught him adjusting it. The terrifying bit? The way his face looked beneath the balaclava. He looked like he was out to do something absolutely grisly. That's when I realized how worthwhile a security camera investment is.
#9 Diving Onto Concrete
Years ago, I worked overnight at a homeless shelter for men. One night, when I arrived for my shift, I noticed there was a much larger police presence than usual. I walked into our office and the officer in charge started asking me if I had noticed a guy behaving unusually. I had not seen anything out of the ordinary and I told them such.
The police left without telling me anything except the fact that they needed security footage from two specific cameras from the night before. I did not work the night before and the guy I normally worked with pulled a no-show. We were the only two people besides the manager, who was on a holiday, that were trained on how to burn footage to a DVD.
I spent the rest of my shift in shock. When I found the footage they were looking for, I felt physically ill. The suspect in question had gone out onto the second-floor deck, got up on the railing, and leaped. The first camera on the second floor showed him jump. He was hurt with some broken bones but at least he was still alive. He had a lot of explaining to do.
#10 Steal The Eagle
We have an old fountain at my apartment building that has a large eagle statue. One night, I had to check the security cameras because of a break in. At 2 a.m., I came across footage of about five guys trying to steal the eagle statue. It was actually quite humorous to see all five of them fail at lifting it from the ground. Maybe they were tipsy.
#11 Just Floating Around
At one of our locations, the overnight technician looked at the cameras and saw a customer floating through the hallways with their body stiff as a board. He said it sent a shiver down his spine. The guy rounded the corner and on the next camera, he realized the guy was actually just riding on a hoverboard through the hallways.
#12 Stare Too Long Into An Abyss...
My mom works on a cruise ship and has to go through surveillance footage. She said she has nightmares of one simple but creepy incident. One night, a guy walked out of a cabin into the view of the camera and stood for a few minutes, doing nothing. Then, he looked up at the camera, moved as close to it as possible and smiled into the camera for about five minutes. She said it was just something she couldn't get out of her head. It made her feel so uncomfortable.
#13 Infiltrators In Habits
My first job out of college was working for a big security company. I had to assist in the writing of a report regarding the security system footage for a nuclear storage facility we had designed. Basically, the facility got invaded by octogenarian nuns who were protesting at the plant for reasons I'm not even sure of.
#14 Ignore The Seizing Man
I saw a guy at my old job suffer from a seizure on camera. He was in town regularly and never took care of himself. He always looked off, but he was never tipsy. In the middle of counting his change, his head snapped up in the air like he was looking to the heavens above. Then, he just fell right onto the ground. His head missed a wooden display by an inch or two.
He flailed around and all the change he had was scattered along the ground. One of the guys I worked with called 911. Paramedics ended up coming and taking him to the hospital. He was okay, but he ended up spending a couple of days there. Despite the fortunate ending, the footage is still pretty jarring to watch.
#15 Midnight Deer Snack
I was a security coordinator for a large electric company and had access to 80 of the facility's CCTV infrastructures. I was doing a maintenance check on some random train station at like, 3 a.m. I panned a camera as far to the right as possible to check that it was functioning and ended up seeing a dude on all fours eating a deer in the middle of the tracks.
I watched him for like ten minutes and went to get the other guy on shift. When I came back, the dude was gone. I rewinded the tape 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. We got the police involved soon after but they never got back to us with anything.
#16 Horror Movie Granny
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. 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. The patient was an old lady. In a dark empty room, the phlebotomist walked in and saw that the bed is empty. As she turned around, the door swung open and standing behind it was the patient, with naked and with pure hatred in her eyes. 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.”
The 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. She never remembered even a moment of it.
#17 The Woodsman
I used to be a security guard at a factory. There was a parking lot that was next to the woods, and one night, a man came out of the tree line and stared into the camera for an hour straight. We called the authorities to make a trespassing complaint as none of us wanted to go out and confront him. Around the hour mark, he suddenly sprinted back into the woods. The police never found anyone.
#18 Not The Butt You Expect
I used to work in IT. One time, I needed to clean up a network drive and found a saved security camera video folder labeled "butt man." I had to go ask the security guy who butt man was and if I could delete the file. Turned out, it was a man whom, in the middle of the night, would raid our disposal bucket near the side door, empty the contents into a bag, and run off; all while being butt naked.
#19 Logging Reactions
I watched footage from the previous night of a nurse walking onto an elevator, casually talking on the phone. As she walked off, she went #2 by accident. The following 60 minutes of video were of hilarious reactions, and lack of reactions, to what had just happened. The lack of reaction came from random folks who didn't look up from their phone. One unfortunate soul stepped right in it. I wonder if they ever noticed that they stepped into it?
#20 Real Or Not Real?
I used to work late and at one point I would start seeing strange things from isolation and lack of sleep. There were many times I jumped to the cameras to confirm if what I was seeing was real or not. I often thought I saw people watching me, but it was never real, so I stopped worrying about it. Then, one night, I saw someone watching me for 20 minutes straight. At that point, I just ran back inside and decided I was done my patrols for the night.
#21 A Single Balloon
I 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 the building and I spent most of my 12-hour day just people watching. It is honestly pretty amazing what people do when they don’t think they are being watched. One of the creepier incidents I saw involved a man walking through the building in the dead of night carrying a single balloon. That one got to me.
#22 Evidence Of Insanity
We put up a security camera because our neighbor went crazy. One day, he started screaming at us that we were stealing his meds. He called the cops on us multiple times for other random things too, like parking in his spot even though we never did, or causing too much noise at night even though we kept entirely to ourselves.
After it started, my husband installed a security camera pointed at the little parking lot right outside our apartment. It was an old Victorian turned into multiple apartments. We caught him on camera doing strange things. The funniest was when he paid someone to bust out his car windshield so he could blame it on us or our kids.
#23 Masked And Staring
I don’t watch security cameras for a living, but one time I worked at Walgreens and my coworkers told me to look at the security camera. It was close to Halloween and this dude walked in. He seemed normal, maybe a little odd, and he was wearing mostly black clothes. He bought a mask and some other things and I checked him out.
However, on the camera, he walked by the pharmacy. The pharmacy has this camera where it also shows what the subject is looking at, for safety and security. This dude put the mask on and just stared at the camera, not moving for a solid minute before just walking away. Watching that video with him staring at me was too creepy, especially since I was the one who checked him out.
#24 Walking On Eggshells
Sitting in an Ops Center in the Middle East, we watched a pair of individuals dig a big hole into the shoulder of the road at 3 a.m. We could only watch because we had to give the suspects the benefit of the doubt. After all, they could be doing irrigation... at 3 a.m. In reality, we all knew exactly what it was. We watched them dig the hole, move stuff inside it, then fill it.
We watched it all through a thermal eye in the sky, but couldn't do a thing because the rules of engagement were at a low point. We let the local military know where to find it, and they said they'd check it out the next day. As the sun came up, I watched as people went about their lives walking over this hundred-pound bomb. Mothers walking their kids to school, to the mosque, whatever. Farmers hauling their produce. The local military found it alright and it turned their truck into a crater.
#25 Dropping In The Well
I used to do IT support for a charity that supplied housing and support for homeless people. A large proportion also had mental health issues, so there were a fair amount of interesting events that happened. Anyway, I came in one day, and there was an email labeled "urgent." Apparently, there was an incident at the stairwell of one of the properties on Sunday night.
I pulled the relevant CCTV footage and put it on a DVD. I skipped through the footage, found the incident and burn it to DVD for the police. The email never mentioned what the incident was, so I skipped through the footage to watch. Two people were fighting in the staircase and at some point, one of them pushed the other down the stairs. The one who fell survived but was severely hurt, while the other simply ran away.
#26 Nothing Or The Worst Thing
We install temporary cameras for sites while they're in construction. For one site we were working on, a camera was set up parallel to the perimeter so you could also see the footpath. One night, at about 11 p.m., I saw a woman walking down the footpath. It was obvious she was just walking home from work or something and wasn't trying to breach the site.
But when I was about to close it, I noticed she kept looking back at something as she was walking. I gave it a few more seconds and suddenly, a silhouette of what looked like a man wearing a hoodie appeared. He crossed the road to the side of the footpath she was walking down on. She then started to speed up and jogged past the camera, out of view while the guy behind her started to run in the same direction. After a few minutes of debate, I called the police to hopefully get someone to even just drive by and check it out but we never heard back about it. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
#27 Ghostly Convention
I work security at a high-rise building. Here's the creepiest thing: every Halloween, a dozen of the folks who work there participate in a group Halloween costume. One year, it was presidents. Another year, it was different characters from the same TV show. That Halloween, I was watching the cameras. I glanced at the elevator cameras to see an elevator door open, and a dozen women all dressed like The Grudge entered together.
#28 Ghost At Fault
I worked as a valet back in the day at a very high-end hotel. After a busy Friday and Saturday night, I got called in along with every other member of staff. The hotel manager was angry: they had set out a bottle of wine that cost something like $25,000 for a very important guest and it was smashed on the floor. Everyone denied doing anything so it just kind of went away without anyone knowing what happened.
A few days later, my buddy in security showed me the security camera footage. You could clearly see the manager place the bottle on the bar and then leave to close up shop. Then, the bottle mysteriously moved on its own, almost like an invisible cat had knocked it off the table. There have been tons of stories about the place being haunted but that was the first video evidence I’d seen.
#29 Local Nature On Camera
One side of the building has a camera that faces the highway. The other two cameras are up against the other buildings. In the back, however, is probably a good 50 miles of untouched forest. One night, I heard noises coming from the back door. I went to the back room to look at the security cameras and discovered a small herd of deer hanging around back there.
A customer came in a few minutes later and I went to serve him. When I came back later, the deers were still there. Then, to my surprise, out from the woods came a mountain lion. It leaped on one of the deer and... well, you get the rest. Since the back room was connected to the back door I got to hear everything as well as see it.
#30 Can't Leave His Machine For Anything
I was working at a pub in Sydney and watching the CCTV when I saw a guy continually cross and uncross his legs while playing at a slot machine. After a few minutes, he walked to a corner of the room, took a #2 and proceeded to go back to playing his machine. Talk about being addicted!
#31 Shadow Uncast
I worked security at an art museum in Ohio. It's a very old, architecturally-beautiful building. While watching the cameras one day, I noticed something weird at one of our entrances. I rewinded the video and played it back in slow motion. There was a glitch in the video and as soon as the video was back to normal, a black shadow went across the wall as if someone walked through the foyer to the outside. Creepy.
#32 At Home In The Garage
Security guys kept seeing this homeless guy enter the parking garage elevator around the same time each evening. They realized that they never saw him come out again. He didn't reappear on any of the parking garage floors, nor into the sky bridge leading from the parking garage into the hospital. So they talked to the day shift crew, and all the guys reviewed some of the past week's morning footage together.
They saw the guy leaving around the same time every day. This had only been going on for a few days when they noticed it. Anyway, 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.
#33 Random Things At Target
I worked in assets protection at Target through college. The cameras have a search feature where you can search a selected area for motion so you don’t need to watch the thing for hours to find out when something was taken off the shelf. I would always get creeped out by what it picked up in the middle of the night. Sometimes it picked up nothing visible—just stuff falling off shelves randomly. I hated closing shifts.
#34 Not-So-Great Ball Of Fire
At a previous job, I had to control facilities all over North America. One night, I received a system security alarm for one of our unmanned stations in the middle of nowhere. It was a gated station so the alarm triggered anytime motion was detected. I pulled up the camera footage and saw a large fire. I began calling the fire department when all of a sudden a giant ball of flame started moving abnormally across the facility. It took me a few minutes before I realized that it was a person on fire.
#35 Exactly The Place For A Haunting
The building I worked at used to be a hospital and the cameras would always act funny in the part that used to be the morgue. Since they sensed movement, I was obligated to go down there and check. One time I went down and, as I was walking away, I heard my name get called out in a loud whisper tone. I was super creeped out.
I looked for whoever it was and I didn't find anyone. Then, later on, I heard a door slam in the restroom while I was down there. I checked and there was no one there, yet I heard the toilet flush. I went back upstairs and talked to my colleague about it and he said he saw me running around on the camera, but no one else.
#36 These Rocks Are Not Right
It was twilight in the video so the details were not the best. A man in a hoodie walked up to this lady's front porch and stared at the garden next to the house before walking away. Later in the same evening, the man came back to the same spot and started staring again. The creep factor was multiplied due to the infrared cam picking up the white in the guy's pupils. This time, after standing there for ten minutes, the guy walked to the garden, rearranged the rocks in it for a while, and then walked away.
#37 Lurking Back And Forth
I work for a bank. Part of my job is checking the cameras in the morning for pings overnight, and then making sure all the pings were just squirrels or leaves. Last week, I saw a ping on our back entrance camera and when I went to watch the video, it was a guy I didn’t recognize walking back and forth in front of the door at 3 a.m. for a solid 20 minutes.
He was just pacing the whole time, and every couple minutes he’d stop and walk up to the door to stare into the camera. Then he’d go back to pacing. A car eventually went by and that must’ve set something off in him because he ran away and didn’t come back. We ended up calling the cops about it but I still have no idea who he was or what he was up to.
#38 Not In The Job Description
I worked in a 24/7 filling station outside of a large town in Ireland. The area is pretty rural and it gets really dark at night. The forecourt has a motion-activated buzzer that lets night crew inside know whenever there's movement outside. The buzzer went off during my shift and when we looked outside, we couldn't see anyone.
It was just a heavily pregnant ewe (female sheep) staring back at me. I went to phone my dad for him to check if he knew who it belonged to. As I dialed his number, the ewe turned around and there were two little legs sticking out! It was giving birth to a lamb there and then. Never thought lambing a sheep at 3 a.m. was going to be part of the job.
#39 A New Appreciation
I worked as a security guard for a pharmaceutical company. I monitored a bunch of equipment, door alarms, and cameras. There was a customer service center in one of the buildings on campus. One woman who worked there was very beautiful. She was constantly fending off creeps. Like, people would come to the front desk of a secured building just to try to find out where she worked.
I often followed people's 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.
#40 Eyes In The Dark
My significant other and I have the Owlet monitor for our infant. It's set up like CCTV and it's kind of creepy. One night, I woke up at 2 a.m. to go check on him, then I went back to bed. Once in bed, I got on my phone to view the monitor just for reassurance and I saw two light dots like eyes in the window of his room.
I was so scared at first, but I went into the room to check it out. I couldn't see anything outside, so I turned on the monitor again. I didn't see the dots anymore, so I thought it was probably just a dog or something. I sent back to bed and woke up again an hour later to check the monitor. The dots were there again. I grabbed a baseball bat and went outside his room to check the spot by the window, ready to swing.
I didn't find anything, but the monkey grass had been mashed down by the window as if something had been sitting there for a while. I set up a sleeping bag in my son's room after that for a couple of nights and I checked the monitor so I could see what the night vision caught, but I never saw those lights again.
#41 University Ghost
I worked on campus watching camera footage. I was doing my hourly check at around 1 a.m. while talking to my buddy who was the on-duty guard. While flipping through the cameras, I passed by one of our entrances and saw some guy standing at the door just staring in. My buddy and I just stopped talking and looked at each other because he was suddenly gone. I switched to the next camera, which was the exterior camera, and he was not anywhere to be seen. I asked my buddy if he wanted to go check it out, he said: "Heck no."
We checked the footage to see if we saw it right, and sure enough, he was there, but we could never find him on any other camera at that time. The university I worked at was reportedly haunted, but I don't exactly believe in ghosts. I still don't believe it was one, but it was still creepy and I can't explain what exactly happened.
#42 From Bounty Hunter To Thief
I worked at a hobby card shop about 12 years ago. I got to work one morning and the police were already there. We had a break in and had some stuff stolen. Our IT guy got in and pulled up the video from the night before. We saw a person pace back and forth in front of the door a few times before eventually throwing an object through the glass, smashing it.
He ran in, hopped the counter, threw some Yu-Gi-Oh booster boxes into a trash bag and ran back out. We froze the picture to get a good look at the intruder and realized the thief was wearing a Boba Fett helmet. We all exclaimed, “It’s Boba Fett!” and start laughing hysterically. Needless to say, Orlando’s finest never caught up to Boba Fett.
#43 Aquaman?
I worked as a harbor master and had to check the marina's cameras after a boat was abandoned at our docks. I was looking for the owner. I looked on the tape from the boat's first night in the marina. The man who had sailed the boat in was standing on the end of his boat for two hours, barely moving. Then at 1:30 AM, he just walked off the back and dropped into the water. He never came back up. They also ever found his body. Freaky.
#44 Just Having Some Very Odd Fun
I was working at a corrections facility and weird stuff would always happen after lights out. It was the usual things you would expect: assaults, fights, and just screwed up stuff. The one that sticks out is when I saw a man standing on the dayroom table completely naked except for a cap made from bedsheets and a mask made from a sock. He proceeded to do a flip off the table and roll towards the showers. I called the officers working for the pod and he turned out to be the dorm janitor having fun after work.
#45 It Was Only Myself
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 was sitting in my office around 3 a.m. and some movement on the CCTV caught my eye. I looked up and there was 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 started racing. Did I leave a cell door unlocked? Had 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 was trying to process all of this, I saw him suddenly stop and change direction.
He just straight up bee-lined into my office. With no time to do anything else, I jumped up and ran over to the door, getting ready for the fight. I waited for what felt like an eternity for the 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. 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.
