Recently, Reddit user u/rudsfromithaca posted in r/AskReddit, asking, "People who watch security cameras for a living, what creepy things have you tried to forget?" Here's what they said.
1. "I worked as a harbor master a while ago, so I had to check the marina cameras after a boat was abandoned at our docks."
"I was looking for the owner, so I checked the tape from the boat's first night in the marina. In the footage, the man who had sailed the boat stood on the end of his boat for two hours, barely moving. Then at 1:30 a.m., he just walked off the back and dropped into the water. He never came back up. Never found his body. Freaky."
—u/[deleted]
2. "On security footage, I've mostly just seen lots of sex. I've had to turn on the microphone and tell them to stop it or they'll be thrown out...of the college gym."
3. "I was a security coordinator for a large electric company, and one time, 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 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, but when I came back, the dude was gone. I rewound 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."
4. "I was working at [a] pub in Sydney, watching the CCTV, when I saw a guy continually cross and uncross his legs while playing a slot machine. After a few minutes, he walked to a corner of the room, took a shit, and then proceeded to go back to playing his machine."
5. "My brother's friend used to watch security cameras at an amusement park."
"In the park, there was one of those riverboat rides which had hidden cameras to prevent people from pissing in the water, vandalizing, etc. One day, a couple hopped on the ride, and the girl started giving her boyfriend a blowjob. When they finished, the girl leaned over the side of the boat to spit. Now in the event of any bodily fluids getting into the water, there is a whole process that must be followed involving draining the whole river and decontaminating the ride. It takes a long time, and all the employees hate it. So as soon as my brother's friend saw her about to spit, he grabbed the intercom to the ride and shouted: "SPITTERS ARE QUITTERS!! SPITTERS ARE QUITTERS!!" She panicked, having no idea anyone was watching, and swallowed it."
6. "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, so 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."
7. "It's not my job, but my S.O. and I have the owlet monitor for our infant looking at his crib and room. It's set up like CCTV, and it's creepy to begin with."
"One night, I woke up at 2 a.m., went to check on my son, and 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 night vision in the window of his room. I quickly went in the room to check everything out. I couldn't see anything outside, so I turned on the monitor again. There was nothing. I went back to bed. I woke up again an hour later to check the monitor and the dots were there again, so I grabbed a pistol and went outside around his room. I didn't find anything, but the monkey grass had been mashed down by that window like something had sat there for a while. I set up a sleeping bag in my son's room after that for a couple nights. I never saw those lights again."
8. "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, and at 2 a.m., I came across footage of about five guys taking turns humping the eagle. One of them even stole the Santa hat I had on it."
9. "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., leaving at around 3, and not really taking anything. Fast forward to 7 p.m. and the guy comes back in and walks around the auditorium until 6 a.m. the next morning. In that time, he proceeded to strip into his underwear, steal and wear a mask, and smoke a shit ton. He managed to steal six full bags of random items. It was bizarre."
10. "I was a property manager at a giant apartment complex for a year. Part of my job was taking complaints that came in during my off hours and reviewing the tapes to see what the cameras caught."
"We got calls for people having sex in the spa a lot, and this was one of those times. I got the form out to issue the warning when the maintenance supervisor noticed something. He zoomed all the way in, and across the property, he could see a woman we all knew sitting on her patio smoking a cigarette and watching. Then we noticed there was the glow of a small red light — she was videotaping the whole thing! What makes it weirder is that this lady was a pastor at the local church."
11. "I had security cameras installed on my 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. One night we heard something, so we turned on the monitor but saw nothing unusual. I was ready to go back to sleep, but my partner thought something was off about one of the cameras. She thought it seemed like one was facing a slightly different direction, so she started watching the recordings. Sure enough, we found footage of some dude prowling around on the property and adjusting our camera. The terrifying bit? The way his face looked beneath the balaclava."
12. "I’m not in security, but I work for a bank, and part of my job is checking the cameras in the morning."
"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. He was pacing back and forth in front of the door at 3 a.m. for a solid 20 minutes. Every couple minutes, he’d stop, walk up to the door, stare into the camera, and then he’d go back to pacing. A car eventually went by, and that must’ve set something in him off because he ran away and didn’t come back."
13. "My first job out of college was doing electrical engineering and security system design for a big security company."
"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."
14. And finally: "I once saw a chicken walk up the side of a tree at 2 a.m."
—[deleted]
H/T r/AskReddit
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.