Working any kind of night shift just sounds terrifying to me. Weird people out and about, things going bump in the night. Uh uh, not for me.
But somebody has to do it. These night-working AskReddit users shared the creepiest and most unexplained things they ever witnessed on surveillance videos.
1. The culprit
“In the late 90’s, early 00’s – my family would put these plastic candy canes along the driveway with Christmas lights strung across the bottoms.
Shortly after installing them, a particular wire was cut in the middle of the night. My dad repaired the wire and it happened again the next night. And the next night.
It became a conspiracy on our cul-de-sac to the point where fingers were being pointed at our neighbor, teenagers, etc. Neighbors set up video cameras in their windows pointed directly at our driveway. My dad even rented one and set it up.
After two weeks of this, my dad wakes me up at 2am and asks me to come look at the viewfinder on the camera.
It was a rabbit. Every night, it would trek the same path, find the wire in its way, and snip it with its teeth.
Half of our neighbors found this hilarious while a select few were kind of disappointed at the lackluster conclusion.
We ended up lifting the wire higher off the ground so the bunny could go under and, needless to say, the wire-cutting bandit never struck again.”
2. Ducks
“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.”
3. Potential burglar
“I 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…”
4. Scary
“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. Ghost?
“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.”
6. Mysterious orbs
“Used to see little crescent shaped light orbs floating around the back dock of a nursing home that I did a little security for when I was young.
First time I saw it I thought it was a reflection of a flashlight and that somebody was screwing around behind the building. I jumped up and ran to that door only to find that it was pitch dark and no movement of any kind going on.
Only explanation I was ever able to come up with is it had something to do with the electrical panel energizing when the ac units would kick on. Don’t know for sure but it made me feel a little better.
Also around that time the nurses found a cat that had been deboned, sprawled out on the sidewalk in front of the healthcare entrance. Paws and skull were the only hard bits left.”
7. Spine tingling
“I used to work at a place which required to be manned 24 hours a day. 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. 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.
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 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.”
8. The stranger
“The security guy showed me footage of an old man standing outside the building at 4 in the morning for an hour or so each night.
This happened for a few weeks then suddenly he never came back.”
9. Lockdown
“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 gets out 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.”
10. Crash
“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.”
11. Hallucination
“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.
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 bloody murder. 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.”
12. Close call
“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.”
13. That’s odd
“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.”
14. The Upside Down?
“I was storing my bike at work while I moved to a new apartment. One day in the middle of the week, I come into the office, walk past the bike rack and notice that it’s completely empty. The building has a bunch of security cameras and one more or less is facing the bike rack since it’s adjacent to the front entryway.
I sit and watch the security tape with the IT guy. We’re watching, see everyone leave the office the night before, see my bike, keep watching, then all of a sudden poof, bike gone. We slowed the tape down and it seemed like when you’re watching digital cable or satellite and the image gets garbled.
Literally it was bike there, then poof gone. In the tape’s time stamp it literally happened in one second. I assume my bike got taken to the upside down.”
15. That is scary
“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.”
Alright, so those were creepy AF. Have any stories of your own you’d like to share?
Do that in the comments RIGHT NOW! Or we will haunt you!
No, we kid… but write a comment already, would you? It’ll take thirty seconds.
kthxbai
