Cameras meant to ease worries at home sometimes fuel them instead
Owners of doorbell and indoor security cameras in Illinois, New Jersey, Florida and California describe captures they cannot explain: a voice with no one on camera, a shadowy mist drifting through a closed toy shop, a refrigerator door that opened on its own, and what appeared to be a family dog that died three years earlier. The accounts were gathered in a report published Oct. 31 by The Wall Street Journal.
Amanda Presswood was upstairs in her home last month when she checked her Ring doorbell camera to see if it was raining. It was dry out. Instead, she heard a male voice followed by women’s voices — the speech was garbled, but to her it sounded like the male voice asking, “Can I talk to you?” There was nobody on camera. She watched two cars drive down the quiet street beyond her porch.
Presswood, a school-bus attendant who lives with her adult son in a 93-year-old house in Galesburg, Ill., a small town not far from the Iowa border, had been spooked by unsettling anomalies before — footsteps when no one was around, the TV suddenly powering on. She looked for a reasonable explanation. “I’ve watched those paranormal shows and a lot of the stories can be debunked, so I tried to debunk it,” she said.
Her son was not home. She knew her neighbors were not home either, and that no one was at the church across the street. She panned around with the camera and did not see anyone, then went outside and found no sign of anyone. So far, the episode remains a mystery.
Home-security cameras are meant to reduce the anxiety people feel from the unknown: Who’s at the door? How is the baby sleeping? What’s happening at home while we’re on vacation? According to the Journal, the cameras do provide solace and occasionally serve to prevent problematic behavior and even criminal acts. But in some cases the video feed only fuels worry, and in rare instances, the paper reported, what owners see can be inexplicable — or downright terrifying.
Christine Peck, owner of the Sock Monkey Kids Shop in Cape May County, N.J., received a motion alert from the store’s Ring camera one day in August 2024. The shop was closed. She figured an employee had left something and gone in to retrieve it, but no one was inside. Instead, she saw a black shadowy mist drifting around a room filled with toys.
Mysterious things had happened at the shop before, she said: several times, plush toys had fallen off shelves with seemingly no intervention. The mist was the last straw. Peck turned off the camera alerts. “I don’t look anymore,” she said. “I don’t want to know.”
The area’s reputation extends beyond one shop. Vivint, a home-security company, ranked Cape May sixth this year on its list of the spookiest cities in America, a ranking built from reported ghost sightings and haunted locations, among other criteria.
Ken Weeks would concur, the Journal reported. Two years ago, he was at his winter home in Sanford, Fla., when he got a door alert from the Samsung refrigerator in his house in Cape May. On his Ring camera, he could see the door open slowly on its own. He even heard the ding the fridge makes when someone waves a hand under the door sensor to open it. The episode gave him chills, he said.
Weeks, who works for a software company, asked a neighbor to check the house. Nobody was there, and there was no sign of entry. “Being a skeptic, my first reaction was that it was a technical glitch,” he said. “But we haven’t been able to come up with a rational explanation for how that happened.”
The door has not spontaneously opened again, though some people have complained on Reddit about the same model opening randomly. Samsung did not respond to requests for comment.
Not all unexplained occurrences are unwelcome. Emily Pendergast, an actress in Los Angeles, set up a SimpliSafe indoor camera with her husband in the spring of 2024 so they could keep tabs on their new rescue pit-bull-mix puppy, Winter. One day, while the couple was out grocery shopping, a motion alert arrived and her husband pulled out his phone. “He stopped dead in his tracks,” Pendergast said.
For a moment, the camera showed what appeared to be Lang, the beloved rescue shepherd mix the family had for nearly 13 years. Lang died in 2023. Pendergast held on to the video and watched it over and over again. Earlier this month, she posted it on Instagram because she felt it might bring comfort to others who have lost pets, and it has drawn more than seven million views.
“I felt we were able to see something we weren’t intended to see,” Pendergast said. She likes to think Lang is watching over Winter, the puppy the camera was set up to monitor.