Our dog was sitting in the center of the room, staring at the ceiling, and we woke up to the sound of his sharp barking. Then we saw something awful up there and contacted the police.
Loud, piercing barking awakened us up last night.
I was initially unable to comprehend what was going on because the room was dark, my heart was pounding, and the dog was constantly barking, seemingly to alert us to something frightful.
We both sat up in bed when my husband abruptly turned on the light. The dog stood in front of the room’s corner and gazed at a single area.
— Ghosts appearing once more? — I made an attempt to joke, but my voice was shaking.
However, it was no laughing matter this time. The moment was particularly unsettling because of the weariness, the rage at being awakened in the middle of the night, and the odd atmosphere in the room.
My husband reached for the dog when I begged him to remove her to another room so we could sleep, but she escaped and ran back to the same spot, barking and growling.
My husband said impatiently, “Well, what do you want?” “Why won’t you let us sleep?”
Then he stopped. He examined the spot where our dog was gazing intently.
He answered forcefully, “Call the police right away.”
I turned in the same direction and questioned in a shaky voice, “Why, what’s there?”
Then I noticed something frightful. In our room, right there
A little black dot—the lens of a camera—was barely visible in the corner, surrounded by the shadow of the wardrobe and the folds of the wallpaper.
We stopped. Without the dog, we wouldn’t have seen the camera because it was so well hidden.
Thirty minutes later, the police showed up. Officers took the gadget out, plugged it onto a laptop, and listened to the recordings.
The police noted that these cameras are typically used to either spy on renters or gather blackmail information, but they were unable to identify any faces since someone had previously wiped their tracks.
We made an effort to figure out who would require this. We maintained nothing of value and had no enemies.
The investigator gave us another call a few days later. A computer in the neighbor’s basement was receiving the video footage from the camera, which was linked to a network.
One of our neighbors, a quiet, unobtrusive middle-aged man, had been gathering these recordings from various tenants for years, the police found when they raided it.
He even betrayed people’s trust by hiding cameras in apartments where he was invited “for a cup of tea.”
The most terrifying aspect, though, is that they discovered a folder with our name on it amid hundreds of files. Recordings from the previous weeks were within. Everything was there, including our talks, every move we made, and even our most private moments.
The neighbor was taken into custody.
What about the dog? She turned into our real hero. We would have been totally oblivious that we were being watched by someone else if it weren’t for her barking that evening.
