We’ve been renting the same apartment for three years.
Last weekend, our landlord said the upstairs unit had a pipe burst, so he needed to come by and check the walls for moisture.
He came when my husband was at work, then checked the bathroom for about ten minutes and finally said everything was fine.
The next day, I noticed that the mirror in our bathroom was slightly off-center.
My husband suggested that maybe the landlord had bumped it.
I reached behind it to straighten it and was left speechless when I accidentally touched…
…a small, cold metal object.
It clicked.
My heart leapt into my throat. I pulled the mirror back gently—and there it was.
A tiny camera, blinking softly.
I stumbled backward, nearly knocking over the laundry basket behind me. My hands shook as I grabbed my phone and took a picture of it. I didn’t even know what I was thinking—fear, disbelief, rage—they all crashed into me at once.
Why was there a camera behind our mirror? And how long had it been there?
Had we been watched? In our most private moments?
I called my husband immediately. He didn’t believe me at first—until I sent him the picture. He left work early.
We unscrewed the mirror completely and found wires running through the wall… straight into the shared ceiling space with the upstairs unit—the one that had the “pipe burst.”
That night, we didn’t sleep. We took turns watching the mirror space, as if the camera might suddenly move. First thing in the morning, we called the police.
The officer who showed up looked disturbed. He asked us not to touch anything else. After inspecting the unit and asking us a series of questions, he finally said:
“This wasn’t just your landlord trying to fix a leak.”
And that’s when the real nightmare began.
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The police returned the next day with a warrant.
They brought in a forensic tech team and carefully dismantled the wall behind the mirror. What they found made my skin crawl.
There wasn’t just one camera.
There were three.
Each pointing in a different direction: the shower, the toilet, and the sink.
Worse—tiny wires led from the bathroom wall into the crawlspace above our ceiling, threading down into what looked like a hidden relay box. From there, the cables traveled up… straight into the upstairs unit.
The one with the supposed “pipe burst.”
But the tenant upstairs? The one we’d seen in passing all these years?
He didn’t actually exist.
The unit was vacant.
According to the building records, it had been empty for over 18 months. The landlord had kept it off the market, saying he was “renovating” it—but in truth, the door had never been opened, not once. Not by tenants.
Only by him.
Our landlord, Mark, had installed a full surveillance setup in that unit. When the police entered, they found a room with a monitor wall. Screens. Storage drives. And a locked metal cabinet with recordings.
Hours and hours of footage.
Every family who had lived in our unit before us. Every tenant who thought they were alone in their own bathroom. Recorded. Watched. Archived.
It wasn’t just us.
I nearly threw up. My husband held me as I sobbed, my body shaking with rage and violation. It felt like we were living in a crime scene—and in a way, we were.
The landlord was arrested that same night.
The police said he would face charges ranging from illegal surveillance to invasion of privacy and, likely, distribution of illicit material. Apparently, they suspected he had been selling some of the recordings online.
That’s when I broke.
The thought of our daughters…
Our friends who had visited…
Us. In the most vulnerable moments of our lives…
We moved out immediately. We didn’t wait for the lease to be broken—we left everything behind and stayed with my sister while we tried to piece our lives back together.
It’s been six months.
The trial is set for next month. We’re expected to testify.
I still struggle to sleep through the night. I tape over every camera, every lens, even my laptop. I can’t take a shower without checking the corners. I look at mirrors with suspicion now, even in public restrooms.
But you know what keeps me going?
That one moment.
When I noticed something small. Off-center. Wrong.
That mirror saved me. And if this story saves someone else from what we went through, then maybe it wasn’t all for nothing.
Please—check your mirrors.
If anything feels off, trust your gut.
You never know who’s watching.
