The babysitter had been with the family for a while, and nobody suspected a thing until the mother noticed her kid coming home looking thinner every day. The husband was away on work, so she’d hired a daytime nanny to watch their two-year-old. But the boy kept losing weight, his cheeks hollowing out, his energy gone. She set up a hidden camera.
What she saw made her sick. The nanny would bring her own child along, feed him all the food that had been prepared for the little boy she was supposed to be caring for, then hand the boy cheap biscuits to keep him quiet. She was handed over to the police that same week. It happened to my uncle too.
The babysitter was stealing his formula to feed her own baby, giving him watered-down bottles instead. He grew weaker and sicker by the day. They fired her, but it was too late. He never recovered, and eventually he died.
My own parents had a nanny cam set up in my sister’s bedroom. The only thing my mom ever saw that disturbed her was the babysitter crying while holding my sister. It turned out she’d had a miscarriage the day before. My mom never said a word about it to her, just let her grieve in private.
But not every story is that kind. One family caught their nanny doubling every baby’s food portions and force-feeding the infants until they were sick. Another caught theirs giving the kids Benadryl in pill form so they’d sleep all day and leave her alone. A mother in Scotland came home early because she was suspicious—her kids never slept after a day with the nanny—and found both of them dozing in bed in the middle of the afternoon.
The nanny had been dosing them with children’s medicine just so she could sit and do nothing. My stepsister watched my brother, who has disabilities, while my parents were out. She’d empty the capsules of his medications and save the powder for herself. We didn’t find out until he started having seizures constantly and ended up in the hospital for the second time.
Not all cameras catch cruelty, though. Some catch the strangest, most human moments you could imagine. My parents caught our babysitter carrying our sixty-pound golden retriever around the house like he was a baby. He was perfectly happy about it, his legs dangling, tongue out.
We still laugh about it. We caught our maintenance guy spooning with our 130-pound mastiff on the living room floor. They were both fast asleep. We encourage their love as best we can now, and he still comes by to visit her.
My friend’s family bought a camera to check on their dogs while they went on vacation twice a year. It had audio, so they could talk to the pups. They hardly ever used it. But once, while they were out, they checked the feed and saw their dog sitter—a sweet old lady who’s since retired—arriving a full thirty minutes early just to sit on the floor, pet the dogs, and play with them.
Another time, my dad left about six hundred dollars in cash on top of the washing machine. The sitter found it, wrapped a rubber band around it, and left a note saying he’d misplaced it. I travel the country for work and bring my two beagles with me. They’re ten and thirteen now, and they’ve never been away from my side longer than a workday.
I keep a camera in the hotel room to check on them, mostly because my larger beagle is an escape artist—he opens doors, scoots chairs across the floor, jumps onto counters. Last year I was in Oregon when a family emergency called me home to Michigan. I don’t fly with them; I only drive. So I was stuck.
I reluctantly hired a woman off Rover who agreed to stay in my hotel room for three days. She was incredible. She texted me constantly: just tossed them a ball, they’re worn out. When I checked the camera, she wasn’t just sitting there.
She was playing with them until they were exhausted, teaching them new tricks, setting up puzzles to make them think, even getting my forty-two-pound beagle to climb onto her back so she could do push-ups. She was a CrossFit nut. My dogs were thriving. I was thrilled.
It was the most wholesome thing I’ve ever caught on camera. Another family caught their nanny on video giving their two-year-old the Heimlich after he tried to swallow a rock. The camera was one of those bear-shaped ones in the living room. She saved his life, and they never forgot it.
I used to nanny for a family with a three-year-old and a seven-month-old. One afternoon the toddler was down for a nap, so it was just me and the baby. I put on some Otis Redding and was singing to her, twirling her around the kitchen, when her mom walked in. I was mortified, but she just smiled and said it was the cutest thing she’d ever seen.
A friend of mine had a nanny cam set up because she’d noticed her child crying way more than usual during diaper changes. Turns out the nanny was grabbing Clorox wipes when they were nearby instead of baby wipes. The poor kid’s skin was raw. One couple caught their nanny on camera dancing with their baby, making him laugh, covering his face in kisses.
They said the cameras gave them peace of mind, knowing she treated him like her own. She was the best nanny they ever had. My grandfather was staying with my parents when they had to attend a wedding a couple hours away. They hired the regular sitter to watch my younger siblings overnight, thinking my grandpa wasn’t up to it.
They set up motion-activated cameras in the kids’ room, the master bedroom, the living room, and the kitchen. They normally wouldn’t bother checking the footage if everything looked fine. But when they got home, the master bedroom camera had been triggered. It never got triggered before.
They checked the footage. It showed my grandpa, around seventy at the time, and the sitter, around twenty, both completely naked, making out aggressively from the doorway, staggering toward the bed, and then about twenty minutes of what can only be described as a very enthusiastic encounter on my parents’ mattress. My dad called me immediately, laughing so hard he could barely speak. I could hear my mom in the background, mortified, shouting at him to throw out the sheets and kick Grandpa out of the house.
When my mom confronted the sitter, she just apologized and mumbled something about a connection. When she asked my grandpa what he was thinking, he shrugged and said, “At my age, you seize every opportunity. ”
I still lie awake at night wondering what kind of game my grandpa ran to get that girl into bed. Honestly, I hope I’m that smooth at seventy.
I was the kid in one of these stories. My mom loves to tell the one where I gave our babysitter a big hug after she served me lunch, and she just broke down crying out of nowhere. Turns out her father had died a month earlier, and that day was just too much for her. I still remember you, Ms.
Phillips. I hope you’re doing all right now. The family I sat for had a nanny cam in their living room, one of those bear-shaped ones. They caught me on video giving their two-year-old the Heimlich after he tried to eat a rock.
The mom cried when she saw it. A friend of mine hired a sitter at the very last moment because nobody else was available. This woman had a reputation for being bad—not dangerous, but the type who wouldn’t console a crying child, who’d punish kids for small things. My friend was nervous the whole time she was away, constantly checking the baby cam.
What she saw was the sitter playing with her son, singing songs, engaging him completely. When my friend came home, she gave the woman a large tip and never hired anyone else again. What had happened was that years earlier, a crazy parent had hired this sitter, taken a disliking to her for no reason, and spread a bunch of rumors through the neighborhood. The reputation was pure fiction.
One family caught their nanny playing blackjack with their young son. She lost fifty dollars. She paid to babysit him. Another caught their sitter building pillow forts with their kid twenty minutes after bedtime, supposedly to defend against monsters during a thunderstorm.
The parents dealt with it appropriately, which meant absolutely nothing, because that sitter was a treasure and they kept her for years. I got a nanny cam to watch over my elderly grandfather, especially when the home health aides were around. He started asking for large amounts of cash and couldn’t remember what happened to it. A brooch my aunt was supposed to inherit disappeared.
Then I heard reports of him being inappropriate with some of the aides. The camera caught him hiding his medication in his chair cushion instead of taking it, handing money to one aide, and harassing another. I’ve worked with dementia patients for thirteen years. They lose the frontal lobe, the part that filters their behavior.
Little ninety-year-old ladies who never swore a day in their lives turn into sailors. And the men get frisky. It’s just what the disease does. My uncle set up a wildlife camera, the kind hunters use, in my great-grandmother’s apartment.
She was badly demented and kept telling us incoherent stories about people breaking in and stealing her liquor and chocolates. Turns out she was the one hiding the goodies from herself. But the camera also caught something else: my other uncle, the one nobody talks to because of shady dealings with his wife, had a key to the apartment and was regularly showing up at midnight to steal jewelry. I was around twelve when my parents caught my babysitter on camera stealing my video games and shoving them into her clothes.
They confronted her, and she kept denying it until a copy of Ninja Gaiden slid out from her pant leg. My mom took her into another room and made her empty everything out. She had games tucked under the strap of her bra and along the waistband of her underwear. She must have planned it for weeks.
We got our games back, and she was sent home without pay. Not a nanny cam, but my dad once caught our maid stealing the silverware. That whole thing got overshadowed when my dad scared her half to death confronting her. If the internet has taught me anything, he probably just gave her a stern talking to.
A friend of mine had cameras set up in her living room and dining room for her dogs, the kind that dispense treats remotely. I thought the one in the corner was a strange essential oil diffuser until she told me what it really was. I dogsat for her and was only supposed to stay for an hour, but she found out I was actually staying two or three. When she asked me about it, I said I’d want someone to do the same for my dog.
Now she leaves me treats in the kitchen and even got me a Christmas present from the dogs. My friend’s family caught their nanny picking up their pug mix and dancing around the living room with him while that song “Hey, I Just Met You” played on the radio. The dog was having the time of his life. My uncle once told me about a babysitter who was holding my older cousin when she was a baby.
The baby was playing with a toy and somehow swallowed a small piece of it. The sitter performed the Heimlich on her, the infant version, and saved her life. They have no idea where she is now, but she’d be in her late forties, and they still talk about her like a hero. I was the kid once.
My parents didn’t have a nanny cam, but they left out a bucket of toys and hired a sitter while they both had to work overtime. The sitter moved the bucket to another room, put me in a crib, and went off to read for hours, only coming back to feed me or change me. My parents came home to me sitting in the crib, staring into space. It broke their hearts.
Another child caught her sitter on camera after the sitter set the camera down, thinking she’d turned it off. The sitter spent over an hour teasing the toddler with candy and popsicles, holding them just out of reach, then eating them in front of him with exaggerated sounds of enjoyment. She called him mean names, things like turd muncher and worse. The parents confronted her with the footage, and she claimed it was all a lie, that they hated her because she was prettier than the mother.
She wasn’t. That was the last time she was allowed near their kids unsupervised. One family caught their sitter on camera taking a nap on the bed next to their daughter during her afternoon nap. The sitter and the two-year-old were both fast asleep, foreheads together.
The parents thought it was funny. I used to babysit for a family that actually encouraged me to nap alongside their kid. Those were the best naps of my life. A woman caught her babysitter masturbating on the couch.
The babysitter was her female cousin, so she decided to just say nothing and save everyone the awkwardness. The cousin did it a fair amount, apparently. Months later, the woman mentioned the house camera by accident, and her cousin’s face went pale. She casually added that she’d never checked the footage again, to spare them both.
They never spoke of it. One Australian couple caught the husband on the indoor camera screaming like a child and jumping away from a giant huntsman spider. She watched the playback on repeat until she had an asthma attack from laughing so hard. He called her a name, sarcastically, she was quick to add.
A couple with no kids but two dogs told their dog sitter about all their cameras, including the one outside that caught reflections and notified them of motion. She forgot to pass that along to her boyfriend, who came by and walked around outside completely naked. The dogs were naked too, the husband said. Fair’s fair.
I got caught on camera a few times myself. One family with bunnies caught me booping a bunny’s nose to the beat of the song I was singing. Another family saw their ninety-five-pound mastiff puppy tackle me flat on the floor, and they immediately called to check for a concussion since I just lay there for a while. I was fine, just had the wind knocked out of me.
A third family caught me reading to their kids and later complimented me on all the voices I did. I had no idea they could hear the audio, and I was deeply embarrassed because I really had gone all out. I paid a neighbor to feed the stray cats in my garden while I was away for a few days. The camera caught him pole-vaulting over my fence one time.
He nailed it perfectly. One father caught his own brother on camera playing with the rabbit he claimed to hate. The brother walked into the room, lay down on the floor, and started gently playing with the bunny, talking to it softly. It warmed the parents’ hearts.
First rule of siblings: never let them see you love their pets. A friend caught his nanny hitting their kid for interrupting her binge-watching of Friends. The cops were called. A woman caught her babysitter stealing a single puzzle piece from the puzzle they were working on.
The final straw was when one of their potted plants went missing. Not a nanny cam, but a friend’s family had a baby monitor set up and caught their month-and-a-half-old projectile vomiting onto the mother, then two minutes later, straight into the father’s open mouth and all over his face. It’s funny now, they said, but it absolutely was not at the time. My aunt set up a nanny cam and caught my older cousin’s babysitter playing blackjack with him.
She lost fifty bucks. She paid to babysit him. Another family used a camera to check on their free-roam bunny while they were at work or on holiday. One day their dad, a fifty-year-old big bloke who always claimed to hate pets, visited while they were out.
He went into the room, crouched down, and spent a full hour trying to pet the rabbit, repeating in a soft voice, “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to pet you and see how fluffy you are. ” He nearly jumped out of his skin when his daughter spoke through the camera and told him the bunny was very fluffy. One grandpa stayed with his family while they hired the regular sitter to watch the kids overnight.
They didn’t think he was up to it. When they got home, the master bedroom camera had been triggered. It showed Grandpa and the twenty-year-old sitter, both stark naked, aggressively making out from the doorway and then going at it on the bed for about twenty minutes. My dad called me laughing, my mom crying in the background.
When my mom asked Grandpa what he was thinking, he just said, “At my age, you must seize every opportunity. ”
And then there’s the one that broke my heart. A mother set up a nanny cam in her daughter’s room because the girl was crying constantly for no apparent reason. The doctor said she seemed stressed, and they noticed tiny dots all over her belly.
They installed hidden cameras. The babysitter was stabbing the baby with a needle at random times and shaking the crib violently just to torment her. The police were called, and she was arrested on the spot. I’ve heard all kinds of stories over the years.
Some of them make you want to hug your kids and never let anyone near them again. Some of them just make you laugh. And some of them remind you that even with all the cameras in the world, you never really know what goes on when you’re not looking. But most of the time, people are just trying their best.
Even the ones caught dancing with dogs, losing money at blackjack, or stealing the occasional puzzle piece.