Baby monitors can bring many parents piece of mind when Junior is napping or left with a sitter. However, they can also lead to some really bizarre stories. Here are 23 families who share their weirdest baby monitor story. Some are funny. Some are unsettling. Some are just down right odd.
It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane, It’s A…
“Once caught the babysitter taking the baby’s blanket, putting it around her neck like a small cape, and ‘flying’ around the room with it on. Keep in mind, the baby could only see out of the crib and was not present for the show.
Needless to say, we found out she was often high during babysitting.” Source
But The Bird Didn’t
‘Our crib was under a window (shut and locked, don’t worry). Every few days I’d check the camera when a hawk or some other kind of large bird would land on the outside of the window. The bird and my daughter would sit there for a good 10 minutes bobbing their heads at one another. It was adorable, despite the fact the bird probably wanted to eat her.’ Source
Tip That Babysitter!
“When I’m home from college I babysit for these pretty wealthy people. At the time the boys I would babysit were about 2 years old and 9 months old. It was summer and I had laid the younger one down for a nap, then took the monitor out with me to the backyard so the two year old could play. I hear sound going off and see arms reaching into the crib to the sleeping baby. I grabbed the two year old, a knife, and slowly walked upstairs. Their grandma had come to see if I needed any help, but didn’t have my number so she didn’t text me she was there. We laughed about it but never have I ever been so ready to shank someone.” Source
It Wasn’t -Supposed- To Be A Baby Cam
“My buddy has a camera that sits on his doorstep. It has a motion sensor and every time it detects someone or something on the porch, it snaps a photo and sends it to his phone.
It’s a Sunday morning, and for once, his two year old isn’t shouting into his bedroom to get him out of his crib. Ah, yes. A rare morning to lay in bed. His phone goes off. A photo of a little red-headed boy reaching out of the front door to grab a package appears.
And that’s how he discovered that his son could get out of the crib.” Source
The Hand
“I was the nanny. I had to wake the baby to go get her sister from morning care so I reached into her crib and rubbed her back gently. Her mom happened to be checking the baby monitor via her phone at the time (she liked to check in during her nap time and the camera is above the crib) .
So all her mom saw was her baby taking a nap and then a hand suddenly reaching down toward her. Said she about peed herself before she realized what was happening!” Source
Awkward
“Using a baby monitor to care for aging parent. My sister comes in and tries to convince my dad to cut me out of the will and give everything to her.” Source
Stranger Danger
“Just me. I went into his room to get him and said ‘Daddy’s here, don’t cry.’ I went with him back to my room and heard my monitor say ‘Here, don’t cry.’ Since my voice sounds so alien to me I freaked out and watched in horror as a tall man grabbed my baby and walked out. It really probably took 1 second to realize I was holding him and it was me in the video, but I went through 10 years of grey hair in that second.” Source
The Parents Were Horrified
‘Other side of the story-I got fired because of a nanny cam. I was working for a very rich (by Australian standards) family. The dad was a surgeon and he’d invented some kind of special surgical screw.
Anyway. So I was 25, looking after their five children, all boys, aged 17, 16, 11, 9 and then baby surprise who was 3 years old. The two older kids obviously don’t ever need me, and the 11 and 9 year olds were really sweet and cute and didn’t need that much. The toddler though. Just the worst kid I’d ever cared for. Really bratty and awful, but stopped short of torturing small animals.
One day we’re stuck inside playing Star Wars lego and he’s bossing me around and talking about the ‘Cat-Cat Walkers’ we’re building. I’m like little dude, it’s AT-AT for real. He cracked it, flipped over the fancy lego table, told me he hated me and ran down stairs. Being the consummate professional I am, I calmly flipped him off for 2 whole minutes before I went down and helped him cheer up.
Next day I was fired.’ Source
Vanished
“Late to the party:
I was at school and my mom came to my house to pick up my kids because husband was leaving for work. My daughter was a month old at the time, my son was eight. My mom was watching the live video feed of the nursery where my daughter was napping when the screen went black and then returned to normal WITH THE BABY NO LONGER IN THE CRIB.
My son claims he picked her up but none of this was recorded. Baby there one second, baby gone the next. My mom is superstitious so that really wigged her out. I played the video when I got home and she wasn’t exaggerating. It never recorded my son entering the nursery and pulling his sister out of her crib. It was just the baby sleeping, static, black screen, and then back to an empty nursery.
We never figured out how my son supposedly got the baby out of the crib or why for that matter. It was very out of character for him.” Source
So Cute
“My old roommate has two kids of his own. The older kid(3) deactivates the baby monitor cam when he and his sister want to do something they’ll get in trouble for. Kid even waves bye to the camera before he pulls the plug.” Source
This is Adorable
“Ok, not a parent, and not a nanny cam, but my nephew and his baby monitor.
Sis called me cry-laughing to tell me that niece went into the nursery and proceeded to lay out a few ‘house rules’ on her 4wks old little brother. Sis says it was things about sharing, and cleaning up and being nice and protective and minding his manners.
That was funny enough, but niece finished with this gem: ‘Everybody pulls their weight in this family. You’re lucky you’re only nine pounds.’
That little bossy munchkin. She’s super protective of him, still. I have multiple pictures of them holding hands while they nap.” Source
I Hope They Called The Cops!
“When I was a toddler, I went from fairly chubby to very skinny in a matter of weeks. My parents were worried that I was sick, and when they asked our nanny, she said ‘everything is fine.’
A few days later, they decided to install a camera to see what was wrong. Keep in mind that after lunch time, she would let me nap and then go home (that was the deal).
It turns out that she would feed me a few bites and then throw my food away so she could leave earlier. I was too young to make anything of it. This was all caught on camera, and she was fired the next day.” Source
Mom Was Never The Same
“Baby monitor back when my daughter was young. Staying with my parents, my wife and I went out for the rare night out. Mom went to bed and took the monitor into her room to listen for out daughter. Wife and I came in from a few to many drinks. She, for some reason, checks on our daughter and grabs the ‘transmit’ part of the monitor and brings it to our room (probably thinking speaker). Two young parents in love with a few drinks….nature takes its course. The next morning, my mom can’t look my wife in the eye. She later explains, she was awakened in the middle of the night by strange sounds of ‘moaning’. She picked up the monitor and started heading to my daughter’s room to investigate. She was about halfway there when she realized what the sounds ACTUALLY were. She ripped it apart trying to get the batteries out while standing in the middle of her living room and fled back to bed. That morning when I stumbled out to get something to eat, my mom told me, ‘Ya’ll need Jesus. And a new baby monitor. And to remember to pick up the speaker from my room when ya’ll come in.’ So, I guess, strangest thing MY parents heard?” Source
Mr. Quackers
“Probably late to this, but whatever.
I remember a year back, my son would come up to me and tell me about a haunted duck that quacks at him at night time. He reminded me every morning about it and I kind of let it go, because kids say weird things. It wasn’t until one night when I was in the lounge and turned on the camera to see what the fuss was about. All of a sudden, a quack noise! A really huge fucking noise too. It woke up my son who pulled his blanket up and sucked his thumb. I walked in there and couldn’t find anything and was pretty wtf about it.
So the next night, my husband comes home and rushes past me and goes straight to the toilet for a half hour. I went to the hallway to clean up the toys and heard the fucking duck noise again, until I realised it was my husband shitting and farting like a duck, startling the entire house.
Had to explain to my husband the whole story of the haunted duck and he now shits at work before coming home.” Source
Why Did They Hire Her???
“Late to the game but we had a Nanny we thought perhaps was psycho. She smelled like cat pee. Anyway, she was well aware we have a security system with 8 cameras in every room in our house. We got it to watch babysitters since one of my children has Down syndrome and is mostly non verbal. We don’t hide the cameras and make it quite known we watch them. Anyway we had vodka in our fridge and the sitter started drinking it. She drank the entire unopened bottle. She then proceeded to pee in cups from our cupboard and dump them down the sink and return them to the cupboard…” Source
Choking Hazard!
“I was babysitting for my sister a few months ago and was checking on my 2 year old nephew through the nanny cam, asleep in his crib. I got up to put dinner in the oven and when I came back I checked the cam again and…
There was a huge black mass in the crib with him.
My sister doesn’t have any pets, so I was like.. WTF!? A black dog or cat or something had got in and is attacking my nephew!
I ran upstairs like shit off a shovel and saw, to my horror, my nephew has pulled a black bin liner into the cot with him and had crawled inside!! I got him straight out of it and he was fine.. I took the bin liner back downstairs and just sat on the floor crying.
This was my first time babysitting for my sister. I had a go at her when she got home, ‘Who keeps a bin liner where their baby could get it?’ And she said there was one in his cupboard full of nappies (diapers) well out of reach, so we checked and the nappies were in there but the bag had been taken out, somehow?’ Source
Crazy Timing
“My son was awake in his crib babbling to himself and having a good time. My wife and I were watching him through the baby monitor kind of laughing at him being silly.
He could pull himself up and while holding the crib rail slowly walk around the inside edges of the crib. As we’re watching him, he comes around and looks directly into the camera so looking directly at us in the baby monitor.
As we’re watching him, he reaches out to try and grab the camera. We see him leaning over the crib rail stretching his hand out for the camera which is just out of reach. Suddenly he flips right over the crib rail while we’re watching live and lands with a thump on the carpet. Cue his crying and our running to check on him. He was scared but otherwise fine.
Not that great of a story, I guess. Still my wife and I were both so surprised and the odds of us having both been watching the live feed exactly at that moment were pretty low. In my mind’s eye I can still see that sudden look of surprise on his face as he flipped. He never tried to climb out of his crib on his own like his sister did and I wonder if that was the reason why.” Source
Practice Makes Perfect
“My child was nonverbal as a baby. Obviously very smart, so we weren’t worried about it and just figured it would happen when it happened. You would ask her questions and she’d point at things or if you said something funny, she would laugh. She also mastered the art of giving meaningful looks, of which we now have many, many hilarious pictures. We also tried to teach her sign language, which she thought was silly.
Wife and I occasionally talk about it, but no big deal. Then one morning we hear our daughter through the monitor. She woke up early and was sitting up in the crib, practicing her words. She’d say a word over and over until she got it right, then move on to another. This was accompanied by grunts of frustration if she got one wrong.
Wife wanted to run in and give kisses, but I had us wait it out so we could see how deep her vocabulary went. It was actually pretty big, more than 20 words.
All that day and for at least a few weeks more, still nonverbal. Then one day she simply started speaking in complete sentences. It was the same when she started walking later.” Source
Poor Nanny
“I know of a family who had a full-time plus nanny/cleaner/cook (known as a ‘helper’ in Hong Kong and often expected to work 20 hours a day, plus sleeping in the same room as the kids, with only Sundays off). They got a nanny cam and fired this woman because after spending her entire day getting the kids ready for kindy, cooking a hot breakfast, picking up after the family, doing 3-4 hours of cleaning, prepping for dinner, setting out activities for after she went out to get the kids, in other words after a very full days work for minimal pay, she had the audacity to sit down on the family’s couch, in the communal room of the house she was contractually obliged to live in, for 15 minutes to have a rest before leaving to get the kids.
Work for 10 hours straight and sit on the couch for 15 minutes of downtime before getting the kids, making dinner, cleaning the house, welcoming the parents home, serving dinner, cleaning up after dinner? Fired.” Source
Show Babies
“Back when mom worked at Hewlett Packard, one of her coworkers used a nanny cam for all three of her babies. But on baby number 3, the older two found out about it and started doing things like dancing or jumping around and making funny faces in front of it, or doing things like lining up the toys to face the camera.
Though one of them apparently recorded a ‘Happy birthday daddy’ message on it.” Source
Creepy
“My aunt liked to tell a story from a time, when her children were small. One time she was lying in bed, everything fine, and then suddenly she heard a deep voice saying:
‘It’s me, the monster, I came to get you’
Of course she went into panic mode instantly, ran to her child and… nothing there. So she went back and heard the voice again, realizing that it’s one of her neighbors playing with his kid.
Turns out those devices used the power grid and, since they both used the same model, apparently made her hear what was said into the neighbors’ baby phone.”
Outrageous!
“I worked as a preschool teacher in the late 90s, and our school decided to put secure webcams up in the classrooms so parents could see their kids during the day. The parents had usernames and passwords, etc; it wasn’t viewable to anyone whose child wasn’t currently enrolled. As a parent of a small child at the time, I thought it was kind of neat, even if it meant people might see me picking a wedgie every now and then.
Well. There was just one problem.
Within a month of the webcams being online, two parents had come to us about their co-parents’ browsing habits. One was masturbating to me and the other teacher. The other was masturbating to the children. Then a third report of a parent finding still-captures of someone else’s child in a folder on her husband’s computer.
That was the end of the webcams. DCF, back then I think it was called HRS, was brought in to investigate the families involved. We even changed our pick-up and drop-off policies. Parents were no longer allowed to enter the classrooms beyond the little ante-rooms where the children’s cubbies were.
I only taught preschool for a few years, and this was towards the end of that time. I read later that this issue was a common one in preschools and daycares that used webcams.
As for the quality of the video parents were able to view, I have no idea. My child wasn’t enrolled; I did not have access to view any of it.” Source
I HOPE This Is On Camera
“I can tell you in like 1995 I was babysitting for this really wealthy family, and I couldn’t figure out how to turn the tv on. The little girl was fast asleep and I was so bored. I checked out her enormous play room, and ended up playing with a doctor kit with their little Shih Tzu dog. They literally walked into the house on me, with a doctor coat on, weird doctor headband that looks like a headlamp, and taking the dogs heartbeat with the stethoscope. I was like 15 and so bored. They were- speechless. ” Source