I bought three cameras. I installed three cameras. The app shows four.
Let me get the boring bit out of the way first because every single time I tell anyone about this they immediately try to solve it, and I've already tried all of it, so I'd rather save you the effort.
Yes I checked if it's a duplicate. It isn't. Camera 1 is the front door, Camera 2 is the back gate, Camera 3 is the hallway. Camera 4 has its own serial number and its own firmware version and its own name, and the name isn't one I typed. It's called hall underscore b.
My house doesn't have a hall B. My house has one hall and that's Camera 3.
Yes I contacted support, twice. First time they told me to log out and log back in. Second time, after I sent screenshots, someone I'm fairly sure was an actual human and not a script told me the device was "registered to the account" and asked me to confirm I wanted it removed. I said yes. They said up to 24 hours. It's been about eight months. When I chased it the ticket had been closed with the resolution set to "no fault found".
Yes I factory reset the hub. Camera 4 came back in about ninety seconds, before cameras 1 to 3 had even finished pairing.
And yes, this is the one everyone asks. Yes I've watched it.
For two years Camera 4 showed nothing. Not black, nothing, and those are different things. When a feed's offline the app gives you a flat grey card with a little crossed out cloud on it, and that's what Camera 4 gave me every time I looked for two years, which is why I stopped looking.
I wasn't living in fear of my house or anything. I had a mortgage and a job and a dog. Camera 4 was a bad bit of software I was paying nine quid a month for, that's it. If you've ever had an old handset stuck on a phone contract you can't get rid of, it was that. An annoyance with a serial number.
It came online on the sixth of February at 4:52 in the morning.
I know because it sent me a motion alert and the alert woke me up, and I looked at my phone in bed with one eye open expecting the fox that gets in the bins.
The thumbnail was a hallway.
It wasn't my hallway, and I checked immediately, on my feet, with the light on. My hallway has a radiator on the left and a mirror and the coats. The one in Camera 4 has none of that and it's narrower. But the floor's the same. That's the bit I keep going back to. Same boards, same pattern, same dark patch by the skirting where something got spilled before I moved in that never came out.
Same floor, different hall.
There was a shape at the far end where a door would be, out of focus and low contrast, the way things go on infrared right at the edge of the range. Could have been a coat on a hook. There are no hooks.
The clip's eleven seconds long and in the eleven seconds nothing moves.
Motion alerts don't fire for nothing.
Over the next six weeks Camera 4 came online eleven times, always between four and five in the morning, always under a minute, and I've got all of them saved and I've watched them more times than is good for anybody.
Nine of them are the hallway and nothing happens in nine of them.
In the tenth one the shape at the end of the hall is closer. Not moving closer, there's no movement in it at all, it's just standing somewhere different than it stands in the others. Like furniture that's in a different place after somebody's been in your house.
The eleventh is why I'm writing this.
The eleventh one isn't the hallway. It's a bedroom and the bedroom is mine.
I recognised it upside down and in infrared at four in the morning with my heart going, and I recognised it straight away, the way you know your own handwriting. My wardrobe with the door that doesn't sit flush. My window with the blind hanging crooked because I put the bracket in wrong and never fixed it. The pile of washing on the chair, which was there that night, and I can date it, because I remember the shirt.
And me. In the bed. Asleep.
The angle's high and slightly to the left, up near the ceiling in the corner by the door, and there is nothing in that corner. I've stood on a chair with a torch and run my hand over every inch of it and there's a cobweb and a nail hole from a previous tenant and that's it.
The clip's 43 seconds. For 41 of them I'm asleep and the room is still.
At 41 seconds my head turns on the pillow.
At 42 seconds my eyes are open.
At 43 the clip ends, because the clip is 43 seconds long, and there's never been any more of it no matter how many times I've gone back into the app hoping the buffer coughed up something else.
I don't remember waking up that night.
What I did next was stupid but I think most people would have done it.
I put my own camera in that corner. Took Camera 3 off the hallway wall and gaffer taped it up in the bedroom corner pointing at the bed, recording continuously to a card, not to the cloud, because by that point I'd stopped trusting the cloud.
Did that for nine nights.
Eight nights of a bloke sleeping badly. You can watch me check my phone at two, at half three, at four. You can watch the dog come in and go out again. It's the most boring footage ever recorded and I've never been so relieved by anything in my life.
On the ninth night the card recorded seven hours and forty minutes and the file is seven hours and forty minutes long and there's a gap in it.
Not a cut. The timecode runs straight through, the file doesn't skip. Between 4:51:58 and 4:52:41 the frame is identical, bit for bit identical, I checked, I know how to check. Forty three frozen seconds in the middle of a continuous recording, on a camera writing to a card, in a room with no network in it because I'd switched the router off at the wall.
Forty three seconds. Same length as the clip.
Whatever's in that corner didn't want to be recorded, and it could tell, and it could do something about it.
I haven't slept in that room since May.
I sleep downstairs on the sofa with the dog and the hall door shut, which is not something I have ever done in my life before this. It's a stupid way for a grown man to live. My sister thinks I'm having a breakdown and I've decided not to argue with her about it, because the other explanation is worse and I don't want to say it out loud to her.
I'm still paying the nine quid a month.
I know. I know exactly how that sounds. But you have to understand what happened when I tried to cancel.
I rang them in April and told the bloke on the phone I wanted the account closed entirely, all four devices, effective immediately. He was lovely about it. Read me the retention offer, I said no, he said that's absolutely fine and he'd process it. And then there was a pause and he said, in a slightly different voice, "It says here the account has a secondary user."
I said that's not possible. It's my account, I set it up, there's one email on it.
He said, "There's a second one. It's been on there since the account was created."
I asked him what it was.
He read it out. It's my email address but wrong. My name, my provider, but the numbers on the end are swapped round. Two characters. The kind of thing you'd never spot in a list.
I asked what permissions it had.
He said it's an owner. Same permissions as me. And then he sort of lost confidence halfway through the sentence, which is somehow the worst part of the whole thing. He said that technically, on the system, that account is the one that added the fourth camera.
I asked when.
He gave me a date in 2019. Eight months before I bought the house.