Woman Says She Thought Her Landlord Might Be Watching Her Through the Smoke Alarm — Then Police Found Out Her Ex Was Stalking Her Instead
In a Reddit post, a 26-year-old woman living alone for the first time said her apartment had started feeling wrong in ways she could not explain. According to the post, her landlord was a man in his late 40s who often made comments about her appearance and had been unusually intense about one thing when she moved in: he told her very clearly not to touch the smoke alarms in the bedroom or hallway, claiming they were directly connected to the fire department. The one in her bedroom had always made her uneasy. She said it made odd noises at night, sometimes like a remote-controlled car, other times a muffled beeping sound. When she mentioned it, the landlord told her it was nothing.
She wrote that other things started happening too. During the move-in process, she tested a bright shade of paint on a bedroom wall. A few days later, during a phone call with her parents, the landlord suddenly snapped at them about how horrible the pink looked in her bedroom, even though she said she had never let him inside her apartment. Then there were the small but eerie signs that something had been touched when she was away: a drawer under the bed pulled out, underwear drawers standing open at four in the morning, furniture in the bedroom slightly moved. Every time she brought it up, family members told her she was probably overthinking it or forgetting things herself, and she said she ended up feeling ashamed for even mentioning it.
At one point she became so frightened that she called her mother in the middle of the night because she thought someone might still be inside the apartment. After that she installed a door chain and got an alarm for when she was at home, but she said that only covered the hours when she was physically there. What kept eating at her was the idea that somebody may have been inside while she was out. In the post, she finally asked the question that had been circling in her head for months: was it possible there was a camera hidden inside the smoke alarm?
The next morning, she called the fire department and was told something that changed the whole direction of the situation. According to the post, the fire department told her the smoke alarm was not connected to them in any way and that it was suspicious the bedroom unit looked as though it had been tampered with. They advised her to have someone who understood electrical work inspect it rather than ripping it down herself. A family friend who was an electrician later looked at it and confirmed that something had happened to the alarm, though at that point she still did not know who had done it. Then, just a few days later, she stopped posting because there was suddenly an active police investigation.
Three years later, she returned with the full explanation. She said her landlord was not actually the one watching her. Instead, her ex-boyfriend had been stalking her. According to the update, he tried to break into her apartment one night while she was home, and she only managed to scare him off after locking herself in the living room. That attempted break-in became part of an already ongoing investigation against him. Police also had reason to believe he may have gotten into the apartment at earlier points while she was away, which finally made sense of the drawers, the moved furniture, and the awful feeling that someone had been there.
She said she still never learned for certain who had tampered with the smoke alarms. It could have been the landlord, the previous tenant, or the ex. But by the time everything was over, the damage had gone far beyond the original mystery. She said she no longer felt safe in the apartment, lockdown made everything worse, and the stress pushed her PTSD so hard that she eventually admitted herself to a clinic in 2022. The case took years to reach court, and she said that once it was finally over, she still struggled for a long time with what had happened.
By the end of the update, she said she had moved, no longer lived alone, and was in a much better place. She had gone to therapy, rebuilt parts of her life, and reconnected more closely with her parents. Her ex was punished, and all the alarms in the apartment were eventually fixed. But the part that seems to stay with readers is how close she came to doubting herself the whole time. She felt watched, and she was right. She just had the wrong person in mind at first.
