Amanda Presswood wanted to know if it was raining. From her upstairs bedroom she opened the doorbell camera. The street was dry, and a couple of cars went by. Then the speaker picked up voices, a man's first and then women's. One seemed to ask, “Can I talk to you?” The porch was empty.
Presswood lives with her adult son in a 93-year-old house in Galesburg, Ill. She's a school-bus attendant who likes to find the explanation. She's watched the paranormal shows and knows many of those stories fall apart. So she tried to take this one apart. Her son was out. The neighbors were out. The church across the street was empty. She panned the camera around and then walked outside. No one. The Journal's Julie Jargon reports the mystery is still open.
The feed that feeds the worry
Cameras are sold to settle our nerves. They tell us who rang the bell and whether the baby is asleep. Often they do exactly that, and sometimes they stop a crime. Sometimes the feed does the opposite. Christine Peck owns the Sock Monkey Kids Shop in Cape May County, N.J. In August 2024 her camera showed a dark, shadowy mist drifting through the closed store. Plush toys had fallen off shelves before. She turned the alerts off. “I don't want to know,” she says. Cape May, for what it's worth, ranks sixth on home-security company Vivint's list of America's spookiest cities. Ken Weeks was at his winter home in Sanford, Fla., when his Samsung fridge in Cape May sent a door alert. On camera, the door swung open slowly by itself. A neighbor found nobody and no sign of entry. Weeks works in software and calls himself a skeptic. He still has no explanation. Samsung didn't respond to the Journal.
One alert brought comfort instead of a chill. Emily Pendergast, an actress in Los Angeles, set up an indoor camera in spring 2024 to watch Winter, a new rescue puppy. One day at the grocery store, a motion alert came in. Her husband pulled out his phone and stopped cold. Beside Winter was what looked like Lang, the shepherd mix they'd had for nearly 13 years. Lang died in 2023. Pendergast kept the clip and finally posted it to comfort others who've lost a pet. It's been seen more than seven million times. We'll leave the explanation to you. She likes to think Lang is keeping an eye on the puppy.
Our read
File this under Consumer Protection, M11 in our planning map, with a Behavioral footnote. Nobody can tell you what Presswood heard. We can tell you what every camera owner should know. A camera is a small computer in your house that streams video to someone else's server. The cloud plan that stores the clips renews on its own, and the price can change. The feed is only as private as the account's password and the people you've shared it with. The alerts have a cost too. Peck turned hers off because looking made things worse. The same goes for checking a 401(k) balance every day. More looking isn't more safety.
Here's the check for this week. Open your camera app and tap the account settings. Look at three things. Who has shared access, including the old house sitter. Whether two-step sign-in is turned on. And what the cloud plan costs at its next renewal, since those prices creep. Then decide how many alerts you really want. A camera should answer a question, not raise a new one every night. If your subscriptions have piled up, that's a short list worth walking through together. You don't wait for a stranger's voice on the porch to learn who else can hear it.