My landlord had been watching me for a year...

I've lived around Sacramento for most of my life. I grew up there, went to school there, went to college there, and basically never had any reason to leave for more than a few days at a time. My family was there, most of my friends were there, and until my first real job, I had always assumed I'd probably spend the rest of my life somewhere in the area.

That changed in 2017.

I got a job on the Bay Area side. Nothing glamorous or particularly interesting (just a regular administrative job), but it was my first real full-time position, and I was excited about it, even though it meant moving away from everything I knew.

I obviously couldn't afford anything fancy (lol), so I started looking for an apartment within reasonable commuting distance. Eventually, I found one about a 20/25 min drive from work. It was an older apartment in a fairly unremarkable building. I'm purposely describing it so that you can visualize everything, but the kitchen was small, the bathroom was old-fashioned, and the whole place had that slightly worn-out feeling you get from an apartment that has had a lot of tenants over the years.

You'd ask me why I still moved in ? The rent was cheap...Really cheap. At least, cheap enough that I didn't ask too many questions.

I met the landlord before moving in. He was somewhere in his sixties, maybe mid sixties. He had a pretty intimidating presence, although I wouldn't necessarily have described him as threatening at the time. He was just... unpleasant, very gruff and quiet, y'know, not someone who seemed interested in getting to know his tenants. When we met, he mostly went over the practical stuff, gave me the keys, and told me to contact him if something broke.

I remember thinking that he was probably just one of those landlords who didn't want to have anything to do with his tenants, and honestly ? that was fine with me. I wasn't looking for a friend, I just wanted a cheap apartment close to work.

For the first few months, everything was completely normal and I established a routine pretty quickly. I'd get up, drive to work, spend the day doing paperwork and answering emails, drive back, make dinner, watch TV, and go to bed.

I started dating someone around that time too. She lived a little farther away, so she'd sometimes come over and stay the night (again, nothing unusual). I never had any reason to think that someone else could see what was happening inside my apartment. And that's what makes this whole thing so difficult to process even now, because looking back, there were little things. Nothing that would have made me call the cops, bust little things that seemed odd in isolation.

The landlord occasionally seemed to know when I had been away. Once, he asked me if I had been working late that week. Another time, he made a comment about having "company" over. I remember being slightly annoyed because it felt like he was being nosy, but I didn't think much of it, I just assumed he was seeing cars coming and going and that he saw my ex-gf coming out of it.

There was also one occasion where he entered the apartment for a maintenance issue while I was at work. He had given me notice, so technically there was nothing strange about it, and at the time, I didn't question it.

I mean, seriously... Why would I? It was his property ! I was renting it !

I trusted that the apartment was still my private space. That's the part I keep coming back to... I fucking trusted it !

In total, almost 15 months went by.Then, one evening, everything changed.

I was taking a shower and the bathroom had an old ventilation grille near the ceiling. It was one of those ugly plastic vents that you stop noticing after you've lived somewhere long enough. While I was showering, I happened to look up, and I saw something flicker : a tiny red light.

Just for a fraction of a second...

When I moved my head again, it disappeared, so I thought maybe it was a reflection from something outside. I moved again... There it was. A tiny red blink coming from behind the ventilation grille. I immediately turned off the shower, got dressed and grabbed a flashlight.

At first I was actually embarrassed by how paranoid I felt. I remember thinking, "This is probably nothing." I took the grille off, and there was something behind it : a small camera.

I just stood there staring at it. For several seconds, I couldn't process what I was seeing,then I started shaking.

I called my girlfriend and told her not to come over. I don't remember exactly what I said. Something along the lines of, "There's a camera in my bathroom." She thought I was joking at first... I wasn't.

Once I'd found the first one, I started looking everywhere. And that's when things went from horrifying to completely unreal. I found another camera positioned to see into the main living area, then another one in a position where it could see toward the bedroom. There were also devices that I wasn't initially sure were cameras, so I took pictures of everything and stopped touching things. At that point I was terrified that I'd already destroyed evidence without realizing it. I spent the rest of the evening sitting outside my own apartment because I couldn't bring myself to stay inside. I kept thinking about everything that had happened there during the previous 15 months (the showers, changing clothes, sleeping, my girlfriend staying over, having conversations I thought were private, EVERYTHING...)

At that moment, I couldn't even describe how I was..., I felt physically sick. So the next morning, I went to the police, bbrought photographs of what I'd found and explained the situation. The officer was young and he initially asked me a lot of questions about the landlord, the lease, and whether I knew of any legitimate reason the devices might have been there. I told him absolutely not, these weren't cameras covering the exterior of the property, but were positioned inside my apartment, in places where there was no conceivable reason for them to be. The police eventually came to the apartment to inspect the devices. I remember watching them walk around and thinking how surreal the whole thing was.

They removed some of the equipment and started treating it as evidence. At some point, one of the officers asked me a question that I still remember:

"How long have you lived here?"

I told him.

Almost 15 months.

His expression changed, not dramatically, but enough that I noticed. He basically said that the length of time was going to be important to the investigation. I spent the next few days in a hotel because I couldn't stay there anymore. My girlfriend came to see me, and that conversation was awful.

She was furious at first, then embarrassed, then devastated...

She kept asking me questions I couldn't answer.

"Could he have seen us?"

"I don't know."

"Was there a camera in the bedroom?"

"I don't know."

"Did he record us?"

"I don't know."

I thing that was the worst part : I couldn't give her certainty about anything. I couldn't tell her what had been recorded, who had seen it, whether anything had been saved somewhere, or how long the cameras had been there.

The police eventually took possession of the equipment and investigated the landlord. I'm deliberately not going to pretend I know every detail of what happened behind the scenes, but the investigation did not end with him simply saying "I didn't do it." There was enough evidence connecting him to the cameras that he was arrested and charged. I later learned that some of the equipment had been connected to a system that allowed remote access. That revelation made me feel even worse. It meant that the person responsible didn't necessarily have to be physically standing somewhere in the building to watch. I don't know exactly how many times he accessed the footage, neither know whether anyone else ever saw it, nor how long he had been doing it... And honestly, I'm not sure I want to know.

What happened with my girlfriend was almost as painful as everything else. For the first few days, she was incredibly supportive, but I immediately saw that something had changed. She couldn't come back to the apartment, then she didn't want to come to the hotel, and then she started avoiding being alone with me. I understood why, even though it hurt, and a few weeks later, she broke up with me.

She told me that she knew rationally that none of this was my fault, but every time she looked at me, she thought about the possibility that someone had been watching us, and she said something that I think will mark me forever : that memories that had once been private and intimate now felt contaminated.

I can't really argue with that, because I felt the same way. The only difference was that I had to live with the knowledge that someone had violated my home.

I eventually found another place and continued working for a while, but the whole experience changed the way I looked at privacy. I started checking anything that looked even slightly out of place. I'd never been paranoid about that kind of thing before, but now I was.

About a year after everything happened, I left the Bay Area and moved back to Sacramento. It was strange coming home, because of everything that happened, I came back feeling like I had aged ten years. Even now, years later, the thing that disgusts me most isn't just that there were cameras... It's the amount of time.

Almost 15 DAMN MONTHS !! For almost 15 months, I thought I was alone when I was alone. And knowing that he may have been watching me and potentially my girlfriend for that long makes my skin crawl. He didn't just invade my privacy, he took something from us that we can never get back. And that's something I still struggle with, even today...