My wife was the first to notice it—a faint blinking light inside the smoke detector of our Airbnb.
At first, I told myself it was nothing. A sensor. A glitch. But when I climbed onto a chair and opened the casing, my hands went numb.
A tiny hidden camera stared straight back at us.
We didn’t argue. We didn’t debate. We packed in silence, left the key on the counter, and drove for miles without looking back. Only when we reached a diner parking lot did we finally stop.
Shaking, I opened the app and posted a blunt, furious review to warn anyone else who might book the place.
The host replied almost instantly.
“It’s not a camera,” he wrote. “You broke our security transmitter. They’ll come looking for it.”
They.
My stomach dropped.
I scrolled through photos on my phone—pictures I’d taken earlier that night. In one of them, barely visible behind the curtain, a faint red dot glowed in the dark.
Watching. Tracking.
That’s when it hit me: this wasn’t just a rental gone wrong.
It was a setup.
We never went back. We checked into a crowded city hotel under a different name, destroyed the phone we’d used for the booking, and filed a police report the next morning.
Even now, I don’t know who was watching us—or why.
I only know this: sometimes, a place that promises comfort isn’t a refuge at all.
It’s a trap.
