I was fourteen when I spent the night at my friend, Kayla\u2019s, house for the first time.<\/p>\n
Her father was quiet and barely spoke to me, but nothing seemed especially strange.<\/p>\n
Around 2 a.m., I woke up and noticed a tiny blinking light on a shelf.<\/p>\n
When I looked closer, I realized it was a camera pointed toward the room.<\/p>\n
I panicked.<\/p>\n
Without waking Kayla, I threw a blanket over it.<\/p>\n
Less than five minutes later, her father rushed in.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy did you cover that?\u201d he demanded.<\/p>\n
I was terrified.<\/p>\n
Then Kayla sat up and immediately started crying.<\/p>\n
Her father took a breath and explained.<\/p>\n
Kayla had a serious sleepwalking problem.<\/p>\n
A few months earlier, she had wandered outside in the middle of the night and nearly reached the street before anyone noticed.<\/p>\n
Since then, her parents had installed motion alerts and a camera facing the bedroom doorway so they would know if she got up while asleep.<\/p>\n
I looked again.<\/p>\n
The camera wasn\u2019t aimed at the beds the way I had assumed.<\/p>\n
It was positioned toward the door.<\/p>\n
Her father apologized for frightening me and admitted he should have explained it before the sleepover.<\/p>\n
Later that night, the alert actually went off.<\/p>\n
Kayla stood up asleep and started walking toward the hallway.<\/p>\n
Her dad gently guided her back to bed.<\/p>\n
I had spent several terrifying minutes convinced I had uncovered something sinister.<\/p>\n
Instead, I had accidentally disabled the very thing her parents were using to keep her safe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was fourteen when I spent the night at my friend, Kayla\u2019s, house for the first time. Her father was quiet and barely spoke to me, but nothing seemed especially strange. Around 2 a.m., I woke up and noticed a tiny blinking light on a shelf. When I looked closer, I realized it was a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10431,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lifestorybuffering.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/fdfdfdfdfdddd.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifestorybuffering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifestorybuffering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifestorybuffering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifestorybuffering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifestorybuffering.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10430"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifestorybuffering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10432,"href":"https:\/\/lifestorybuffering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10430\/revisions\/10432"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifestorybuffering.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifestorybuffering.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifestorybuffering.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifestorybuffering.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}