Payton Weide (@plitplatpayton) didn’t think much of booking a four-person Airbnb in Yonkers, New York. Then she says her host showed up unannounced with footage of her friends and a lecture about who she was allowed to have over.

Weide, then 19, flew from California to visit a longtime internet friend, Issa. She booked an Airbnb “right down the street from his house.” With Issa working day shifts as a mailman, his friends periodically came over to keep her company. The listing, she says, explicitly allowed up to four guests.

Three days in, someone knocked on her door around 8 or 9 a.m. “I wasn’t even really dressed,” Weide recalls.

It was the host. “Hey. Um, can we talk?” he asked. Then he walked in and started scoping the place out. She recalls it was “like to find something that I was doing wrong.”

Weide says then he lectured her about the friends she’d been having over. “He hands me the phone, and it’s like security footage outside… Bro didn’t tell me that he had cameras outside, by the way. He never disclosed that to me.”

This means that for three days, he had been watching her comings and goings. This could obviously be perceived as rightful security surveillance of his own house. But what she says followed suggests something else entirely.

The lecture stretched 15 to 20 minutes before pivoting into recommendations for Broadway, an offer to be her “tour guide,” and eventually a text asking her out. “I am a little bit creeped out by the interaction,” Weide said.

He called again days later, repeating his rules. By then, Weide had had enough: “I’m not doing anything that’s against the guidelines or the rules.”

Surveillance at an Airbnb

Weide doesn’t provide too many identifying details in her account of what purportedly happened at the Airbnb. Other Airbnb guests have reported being surveilled by the hosts. This is permitted under Airbnb’s guidelines, provided the surveillance is disclosed and doesn’t include indoor areas.

If you do find undisclosed or unpermitted surveillance cameras, you can inform Airbnb.

People who commented on Weide’s post didn’t blame Airbnb, however.

“Okay, this is a weird story, but how is it Airbnb’s fault itself?” asked one person. “It sounds like a person who has an Airbnb being weird, not the company itself.”

In this instance, Weide suggests she was not informed that there was a surveillance camera.

Weide’s undisclosed-camera complaint echoes a CNN report. CNN found that Airbnb has fielded tens of thousands of customer support tickets related to surveillance devices over the past decade.

A more recent case shows the same dynamic playing out on TikTok itself, but amped up to another level of creepiness. A guest in Marrakesh found a camera disguised as a picture frame in her bathroom.

One person warned, “I guarantee you that’s not the only one, that’s just the one you found.”

The Big Lead reached out to Weide and to Airbnb via email for more information.

@plitplatpayton WEIRDEST AIRBNB EXPERIENCE EVER #storytimegrwm #storytime #grwm #horrorstory #airbnb ♬ original sound – plitplatpayton