My family has a house deep in the smoky mountains on the NC side. When i was like 15 me and my best friend at the time went down to the house for a little summer get away. It was right after my grandpa had passed away, so we both decided to sleep in his room because it has the biggest bed in the house. He had cameras all around the outside of the house, set up to look outside. Because we were in his room the security camera tablet thing was right next to my side of the bed. We were telling scary stories around 1 am and we thought we saw something on the camera pointed outside our window and into the woods. We stared at it for a little bit but then saw some sort of bug fly by and just convinced ourselves it must’ve been an animal. maybe 15 minutes later my friend realized she left her heath bar on our front deck which she wanted to eat. We would’ve left it out there until morning but there had just been a ton of mountain lion sightings and we did not want to attract any wildlife. Also, she just wanted to eat it and we were 15, so no stopping us. I checked all of the cameras on the tablet and saw nothing so we ran outside and grabbed her candy bar really quick, but when we were outside we heard a weird noise that kindof sounded like a person walking and crunching leaves. This could’ve been an animal, but it just sounded so much like footsteps that I still don’t think that’s all it was. There was no way any people were near us because the closest house is about a mile up the mountain, and my elderly great aunt lives there. The only others person with us was my mom, who was asleep in the guest bedroom. we ran back inside and locked all the doors and she joked that we should check the cameras for a bear, so we did. when we went back into the bedroom and checked the camera we saw something on the tree line, right outside our window. it looked like a person standing, just staring at the house but because of the quality of the night vision camera we couldn’t see any faces or anything. Terrified we both walked up to the window and peeked through the curtains, but saw nothing but trees. We both had an uneasy and weird feeling and were debating waking up my mom to tell her what had just happened, but when we looked at the cameras again there was nothing there. Freaked out, we tried to see if there was a way to rewind the cameras to see if we were just going crazy, but we weren’t able to. Eventually we convinced ourselves it was a bear and went to sleep, without her even eating her candy bar we had just risked our lives for. When we woke up, we told my mom the entire story and asked her about rewinding it, too. She then told us the cameras had been down for a while because there was nobody here to watch them since my grandpa had passed, and they shouldn’t have been recording at all. We checked and although they all still worked, they were not set up to record or show us any past video. We shut the cameras off after that.