It was midnight. My husband covered it with a towel, and we went to sleep. At 2 a.m., the door burst open. The Airbnb owner stormed in, furious, screaming, “You idiots, this is a…

…fire alarm!“

My husband and I sat up in bed, blinking like deer caught in headlights. The owner, a man in his late fifties with graying hair and a Hawaiian-print shirt that looked wildly out of place given the situation, stood in the doorway, panting. His eyes darted between us and the towel-covered device.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?!” he continued, his voice a mix of panic and exhaustion.

I looked at my husband, who was still processing everything. “Wait, what?” I managed to say.

The owner groaned and marched over to the wall. He yanked the towel off, revealing… well, not a camera. Instead, it was a round, white fire alarm with a small blinking light.

“This is not some spy camera!” he hissed. “It’s a smoke detector! A legal requirement for rental properties! You covered it, and the system automatically alerted me to a malfunction.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. Then opened it again. “Okay, but—” I started.

“But what?” the owner snapped. “You thought I was watching you sleep? Why would I want to do that?!”

I winced. “Well, when you put it like that…”

My husband finally found his voice. “To be fair,” he said slowly, “it was blinking. And it looked suspicious.”

The owner let out a sharp laugh. “It blinks because it’s working. You know what would be suspicious? If it didn’t blink!“

That actually made sense.

A painful silence settled in the room. I could feel my face burning with embarrassment.

We panicked over a “hidden camera” in our Airbnb—only to realize it was just a smoke detector. The owner? Furious. Turns out, covering it triggered an emergency alert, dragging him out of bed at 2 a.m. Lesson learned: paranoia makes fools of us all. And yes, we apologized.