For weeks, Heather Yates thought the dark spot on the bathroom mirror in her new apartment was just a smudge. But this week she made a disturbing find.

It’s not a smudge. It appears to be a peephole.

“A hole in the wall in the bathroom? To me it’s obvious what it’s there for,” said Yates, a 27-year-old Kansas University student. “Upon a discovery like that, it violates any sense of security you have.”

Yates, a KU doctoral student in political science, moved to Lawrence from Kansas City earlier this month so she could be closer to campus. She found an apartment for $510 per month at The Oaks, 2357 Ridge Court.

On Tuesday, her father came to visit the apartment. While he was in the bathroom, he saw the dark spot on the mirror and was immediately concerned.

The spot turned out to be an area where the back of the mirror had been scratched off with a small, sharp object, making it possible to look through from the other side. On the wall directly behind the scratched part of the mirror was a hole in the drywall, roughly 4 to 6 inches in diameter.

A second, smaller hole above the large spot on the mirror corresponded with a second hole in the drywall.

Behind the wall was a narrow mechanical area just big enough, Yates believes, for someone to squeeze inside and place a camera.

She filed a police report and called the apartment manager to have the drywall fixed. But as of Friday, the only repair was a piece of drywall board to block the view. She also took a photo through the scratch in the mirror, showing that someone looking through it could have had a clear view of her bathroom and, beyond it, her bedroom.

Yates is trying to get out of her lease and said she hasn’t been able to sleep at the apartment since she discovered the hole.

She said she doesn’t think the management company, Vintage Management, or the police are taking her concern as seriously as they should.

• 6News video: KU graduate student finds peep hole in apartment

Mark Lehmann, owner of Vintage Management, said Yates shouldn’t worry.

“It’s very, very old,” he said of the hole. “I don’t think anyone ever saw anything through it.”

He said he’s only been manager of the property for three months and doesn’t know how it got there. If he’d known about it, he said, he would have fixed it immediately.

Kim Murphree, a Lawrence Police spokeswoman, said police are still investigating, but officers reported that dust and cobwebs behind the wall indicated the area hadn’t been disturbed recently.

Heather Yates, a 27-year-old Kansas University student, says she has lost her sense of security and feels like her privacy has been violated after she found a peephole behind a mirror in the bathroom at her apartment. This photograph - taken from behind the mirror and through a small scratched-away section of the mirror's backing - shows Yates looking into the mirror.

“We’re taking it as seriously as we would any report and investigating what went on here,” she said. “This is the early part of the investigation.”

The Oaks is near another apartment complex where apartment peepholes were discovered in 1999.