My wife and I have a Victorian that we fixed up. And it does have a secret passage between two of the rooms. There were two closets back to back and we put in a a small sliding wall there.
We have two secret rooms hidden behind swing-out book cases that don’t look like they swing out. The one upstairs leads to the attic where there is nothing and really not much room to move around. The one downstairs is beneath the staircase and it was the more complex to build and can be converted to a passageway leading from my office to the dining room if I ever get the time and money again.
But no it isn’t activated by pulling on a book or candlestick. I have to pull on the whole book case in both cases. With the upstairs one five or six books always fall off when I open it. In the upstairs one the actual opening is masked by a quilt covering it with the caster mounted bookcase in front of that. The downstairs is bookcase in front of wall that has bookcase attached to the wall which opens (used to be a door but I wall papered over it and mounted the bookcase on it).
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