This is so cool, I had to share in case anyone hasn’t seen it yet. This woman in an NYC apartment felt a draft coming from behind her bathroom mirror. (5 minute video showing her discovery and exploration here. She removed the mirror. Surprise! She climbed through the hole and discovered not just a secret room but a good-sized secret apartment back there. (It was vacant, but there were indications people had been living in it in the past.)
Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been fascinated by secret compartments, rooms, and passageways. As an adult, I was thrilled when I discovered a secret room and a secret passageway in the house I’d bought months earlier. I still have pleasant dreams in which I discover secret rooms.
Has anybody besides me discovered secret rooms, passageways, or compartments? (If you have an antique desk, odds are there’s a secret compartment or two in there.)
This is awesome! Hated the video; it’s somewhat better on mute but still really annoying compared to the coolness of the story. Who pronounces “blow” with two syllables?
I’ve known of two houses with what were effectively bedrooms that were accessed through hatches down low in a wall. In one case the hatch was below a large built in desk and shelving unit where it was hard to see (I forget the other case). Both of these rooms were finished with painted drywall, electricity, wall to wall carpeting, and had furniture including a bed, and an exterior window or two. Note that the exterior window would make discovery much more likely.
The one I was more familiar with was built by a teenager as his private hangout and was meant to be secret, and was discovered by his mother a couple years later because she noticed the window lit up at night. The other one was not meant to be secret, but instead was an investment as bedroom rental space in a university town, which I looked at for myself – I don’t remember why I didn’t take it, but it wasn’t because of its unusual entrance. It had been built in space that was impossible to access with a normal door because of the original roof line of the house.
NYC is so frickin weird like that. I remember watching an episode of cops.
Cop chases guy into a 7-eleven. Chased him into the walk-in freezer. At the back of the walk-in freezer was a door that led to what looked like an abandoned warehouse. And at the other end of the warehouse was a door that led to a hallway of an apartment building. That’s where the cop finally caught up with the guy.
When I first bought the house we live in now it was an investment property and we rented it out for over 20 years.
After our kids were all grown we sold our other house, pocketed the cash and moved into this one after our last tenant left.
Before we moved in I did some renovations. In one of the bathrooms I discovered a 4x3 window behind the wall in the bathtub/shower. Couldn’t see it from outside because it was covered there by siding.
Makes absolutely no sense. The way the plumbing is set up the shower has always been in that location. Who the hell would want a big window right there? And a shade or curtains wouldn’t do any good, they’d get soaked.
Although hardly in the same league as an undiscovered living space, my mother had a story about living in an apartment with my father shortly after WWII. It had a refrigerator that was built into the apartment rather than a free-standing one plugged in. This was back in the day when the freezer compartment was a small box in the upper corner just about big enough to hold a couple ice cube trays.
Needing ice, she opened the door and was reaching for a tray when it was yanked out of her hands and disappeared in the other direction. Startled, she bent over a bit to peer into the compartment and found an equally surprised person looking back at her. Apparently the refrigerators in adjacent apartments were back to back and shared the refrigeration portion.
So to me, it looks like it’s just an empty apartment that backs up to hers, that is/was undergoing some renovation, nothing “secret” at all. At 4:33 she walks down some stairs and there appears to be a door to the outside - there’s light coming from under it. She also says “I’m going to lock this door now.” The only unexplained thing is why there was the hole between the 2 apartments, and most likely they had removed in-wall medicine cabinets from both apartments at some point.
You must read the fabulous novel, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles immediately. One of the best books I’ve ever read (my whole book club loved it, too-- which never happens). 'Nuff said.
When I was househunting in the 1980’s, the real estate agent left me the MLS book (intended for agent use only) of home ads to peruse. There was a house whose listing said “contains secret room to be revealed ONLY to actual buyer”. Sadly, it was too far away and too expensive.
Someone, maybe my dad, I don’t remember who, told me that our house where I (failed to) grew up had a hidden room somewhere. It was plausible to me as our house was old by Australian standards (about 100 years old). I searched around for years. I found a key, and was certain that that key must unlock some hidden door but I never found it.
One kid I went to school with when I was about 12 had a secret staircase in his house that led to a lookout tower. They were right on Brighton Beach so the tower looked out over the ocean. The door was a panel in the billiard room, it looked like all the other wainscoating panels, but if you pushed it in the right place it swung open. Marvelous.
My current house has a walled in 6’x6’ space that was only evident after trying to run some coaxial cable from one room to the next. After a couple of years, my curiosity got the best of me and I cut a hatch into it from the back of a closet. All I found was an empty New Coke can from 1985, when the house was built.
I am reminded of Charles Stross’s “Dead Lies Dreaming” in which the inhabitants of a house discover a secret corridor that leads to an entire new house that extends into past time, not space, and various adventures that follow in a bygone London.
One of my college rental houses had a hidden room in the basement. It was an inhospitable basement since it had a fairly large hole in the foundation to the outside (a feral cat had a litter of kittens down there - joy). When we moved it, we noticed there seemed to be a lot of missing space. We found a sheet of paneling that could be pried out revealing the hidden room. Can you guess what it was used for in this college town? The many dried up leaves on the ground helped us solve that mystery.
I have wondered how many razor blades might collect in old buildings. Sometime in the post-apocalyptic future the ruins of apartment buildings may be a great source of metal blades for the survivors.
