I had typed this response to Diamonds02 rapidly locked thread. I’m not sure what that was about, but I thought my story was sufficiently mundane and pointless to share:
My company has locations around the U.S. One of these locations was custom-built by the former president of this location. When I was visiting this location I was given a tour of the facility, and saw the former president’s office. Apparently, he was quite the philanderer, and quite fearful of having angry (and possibly armed) husbands or boyfriends of his paramours confront him at the office. To this end, he has a trapdoor built in his private office so he could beat a hasty, discreet retreat if needed.
I was rather incredulous, but I saw the trapdoor with my own eyes.
It is one thing I have considered in the extremely remote possibility that I won one of those kajillion dollar (read: over $200 million cash option) lottery drawings. Build a hidden trap door in the closet that either leads to a fire station like pole or just a ladder that goes down to a safe room in or under the basement. And maybe a tunnel from there that leads to a hidden exit about 100 yards from the house.
When we were considering building an addition onto our house - I was planning to have a hidden staircase built in. It would be so COOL! Maybe a spiral staircase going from the 1st floor game room up to the spare bedroom closet??
We quickly realized we could not afford an addition - much less the hidden staircase. Sigh. Why can’t we have any fun??? We still play the lottery justincase.
Friends of my parents have a massive secret church right in their house. It’s weird, this really old house in Haarlem, in the Netherlands. It’s from the time Catholics were persecuted in the 16th century (I think). The strangest thing is how big it is. Literally the size of a church, but you just can’t tell. It’s a big house, with some huge staircases. I guess they didn’t have google earth at the time.
My gramma’s house had a secret passage between the closets of two of the bedrooms. Well, OK, it wasn’t actually hidden except by a bunch of clothes hanging in the vicinity, and it was only about a foot wide, but that was totally close enough when we were kids.
There was a passage and small hidden room between two bedrooms of a house I lived in when I was a kid. The house had 2 large upstairs bedrooms, both had built in seat storage under the windows that faced the street. One could open the storage and climb in and crawl to the under seat storage in the next bedroom. The neat part was a room of about 4 feet by 10 feet between them that could only be accessed by the under seat storage. It was actually the dead space over the stairs.
My parents did not know about the room when we move in, my brother and I found it was a great place to hide if we got in trouble. When I was in high school, I got to know a gal that lived in the same house. Sometime after we moved out, someone put a door into the room and made a closet out of it.
My house has an office with 2 ‘secret’ entrances (that we show off to anyone who takes a tour of the house).
The first one looks like a closet (in the hall), but has a door at the end to the office and the other is a swinging wall (complete with bookcase on the outside) that opens into the library on the top floor of the master bedroom.
There is a secret room in this house, but I am surely not going to describe it to anyone.
Or even tell anyone about its existence.
In fact, I didn’t even post this.
My childhood home had a “dead space” that was oddly-shaped, triangular, about 50sqft, wedged between the kitchen and a bathroom. It was only accessible from the attic, using a ladder.
Many years after the house was sold, I happened to run into the people who had bought it.
“Darn shame that it’s so hard to get into that secret room, huh? Have you guys ever gone down the ladder to have a look?” (I have to admit, it does sound kind of deranged.)
They looked at me like I was a crazy person, and demanded to know what I was talking about. I asked them if they’d ever pictured that area of their house on a floor plan - there’s a dead space roughly the size of a closet, that’s only accessible from the attic. Because of the way the ductwork, wiring, and bathroom shower stall and sinks were laid out, there was no hopes of ever adding an access door.
They had really never noticed that the size and shapes of the other rooms didn’t quite add up. They’d lived there at least 10 years.
I think they were intrigued, but I haven’t seen them since, so I don’t know if they have done anything with this information or not.
I have a typical storage closet under my stairwell. It has an ugly bifold door. Since I’m remodeling every other part of the house, I really, really, really, really, really want to put a fake bookcase or something over it so it becomes a hidden closet. It’s big enough to hide in - in fact, it’s my safe room if a bad enough storm comes though.
I just have to figure out how to do it…and how much I’m willing to spend on it.