I work a part time job at an old upscale club and I was wondering why there was a long winding hallway around the building. The door outside leads two ways, one directly to a kitchen and the other winds to the front.
I later found an old plan of the building and it turns out this hallway was the ladies entrance in the 1940s. Evidently it was unladylike for a woman to go through the front door but OK if they entered through a dirty alley and walked in unseen.
The building was built in the 1890s and has lots of stupid stairways that don’t seem to lead to no where or duplicate service. I was assuming these were left in as it was easier to leave them there than remove them when the layout of the club changed over the years.
But I was thinking about old buildings with secret passageways? Has anyone ever been in a building as such? Is it really possible to hide passageways for long. I can see how you could do it from guests that come over once in awhile but it seems after a while you’d get to know the layout?
The Dungeon in New Orleans is pretty twisty turny with the outside door unmarked and sort of blending in a long line of other doors. Inside the bathroom doors are hidden behind book shelves and whatnot.
A lot of high-end places like mansions and swanky hotels had “back stairways” for the servants. That way, they could get meals from the kitchen to the dining room without the master and his family having to endure the awfulness of being near a working class person any longer than was necessary. Same with other back stairways. The servants could access rooms directly from the servant areas without crossing paths with the master. I suppose some of those serving ways could be sealed off and become secret once all the folks who knew about them died off or left.
I’ve lived in homes with servants’ stairs, and although part of the reason might be so the owners weren’t sullied by the working class, a lot of it was practical reasons. The stairs were off the kitchen, where the servants worked. If they needed to bring up breakfast, or clean laundry, it was much more conveniant to have a stairway near those areas.
I got thrown out of The Dungeon. As I recall, I happened to see a staircase running sideways up a wall and it looked like it didn’t go anywhere. Curious, I started up the stairs to see what was up. A bouncer materialized from out of nowhere and explained curious people should exit the premises immediately and perhaps enjoy some coffee at Cafe du Monde. Somehow I got the feeling I had not been 86’ed as much as rescued from some Lovecraftian intrigue for which my constitution was ill-suited.
Missus Coder grew up in a typical 50’s ranch-style tract house in the near north 'burbs of Detroit (East Detroit, actually, but why it was on the north side of the city of Detroit is another story). The place had a secret room. Actually, more of a large secret closet.
The door into this closet/room was disguised as a bookshelf, I think. It was on the back side of the house behind the living room and near the dining room, and built around/over the basement stairs and next to the back door in such a way that you didn’t really notice that there was a fair amount of space between the south wall of the living room and the back wall of the house. They used it mostly for storing things you needed for the living area and didn’t want to haul up from the basement - vacuum cleaner, dining table linens, etc. You’d never notice it was there unless someone pointed it out.
And the houses I’ve seen them in weren’t exactly mansions or high end, they were just typical largeish houses built in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s.
There’s a lot of old buildings in England with secret bolt holes, and passageways, dating back to the religious chaos in the 1500s. Every now and again, a new unknown one shows up; including one which was discovered running under my old school, from a fake gravestone at the local church. The builders building a new toilet block accidently dug into in, though I think it was largely collapsed.
I’ve also visited a fair number of stately homes with secret rooms, though of course they’re not exactly secret anymore, being open to the public. In the days of two foot thick walls, wood panelling, and servants corridors, they weren’t so hard to hide as you’d think…
Or as P.G. Wodehouse used to put it, “another stately home of E.”.
I assumed “hidden” passageways were fairly common in houses of that type, by which I mean a stranger might not know about them, but every member of the household, upstairs or down, did know. In the film Remains Of The Day I recall at seeing a doorway to the servants’ area which opened onto a landing of a broad stairway, but was almost impossible to see when closed.
While we were growing up, the neighbors across from us had a trap door in their house. This led to an extra bedroom below which the older of the two daughters occupied. The younger sister had the room above, and you used a ladder to go from one room to the other. We were on friendly terms with the younger sister, and sometimes would be hanging out in her room as the older one suddenly climbed up out of her trap door, which was in the closet. Rather odd, that.
Apart from the trap door, it was a fairly typical 1950s house, not particularly large. At that time it was unusually for any but very large houses to have more than one story in this area, but this house, being at the bottom of a steep hill was somewhat unusual.
A friend of mine worked demolition of the old French Quarter New Orleans Playboy Club back in the early 1970’s, and he told of seeing hidden rooms, secret passageways, odd doors and stairways. I wonder what the history of that building was.
Lots of clubs had secret rooms and hidden passageways added during Prohibition. I wouldn’t be surprised if this weren’t the case for the Playboy Club.
Not really hidden, but ballrooms in fancy big city hotels often had an unobtrusive door near the front that led to a parlor nearby, sometimes one flight up or down. This was so an important speaker, such as the president, arriving to speak at a big gathering, didn’t just come in the back door and sidle between the banquet tables. Instead, he came in and stepped immediately to the dais.
My grandfather built a house, a common floor plan where the bedrooms were back to back, and the closets to each staggered in between. Apparently, he didn’t see a need to put a wall between them, which left sort of a secret passageway (especially crawling under the clothes hanging in them) between the bedrooms.
A building on the local college campus has strange passageways and winding stairs tucked in unexpected places.The architect was mentally ill during the planning and construction, and murdered his wife when it was done. It is one of the supposedly haunted buildings on campus.
People in my hometown bought an old house that was by the river. It was in a very nice neighborhood, and was a two story wooden structure.
One day their youngest kid was playing and found a trap door in the upstairs bedroom closet of his parents. The parents had never noticed the trap door before their kid found it that day.
It had a ladder that went down way below the house and they figure it used to be a secret passageway for the underground railway, going to a tunnel allowing slaves to cross under the river. (The tunnel no longer existed, or had collapsed decades earlier.)
There was a small write up in the local paper, with pictures, and a brief history on the underground railway system in the town.
I always though it would be cool to have a secret room built in the house - but unless I built it myself, all the construction crew would know about my “secret” room and it wouldn’t be a secret anymore. I guess I could then kill all of the construction crew, but then I would need another secret room to hide their bodies, which would mean hiring yet another crew…I will have to think this plan over a bit…
My uncle lived in a very old house that had a small passageway that led from his basement to a cellar in St Albans Cathedral. That tunnel would have been quite a few centuries old.
Humm - maybe he just didn’t like the cut of your jib - my party went up there and it was just more rooms and another bar. It was a very quiet night when we were there - perhaps on busier nights there would be more freaky stuff to avoid - in fact I’m sure of it based on some of the stories a couple of our group members had from a previous visit.
I have a decent sized storage closet under my stairwell. I’ve always thought the entry to it was ugly and out of place. Since I’m doing a total remodel of the house, I’m seriously thinking about putting a moving bookcase type door to hide it. Maybe side by side, with one of them made to swing out to reveal the opening.
I just think it would be fun to have a hidden room like that.
-D/a
