I wonder if sometimes the presence of oddly placed doorways and corridors resulted from the fact originally separate buildings, remodeled and added to over the decades or centuries, ultimately “grew into” each other.
This is a picture I took from the courtyard of the Pico House Hotel in downtown L.A. The wall opposite is that of the adjacent Merced Theatre, and both buildings went up within a few years of each other. From what I know of these buildings’ history, there’s no ready explanation of the “extra” about halfway up that flight of stairs.
ETA: Or maybe it’s the lower door that’s the extra one.
Also in Hertfordshire, my great aunt and great uncle lived in an old mansion that had been converted to (very nice) council flats. It was a Regency building constructed on the site of a much older farmhouse, then remodelled by a Victorian eccentric.
In the 1970s the council wanted to take back the building to use as offices, but my aunt and uncle had lived there since the war and held out, so rather than evict them, the council converted the place around them, and they ended up being the only people living there. This was fairly spooky during the evenings and weekends when the workers went home, but totally cool for us kids as we had the run of the place.
My great aunt was convinced it was haunted, and claimed to have seen, during a party in the flat, a woman dressed as a nun walking towards a bathroom that was out of order. When she asked her to use the other bathroom, the nun disappeared.
Alleged manifestations aside, it was indeed a spooky place, with a creepy oil painting of the eccentric woman who’d had it altered glaring down at you in the hallway, and the library had a Scooby-Doo style door hidden in a bookshelf with a secret doorhandle behind a fake book.
But even weirder, when I was about three or four, I was dashing around the wood-panelled hallway and I banged into one of the panels, which swung open revealing a passageway down to the cellar that nobody had ever known was there. I remember looking into its musty interior and seeing some white powder lining it that my father identified as quicklime.
My great aunt claimed that all nun sightings disappeared after I’d opened up the passageway.
The Oakroom at the Seelbach Hotel in Louisville used to host various gangsters from time to time and had a couple of hidden passages for quick getaways. Al Capone was a frequent visitor there for a time.
It’s still a very lovely place. I had a spectacular birthday dinner there once.
My aunties old house had a passage between a bed room to the kitchen. When you walked into the house, you went through a door, and you were in a latticed veranda. then you could go to your right and go through the front door or go straight ahead and go through a door leading into the living room, not the hallway. But I assume it’s like that because it was a house converted into apartments converted into a house.
My great grandparents house has a store room behind a bookcase.
Many old New England houses had a “hiding closet”-a room with a concealed door, where people could hide if the indians raided the town.
Although not much se if the indians decided to burn the house.
A house near my grandfather’s home belonged to a prohibition era bootlegger. It had a concealed room in the basement, that was sed to store liquor.
I just realized my cousin’s house, which was an old New York farmhouse, had a back staircase which must have been for the servants. The main staircase was in the front of the house and was wide and curved down from a small balcony. The other staircase was steep and narrow and went up from a small door in the kitchen. That’s the one we always used!
H. H. Holmes had various parts of his Chicago torture hotel built by different crews so that none of them ever saw the whole thing. He wouldn’t pay them so that after two weeks or so, they quit and he repeated with a new crew. Thus, he was able to get his horrifying building constructed with no-one the wiser and at a considerable savings.
I used to frequent a bar called Chumley’s in the West Village in NYC that was supposedly a speakeasy during Prohibition. No sign outside. It had both a false bookshelf that was actually an exit door to an alley AND a trapdoor in the floor near the bar that purportedly led to a tunnel that ended up in the basement of a friendly neighbor around the corner. Sadly it’s closed now.
I knew someone who, after living in his house for several years, realized that there were windows on a second floor that you could not get to from any of the interior rooms. He subsequently found a plastered-over trap door in the ceiling of one first-floor room.
Many decades ago we looked at and almost bought an old house that had servants’ back stairs. It also had fireplaces in every room, all of which were bricked closed. Lots of other nice features as well. Unfortunately, it also had a very weak floor in one room, apparently about to collapse, that was “hidden” by a rug but found by an inspector, which made us wonder what other flaws were hidden. It was also, despite being a good-sized house, situated on a mere quarter acre of land. It had been the main house of a large estate once upon a time, but all of the other surrounding land had been bought by developers who put in rinky dinky little tract homes, and there was a highway along one side.
When I toured the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, MA., it had a secret staircase from the front room fireplace to an attic, it was so cool. It was thought to be part of a hiding place on the underground railroad?
You pushed a button in the fireplace and a panel of a wall opened.
The price of admission was worth it just to walk up it!
I discovered one day, in my house growing up in St. Louis, a Priest Hole in the dining room. There were two china hutches built into the walls, and the wall below one hutch had two ball-bearing-looking hinges that allowed for the whole panel to open into a tiny space.
I never told anyone about until I was much older, b/c I used it to win every single hide and seek game my brothers and I ever played.
When I came clean years later my brothers were actually pissed. Grown men shouting at each other while our wives looked at one another, rolling their eyes. Ah, brothers.
I remember an episode of the TV series of the 50’s, Maverick, where a mans house wall was connected to the back of a bank vault and he could come and go anytime.
These are called “jib” doors. A lot of the ones you’ll see in stately homes are designed to look like bookshelves, complete with the backings of fake books.
