When we think of hidden rooms we're often filled with images of spinning fireplaces and spy-level secrecy. Maybe it's a special room full of books and whiskey where a James Bond type can map out their plans. Other times, it's a bunker-style apocalyptic survival abode, neatly hidden from the world so a villain or hero can outlive everyone.
In reality, the purpose of secret rooms run the gamut from deeply mundane storage spaces to terrifying dungeons for captives. Some old houses still have rooms built to protect people during the Holocaust, or secret lounges to drink during Prohibition, or rooms to sequester mentally ill family members before mental illness became destigmatized. Finding these spaces can provide a fascinating time capsule hearkening to another time, and in some cases a grim mystery.
In a recent Reddit thread, people who live in houses with secret rooms shared their discoveries, and they run the spectrum from creepy to wholesome.
1. fluxelegy found multiple secret rooms.
"A couple of years ago I rented an apartment that was in a massive old architecture style building, no idea how old it was. I remember when I did the showing they showed me a door that had an elaborate staircase that went straight up to the ceiling and explained that it went to the attic, which was sealed up. When I was finally moving out curiosity got the best of me and I pushed on the panel at the top of the stairs until it popped open and hoisted myself up there."
"It was completely dark and the floor was covered in at least an inch of dust, and I found that it was an entire extra floor to my unit. There was some old rotting furniture and magazines littered throughout the rooms. I eventually found a small hole in one of the walls that went into the sealed off upstairs of the unit next to mine and decided to go through that one too. I found a smaller hole at the back end of that area that led to the next one. I eventually made my way through about 5 or 6 of these sealed off spaces that had no entrances save these small holes in drywall. The farther I went in, the older the furniture I found, fridges from the fifties or earlier, old dishware, and so much dust over everything."
"The last unit was the most interesting, hand painted scenes on the walls and holes to the attic letting sunlight stream in. I took small videos but they're all on snapchat so they're hard to post. I must have been up there for hours just exploring alone in the dark. I was pretty lucky to have the only room with access up there.
Edit:Album
Sorry for the format/captions no idea why I decided video was the way to go."
2. KE5TR4L found their grandma's secret room.
"When clearing out my grandmas house I found a small door in the wall of the basement that led to a tiny room, according to my mother that’s where they hid the family heirlooms when thieving relatives came to town. I was mostly interested in the fact that it was covered in scribbles from my mom and her sisters growing up."
3. -banned- still doesn't know if there was a teddy bear or not.
"Back in college some friends and I rented an old mansion that had been built in the early 1920s from an elderly lady. The place was falling apart, but it was huge and rent was dirt cheap. About two years into living there I went to the basement to do some laundry and momentarily lost my balance, reaching out to steady myself using one of the wall panels. It flexed more than I expected, and after some inspection I found that it was removable."
"Behind it was a small, mostly empty, very dirty concrete room about 100 square feet. I say mostly empty because right in the middle there was a hole the size of a well that had been previously bricked up. It must have been old because the bricks had eroded at some point and exposed some of the hole, maybe a 2ft diameter circle out of the full 5 feet. After calling my friends down to look at it I got the courage to creep a little closer and peer down into it."
"There was another room roughly the same size but deep, maybe 15 feet down, and mostly dirt. We shined a flashlight down into it and I could swear there was a teddy bear at the bottom. Unfortunately despite plenty bargaining, none of us were ever able work up the courage (liquid or regular) to tie a rope and climb down for a closer look. Especially after we noticed that the bricks which I thought had fallen in were all accounted for, scattered around the hole as if something had broken out."
"At the risk of my account being discovered by my redditor friends, this was in Pittsburgh. We did a little research and think the sub-basement may have been related to prohibition, but honestly I'm just willing to accept that explanation in order to avoid lifelong nightmares."
4. skogvarandersson could've snuck to the other side of the duplex all this time
"Not necessarily secret, but my old house was a duplex. There was a hobbit-sized door on the bottom floor and I glanced in there a few times but only saw pipes and different electrical units and stuff. There was some of the landlord’s/maybe past resident’s junk in the corner. After a few years I explored behind it and realized it leads to the other half of the house."
5. R12356 was disappointed by the pinecones.
"It was about a year into owning our house. We actually found two secret rooms. One was just a room under the stairs that was closed off. Had some toys from the 70s in it. The really crazy one was when we redid the insulation in our attic. One of the workers asked if I new there was a room up there. I had no idea. So we cut open the drywall and there were stacks on stacks of boxes from the 60s. Like a ton of boxes. And they were all full! So I opened them up expecting some cool stuff. And they were full of freaking PINECONES!! One of the bigger bummers of my life."
6. Jarkoface didn't appreciate the former owner's prank.
"There was a hidden door behind the wallpaper (obviously the doorknob was taken off, so it blends in with the wall) in the hallway. We lived in this house for 6 years and I found out about this door 2 years ago, when we opened it we saw a skeleton in the corner, not gonna lie that scared me sh*tless, although it was just a prop left by the past owners of our house."
7. Andandromeda3821's husband found a secret art room.
"I didn’t find one but my husband did in a house he lived in before we started dating. He lived in the house with about 3/4 roommates and they had been living there for six months. They only lived on the second floor because it was a duplex type. One day he was walking down the alley beside the house and was just looking at the windows. He thought “that’s where the kitchen should be but the kitchen doesn’t have a window right there”
"So he went in and started examining the wall in the hallway by the kitchen. Eventually they find that a door had been plastered over. They cut through and tore out wall to get into the room. He says they found found a table, chairs, an easel and some drawing supplies. Idk why it was sealed it up."
8. rgursk1's neighbor had a haunted secret room.
"Similar happened to my neighbor. They bought the house then realized there was a window on the second floor adjacent to the kitchen that they couldn’t access from within. They then also realized they had a few kitchen drawers that extended out like 5 or 6 feet, meaning they had to have a space behind them big enough to accommodate the drawers when closed."
"I suggested we get a ladder and climb up and break the window. They refused. They’ve been there about 15 years now and still won’t even try to look in that space. They said when they moved in the house was haunted, all kinds of crazy things happened to them. So they called in a spirit specialist and things got better. But won’t even think about looking into that room"
9. ckjm rebuilt the whole cabin.
"Bought a very rugged cabin with acreage a few years back. Cabin was built in the 70s. A friend of mine discovered a large attic which was surprising. There was no easy way into the attic. I knew there was space, but it did not appear to be as big as it was. Inside the the attic was evidence someone was living in there at one point... including a bloodied mattress. There were no lights, no comfort, just a sheet blocking off the part of the attic that didn't have some semblance of a floor, and a bloody mattress."
"This was all above my room. I got hella weird vibes in that house after that, and an earthquake ended up taking out the cabin shortly after. I tore it apart, salvaged a bunch of wood, and rebuilt a new cabin without the creepy vibes."
"The most unnerving part about the cabin was the previous owner, upon finding news I had bought the land, came back just before I got the keys from the realtor and left a note that simply read "good luck" in the center of the living area. Just recently found a massive old tree on the land that had been previously scorched by fire, decades ago, and survived. If that land could talk I'm sure it would have stories."
10. carthy101 wasn't ready to meet Harry Potter.
"There was a small door under some stairs (almost like Harry Potter’s room) in my old apartment in Venezuela. We’d lived there for a year until I leaned on it and felt it wiggle a little and realized it was a small square door. I was too scared to open it so had my dad do it and about 20 or so cockroaches flooded out. Never have I felt so much panic."
11. PerpetuallySl33py experienced the worst part of Ratatouille.
"Watched home alone and saw that attic that Macaulay Culkin was staying in and wondered if we had one in our townhouse. Ran around with a step ladder until I found it in my mom’s closet. Got on my tiptoes on the stepladder and fought the door open (ended up being a big piece of plywood) and peered into the attic. A mouse colony stared back. It was like that scene in ratatouille. Decades worth of feces covered the whole space. My mom was not happy once I told her. We moved shortly after."
12. Bathoriel found vintage trash.
"Helping my granddad move house, we accidentally found access to the under floor area (not even big enough to really call a crawl space I don't think, spotty memory).
There was a small pile of trash from the 60s/70s (juice cans, chocolate bar wrappers and crumpled newspapers) and bits of discarded construction debris and some broken tools. We think it must have been used by the builders in lieu of a trash can. It was cool, an accidental time capsule."
13. SexualStallion's house has belongings that were stowed away during the Holocaust.
"Not 100% of the answer your expect, but still kinda relevant - My grandpa bought our house back in ~1960, it was once owned by Jewish people (we live in a small village in Germany), but they got kicked out when Hitler did his things. He renovated the upper part of the house, the roof, you know the usual things you do with a house that's around 400 years old. He didn't renovate the rooms in the lower floor though, as they were good as is."
"Many many years later, long after he died, around 2010, my sister noticed a broken floor board in the smaller of the two attics we have, it's between the lower and upper floor and wasn't part of the renovation. She got a flashlight and a mirror and checked, because we're just curious little fucks and love to hunt for treasure. We knew that Jewish people owned it, and we knew the history of them hiding their belongings because the Nazis forced them out."
"So yeah, we found a ton of cutlery, that weird shit. Pointy spoons, weird looking teaspoons, sugar cube grabby grabbers (idk what they're called), plates, lots of it. It's all pure silver, and just looks amazing in a weird way."
"It's nothing special as they're rather common, but it was still a creepy yet amazing find. Just realizing that some people used those things and had to hide it from the Nazis right at that spot. It's about the story that emerges in your mind, because this I exactly what happened, sadly. We kept all of it since then in a showcase, and if someone wants to see pictures I'll happily post them later on!
Edit: As there's huge demand, I'll be able to post pics in around 7 hours, as I'm not home currently."
"EDIT 2: And I shall deliver - 2 bonus pics of my grandpas dad (please don't judge him, I know what you guys gonna think), and some old old old family members. If you guys want to have a detailed picture of something, please just ask and I'll deliver!"
14. notlikethat1 had a special hiding place as a child.
"Moved into an 18th century farm house as a little kid and found a small panel door in the back of the large closet in my small room. Turned out to be a small finished room over the eaves that had a small portal window. I spent hours in that room reading and hiding from the world."
15. qbeanz found a few blasts from the past.
"Hidden closet in basement wall after 20 yrs of living in the house. We found some personal documents of no real interest, a newspaper from the day after Pearl Harbor, and a hand drawn cartoon of a pregnant Lucy yelling “Goddammit Charlie Brown!”"
16. GrandProduct found an old weed room.
"I went to visit my Grandparents a few months after they had moved into a new house out in the country. I got into a bit of horseplay with a cousin and got shoved into a wall. It broke a big hole and we realized there was a large empty space back there."
"With grandpa's help we tore the wall down and found a little room full of planting trays and grow lamps. There were a number of books about horticulture and one specifically about growing marijuana."
"There was no secret way in as far as we could tell. Someone had just walled the entire room off for some reason."
17. purplhouse was deeply creeped out by the plushie.
"We bought a house that had been built in the 1880s, lived in it for seven years and then had to have some wiring work done. The electrician was working down in the basement and wanted to drill through a (brick) wall to the outside for some reason I no longer remember. We give him the okay and go about our business. He starts drilling and then stops, comes upstairs and tells us he just found a bricked up room and what do we want to do about it? Well we kind of still want our wiring situation taken care of, but if there's a body and some amontadillo in there, I definitely want to know."
"On the other hand, I don't want to let my sister's boyfriend knock the wall down with a sledgehammer. As we are discussing this, the electrician offers to run a scope through the hole he just drilled so we can take a look without doing more damage, or, as he put it, destroying evidence. So our new friend gets his scope set up and we all go down to the basement and watch the monitor."
It's a very small space, maybe 3 by 5 feet. Nothing in there but a really old, gross looking plushie. Not a teddy bear, maybe a dog? It was sewed out of some kind of patterned fabric in a vaguely dog like shape. That's it, nothing else.
"Electrician asks us what we want to do. I ask 8f he can seal the hole he just drilled because this is definitely how ghost movies start. He agreed and patched it up, drilled somewhere else, finished the rewiring and we all continued our lives. We moved out 2 years later and as far as I know, Haunted Doggy is still bricked up in the basement of that house."
18. thatstheteahoney used to play in the prohibition room.
"In my house there was an upstairs bedroom that was made into a game room for me and my sister. When we were about 12 years old we realized that a section of the paneling came off and there was a small closet sized room behind it. We kept it a secret so that when friends came over we would have the ultimate hiding spot for hide and seek. A few years later we were talking about to our parents about what we found and they said that the house was built during the prohibition era, so they most likely used it as a place to hide alcohol!"
19. jaap_null's grandparents had a secret room beneath the trap door.
"I lived in the house or my grandma for a few years, secret “room” beneath a trapdoor on the second floor, which was basically a void between walls on the complicated first floor. Was used to hide Jewish families during WW2."
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