Many of us dreamed of finding a secret passageway or an underground tunnel as a child. If I grab just the right book from this shelf, I will activate a secret doorway and unlock a whole new realm! Maybe I just read too many mystery novels as a kid, but much to my disappointment, these situations never came true in my real life. Yet for some lucky individuals, their adventurous dreams came to life when they discovered secret spaces right under their noses…
Reddit user Reptilesni reached out asking people who “have found a secret room or space in their house” to share how long they lived there before finding it, what was in it, and what the eventual outcome was of discovering the space, and many readers came through with stories that sound like they belong in film scripts. We’ve gathered some of the most fascinating responses down below, so you can live vicariously through these individuals who evidently picked the best houses to live in. Enjoy reading these stories that might make you want to reread The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and be sure to upvote all of your favorites. Keep reading to also find an interview with Steve Humble, president of Creative Home Engineering, and then if you’re interested in reading another Bored Panda article featuring real-life secret compartments, check out this story next.
#1
Lived in a warehouse in Melbourne. Always thought it would be cool to get on the roof, but there was no access.
After about six months, I’m standing in front of a mirror upstairs when I notice it has hinges.
I push on it, it clicks and opens out, revealing a small attic and roof hatch!
That was pretty cool. Used to sit up there and watch the sun set over the city.
Image credits: redhighways
#2
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.
Image credits: notlikethat1
#3
My family lived briefly in Copenhagen when I was a young child. In the house that the government provided there was a false wall with a pocket which was great to hide in. One day an older neighbor girl (native Danish) was over and said while we were playing that people used to hide in it. Her mother confirmed later that it was a Holocaust hiding space. I’m really grateful my mother took the time to explain to us what that meant, and the history behind it, rather than waiting until I was older.
#4
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.
Image credits: jaap_null
#5
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.
Image credits: KE5TR4L
#6
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.
Edit: Thanks for the gold kind stranger!
Image credits: PerpetuallySl33py
#7
We moved into a house with a door in the kitchen that could not be opened. The real estate tried but failed, assumed it let to the laundry room but was walled off. My older siblings, like any typical teenagers, were not convinced of this and were determined to open it. It was just a normal pantry but they never told our mother they managed to open it, and used it to hide things from her like alcohol, smokes, and weed.
Image credits: anon
#8
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](https://ift.tt/0d4nBuZ)
Sorry for the format/captions no idea why I decided video was the way to go.
Image credits: fluxelegy
#9
My best friend lives in France where I did as well for many years. She lives in a house that has been in her family for over six hundred years. It was built at the top of a hill about an hour outside of Paris and additions had been made to it over the years as one could imagine. Anyway, the house was built kind of at the top of a hill with rooms going down several levels into the side of the hill. The existing kitchen is new and modern and the original one was still intact but not in use as it was basically just one of those big fireplaces with a caldron looking contraption in it.
As her and her husband first moved into the house and started updated and painting etc., they removed the tile from the old kitchen wall behind the fireplace. Behind the tile was some more old tile and beneath that they found a crumbling old brick wall. When they removed the old wall they discovered that it was actually the entrance (or rather ‘exit’) to a tunnel that was an escape route from the town’s (Êpone, France) castle. In case the castle came under attack, the inhabitants could use the tunnel to flee and it came out right in my friend’s house about a kilometer away.
Mind. Blown. when she discovered that!
#10
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!
Image credits: thatstheteahoney
#11
It wasn’t a room, but after living in our house for a few years, we decided to remodel the basement bathroom. Tore out the old shower enclosure and found a window behind it! Said window was covered on the outside by an apron of siding that came from the cantilevered room upstairs all the way down to the concrete pad. We tore off the siding apron and let some light in. it was much better.
Image credits: goodwid
#12
My parents found one when I was a kid! My dad was remodeling our lower level when he noticed that part of the closet wall sounded hollow, and realized there must be something behind it. He had to cut away the wood paneling to get to it. Inside, we found it must have been a little “clubhouse” that some previous owners made for their kids or grandkids a long time ago. There were 4 pegs on the wall, each one had a boy’s name written underneath it. We think they used them as coat hooks.
It was the mid 2000s when we found it, so my parents got my sisters and I some motion-activated lights to stick on the walls, and gave us some old cushions so we could use it as a “clubhouse” too. Good times.
#13
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.
Image credits: purplhouse
#14
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.
Image credits: carthy101
#15
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.
Image credits: -banned-
#16
My family just moved out of our (story-and-a-half) house that we had lived in for around 2 years. From the front of the house it was easy to spot 3 front-facing windows, but upon inspecting the upstairs, there are only two accessible windows. I never investigated as it was my younger siblings’ rooms, I was in college, and I didn’t like the low ceilings of the upstairs. When I was helping move out, I decided I needed to check out what was up. There was a small (almost unnoticeable) door panel on the slanted ceiling that gave access to the 3rd window. It was filled with old insulation and a very used pillow but was overall a very small space.
My siblings wanted to show me the other secret room they had found also. In the center hallway also upstairs there was a 1/4 sized door, handle and all, stashed behind a cupboard that you could scooch out enough to get behind. It was also insulation filled (without the dirty pillow) but was a much larger space that just seemed unfinished. My siblings used it as a hideout when chores needed done.
This is my first comment ever, excuse anything I did incorrectly and I guess I’m supposed to say I’m on mobile as well.
#17
My sister and I shared the basement room of a house that we were renting. The owners had slept in that room when they lived in the house, all of the kids slept upstairs. We noticed that one of the panels of the wood wall looked loose so our brother carefully pried it off. Behind that wood panel was a secret room that had monitors lining the wall along with a random assortment of items. The monitors were not hooked up to anything but they explained why each room upstairs had holes in the corners of the ceilings. My Mom ended up asking about it to make sure, and yup, the owners had cameras in their kids rooms and we found the creepy headquarters. We moved out pretty soon after that.
#18
I was pretty young (maybe 7-8) so I don’t remember all the details. But my family moved into a new house (new to us but maybe 20 years old). There was one closet in my older sister’s room (9-10), not that big but it had a very small door in the back wall. It was locked and my parents never showed much interest in it.
I guess I sort of forgot about it over time, until one day I was hanging out in my sisters room and somehow she got it open. An awful smell came over us, I think we just assumed it was because the house was old or something. We didn’t go inside because the doorway was so small and we were already creeped out by how dark it was in there. We shut the door and got distracted by something else pretty quickly.
A day or two later, my sister mentioned it to my parents, they seemed a little confused but mostly just amused and my dad went to go check it out. After a couple of minutes he called my mom upstairs, she goes upstairs and a little later she comes back down. I just remember her asking us if we want to go to the park. My dad stayed behind. According to my sister, mom was acting strange.
When we get back home, there were bags in the car with our stuff. Apparently our grandma had invited us to stay with her for a couple nights. So we drove the 20 mins to her house and stayed there for 3 nights… then 4…. I think it was maybe a week until we got back home. But when we did, the door was sealed shut. Eventually replaced with more drywall.
My parents never talked about what was behind the door. I always wanted to ask them, but they both died in a car accident when I was 15.
#19
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.
Image credits: anon
#20
After 15 years, we found a second basement in our farmhouse. My father had removed one of the large rocks that makes up the basement wall. I crawled under the log frame a few feet and there was a wall made of baseball sized rocks. I knocked those down and entered an old root cellar. There were shelves and shatter mason jars. And bones. lots and lots of bones. We dug a tunnel so we could access the room.
Found many secret areas in my current house behind wood panels. First secret door was in the basement, it lead to a underground bomb shelter with separate air intake and water line. I knew of it prior to buying the home and was a major selling point for me. Stocked with a radiation detector, used for storage.
Second room was only three feet high, had a light a bunch of toys, crayons and drawings. That one I didn’t find for a few months. After about two weeks I discovered a few hidden panels with shelves with toys, magazines, books and some clothing. Nothing interesting.
After a year or two, I located a suspicious wood panel on the floor, pried it open a bit and was able to see a full length staircase leading to a brick wall. I haven’t bothered to fully open the panel yet.
#21
I found a secret space in my closet when my mom and I were moving out of the house she was renting to move into my stepdad’s house. I never noticed it because junk covered the section of the wall that was covering a small entrance to a room that was sealed off with boards and plywood. I couldn’t pry it open but I could see light shining in it and a single mason jar filled with what I assumed was water. The air was cold in there like as if the central heating didn’t even reach that part. I showed it to my mom and she told me that she doesn’t remember seeing that there when we had moved in 8 years prior but since we were moving out, it didn’t matter. The room gave me the creeps for whatever reason. I know why it was sealed off or why there was a single mason jar filled with water in the center of the room.
Image credits: PraetorKiev
#22
Found it moving in. Latch at bottom of corner of closet. Cape cod style house, crawl space to basically uncarpetted room with two windows over garage. Fell through one time.
Image credits: Slylizardcue
#23
My old house had this weirdly large concrete slab in the corner of the yard that was covered by a ton of leaves when we moved in. I thought it was maybe foundation for a shed, but it was in a very odd location. Years later when I was getting ready to move, it bugged me that I didn’t know what it was for. I got a friend to help me come dig around it, expecting to confirm that it was just an old foundation.
We dug for days in the middle of August. We had to start digging at night to protect ourselves from the heat. We got about 15 feet down and the concrete wasn’t showing any signs of ending. We eventually struck a pipe with a nozzle, and discovered that there was more concrete moving towards the center of the yard.
About a week later my Dad came home and almost had a stroke when he saw that we were digging up half the yard. We had sold the house and were expected to leave by September first. He made us fill it all in and I left home never finding out what it was. Some of my teachers who were longtime town residents told me that my neighborhood had been farmland before development and that there may have been several bomb or fallout shelters in that area. I would have loved to have found an entrance into the bunker, if that’s what it was.
Image credits: anon
#24
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.
Image credits: skogvarandersson
#25
I bought a house back in 2010. There was a wooden box next to an old oak tree in my backyard. It had no doors and no way to look into it. The box was about as big as a love seat and it looked as old as the house. (about 30 years) but very well kept, no bug damage.
I waited for about 2 years until I got the nerve to open it… it was empty.
Image credits: shaka_sulu
#26
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.
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Image credits: Bathoriel
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