Old houses can hold lots of secrets, but of you have been living ik a house for a while it's pretty reasonable to think you have discovered them all.
These folks hadn't, and were in for quite a surprise when they discovered secret sections of there homes that they had never known about.
Reddit user u/reptilesni asked:
20.
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.
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.
18.
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!"
Update: As promised
Well! I only half-remembered things but as promised, here is what we found. The newspaper turned out to be a reprint, so not valuable but still fun to look through. The cartoon is just as I remembered. Goes to show what I find important. BUT I had completely forgotten about the photo album! I'm going to try and track these people down and return their memories. Thanks for poking at me to dig this stuff up!!
17.
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 if 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.
16.
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.
15.
Growing up my dads hoarding was pretty bad and my childhood home was pretty old. Around my preteens I started trying to navigate through the clutter to parts of the house I truly had never seen because of all the junk. I found this door that had been blocked off and I eventually moved stuff around enough that I could open the door (which was hard because the room was big but he filled it so much all the only way to navigate it was a single narrow path) behind the door was trippy to me as a kid because the back couple of rooms of the house were rotted out and collapsed in places so my parents just blocked it off I guess.
Going from my packed house to this completely empty callapsing ruins was actually really interesting to me, I used to try and navigate through it till one day I fell through the floor and landed underneath the house with my head a couple inches from a nail pointed up from the ground. I dont remember if I ever went back through the door after that.
14.
While installing CAT5E network cables many years ago in my house, I discovered a short and squat, cast iron water heater -- inside some walls (around a staircase and bathroom) connecting the basement and the next level of the house. I'm guessing whoever did the remodel didn't think the little bit of space that could be reclaimed was worth it.
I found it when I realized my measurements weren't making sense and couldn't figure out why I wasn't seeing my ethernet cable. I had to plot everything out carefully because of the split level nature of my house, the crawl space, the basement, etc... and figured out there was three feet of space unaccounted for.
It will probably be removed when we remodel the basement bathroom -- I figure I can either get more storage space or a full bathtub instead of just the shower stall that is there now.
13.
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.
12.
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.
11.
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.
10.
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.
9.
My parents bought a house from an old family member to help her pay for nursing home care (she hadn't lived in the house for years at that point). She was a hoarder and we were tasked with cleaning up the house of the course of a summer in order to make it livable prior to the start of school. Rat carcasses fused to the carpet, old tax documents from the 60s, etc.
Well, we were scraping up the linoleum tiling (covering the original hardwood floor, disappointingly enough) in a side room when I made the joke about the previous resident being a secret mass murderer and that there was a trapdoor under the linoleum full of dead bodies.
I pulled up a huge section of tiling only to find...a trapdoor underneath. Scared the hell out of me, but when we finally built up enough courage to open the damned thing, we discovered there was nothing under there. It was a walled off section of the basement with a dirt floor. We suspect it was an old root cellar from back when farmers had to store their food in a cold, dark place to prevent it from spoiling.
8.
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.
7.
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.
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.
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.
4.
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.
3.
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.
2.
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.
1.
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.
