25 Bizarre Secret Rooms Discovered

It was 1896 and sewing tycoon Commodore Frederick G. Bourne decided he needed a summer home. He built Singer Castle on Dark Island in the St. Lawrence River of New York. During construction, Bourne had several secret passageways and even a dungeon built. Why? When he had guests over, he wanted to be able to sneak behind the walls and listen in on what they were talking about and maybe even hear what they thought of him.

A Redditor named Lmbrjack posted a photo of a crawlspace he found in his attic. A strange black door with a padlock blocked the way inside. When he finally got inside, the room was covered in soundproofing board, plastic, and had four electric outlets. It also had a platform the size of a bed. Making things more suspicious, he found a briefcase full of jewelry items and several black VHS tapes, some with ominous writing like “No No No No” and a note that said, “Save yourself” on it. Some have called this a hoax but he insists it isn’t.

In Lancashire, an old, boarded up shop had been feared dangerous since it was abandoned for so long. When authorities went inside, they discovered many of the original items that were on the shelves 40 years ago, including magazines, ice cream spoons, and cigarette advertisements.

According to one Redditor, some friends of theirs bought an old farmhouse and found a secret door in one of the closets. It was only a couple of feet tall, and you had to crawl through it. Inside this hidden room was a bed that someone put in there before it had been constructed.

Long ago, when the second World War was brewing in Europe and the Nazis were marching into Paris, a wealthy Parisian woman locked up her apartment and headed south. She never returned, but surprisingly, she never stopped paying rent for the apartment, either. When she died at the age of 91, her heirs found the apartment on the books and went to go find it. It had been left untouched for 70 years with tons of collector’s items, including a priceless painting of the actress Marthe de Florian, worth 2 million Euros (2,324,756 U.S Dollars).

A construction worker did some plumbing work on a condo. While working on the project, he found a secret room that led to a secret office. The secret office had a one-way mirror looking into a guest shower.

In 2016, Alexandra Poulos discovered something strange in her Pennslyvania home – a secret room that could have been part of the Underground Railroad. After doing research, she discovered her home could have had a room covered up with cement in her basement. She asked a few guys to see if they could find anything and they did. The region is known for being an abolitionist sympathizer and being involved in the Underground Railroad.

One Redditor claimed the house they lived in when they were younger had a secret room behind a mirror. When they went back there, they found a big blood stain on the floorboards.

In the French region of Alsace lies this abbey with a 1,300-year history. Still populated by monks and nuns, the abbey has quite the library. In August 2000, they noticed books were missing. They suspected the librarian but had no evidence to prove it. They locked doors, sealed windows, and even put up guards and yet the books still vanished. Turns out, a young professor named Stanislas Gosse discovered a secret room in the library full of old manuscripts and was taking them home to read. Eventually, he was caught, ordered to pay a fine and help the monks preserve many of the other manuscripts.

A young couple with a two-year-old child purchased a foreclosed five bedroom, two bath house for only $75,000. They were thrilled to get such a deal. When they started to do renovations, however, they found a passageway that led to a hidden room. Inside, a note read, “You Found It! Hello. If you’re reading this, then you found the secret room. I owned this house for a short while, and it was discovered to have a serious mold problem. One that actually made my children very sick to the point that we had to move out.” Needless to say, the young couple was devastated.

The Aspen home of the video game designer and programmer of Myst looks like an ordinary log cabin on the outside but inside is a different story, full of winding and mysterious passageways. Filing cabinets conceal doors and dresser drawers are entryways to hidden passages. To make matters worse, this house has a “Room of Doom” where people have to either swim through a chute or jump through the waterfall, hoping they land in a swimming pool.

When Norwegian students entered their new house, their landlord told them about a secret room but wouldn’t give its location. After some digging around, they discovered the secret room up in the attic. It was a tiny living space, likely where they kept Jewish or Nazi oppressed families on the run. It had a map of Britain and some of Europe, plus an alarm light to warn the families staying in the tight quarters.

During a remodeling project, workers came across something odd at Placer High School in Northern California – a cold war shelter stocked with goods. Food, water, supplies, medical kits, and everything you could think of to survive the end of the world was inside. Built during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it had remained untouched for years.

After a few drinks, a couple decided to investigate a metal grid in their Telford home in Shropshire. When they climbed down inside, they discovered a very old chapel with a wooden cross on the floor, hooks hanging up on the ceiling, and a wood box. The eerie setting is believed to be an old Catholic chapel used long ago when it was illegal to be Catholic in the area.

After Archie Graham-Palmer took over the Cefn Par mansion from his father, he came across something strange. Covered up behind a wall was an old war bunker complete with a kitchen. The kitchen was at least 100 years old with all the supplies and cooking equipment needed, including cookbooks, to prepare food. An 1881 census said the house once had a live-in butler, valet, footman, two housemaids, a gardener, and a coachman.

An Imgur user under the name “TwoBiteBrownie” posted images of his experience of a discovery he and his brother made at his house. They found out there was a secret passageway behind a bookshelf that led to a spiral staircase. The staircase went down to a room and looked like someone had been living there with a white blanket, creepy dolls, and food wrappers. Many called it a hoax, but we still aren’t sure of its veracity.

Students at Ohio State University just thought a door in their house led to a maintenance cupboard. They were quite wrong. After hearing strange noises and finding cupboards open, they thought their house was haunted until they went through the door which went to the basement. Inside the basement, they found a bed, textbooks, and a squatter living in their house they didn’t know they had. They ended up changing all the locks and leaving a note telling him he could no longer liver there.

When a student moved into a house his parents purchased in New Mexico, he wasn’t expecting to hear noises underneath the floorboards. When he looked into it, he found a door underneath the floor of the pantry, leading to a hidden room. Inside was a desk, working lights, and a recently smoked cigarette. The student never saw the inhabitant again.

When Reddit user demc7 moved into an apartment, he found a secret door underneath the floorboards. At first, he thought it was just a nice place to keep stuff, but when he went down into it more, he found out it was a dreary dungeon and catacombs. Graffiti was on the wall, and he found a dirt hole in the middle of the room that looked recently dug up.

John Darwin and his wife came up with an elaborate scam. Owning both a house and an apartment right next door, he built a secret passageway from his wife’s closet to the apartment. Then, he mysteriously disappeared and was eventually declared dead. His wife filed insurance and pension claims as part of the scam, but the whole time he lived next door in the apartment and would sneak over to be with his wife. Of course, they didn’t get away with this Scott-free. They were caught and thrown in prison for insurance fraud.

Built by Ultima video games developer Richard Garriott, this mansion was strictly designed to have a spiral staircase hidden in the center of the house. From hidden rooms, gardens, and a dungeon, Garriott designed it to be a mix between medieval and modern.

This colonial house is now part of Smith College and was built by Captain Jonathan Hunt. Hunt built a hidden spiral staircase down to a secret room to hide from potential Native American attacks. Later, it would be used for the Underground Railroad. Legend says the room is now haunted by Hunt’s granddaughter who used to meet up with her lover in the secret room.

The heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, Sarah Winchester, thought that she was being haunted by all the people killed by her company’s firearms. To avoid the ghosts, she would take extreme measures, including sleeping in different beds every night and going down different paths. Eventually, she was told by a medium that if she stopped building her home, she’d be killed by the ghosts. So, she never stopped construction and as a result, built a madhouse of stairs to nowhere, secret passageways and hidden rooms. To date, many of the hidden rooms have yet to be found.

In 2010, French engineers wanting to build a road stumbled on an abandoned German trench that hadn’t been touched since the first World War. Inside the trench, they found an elaborate setup of walls, floors, a system for heating, wine bottles, phone lines, and the remains of a goat that they likely used for fresh milk. The findings promoted the idea that these soldiers were living in much greater luxury than most soldiers did in a trench back then.

Of all the weird, creepy, and bizarre secret rooms, the ones inside Murder Castle hands-down are the scariest. Designed by notorious serial killer H.H. Holmes, the macabre and vicious castle maze included secret rooms, winding passageways, trapdoors and chutes to throw his victims down, and a dungeon of acid vats and quicklime.