Hidden treasure, a secret clubhouse, and buried secrets... you never know what you'll find in old buildings. We asked people from around the world about the times they've stumbled across whole rooms. These stories will have you checking under your stairs, the back of your closet, and behind every bookcase for a secret space of your very own.
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35. Perfect for crafts.
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.
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34. The reason was because it's illegal.
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 pot plants. There was no secret way in as far as we could tell. Someone had just walled the entire room off for some reason.
Image by Rex Medlen from Pixabay
33. Look out, Aunt Sticky Fingers is coming over.
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.
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32. Prohibition left a cool legacy.
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 booze!
31. Everyone needs one of these.
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.
30. Alone with the muse.
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 found that a door had been plastered over. They cut through and tore out wall to get into the room. He says they found a table, chairs, an easel and some drawing supplies. No idea as to why it was sealed up.
29. Wisdom prevails.
Half the attic is walled off from renovations from one of the previous owners. I can't seem to convince my dad to let me cut a piece of the drywall out to look inside. This house is from the 1920s which is rather old for New Zealand. It would be a rather large space, about the size of our kitchen. Unfortunately my dad won't let me knock the walls down to see what's inside.
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
28. Secret passageway to the neighbor's.
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 by Maret Hosemann from Pixabay
27. The cement mystery.
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.
mage by Vlad Vasnetsov from Pixabay
26. The literal skeleton in the closet.
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 until I realized it was just a prop left by the past owners of our house.
25. Technically someone was living there.
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.
24. Mobster trap.
Not my house, but they found a secret room in a home in Denver a few years ago. The new home owner started to do some demo work and they found a secret room booby trapped to burn the house down quickly. Luckily they didn’t accidentally set it off before finding it. They kept smelling smoke just before they found it. The home used to be owned by a local mob family and it traded hands without the room being dismantled or discovered since it was most likely made in the 30’s. I can’t vouch for how long since the 30’s that someone from that mob family might have lived there though.
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23. Never to be found again.
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 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.
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22. Cubby hole turns clubhouse.
It was secret from me but not my parents. You know how some houses have beds in drawers? We had a drawer like that but didn’t use it, and the empty drawer could also be accessed through a hole in the adjacent closet. I think I found it around age 8, so about six years after moving in, when playing hide and seek and crawling deeper into that closet than I ever had previously. I spent a lot of time in there after that as my “secret” clubhouse. Eventually the whole room was remodeled and that drawer as well as a second staircase were removed. Apparently that room used to be a servants quarters when it was first built, which explains the stairs from a bedroom to the kitchen, and maybe someone with only one room to themselves would want the space saving of a drawer bed? But my parents had no use for it because we didn’t have a live-in servant.
21. A step back through time.
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.
20. Secret silver stash.
My grandpa bought our house in Germany back in 1960, it was once owned by Jewish people who got kicked out in WWII. 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 types 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 we found a ton of cutlery. Pointy spoons, weird looking teaspoons, sugar cube grabby grabbers, 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.
19. A whole house unlocked.
Growing up my dad's 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 collapsing ruins was actually really interesting to me, I used to try and navigate through it until 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 don't remember if I ever went back through the door after that.
18. A hiding space revealed.
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.
17. Forgotten history uncovered.
My Grandma's house is about 244 years old. I think I was about 12 before I realized that there was an extra window between the kitchen and what was at the time the living room but has since resumed service as the dining room. Logically it didn't make sense . I knew there was a butler's pantry between those two rooms, but I knew there was no window in it. I went climbing through the huge old bushes under (almost over) the window, and eventually found an overgrown door. It was like that part in the Secret Garden where Mary finds the door in the ivy. It wasn't opening, and I was too little to look in the window. Unlike in the book, a little bird never showed me where the key was buried, unfortunately.
I kinda forgot about it. Figured it was just as forbidden as the attic. Which I was fine with because the attic was scary. Until a few years back, when my aunt uploaded an album to Facebook. It was part of a now abandoned project to renovate the old family homestead. The workers had cleared the jungle that was the back of the house and gotten the door off of the hinges. It was actually nothing. Just a little extra storage space that had been cleaned out decades ago. But she also posted some history.
The house used to have an annex (dates unknown), making it into a T. There are absolutely no known pictures of that annex, which hurts. My aunt, who has a familial interest in history, said she thought the window must have been original to the house, and that the shed was basically empty space left over after the annex was eventually demolished.
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16. Something escaped.
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.
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.
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15. Found it too late.
Friends of mine rented a holiday villa in Mexico years ago. They stayed there for 3 weeks. It had been advertised as '4 bedrooms, 3 baths' so they were kind of ticked off to find that there were only 2 bathrooms and the fourth bedroom was kind of small.
The day before they were leaving they did a little bit of a cleanup. One of my friends went to put the broom into the closet beside the fridge. He opened the closet door only to find that it led to a massive room with a bathroom and it's own balcony!
The first night that they had gotten there, one of them had tried the door and thought that it was locked and assumed that that was maybe where they stored cleaning stuff or extra linen. After that, no one thought to try the door again until it was accidentally opened the day before leaving.
Image by Chris Reynolds from Pixabay
14. A scary safety precaution.
When my wife and I moved in, we went into the garage and discovered a trap door on the floor. The door lead down to an underground tornado shelter. There were no lights. The stairs creaked horribly, the air was thick with dust, and the echoes sounded like something was walking towards you. To make things even worse, you had to go down the stars backward, so you couldn't see whatever evil monster was waiting for you in the dark.
I told my wife "That tornado shelter is scarier than a tornado. I'm never going down there."
But later, we actually had a tornado warning. We grabbed flashlights and sleeping bags and rushed down there. It turned out, once you walked around the corner, the super creepy tornado shelter was bright pink and covered in lady bug stickers. Apparently the last owner's little girl used it as a play room.
Image by skeeze from Pixabay
13. Don't panic, there's a room for that.
I used to live in suburban Detroit where people had an immense fear of breaking and enterings. So, when we moved into our new house, the landlord showed us the 'special cabinet.' One of the cabinets in the office room off the living room was actually a passageway tiny to a small room with some waterbottles, gas masks, other important survival things. It had room for about 2 or 3 people to hide in in case a gang or something broke in.
Needless to say, we never used it.
Image by Денис Резник from Pixabay
12. Stolen treasure.
This is more of a family legend, but here it goes. Everyone always heard that my great grandma had build a secret room in her farm in Mexico somewhere. No one knew where it was or what she kept in there, but the speculation was that it was gold as she always saved money, bought gold, and there was no trace of it.
She died without telling anyone, or so we thought. However, an aunt started going to the old ranch an awful lot in the months following her death. She went repeatedly and then suddenly stopped.
About a year later, a different family member found a will, with the location to the secret room, a small 2'x2' crevice with a lock. Many members of the family went together to prevent foul play, but found that the lock was broken and the small room empty. Looking back at the clues, that first aunt suspiciously had money to buy herself property and businesses in the times following the death.
Although she never admitted to it, most of the family is convinced that great grandma had a stash of gold, the aunt found it, and hoarded it. No one knows for sure though.
11. The lost world.
I used to live in a big old house in the mountains of California. When I was 8, I was rustling around in some big bushes up against the side of the house and found a boxy structure with a heavy door. To the left of the door, someone had scrawled "The Lost World" and drew the Jurassic Park logo.
As a Jurassic Park fan and budding young buccaneer, this intrigued me. Did this door lead to some kind of lost world? Was it hiding a fabulous secret?
I spent three years trying to find out, but the door was always shut fast and locked with a big brass padlock. My schemes to invade, including digging under it from beneath the front porch, were failures.
Finally, not long before we moved, I found the door unlocked and ajar. Flush with success, I crept inside what was actually the well house. A cramped, stuffy little room containing only the well pump, spider webs, and a smaller door to the space under the house.
It was anticlimactic, but it did give me three years of childish fancy.
10. Tag, you're... gone.
I used to live in a very large house in northern Ontario (Canada) and there was a closet in the front hallway that if you entered you could make your way through and come out in the bedroom on the other side. It was like a mini hallway/passage between the walls from the front closet to the bedroom closest. Me, my siblings and my pets got many hours of fun out of it!
Image by Paul Sprengers from Pixabay
9. No joy at the top of the stairs.
A junior high school that I used to go to for language classes had a hallway at a corner of the building which was completely dark. The hall led to a stairwell which was dark as well. The teachers always used to tell the students to never go upstairs, so naturally we formed "raiding parties" to find out what was upstairs. You'd think it would have been easy to get a bunch of kids to run through a hallway and up some stairs, but there were a lot of failed attempts because teachers came to stop us or kids would run back as soon as they got to the stairs cause they were scared. Anyways it was quite some time before we actually managed to reach the top of the stairs and what we saw up there reinforced the rumour that that place was haunted. Basically you walk up these steps in complete darkness and you are met with a bright painting of a clown at the top. Let's just say there were no more attempts to explore further the upstairs anymore after that day.
8. Perfect place to skip classes.
At my undergrad college, there was a series of what were called "steam tunnels." Supposedly in the earlier history of the college, they were used to allow students to pass between buildings during times of gnarly winter weather, but they had been sealed off long before I got there. Unless you knew how to get in. Most students thought they were a myth; the few of us - and judging by the number of people I saw down there, there probably were less than 100 out of 5,000 students who knew they really did exist - who did found a nice haven for - whatever. Makes sense that they were old, because they only went between the three oldest buildings on campus. They were just really wide tunnels with high ceilings that did in fact carry steam pipes, so they were warm; there were some blind offshoots, but mostly they were just nice, wide thoroughfares that were fun to explore.
7. An unholy tunnel.
My parents' old house in Kent, southern England, had a cellar that they filled in with rubble from the renovation work (and regretted doing ever after). The house wasn't wildly old - a bit of it was seventeenth century, some eighteenth, but there had certainly been a dwelling on that site for a long time.
Anyway, there was a tunnel heading out from the cellar, angled so it pointed directly at the church, which was on the other side of the road, and maybe a hundred yards away. The church is Norman, late 11th Century.
It was almost certainly a smugglers' tunnel. Village vicars and parsons were frequently part of the smuggling gangs in the 18th century, because it was not quite the done thing to search a church. And the 18th century saw a big upsurge in smuggling.
I imagine the tunnel's still there.
6. The hiding space.
My family just moved out of our 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.
Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay
5. He just keeps finding them.
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 shattered 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.
Image by Дмитрий Дроздов from Pixabay
4. The curse of the mystery door.
I was pretty young when my family moved into a new house. There was one closet in my older sister’s room, 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.
3. The secret history of the secret room.
I grew up in an old farmhouse, two floors and a basement. The basement was creepy because it had rickety wood slat stairs, stone walls, was dimly lit, in an L shape with dark corners, and was only lit by a single hanging lightbulb. Also there were soooo many spiders and cobwebs, and these spiders turn bright white when they died. Anyway at the back of the basement it always seemed cut short, so one day brother and I decided to search under our old back porch that was overgrown with weeds at the time. And we found a door to another room that had been walled off from the rest of the basement.
Well "door" is probably an overstatement. It was kind of a hanging half-door made with weathered 2×4's with big metal hinges. It wouldn't move when we tried to open it so for years we jokingly refered to it as "the murder room", daring friends to go inside, which no one would of course, and the legend grew. What could be in this room? If it was for storage, why would it be walled off from the rest of the basement?
Eventually we could lift the door ever so slightly but it was pitch dark inside and when my big brother pushed me in one day our mom would end up telling us to stop messing around back there, that the old door was dangerous if it swung down on us and she didn't want us playing back there anymore. Of course this only made the interest grow. But what was the room for?
One day our mom had the old carpets thrown out and finally fixed the wood floors under them like she always wanted to. Eventually when cleaning out a tiny closet under some stairs I noticed that some of the boards made a distinctive square. It was right over the murder room! I pulled up the square and saw the secret room I'd been barred from years before. My girlfriend and I ventured inside and found a small chair and a child's school desk. It freaked us out, but later I found out many buildings in our town were linked to the underground railroad.
Image by klimkin from Pixabay
2. A house with top secret headquarters.
My family moved from California to New Mexico when I was eight years old, arriving in the dead of night only a few days before Christmas. Our new house was a large, multilevel structure in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains, and my younger brother and I insisted on exploring the entire interior as soon as we had climbed out of the car. This endeavor led us absolutely everywhere that we could walk, from our parents' bathroom to the back corners of the kitchen pantry... but as we poked our heads into one of our shared bedroom's closets, we found something unexpected.
"What's that?" I remember my brother asking. "Max, what is that?!"
The detail that had caught his attention was little more than a literal hole in the wall. It was about three feet square, bordered by some kind of moulding, and absolutely pitch black on the other side. The two of us stood and stared at the space, both feeling somewhat uncertain about what we had discovered, before turning and running back upstairs to find our parents in the living room.
"Mom! Dad!" I yelled, barreling towards them. "There's a... there's a cave or something in our bedroom!" I don't know why I thought this would be news to them - after all, my father had been living there for over a month already, and he certainly would have been made aware of any caverns connected to his house - but they played along as though it was new information.
"A cave?!" repeated my father. His voice adopted the tone that I would later learn to recognize as being a part of his storyteller persona. "You mean we moved into a house with a secret room?"
The term hadn't yet occurred to me, but I immediately went along with it. "Yes! Yes, it's a secret room, and it's in the closet."
"What's inside?" my mother asked.
My brother and I glanced at each other. For all of our outspoken love of fantasy and adventure, we had both been hesitant to go spelunking without permission. "We... couldn't get in," I eventually replied, suddenly feeling embarrassed. "Also, we couldn't see anything."
"Now, would the Hardy Boys just give up like that?" asked my father. He left the room for a moment, and when he returned, he was carrying a matching pair of flashlights. "Go try again," he continued, "and then let me know what you guys find!"
That was all the prompting I needed. My brother and I ran back to our bedroom, turned on our torches, and got ready to mount a second expedition to the hole in the back of the closet. After a few false starts, we managed to climb inside and shine our beams around, at which point we noticed a switch on the wall nearest to us. Flipping it - the wisdom of which we briefly debated - illuminated the area, allowing us to see that we were in a fairly large crawl-space with a back wall that had been finished in a peculiar design of ornate hardwood.
An adult likely would have found it underwhelming. For my brother and me, though, it was the discovery of a lifetime. Over the years that we lived in the house, that secret room became everything from a hidden base to a museum gallery to a space station to an enchanted forest, with each setting being augmented by the "artwork" we'd draw on the three walls that weren't adorned with wood. It was the sort of place that was absolutely ideal for a kid with an overactive imagination, and years later, my father confessed that he'd thought the very same thing.
It wasn't the only reason he'd purchased that house, obviously... but knowing that his kids would love the place had helped.
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
1. This is not the bat cave.
Had a small door half the size of a regular door in a room in a house I rented. The landlord told me "not to worry about it and never open it" - of course that wasn't going to do anything but make me want to open it. Sadly it was a school lease, I took the place but had to sublet it to a friend for the summer because I was going home. So I literally "took possession" and then handed the keys over to him.
So I finally move in months later and I ask him about the door, and he says, "Oh, me and the girlfriend call it the bathroom door. The landlord was right - you don't want to open it." So of course I open it. Almost immediately after he's gone.
Turns out they called it the "Bat Room" not the "Bathroom" door. Door couldn't be open for more than 10 seconds when bats come flying out of the door. Only 3 or 4 but even one bat is crazy.
Found out when my sublet had opened it, so many flew out that he had to get professionals to remove them and clean up the damage and didn't want to tell me (or me tell the landlord). But at least he had the number of the guys who did the removal handy. They asked me "if we will ever learn."
