old houses: secret passages and compartments and other tales

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

This is the thread where you talk about the strange things you've found in your (or an) old house. Including esoteric architectural features, love letters beneath the floorboards, old photographs, just about anything. If you have any unusual old furniture or objects you can talk about that too.

This is the type of thing I obsessed over when I was a kid.

― Melissa W (Melissa W), Friday, 21 February 2003 15:47 (twenty-two years ago)

when I lived in a college hostel in Green street Cambridge, I decided to climb up into the attic space. I found an old envelope. in it were rather boring documents about refurbishing/building the college boat house. it was written in splendid handwriting with a section of neat numbers (in L S D) for the costs involved - i think it dated back to the 1900s. I might still have it (actually may have thrown it out in my last move)

― Alan (Alan), Friday, 21 February 2003 15:52 (twenty-two years ago)

my parents' house was built in the 1920s. It has an escape hatch from the 3rd floor up to the roof. A servant's call button (3rd floor was servants' quarters). Weird liquid fire extinguisher thingies that are basically glass balloons filled with liquid that would drop in the event of a fire. Weird lightning rods all over the place. And prolly some other stuff I've forgotten about. Apparently for a long time an "inventor" lived there.

― hstencil, Friday, 21 February 2003 15:53 (twenty-two years ago)

haha when we moved out of the flat in graham road we forgot to empty the loft (which wz real hard to access), and only remembered afterwards that in we had stored three binbags full of hideously lurid lifesize cartoon-y papier mache heads, which our flatmate rae had made for her first ever stage-design commission

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 21 February 2003 15:56 (twenty-two years ago)

Also, Melissa, this obsession of yours must be quite common, cos something like that is the start of nearly EVERY girl's comic serial story from the 70s/80s. "Oh look a weird photo of a family. Very victorian. And even stranger, that young girl looks just like ME! And what's this strange pendant in the secret compartment I've just uncovered..." with spooky consequences

― Alan (Alan), Friday, 21 February 2003 15:56 (twenty-two years ago)

In the state park near my house there are a bunch of abondoned houses around. In high school There was a huge party at one of them where there must have been 200 people in this one house with no electricty. There was a few kegs on the third floor in the bathroom, and the only way in was from the basement. A few people had flashlights, but no one could really see anything. It was soo cool.

― A Nairn (moretap), Friday, 21 February 2003 15:57 (twenty-two years ago)

And what's this strange pendant in the secret compartment I've just uncovered...
Haha, I'm fairly sure I probably wrote some stories when I was very young containing that exact line!

― Melissa W (Melissa W), Friday, 21 February 2003 16:00 (twenty-two years ago)

in my HS buddy brian's house, they had a number of cool things! in the kitchen, there was a panel behind the counter that removed and there was a little cubbyhole behind for hiding things. also the top part of the handrail to the basement was removable so you could bonk people with it. i know it just sounds like it was broken, but i did get the impression that it was expressly designed for bonking.

i like how in my aunt and uncles house, there are these little tubes that run from the kitchen to a small dressing room between the bedrooms on the second floor. you can talk through them, sort of a stone age walkie talkie. i think the servants were hanging out in the dressing room brushing the kid's hair and whatnot and needed to confer about the luncheon or something.

― ron (ron), Friday, 21 February 2003 16:02 (twenty-two years ago)

My house actually looks like a gigantic Victorian dolls house, but sadly we haven't found any shoeboxes containing a broken porcelain doll and the love letters written by a woman to her wartime sweetheart under the floorboards yet. We did find the keys to a BMW, but no car to go with it sadly.

― Matt DC (Matt DC), Friday, 21 February 2003 16:15 (twenty-two years ago)

This isn't quite the same, but as a child, I had recurring dreams about a secret, narrow back staircase in a big, old house, and a room with scary grates behind which no doubt hid monsters. I had no idea what it meant, until, as a teenager, me and my family visited some friends in the country.

They had just moved back into a house they'd left ten years earlier, and as I was looking around, I found the secret staircase! It was just as i remembered it from my dreams (though totally not from any conscious memories), only much less dramatic. Similarly, the room with the grates was no longer scary in the slightest. My demons were banished!!

― Mark C (Mark C), Friday, 21 February 2003 16:25 (twenty-two years ago)

What was in the secret suitcase?

― Matt DC (Matt DC), Friday, 21 February 2003 16:26 (twenty-two years ago)

I've been in a few musty attics with old bathtubs, but that's about all there is to say.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 21 February 2003 16:36 (twenty-two years ago)

Mark C - if you dream of me dying in hideous and painful cicumstances, please do not tell me about it!

― Lara (Lara), Friday, 21 February 2003 16:39 (twenty-two years ago)

ned i immediately thought of "lost hearts"!!

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 21 February 2003 16:43 (twenty-two years ago)

Hey, you're right! :-) Still a great story. I was very pleased to finally get a couple of the collected stories two years back.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 21 February 2003 16:51 (twenty-two years ago)

For some reason once when I was young I was in the house of a fundamentalist preacher (you know the kind that have their own independant congregation and somehow manage to encourage everyone in it to give them lots of money and it's very cult-like and creepy) and there was a secret passage to some stairs up to a little loft overlooking the living room upon which there was a plastic tree that had hundreds of dollar bills attached to it (don't ask me...). That was weird.

― Dan I., Friday, 21 February 2003 16:51 (twenty-two years ago)

This thread can't die yet.

― Melissa W (Melissa W), Friday, 21 February 2003 18:03 (twenty-two years ago)

Whilst rummaging through a large closet in the professor's country home, I found myself transported to a strange land, where I met an alabaster snow queen, who offered me Turkish delight.

― Ernest P. (ernestp), Friday, 21 February 2003 18:42 (twenty-two years ago)

You are so gay it's unbelievable.

― Lara (Lara), Friday, 21 February 2003 18:54 (twenty-two years ago)

more more

― Melissa W (Melissa W), Saturday, 22 February 2003 03:13 (twenty-two years ago)

When my parents remodeled their house they tore down some of the drywall and found that the mice had been storing enormous amounts of our late dog's kibble and dog hamburger-type food in the spaces between the wall studs.

― felicity (felicity), Saturday, 22 February 2003 03:17 (twenty-two years ago)

This is a fabulous thread. Unfortunately I don't have much to contribute. In my last apartment in Boston, I found a 25-year-old box of Pop Tarts in what was the laundry chute. Inside was a little comic book featuring a walking talking piece of toast.

I'm trying hard to separate actual discoveries in old houses from the ones I imagined so prodigiously in my youth (like a lot of other people, I wrote stories and dreamed dreams about such things).

The place where I went to summer camp was acres upon acres, with a number of abandoned/falling apart buildings nestled in the woods. And the main building--the farmhouse--was at least 120 years old. Every so often I'd wander off on my own and leave something of sentimental value hidden away in a far corner of a building or under a big rock in the woods. I'm sure much of it is still there. I imagine someone in the year 2045 will turn over a rock and find a smaller rock with a mash note from a 11-year-old written on it.

― Amateurist (amateurist), Saturday, 22 February 2003 04:54 (twenty-two years ago)

i used to leave messages around in my room for people from the future to find

― minna (minna), Saturday, 22 February 2003 05:03 (twenty-two years ago)

i climb through a grandfather clock to get to my bedroom.

― phil-two (phil-two), Saturday, 22 February 2003 06:09 (twenty-two years ago)

my parents own, and i grew up in, a house that was built sometime in the 1870s/1880s. alas, we never found any secret passages, compartments, letters, or other bric-a-brak. my parents used to claim that we had a "ghost," but we knew they were just trying to scare us.

― Tad (llamasfur), Saturday, 22 February 2003 06:13 (twenty-two years ago)

My house was built in 1911, and the first time I went into the attic I expected to find some old weird stuff, but only spotted a page from a newspaper. After retrieving it I saw it was from the mid 1970s, and not even interesting on that level. I continue to find nails and bottle caps in the back yard, rusty and old-looking but probably no more than 30-40 years old. And the weirdest thing is a chimney in the attic that was built to vent a fire-driven kitchen stove, that is undetectable from the kitchen now. About ten years ago I came home to find a notice from the city that I had a bee hive in my chimney, which I couldn't believe since I only knew about the living room fireplace. After looking around and calling the city and finally climbing on the roof I discovered this phantom chimney, and there was indeed a colony of bees living there. I had to call some bee-remover specialists and they said there was 40 pounds of honey up there. I kept some of it, intending to make some kind of honey wine/beer, but haven't gotten around to it.

― nickn (nickn), Saturday, 22 February 2003 11:06 (twenty-two years ago)

I lived as a child in a genuinely old house, a big old former coaching inn from the 17th century in a village called Sherston in Wiltshire (if you're passing though, on the old London-Bristol road, you might still see the family name on Ye Olde Belle House halfway along the High Street - my late dad's butcher shop had built a good rep, so they kept the name when it was sold). It has huge thick walls in places, like two to three feet, but we never found any secret passages or anything like that.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Saturday, 22 February 2003 12:32 (twenty-two years ago)

Growing up in an apartment, I felt deprived of such things.

But there are secret passages at both universities I've attended.

― gabbneb (gabbneb), Saturday, 22 February 2003 17:40 (twenty-two years ago)

In the basement of the house I used to live in, I found a few stacks of Playboy and Hot Rod dating from about 1967 until 1989 or so. Sally Field was on the cover of Playboy once!

― kirsten (kirsten), Saturday, 22 February 2003 18:02 (twenty-two years ago)

Oh yes: "secret" passages beneath the dormitories where I lived freshman and sophomore years, full of students' graffiti. You could travel from one dorm to the other without going outside. A more extensive series of underground passages was sealed off after the 1970s (b/c students used them to take over administration buildings during protests!) but some remained. There were locked gates but it was easy to reach around and unlock them. At least once there was a rock show down there but security did come by and shut it down. I don't recall finding anything exciting down there though, aside from 15-year-old punk rock graffiti.

― Amateurist (amateurist), Saturday, 22 February 2003 19:32 (twenty-two years ago)

My family has a rather excentric builder friend who built his own bungalow. (My dad did the drawings for it). Every few years he keeps adding bits too it. A few years ago when he wanted to extend his bedroom. He built it behind his old bedroom, and changed the old bedroom into a dressing room type thing. Access to the new bedroom is hidden through the wardrobe doors.

He's always said he wants a tower on the bungalow, and an inglenook fire place. Dad has drawn him some plans for an inglenook fireplace in the living room. The inglenook part is wood paneled, and one of the wood panels would move to reveal a stair case going up to a tower. They haven't got round to building it yet.

Other than that I've never found any secret passages in any old houses, (although there are rumours of lots of underground tunnels around this area, and the lofts at uni were great hiding places when the TV license people came round). I have found some great scary photos in second hand books though.

― celeste (Celeste), Saturday, 22 February 2003 19:39 (twenty-two years ago)

So I guess we went to the same undergrad then. Does everyone here have a connection to it?

― gabbneb (gabbneb), Saturday, 22 February 2003 19:49 (twenty-two years ago)

my uni also had underground "tunnels" with grafitti. they were quite creepy, but i used them anyway, because despite being canadian, i am still a wimp when it comes to cold weather.

there were rumours that rapists were hiding in the tunnels, waiting to pounce on girls walking alone, but i don't think there was ever any proof of this. apparently, lots of students used to go there and smoke pot etc.

― sand.y, Saturday, 22 February 2003 20:53 (twenty-two years ago)

I've always wanted to go explore the Paris sewers.

― Dan I., Saturday, 22 February 2003 23:10 (twenty-two years ago)

hey just yesterday i went to check out this shop my friend has just rented and he showed me a secret passageway underneath this cupboard that leads to a cellar with a low roof and lotsa damp and spiderwebs that looked like a place youd hide smuggled brandy kegs. its a port town and apparently the shop used to be a chemists maybe they stored the smuggled laudanum there

― hellbaby (hellbaby), Sunday, 23 February 2003 03:53 (twenty-two years ago)

This doesn't exactly fit the bill, but: When I was in high school, circa 1971 (yes...sigh), I went driving with a group of friends after a party. Can't remember what drugs were in charge of us, but we ended up at sunrise somewhere on the north shore of Long Island, NY. Atop one of the dunes there--dunes forming cliffs about two stories high--was an old abandoned house. We weren't he first to have barged into it, but there was still quite a lot of stuff in the house, and all of it was about thirty years old. There were many newspapers, the dates of which ran up until sometime in 1942. For years I kept some empty packages with interesting labels I found there. Anyway the story was that the house had belonged to two aged sisters, who at some point during the war saw a German submarine land on the beach, and fled in horror, never to return. (A German submarine did land four spies, who were eventually caught, on the L. I. shore.) Years later I tried to find the house again, but never succeeded.

― Bingo, Sunday, 23 February 2003 06:27 (twenty-two years ago)

three years pass...

This was a cool thread.

― Melissa W, Wednesday, 21 February 2007 20:52 (eighteen years ago)

it wasn't quite a secret passage or anything -- but when i was little, there was a little hole in the floor of my bedroom. i used to love shoving paper, small plastic toy soldiers, baseball cards, etc. down that hole.

our attic had bats!! and a smaller adjoining room to the attic that the exterminators found after they killed the bats and fixed it so that we wouldn't get bats again -- nothing spooky or cool about that room (like bones or being painted some funky color or anything like that), nor could we do anything in that room b/c after it was discovered my parents filled it up with fiberglass. ;__;

― Eisbaer, Thursday, 22 February 2007 06:13 (eighteen years ago)

we have a phantom chimney also. cool thread.

― sleeve, Thursday, 22 February 2007 07:34 (eighteen years ago)

i knew a kid named jay
whose father was a pederast
he called me one june saturday
to model rockets, and to blast
them fucking spacewards
with AAA fuel.

jay's dad caught us, got mad for some reason (he was a drunk, he also beat a python to death that day) and locked us in jay's room. got shitfaced downstairs. two hours afterward, and jay was still sullen and mad, and i tried to cheer him up by convincing him to move the furniture. i was 10 and that seemed fun. jay agreed, and shortly thereafter i realized that – honest to fucking god – most of the muebles in jay's house had a structural as well as functional or decorative function. when we moved the dresser the wall bowed in alarmingly; when we moved the bed we found a 3x3" hole gaping into the crawlspace. looked like water damage, but with pink fiberglass insulation sticking out like faux-moss or blood aerosolized and crystalized. 'jay' i said, 'what the heck is that?' i didn't swear back then. 'that's the trap-door my dad found, it leads to an underground railroad stop' he told me. i don't think he knew he was lying, but even then i did. it had an outline vaguely redolent of a drunk's stumble-shape, dimensions the same as those that'd be 'caused by a helluva fall. jay and i finished cleaning the room and planned on an 'escape' using the underground railroad stop. semi-salvation via drunkdamage. we climbed in (jay's mom's bic for illumination) pulled the dresser in front of the hole, and knee-walked for a dozen - two dozen feet to come out underneath the porch. we couldn't go any further: we were in the presence of the world's most (de/im)pressive collection of $6 vodka bottles. somewhere between four and five hundred of them, filling and backfilling the area under the porch, tumbling down the uninsulated space between the low and walls. seems jay's pederast dad had been dumping all his empties in the underarea – he put away at least two liters a day – with the assistance of a loose floor-slat by the rocking-chair he got soused in. over the years they'd built up enough volume, and leaked enough to actually weaken the wall to the point that even stumbling into it had been enough to dramatically hasten its entropic rate.

looking at the empty booze, jay's mood turned extra-serious and he demanded we go back to his room and re-re-arrange his furniture. so we did. his dad came in a few hours minutes after we finished to let us out 'hey kiddos, forgot you were even up here. you're good guys, come on down and have some tuna fish' and later i went home sans further incident. next week at school jay told me he'd gone back in the hole and tried to light some of the bottles on fire, and if i wanted to come over and see i probably could, 'cause they'd been burning through the weekend already and showed no signs of going out.

― remy bean, Thursday, 22 February 2007 07:57 (eighteen years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.