A question for people who have looked at / moved into old houses

[charlie and algernon]

Do you not open and go into every single room in the house and check every square inch before you even THINK of moving in?

How do people in horror movies stumble onto undiscovered rooms/closets/chests/etc AFTER they've already moved and gotten established?

[texanwitch]

1. I lived an haunted house, nobody told us.

It was cool, we were young and didn't care.

Ask the neighbors, they will tell you.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. The house I used to live in had a little secret room

which we didn't discover until we'd lived there awhile. The only way you could get to it was by pushing on the panel at the back of the bottom-right-hand cabinet in the built-in buffet. A door would swing open and there was a small room. You would crawl through the buffet to get to it - it wasn't very big but you could stand up and move around in it. It was under the stairs, and not at all obvious, since the kitchen pantry seemed to occupy that space - but what wasn't apparent was that the pantry didn't go all the way back. The "secret room" took up the closed-off space at the back of the pantry.

We found the room when we were putting some things away in the buffet cabinet, and somehow noticed a little crack at the back of the wall. After that we left the cabinet door and the door to the little room open a bit so the cats could go back there.

We thought it would be entertaining to get a human skeleton from a medical school, dress it in tattered clothes and leave it in that room, then sell the house....

My ex still lives there. I hope he does that someday.

[Luciferous]

5. That is so cool!

[TuxedoKat]

7. Interesting

was the house on the Underground Railroad perhaps?

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

11. No - it was built in about 1906

and is located in Minneapolis. I think the room was just an architectural hiccup.

[Skittles]

3. do you mean the attic with the S&M guy?

:D

[chillspike]

4. Forget ghosts be wary of mouse poop

I owned a house with my brother that was over 100 years old. We decided to gut out the plaster walls to make a room bigger and found decades of mouse poop in the walls. We ended up replacing all the walls in the entire house after that.

[dimbear]

6. Most of my house has open ceilings, but over the bathroom there's attic.

When I moved in there was no repeat no access to that little space. Had to cut into it and install a trapdoor to install a ventilator. Nothing of interest in it, tho. Maybe some squirrel scat.

[Avalux]

8. I'm sure my parents did, but they never told me about the Cupie Hole.

Please don't ask me why it's called that.....I don't know.

My parents moved into a 100+ year old victorian house when I was 5. It was run down and looked like a haunted house.

So the Cupie Hole - a little room off the attic (it had a little door, maybe 3 feet tall); no floor, just rafters. I was young but was smart enough to know it was located over my bedroom. I was terrified of what I imagined might be up there and the water marks on my bedroom ceiling because the roof was bad didn't make it any better. I was convinced those water marks were connected to whatever was up there (and not just a leaky roof).

For several months, I refused to sleep in my bedroom and slept in the hallway in a sleeping bag. After that, I slept with a bright light for a long time.

My parents fixed up the house and made it warm and inviting; however that Cupie Hole is still there, and still creeps me out.

[Shagbark Hickory]

9. I'm still finding capinets and drawers I didn't know I had in this house.

Not an old house.

[Duer 157099]

10. Yes, it really does happen

I once moved into a house that I thought was a 2 bedroom, but after living there for about 6 months, we discovered a door that we had simply never noticed before, and opened it up and there was a 3rd bedroom!

[hunter]

12. We once found a basement in a house that didn't have a basement.

It was full of World War One era prosthetic limbs, glass eyes, bed pans, enema kits, metal syringes, various sorts of hernia trusses...

The house had once belonged to a physician who treated a lot of veterans. I think he'd simply collected stuff when his patients no longer needed it... :scared:

The inside basement door had been plastered over and hidden behind kitchen shelves. The single basement window-well had been covered with a large piece of slate.

We found the basement when we moved the slate. We told the landlords and they came out to look, but then they simply let it be.

Creepy as hell.

[Lucinda]

13. I have a new house with a room that would be unknown if I didn't tell you about it

It's a storage room accessible if you pull out a built in cabinet in a closet.

I had space to make a storage room behind my closet and master bath. It's long and narrow with a fairly steep pitch on the roof, but it is great for off-season/long term storage. I didn't want to give up shelf space in the closet for a formal door, so we made the built in shelves removable for access.

[rurallib]

14. Welllll - I did not fully inspect the attic

which had a few old boxes etc.
in the boxes and behind a small closed off area I found a teenage girl's diary and about 4 12 packs of Schlitz.

[Chan790]

15. I grew up in one...

a big old New England colonial mansion and no, we'd been living there for 12 years and were still discovering secret-space. The house on area was something close to 4200'^2 on an external footprint that projected to closer to 4500'^2.

We found prohibition-era whiskey in the walls too.

[TorchTheWitch]

16. I'd check every inch of the house whether it was old or not

I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't.

And I hate horror movies. I don't even know why they call that genre "horror" when it's generally all "stupid movie with lots of blood and guts" now. I used to like real horror movies that were scary as hell without any blood and guts because it didn't need any to be terrifying. Frankly, I don't even think what's called horror movies these days are scary at all - just gross. They don't terrify you, they just gross you out. I don't consider that horror.

[applegrove]

17. I once dog sat for a woman and discovered a trap door in the roof of the anti-kitchen. She had never

noticed it before. We climbed up in it and found newspapers from the 1940s.