A couple were shocked to find a “secret room” in their house, after they snapped up a property without ever seeing it in person.
Raine, who goes by Sissyhankshaw online, shared a clip to TikTok revealing their bizarre layout. The video of the secret room has been watched more than eight million times.
The 27-year-old gave followers a mini-house tour online, showing the inside and outside of their new 1,110 sq ft home, somewhere in the Midwest.
She explained that she and her boyfriend didn’t want to unnecessarily travel from Philadelphia to look at the house amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and with Raine’s background in real estate they felt confident to make an offer.
Raine said: “Because of the pandemic, we bought this house on the internet without ever seeing it before. And when we finally saw it in person after two months of looking at it online, we realised that it had something very weird about it that we had not noticed from the 18 pictures we’d stared at for the last couple of months.”
Filming the exterior, she added: “The front of the house is like a house-shape, and the back has this tug-boaty, sticky-up situation which my office is in.”
But there’s a section of the house, with a pitched roof and a window, which is clearly visible from the outside, with no access from the inside.
Raine filmed herself going up the stairs to her office, saying: “So you can go in here, I go in here everyday, there’s a little closet. That’s about it. As you can see, there’s no access to the other part of the attic, at all, anywhere. This is my ceiling, my living room, dining room, bedroom, there’s no way to access the other part of the roof, which sticks up on the front of the house.”
She said “there’s no way to access this part of the house,” adding: “It has a window, it’s a real room with a locking window. Except for this.”
In the video, she goes into the small closet and films an access panel on the wall, which they unscrew to reveal a vast room flooded with natural light.
“We’re finally entering our attic, or secret room,” she said.
The room has windows at the side and at the front, with a sloping ceiling tall enough to stand in the middle.
Filming the extra space they’ve just uncovered, Raine said: “I realise it’s not a secret room, but I just find it so interesting that there’s no access to this elsewhere in the house. This wall that we enter through is new, there’s finished floors up here, I just think it’s so interesting they’d spend the money to finish the floors, but not actually finish this room. It does have new wiring in it, we also have a new roof so someone’s been up here recently. All of this insulation is safe, our house has been inspected multiple times.
“I just think it’s interesting they put latching windows up here. I think these are really beautiful. There are many other houses in our area with this exact same floor plan, and their stairs are in a different place. You have to enter through this weird tiny closet door which makes no sense to me, usually the stairs are close to the front of the house so you have access to this area. But we don’t.”
Raine, who moved in with her Bernese mountain dog, revealed she and her boyfriend paid $12,365 as a down payment and closing costs for the home, saying it “was not the worst decision we made.”
Fellow house-hunters were in awe of their find.
Commenting online, Jtwohawks thought: “This would be a cute hidden library.”
While AB suggested: “Clean up the insulation, install a hinged bookshelf door, and embrace the cool hidden room you’ve been gifted with.”
Although Beck Tomczyk asked: “Who buys a house without actually seeing it?”
But Cinnamon Girl thought: “Am I the only one who’s completely freaked out about this lol?”
And Lilylovelace added: “Girl close that back up it’s haunted.”
Getty Images/ake1150sb