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Realtor’s Video Reveals Secret Room with Direct View Into Bathtub: ‘Look at How Creepy This Is’
"I'd always think someone was hiding in there watching me," one commenter wrote on the viral TikTok video
By Erin Clements Published on March 27, 2024 05:26PM EDT
Realtor Lauren Rockel was showing her clients a prospective home in Lowell, Mich., when she discovered an unusual feature.
In a video posted on TikTok, Rockel reveals how she found a “creepy” hidden room in the house, adjacent to the bathroom.
“Secret rooms are one of my absolute favorite things to find when I’m showing homes,” Rockel notes in the video, which has racked up more than 800,000 views on the social media platform.
“I absolutely love weird real estate,” she adds.
Rockel explains that she noticed some hinges on the outside of a built-in cabinet in the bathroom and gave it “a little tug.”
It was then that she uncovered the hidden space behind the cabinet, which she figured was “probably a storage room.”
Instead, she found a room with a window that looked directly into the bathroom, giving a view of the bathtub through glass blocks.
“Look at how creepy this is,” Rockel says in the video.
The realtor's first thought was that perhaps the glass blocks allowed light into the hidden room if it was lacking a light source of its own, but she quickly discovered there was an electric light in the space, so the window into the bathroom “definitely didn't need to be there.”
“I don't know if maybe they put that glass block there before they decided just to put a light in it so light could get in,” she says.
Tiktok users also found the feature highly troubling.
"I'd always think someone was hiding in there watching me," read one comment on TikTok, while someone else wrote, "The way I'd have to check to make sure no one's in there every time I go to the bathroom."
Since Rockel was the buyers’ agent, she hasn’t spoken to the previous owners about what the room was used for, she explains.
While her clients didn’t end up purchasing the farmhouse-style home from 1987, she shared their daughter thought the hidden room was “super fun.”
Rockel says she’s always on the lookout for hidden spaces in houses she shows because of another experience about five years ago.
“I had a client buy a home and he moved in and then stumbled upon a secret room,” she recalls. “I contacted the listing agent and the listing agent said the seller didn't know about it either. So there was a secret room in this house that no one knew about for years.”
She advises anyone looking out for hidden features in a potential home to look for “dead space” and built-in shelving and cabinets.
“Like, oh, wait a minute, this wall should be here,” she explains. “Sometimes there's a room that's behind a picture that's on hinges or something. But I would say looking for any little locks, hinges and built-ins. Sometimes you push on them or pull on them and they just pop open.”
Rockel, who’s been a realtor for over six years, says she finds four or five hidden rooms in the approximately 300 homes she shows each year.
In another video she posted on TikTok this week, Rockel shows a mid-century home in East Grand Rapids with a secret space behind a cabinet over a toilet.
“There was a cot and books and stuff in it, so someone was just hanging out over their toilet in the bathroom,” she says.
Rockel also recalls another surprising discovery she found when she was just starting out in real estate.
“There was a labyrinth in a basement that every time you opened a door, it closed a door behind you and it just was like hallway after hallway until you got to the very back and it had a 5’ x 5’ room with a lock on the outside of the door and then a chair and a mirror in the room, and that was it,” she says.
“That was super creepy,” she adds. “What are you doing with a lock on the outside of a door? I don't know. It was wild.”
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