They say some doors are best left closed, but curiosity will often get the better of anyone posed with the mystery of what lies beyond. And out of the many door varieties, trap doors take the cake for generating the most intrigue and hiding some of the creepiest finds.
From secret underwater passageways to hidden horror pits, grab your torches as we venture through some of the strangest trap doors ever found!
The Secret Swamp
When vacationing in the English countryside, a quaint lakeside cottage might seem like the perfect destination for some rest and relaxation. So, when TikTok user robertibus booked a Lake District AirBnB for his family vacation, he was expecting to have a wonderful holiday surrounded by greenery.
Little did he know that things were about to get a lot greener than he’d intended! Upon entering the property, everything was just as Robert had expected; comfy couches, a TV, and a piano but in the midst of the carpet, partially covered by a sofa, was a large wooden door.
Baffled by the unexpected door, Robert’s curiosity led him to investigate and after a quick sofa shuffle, he was able to pull open the spooky basement door. At first, he was met with only a stairway leading into impenetrable darkness.
With his pet dog nearby for moral support, Robert descended the stairs, and nearing the bottom, he was confronted with what looked like a sea of bright green toxic waste that was certainly not mentioned in the rental ad!
At first, Robert was as baffled as the rest of us, but in an update, he told followers it seemed as though the green water was due to the use of a staining solution used to find leaks. Considering the whole basement was bright green and flooded, I guess you could say it served its purpose, though it seemed a little late to help that leak!
But green dye or not, the discovery of this swamp pit wasn’t the only creepy thing Robert and his family encountered while staying at the cottage. Water faucets reportedly began turning themselves on and off and after hunting high and low for a missing TV remote upon arrival, it mysteriously appeared right in the middle of the sofa the very next morning!
So, was a combination of bad plumbing and forgetfulness to blame, or was there something sinister lurking in that swampy green pit?
Door In The Water
The allure of most trap doors revolves around the mystery of working out what’s inside, but the secret behind this next hatch is finding it in the first place!
The man behind this trap door discovery is Martin Zero, a history buff who spends his time uncovering the secrets of the northern English city of Manchester. Being something of an expert on the hidden architecture of his city, Martin had found out that there was a hidden river that ran beneath Manchester known as the River Tib.
Pretty fascinating on its own, but why would there be a river under a city? Well, during the Roman period, the River Tib marked the border of a settlement known as Mancunium until it was built over during the industrial revolution of the late 1800s.
During this boom in manufacturing, towns and cities like Manchester found that they needed a more effective way to transport goods quickly.
As waterways, canals provided greater control over the flow and level of water compared with a natural river, making them less likely to flood and disrupt the transport of materials. And so, the River Tib was bricked over and replaced by the Rochdale Canal that currently runs through Manchester.
While Martin had heard rumors about a legendary trap door in the canal that led to the hidden River Tib, he wasn’t sure what to believe. Legend had it that the trap door lay in the depths of lock 89 of the Rochdale Canal and was installed to act as a plughole when the canal needed cleaning. But, ever the historical adventurer, Martin wanted proof!
After doing some research, Martin found out that there was actually physical evidence of the trap door at the canal itself, and sure enough, when he went to investigate, he found it. Carved into a concrete slab on the canal bank was an arrow pointing to the water and Martin felt sure that he’d found the x that marked the trap door!
Depite this incredible find, the water was far too murky to be able to see a door for that crucial proof, and Martin sadly concluded that he’d never get the chance to see it if it was really there at all!
That was, until one day, when he heard that lock 89 was due to be cleaned out. This meant, if it was really there, that the coveted trap door drain was about to be revealed! Donning a hard hat with a camera in hand, Martin was able to capture something amazing. Not just proof that the door existed, but also a very rare look at the trap door drain in action!
The trap door itself is over 200 years old and acts as a plughole through which water from the canal journeys a 16 to 20 feet drop into the lost River Tib which runs through to meet the much larger River Medlock.
While you might think this trap door just conceals water, it’s actually hiding a whole 200-year-old world underneath, a doorway into Manchester’s rich history. Anyone else really want to go and explore down there?
An Elementary Mystery
Reddit user ‘Asian Prometheus’ shared the story of the strange discovery he made after being caught in the midst of a mischievous pranking frenzy in elementary school. He and another student were left to clean out the school gym as punishment while the rest of the class went off on a field trip.
Bored senseless and left all alone, these whippersnappers were desperate for some excitement and when they noticed a mysterious looking under-stage panel, they sensed that an adventure was afoot.
A trap door, of course, just in case you missed the title of this article! Being the fearless, or possibly stupid, kids they were, these boys didn’t hesitate to jump straight down, through the trap door, only to find themselves ankle deep in water. Regardless, they ventured on.
Splashing along a gloomy tunnel into an even darker room, the boys deduced that they were below the school’s newly built kindergarten playground. Despite the presence of a tiny window, they couldn’t see a thing.
Confused by the boys’ revelations, the school sent a team down with flashlights to investigate what was beneath the trap door. What they found will send a shiver down your spine.
Despite concluding that the underground bunker was nothing more than an old storm cellar, no one could have predicted the terrors that had been lurking in the dark, totally unbeknownst to the boys.
Little did the boys know that when they’d been down in that dark room, there had been several pairs of eyes looking right at them through the darkness. Thanks to their flashlights, the team sent down there were able to see that the dark room was filled with a whole lot of incredibly creepy wooden dolls!
Don’t Ask About The Trapdoor
When checking into a 2-star hotel, you probably anticipate that it might not be the best night’s sleep of your life. But one 2-star hotel guest had 5-star’s worth of the heebie jeebies when they discovered something disturbing in their room; something that just kept getting stranger and stranger.
Addison Cassel, who shared her story with TikTok, was relaxing on her hotel bed when she first noticed a cut mark in the carpet below. Picking away at it, she was surprised to find a hidden flap in the floor!
Seeing as this particular hotel had just one story, Addison didn’t think she’d actually find anything below, but lifting the flap, she uncovered an eerie hidden crawl space! The space was pretty small and chock-full of cobwebs and served no apparent purpose.
But while there wasn’t anything in it at that moment, it was hard not to think about one fact that the space was pretty much the perfect size for a human body. Still feeling a little unnerved after she’d left the next day, Addison’s curiosity got the better of her. She called the hotel after leaving to ask about the unexpected cavity in her room and this was where things got much stranger.
To her surprise, she received quite the bizarre response. The hotel receptionist became audibly annoyed by Addison’s curiosity, answering every question by claiming that it was none of her business.
Finally, the receptionist told Addison that the crawl space under her room was used for pipes and nothing more, evasively ending the conversation. If that’s what it was really for, why was she so shady about it? And as if that wasn’t odd enough, as we can see from Addison’s footage, there’s not a single pipe to be seen in this creepy hole, only a wooden crossbeam at the end.
The Tailor’s Trap Door
While the insatiable curiosity to explore the hidden depths of off-limits places can be dangerous, it can also result in some truly amazing discoveries.
One guy out there that can’t get enough of adventuring is Brennen Evangelista, a YouTuber with a passion for exploring abandoned buildings, shared on his awesome channel, Uncharted Travel.
In September 2018, one of Brennen’s explorations became even more intriguing when he stumbled across something he’d never expected while exploring the small commune of Elice in central Italy.
In 2009, Elice was hit with an extreme earthquake that shook the Abruzzo region of Italy. Shortly after the devastation, the population of Elice declined from 2,000 to around 800 – rendering it quite the ghost town. Due to this steep decline in population, Elice is home to many abandoned villas, left behind by families fleeing the earthquake.
After speaking with some locals, Brennen was able to get access to one such vacated villa that had been home to a tailor and his family. Inside the villa, Brennen found a whole host of creepy abandoned personal effects, including the tailor’s craft supplies, old photographs, as well as cracks in the tiles, presumably from the earthquake.
While exploring the kitchen, Brennen noticed a mysterious trap door in the corner of the room with a lock on it. Amazingly, Brennen found that the door was unlocked. When he finally opened the hatch, he was amazed at what he saw. Behind the door, a wooden staircase paved the descent into the unknown.
When Brendan reached the bottom, he found the cellar’s contents, thick with dust and decay and presumably had been left undisturbed for almost 10 years after being abandoned by the family.
The villa itself was built sometime in the 1400s, so this cellar was likely to be hundreds of years old and would have been used by many families in its lifetime. Unfortunately for its most recent inhabitants, their life here was sadly cut short by their evacuation, and the haunting remnants of a beloved home left in a hurry were everywhere.
The place was filled with eerie reminders of what would have been used in the kitchen; from half-filled casks of homemade wine to jar upon jar of pasta sauce and other vague, rotten jarred goods.
With no idea what the tailor or his family are doing today, nor what their reasons were for never returning to collect their stuff, the whole experience had an undoubtedly eerie quality to it. All that remains are the ghosts of possessions past.
Tunnels Of Horror
While the contents of that last trap door were steeped in family history, how about one that reveals the history of an entire country? The trap door I’m going to tell you about may look straight out of a found footage horror movie, but the reality within is even more terrifying than any work of fiction could ever be.
This image below shows one entrance to the Cu Chi tunnels, a network of underground burrows used by soldiers during the Vietnam War. When closed and covered with leaves, the trap doored tunnel entrances are almost completely undetectable and helped Communist Vietnamese soldiers, known as the Viet Cong, stay hidden from enemy forces.
The Cu Chi tunnels span for 75 miles in and around Ho Chi Minh City, now known as Saigon, and are still accessible today. These tunnel complexes were made up of one to four levels, each separated by secret trap doors and included kitchens, hospitals, and other rooms needed for a functioning army
Not only that, but the tunnels were chock full of booby-traps including spiked snares hidden in the darkness. These were there, ready to greet any anti-Communist Vietnamese fighters or Americans, who were unlucky enough to be assigned the job of scoping out the underground burrows.
Despite providing cover from aerial bomb attacks, living conditions in the Cu Chi tunnels were appalling. Food and water were scarce, and the tunnels were often infested with snakes, scorpions, spiders, and rats, and that wasn’t even the worst part!
One of the most challenging aspects of tunnel life was breathing underground. The tunnels had cleverly disguised air vents like the one in the image below, disguised as a termite mound.
However, it was still utterly suffocating down there, and the stale air caused near-constant headaches and dizziness. On top of that, in such cramped, hot conditions, diseases spread like wildfire, and thanks to this, malaria became the second-largest cause of death besides battle wounds.
What’s more, the darkness in some of these tunnels was so absolute, that many long-term tunnel dwellers even suffered temporary blindness when they emerged back into the light.
Hole-ier Than Thou
If all this talk of secret tunnels and basements isn’t spooky enough for you, how about a spooky basement inside a spooky attic?
UK based TikTok user badgalbeepbeep, who lives in the boarding school her mom runs, found quite the double threat in an attic conversion when she stumbled across a strange creaking floorboard in the corner. Peeling back the carpet and removing a dark wooden slab, badgal discovered a hole with a ladder descending into the unknown.
Badgal by name, badgal by nature, the TikToker bravely scaled the ladder rungs and found herself in a bunker that looked as though someone had been living down there! The place was filled with trash, but with no hidey-holer to be seen, badgal was on the hunt for answers.
In a follow-up video, the TikToker explained that the boys’ boarding school her mom was in charge of had been built sometime in the 18th century, and the hole in question was actually what’s known as a priest hole.
In 16th and 17th century England, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the first, being a Catholic was a big no-no and priests had to go into hiding to escape persecution. These secret chambers were often concealed in walls and, like this one, under floors.
Turns out that the hideout found by badgal hasn’t been used by priests in a couple of hundred years, but it was clear that it had hosted some far more recent mischief. The soda cans, snack packaging and empty bottles of alcohol revealed that the boarding schoolboys had obviously found themselves a little party pad for afterhours.
Despite badgalbeepbeep clearing out the trash, the hideout still doesn’t exactly look ideal for a chill spot unless you don’t mind hanging with some spiders and priest ghosts!
By now, we can see that the contents of some trap doors give their finders a lot more than they bargained for. But this next set of hatches are quite the opposite!
Street artist Biancoshock has taken the idea of a trap door, and re-positioned it as far as possible from large, dark, cobweb-covered rooms, with an exhibition that colorfully, and satirically, showcases the tough reality of cramped living conditions.
Dubbed ‘Borderlife’, the 2016 exhibition showcased opened trap doors all across the Lodi district in Milan, depicting a downsizing of ordinary household rooms.
Beneath each heavy metal trap door lay a cramped world that seems unimaginable for anyone to inhabit, including a tiny kitchen with a clock and hanging utensils as well as a miniscule bathroom.
The underground installations might be modelled on what you could find in a traditional house but are actually inspired by the estimated 600 people who are thought to inhabit Bucharest’s sewer system in Romania.
While no one lives in Biancoshock’s Milanese manholes, as nicely decorated as they are, the thought of being locked inside one is the ultimate nightmare fuel.
Under Home Dungeon
Moving home can be a stressful time, but if a great deal on a great place is on the table you need to act fast! That’s exactly what this next trap door discoverer did, though, not without a few shocking surprises!
On move-in day, he found something that turned out to be a whole lot more than he’d bargained for. Everything looked totally normal at first, just your average studio apartment. But, just outside the bathroom, a strange hook hung on the wall and below was a mysterious trapdoor that stood out among the dark floorboards.
The rent for the one-bedroom property had been pretty cheap so it seemed unlikely that there would be anything extraordinary below. Even so, he couldn’t contain his curiosity and slowly opened up the trap door.
At first, it looked like the secret hatch was just a small storage space, but, after taking a closer look beyond the bulk of DIY supplies, it became clear that things were not as they seemed. Peering down inside the hatch, the new tenant was startled to see something that most certainly wasn’t on the lease, a stairway into darkness!
With the purpose of the wall hook now clear, he attached it to the trap door, holding it open as he cleared a path and made his descent.
As he continued exploring, it became apparent that this wasn’t just an underfloor room, it was a full-on labyrinth that stretched across the entire apartment complex.
The tenant later found out that his new digs were inside a renovated English monastery that dated back to the 1800s, making the discovery of the tunnel all the spookier. Turns out the basement extended way beyond the edges of the apartment, and he could even hear his new neighbors in their apartments above the ceiling of the tunnel.
With a dungeon space as big as that beneath the apartment, spreading out below other people’s homes, the scariest thing about this dungeon is the fact that, unbeknownst to his neighbors, the previous tenant of the trapdoor apartment could’ve been spying on them all from below!
