In New York City, space comes at a premium, and most residents can only dream of finding extra square footage in their homes. However, one unsuspecting tenant got rather more than she bargained for when she unearthed a secret apartment hiding behind the mirror in her bathroom. The eeriest domestic discovery we’ve seen to date, click or scroll on to see her unsettling find...

Documented in a series of now-viral TikTok videos, 26-year-old Samantha Hartsoe noticed an unexplained stream of cold air in the bathroom of her three-bedroom apartment on New York’s Roosevelt Island. She examined the vents, before realising that the icy draft was in fact coming from behind the bathroom mirror.

To the shock of Samantha and her two roommates, the mirror lifted away from the wall to reveal a gaping hole in the studwork. At first, they assumed the space was just a void for electric wiring, but on closer inspection, they got a hair-raising surprise…

Through the hole, they glimpsed an empty room lying on the other side of the wall. In a twist befitting of the Academy Award-winning film Parasite, they wondered if anyone might be living in the eerie space, mere centimetres away from their own home.

Despite her roommate’s protests, Samantha decided to venture inside the room to find out more. Donning a makeshift headtorch and mask, and arming herself with a hammer, she crawled through the gap and discovered an entire three-bedroom apartment hiding just behind the wall. 

Inside, she found a discarded porcelain toilet, along with trash bags of belongings and debris littering the stripped rooms, almost as though the apartment was abandoned in the middle of a renovation. The windows had been left open, which accounted for the draft in Samantha’s bathroom. Most unnerving of all, however, was the water bottle balanced on the staircase balustrade: “Okay, so there’s signs of life”, Samantha whispers in one video.

Thankfully though, after a thorough investigation of the abandoned property’s two floors, there were no secret residents to be found. Samantha locked the front door to prevent unwanted visitors from trespassing, before returning unscathed her own home. Even now, the apartment within an apartment remains a mystery, with the building’s management reportedly perplexed by the chilling discovery…

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