We're sunsetting PodQuest on 2025-07-28. Thank you for your support!
Export Podcast Subscriptions
cover of episode Hidden Rooms: What Lurks Inside the Walls

Hidden Rooms: What Lurks Inside the Walls

2025/5/6
logo of podcast Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Eagan

Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Eagan

Transcript

Shownotes Transcript

Hey strangers, welcome to our month of limbo in between seasons four and five. We'll be bringing you 10 classic episodes this month. Today's episode originally aired in season one on October 11th, 2021. It features a story about a man who built a secret apartment

Have you ever had one of those dreams where you discover other rooms in your apartment?

Like suddenly there's a door you never noticed before and beyond it is all the extra space you always wish you had? Or maybe you've had the nightmare version where you open your closet and instead of your clothes you're looking at some kind of medieval torture dungeon? What would you do if you actually found a hole in your home leading to somewhere else?

Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I'm a writer and an actor who could really use a spare room no one else knew existed. My husband would be like, where do the bottles of wine I buy keep disappearing to? And I'd be like, definitely not in the secret room I hide in so no one can bother me. What? This week, what lurks inside? Four stories about hidden spaces in plain sight.

In March of this year, Samantha Hartsoe posted a video on TikTok showing a mysterious draft coming from the windowless bathroom of her apartment in New York City. New York City apartments are not known for being paragons of craftsmanship, especially the newer or, quote, remodeled luxury apartment buildings. I once heard a construction worker on his cell phone on a break in Brooklyn say, you couldn't pay me to live in one of these places. They're made of cardboard and tape.

That said, it's not normal for a draft to be coming from a room with no windows, no matter how shoddily the place is built. After a little sleuthing, Samantha found where the draft seemed to be coming from, and it made absolutely no sense.

The draft was coming from around the mirror in her bathroom. The mirror. Not a medicine cabinet that might be installed in a hole in the wall, just a wall mirror. Now how, you might be asking yourself, could there be a draft coming from behind a mirror?

Samantha was asking herself the same thing. The mirror, it turns out, was barely attached to the wall. And when she took the mirror down, there was a square hole in the wall behind it with electric conduits just kind of hanging there. The hole was maybe three feet by two feet. And beyond it wasn't just some crawl space with pipes or whatever. It's not like there was another wall a couple feet away. Nope.

On the other side of the hole in Samantha's bathroom wall was an entire other room with an open doorway on the far wall leading God knows where. Samantha then proceeded to climb through the murder hole in her bathroom into whatever this room was beyond it.

Now, let me just pause here to say, Samantha, girl, what is going on in your life that you would just climb through a hole in your bathroom wall? Are you struggling? Do you have an active death wish? Have you never seen a horror film? To her credit, Samantha brought a hammer with her. The empty room on the other side of Samantha's bathroom led to an entire other apartment. In case that went by too quickly, let me emphasize that

The only thing between Samantha and an entire other apartment was a wall mirror that could be removed with a gentle push. Armed with her hammer, Samantha boldly walked into the unknown. And I don't care how old she is. If she were my kid, I would have grounded her immediately after seeing that TikTok. What are you doing, Samantha? The apartment was unfinished as though it was or had been under construction at some point.

Fortunately for Samantha, no one had decided to make this apartment their home. A piece in the New York Post said the apartment reveal is anticlimactic. I'm sorry, what? Revealing a whole empty apartment just a nudge away through a hole in your wall is anticlimactic? What if someone had been watching her? What if someone had come in through the bathroom mirror in the middle of the night?

And why did it not occur to Samantha to lure her landlord into her bathroom and reveal the fucking parasite hole for TikTok? Knowing New York City real estate, the guy would have been like, it's communal living. Congratulations, your rent is going up.

As terrifying as it must be to find out your bathroom is a literal portal into a whole other place, at least the apartment on the other side of Samantha's bathroom mirror was empty when she discovered it. And while someone had to have known about the hole in the wall, as far as we know, no one had climbed in through Samantha's mirror to try to get her. Believe it or not, this was not the first time someone realized their apartment had a secret entrance in the bathroom.

Samantha found hers before it was too late. But 52-year-old Ruth May McCoy wasn't so lucky. On April 22nd, 1987, at 8.45 p.m., Ruth May McCoy called 911 from her apartment in the Grace Abbott Housing Project in Chicago. What are they doing, ma'am? They want to break in?

Throw the cabinet down. From where? I'm in the project. I'm on the other side. You can reach me in my bathroom. The dispatcher didn't understand what Ruthie Mae was reporting. It didn't make a lot of sense. She sent a car to check it out, but marked it down as a disturbance with a neighbor, so the responding officers weren't in a tearing hurry to get there. 17 minutes after Ruthie Mae called police, her neighbor called to report gunshots coming from Ruthie Mae's apartment.

Two minutes later, another neighbor called to report gunshots and shouting from Ruthie Mae's apartment. Officers arrived at Ruthie Mae's front door almost a half hour after she called 911. Now, strap in, because this part is infuriating. Officers knocked on Ruthie Mae's door and got no answer. They had dispatch call Ruthie Mae's number. They listened as Ruthie Mae's phone rang and rang and eventually stopped without being answered.

Two of the officers had to drive two blocks away to get the project's management office to get a key to Ruthie Mae's apartment. The key didn't work. So you know what police did then? They left. They left. One officer told dispatch that Ruthie Mae's neighbor said she always answers her door. He said, and there's no answer, so I don't know if maybe she answered to the wrong person or what.

I'm sorry, is it just me or isn't there like pretty clear protocol in place in cases where someone who called the police doesn't answer the door of an apartment from which gunshots were reported? Like, doesn't that seem like policing 101? Officers, I don't know how to police and this is too hard, walked away from Ruthie Mae's apartment shrugging and going, huh? At 9.48 p.m.

The next day, police got a call from another neighbor that I'm assuming went like this.

Hey, remember yesterday when a woman called you in a panic saying someone was coming into her apartment and then there were gunshots and then you stood there knocking on the door like Jehovah's Witnesses hoping to spread the good news and then you just walked away without doing anything? Yeah, she hasn't come out of her apartment all day, which is not normal. And I'm wondering if you might come back and do a little bit more than the absolute bare minimum if it's not too much trouble.

In an ironic display of overkill, six police officers and four or five security guards from the Chicago Housing Authority showed up. At this point, I don't know what they were expecting to find on the other side of that locked door in an apartment that had been utterly silent for hours. But there they are, nearly a dozen grown-ass adults once again standing there going, "'How do we get in there?' Like it was fucking Nefertiti's tomb or something."

Finally, one of them suggests breaking the door down, and the security guards were like, "Geez, I don't know, Bob. What if the lady in there doesn't like it and sues you? Also, you'd have to figure out a way to secure the door afterward." Seems like a lot of unknowns. Yep, you heard it. They were worried that the woman who wasn't answering her door after calling police was going to sue them for trying to rescue her.

The next day, after Ruthie's neighbor once again voiced her concern about Ruthie's whereabouts, this time to building officials, a building manager brought a carpenter to Ruthie's door. The carpenter drilled the lock off the door and went in to discover Ruthie Mae McCoy lying dead on her bedroom floor.

She had been shot four times. The fourth shot, which severed the pulmonary vein, was deemed to be the fatal shot. Though, considering she had also been shot in the abdomen and she wasn't found until three days later, she could have easily bled out without that last shot. When police arrived and turned Ruthie over, they noticed the smell of decaying flesh because, of course they did. That's what happens when you leave a dead person for three days.

So, how did Ruthie's killers get in if her door was locked? Remember when Ruthie called 911 and said they threw the cabinet down and they wanted to get in through the bathroom? Sounds crazy, right? I'm sure police thought it sounded crazy, until they went into Ruthie's bathroom and saw her medicine cabinet was on the floor, exposing a hole just big enough for a small person to fit through.

Now, I'm sure the police were scratching their heads at this point, like, who has ever heard of people using medicine cabinets to break into apartments? Turns out, all the other residents of the Abbott Apartments had. About a year before Ruthie was murdered, someone figured out how they could use the space between the walls in the building to move around without being seen.

I can't even begin to imagine how this first occurred to someone. Like, did someone's bathroom cabinet accidentally come loose from the wall and they were like, "Huh, I bet you could fit through that hole." One of the building's janitors apparently was like, "Yeah, people travel through the walls all the time." One neighbor was quoted as saying she had been watching TV one day in her fifth floor apartment when some kid ran from her bathroom through her apartment out the front door.

She said from there on out she used a rope tied to her kid's bunk bed to keep the door closed at night. Other neighbors said they would put furniture in front of their bathroom doors. An article in the Chicago Reader from 1987 said, "...it's hard to fault the architects. As the janitor says, they probably weren't thinking that people were going to be totally animalistic." Uh, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and fault the architects here.

Maybe when you're designing a building, don't make it super easy for people to break into apartments through everyday bathroom fixtures. Like, I don't care if you have a lot of faith in people to not be, quote, totally animalistic. But people, when given the chance, usually take the easy option. If that option is climbing through the walls, they'll do it.

Could you imagine what your life must be like if people breaking into your home through the bathroom is just like a daily fact? Ruthie Mae had lamented about how scared she was living alone. Unfortunately, she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia years earlier, so regardless of whether her fears were founded or not, she wasn't taken seriously. And even despite her mental health troubles, her fears were founded, clearly.

The Abbott Housing Project had a terrible record with violent crime, which isn't particularly surprising given the living conditions. It doesn't take a psychologist to understand that a single elderly woman living alone in a housing project with incredible rates of violence and people climbing in through your bathroom walls might feel a little unsafe.

If this story sounds familiar, it's because six years after it happened, a movie called Candyman came out about a killer who appears in your bathroom when you say his name three times. The movie isn't officially based on what happened to Ruthie Mae McCoy, but it's set in a public housing project in Chicago, and the woman who gets attacked is Anne Marie McCoy. My friends and I rented it when we were probably 14 years old, and it scared the living hell out of me.

Incidentally, one of the friends I watched it with was Jordan Peele. Not to brag, but we totally dated for like a whole month. Jordan Peele just made a remake of Candyman. Friends, I was in the room where it happened. I'm really sorry about that. Moving on.

Not all secret spaces hidden behind walls are terrifying, though. In 2007, an art student was arrested leaving the apartment he'd built completely in secret in one of the busiest places you could possibly think of.

In the early 2000s, the Providence Place Mall in Providence, Rhode Island ran a series of ads asking the viewer to imagine how wonderful it would be to live in a mall. Now, personally, unless it was the apocalypse, the mall is the last place I would ever want to live. Anxiety about mindless consumerism already keeps me awake at night. Why would I want it on display right outside my window?

It's like the artists who moved into lofts in Soho in the 70s and 80s and then woke up one morning in the 2000s to find an Apple store across the street and a parade of trust fund kids buying up the lofts around them. What could be more depressing?

For art student Michael Townsend, however, imagining living in the mall wasn't going to be good enough. He needed to experience it. He decided he was going to make the hypothetical of that commercial a reality and figure out how to actually live in the mall. Michael had watched the mall being constructed in the mid-90s, and it seems he had a keen memory of its layout, including back hallways and storage spaces.

There was a space in the mall that had been used as storage during construction, but once the mall was completed, the space wasn't used. I don't know how Michael knew that exactly, but when he visited the space and found it was empty, he decided that would be the right place for his apartment inside the mall. Michael was very excited about it.

Michael and a handful of his accomplice friends, including his then-wife Adrienne, quietly set about building an apartment complete with a fake cinderblock wall, a bedroom, a TV, and a PlayStation. The space in the mall achieved a base level of comfort with enough amenities to qualify itself as a livable domestic space.

Life from within the mall was committed to the pursuit of normalcy and the purchase of objects and clothing that would help define me an active participant in the great things the mall has to offer. The apartment was a superb space for hosting guests. And I only regret that we didn't have a working toilet.

Here's a weird fact about me. Whenever I visited a bathroom in a restaurant when I was young, I would try to envision the bathroom as my home. Why I would need to live in a public restroom, I have no idea. Where the idea came from? Not a clue. I would imagine where my bed would go, my dresser and my bookcase. I'm 100% sure that if I happened upon a janitor's closet or something in a mall back then, I would have pictured it as my living space.

Michael was arrested in 2007 when mall security caught him coming out of the apartment one day. It's incredible it took them four years. Even weirder still, at some point in the four years that the group occupied the apartment at different times, the PlayStation went missing. Apparently someone stole it. Presumably someone not connected with the project, which begs the question...

Who the hell stole the PlayStation? How did they find the secret apartment? And why didn't they tell anyone they'd found it? I cannot emphasize enough that the entire endeavor was done out of a compassion to understand the mall more and life as a shopper. It has been my utmost priority to not disrupt the security forces working at the mall, and I have gone to great lengths to make sure that my project did not interfere with their work. Plans to finish the kitchen, install the...

wood flooring at a second bedroom and replaced the outdated cutlery were put on permanent hold recently as I was apprehended leaving the apartment. And security personnel who took care of the situation did so in a fluid and professional manner. Michael was sentenced to probation and banned from the mall for life. He and his wife at the time were the only two members of the group who identified themselves and suffered the consequences, which...

I suppose could be considered noble. I have mixed feelings about this whole thing. Like, it's amazing that he managed to pull it off and all, but it's not like he needed a place to live. He already had one. And it's not like he was trying to make some comment about affordable housing. I'm pretty sure it was meant to be a sort of Warhol-esque comment about consumerism and the idea that anyone would think living in a shopping mall would be fun.

But what's the point of an art piece that isn't meant to be seen? And ultimately, it seems a little more like Ferris Bueller than Andy Warhol. It's fun to watch someone get one over on the man, but when the one getting one over is ultimately the man himself, there was never any real risk. At the end of the day, a white, cisgender, male art school graduate is most likely not really going to pay the price. After all, Michael didn't even go to jail.

But what if, unlike some guy who was having a laugh, a hidden room was so important and necessary that if it was discovered, it could mean the death of its occupants? I know you're thinking Anne Frank, but that's not who I'm talking about at all.

Six months from now, you could be running a 5K, booking that dream trip, or seeing thicker, fuller hair every time you look in the mirror. Through HERS, you can get dermatologists-trusted, clinically proven prescriptions with ingredients that go beyond what over-the-counter products offer.

Whether you prefer oral or topical treatments, HERS has you covered. Getting started is simple. Just fill out an intake form online and a licensed provider will recommend a customized plan just for you. The best part? Everything is 100% online. If prescribed, your treatment ships right to your door. No pharmacy trips, no waiting rooms, and no insurance headaches.

Plus, treatments start at just $35 a month. Start your initial free online visit today at forhers.com slash talk. That's F-O-R-H-E-R-S dot com slash talk. Tom Pounder products are not FDA approved or verified for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information.

In 1945, Kolditz Castle in Germany was basically the Alcatraz of POW prisons. Particularly pesky British and American soldiers who had annoyingly tried to escape other prisons they'd been put in were transferred to Kolditz because it was seemingly impossible to escape from. With only two heavily guarded entrances and a 60-foot cliff on the backside, there really was no way out.

But here's a fun factoid about people. In general, we tend to prefer freedom to prison, and when given the opportunity, the majority of us will at least attempt to escape imprisonment. Despite how inescapable Colditz Castle was supposed to be, around three dozen soldiers successfully did manage to get out. And a ton of attempts were made, including one guy sewing himself into a mattress, one guy stuffing himself into a three-by-three-foot box,

others impersonated officers or duplicated keys. French soldiers somehow successfully set up radio communication with their base. If you have a minute, I highly recommend googling "Colditz Castle Escapes." The Wikipedia page is a fascinating read. The most famous attempted escape from Colditz Castle was named the "Colditz Cock." Named after the bird, you cheeky little monkeys.

POW Bill Goldfinch hatched the plan after watching snowflakes being lifted by the wind outside his window. He would build a glider that would catch the updraft on the cliffside of the castle and glide him to safety. He took his idea to the head of the escape committee. The head of the escape committee, people. These soldiers were so serious about getting the fuck out of there that they formed a fucking committee.

The head of the committee had been appointed because of his own attempted escape. Everyone was like, "Damn, check out the stones on that one!" And they made him boss. Goldfinch and his best friend, Jack Best, were assigned as lead engineers, with 12 more men, deemed the apostles, also assigned to help. Using a book they'd found in the library that apparently had, like, one lone drawing of one wing of a hypothetical glider, the men figured out all the specs and set to work building in their rooms.

They quickly realized, though, that as the pieces came together, they needed a bigger, less conspicuous place to build. So these dudes built a fake wall in the attic of the chapel using shutters and mud. How, I hear you asking, did they get mud into the attic? By using dust. Folks, they made mud out of dust.

Even if they had brought heaps of mud up to the attic from the outside, considering what else they managed to get up there without being caught, mud would have been a piece of cake. Oh, they also built a trap door in the attic floor in order to access their secret workshop. Both wings took more than 6,000 pieces to build. 6,000 pieces, I should mention, that were all made by hand.

They used floorboards and bed slats. They used some of the food they were rationed to seal the cloth covering the glider. The cloth was made of bed sheets. According to a piece about this ANOVA, quote, to make just one rib, they had to shape a piece of wood, steam it to render it pliable, bend and pin it, then finally glue it into place. And the glider required hundreds of these.

The roof above the chapel attic was conveniently the perfect launching spot and was part of the castle that was unseen by guards. The design included pulleys and ropes and counterweights. I don't know. I'm not an engineer. But part of the plan included a bathtub full of cement that would be dropped off the cliff into the courtyard below.

Look, okay, I can see smuggling floorboards. Like, not really, but I can see someone casually walking down the hall with a floorboard stuffed down their pants. But a bathtub filled with cement? Even if you wait to fill it with cement until you get it up to the attic, how are you surreptitiously carrying a fucking bathtub through an entire castle filled with Nazis?

You'd think at least one Nazi would have seen people lugging a bathtub through the castle and been like, "Ooh, that's a nice tub. Wait a minute, what are you doing with a bathtub?" That was my Nazi accent. Also, where is this bathtub coming from? Isn't anyone going to notice a missing tub next time they go to take a hot bath after a day of being piece of shit Nazis? Not to mention the cement.

And what were the Nazis doing this whole time that their prisoners are just flitting about the castle, hither and thither, prying up floorboards and stripping stuff of wires and shit? And no one noticed that the attic was suddenly eight feet shorter one day? Like, oh, that's weird. I thought this room was, I don't know, roomier?

The plan was to make the escape during an air raid blackout, which I assume includes one of those super loud air raid sirens. That way, when they dropped the bathtub full of cement 60 feet to the courtyard below, the sound would be covered by the sirens. These guys thought of everything.

By April of 1945, the glider was done. And if you're envisioning, like, a glorified kite, stop. This thing was 32 feet wide, over 19 feet long, and weighed 240 pounds. It fit two people, the pilot and a passenger. I'm assuming Goldfinch and Best would be the ones to use it. And if you think it's weird that 12 others helped build something they wouldn't get to use to escape...

Don't forget there was an entire escape committee in Kolditz Castle, so it seems there was a real sense of camaraderie about escaping. By the time the glider was ready for flight, the POWs had gotten word that the Americans were on their way to liberate them.

They decided to wait it out and walk out the front door, saving the glider for just in case the Nazis decided to massacre them in a desperate last-ditch measure before being caught. They figured having a way to get out and ask the Americans to hurry the fuck up might be wise. In the end, the good guys won, and the glider was left behind as the British POWs were freed.

I'm sure the 14 men who worked on the glider were fucking thrilled to be getting out of there, but I can't help but wonder if there wasn't a small piece of them that was like, "Wow, that was a shit ton of work for nothing." Then again, I guess, what else did they have to do?

No one knows what happened to the Colt It's Cock after that. It disappeared into history, save for one photo and Goldfinch's blueprints. In 1999, a replica was built based on those blueprints. In 2000, with Goldfinch, Best, and the Twelve Apostles watching, the replica made a successful flight at an airbase in England. Goldfinch died a few months later, hopefully with the satisfaction of knowing his glider could have saved his life.

Though something tells me the people who built the replica didn't use food or bed slats as building materials. So really, who knows? So before you go to bed tonight, I don't know, maybe just do a quick double check and make sure there isn't a portal tucked away behind a cabinet. Sleep tight.

Next time on Strange and Unexplained, another classic episode, Lost in the Wilderness, Hikers Found Missing. This episode was originally produced by Becca DiGregorio and Natalie Grillo, with research by Jess McKillop. It was originally engineered by Jennifer Swatek. Our voice actors for this episode were Lauren Hooper and Ryan Garcia.