Woman finds entire apartment hidden behind bathroom mirror with 'signs of life'

When Samantha Hartshoe traced a persistent draught to her bathroom mirror, she might have expected to find a hole behind it.

But when she took it off the wall, she made a staggering discovery, stumbling upon a hidden three-bedroom apartment.

New Yorker Samantha had been baffled by the constant cold breeze, which she noticed every time she went into the bathroom. She spent days searching for the source and covered up a hole as well as a light switch to try to stop the flow of cold air.

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However, in a TikTok video, she showed how she discovered the breeze was coming from the mirror, removing it to reveal a gaping hole leading into a dark, dank room.

In the 2021 clip, she doesn't retreat in horror, instead calling out to her housemates before donning a makeshift headlamp and mask and arming herself with a hammer.

One of them tells her to “mean it when you swing” it as she clings onto a pipe and clambers through the hole in the wall. Her friend tells her, “you’re in the other side of the dimension,” and urges her to “go onward”. He compares it to the movie Parasite, in which a family discover other people have secretly been living in their hidden basement bunker for years.

Samantha soon realises she’s discovered an abandoned three-bedroom apartment and begins to explore.

She comes across an old toilet, scattered bin bags, and an empty water bottle, which she calls a “sign of life”. Samantha whispers, “what’s wrong with me?” and asks “what’s my game plan?”, terrified by what else she might find.

Eventually, she climbs back through the hole and seals her bathroom up, promising her landlord will “get a fun call tomorrow”. Samantha later told Curbed: “I was kind of expecting there to be somebody, especially with the water bottle being there. And that definitely put me on edge.

However, she quickly realised the separate apartment was uninhabitable.

She went on: “I’m not sure if it was being renovated or if it is empty. It’s really old, and nobody’s been in there a while. The shower-bathroom area is all piping — there’s no actual bathtub or toilet. The floor, and what I think would be the kitchen, was ripped up.”

Samantha later said that even her building managers were flummoxed by the discovery, and the apartment is still shrouded in mystery.

She added: “I think everybody in New York has such small apartments, you don’t know what you’re going to find. And everyone’s hoping for more space.”