Woman Discovers Creepy Staircase in Her 100-Year-Old House While Cleaning

A woman was left "terrified" after uncovering a secret door leading down to a hidden room in her house, three years after she first moved in.

Julia Henning is a lifestyle entrepreneur and voice-over artist based in Los Angeles. She told Newsweek that she first found the room while rearranging furniture to make space for an at-home voice-over studio.

"I had always thought the random little coat closet in my living room might make for a soundproofed and cozy recording nook if I ever needed it," Henning said. "As I cleaned out the closet, my eyes kept tracing the small glass knob that stuck out in the corner of the room close to the door frame."

Henning said that, up until that point, the closet had been used to store coats and other miscellaneous items. However, as she looked closer at the mysterious door knob, she also noticed hinges in the floor.

"So, with the room clear, I lifted the knob and the floorboard to reveal what looked like a staircase to hell," Henning said. "Imagine not only my shock and terror, but the notion that I had indeed lived here for three years without knowing this. It was shocking!"

From a purely financial standpoint, the discovery of a hidden room can add significant value to a home. Rochelle Atlas Maize, a leading luxury realtor based out of Beverly Hills, told Mansion Global: "There's a James Bond feel to them, and they're always a conversation piece when it comes to the resale of the property."

Henning had a very different reaction. "I was scared s***less," she said. "I've known since I moved into the house that there was 'energy' in it."

Though she's not claiming to be a medium, Henning often felt like she "wasn't alone" in the house. "From what I know about the house, it's over 100 years old," she said. "It would be naive to think there isn't some energy left over from another time."

In the first of a series of videos posted to her TikTok account, Henning shared a glimpse of the small door and the dark winding stairs that descended down beneath it. The unsettling footage has been viewed over 22 million times.

"When I saw the staircase, I was terrified simply because it was a dark room that I couldn't see into," Henning said. "The winding nature of the old wood stairs was giving way too much horror film energy that anyone alone would want to stumble upon."

However, with the help of a couple of friends who documented the experience for TikTok, Henning eventually plucked up the courage to go down into the hidden room below. What they found did little to calm her nerves: empty shelves, save for a jar containing objects like thimbles, toy cars and playing cards, while the names "Joe" and "John" had been painted on the wall.

"We were terrified by this discovery, especially not being told about the room in the first place," Henning said. "I never expected to have more questions than answers after going in."

Henning has lived in the house for three years, but said that she purchased it during the pandemic, when these kinds of details could be easily missed. "I had a short amount of time to view the house, and at the time, my concern was running water, working lights, and working out in my head how I was going to manage the lack of closet space for my vast amount of clothing," Henning said. "I wasn't fishing around floorboards to see if they led to underground rooms."

Despite the eerie nature of what was found, Henning did notice wine racks in the space so has a theory as to how the room ended up there. "From what little history I know, the house was built in the Prohibition era, so I can only imagine the room existed as a storage cellar for food and wine, if not other unmentionables at the time," she said. "What we found in the room I can only at this point attest to a possible time capsule or item left behind by previous owners, though no confirmation has been made."

For now, the closet space is doubling as her private recording studio. Henning's not quite sure what to do with the secret room though, other than store some wine there. "Do I intend to hang out in the creepy cellar that lives under the floorboard? Not likely," she said.