30 Construction Workers Share What Creepy Secret Rooms They Were Asked To Build

Residential contractor here. A client once asked that I add a 4x6 room next to the master that would be "just big enough to allow someone to 'calm down' if they were being 'bad'". Specs had no windows. Brick walls. Double thick door, etc. He gave off that creepy as hell vibe, but you know, money.

Anyway, the job was going fine until we ran out of red bricks and started using those blue and yellow ones. He lost his s**t! Canceled the contract and never looked back.

tldr: My son's standards for Lego houses are so high that Jesus himself couldn't reach them.

Just moved into a house that was built in the 70s. The previous owners custom built it, and the architect was the man's old frat buddy. Custom stuff everywhere (trash chute straight from the kitchen into the garage wheelie bin!).

When we first looked at the house, we really loved it, but there was no office space that my husband could use for his music stuff. It was the only disappointing thing about the house, but since everything else was so perfect, we went ahead and put in the offer.

When we were doing another walkthrough with our parents, we showed them the walk up attic, which is pretty cool too. When I turned around to leave, I noticed a wall of insulation that looked....different. if you push the insulation to one side, a doorknob appears. And behind it is the secret office.

Coolest house ever.

My dad is a doctor and does a lot of construction at home in his free time. This one time he was moving a wall, making one room smaller and another bigger. He was putting an entire-wall-bookshelf kind of thing in the smaller room, and just to f**k with future homeowners he snatched one of those plastic skeletons from his job and hid it in the space between the bookshelf and the wall

I expect headlines sometime in the future

In the 1970s, a group of Edinburgh students living in a flat in Niddry Street, in the city's Old Town, knocked on a wall and heard a hollow sound.

Curious, and probably drunk, they knocked a hole through it, where they exposed an old labyrinth of corridors and rooms underneath North Bridge, nearly half a mile in length. People had lived and died in these rooms, underneath the city's bridge. There had been bars and brothels, and doss houses for the poor.

People in Victorian times had closed it off and subsequent generations had forgotten where the entrances were.

Never built one, but I did find one in a house I was doing some plumbing work in once. This was an expensive condo, and they had a secret office that had a secret one-way mirror looking into the GUEST SHOWER. Creepy as f**k, man.

Was a draughtsman for a while. Two super wealthy Chinese parents were building all three of their children houses on their massive property. I was asked to design the ironing room for the eldest daughter. She...genuinely liked doing ironing? And laundry? I ended up designing this massive room with bay windows overlooking the lake with all sorts of storage compartments and a variety of ironing stations. She loved it, I got a healthy bonus, and I'm still confused to this day.

Wife and I had a secret, soundproof "sex dungeon" type room built adjacent to our bedroom. The reason for the room is that we have various devices in there that are impractical to disassemble and put away when we have friends over (or the day we have kids and still want to enjoy our fun discreetly).

We had some devices installed when we built the room, such as a large metal cage and other restraining devices. The people who built the room probably asked us a hundred times if we were sure we didn't plan to abduct people. The architect nearly dropped the project when I jokingly asked him to make sure there'd be an electric outlet to plug a chainsaw.

During the finishing stages of doing a basement, the customer decided she wanted a wall with dead space behind it. Gave no reasoning, only details how big she wanted it. I had joked multiple times it would end up being a tiny grow room for Marijuana.

It ended up becoming a small grow room for Marijuana.

I had a client once who wanted a safe room. Full concrete, ballistic glass, rated to withstand explosions, reinforced doors, separate power, and HVAC systems. Dedicated phone and tele/data as well with direct alarms to security and the police.

The thing that was unusual was that they wanted it handled entirely separately. A different building permit, with a different crew, all work being done at night. If anyone was ever able to find blueprints or permits to plan a Hollywood-style caper, they wouldn't know about the safe room. (This was a public building, not a private residence.)

This one to me is the coolest. We have a family friend who is a builder and built his own house (obviously). I haven't been over to his house in a while, but last time I was there, they were still finishing it (they've been finishing it for several years, and you'll see why soon). Their house is 7 stories tall (4 above, 3 basement levels), has elevators, a full-size basketball court (indoors), several kitchens and living rooms, a huge theater room, an apartment that is attached with its own kitchen, living room, dining room, and 4 bedrooms, and the main house has countless bedrooms and other multipurpose rooms. The house is enormous.

BUT the coolest part is the house has those McDonald's slides in it. There are 2 in it (maybe more now) of these slides. One goes from the top floor to the bottom, and one goes from the top floor to ground level. In the biggest one however, there is a secret passage, thats kind of hard to get to. When the slide gets to its steepest point, you have to brace yourself against the walls so you stop. If you can, the slide actually has a tunnel to the side that you can take. When you go through that secret tunnel, it takes you to a secret balcony in their in-home theater, with a fridge and chairs and stuff. It's a pain in the butt to get to, but it's really cool.

They do have a few other hidden rooms, but unfortunately, the guy who owned the house wouldn't tell us, he said we had to find them on our own. Every time I was there spent the entire time knocking on walls, inspecting bookshelves, etc

I am not a construction worker. I. attended a private boarding school when I was younger the school itself was 200+ years old and the castle it was built around was much older. Upon exploring I and a few other friends found an entrance to a system of tunnels that ran beneath the school. The tunnels were used as maintenance tunnels for the old heating system that was once run from a gas boiler system. Originally we thought that was why they were built. We began trying to map out the tunnels and used to spend hours underneath the school during study time/ night roaming around with a measuring tape drawing it to scale. We never completed the map due to the systems enormity.

As we got further and further into the tunnels we learnt that these were much older than just the gas boiler. A new, cement tunnel seemed to extend about a kilometer in radius. Past a kilometer the tunnels got older and more dangerous. We found that they extended all the way out to a pavilion in our school. These passages were also in cement but were very clearly much older. Most of my time as a 14-year-old was spent roaming around them. It gave us passages into locked rooms, the castle (banned grounds), to the forests, etc. We decorated a lot of the walls down there in shoe polish and stolen art paints. We would even smoke down there a mere few feet below the headmaster's office.

Here is mine

Had a request to build a hidden room which was to my belief be used as a sex dungeon. He requested low-hanging support beams, a sunken in part for "storage" we painted it in red and black colours. The floor was tiled in one portion for a drain.

Electrician here. Have done a few. The coolest was a secret passageway and attached room in a very nice house. It was hidden by a movable bookshelf on both ends. The guy said he didn't have a specific reason for building it, he just always thought it would be cool to have a secret passageway in his house.

The other one that stands out was an underground survival bunker accessed through a hidden door in the back of a garage. It had an additional exit by means of an underground tunnel that lead almost 100 feet in the bordering forest. The strangest thing about it was that it was a survival bunker where he had our wire with outlets and lights, despite there not being any type of backup/off-the-grid power. Makes me think that he actually had an alternative purpose for the shelter.

Electrician here. The customer wanted a sliding bookcase that hid 2 fire poles that slid down into the basement. Just like the old Batman TV show. He even had the bust on his desk that had a button under the flip-up head. The customer told me the bust was from the original show.

The house also had a couple of hidden doors and a panic room hidden behind a Tardis. It really was bigger on the inside.

There's this one house we did where there was a concealed stairway from the master bedroom to the dining room, just so the parents could get booze and snacks without walking past the kid's rooms. Concealed because at the top of the stair was a massive safe.

Plenty of times. There was one I never saw the finished stages of that was basically an entire apartment accessible only by a small hatch in a closet. Either the homeowner was planning to harbor criminals, or a mistress, a man in an iron mask, or just really wanted to be able to get away from his family. Hope it wasn't like an HH Holmes thing.

Did a lot of mansions and this wasn't insanely common but far more than I expected. There was one builder that did a lot of these houses who managed to find a retired electric chair that he kept in a hidden room. He 'joked' that when his kids were bad he would make them sit in it for a few hours. It didn't have power running to it but still.

I built a Narnia closet for someone. Their daughter had one request for the new house: she had a built-in armoire, white and modern looking with nice shelving units on the right side and a bigger opening on the left. However, when you pushed the back of the left, closet side, it opened up into an actual closet that was about 5x10 feet on the inside, not too shabby at all. Was a pretty fun build, albeit somewhat challenging. Edit: spelling/words.

I was a custom interior carpenter and I did two. One was a bookcase that opened up into a large storage area.

The other was a hidden room behind their wine cellar. We installed a custom wine rack on a piano hinge, with a latch in the space behind one of the bottles. In the room, they installed a safe and a gun safe. All of the electronics for the house lived down there, as well as a panel that opened up into the main living room, in case you wanted to shoot an intruder from the safe room.

Booze, guns, and safety all in one place. I guess what I'm saying is that I know where I'm going when the zombies come.

I used to work construction over the summers in high school and within just a few miles of where I grew up there are 20,000sq+ foot homes...anyways this one client (who was pretty well known for being a CEO of a large corporation) requested a secret self-contained smoking room. Complete with a secret entrance, a bathroom, cedar paneling, self-contained heat and A/c, and an industrial-sized smoke-eater. Along with hideaway shelving that would store an endless amount of mason jars full of pot. Also has some crazy vaporizer as well. He would have meetings upstairs in his underwear and robe whole being high as f**k