Incredible facts
In fact, this happens far more often than you might imagine. Someone discovers an entire room hiding behind a basement wall, and someone finds a secret door in their backyard.
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Sometimes secret rooms are found even in very famous buildings and on famous ships.
1. Queen Mary
This vessel was built in Scotland in 1930. Today it is one of the most famous ships in constant use.
The ship's website says that the Queen Mary went on her maiden voyage as a pleasure liner on May 27, 1936, but after the outbreak of World War II, it was used as a warship. The ship was repainted gray and deprived of all luxury. The ship was very fast, and it was nicknamed the “gray ghost”.
However, in 1947, the Queen was again turned into a wealthy cruise ship. Mary made her last flight in October 1967. After that, she stayed at the dock in Long Beach, California, forever.
This huge ship has become a tourist attraction, so we can assume that every inch of it has long been explored. However, as you can see, the ship made it to our list for a reason.
In 2017, the owners of the ship spoke about their discovery. When workers were repairing sewer pipes, they suddenly noticed a big hole in the wall. When they went into this hole, they found a full secret room.
“We found a room that was in almost perfect condition and had a lot of massive equipment, motors and gears. Dozens of people have not visited this room since the last renovation, which took place in the 1960s,” said the owners of the ship.
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“Under the tank, there is an engine room that stores original electrical equipment designed to lift multi-ton anchors. A mooring device was also found that monitored the operation of the ship's huge anchor system, “the Queen Mary's website says.
The owners explain that the photos show how this room provides an opportunity to look into the depths of history and understand that this vessel was the most engineering marvel of the time. It turned out that the last surviving ocean liner of those times can still surprise.
Today, the owners are planning to restore the engine room to include it in the tour plan.
Mysterious stories
2. Michelangelo's secret room
This incredible historical find was made in Florence, Italy in 1975 by Paolo Dal Pogetto, director of the Medici Chapels.
According to National Geographic magazine, Paolo and his team were trying to find a new way out of the tourist chapel near the new sacristy, which is a storage room for unique Medici tombstones.
A solution has been found! Paolo found a hatch that hid a staircase that, in turn, led to a small room. They originally mistook it for a storage room. The room itself was not of particular interest, but researchers were interested in the drawings made with chalk and charcoal on the walls of the room.
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As a result, experts found that the author of the drawings is none other than Michelangelo, the most famous Renaissance master. It is believed that the artist lived in this room for several months, hiding from the Medici family. This is because he openly opposed them, and this was very risky in Italy at the time. In his refuge, the artist had nothing to do, so he practiced his skills.
Of course, it is absolutely certain that absolutely all the paintings found are by Michelangelo, however, it is very likely that at least a few of them he did.
“You need to be incredibly careful in buildings that are several hundred years old, as you can find amazing things,” says Paolo's successor Monica Bietti.
The room is closed to visitors today.
Mysterious stories
3. Sally Hemings Room
A woman by that name was Thomas Jefferson's slave. However, in recent years, an increasing number of historians believe that she also appears to have been the mother of his six children.
According to her son Madison, she first became pregnant when she accompanied him on a trip to Paris. She was only 16 at the time. Of course, Jefferson kept their connection a secret. In his will, he did not free this woman from slavery, but he gave freedom to five male slaves. Hemings spent the rest of her life on his plantation in Monticello. She died when she was 61 years old.
After Jefferson's death, his loved ones destroyed a large number of documents that confirmed his affair with the slave and, of course, got rid of her personal belongings.
But in July 2017, the Hemings Room was discovered at the Monticello Plantation. For decades, this little closet was a mystery and mystery, and at some point it was completely converted into a men's toilet.
The owners of the estate now want to restore the room and include it on their list of visits to Monticello.
Interesting stories
4. Forgotten rooms in the Cheops pyramid
Often, a secret room turns out to be a whole secret space. But that doesn't make it any less valuable, especially if such space is found in a 4,500-year-old pyramid.
In 2016, experts using modern technologies scanned the entire Great Pyramid of Giza. The project was led by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. As a result, a team of experts used infrared thermography, 3D reconstruction, and muon radiography to study the pyramid.
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Many of you will probably ask why they don't go inside the pyramid? This is easy to say but hard to do. The pyramid is over 4,500 years old, so it is impossible to enter the smallest rooms without damaging them.
However, experts still did not expect to find the two cavities they found during the scan. They were very careful to say that these could well be ordinary voids left over from the time the pyramid itself was built.
But it is quite possible that these voids may be previously unknown tombs. After all, the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun was also a mystery until it was discovered in 1923.
“Whatever it is, this is the discovery of the century,” says Egyptologist and archaeologist Yukinori Kawe, noting the very large size of one of the cavities found.
Interesting stories
5. The Nazi cache in Buenos Aires
June 2017 was a landmark for an ordinary suburban home near Buenos Aires. Argentinean police then entered it and surrounded a bookcase, behind which they found a door that, in turn, led to a secret room. The room was a large treasure trove of Nazi attributes and artifacts that have been lying there since World War II.
The finding was by no means an accident. The Argentine police, together with experts from Interpol, were investigating suspicious paintings and other works of art that were exhibited in one of the capital's galleries.
The origin of the entire collection was highly questionable; moreover, it is known that many Nazis who fled Germany after its defeat in the war found refuge in Argentina.
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The suburban house in which the cache was found was owned by an art collector. His name has not yet been revealed, just as no charges have been filed so far. However, genuinely Nazi items show a heightened interest in this terrible regime, which took millions of lives.
The collection includes, among other things, a magnifying glass (historians believe it belonged to Hitler), Nazi daggers, a bust of Hitler, toys for children with a swastika on them, and It is also a tool used by German pseudoscientists — phrenologists to measure the shape of the human skull. Some secrets, perhaps, it's better not to know at all…
6. The Mystery of the Winchester House
This house, which is located in a California town, looks like a Gothic castle. Sarah Winchester was the widow of the heir to the family's vast fortune. She built this incredible mansion on the basis of an eight-room cottage. It was built by a woman for almost 30 years, from 1884 to 1922.
Legend has it that Sarah started all this grandiose construction in order to confuse a huge number of human ghosts, those who fell victim to the Winchester weapon. According to another version, the woman just wanted to give jobs to builders.
Whatever the truth, by the time it was Sarah's turn to go to the next world for her husband, her mansion was simply a monumental structure. It had about 160 rooms, 47 fireplaces, 2,000 doors and 10,000 windows, and countless secret viewing holes to peek through.
It may seem that a secret room in such a mansion would not be of any interest, but in reality it is not so.
In 2016, the current curators of the mansion found a secret room that Sarah built just after the 1906 earthquake struck. Knowledgeable people say she was afraid of evil spirits living in the room.
Many interesting items were found in the secret room, including a Victorian couch, paintings, a harmonium, a sewing machine and a mannequin.
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But despite the great media publicity this story received, the whole story turned out to be a fiction. Winchester's head of marketing said that reporting on a new room is nothing but the result of misrepresenting a bad press release.
According to the head of marketing, all employees were aware of the existence of “this discovery”. Moreover, this room can't even be called a room.
“There is a shooting range in our yard, which was built in the form of an attic. There are 38 targets, which are symbols of 38 years of construction, there are copies of various Winchesters, etc. The press simply took our attic and turned it into a “secret” room,” says one of guardians of the mansion.
The shooting range was built in 2016. Of course, no one “found” it, because the space has been used for other purposes for a long period of time.
“The story of Sarah's secret room was invented to somehow explain the fact that there was an attic in the courtyard. The press simply snatched a part of the promotional press release and turned it into a description of a secret room,” explain the curators of the mansion.
Whatever you say, in very old houses, different stories appear along with cobwebs and dust. However, not all stories can be trusted!
Admit it, would you like to find a secret room?