Samantha Hartsoe/TikTok
- TikTok user and NYC resident Samantha Hartsoe says she found a secret apartment behind her bathroom mirror.
- The abandoned and uncompleted three-bedroom apartment had exposed wires and pipes.
- Hartsoe contacted her building’s management team but even they aren’t sure what’s going on with it.
- Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
It’s not unreasonable to expect to see your apartment wall when you lift your bathroom mirror.
But one TikTok user made a far more exciting discovery when she lifted hers to find an entryway to a whole other, seemingly abandoned secret apartment.
New York City resident Samantha Hartsoe shared a series of videos of herself removing the mirror to find a strange hole, crawling through that hole, discovering a room, and then realizing it was actually just one part of a “freezing” apartment that she said she didn’t know existed.
The first video in the four-part series, posted on Wednesday, has 9 million views at the time of writing.
Several top comments on the TikTok videos advised Hartsoe to make the most of the situation given NYC’s competitive real-estate market.
"Girl, don't say anything you just got a second apartment," one wrote.
"Don't be shy, rent out the room," another commented.
Hartsoe did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Hartsoe's investigation started with a suspiciously cold apartment
In her first TikTok video, Hartsoe told viewers that her apartment is always cold, no matter "how high the heat goes."
"So I walk into my bathroom and I feel cold air blowing on me. There's no vent or anything," she said before tracing the potential source of the cold air to her bathroom mirror.
In the second video, she removes the mirror from the wall mount to reveal a square-shaped hole in the wall directly behind it. Instead of showing exposed bricks and pipes, the hole opens up to an empty room that's not part of Hartsoe's apartment.
Armed with a hammer and a flashlight strapped to her forehead with an elastic headband, the video shows Hartsoe climbing into the hole to explore the room.
However, once she made it into the room, she said she realized that there was an entirely separate apartment on the other side with a short flight of stairs that leads to a door. The apartment looks like it was abandoned mid-construction with exposed wiring and pipes. There were several garbage bags on the floor and a water bottle that Hartsoe called "signs of life."
"I was kind of expecting there to be somebody, especially with the water bottle being there, and that definitely put me on edge," Hartsoe told Curbed. According to Curbed's report, Hartsoe says she eventually discovered that the secret apartment was unfinished and not ready to live in.
"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," she said.
Hartsoe said that when she contacted building management, even they were unsure about the status of the three-bedroom apartment and what the plan was for it.
Hartsoe's friend and social-media users compared the secret-apartment discovery to a common plot in horror movies
Two of Hartsoe's friends make brief appearances in the video series. One of them can be heard saying, "Have you watched the movie 'Parasite?'" referencing a plot point in the Academy Award-winning 2019 South Korean thriller.
On Twitter, others drew parallels between Hartsoe's videos and the 1992 horror movie "Candyman," where a supernatural killer attacks victims through the bathroom mirror.
—Jacob Davison (@JacobDavison_) March 4, 2021
—Tiffany D. Jackson (@WriteinBK) March 4, 2021
While the status of the secret apartment remains unclear, it's far from the first unusual New York City apartment to go viral on TikTok. In February, the "worst apartment ever" - a Greenwich Village studio with no stove or bathroom - caused an uproar on the social-media platform.
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