What’s Hidden Behind Your Home’s Walls?!

The latest Tik Tok trend is hidden rooms, in which people, on camera of course, explore a secret space that was built into a home. They may be safe rooms, wine cellars, extra storage closets, or act as vaults to hold all of the homeowner’s treasures. 

There also isn’t one type or age of home that holds a hidden room, as people are discovering them in Victorian mansions, Brooklyn brownstones, normal suburban ranches, and especially ultra-modern new homes.

That got me to thinking about not only hidden rooms, but people who find things tucked away in the walls of their homes. 

Right here in Sacramento, I had a friend who bought an old commercial building (on D Street in East Sacramento) and converted it into his own personal residence. While doing some demolition to an interior wall one day, he discovered a banker’s bag buried inside the plaster that contained all sorts of antique coins, some of them going back all the way to 1905!

He cashed in the newer ones for a couple grand and kept the most valuable antique coins on display.

Here is a list of some other things homeowners have found buried, tucked, and hidden within their walls:

• Liquor bottles are quite common to find in the walls in older homes, as Prohibition in the 1930s led people to keep their alcohol stash hush hush. The same goes for cash, coins, or even bonds, as property owners back in the day didn’t trust banks so they hid valuables in their walls. 

• One homeowner found hundreds of love letters sent from a solder in WWI to his sweetheart back home hidden within his walls. (I wonder why they ended up in the wall?!)

• An ecstatic homeowner found an Action Comic #1, featuring an early Superman, buried in his walls and long forgotten. It was still in good enough condition that he was able to sell it at auction for $175,000! The best part was that he’d only paid $10,000 for the old fixer home!

• When their father passed away, two brothers were going through the home of their late-dad’s home. He had a Norman Rockwell painting hanging on the wall, which they knew was just a copy. 

• But then they discovered a well-wrapped Norman Rockwell painting stored within a nearby wall – that was the same painting but a certified original!

• Apparently, their father had switched out the original for a copy to hide it from his ex-wife in their divorce, and now the original was worth millions!

• Here’s a Scooby Doo mystery for you: a new homeowner found a hidden crawl space in their property that contained a briefcase, a series of watches, videotapes, and cash. 

• But the strangest thing was a note that accompanied the random items, spelling out just “Save yourself.”

• In 2011, a Wisconsin man was remodeling his bathroom when he found a large metal object entrenched in the wall. Upon removing it and dusting it off, he found that it was a US army missile from the Korean War…and was still live with a five-inch explosive head! 

Obviously, he called in the authorities to remove it safely.

• IA man in New York City was renovating his commercial building when he noticed a strange subtle glow behind a crack in a wall. Upon investigation, he found that there was a neon light behind that wall that had been left plugged in and on for 77 years! 

The building had been a forest-themed restaurant back in the 1930s including neon effect lighting, but parts were walled-over when it was refurbished in 1949. Apparently, the construction workers didn’t bother unplugging or even turning off the light!

The new property owner estimated that keeping that light on for 77 years probably added $17,000 to the electricity bills.

• Beehives containing 80,000 bees, scores of cats, squirrels, rat infestations, and even snakes (hundreds of them!) have been found inside people’s walls. 

If you found that your walls were literally crawling with snakes, how fast would you call me to sell?!

Then again, if you bought a home using my help and you found a million dollars in the walls, would you call me immediately and offer to share it?!