In the new house you found a secret door with a staircase going deep down, which physically could not be there. And a note: "DO NOT GO DOWN." Fifty years later, living out a lonely and sad old age, you decided that you had nothing left to lose anyway.
So! Here's the problem; I love utility rooms. The furnace room. The boiler room. The old coal chute that has been closed up but once fed these things. The crawlspace where you can track the development of electricity and indoor plumbing by how many previous incarnations are still there, and where the scars remain.
Not a lot of that in my area. We're too new for lead paint.
It was a small disappointment that the house had neither a crawlspace or a basement. The boiler was a new-ish on-demand mounted to a wall in the garage and all the drains disappeared into the monolith slab. If I needed to change anything down the line, I'd have to get a jackhammer first.
it was also a bought AS-IS, WHERE-IS hoarder situation, so I consoled myself with the hope of at least finding interesting things while filling the dumpster outside.
What I did not expect was to find a door behind the collapsing wall of banker boxes. For one, that was the exterior wall and from the outside, there was not a door there. But two, SECRET DOOR FOR ME.
I was going to be happy even if it inexplicably just opened to the inside of the wall, vapor barrier and insulation and the plywood of the outside of the house.
I was also just as gleeful to find it locked. That was a better mystery. There were no other keys given over at the time of the sale, and even though I'd found keys throughout the cleaning process, I did not feel any particular need to sort through them.
Because, to my ongoing amusement, the hinges were on my side of the door. With a flathead screwdriver and a rubber mallet, I pulled the hinge pins and opened the door by simply removing it.
The draft of cool air was my first indication that this was not just a small void space in the wall. I propped the door out of the way and discovered my very own, very steep, very narrow, murderstairs.
Now, when I say murderstairs, know that I say it with the most gleeful fondness. This is a relative of the murderboard (pinboard with yarn and conspiracies) and the murderbasement (normal basement, but it's concrete and someone failed to entirely cover the original red paint with gray and it looks like a movie set for serial killers.)
Also, very un-lit. The phone flashlight did not show me the bottom of the stairs, but it did reveal the penciled writing on the inside of the wall. DO NOT GO DOWN.
Excellent.
The only way this could get better was by finding a door at the bottom of the stairs with the "don't open, dead inside"/"don't dead, open inside" painted across it.
Now, I am not actually totally bereft of self-preservation. I did not and do not actually want a basement where murders have occurred, or secret body disposal site, or to accidentally fall through some rotten steps that shouldn't be going down through the monolith slab foundation. My coworkers might have noticed my absence after a couple days, but I didn't think they'd know where to send the rescue party.
Step one! Better flashlight to just look down the stairs from the safety of the doorway! To my delight and increased curiosity, the steps dropped down to a corner landing and turned, which meant that they were now passing somewhere under the house. At some point I would need to find out whether or not this had structural consequences.
But that was somewhere around step twenty seven.
Step two! A broom to sweep the cobwebs out of the way, because even though I live in a place that doesn't have that many spiders, I still hate cobwebs in my face!
Step three! The most tentative of checks. I half-stepped onto the first landing to feel if it was solid, to listen for boards shifting around or flexing, and to decide whether or not I needed to go back for the five-point harness and long rope that usually only get brought out for roof work.
But nope! Surprise beyond my wildest expectations, the steps were solid. Concrete or stone solid.
I stood on the landing, broom in one hand, flashlight in the other, getting the first feeling that this was out of place. Like... the buildings here aren't that old. We don't have ancient foundations or even the cold war recommendations on digging your own bunker. And this was a lot of work for someone to put in.
But also, if it just went to a secret grow room from the days when that was illegal and profitable, then that would also make sense.
I did step back a moment, to call a friend and update them on the exciting new find, but mostly so that if I did get backrooms'd or white vault'd, then someone would know where to start the found footage horror series.
The friend advised that I brick up the doorway and pretend it wasn't there. This would be the same friend who suggested I clean up the hoarding situation by setting it on fire, so they're not known for the most helpful or proportionate of suggestions. But! Same friend would at least call 911 on my behalf if I didn't call back in an hour.
I set a timer for forty-five minutes, because I didn't want to explain an innocent murderbasement to a cop doing a safety check.
Thus prepared, I gathered my broom, flashlight, and sense of adventure. I proceeded right past the warning note and down to the first corner... where I found more stairs descending to another corner. And at the bottom of that another corner.
RIP to the builder, they would have loved minecraft.
The next corner, I stopped dead in my tracks.
The stairs dropped into a natural limestone tunnel, walls overgrown with columns and stalactites. The only route ahead was a narrow gap, like someone had broken out the teeth to squeeze through.
fUCK that.
Nope. Absolutely the hell not.
I might love me a murderbasement, but I don't have whatever it is that calls spelunkers to the depths.
I went right back up my perfectly constructed murderstairs and called the friend to close out the murderbasement travel plan. Fifteen minutes. I put the door back on its hinges and installed a new lock while my friend stayed on the line and very reasonably suggested that I seal the whole thing with dynamite.
I did go back down, once, to install a very official sign at the bottom of the steps. DO NOT GO UP. NO EXIT.
If I ever hear a single knock on that door, I'm selling the place. Probably to cavers.
AS-IS, WHERE-IS.
