Photo: @ samanthartsoe / TikTok
As if the life of a New York tenant is no longer intimidating enough – with rats coming out of drains and rat skeletons raining down from the ceiling, not to mention new varieties of slums – Samantha Hartsoe, 26, has experienced a totally different experience. strange new tenant story when she found a entire apartment accessible through a hole hidden behind the bathroom mirror. Hartsoe documented his discovery and exploration of the mirror unit in a series of four-part videos on TikTok that went viral today. But we still had questions, even after the ending came out this morning, so we tracked Hartsoe, who shares her three-bedroom apartment (plus the mysterious extra space) on Roosevelt Island with two roommates. The story is not as simple as a hole without a cover that inadvertently gives access to an empty unit on the side; as Hartsoe tells us, even the management of his building is not sure what is going on.
Last weekend, when she came back from a walk, she realized that her bathroom was very cold. “It was strange, because I don’t have a vent that I know there that blows cold air.” Eventually, she realized that the draft was coming from the mirror over the sink. “I realized that it is not connected to the wall, which seems a little strange to me. Sometimes the mirrors are just hanging … but the cold air was a little suspicious. ”When she took the mirror off the hanger, she discovered a hole in the wall – it looks like a niche that once held a medicine cabinet, but without a back – that led to another room. And as any horror movie character would do (as we shout at the screen telling them not to do this), she decided to come in and explore the space on March 1, even though her roommate John tried to convince her not to it.
Then she put on a mask, attached a flashlight to her head with a hair band, took a hammer (another touch of horror film, just in case) and climbed. As soon as she fell into the room on the other side, she realized that it was probably too high for her to climb back. “I have to find my way out of here,” she remembers thinking. “I have to go back through that hole, which is practically impossible, or I have to find my way out of that place, which means I have to explore everything at this point.”
What she had entered was a three-bedroom apartment filled with open windows – that was the source of the cold draft – containing some “signs of life”, as she said in the video: a lot of garbage bags, a bottle of empty water. “I was hoping there would be someone, especially with the water bottle there,” she said. “And it definitely made me nervous.” But walking, she realized that the place was despoiled and uninhabitable. “I’m not sure if it was being renovated or if it is empty. It is very old and no one has been there for some time. The shower-bathroom area is all plumbing – there is no real bathtub or toilet. The floor, and what I think the kitchen would be, was torn. ”She found a different way back to her own home, one that suggests that, contrary to what some TikTok users assumed, this was not simply the apartment next to hers: leaving that apartment through the main door led to a hallway somewhere else inside her apartment complex, and she had to make her way through her building to get back to her own apartment. Despite all the frightening experience, the inspection visit did him good: “I felt better sleeping there that night than any other night.” She says she is still avoiding her own bathroom as much as possible, however.
The story is not over yet, so there is room for another dramatic moment in the TikTok style: will the supervisor simply plug the hole behind the mirror? (Probably.) Will your landlord increase the rent because she and her roommates have more space than they thought? (It is not impossible to imagine. After all, we are in New York.) Hartsoe says that we will find out more tomorrow, after someone from the administration office comes to inspect the discovery.