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Image / Self / Real-life Stories

A New York woman finds a derelict apartment behind her bathroom mirror


A New York woman finds a derelict apartment behind her bathroom mirror

A New York woman feels a draught in her bathroom and finds an entirely empty three-bedroom duplex apartment hidden behind her mirror.

Horror writers, listen up. A woman, standing in her bathroom late one night, starts to feel an icy chill around her neck as she surveys her own mirrored reflection. The lights, bright with a blueish tinge, cast a morbid aura over the scene. Her skin pimples and she begins looking for the source of the breath, her hands miming in the mirror, feeling the nothingness.

Her fumbling fingers grip the edge of the mirror, which is cold to the touch, like a window left ajar. Lifting the mirror from its place, she finds, not a plastered wall painted in renter’s marigold, but a hole into a room identical to her own, except empty and crumbling.

If this is starting to sounds like bad dream territory, yes, yes it is. But it’s also exactly what happened to one New York woman.

In a series of viral TikToks, Samantha Hartsoe discovered a derelict three-bedroom duplex apartment behind her bathroom mirror. Finding that her hair was ruffled by a distinct breeze every time she walked into her bathroom, she lifted her mirror to find a hole, barely a foot wide, cut through two layers of plaster wall and into another apartment.


Deciding she had to venture in and see it, she climbed through the hole armed with a torch, her phone and a hammer, naturally. The apartment, freezing and filled with rubbish bags and flaking plaster, was empty, aside from a bottle of water. Eventually, she found the front door (unlocked) and decided to circle back home.

Maybe the creepiest thing of all was that through the hole looking into her own, there appeared to be the remnants of a vanity light. I really hope her mirror isn’t interrogation glass, mirror one way, glass the other….

Needless to say, her landlord should be expecting a call.