After living in their home for four years, an Iowa couple was surprised to find a room hidden behind a wall in their basement.
Maridith Morris, a certified nurse and midwife, shared the discovery on TikTok in a series of videos that have racked up nearly 20 million views.
She recorded her husband stepping behind a bookshelf and sliding the wall to the side to reveal a metal door and, beyond it, a narrow room with space for just a few people.
“What the fuck, we’ve never seen this in our house and we’ve lived here for four years,” Morris commented in one clip.
He explained how the couple stumbled into the room when they were ripping out the basement carpet.
Nurse and midwife Maridith Morris shared the discovery of a hidden room in her family home on TikTok.
The Iowa woman explained that she and her family had lived in the house for four years and only found out about the room when they were renovating the basement.
Inside the small room, reddish-brown stripes surrounded a drain in the floor.
The room was virtually unremarkable, save for some peculiar red stains surrounding a drain in the floor.
The blood-like stains prompted Morris to ask, “Should we bring in a cadaver dog?”
Her husband, a doctor, had his own theory. ‘“I think this was intended to be some kind of panic room,” he said.
Users in the comments expressed their own ideas about the room’s intended purpose, with some theories more sinister than others.
‘Ma’am, that screams fourth murder. You can only open the door from the outside, there is a drain in the floor and there is “rust” on the floor,” one commenter wrote. “I think you guys need the police to come and look at that.”
‘Actually, it looks like a room where a serial killer took his victims to dismember them. Look at the random drain in the floor,” another commented.
Another user suggested the couple use a black light to “see if there’s blood or not.”
Other users were not convinced. “Everyone says jail cell, but with all that electricity in there, I think they were growing marijuana,” one commenter wrote.
Morris filmed her husband sliding aside a wall behind a bookshelf, revealing the metal door and the narrow room beyond.
Netizens suggested that the room was used by a “serial killer”, prompting Morris to call the police, who found no reason to investigate.
The Iowa woman showed another room hidden behind a mirror. The renovated children’s playroom was “one of the reasons she wanted to buy this house,” Morris explained.
In later videos, the couple showed their children the mysterious room. Morris recorded his daughter and two young sons, one of whom entered the space armed with a wooden cross, as they looked around him in disbelief.
The nurse later revealed that the room was not a rarity in the house, as it had other hidden spaces.
The couple already knew of the existence of a hidden room at the time of the discovery. This was located on the other side of a mirror and had been converted into a games room.
Morris demonstrated how the mirror opened like a door, revealing a staircase and, beyond, a pile of toys.
“One of the reasons I wanted this house was because I loved the hidden room,” she said. ‘Unfortunately, the mirror is not as airtight as children use it all the time. It’s been abused a bit.’
Still, some TikTok users expressed that there was cause for concern about the strange “rust” stains and drainage on the floor.
“This is wildly inappropriate,” raged one commenter beneath a video of Morris’s children exploring space. “There is a real possibility that one or more crimes have been committed here and instead of calling the police, you are joking about it on the Internet.”
According to the mother of three, the police stopped by the house to take a look at the room, but found no reason to investigate.
“They didn’t see any signs of a crime, they’re not investigating anything, they didn’t see anything that looked like DNA evidence that should be collected,” Morris said.
However, he added, “they were really impressed by how hidden the room was and that it was really cool.”