Harry Potter and the Chamber of the Gnarled Wooden Stick just doesn't have the same ring to it.
"Secret entrance spotted!"
— Ayane, ANNO: Mutationem
While searching the Old, Dark House or Haunted Castle for clues, the Amateur Sleuth is likely to come across one of these: a hidden room behind a wall or underneath the floor that can only be revealed by triggering an opening mechanism.
Uncovering a Secret Room often marks a turning point in the investigation since these places may contain evidence or compromising diaries. Alternatively, these rooms served as a vault to hide valuables or as a hiding place.
Video games like to feature these places as Easter Eggs, so expect to solve some puzzles before you can access these rooms. Often, particularly in platformers, a secret room may be concealed by the scenery to the players, but not to the player character.
Compare Secret Path and Secret Underground Passage for convenient ways for characters to sneak in or out of dangerous places or compromising situations. See Missing Floor for secret floors in a building, Strange Secret Entrance for ways to hide the entrance to a place, and Cave Behind the Falls for entrances hidden behind waterfalls.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Kaguya-sama: Love Is War: Shuchi'in Academy's Student Council room has a room hidden behind the cabinet that Shirogane was completely unaware of until the last day of his first term as president. Karen also comes across a classic "push a certain book to move the bookcase" example during the culture festival.
- Magus of the Library: The Central Library categorically refuses to burn books, so instead of destroying the copies of the "The Black Text" (a book full of racist lies that caused a genocide), they stored each and every one of them in an underground room in the library, which serves as a kind of memorial museum where they keep a detailed record of who enters and who leaves. Usually, trainees are only taken there when their training is about to end, but Theo's class got an early field trip because the Central Library was going through a censorship controversy of a novel with racial caricatures.
- Shenmue: Iwao has one where he keeps the Phoenix Mirror and his photo with Sunming Zhao hidden until Ryo discovers it in "Yin Yang".
Comic Books
- Gotham Academy: Not every hidden door and passageway in Wayne Manor leads to the Batcave, as Damian shows Maps. At least one disguised panel in the rear entry of the house leads to a secret armory instead.
- The Oracle Code: Babs discovers that the missing patients have been removed to the basement where they are being experimented on, with the other patients being told they moved to other facilities and the outside world being unaware. The entrance is hidden behind a portrait.
- Wonder Woman (1942): Following her initial arrest, Paula von Gunther is able to construct a new Supervillain Lair in the hidden chamber beneath her cell.
Fan Works
- In the Star Trek: Voyager/Stargate Universe crossover "Destiny and Voyager: Crossroads
", as the two crews work to repair Destiny during a trip to the Star Trek Earth, they discover further rooms in the ship, including another shuttlebay with a new shuttle inside. The two crews subsequently use that room to store the various Stargates they have been collecting to share with Starfleet, moving the shuttle to one of the exterior docking bays.
- Dungeon Keeper Ami: From Research Breakthroughs:
Ami's private lab was so secret that it didn't even have an entrance and could only be reached by teleportation.
- Vow of Nudity: On her first day of school, Spectra finds a hidden room under the abjuration teacher's office, with a mysterious and secretive man living in it.
Films — Animated
- Subverted in Coraline when Coraline finds the outlines of a little door behind a box in the living room, but she cannot open it because it's covered up by wallpaper. Then her mum rips the wallpaper open but the door turns out to be a Real Fake Door as it's all bricked up behind it, making the other side of the door impossible to get through.
Films — Live-Action
- In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Tony (and Jarvis) scan the room Tony's in and find a secret room. Inside is the scepter of Loki that the Avengers are searching for.
Tony Stark: [to himself as he walks over to the wall] Please be a secret door, please be a secret door, please be a secret door... Yay!
- The wealthy protagonist of The Best Offer has a secret room in his house whose walls are filled with precious paintings he acquired over his lifetime. He often goes there just to enjoy the sight. The room is hidden behind a wardrobe and needs a keycode to enter. A Femme Fatale later discovers the secret room and steals all the paintings.
- In The Changeling, John Russell finds a hidden doorway in an upstairs closet, behind a hastily installed shelf. Behind, the doorway leads to a room hidden in the attic where the family's father had hidden his sickly son.
- Donnie Darko: Guided by Frank, Donnie sets the house of public speaker Jim Cunningham on fire. The firefighters later discovered a secret room in the house behind a burned-down painting where Cunningham kept child pornography material. He is arrested the next day.
- The General's Daughter (1999): After the esteemed Elisabeth Campbell's mysterious murder, Brenner and Sunhill investigate her house. Nothing looks out of the ordinary until they find a secret room filled with bondage equipment, revealing Elisabeth's secret sex life and videotapes implicating much of the base's staff.
- Haunted Mansion (2023): In the mansion, there turns out to be a seance room, which is hidden behind a painting.
- Havenhurst: Jackie and Sarah find a secret room behind the laundry room in the apartment that contains documents and newspaper clippings detailing the killing spree of Eleanore's ancestor, Herman Webster Mudgett.
- The Colombian movie The Hidden Face revolves around a woman who got trapped in a secret room behind the bathroom in a designer house in the countryside. The room's entrance is Hidden in Plain Sight behind the bathroom mirror, but nobody noticed it because the key to open the latch is not easy to find.
- Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: While trying to escape from the fiery blaze consuming the dining room of Castle Brunwald, Indy and his father accidentally stumble upon a communications room of the Nazis that's hidden behind the fireplace.
- Jojo Rabbit: Jojo discovers that his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in a secret room behind the walls of his late sister Inge's room.
- This is a huge plot point in The Orphanage, in which a family moves into a big old house. A couple of days later, the son disappears without a trace, which leaves his parents in despair. Only nine months later does the mother find his body in a secret basement under the stairs that was hidden behind scaffolding and wallpaper. Apparently, he was playing there, and she unwittingly blocked the entrance that day, which locked her son up.
- There is a secret bunker below the actual basement in Parasite (2019). The entrance is hidden behind a set of cupboards.
- Spectre: As a last request of Mr. White, Madeleine Swann takes James Bond to the room in the hotel L'Americain that her father stayed at every year. Bond ransacks it looking for a clue White might have left behind, but finds nothing. That night, Bond sees a mouse enter a mousehole where there should be a solid wall. He breaks down the wall (actually a doorway that's been plastered over) to reveal a hidden room.
- The Substance: Sue discovers an unused space behind the bathroom, which is then used to hide her and Elisabeth's bodies by converting a section of wall into a hidden door.
- Played for Laughs in Young Frankenstein. Frederick and Inga find out that there's a hidden room in the mansion, but can't figure out how to open it.
Literature
- C. S. Forester's "The Bower of Roses" has a country house with a secret room. First, the Jewish owner is "disposed of" by a Stormtrooper commander, who appropriates the house as his own. When the Stormtroopers are in turn purged by Hitler, the new owner remembers the secret room he found and tries to take refuge there. He is later discovered and executed. Then the new owner, the Nazi Gauleiter, discovers the secret room and notes it as a possible escape route. He stocks it with what he will need to lie low for a few weeks before disappearing — should he need to. He has this need in April 1945 as the Russians close in. The Red Army officer tasked with tracking him down and arresting him is nearly taken in, then notices that the upstairs of the house has sixteen visible windows, but he can only count fifteen on the inside...
- Discworld: In The Fifth Elephant, the Ankh-Morpork Embassy in Bonk has one, used by the former ambassador, who was actually a spy. New ambassador Sam Vimes knows nothing about it, until his wife starts measuring the building for carpets and realises the floorspace doesn't add up properly.
- In The Dreamside Road, Sucora Cloud hid her film records of the Dreamthought Project's experiments in a hidden room, buried beneath her business and accessible through a secret passageway from her family's mausoleum in the local cemetery.
- The Famous Five: Secret passages appear in many of the books. A prominent example of a secret room is in Five Get Into Trouble, where a tiny room is hidden behind a bookcase, in which an escaped prisoner is hidden.
- Goblins in the Castle: Discussed early on, as William notes via narration that he's found a number of hidden rooms in the castle.
- Harry Potter:
- The Room of Requirement is a magical room known only to those in the know. Ordinarily, it has no door, but if one paces back and forth at the right corridor visualizing something you need, a door will appear, and the room will be filled with what you need. The room can be filled with anything in principle, although in practice it's mostly used for secret meetings and to hide things.
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets has the eponymous chamber built by Salazar Slytherin, located through a secret passage in the 2nd floor's girls' bathroom and only accessible to parselmouths (i.e. snake talkers). The entrance was originally just a hidden trapdoor, but because of plumbing reforms that threatened to reveal its existence, it had to be adapted into an elaborate mechanism by one of Salazar's descendants.
- The closet under the stairs where Harry lives at the Dursleys. There is very little evidence of a second child, and two spare rooms.
- The Missing Piece of Charlie O'Reilly: Behind a shelf in the New York Asylum for Orphaned Children's wine cellar is a door leading to a section of the abandoned salt mines, now blocked off by cave-ins. The original owners installed the door so they could smuggle wine. Brona puts children under her control who turn eighteen into an eternal sleep in which they never age, and keeps them lying on cots in the mine. There are people there dating back to the 1840s.
- Nickel Plated: A seemingly normal house in a poor neighborhood contains a secret door at the back of the pantry that opens into the basement where the owner keeps the children he kidnaps before he sells them.
- The Precipice: Grace discovers a crawlspace most likely sealed by painters during renovations of Topliff House. It eventually becomes her first lair.
- "Pigeons from Hell (1938)": There is a secret room in Blassenville Manor that Elizabeth claims to have been forgotten for a hundred years. How she knows about this timeframe or if she's just guessing is unclear, but the fact is that the room has not been known about for several generations. Celia and Elizabeth independently discover the panel to open the hidden door in the wall. This door leads into a narrow corridor that runs through one of the thick walls. At the end is a windowless chamber whose original purpose is unknown. Also unknown is when Celia found the room, but it is the place she hides in once she becomes a zuvembie. It is also the place where she abducts her nieces to and where she hangs them, missing out on killing the fourth, Elizabeth, only because she discovers the secret room while the zuvembie is off-guard. Elizabeth escapes and tells the townsfolk about the secret chamber, but she refuses to return to the manor and the townsfolk can't find the hidden panel without her help. Knowledge of its existence does get passed on because Sheriff Buckner has heard about it by the time he goes after the zuvembie in the 1930s. He doesn't find the hidden panel either, but he fatally injures the zuvembie when she has the door open and that allows him to discover the mummified corpses of the missing Blassenville sisters too.
- Repairman Jack: Legacies: There's a minor character who belongs to a group of people who like to hack buildings to find secret rooms. As skyscrapers, office buildings, and government buildings are remodeled and renovated over the years, often the crews will wall off a room that is no longer needed or doesn't fit the new layout. This group enjoys sneaking in, traveling through the ventilation system, then finding these rooms and leaving their mark or tag or calling card.
- The Secret Life of Kitty Granger: The Orchestra suspects that Nazi sympathizer Henry Lowell has a hidden room somewhere in his estate where he and his friends make their plans. Kitty is sent with Verity to help look for it. Sure enough, she finds a Secret Underground Passage leading from the wine cellar to the chamber where Lowell, Smythe, and their fellow extremists plot their False Flag Operation and their takeover of the British government.
- The Speed of Sound: Lawrence has a house in rural Virginia with a secret door activated by a retinal scanner that leads into a secret underground control room in case he or Caitlin needs to go to war with the American Heritage Foundation.
- Star Trek Expanded Universe:
- In the Star Trek: The Original Series novel Ghost-Walker, a few of the enlisted crew and junior officers are dissatisfied with the quality of food available in the USS Enterprise dining rooms. They set up a food synthesizer with a lab-quality computer terminal and manual controls in an unused compartment in the engineering hull so that they can make better food stuffs. When Spock is forced to hide in the compartment for about a week in order to avoid being killed by Yarblis Geshkerroth, Spock finds that the manual controls allow him to make the first truly edible Vulcan M'lu in over three years.
- In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel Station Rage, Captain Sisko has Chief O'Brien and Odo explore some of the abandoned passages in the station with an eye towards cleaning them up and making the areas operational again. During their explorations they come across a secret chamber with a number of what appear to be dead Cardassian soldiers in the chamber. While Sisko and the DS9 staff try to figure out a diplomatically feasible way of repatriating the Cardassians Garek goes to the chamber and starts the sequence to bring the "dead" Cardassians out of suspended animation.
- Strange Houses, all of the houses have a room that is hidden from outside, and even inside, view. In the Saitama house, there is a windowless room accessible only through the master bedroom. In the Tokyo house, there is a windowless room in the center of the second-story floor, accessible only via an "airlock" hallway that opens out. The Katabuchi mansion has one at the very back, accessible only through a hidden passage either over a household shrine or side room doorway. A similar secret passage was present in the Tokyo house, both were intended to be used to murder guests. Though only the one in the mansion was used for this purpose.
- In the Tempest (2011) trilogy, the selkie royal family lives in a castle on an island that can be accessed by a network of tunnels leading from the seafloor up through the island. One of the passages contains a bed of oysters, abalone, and clams that hide a watertight secret door. Behind the door is a room that contains a security feed of every room in the castle. When Tempest is fleeing from Tiamat's minions in Tempest Revealed, she goes into the security room, shuts the door again before enough water comes in to damage the surveillance equipment, and watches Tiamat's minions fruitlessly search for her. Unfortunately, the Leviathan can tell when he's being watched, and he forces Tempest to come out by threatening to kill her friends if she doesn't.
- An Unkindness of Ghosts: Sovereign Nicolaeus has a secret trapdoor under a chest in his chambers that leads to a Secret Path to a room with one of the very few windows in the entire starship.
- In Daniel Pinkwater's Yobgorgle, the Rochester public library has a hidden room obscured behind a bookshelf with a special trigger to open it. The hidden room is pretty mundane, as it's just a children's reading room filled with collectible dolls, but it's the most interesting thing for a kid to do in Rochester.
- Yours Truly: The Lovejoys find one under the stairs. The original Truly Lovejoy used it to hide runaway slaves in the days of the Underground Railroad.
- Zenobia July: Arli has a key that veir older brother Lynx gave ven. The key unlocks a maintenance tunnel that leads to a small furnace room in a deserted elementary school. No one ever goes there besides Arli and Zen, and no adult has been there in decades, judging by the outdated hairstyles in a magazine Zen finds lying around. Arli calls it the Fieldwork Sanctum and uses it as a Contemplation Location.
Live-Action TV
- Agent Carter: In season 2, Carter finds a conspiracy in a rich club, complete with a poorly hidden secret door. She is not impressed and makes it clear when she calls for backup.
Sousa: [to his men] Team Two will go with Agent Carter through the hidden door into the secret area of the club.
Carter: That's right. He did say "hidden door" and "secret area". We're dealing with odd rich men here. They love this sort of thing. - Michael from Arrested Development discovers the model home has a secret room under the stairs in the episode "Faking It". It also turns out Tobias knew about it for a while and has been storing bodybuilding magazines there. Michael later realizes that the houses his father was building in Iraq should have a secret room as well since they're based on the model home. He checks and finds evidence that proves his father was innocent of treason.
- Daredevil (2015):
- In "Regrets Only", Matt and Elektra break into a safe but can't find the MacGuffin they're looking for. Matt's super-senses then detect an electrical cable running behind the wall. He shows Elektra where the cable stops; there's a vase there that Elektra turns to open a door to a hidden vault. Elektra then takes credit for finding it. "I'm a genius!"
- A variation in "The Dark at the End of the Tunnel", when Frank Castle realizes that Colonel Schoonover's toolshed has a false wall behind shelving that hides a Wall of Weapons.
- In "Aftermath", Wilson Fisk is ostensibly under house arrest in a hotel penthouse but has a secret staircase behind a shoe rack in his bedroom closet that leads down to a secret command center where he can conduct meetings with Felix Manning and underlings without the FBI noticing.
- The Doctor Who story "Pyramids of Mars" has the Doctor and Sarah Jane hide in a priest hole.
- In The Flash (2014), S.T.A.R. Labs features a hidden room known as the Time Vault, built by Eobard Thawne while disguised as Harrison Wells, which he uses to keep his more shady activities such as the Reverse-Flash suit and his AI Gideon.
- Forever: Henry's basement laboratory, with its entrance a trap door hidden beneath a rug in the antique store.
Lucas: Whoa, you have your own lair!
- House of Anubis: In season 2, the students discover a secret antechamber in the cellar, which not even Victor or the teachers knew existed. This antechamber leads to a series of trap-filled tunnels guarding an important treasure, but the antechamber is treated as a separate place in its own right, a secret study room for Frobisher-Smythe.
- Interview with the Vampire (2022): In Lestat de Lioncourt's townhouse, the coffin room is adjacent to the master bedroom, but it can only be accessed by pressing a hidden button on the fireplace.
- Lucifer (2016): Ella Lopez notices an odd glow coming from an electrical outlet in her boyfriend's house. When she moves a nearby panel, she finds a crawlspace leading to a hidden room containing the poison and flowers used by the "Whisper Killer", a Serial Killer who Ella and the police have been hunting for.
- The premise of Geraldo Rivera's much-hyped The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault! television special was that he would break into a hidden room — the vault of legendary gangster Al Capone — on live television. Over the course of the two-hour event, the viewers were led to believe the vault was full of the gangster's loot, evidence of dastardly crimes, and/or moonshine. Instead, viewers were disappointed to discover the vault was empty with the exception of a few dusty bottles.
- Princess Agents: Yuwen Yue's house has an astonishing number of very large secret rooms and extensive secret passages... or rather, it did, until Yuwen Huai accidentally blew up one of the rooms, setting in motion an explosion that destroyed the whole place.
- The Suite Life of Zack & Cody: In the episode "Arwinstein", Zack and Cody stumble upon a secret laboratory in the hotel, where Arwin created and then hid away his monstrous robot. When the twins ask about it, he attempts to deny that the room even exists.
Theatre
- Spider's Web is set in a house with a secret passage between the drawing room and the library, which features several times, including as the place in which the protagonists hide the victim's body.
Tabletop Games
- Vampire: The Requiem: Characters can add hidden chambers to their Home Base by investing in the Point Build System's "Tomb" Merit. They can only be found with careful investigation and can be sealed against intruders for extra protection, but once breached, their Security bonus is permanently nullified.
Video Games
- ANNO: Mutationem: At Noctis City, Ann is searching for a mook who was spotted entering a storage building. She discovers that a terminal, once activated, causes a mini-elevator to appear from the ground that leads into a hidden basement.
- Nikifor's house in the second Aura game has one, containing the dead body of the house's original owner, and its self-destruct system. It's hidden behind a Bookcase Passage, which needs to be powered up to open.
- The whole goal of Blue Prince is to find the 46th room in an ever-changing house made of 45 rooms.
- Close to the Sun: Rose has to solve a puzzle to find the entrance to the secret room in her sister Ada's apartment where an important notebook is stored.
- The classic Infocom game Deadline (1982) features one of these where the updated will and the papers incriminating Mr. Baxter are hidden.
- Buildings in the Dishonored game series have a bunch of secret rooms for the player to discover. Usually, they are filled with valuables and bone charmes like this room hidden behind a fireplace.
- In the house for Burglary in the first Dishonored game, there is a secret room in the bedroom that is covered with pictures of Lady Boyle.
- Right at the start of Dishonored 2, you have to find the Imperial Safe Room which is located behind bookshelves off the Imperial Chambers. To access the room you need to fetch one of the Imperial Signet Rings from an enemy. Doubles as a Secret Passage as the door at the other end leads you into the city.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Ayleid ruins and vampire lairs occasionally contain secret chambers which are accessed simply by stepping in the right spot.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Many ancient Nordic tombs contain secret chambers accessed by pulling a chain or throwing a lever. In the Dragonborn DLC, Kolbjorn Barrow takes this to an extreme: most of the barrow complex is hidden beyond a secret door that can only be opened by removing a weight from a pressure plate.
- Eternal Darkness: Roivas mansion has two secret rooms. The first is the secret study where the plot-driving Tome of Eldritch Lore is kept. The second is the old servants' quarters that has been boarded up and wallpapered over after Maximilian Roivas murdered all his servants.
- A Hat in Time: The spaceship has a secret room where Hat Kid puts her diary.
- Just More Doors: there are lots of them, with very interesting designs, to the point you can easily get sidetracked searching for them.
- King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human: Manannan's study has a Secret Underground Passage that serves as the only way to access his laboratory beneath his manor which contains his spellbook and various magical ingredients. The lever that reveals the stairs beneath the study's floor is hidden in the bookshelf.
- The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games: Nayru has one in her house where the Harp of Ages is stored.
- Love & Pies: Amelia, Joe, and Kate discover a trapdoor hidden under the old oven while cleaning it out. It leads to the café basement, where they believe the treasure is, but it turns out to be an embarrassing old painting of what seems to be Joe and Amelia reenacting the story of Adam and Eve, complete with Scenery Censors.
- Maniac Mansion: The room wasn't meant to be hidden. It's just that the door was painted over so many times that it now blends into the wall. The player can't find the door without using paint thinner.
- Secret rooms are a staple of the Myst series, from Sirrus and Achenar's hidden stashes in the first game, to Gehn's secret control rooms in Riven.
- There are at least two secret rooms to be found in The Painscreek Killings. One in a study room behind a bookcase and one that can be entered via the backside of a closet.
- Paper Mario 64: Mario's house has a secret basement where you can find Luigi's diary.
- PAYDAY: The Heist has a hidden vault inside the First World Bank, which can only be uncovered by four people (in the players' case, robbers) standing on hidden pressure plates in specific spots in the chamber leading to the bank's main vault. Successfully triggering all four plates at once opens up a false wall hidden in the back of the bank, revealing the vault door.
- PAYDAY 2:
- The climax of the Framing Frame job tasks players with stealthily locating and infiltrating a hidden vault room (that's always hidden behind a bookshelf) that's filled with the spoils of an illicit arms deal in the condo of an American senator, stealing the gold within for themselves and replacing it with less valuable cocaine to frame him. Though if they are detected, they're forced to leave the gold behind and simply leak the arms deal to the press to keep their benefactor happy, missing out on most of the job's potential profit.
- In addition to keeping the aforementioned secret vault intact in the remake of that level, unlocking the game's True Ending requires finding a secret passage that leads to another hidden vault in the White House heist, which is hidden behind a painting only that can only be moved after fulfilling a number of convoluted hidden requirements in other parts of the game, and successfully opening it (requiring, among other things, translating ancient Sumerian).
- PAYDAY 3 features two hidden rooms in Touch The Sky: a hidden vault in the bedroom containing a lot of valuable jewelry and an SSD containing the encryption keys the crew are after, and a hidden panic room in the office containing some cash, some cocaine and the code to open the vault. Getting into the panic room requires taking penthouse owner Mason Laurent hostage and forcing him in front of the retinal scanner (possible in stealth or loud), or drilling through the safe door (possible in loud only).
- Professor Layton and the Curious Village: The mansion has a secret room filled with the family fortune.
- Resident Evil:
- Resident Evil 1 has many secret rooms by design since the owner of the mansion was a big fan of the spy genre. Said secret rooms usually require solving a puzzle to reveal the way.
- Resident Evil 2 has a secret room underneath the RPD by accessing a hidden elevator behind Chief Iron's office.
- RuneScape: The haunted mansion where the "Broken Home" quest takes place has three rooms, each hidden behind false walls or hidden trapdoors and requiring triggering hidden switches to activate, often requiring items from a different part of the mansion (one is triggered by fixing a piano by inserting a missing piano key then playing the piano revealing a chamber where a lot of the staff's corpses were hidden when the house became haunted, one is triggered by removing the head of a bust to find a hidden button revealing a room where one unfortunate servant was trapped inside until he starved to death, and one is revealed by replacing a statue's missing crystal eyes revealing a Shrine to the Fallen to the son of the mansion's former owner before he went mad.
- Safecracker has a few of these. Then again, the blueprints for the house are in the foyer, so an observant player can discover them quickly. Getting inside is the real puzzle.
- Tangle Tower: The mansion has two sets of secret rooms, both hinting at its original design.
Visual Novels
- Ace Attorney:
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice: During the events of "The Rite of Turnabout", Phoenix Wright discovers a hideout for the La Résistance hidden behind a statue that was part of a ritual ground sacred to the Kingdom of Khura'in. The fact that the hideout is secretly accessed through a religious site implicates a local priest and his wife as part of the rebels against the Kingdom.
- Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth: During the events of "The Forgotten Turnabout", Edgeworth discovers a secret floor between the 50th floor and the roof of the Grand Tower. The secret floor was used to store evidence that was stolen from police custody and set to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.
- Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: At the end of Chapter 3, Kyoko informs Makoto of a hidden room containing documents within the school's restroom.
- Havenfall Is for Lovers: A secret room in the heroine's house is filled wall to wall with weapons. Across multiple routes, the heroine's discovery of the room prompts the realization that her parents kept secrets.
- Last Window: There is a secret room hidden between floors accessible via a hidden hatch in the elevator.
Web Comics
- High School Lessons: West Point High School contains a few, some of which can only be accessed by specific people. Plus one that just got stuffed with scented candles.
Web Original
- Dreamscape: Vampire Lord discovers one behind the bookshelf of his castle. It contains a mysterious portal blocked by magical chains that he believes leads to Another Dimension. When he sends a bat into it, the bat is shot back out and frozen in time. When he, Anjren, and Ahjeen get closer to it, a humanoid insect creature rises out of it and tries to attack them.
Western Animation
- The Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers episode "Pound of the Baskervilles" has the intrepid rodents go snooping through Baskerville Hall in search of mystery writer Howard Bask's last will. As Chip is an avid fan of Bask's stories, he's able to deduce clues about various hidden latches in the manor house that ultimately lead to a secret workroom where Bask penned most of his stories. It is in this room that the will is found.
- In the Family Guy episode "And Then There Were Fewer", the guests are searching the dining room where James Woods was murdered for clues. Someone leans on a bookshelf, which opens to reveal a hidden chamber... that turns out to be the laundry room. Further searching turns up another hidden room full of actual clues.
- Gravity Falls: The Mystery Shack has a fair number of them. These include an old room that stored wax figures (door wallpapered over), the room with the "Freaky Friday" Flip rug (door hidden behind a non-revolving bookcase), and several basement floors (the entrance hidden behind a vending machine). The latter two are eventually revealed to be connected to the show's central Myth Arc, which is why they were hidden.
- Subverted in an episode of Little Princess. The Princess discovers a room in the castle that nobody uses and thinks it's a secret one only she knows about, but it turns out that everybody knows about it, they just don't use it because they see it as useless.
- The Owl House: In "The First Day", the detention students found a secret room containing secret passages that go all over the school. Eda apparently built it back in her youth so she could sneak around the school whenever she wanted.
- These abound in Scooby-Doo, and are usually found accidentally by "Danger-Prone Daphne".
- The Simpsons:
- This is played with in "Treehouse of Horror IV". Bart and Lisa search for a hidden room in Vampire Burns' castle, but it turns out the "secret room" is pointed out with blatantly obvious signs. Unfortunately, this proves to be Schmuck Bait, as it leads the kids to wake up the vampires within and Bart being bitten (after he falls for another piece of Schmuck Bait by pulling the "Super Happy Fun Slide" lever).
- "The Bart of War" shows that the Flanders' house has a secret room with merchandise related to The Beatles.
- In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Breakin'", we learn that the Krusty Krab has a break room between the restrooms and kitchen... that Krabs triple-sealed behind steel, wallpaper, and brick. Appropriately for its placement, it's clearly a utility closet that had scavenged furniture (a table with an office chair, microwave oven, and mini fridge) crammed into it.
- In Star vs. the Forces of Evil, there are a number of secret passageways and rooms in Butterfly Castle. While Star and Moon are aware of some of them, only Eclipsa knows all of them.
Real Life
- During World War II, many people fleeing The Holocaust, unable to flee Europe before the blitz, took shelter in rooms hidden behind furniture like bookcases and cabinets.
- Corrie ten Boom's autobiography, The Hiding Place, describes how her family hid a number of Jewish friends in their home, the Beje. Ultimately they built a secret room for them to use in case of a raid, while the ten Booms provided food and other necessities for them.
- Many stops on the Underground Railroad had secret rooms to hide the escaped slaves.
- Priest Holes were secret areas in large houses where English Catholics could hide priests, who were accused of treason against the English crown at the time.
- Some mansions built during Prohibition had speakeasies hidden behind walls.
