A TikTok user discovered an abandoned secret apartment behind her bathroom mirror

It's not unreasonable to expect to see your apartment wall when you lift your bathroom mirror.

But one TikTok user made a far more exciting discovery when she lifted hers to find an entryway to a whole other, seemingly abandoned secret apartment. 

New York City resident Samantha Hartsoe shared a series of videos of herself removing the mirror to find a strange hole, crawling through that hole, discovering a room, and then realizing it was actually just one part of a "freezing" apartment that she said she didn't know existed.

The first video in the four-part series, posted on Wednesday, had 9 million views at the time of writing. 

Top comments on the TikTok videos advised Hartsoe to make the most of the situation, given NYC's competitive real-estate market. 

"Girl, don't say anything you just got a second apartment," one wrote.

"Don't be shy, rent out the room," another commented.

Hartsoe did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. 

Hartsoe's investigation started with a suspiciously cold apartment 

In her first TikTok video, Hartsoe told viewers that her apartment is always cold, no matter "how high the heat goes."

"So I walk into my bathroom, and I feel cold air blowing on me. There's no vent or anything," she said before tracing the source of the cold air to her bathroom mirror.

In the second video, she removed the mirror from the wall mount to reveal a square-shaped hole in the wall directly behind it. Instead of showing exposed bricks and pipes, the hole opened to an empty room that's not part of Hartsoe's apartment. 

The video showed Hartsoe climbing into the hole to explore the room, armed with a hammer and a flashlight strapped to her forehead with an elastic headband. But once she made it into the room, she said she realized that there was an entirely separate apartment on the other side, with a short flight of stairs that led to a door. The exposed wiring and pipes suggested that the apartment may have been abandoned mid-construction. There were garbage bags on the floor and a water bottle that Hartsoe called "signs of life."

"I was kind of expecting there to be somebody, especially with the water bottle being there, and that definitely put me on edge," Hartsoe told Curbed. Hartsoe also told Curbed that she eventually discovered that the secret apartment was unfinished and not ready to live in.

"I'm not sure if it was being renovated or if it is empty. It's really old, and nobody's been in there a while," she said. 

Hartsoe said that when she contacted building management, even they were unsure about the status of the three-bedroom apartment and what the plan was for it.

Hartsoe's friends and social-media users compared the secret-apartment discovery to a common plot in horror movies

Two of Hartsoe's friends made brief appearances in the video series. One of them can be heard saying, "Have you watched the movie 'Parasite'?" referencing a plot point in the Academy Award-winning 2019 South Korean thriller.

On Twitter, others drew parallels between Hartsoe's videos and the 1992 horror movie "Candyman," where a supernatural killer attacks victims through the bathroom mirror. 

While the status of the secret apartment remains unclear, it's far from the first unusual New York City apartment to go viral on TikTok. In February, the "worst apartment ever" — a Greenwich Village studio with no stove or bathroom — caused an uproar on the platform.

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