Photo: @ samanthartsoe / TikTok
26-year-old Samantha Hartsoe experienced 26-year-old Samantha Hartsoe as if the life of a tenant in New York was not yet intimidating enough – what about the rats coming out of the drains and rock skeletons raining from the ceiling, not to mention new varieties of slorders? freaky tenant story when she was a whole apartment accessible through a hole behind her bathroom mirror. Hartsoe documented how she found and explored the mirror unit in a four-part video series on TikTok that went viral today. But we still had questions after the finale subsided this morning, and we tracked down Hartsoe, who shares her three-bedroom apartment (plus the mysterious extra space) on Roosevelt Island with two roommates. The story is not so simple, as an unpaved hole accidentally gives access to a vacant unit next door; as Hartsoe tells us, even the management of her building is not quite sure what’s going on.
This past weekend, when she returned from a hike, she noticed that her bathroom was really cold. “It was weird because I do not have an opening I know of in the cold air.” Finally, she notices that the pull comes from the mirror over the sink. ‘I realized it was not attached to the wall, which seemed a little strange. Sometimes mirrors hang just like … but the cold air was a little suspicious. When she lifted the mirror from his hanger, she discovered a hole in the wall – it looked like a niche that had once been in a medicine cabinet, but without a back – that led to another room. And as any scary movie character would do (while screaming at the screen and saying they should not), she decided to enter space on March 1, even as her roommate John tried to convince her not to to do.
Then she pulled on a face mask, put a flash on her head with a hair band, grabbed a hammer (another horror movie, just in case) and climbed through. After falling to the other side of the room, she realized that it was probably too high off the ground to climb back. “I have to find my way out of here,” she recalls. “I have to go through that hole, which is pretty much impossible, or I have to find the exit from this place, which means I have to investigate everything at this point.”
What she entered was a full three-bedroom apartment with open windows – that was the source of the cold move – with some ‘signs of life’, as she said in the video: a bunch of rubbish bins, an empty water bottle . “I was kind of expecting someone, especially with the water bottle there,” she said. “And it definitely got me started.” But when she walked through, she realized the place was stripped and uninhabitable. ‘I do not know if it has been refurbished or if it is empty. It’s really old, and no one has been there for a while. The shower and bathroom area is completely cluttered – there is no bath or toilet. The floor, and what I think the kitchen would be, was torn up. ‘She did find another way to her own place, suggesting that, contrary to what some TikTok users assumed, it was not just the apartment next to her: the apartment through the main door left her after a corridor led elsewhere in her. apartment complex, and she had to drive through her building to return to her own apartment. Despite the whimsy of the whole experience, the inspection tour did her good: “I slept better that night than any other night.” However, she says she still avoids her own bathroom.
The story is not over yet, so there is room for another dramatic TikTok-style wreath hanger: Will the superman just put the hole behind the mirror on board? (Probably.) Will her landlord increase the rent because she and her roommates have more space than they thought? (Not impossible to imagine. It’s New York, after all.) Hartsoe says we’ll find out more tomorrow after someone from the management office comes to inspect the discovery.