Terrified estate agent discovers secret ‘dungeon’ in Florida house

Estate agents are forced to face all manner of challenges when trying to flog their clients’ homes.

From black mould-infested bathrooms to unruly tenants, it can be a treacherous game even for the most consummate professional.

Still, most realtors would agree that selling a place with a hidden “dungeon” goes way beyond the normal remit.

And yet, this was a situation faced by Florida-based agent Jessica Law, when she went to visit a home on behalf of one of her buyers.

Law shared her disturbing discovery to TikTok last week, explaining that she opened the door to what she assumed was a bedroom closet, only to find things weren’t as they seemed.

Addressing her followers, she said: “I am not going to lie, in all the years I've been selling real estate, I've never had something quite like this come up.”

Filming the scene, she showed that, behind the bedroom’s innocuous-seeming wooden door lay an iron gate “with a swing and latch that leads down into an underground room.”

Walking down the stairs of the secret section, she noted: “The other thing that's funky is that we don't have a lot of basements in Florida. That's not typical.”

And yet, she said, this was undeniably a basement, equipped with electricity, water, and a dehumidifier.

In other words, “it is set up to house living things.”

Law ended the clip by asking fellow TikTokers what they believed this hidden room – which she thinks was built at the same time as the rest of the house, in 1958 – was used for.

The video was met with more than 57,700 likes and 12,600 comments in six days, as viewers offered a range of hypotheses.

Some insisted it was a prison or a dungeon, while others joked that it was used to keep “people or zombies out”.

More serious commentators suggested that it was a storm shelter or nuclear bunker, particularly given that it was built in the 1950s, when the US government was “experimenting with nuclear bombs”.

However, others were quick to pick holes in these suggestions, including Law herself.

In a follow-up clip, she said: “I was totally on board with a lot of the comments that said ‘fallout shelter’ or ‘nuclear bunker’, because the house was built in the ‘50s and that would've been during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and people in Florida were freaked out.

But, she went on: “Then there's that door, that iron cage-looking door, and if you were trying to keep out the radiation, why would you have a door like that?”

(Side note correction: the Cuban Missile Crisis was actually in October 1962, not during the 1950s.)

Meanwhile, other users avoided such speculation and simply urged law to “call the cops. Immediately,” with one even suggesting that it might help “solve several cold cases”.

All we can say is, good luck to whoever's trying to sell that place.

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