Secret passageways, trap doors and hidden rooms were standard in some of your favorite mystery series – like “Scooby-Doo” or Nancy Drew. You probably saw them coming. But in real-life, you’d never suspect them at all.
Steven Humble, the founder and president of Creative Home Engineering in Gilbert, Arizona, helps make the unbelievable believable.
The idea for the business was born in 2003. Humble quit his job in the medical device industry and began building secret doors and passageways for local clients. But what started as a “one-man operation” has now skyrocketed into a booming business.
Building secret passageways
“We build secret passageway doors and high security panic room vault doors for clients all over the world,” Humble told “CBS Sunday Morning.”
For some clients, the secret rooms are all about security. For others, it’s about recreating a cool space that they saw on the big screen.
“They’ve seen the movies. They want the movies for their own house,” Humble explained.
In Humble’s profession, you get to be inventive. Doorknobs can be replaced with rotary phones or even gongs. Fingerprints can replace door locks. He’s made around 5,000 hidden doors alone – some costing tens of thousands of dollars.
“People put all sorts of amazing things in their houses,” Humble said.
And it pays to be creative.
Humble said he’s seen houses where they’ve added a secret door inside and it helped them sell their home at asking price.
A centuries-old phenomena
Author April Genevieve Tucholke, who researches hidden spaces, says the phenomena of secret rooms dates back centuries. The ultimate hidden room: a tomb of a pharaoh like King Tut.
“They’ve been many things throughout the years. They’ve served the purpose of smuggling, there were these priest holes in English manors during the Protestant Reformation,” Tucholke said. “And probably the most famous, at least in America, is the speakeasies, when they’re serving banned liquor during the Prohibition.”
These secret spaces are a passageway to history, and our own imagination.
In fiction, secret passageways are used to propel the plot forward, Tucholke said. With these famous references in mind, witnessing hidden spaces in real life can be nostalgic.
“I think humans are curious creatures. I think going back to childhood, we like to go on treasure hunts, we like to dig things up, we like to discover things and uncover things,” she explained. “And so when you find – if you ever find – a hidden room and you enter it, that place has shared a secret with you.”
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