BobInFla said:
I have only recently begun to consider cache hunting and given thought to who might have been candidates for hiding them.
Can't speak to what types of modern people would keep caches (tho I've recently heard everyone from my coworkers to my physical therapist talk about the price of gold), but I do know of some nifty modern hiding spots... built by my father! You're all sworn to absolute secrecy on what I'm going to tell you...
My father is a very interesting man. He doesn't have "wealth" by most folks definition (tho his garden is some gem, let me tell you!), and he firmly believes that he will be financing his retirement split between his pension and his 401k, not some secret cache of hidden moneys. As far as I know, he's never had anything worth hiding from other people... I think my parents bought their wedding bands at a pawn shop. The only gold or heirloom jewelry in the family are my grandmother's emerald ring and gold locket, both of which are in my possession, and my grandfather sold his coin collection when he retired so I'm pretty sure there's no gold or silver hidden away. However, wealth or not, in the two homes that he has owned, I've seen my father build several "secret" spots into both of them.
Sealed Time Capsule
One was a time capsule placed behind a really spectacular inlaid wooden wall he built in a house in Mississippi. The room had a 24 foot vaulted ceiling and became one of the selling features of the home. I remember dictating a letter to my parents to put in the package (I think I was somewhere between 4 and 6 years - this was the early 80's), along with a newspaper of some recent important events (Challenger Explosion?), some small denominational bills (and coins) from that year, and some pictures of the family, and I don't know what else. You couldn't tell that anything was behind the wall by looking - and my parents swore me to secrecy about it. Really interesting fact - that house was one of the few left standing on that street (and in that entire neighborhood) after Hurricane Katrina. As long as the wall hasn't been torn down, we know it is still there.
Secret Compartment #1
The house that my father lives in now has 2 secret compartments that I know of. One is at the bottom of a custom made shelving unit set within the wall. The stairwell is L shaped, and bends around a brick fireplace. In the long part of the L, there is a gap of about 3 feet where there is a section of wall before the brick. My father cut a hole in the wall and build a very pretty (and functional) wooden shelving unit with adjustable shelves to store linens. He painted the interior a solid color, but he also raised the "floor" of the unit several inches, and cut into the "ceiling" above the woodstove below to create a space large enough to store 2 small firesafes... Or something else of similar size. Not quite long enough for a longarm. And it does get warm, but not hot. The "floor" of the safe sits very solidly against the supporting brackets of the bottom storage space, and in order to lift the "floor", you have to lift the board from the opening using a crack that's about a centimeter wide.... And I think there is a wedge 1 cm or so wedge of wood slid in the crack to keep it the floor from moving. This means you have to basically remove all the other shelves, then lean into the unit and push the board "back", then pry the board up to get into the space.
When he made the second one, I was probably about... 12? I remember him calling my little brother and I to come see the finished product. We didn't know what he had been planning, and when he showed us how to open it, he reminded us about the time capsule in Mississippi and told us that this was kindof like that... Only we weren't going to "lock" anything into it because it wasn't going to be permanently sealed. He closed it up, and loaded linens into the shelves, and I don't think either my brother or myself have looked at it since. I do know that my brother and I both knew it was a neat secret (like where my parents stored our firearms and ammunition) that we weren't supposed to tell anyone else about.
Come to think of it, my little brother started collecting Civil War memorabilia and coins after that. Never linked the two together in my mind before...
Secret Compartment #2
The 3rd "secret" place that my father has built is in the floor of a closet that made in a subdivided room. He made this one after I left for college. He took the master bedroom and split it into a bedroom and a study. You walk through the study to reach the bedroom. There is a closet in the "hallway" between the two, and the new wall that runs the length of the room is also a closet (the closet and hallway are the buffer between the office and the bedroom).
Both closets (last time I saw them) are "open" and don't have doors. But they do have wood trim along the bases. Similar to the way he "hollowed out" the downstairs ceiling of the second hiding spot to make a hollow in the floor, my dad cut out the wooden floorboards underneath where he was putting the closet walls. He removed a good... 1-2 inches of the board, then built the wall supports with the floorboard slid under the wall. To access the hidden space, you have to slide the wooden board to the side, under the wooden and 2x4 the drywall is attached to, to get to the hidden space. This space is about the width of 2 or 3 telephone books, and is about 2-3 feet wide. When you look at the floor of the closet, it is the exact shape, color and "length" as all the other surrounding boards. It has simply been modified to make the hole for a cache.
I distinctly remember that my father was dissatisfied with how easily the board moved into the slide, and how he was thinking about ways to make the wooden trim removable so that he could place a wedge in the spot where you slide the floorboards so that it doesn't move if you step on it. I don't know if he has done anything since he showed me the last spot, or his dissatisfaction with what he had done, but I think it's really neat to have grown up in houses that I KNEW had secret compartments in it. There are a couple of other places he's made renovations also, and I can't help but wonder if he has hidden things in there too!
Underground Railroad #1
I've also seen two amazing hiding spaces in houses used for the Underground Railroad. One was a very well-to-do house in Massachusetts, built into the brick fireplaces of the house. The house was just outside Boston and was built around a large central fireplace that was used for heating and cooking. There were several places for rising bread, baking bread and cooking in a kettle or two. If you were to enter the house from the front, there was a large foyer area with a wooden floor. The brick of the fireplace could be seen from the front door, and could be seen from basically every room in the house. There was a small basement/root cellar off the kitchen that wasn't connected to anything, and house rested on a low stone foundation with no basement.
If you entered the foyer, and lifted the floorboards near the brick, there was a tiny entrance to a rather large space build between the two fireplaces. The bricks or stones were extended down well below the bottom of the house, and the space within the hearth was *very* dry and warm. It was a small but super comfortable seeming hiding hole. MUCH larger than would be expected for the enormous size of the fireplaces built just above them. I found it fascinating that the hiding place would be right underneath the feet of any important parties who might come visiting - and equally interesting that the hidden parties would be able to hear when they entered, hear what was said to the visiting parties, and know for a certainty when they were leaving.
I don't think the house is open for public viewing. I saw it because a friend's brother knew the folks who live in the house now, and they gave us permission to poke around in the neat little space.
Underground Railroad #2
The last hiding spot was above a back stairwell in a house in my town (New England). The pitch of the roof is very steep, and the stairwell ceiling was pitched at the correct angle... It was just inset 2.5 feet or so from the actual pitch of the roof. The stairwell led to a hallway that had 2 rooms come off of it. Take an L and turn it on its side. The short part of the L is the stairwell and hallway and the long part has the 2 small rooms off of it. There was a closet built into the wall near the stairwell. If you pushed into the closet, you could pull aside a board and squeeze into the slanted space above the stairwell. There was a small shelf to placing items, and small seat like place to sit, and alot of headspace. I seem to remember that the "ceiling" of the stairwell was also heavily padded so that anyone knocking on it wouldn't know that it was hollow. And the turn in the hallway made it more difficult to see that the stairwell wasn't as long as the room, because you couldn't look down both at the same time and see the difference.
: )
Hope that wasn't boring or tedious to anyone! I'm not too worried about telling my Dad's secrets 'cause I'm pretty sure he's just collecting dust bunnies
(or time capsules) in his hiding places - but they are modern hiding places done by a non-professional home carpenter! And the Underground Railroad stuff is just plain neat.
And after living in a house with secrets hidden in it - I haven't lived in a single place since without checking every possible nook and cranny looking for hiding spaces. Behind radiators, in crawlspaces, in air vents and up chimneys. It's great fun to try to figure out where you could hide things, or find things, as you all well know!
And here's my favorite company that specialize in making modern "hidden" spaces. Their up/down wall safes are neat, as are their swinging bookshelves. I think they have a couple of videos too...
http://hiddenpassageway.com/
