An Airbnb guest recorded a video of her rental in Chicago and it went viral on TikTok (Pictures: TikTok/@notxh2)
An Airbnb guest was filled with fright after discovering a door in her rental led to a hidden chamber.
Xena Habashi booked a basement apartment in Chicago through the vacation property rentals company and was shocked to find what she described as a ‘hidden chamber’.
‘Found a room that wasn’t part of the Airbnb listing,’ she captioned a video she posted on TikTok.
The clip, with ominous-sounding music in the background, shows a normal looking bedroom and then pans to one of the doors which she opens and exposes a dark, cellar-like room with exposed brick, wood and other items.
Among the items were ‘wooden doors with locks on’ and ‘chains on the ground’, and another door went ‘even further down’ the building, Habashi told Newsweek.
Habashi, of Kansas City, Missouri, said she checked in around 4am on December 30, 2023, and intended on going to sleep, but struggled to after making the discovery.
‘I noticed that there were so many random doors inside the house that were never shown in the listing,’ she said.
‘While getting ready to go to sleep me and my cousin noticed a light on in one of the rooms that was locked. We decided to try and open it… I got a fork and was able to open the door. That’s when I saw it.’
The Airbnb guest said the room did not appear as part of the listing (Picture: TikTok/@notxh2)
Habashi said she and her cousin ran to another room to inform her mother, who ‘got scared too because that was never shown in the listing and it looked scary’.
She said they blocked the door using a table but were not able to sleep.
‘We stayed up till the morning, kept hearing noises, and before we left I decided to take that video and it went viral unexpectedly!’ she said.
Habashi also captioned the video, ‘literally barbarian’, referring to the 2022 horror movie around a woman who reserves a rental home she does not know was double-booked and has a dark secret.
The Airbnb likened her stay at the rental to the 2022 horror film Barbarian (Picture: TikTok/@notxh2)
There were no prior complaints about the listing, which had a 4.84 rating.
‘The listing is advertised as a basement apartment, and the separate space that was accessed is part of the basement,’ an Airbnb spokesperson told Newsweek. ‘Our customer service team supported our guest with their concerns at the time, and assisted with a refund and another place to stay.’
It is not the first time such a discovery has been made. In 2021, a Sussex homeowner found a secret door behind a bookshelf and a network of concealed tunnels and rooms beneath his family’s 500-year-old home.
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