Boy finds person living in secret room behind bookcase

He posted photos on the image-sharing website Imgur this week, explaining that he and his younger brother were playing around until he ran into a bookcase... and discovered all was not as it seemed.

“When he fell, he pulled out the bookshelf with him. We always assumed it was just built into the wall,” he wrote.

But the bookcase could come away from the wall, he found out, to reveal a secret passage complete with a hidden spiral staircase.

“At the bottom, the stairs led into a wall,” he continued. “Seemingly pointless, right?”

There was a small crawlspace halfway down the stairs, but upon entering, he uncovered a small living space with signs that someone had been living there very recently.

“Someone was living in our walls. IN OUR WALLS. That is my Halloween candy,” he wrote. “That someone came into my room, took from my bag, and then brought back in here. Banana peel for scale. About 30 seconds after taking this picture, we realized what it meant and got the --- out of there.”

Online debate has surrounded the posts, largely trying to determine whether the story is a hoax or not. The post was soon published on reddit, where it garnered a lot of detractors – and even more views.

“Guys. I am not on reddit, don't message that guy, he is apparently pretending to be me,” he added on Imgur.

“My theory is that it was a friend of the previous owners, who fell on hard times. That is probably the only way they would know about it?” he replied to one user.

A similar story was found in 2008 in Japan, when a homeowner discovered someone living in his house for months with permission. The Imgur user says that he never suspected that he had an unwanted guest behind the bookcase: “I remember hearing bumps and nobody would admit to it, but we just passed it off as something falling.”