misty donkey herder on Nostr: we rented a house in Boulder Creek California once that had a secret staircase down ...

we rented a house in Boulder Creek California once that had a secret staircase down to a mini basement theater. And one of the bedroom closets had a ladder up to the hidden half of the attic, where the owner of the house was still storing his weird junk. It looked like a perfectly normal suburban tract house, plopped down like a Sim City build in the middle of a redwood forest. The owner had excavated the media basement, by hand, and we were honestly terrified to go down in it. You slid a bookcase aside in the garage and ducked down a very short, very narrow dark set of too shallow stairs to emerge into an 8’x8’ media room, with an obsolete projector and some real movie theater chairs. The walls were all painted black and the shallow steps had light cords. Our kid was 3 at the time and we didn’t tell him about the secret room (or the ladder in Dad’s office closet) until after we moved out!