Publish date: 2024-04-27

New York City resident, Samantha Hartsoe made a shocking revelation this week in a viral TikTok video when she discovered a secret, abandoned apartment hidden behind her bathroom mirror.

Hartsoe had no idea what she was in for when she started investigating why her apartment was so cold, but gamely documented her sleuthing for TikTok. ‘I’m in my New York City apartment and it’s cold,’ she says in the first clip. ‘It doesn’t matter how high the heat goes, I’m cold.’

Following the frigid draft to her bathroom mirror led to the disturbing discovery of a concealed portal into a dilapidated, unoccupied apartment next door.

The videos immediately prompted users to draw comparisons the terrifying 1987 murder of Ruthie May McCoy, a 52-year-old Chicago resident who was attacked by intruders that broke into her apartment through her bathroom medicine cabinet. The chilling crime was later turned into the 1992 slasher flick, Candyman.  

A New York City woman was shocked this week to find an entire empty apartment hidden behind her bathroom mirror. She followed a frigid draft to her bathroom where she was confused by cold air blowing from behind her mirror –  despite there being no window or working air vent nearby

Ruthie May McCoy was a 52-year-old Chicago resident that was murdered by intruders that that broke into her apartment through her bathroom medicine cabinet. The chilling crime was later turned into the 1992 slasher flick, Candyman 

 Viewers of the viral TikTok videos were quick to comparisons to the 1992 horror film, Candyman, which is based on the true story of Ruthie Mae McCoy’s 1987 murder 

On the afternoon of her murder, McCoy received outpatient psychiatric treatment at Mount Sinai Hospital when she exclaimed to the stranger sitting next to her in the van ride: ‘Someone has threatened my life!’ The woman urged McCoy to relate her fears to a staff member at the clinic, but McCoy said she didn’t want to get anyone else involved.

Terrifying fantasies and bizarre outburst were par for the course in her life. But McCoy wasn’t hallucinating when – later that night – she made a frantic 911 phone call to report that someone was breaking into her apartment through her medicine cabinet. This time, she wasn’t just imagining things. 

Later that night McCoy phoned 911 to report that someone was breaking into her apartment through her medicine cabinet. This time, she wasn’t hallucinating.

‘They throwed the cabinet down,’ she told the dispatcher. 

Other 911 calls from neighbors reported shouting and gunshots from apartment 1109, but by the time cops arrived on the scene, there was total silence. Ruthie failed to answer the door or respond to phone calls and the police left after 30 minutes of repeated attempts. 

Violence in the south side Chicago projects was rampant. McCoy lived in the Grace Abbott Homes – 15-story the Y-shaped tower where murder, poverty, drug addiction, rape and burglary was part of daily life. 

Cops didn’t discover McCoy’s lifeless body until two days later, after multiple trips and phone calls from worried neighbors summoned the police to break down her front door. She had been shot four times and crime-scene analysts assumed that she probably knew her attacker or attackers because there was no indication they had forced their way in.

But one thing stood out in their investigation: the bathroom medicine cabinet was missing. Leaving behind, instead, a gaping a foot-and-a-half wide hole that opened up into a short corridor.

Through the opening investigators could see the pipes that her killers wriggled past, and beyond that, the bathroom of 1108. Was this the possible mode of entry? 

Cops were stunned by the brazen bathroom break-in but residents of the Grace Abbot project were not. By that time of McCoy’s murder, intruders had been sneaking into apartments through medicine cabinets for at least a year.

‘Even the dullest youth here knows you can slither from one apartment to the adjacent one through the pipe chase, about two-and-a-half feet across, between the cabinets,’ wrote investigative journalist Steve Borgia in the Chicago Reader. The cabinets themselves, secured by only six nails, are no obstacle. 

The buildings were designed with the pipe chases behind the medicine cabinets to provide easy access to the plumbing; if something’s leaking, janitors simply have to remove the medicine cabinet to check the pipes.

A fifth floor resident named Alice Johnson, told Borgia that she was watching a television one night when she saw a figure dart out of her bathroom and race out the front door. Noises in the bathroom alerted her to a second intruder, a 13-year-old boy whose girth slowed him as he attempted to squirm out of the opening where Johnson’s medicine cabinet had been until the first intruder removed it. Two more boys had been behind him in the wall, but had retreated.  

Edward Turner, 19 and John Hondras, 25 were eventually charged in the murder of Ruthie McCoy. Her stunning death inspired the 1992 horror film, Candyman, which is about a Chicago cop that investigates a string of mysterious bathroom-based killings.

In the meantime, Samantha Hartsoe ended her four-part TikTok saga by telling the camera lightheadedly, that she plans to have a ‘really fun phone call’ with her landlord.

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk

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