Laurie Dumas bought the 19th-century property and initially thought it was charming, before her husband started exploring and came across a small room connected to the attic
Finding an extra room in a newly bought house should be cause for celebration – but for Laurie Dumas it revealed an appalling secret.
Laurie Dumas bought the 19th Century property in West Warwick, Rhode Island, US, after being charmed by its beautiful stained glass windows, huge back garden and period features.
She and her then husband-to-be Jeff had plans to renovate the attic into a music room. But while exploring, they found a small, hidden room connected to the attic.
The room could only be locked from the outside, had an unusual metal floor and its own drain. Inside was a mysterious children’s toy, a wooden block with the letter F.
Laurie told US property show, HGTV’s If Walls Could Talk: “It was only when we started cleaning it that we became aware that the floor is metal. It was pretty odd. There’s a door knob on one side and a dead bolt so whoever was in it wasn’t getting out.”
Baffled by the discovery around a decade ago, Laurie sought answers from her co-workers at the local library. One local overheard the conversation, took her aside and told her, chillingly: “You have a disappointments room.”
Laurie learned the term, ‘disappointments room’ was once used to describe spaces created by parents who had a child with a disability and wanted to keep them a secret, hidden away from the rest of the world.
On further investigation, she found out a judge with the surname Carpenter had lived at the property in the late 19th Century, even uncovering his burial site on the library database.
She and Jeff visited his grave, on the side of which was written: “Ruth, 1895-1900, daughter of Job and Francis.”
They were convinced they had found the inhabitant of the so-called disappointments room.
Laurie started going through old newspapers and found various references to the judge, but intriguingly no mention of the daughter apart from her death.
She said: “I think she might have had a very sick little girl that they never mentioned. The birth wasn’t mentioned. Nothing about the rest of her life was mentioned even though the rest of her family were always in the paper.
The couple discovered that the judge was an ambitious man with political aspirations, and they believed he used the disappointments room to keep his disabled daughter a secret.
Rather than convert it to a music room as originally planned, they added some dolls and teddies to brighten the attic and honour the girl’s memory.
Laurie said they “wanted to take some of the sadness away”, adding that Ruth had become “part of the household”.
The harrowing story inspired the 2016 movie, The Disappointments Room, starring Kate Beckinsale.
