‘Have y’all never watched a horror movie?’: Airbnb experience turns terrifying when women discover a stranger in the basement

When you’re staying at an Airbnb, ignorance truly is bliss. A group of girls and their mothers decided to break their bliss by snooping around and ended up discovering a trap door leading to a basement from where a woman’s voice could be heard shouting, “Hello!” Safe to say, the vacation was ruined.

The moment was captured on video and consequentially shared to TikTok by Hailey (@hailey.ellis11), one of three girls staying at the secretly occupied Airbnb flat with their moms. It has amassed nearly 42 million views in two weeks.

The short length of the clip as well as Hailey’s failure to provide context or an explanation unleashed the wrath of TikTok users onto the poor teen, who was then compelled to share a second explanatory video, on top of the unedited version of the first.

“Have y’all never watched a horror movie?” was one commentator’s reaction to the group’s perhaps unwise curiosity. In fact, there’s a nearly identical film, Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, that came out just two years ago where a woman finds a terrifying killer in a hidden corridor in the basement of a house she rented. Plenty of people made that association, saying, “Bro, this is like the plot of Barbarian.” Googling “Airbnb secret room” will send you down an anxiety-inducing rabbit hole not too distant from the dread Cregger’s movie provokes.

Traumatic Airbnb stays have become somewhat of a hot topic online, with some even faking incidents to gain views and followers, like this viral video of an old man hiding behind a bookcase.

Much like what seems to have happened with Hailey, however, there are other real and concerning occurrences. From deplorable conditions that look nothing like the website listing to hidden cameras, the vacation rental company has suffered plenty of hits to their reputation over the years.

In 2024, a CNN investigation into the use of hidden cameras learned that Airbnb “not only fails to protect its guests, it works to keep complaints out of the courts and away from the public.” One host, when questioned by the police, confessed to owning multiple videos of couples in compromising situations such as having intimate relations or undressing. He hid his nano-camera in an alarm clock by the bed. It’s pretty terrifying stuff.

As for the aftermath of Hailey’s situation, she explained in a later video that they opted for calling the police and ultimately received a refund from Airbnb. Weirdly, though, they never found out the identity of the woman in the basement. “We ended up calling the cops, ’cause we didn’t know what else to do,” Hailey’s friend explains in the “story time” clip, adding, “They ended up coming, and we ended up getting a refund, but we don’t know who was down there.”

Adding to the uncanniness of the ordeal, Hailey also recounts how the woman asked them to shut the trap door, prompting her mother to apologize as the teens ran off screaming and laughing. As if they were the ones in the wrong…

No one really understands what actually happened here, because, apparently, neither do the people involved. Hailey seems to have moved on, posting random TikTok videos to her profile like any other person her age. The leading theory from viewers is that the squatter was just the host, visiting or otherwise staying at the house while it was rented out to the group, hoping to make some extra money out of their property, like ol’ Richard in that fake video above.