Always look behind the golden waterfall.
Sometimes you need to keep something valuable safe and out of sight. Safes are tough but conspicuous and easy enough to crack given time. Entrusting your MacGuffin to someone else will inevitably end with it lost or stolen. And everyone knows to dig holes in your backyard once they hear of hidden treasure. What can you do?
The solution: Keep it somewhere close to you. But hide it in a compartment only you and those you trust most can know about and access. This is the Secret Compartment, a secret stash hidden inside an everyday object that you might walk past every day. A dresser might hide a secret drawer inside your sock drawer. A suitcase will have a false bottom so anyone rummaging through your luggage will only find your smallclothes. A shoe will have its heel hollowed out to store your gadgets, gizmos, and maps.
The benefits of such a compartment are manifold. Your hidden stash is (hopefully) secured from prying eyes. Anyone looking for your stuff would need to do an extensive amount of detective work to even fathom the compartment's existence. Your hidden goods remain close at hand in case you need to retrieve or move them. And for compartments hidden inside portable items, you can take even sensitive materials with you without arousing suspicion.
This is Truth in Television. Even with the advent of X-ray machines to check for hidden items at security checkpoints, people are always coming up with ways to hide valuable things from each other and get creative in trying to stay a step ahead. There are entire communities devoted to the making of such compartments, with some retailers even offering products with hidden compartments as a selling point.
A Super-Trope to Book Safe, for when the hidden compartment is a hollowed-out book. A staple of the Room Escape Game. Any Venturous Smuggler is bound to have one of these. See also Hidden Supplies, when someone keeps a stash of something in case of emergencies. The retrieval of items from such places can be shown via a Compartment Shot.
Compare Stomach of Holding and Treasure Chest Cavity, when the compartment is within a person; Loose Floorboard Hiding Spot, when it isn't so much a compartment as a space hidden under a conveniently loose floorboard; and Concealing Canvas, when the compartment is a safe hidden behind a painting. See also Secret Room, Secret Path, and Secret Underground Passage, when there are entire rooms or walkways hidden by a special mechanism, and Shoe Phone, which is when a spy's super gadgets are disguised as ordinary items to be used at a moment's notice. Not to be confused with Victoria's Secret Compartment, where a woman stores or hides something between her breasts.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In Death Note, Light Yagami has multiple, designed to conceal either the titular Death Note or pieces of its pages. These include a desk drawer with a false bottom, rigged so that unless the drawer is opened in a certain way, it will trigger a booby trap that will incinerate the Death Note inside; and a compartment inside his wristwatch so he can kill anytime, anywhere.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Golden Wind: Bucciarati's Stand, Sticky Fingers, allows him to create a Pocket Dimension that no one but him can access. He can use this to create secret compartments out of anything his Stand can touch, such as hiding ten billion lire's worth of treasure inside of a urinal.
- Stone Ocean: Pucci holds a compartment of all the stolen Stand and memory discs he acquired within the confines of tires hidden in a storehouse at the prison's nearby marshland.
- In My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission, Humarise chases after Rody for possessing a suitcase they need. But Rody and Midoriya can't find anything particularly shocking or interesting about the contents. The heroes don't realize what's inside until their last fight with Beros breaks open a hidden compartment in the bottom of the suitcase that holds a puzzle. Said puzzle hides the shutdown key for all the Trigger Bombs that Humarise placed across the globe.
- One Piece: CP9 spent five years looking for the blueprints for the Superweapon Pluton and finally track it down to Franky who they capture in order to get him to reveal it's location. Only after taking Franky to Enies Lobby does he reveal that the prints have been on him the whole time, since being a Cyborg means he can hide items in hidden compartments in his body. Of course he only reveals the blueprints in order to destroy them.
Comic Books
- The Flash: Barry Allen's iconic ring can open and close to store his Flash costume. He's able to compress it to fit in the impossibly small space and expand it for use thanks to the Speed Force. His protégé and successor, Wally West used one until he learned to create one out of the Speed Force and Bart Allen keeps his with him at all times.
Fan Works
- In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Story of Arceus, Quayslaan hid evidence of the death of Richard inside a brick in the wall of his team's room at the guild.
- Vow of Nudity: When Lady Aerouin petrified herself into a statue in order to live long enough to thwart Yrdessa Somberveil's plans, she hid her wand and a black dress in a secret compartment in her statue pedestal.
Films — Animation
- In Batman: Assault on Arkham, Harley Quinn's signature oversized mallet becomes a Chekhov's Gun late in the movie, when it's revealed that its head contains the miniature nuke that Joker smuggled into Gotham.
Films — Live-Action
- In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Newt Scamander's magical suitcase is a supernatural variant of it. It is Bigger on the Inside and houses a Pocket Dimension filled with magical beasts of all kinds. But with a flip of a switch, it can instead open like an ordinary suitcase filled with Newt's things like a Hufflepuff scarf in case he needs to go through security.
- Snowpiercer: Every car on the train has a sigil on one wall, and almost no one thinks much of it. In fact, behind these sigils are telephones that let Director Wilford communicate covertly with his minions. This is how he can orchestrate and later quell a Staged Populist Uprising.
- Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope: The Millennium Falcon has compartments hidden below the deck for smuggling, in which the heroes conceal themselves when the ship is captured by the Death Star. Han Solo says "I never thought I'd be smuggling myself in them".
- Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi: Artoo and Threepio were donated to Jabba the Hutt as goodwill gifts. Nobody thought much of Artoo, a lowly astrodroid repair 'bot. However, when it seems that Luke Skywalker is about to be fed to the sarlacc, Artoo opens a compartment in his head, from which it ejects a lightsaber. Using the Force to pull the weapon into his hand, Luke is suddenly an armed Jedi, slicing and dicing Jabba's mooks.
- Wasabi: When Hubert arrives at the apartment of his dead lover Miko, the whole place has been ransacked. He then begins to rap the walls, explaining to his friend that he and Miko got the same training from the French Secret Service and one of the lessons was to never conceal anything important in an object that could be taken away easily. A couple of seconds later, he finds a hollow part of the wall that he smashes open, revealing the documents Miko died to acquire: bank information on the Yakuza.
Literature
- Heralds of Valdemar:
- At one point in The Founding of Valdemar, Kordas thinks back to the summer he spent designing and making concealed compartments in just about everything he could find at the manor to impress his grandfather (who had already started work on the family "escape-the-Empire" plan).
- Exile's Valor — the table in Alberich's quarters has a secret compartment in one leg, positioned so that he can place items in it without a hypothetical person peeking in the window noticing anything.
- Storm Rising — General Tremaine's travel desk contains a concealed drawer designed for storing blackmail materials. Unlocking it requires a complex series of actions in a carefully timed sequence. Get the sequence wrong, and something Very Bad will happen.
- In Death: In Glory in Death, the second book in the series, Officer Peabody finds the killer's stash of trophies taken from his victims in a secret compartment in his sofa. She explains that when she was a child her father liked to build things with hidden compartments for his children to find, so she was able to easily recognize one.
- Nina Tanleven: In The Ghost Wore Gray, Nine and Chris find Captain Gray's old trunk in the attic of the Quackadoodle and soon find it holds a false bottom, hiding a compartment with Captain Gray's diary (and, as revealed in the diary, had housed the jewels which Captain Gray had smuggled into New York to give to his Canadian contact in return for the supplies he was seeking to purchase for the Confederate cause). The diary also reveals that the trunk had been gifted to him by another ally during his trip to New York specifically to hide the jewels because of said compartment.
- Sherlock Holmes:
- In A Scandal in Bohemia, Holmes tricks Irene Adler into revealing the secret compartment where she has concealed a portrait of herself with the King of Bohemia, who has hired the Great Detective to get it back. It's noted that there have been two attempts to steal the portrait from her house already, but the would-be thieves didn't know where to look. Holmes fakes a fire in the house, causing her to immediately rush to collect the portrait from its hiding place — a hidden recess behind a piece of paneling on the wall.
- The Seven-Per-Cent Solution has Sherlock Holmes pursue Moriarty to Vienna. This journey was actually prearranged by John Watson to get his comrade to meet with Sigmund Freud, in hopes the doctor can treat Holmes for cocaine addiction. While under Freud's care, the two doctors check Holmes's luggage for narcotics. Holmes brought a valise that seems normal but is oddly heavy. It has a false bottom that holds several vials of 7% cocaine solution and a needle.
Live-Action TV
- The Crystal Maze: In some mystery games, the crystal would be hidden in a secret compartment; but a very memorable game in series 3 of this sort was where a giant puzzle has to be put together, and in the same room is a big mirror. When the puzzle is completed, a message can be read in the mirror: "For light be on the treasure to shed, look behind the griffin's head". The contestant has to lift up the piece with the griffin's head, to reveal a secret compartment with the crystal. One one occasion, Richard trying to prompt the contestant to do this is counter-productive, as he keeps interrupting up them at the crucial moment, until they run out of time.
Richard: What does it say?Contestant: For light be on the treasure to shed, look...Richard: What does it read???? What does it say????Contestant: For light be on the treasure...
- Death in Paradise: The "Man Overboard" two-parter features a variation on the Locked Room Mystery in which a man is found dead on his boat in open water after a storm, having apparently been hit on the head by a boom. However, the dried blood on his head indicates he was arranged that way after the storm... but by whom? The boat is empty and no other boats came near it. Part 2 reveals that the victim was a smuggler, and had a secret compartment in the boat's cabin. The killer hid in there until the police returned the boat to harbour, then just left.
- In the Heat of the Night: A wealthy industrialist raped a local young woman some years ago, and discovers that she bore a son from that. To hide his crime, the mogul hires a thug to slay the mother but spare the boy. The thug does the deed, but knowing how ruthless his bosses are, he keeps damning evidence hidden in his house. Verily, the mogul sends more minions to slay the thug, and they ransack his house. Sheriff's deputies, however, conduct a more thorough search and discover the toilet tank's float ball has been taped together. Inside is the damning evidence that connects the industrialist to his crimes.
- The Lucy Show: Federal agents approach Lucy to pose as her lookalike, Rusty Martin. Rusty is the girlfriend cum cohort of bank robber Big Nick, and the feds need Lucy to discover where Nick stashed the $100,000 in cash from his latest heist. Big Nick falls for the decoy, but Lucy discovers that Rusty was the one who hid the loot. When Nick asks where she hid it, Lucy tries bluffing with "the usual." "The usual?" asks Nick, "Baby, that's brilliant!" Then he puts out the second drawer of a dresser and exposes its underside, which holds several bundles of cash.
- In the NCIS episode "False Start", the team discovers that Navy Admiral Henry Davis' writing desk has a hidden compartment full of performance-enhancing steroids. Given Davis' work as a coach for athletes who compete in military and world events, it turns the murder investigation into a drug hunt.
- Pennyworth. A gang robs the Mayor of London's stagecoach, which in this Alternate Universe is an armoured car with carriage wheels. They blow open the door and Shoot Out the Lock on the strongbox...which turns out to be empty. A pistol thrust into the Mayor's mouth convinces him to reveal the real safe...hidden inside the step that you use to climb into the carriage.
- The Professionals. In "When the Heat Cools Off" a convicted London Gangster tries to convince CI5 that the pistol he allegedly used to murder a policeman was planted on him by his enemies. CI5 discover otherwise when they track down the car the gangster used to drive and find it has a hidden slide-out tray with a cut-out compartment that fits the murder weapon.
- In Sanford & Son, The titular duo keeps any extra cash they have on hand hidden in a secret compartment of a side table in their living room. For it to open, the table must be struck with a fist in certain places in a specific order which makes a drawer pop out.
Tabletop Games
Call of Cthulhu: Nightmare in Norway:
- Birdwatcher Otto Schmidt is actually a German spy monitoring the military manoeuvres on Mount Kari. A hidden compartment in the boot of his sports car holds a generous supply of film (including infra-red film) and a machine pistol.
- Olsen's Lodge has a writing desk in the same room as the bridge table, and there's a small secret compartment hidden behind one of the desk's drawers. However, the only thing hidden there is a shrivelled old apple core.
- Scum and Villainy: The Stardancer crew can unlock a unique upgrade called "Smuggler's Rigging", which allows every member to carry an additional small item (such as a gun, or a stash of illicit goods) that is perfectly concealed from all but the most intrusive of searches.
Video Games
- ANNO: Mutationem: Alan Doyle keeps the access code for his underground lab's personal computer hidden within a stuffed teddy bear that used to belong to his child to ensure no one finds out who he works for.
- Disco Elysium has you, the Player Character, find a damaged ledger in the trash. There's an option to try and open a compartment on it, which contains a card inside that provides major hints about the ex-something you're still obsessed with.
- The Escapists 2: Each desk has a hidden compartment, which hides contraband from guard searches, and cannot be accessed by other players in multiplayer. However, guard dogs may still retrieve missing keys from the hidden compartment.
Western Animation
- Played for Laughs in Avatar: The Last Airbender. The machinist's replacement airbending staff for Aang includes a hidden snack compartment in the handle. Aang initially finds this function frivolous, but the snacks come in handy when he's gliding long distances.
- The Casagrandes: Carl keeps his candy hidden in a hole in the wall so that his siblings, cousins, and pets don't steal it.
- In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "The Secret Box", Spongebob is convinced that a box that Patrick Star is carrying around has a picture of him doing something embarrassing and tries his best to find out. At the end, Patrick ultimately relents and Spongebob is relieved that it was just a string. However, once Spongebob is out of earshot, Patrick reveals that pulling the string opened up a secret compartment in the box, which did hold the embarrassing photo.
- Underdog: In some episodes, Underdog is weakened, and needs a Heroic Second Wind. Fortunately, he has a vitamin pill for that purpose, which is stored inside an insignia ring on his finger.
Underdog: The secret compartment of my ring I fill. With an Underdog super energy vitamin pill.
Real Life
- Given the nature of spywork, intelligence agencies across the globe have developed means to move things around covertly. "Dead Drops" involved hiding useful things like money and information inside common objects like gloves. Some spies even received their supplies inside taxidermied rats dipped in tabasco sauce to keep away scavenger animals.
- There are entire companies like Secret Compartment Furniture
or Stealth Furniture dedicated to creating furniture with secret compartments as custom orders or ready-made products.
- The Philosopher Desk is a desk specifically designed to have as many hidden compartments as possible. These include compartments that open when a handle is turned instead of pulled, a drawer hidden in the back of another drawer, and a drawer on top of another drawer that can only be accessed by twisting and pulling a different handle.
- This former spy mentions an Iranian spy who had a safe hidden behind a bookcase...which was empty, because the real safe was hidden behind the decoy safe.