A Man Entered This Bricked-Up Room In His House – And Uncovered An Eerie Shrine To A Fallen Soldier

Until Fabre opened up the bricked-off room in his house, he didn’t know exactly what was lurking behind it. And he was surely amazed to discover that the sealed entrance was hiding a sort of portal back to 1918. Though coated in cobwebs and dust, the room’s purpose was clear. Fabre’s house was hiding a hair-raising shrine to one of World War I’s many fallen.

Yes, the parents of the perished soldier had left the room exactly as it had been when he went off to war. Stricken by grief, they had resolved never to disturb it again. And to keep it untouched, they had bricked up the doorway. That way, they figured, the memorial that they had created for their lost son would remain intact. And that’s exactly what happened!

The house is a fitting place for a shrine, as Bélâbre mayor Laurent Laroche told U.K. newspaper The Guardian in 2014. He said, “It is a magical place, which we believe was built using stone from the Middle Age ramparts of the village and has a superb little garden that is like something out of a fairytale.”

But who occupied such a magical property and left the well-preserved tribute behind? Well, that would be the Rochereaus, a military family whose lineage traces back to the days of Napoleon Bonaparte. And given their history, it was almost expected that their son — born in October 1896 in the very same room Daniel Fabre would uncover decades later — ended up a military man.

Until Fabre stumbled upon the concealed room, the only other mention of the soldier could be found in the village square of his birthplace. Bélâbre, located more than 30 miles from the nearest big town of Chateauroux, features a memorial for those who gave their lives in WWI. Inscribed among the names of the fallen is the soldier now thrust into the forefront of history — Hubert Rochereau.

But long before he'd made the ultimate sacrifice, Rochereau proudly kicked off his military career at the Saint-Cyr Academy in Fontainebleau, near Paris. An institution similar to West Point, it served both French officers in the infantry and cavalry. As established by Napoleon in the early19th century, the school saw countless young soldiers pass through its grounds. And it was there that Hubert found his purpose.

Soon after, the young soldier was assigned to the 15th Dragoons. This regiment had its base in the town of Libourne, not too far from Bordeaux. But of course, Rochereau would not stay there long, as he was posted to the Western Front, preparing to enter the fray.

In fact, the young mounted soldier found himself involved in the fight over the Belgian village of Loker in April 1918. The cavalry were renowned for their dash. The commander of Rochereau’s unit fell himself when he caught a shot to the head just after he had ordered the dragoons into the attack on the village.

We can imagine the brave young cavalry officer charging into the fight at Loker. Tragically, though, it was this courage and boldness that would hasten his end. He was mortally wounded in the clash over the Belgian village. And as the English drove him away from the scene in a field ambulance, he passed away. He was only 21 years old.

The fighting over Loker was particularly bitter, with the site switching between Allied and German control more than once in the last days of April 1918. In the end, a few days after Rochereau’s fatal wounding, it finally rested in French hands. But this would be little consolation to his parents.

All the same, Rochereau’s mom and dad would doubtless have felt pride that their son had served bravely. He was granted the Légion d'honneur – the Legion of Honor – for his gallantry in action, and the Croix de Guerre – the War Cross – marked his sacrifice. This decoration is given in France in the same circumstances that an American soldier would be “mentioned in dispatches.”

At first, the noble second lieutenant was interred in Flanders. He was originally buried in a British cemetery, having passed away in their soldiers’ care. His bereaved parents did not even know the location of his grave for four years. But as soon as they learned where his remains lay, they made plans to bring him home.

So now Rochereau lies in the cemetery at Bélâbre, where his final resting place is marked by a large gravestone. Sadly, it is not tended these days, and the stone is falling into ruin. Ivy twists around it, obscuring the details of how he gave his life for his country in Flanders.

As noted, in the square of Bélâbre, a memorial lists the names of the men whose fate was Morts pour la France. And you can find Second Lieutenant Hubert Rochereau among them. You can also find his name in Libourne, where he is remembered alongside other members of his regiment. But these are not his only memorials.

Rochereau’s parents decided to turn his bedroom into a shrine to his memory. The plan was to keep it just as it was when he went to war. They even included a clause in the contract when they sold the house that forbade changes to the room for five centuries. But the clause “has no legal basis” according to current owner Daniel Fabre, who served as a local bureaucrat.

The Rochereaus had made a bequest of the house – a decently sized residence – to a friend from the army, General Eugène Bridoux. The general went on to become something of a villain, working for the French Vichy government. In his capacity as Secretary of State, he had taken care of rounding up local Jews and sending them off to the now-infamous German death camps.

Needless to say, when World War II ended, Bridoux scarpered. And his house was snatched by the French government. It was let out privately to a lawyer and his family for a while, but come the 1950s Bridoux’s family wanted it back. So Bridoux’s granddaughter recovered ownership of the home, and Fabre married her.

Fabre and his wife weren’t unaware of the room, as Mayor Laroche shared with The Guardian. He said, “They knew about the room at the end of the corridor but had never seen it because it was bricked up. So they broke down the wall and made this strange discovery.”

Even though the house-sale clause isn’t legally binding, the Fabre family have every intention of keeping the promise and not touching the room. But Laroche made clear that its future could not be guaranteed. He said, “We cannot forget that it is a private property. Mr Fabre has two daughters and we don’t know what they will do with it one day. Indeed, they are perfectly free to do whatever they want.”

For now, the room really is just how Rochereau left it. The blue jacket from his uniform lies draped over a clothes stand, exactly as though he had just walked in and taken it off. Only its moth-eaten condition gives away that it is more than 100 years old. It is a haunting reminder of his service.

On Rochereau’s desk, facing the window of the room, sit some of his belongings. Guns that he may have carried lie alongside knives, some keys and a notebook. Next to them is a pipe, which some have speculated is for smoking opium, although there is also some tobacco on the desk.

In the bookcase next to Rochereau’s bed are many different volumes. Intriguingly, the young man seems to have been learning to speak German. Alongside books on the language are steamy novels. There’s also a temperance publication, warning him against the evils of the demon drink. And no sign can be found in the room that the young soldier ever touched a drop.

The second lieutenant did have at least one vice though, as a packet of Country Life smokes attests. Fabre even gave one a go. He told the BBC in 2014, “I tried to smoke one.” But any attraction had apparently paled over time: the home’s owner noted, “It wasn’t very nice.”

On Rochereau’s bed, on top of the comforter made of lace, lie his medals and pictures of friends who also lost their lives in the conflict. Poignantly, his hat, a fabulous creation complete with feathers, sits abandoned on the bed. With the exception of his uniform items, the room is tidy, nothing out of place, as though his parents had it ready for his return.

The only thing that Rochereau’s mom and dad added was a small flask filled with earth. This has a note attached to it that describes its contents. It says it holds “the soil of Flanders on which our dear child fell and which has kept his remains for four years.”

When Fabre showed Rochereau’s room to Agence-France Presse (AFP) in 2014 he drew the news agency reporter’s attention to one of the knives. He said, “I believe this is a German bayonet from the First World War.” While showing the room, it was clear that Fabre did not share the sentiment that surrounded it, although he was willing to pay his respects.

Fabre told the BBC, “I like to say I live in his house, but not with him. I don’t feel any kinship with him. He was young, a military officer, and I imagine him to be quite provincial, perhaps even narrow-minded. But it’s part of the history of the house, so I keep it.”

What did worry Fabre was the idea that the media interest stirred by the uncovering of the WWI shrine might bring tourists. He really didn’t like the idea of his home being beset by sightseers or by people who had an attachment to martial history. At the time of AFP’s visit, in 2014, he had no intention of making this very private place available to visitors.

Fabre told the newswire, “I especially don’t want to be invaded. Certainly not. After all, this is my home.” Of course, Fabre would not live for the whole 500-year term that the Rochereaus had asked for the shrine, but he was not too concerned. He thought his daughters might well sell the place.

In fact, Fabre’s reaction to the idea that they might do that was strong. He said, “To be brutal: I don’t give a damn. What happens after me, generally speaking, I don’t care.” Even so, he was prepared to admit that it would be a pity if it was changed, and he added, “But I think it would be a shame to get rid of all this.”

One person who very much hopes that the shrine will be maintained is Mayor Laroche. He told The Guardian, “When you walk into it, it’s as if time has stood still. On a much smaller scale, I imagine it’s how the explorers felt when they opened the first pyramid or ancient tomb.”

Laroche hoped that someone might come forward with the money to buy the house – and the room it contains – for posterity. He noted, “It would be a great shame for it to disappear. As someone who loves history, I feel it’s also important not to forget the sacrifice made by men like Rochereau.”

But he explained the money couldn’t come from the village, saying, “We are currently reflecting on what we can do to preserve the room, but to be honest we are a small local authority whose finances, like everyone’s, have been squeezed by the economic crisis. The fact is that while it would be nice to be able to one day buy the property and perhaps turn it into a museum, we simply don’t have the money.”

One thing that gave Laroche hope that a mystery buyer might turn up was the publicity that came when the story of the room first went viral. It had made the name “Bélâbre” travel the world. He said, “Someone even sent me a picture of someone in China reading the story in The Guardian.”

Laroche expressed how it had made him feel, saying, “Our little village is being spoken about the world over, which makes me proud to be mayor. And maybe it will help us find long-lost Rochereau relatives and save the room. It would be a great pity for it to be lost to future generations.”

There’s no denying that the room had instilled a fair bit of municipal pride, as Laroche explained to AFP. He said, “It’s history, but it’s also a form of family worship.” And he felt that Rochereau’s long-deceased parents might have found some comfort in the fact that their memorial to Hubert had survived the passage of more than a century.

After all, Rochereau had for many years been remembered as just a name on a memorial, one of many men who had perished in the terrible conflict of World War I. But as Laroche expressed to AFP, “He reappears 100 years later… And I think that if they could see that somehow, his parents would be satisfied.”

Why else would they leave behind such a fascinating time capsule, if not to share a glimpse of well-preserved history? And so, the soldier's room joins the small group of almost-untouched properties that give historians keys to the past. Another such property exists in Northern Ireland — a farmhouse whose contents have remained undisturbed for generations — with papers referencing the Titantic spread across its desk.

The eerily-untouched property was observed a century later when a photographer named Rebecca shared her findings with the Northern Irish website — the News Letter. “Even though it was messy,” she said, “We could see on shelves and in cupboards that the history in this country cottage was something to get very excited about!” And as she made her way through the cottage, she came across fascinating historical treasures in every room.

“Once I took a walk through each room and had a proper look, I was blown away by the historical items that were left here,” Rebecca told the Belfast Telegraph in August 2019. “This literally was the diamond in the rough.” The owner of the house, a neighbor who inherited it after the last man to live there died, asked Rebecca to document a building that was seemingly frozen in time. That final resident was a dairy farmer referred to only as Dessie.

Even though the photographs Rebecca took have an undeniably eerie quality, she felt quite comfortable during her visits to the old abandoned home. “Some buildings have very different atmospheres,” she explained. “But I felt welcome in Dessie’s house, which was surprisingly quite warm, even though there hadn’t been any heating in it for a long time.”

The house is located in rural Northern Ireland, not far from the County Tyrone town of Cookstown. Look at a map and you’ll see that it’s more or less in the middle of Northern Ireland. This constituent nation of the U.K. is in the northern part of the island of Ireland and was created in 1920. To the south lies the much larger territory of the Republic of Ireland, independent from Britain since 1921.

Rebecca has been running her Abandoned NI website since 2017. On it, she publishes the stories and images of abandoned buildings all over Northern Ireland and the Republic. She’s also worked in Belgium, where she documented a derelict hospital. Rebecca gives lectures as well and in 2018 mounted an exhibition about Dessie’s house.

Rebecca has photographed many fascinating locations around Ireland. These have included the neglected Kilwaughter Castle in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, which dates back to the 1620s. It’s been much altered and added to during the ensuing centuries. In the early 1900s a wealthy American woman, Elizabeth “Bessie” Bringhurst Smith, lived in some style at the castle. When Rebecca visited in 2018, though, roofs, windows and doors were all gone and the interior was filled with rubbish.

In a 2017 entry on the Abandoned NI site, Rebecca wrote, “People always ask, ‘Have you ever had any paranormal experiences while [urban exploring]?’ The answer is yes, I’ve had a few things that I cannot explain. Every building that I document has a different vibe, some good and some not so good.”

So, what paranormal phenomenon has Rebecca been a witness to? She writes of a visit to a “glorious mansion” dating from the late 19th century. This was in fact the very property that first sparked her interest in photographing abandoned buildings. On her website she describes visiting the site with a friend: “We had walked the entire house from top to bottom and had been there maybe 30 or 40 minutes, to the best of my knowledge there was no one else in the house.”

The two explorers were just at the doorway to the house’s grand ballroom when “there was a massive crash behind us... I shouted out ‘hello’ as I was thinking there had to be someone here.” There was no answer, but then, “Through the silence I hear could hear footsteps coming over the rubble towards us along with the swishing of someone’s arm on their clothing.”

Rebecca related the reaction of her and her friend: “At this point it’s fight or flight, my only option was flight! We ran down the hallway and out the front door.” And the photographer has experienced other strange happenings. One such incident came at an abandoned tuberculosis hospital in Northern Ireland. When she toured this spooky building, she heard voices – but there was nobody there.

Then there was the property that Rebecca bills as “Northern Ireland’s most notorious ghost house.” Rebecca describes hearing tales about the Coneen Ghost House years before: “When I was young I remember my grandmother talking about a local haunting, one where the family was tormented by a poltergeist throwing plates, knocking walls and even shaking the children out of their beds.”

A widow called Bridget Murphy was living in the house with her kids when the haunting occurred in 1913. She called in a priest to try to bring an end to the disturbing events. But although he exorcized the property not once but twice, it was to no avail. Terrified by the events in their home, the Murphys upped sticks and relocated to the U.S. Nonetheless, when Rebecca visited in 2017 all was peaceful.

We’ll get back to Rebecca’s photos and the story of Dessie shortly, but first let’s find out something of the history of County Tyrone, where the old farmhouse is located. The Anglicized name of the county comes from the Gaelic Tir Eoghain. That translates as “territory of Eoghan.”

This Eoghan was the son of Niall, a figure who’s come down through history and legend in tales from some 15 centuries ago. Niall was apparently a fearsome warrior and chieftain who fought everyone from the Romans to the English, not to mention the Scots and the French. And it seems that Niall wasn’t just very active on the battlefield. There was also the bedchamber.

Professor Don Bradley of Dublin’s Trinity College led a research team studying the genetic heritage of Niall, and its findings were published in June 2020. The study concluded that a startling one in 12 of all Irish males may share DNA with the ancient warlord. Moreover, in the north-west of Ireland this proportion rises to an astonishing 20 percent. Niall gave the commonplace Irish surname O’Neill to posterity.

Bradley described the research conclusions during a June 2020 interview with the IrishCentral website. “In many countries, powerful men historically have more children, and it’s not that hard to believe that it happened in Ireland, too,” he explained. “We estimate there are maybe two to three million descendants in the modern age, with a concentration in Ireland, obviously.”

In addition, according to Bradley, some one in 50 New Yorkers with surnames of Irish origin such as O’Reilly, O’Connor or O’Neill are distant descendants of the ancient Niall. Niall is also famous in Irish history for taking “Nine Hostages.” They were the unfortunates seized by the warlord during his many conflicts with the peoples of other nations and Irish kingdoms. One of the captives is said to have been Saint Patrick, Ireland’s modern-day patron saint.

So, County Tyrone can trace its history back to the days when Ireland was riven by conflicts between rival warlords. In more recent times, the Earl of Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, was forced to flee his lands by English invaders in 1607. His territories were forfeited, and Tyrone became a colony of the English state. The die was cast for centuries of bitter conflict, not only in County Tyrone but across the whole island of Ireland.

Cookstown, the nearest place of any size to Dessie’s farmhouse, was the scene of a rebellion by Irish natives against the Planters in 1641. The Planters were those who came from England and appropriated the seized lands of County Tyrone. The settlers, backed by English forces, extracted a brutal revenge, burning the settlement to ashes.

For nearly 100 years after that devastation, the town languished. Eventually, prosperity returned in the late 18th century and an almost completely new settlement was built. Cookstown now took on the role of a market town serving the rural population with trade in cloth and farming necessities. In the 19th century, the industrial revolution arrived in Cookstown in the shape of linen mills and the advent of the railroad.

In fact, if you visit Cookstown today, you’ll see very many of the same buildings and streets that a 19th-century farmer would have walked past. History came calling again at Cookstown during the Irish War of Independence. In 1920 the Irish Republican Army attacked a police barracks in the town. During the fighting, IRA volunteer Patrick Loughran died, the first Republican casualty in that period of Irish conflict.

It’s now time that we returned to the story of Dessie’s house. Dessie was the home’s last occupant, living there on his own for a time after the two brothers he’d shared it with had died. By 2015 Dessie was in his 80s and could no longer to support himself alone at the farmhouse so he relocated to a care home, where he died in 2017, the very year that Rebecca first came across the house. The new owner of the property asked Dessie to document the incredible contents of the old site.

“The plan was to knock down the house and build a new one, but all concerned wanted me to record Dessie’s place before it was demolished,” Rebecca told the Belfast Telegraph in August 2019. “The house was a nondescript story-and-a-half cottage, so I wasn’t really expecting much when I went there one early winter Sunday morning with the snow on the ground.”

The photographer recalled her first visit. “Once I got inside, I could see the house was full of clutter and a lot of rubbish,” Rebecca said. “Each room was stacked high, floor to ceiling with Reader’s Digest boxes, unopened. There were up to 200 magazines, but they weren’t in great condition because of the damp.”

And there was a poignant tale behinds those stacks of Reader’s Digest publications. “The neighbor explained that Dessie subscribed to the magazine through loneliness as he didn’t have many visitors and he was the last surviving member of the family,” Rebecca recalled. “He apparently didn’t cancel the magazine because he felt that someone was sending him letters, which is quite sad.”

Before she could take the photographs she wanted, though, Rebecca first had to get the house into some sort of order. She spent a number of days clearing out some of the junk until, she said, “Eventually I had the place back to the way it would have been and I was excited to photograph and document the lives of Dessie and the rest of the people who had lived there previously.”

“On that first visit we found WWI binoculars, a newspaper dating from 1912 with the headline reading about the Titanic sinking,” Rebecca told the News Letter website. “I also found Victorian-era clothing in the wardrobe, war journals and bags of old coins dating from the 1800s along with ration books and newspapers from the latter end of 1890.”

Another old newspaper, a copy of The Mid-Ulster Mail dated January 27, 1917, made fascinating reading. Its front page included an advert for a shipping company, the Allan Line, and offered passages to Canada from Glasgow and Liverpool, and from Glasgow to Boston. Elsewhere, a store called Tubman’s offered tobacco, cigarettes, cigars and pipes.

Perhaps it was at Tubman’s that Dessie, or one of the other farmhouse residents, bought the well-used pipes that Rebecca found in the house. The pipes are accompanied by a collection of old buttons, a wristwatch and various publications. One of those is the intriguingly titled Second Best Bride, presumably a romance. It came from the pen of a Canadian author, Louis Arthur Cunningham, and is illustrated with a picture of an anxious-looking young woman. Let’s hope she did better than second best.

Several of the most striking images are of the kitchen, which would likely have been the center of the home. There’s an old-fashioned cast-iron stove where Dessie is said to have baked traditional Irish bread. Three steel kettles sit atop the range, perhaps ready to make the strong tea that many of the Irish are so partial to.

Another of Rebecca’s images shows an empty jar labeled “Irish honey,” set in front of a metal teapot. A second kitchen photograph displays a battered transistor radio and an antique set of scales. Rebecca wrote that the radio was in frequent use to keep up with the news. Although a television was in the property, apparently Dessie had no time for that piece of modernity.

An old tin that once contained Oxo beef stock cubes is one of many similar containers Rebecca found in the house. “Oxo Gravy – As Good As it Tastes” claims the legend on the box. Inside it is another smaller Oxo container as well as two pocket watches. Many of the numerous such tins in Dessie’s house also had small collections of nick-knacks within them.

There’s also a photo of a diploma for an inspector of weights and measures, dated 1894. Another image, this time one of a photographic portrait of a man in police uniform, has a fascinating story to tell. This police officer was the same person who earned the diploma. Although the name on the document is obscured here, we know that it’s Edwin Robert McQueen.

It was some time after she’d taken the photos at Dessie’s house that Rebecca finally worked out what part McQueen played in this tale. He was in fact married to Dessie’s mother, although he wasn’t Dessie’s dad. The couple wed following the death of her first husband, Dessie’s father. It was a short union, however, since McQueen himself passed away just a couple of years after they tied the knot. We don’t know for sure, but this photo may well show the marital double bed.

A second room with a single bed includes a wardrobe with a broken glass panel. A pair of ancient battered shoes lies beside the bed along with what appears to be a chamber pot. A stylish, tartan-lined raincoat hangs from the distressed wardrobe, but the bedclothes have been reduced to rags over the years.

The living room of Dessie’s home features in another fascinating photo. We see the open fireplace with an old-fashioned rush broom propped against it. Perished leather furnishings are set off by an old oil lamp, and a mirrored wardrobe fills one corner.

The next image, also taken in the living room, zooms in on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. A fine clock, stuck for ever at 12:15, is the centerpiece. Around it are what look like souvenir plates plus some seashells and a couple of ceramic ornaments. These are perhaps keepsakes from vacations taken long ago.

This photograph shows a fine collection of old medicines and remedies plus an assortment of other bric-a-brac laid out on a small wooden desk. A vial of Elliman’s Universal Embrocation rubs shoulders with other bottles, one containing liquid paraffin, another wild honey balsam. There’s also a sack marked Spratt’s Patent London Limited. This was a British dog food developed by an American, James Spratt, which he patented in the early 1860s.

Our final image is a moving one indeed. It shows an unidentified man, a couple of watches, another pipe and some hand-written letters. Throughout the house, Rebecca found troves of love letters secreted in various cabinets. She told the Belfast Telegraph, “The letters were between Dessie’s brother and his girlfriend. They were supposed to get married but they never did. I was mesmerized.”