There is a dark secret in Pickering, a secret the police don’t want to talk about. Someone, maybe several people, recently built a dungeon in an abandoned, 136-year-old farmhouse.

No one is missing and there is no evidence of a crime — besides trespassing.

The house is hidden behind a long, tree-lined lane, nestled in a woodlot between a cropped cornfield and a gurgling creek. It would be picturesque if its contents weren’t so terrifying.

The room, in the few details police have revealed, is secured by a heavy door with several locks, designed to trap someone inside. But the police don’t want to describe it for fear of compromising their investigation into a crime that may not have occurred.

In late November, the federal government, which owns the land the home is on, sent contractors to 140 Concession Rd. 7 to inspect the property. It was part of a list of about 100 century-old homes set to be torn down to make way for an airport 40 years in the making. But Pickering City Council recently saved the house from demolition, along with nine others.

Councillor Peter Rodrigues said five houses have been salvaged and will be used by the city. The other five, which include the old farmhouse, are available to be purchased within the next six months and moved. The dungeon isn’t included.

Rodrigues downplayed the home’s recent renovation.

“It’s all speculative. The police haven’t told us much — maybe it was used for an amateur film, maybe it was teenagers playing some kind of game,” Rodrigues said. “Or maybe it was used by a maniac.”

It’s known as the Barkey-Michell house, named after the Barkey family that built it in 1875 and the Michells, who owned it until the government expropriated the land in 1972, according to John Sabean, president of the Pickering Township Historical Society.

Abandoned houses are targets for mischief. “The more buildings they take out, the more isolated the ones that are left become, and therefore the more vulnerable they become to fire and vandalism, and — I would have never guessed someone would have used it for confinement, but that’s the kind of thing that could happen because it’s so isolated,” Sabean said.

There isn’t a neighbour within screaming distance, save for Glen Cedars Golf Club and the suspicious eye of a roving government-hired security guard, who, along with four police officers, rushed to the area to deal with a curious Star reporter Tuesday morning.

“There’s a lot of stuff that goes on in the abandoned homes around the area,” said Dan Mayes, manager of the golf course.

Empty homes have been vandalized, burned down and used as a hangout by intoxicated teenagers. But something else was going on in the old farmhouse.

Sabean inspected the house in November 2010; he examines homes for their heritage value and has written reports for Transport Canada, which is in charge of the expansive swath of Crown land.

“There was no confinement room then,” Sabean said, “but there was a lot of junk, which is normal when people leave homes they never owned.”

The house has been abandoned for at least five years, Sabean said, and is en route to dereliction, with its eavestroughs collapsing, paint chipping and windows boarded.

The former tenants, who police say aren’t suspects, sold herbs and flowers they grew on the property. The government boarded it up after they left.

An exhaustive forensic search is being done, according to Durham police spokesperson Dave Selby.

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“Whoever built it,” Selby said, “we hope they’ll call us and tell us what they were doing there.”

lcasey@thestar.ca

Other confinement rooms discovered

October 2011: (Philadelphia) Four adults with intellectual disabilities were found chained in a boiler room in the basement of an apartment building for about a month as a Social Security scam.

August 2011: (Austria) Gottfried W. allegedly kept his two daughters in the cellar of their farmhouse since 1970, raping and torturing them for 41 years.

February 2009: (Hamilton) A 22-year old man was tied up and tortured in an attic apartment for a month.

April 2009: (Hamilton) Two boys aged 2 and 5 escaped from a feces-smeared basement room in Stoney Creek where they were kept by their mother, her boyfriend and their grandmother.

August 2009: (California) Jaycee Dugard was found after being kidnapped at age 11 and abused for 18 years by Phillip and Nancy Garrido, held captive in their backyard in Antioch, Calif.

April 2008: (Austria) Josef Fritzl imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth for 24 years in dungeon-like cellar, where she gave birth to seven of his children.

August 2006: (Austria) Natascha Kampusch escaped after being kidnapped at age 10 and imprisoned in a windowless cellar for eight years by Wolfgang Priklopil.

May 2001: (Blackstock, Ont.) Two boys were locked in cages and beaten over a 13-year period in a small town near Port Perry.