Note Found Inside a Secret Room Brings Nightmare to Family

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A Greenville, SC family bought more than they bargained for when they purchased their family home in the Dunean section of Greenville. Behind a bookcase was a secret room. Inside that room, they discovered a note that read 'You found it!'

But there was no treasure. What they found instead was a room so overgrown with mold, the previous owner, who was responsible for the note, was forced to leave.

"Hello. If you're reading this, then you found the secret room. I owned this house for a short while and it was discovered to have a serious mold problem. One that actually made my children very sick to the point that we had to move out,"

the note read.

Kerri and Jason Brown, the owners of the old mill house were startled by the note and hired an environmental engineer to evaluate the secret room. The findings showed that the room contained the worst of the molds including Stachybotrys, or Toxic Black Mold, as well as several other types.

"On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the worst, I would give this one probably a seven. It's definitely got problems we want to see remediated," said Steve Hendrix of Hendrix Consulting Engineers.

The author of the note and previous owner of the home, George Leventis said about the note, "I didn't mean it to scare the Browns, which I think it did when they first read it. If I didn't write it, it would easily happen again."

With two of Leventis' kids falling sick along with his wife, they had no alternative but to follow the doctor's orders and leave the house. There was no money to fix the problem, and the Leventis' were forced to simply stop paying the mortgage and allow the house to fall into foreclosure.

Of the strategic placement of the note, "I put it in the room because I didn't want anyone to find it if it was left out in the house. I figured if someone else who had another interest or a stake in the house found it, they would just throw it away or they wouldn't tell anyone," Leventis said.

And the Browns are grateful. Kerri Brown says, "I was very thankful that George left the note, there is a possibility that he could have saved my daughter's life".

The Leventis' youngest daughter was so overcome by the effects of the mold that she was 'unable to hold any nutrition, nothing was working, she couldn't breathe,' according to her mother, Tricia.

The Browns filed a lawsuit citing Fannie Mae, and Century 21 Flynn & Youngblood Realtor Sue Bakx as having knowledge of the mold problem when they sold the house to the Browns.

Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association agreed to pay the Browns the $75,000.000 original selling price and were dropped from the suit. The suit still remains active against the remaining parties.