What I’m about to tell you seems like something that you should only see in a horror movie. It really is mind-boggling how this even happened to begin with, let alone how it happened for three years.

Back in 2019 a 4-year-old girl and her sister were both removed from their biological parents’ home after a custody issue. The girls went and lived somewhere else but then things got bad.

One of the girls, Paislee Shultis, was abducted. Immediately it was her parents that were suspected of the abduction however whenever they were confronted by the authorities over the matter biological father of the girls insisted that he had not seen his daughter and that the girl’s mother actually abducted her and left with her to Pennsylvania. Police even searched the home on numerous occasions but never found anything.

Now here’s the crazy part.

The police ended up receiving a tip from someone that Paislee actually was at her biological father’s house in a hidden location. Apparently, there was some sort of secret room or secret pathway that led down to the basement of their home underneath the staircase. One of the detectives ended up walking up and down the stairs several times and never found anything, there was something that seemed off about the stairs. Something just didn’t seem quite right.

Police Chief Joseph Sinagra told CBS New York that Thiele “saw what he believed was a blanket and based on that, they started ripping the steps off the stairs. And at one point they had taken several of the steps off, they could see small feet.”

Thiele then found Paislee hiding with Cooper, her mother.

“It was pretty dingy. It was cold. There was blankets that were laying on the ground, on the concrete floor. They were completely soaked, extremely heavy,” Sinagra told CBS New York. “Now it is our belief that each and every time in the past two years that we went to the residence with new leads, that this is where the child and mother would hide.”

Thankfully the girl was okay but who knows what sort of mental damage has been done at this point after keeping her locked up for so long. Both of Paislee’s biological parents were arrested as well as her grandfather who also lived in the home and knew about the kidnapping.