Skyrim Has A Super Secret Room I Wish I'd Never Found

1 hour ago 4

Published Feb 1, 2026, 1:00 PM EST

Ewan is Deputy Editor for ScreenRant's gaming section. He still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase, and knows more about The Legend of Zelda and Doctor Who than is probably healthy.

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Most of the secrets hidden within The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim are genuinely exciting and rewarding to find. There are treasures not marked on the map, hidden bosses, secret dungeons, and entire quests you can miss out on. But there's one secret I wish had remained a secret.

In Skyrim there are plenty of NPCs that you can either befriend, rob, abuse, or just straight-up murder. But what happens to those NPCs when they die? In-universe, their bodies would likely be taken to the nearest Hall of the Dead and prepared for burial, but where do their actual bodies go after they've been killed in the game? I used to assume they were just deleted. That was a simpler time.

Skyrim's Dead Body Room Will Haunt My Nightmares

Maybe you already knew about this

Skyrim's dead body cleanup cell, a strange purple room filled with bodies

There's a chance some of you reading already knew about this, but I recently discovered Skyrim has something called a Dead Body Cleanup Cell, and it's haunting my every waking moment. This is a secret room where the game sends NPCs you've killed and/or murdered. To be clear, it's just named NPCs, not every single bandit or monster you've bested in battle.

This haunting room is not accessible by any conventional means. You can only get to it by fiddling around with console commands. But if you do, you'll find yourself in a small stone cell that's dimly lit in purple and green. At the end of the hallway is a doorway leading out into a vast black void. In the cell is every person you've killed, naked as the day they were born. I don't know why Bethesda decided to make this room as close to actual hell as possible, but fair play to them.

Why Does Skyrim Have This?

It makes sense, but I wish it didn't

As it turns out, NPCs that don't respawn can't ever be fully deleted. That's one of the (many) limitations of Skyrim's engine. So while generic enemies will always come back, any character with a unique name has to stay dead to keep the immersion alive. So off they go to the death cell so that their bodies don't litter the game. Horrifying. Apparently living NPCs that can't be killed, otherwise known as essential NPCs, can also be sent to this room for various reasons if they're not dead but not currently needed in-game.

Incredibly, it does turn out there's one essential NPC who will never get sent to the dead room. M'aiq the Liar actually has his own special holding cell called Elsweyr that can only be accessed by typing "coc elsweyr" into the console. Must be nice chilling away from all those corpses.

While it makes sense on a practical level, it still doesn't explain why Bethesda chose to make it look so damn creepy. Even if you take the corpses out, it's still a frightening liminal space that you'd be terrified to spend five minutes in, let alone eternity. I love Skyrim, but I fear I went way too deep on this one.