What happens if a secret keeper dies

Pettigrew was the one that slaughtered the 12 muggles and then faked his own death. So, since we know Muggles can access the Leaky Cauldron which seems similar to a Fidelius charm after the Secret-Keeper dies, and thus explains why Harry had to get it pointed out by Hagrid , and yet there are no fears of Muggles revealing the location of the Leaky Cauldron to others, it seems that Muggles cannot be ….

The likely reason for Dumbledore not being the Secret-Keeper was that he was obvious choice to be the Secret-Keeper. He was the leader of the resistance against Voldemort, he was a high-profile target at the very top of the list for Voldemort so the sights were locked on Dumbledore already. Albus DumbledoreAlbus Dumbledore was the Secret-Keeper for Grimmauld Place until his death in , after which everyone who had been told the secret became a Secret-Keeper themselves.

Magic merely reinforces the trust of friends. If a Secret Keeper tells you their secret, then you are bound by magic not to tell anybody. This is why Harry had to learn of Grimmauld Place via a handwritten note from Dumbledore, and not another member of the Order.

However, if Dumbledore had never told anybody, then nobody would ever be able to find it again. A more practical application for this might be some sort of treasure or prize. Twenty times as many opportunities for the Death Eaters to get the secret out of somebody. He told twenty people members of the Order. Dumbledore dies, so the responsibility of keeping the secret transfers to the Order members. The rest follows.

If the Secret-Keeper dies without telling anybody the secret, then nobody else can ever discover it. If they tell anybody else, then responsibility for keeping the secret is transferred to those people upon their death.

The Fidelius charm used by Dumbledore to protect Grimmauld Place is different to the usual charm. Dumbledore is smart, so he probably foresaw his death be it that of Half-Blood Prince or not , and took appropriate measures.

The Order needs to carry on after he dies, and that means they need to be able to bring new people to Grimmauld Place. Dumbledore may thus have set up the charm so that Secret-Keepers work as I described above, so that this could happen. The answer is the FAQ answer is correct, but incomplete.

No one else will know the secret when the SK dies however it does not address what actions are available to those who already knew the secret. It could be a retcon in GoT or a more complete telling, depending on the context of the question answered in the FAQ. If the Keeper had chosen not to reveal the secret to anyone so that they are the only Keepers , then the secret rested with them forever.

It is unknown what criteria had to be met before someone could qualify as a Secret Keeper. However, it appeared that, to be eligible, one had to be capable of divulging the secret if they wished to, as this would explain why wizards did not simply bestow the secret onto creatures who could not speak a human language, or creatures such as house-elves , who could simply be ordered by their masters to not divulge the secret as such an order would override their free will.

Once the secret had been implanted, the only method for another to learn it was for the primary Secret Keeper to divulge it to that person directly ; it could not be discovered any other way. Additionally, the disclosure had to be completely voluntary, as methods of magical coercion such as Veritaserum , Legilimency , the Cruciatus Curse or the Imperius Curse had no effect on the charm. The people to whom the Secret Keeper had already divulged the information secondary Keepers would not be able to pass it along even if they wanted to, and the information in question could not be learned even by stumbling across it, even if one were staring the secret in the face.

For example, if someone were to hide a location in this way, even if a person were to stumble into the specific area they would not be able to recognise it for what it was i. The method for the primary Keeper to voluntarily tell another person the secret could be verbal or written. This theory was postulated because whilst 12 Grimmauld Place was under this charm and being used as a base of operations for Harry, Hermione and Ron only after Dumbledore's death, the Death Eaters evidently became aware of 12 Grimmauld Place's approximate location knowing that Harry Potter had inherited the property from Sirius Black.

It is his stated intention to visit his parents' house in the village of Godric's Hollow ; but as the secret-keeper, Peter Pettigrew , is apparently still keeping the secret, it may prove difficult for him to find it. In fact, it did not seem to be too difficult for Rubeus Hagrid to find it immediately after the incident; while Sirius Black was also present at the time, he almost certainly had been told the secret by Pettigrew earlier.

There is a great deal of discussion on various fan sites about the "missing day"; Voldemort had been dead for a full day before Hagrid appeared at Privet Drive with Harry. It is believed by many fans that the occurrences during that day would be important, possibly even pivotal, to events in the seventh book. It is entirely possible that, if the Fidelius spell was still active, Hagrid would have been unable to find the place until one of the parties to the secret was there.

We can safely assume that Sirius, as one of the Marauders, would have been aware of the Potters' location; in fact, he does say, in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , that he had seen "the bodies and the destruction" of the house, so he must have known the secret, either before the Fidelius charm was performed, or by Peter informing him of it afterwards. If the Fidelius charm was still active, Hagrid would have been unable to enter the remains of the house to recover Harry until Sirius appeared on the scene; and it would have been Sirius who actually removed Harry from the wreckage and passed him to Hagrid to carry back to Little Whinging.

Against this, of course, is Hagrid's statement that he carried little Harry out of the wrecked house himself, which would strongly imply either that Hagrid had been informed of the secret, or that the Fidelius charm's effect ended with the deaths of the Potters. It turns out, however, that the author's statement is at the very least misleading. Mad-Eye Moody explains that with the death of Dumbledore, everyone who had been party to the secret before is now a Secret-Keeper for the secret themselves.

As a result, when Hermione accidentally Side-Along-Apparates Yaxley a Death Eater to the front step of Grimmauld Place , she assumes that she has revealed the secret to him.