Unraveling the Mystery of the Backrooms

Imagine stumbling into a place that’s endless, yellow-lit, and smells of wet carpet, with the low hum of buzzing fluorescent lights—no exit in sight, and something might be lurking just out of view. That’s the legend of the Backrooms. But here’s the twist: this internet horror phenomenon started with a single photo that fans spent over 20 years trying to trace back to the real world. The Backrooms aren’t just a story—they’re a digital-age urban legend, a collaborative nightmare, and maybe the purest example of the internet’s power to blur reality and fiction until you can’t tell which side of the wallpaper you’re on.

So what are the Backrooms, really? In May 2019, a user on 4chan’s /x/ paranormal board posted a photo of a bland, yellow-carpeted room with ugly fluorescent lights and faded wallpaper, asking for images that “just feel off.” The next day, another anonymous user replied, giving the image a name and a story: if you “noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms,” a place with “approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms.” That description became the blueprint for a new kind of internet horror.

The original Backrooms image is now one of the most recognizable “liminal space” photos online. But for years, nobody knew where it came from. Fans scoured the internet, debating whether it was a real place, a digital render, or a Photoshop prank. In 2024, the mystery finally broke wide open: internet sleuths traced the photo back to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, to a HobbyTown store under renovation in 2002. The photo, taken with a Sony Cyber-shot camera, showed a carpeted room with no windows, yellow wallpaper, and harsh ceiling lights—a mundane spot that, stripped of context, became iconic. The room itself was part of a former furniture store, Rohner’s Home Furnishings, at 807 Oregon Street. The discovery involved digging through the Wayback Machine, reviewing a March 2003 renovation blog, and matching file names down to “Dsc00161.jpg.” So beneath the legend, the real Backrooms are just the remnants of Midwestern retail.

But the internet didn’t stop there. Almost immediately after the 4chan post, fans started expanding the Backrooms lore—adding “levels” with their own aesthetics, dangers, and entities. On Reddit, the r/backrooms community grew to over 157,000 members by March 2022. Fans wrote stories, drew maps, and invented dozens of “entities,” from faceless humanoids to things that only appear in the corner of your eye. The fandom split over what counted as “real” Backrooms lore. Some preferred the terrifying minimalism of the first room; others built out complex mythologies with hundreds of levels and monsters. This divide led to the creation of r/TrueBackrooms, a splinter subreddit focused on sticking to the original legend.

The Backrooms became the poster child for “liminal space” aesthetics—photos of empty malls, vacant parking garages, or abandoned hallways that feel eerily familiar. The hashtag #liminalspaces racked up nearly 100 million views on TikTok, and images like the Backrooms started popping up in art, memes, and even architecture commentary. Paste Magazine’s Phoenix Simms wrote that the sickly yellow of the Backrooms ties into a long tradition of horror using color to evoke existential dread and decay. PC Gamer compared the Backrooms’ infinite maze to the impossible cities described in H.P. Lovecraft stories and manga like Blame!.

All this online worldbuilding went mainstream when American YouTuber Kane Parsons—known as Kane Pixels—created a short film called “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” and posted it on January 7, 2022. Parsons was only 16 when he started, using Blender and Adobe After Effects to build his digital nightmare. The nine-minute film, styled as lost VHS footage from the 1990s, follows a cameraman who stumbles into the Backrooms, only to be stalked by a monstrous “Lifeform.” That one video racked up more than 73 million views by March 2026 and was called “the scariest video on the Internet” by WPST. The series grew to 23 episodes, collectively hitting over 197 million views. Parsons received a Creator Honor from The Game Theorists at the 2022 Streamy Awards.

In his web series, Parsons added even more lore. The fictional Async Research Institute, set in the late 1980s and 1990s, discovers and studies the Backrooms—calling it “the Complex.” After Async opens a gateway into the Complex, missing person cases spike as ordinary people get pulled into the maze, sometimes never returning. One character, Peter Tench, is separated from his group and ends up aging years in what feels like days. Another, Marvin E. Leigh, is nearly killed in a room of bottomless pits. Parsons’ storylines introduced government coverups, experimental technology like the “Low-Proximity Magnetic Distortion System,” and hints that the Backrooms' architecture itself is alive.

The Backrooms’ collaborative lore exploded into other media. An indie game adaptation landed just two months after the original creepypasta, followed by titles like Enter the Backrooms, Noclipped, and The Backrooms Project. In Escape the Backrooms, a multiplayer game by Fancy Games, players navigate extended lore and hostile entities. The Backrooms 1998, a psychological survival horror game, stood out for its found footage style and brutally limited save system. By 2025, the Backrooms inspired Dreamcore, a first-person horror game from Argentinian studio Montraluz.

Hollywood took notice. In February 2023, A24 announced a feature film based on Parsons’ videos, with Parsons himself directing. Major producers included James Wan, Michael Clear, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, and Dan Levine. The film, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark—a furniture store owner—and Renate Reinsve, went into production in Vancouver, using over 30,000 square feet of custom-built Backrooms sets. Reports from the filming said people actually got lost on set because of the maze-like design. The movie is set for release in the United States on May 29, 2026, with a runtime of 105 minutes.

The Backrooms even made it into mainstream TV. An episode of American Horror Stories used the Backrooms as a setting, starring Michael Imperioli as a screenwriter haunted by the loss of his son. The episode was part of the show’s third season, released in a “Huluween” event of five spooky stories.

But for many fans, the real pull is the sense that the Backrooms could be everywhere and nowhere at once. The original photo feels familiar—like a room you visited as a kid, or a space you dreamed but can’t quite place. That collective deja vu is what’s kept the legend alive. Fans still debate the canonical “levels,” the true origin of the image, and whether anyone will ever find an actual liminal space that matches the Backrooms perfectly.

Here’s the kicker: the room that launched millions of nightmares was just a carpeted, windowless renovation space in a Wisconsin HobbyTown. The fake walls and partitions are gone now, replaced by a radio-controlled car racing track called Revolution Racing. But the legend it inspired is still growing—level by level, lore by lore. And nobody really knows if, somewhere, there’s another door that leads right back in.