The Backrooms Isn’t Real — But the Photo That Started Everything Actually Is

Few things in internet history have blurred the line between fiction and reality quite as effectively as ‘The Backrooms’. What began as two anonymous paragraphs on a message board evolved into one of the most psychologically resonant horror phenomena the web has ever produced, and the question of whether any of it could be real has haunted millions of curious minds ever since.

The short answer is no. ‘The Backrooms’ is a fictional location that originated from a 2019 4chan thread, generally portrayed as an impossibly large extradimensional expanse of empty rooms accessed by exiting reality. But the longer answer is far more interesting, and far more unsettling.

The Backrooms Creepypasta Origin and the Anonymous Spark

On May 12th of 2019, the original ‘Backrooms’ image of a corridor with an oppressively bright strip light, manila walls, and no furniture was posted in 4chan’s paranormal board in response to a request for images that were “unsettling” or just felt “off.” The image had initially appeared on 4chan a year earlier, with no accompanying text, and neither the identity of the person who posted the image nor the person who responded with the original story is known.

That anonymous reply became the seed of a mythology. The concept was strikingly simple: an empty office-like space with yellow walls, fluorescent lighting, and carpet that looked slightly worn, described with a short paragraph explaining that one enters ‘The Backrooms’ by “noclipping out of reality,” a reference to a video game glitch where a player phases through a solid boundary. That was all it took. Within days, the internet had found its new obsession.

Days after the original post, users began to share stories about ‘The Backrooms’ on subreddits including r/creepypasta and later r/backrooms. A fandom began to develop, with creators expanding upon the original by introducing additional floors or “levels” and “entities” which populate them.

Liminal Space Horror and Why It Hits Different

The real genius of ‘The Backrooms’ lies not in monsters or gore, but in something far more primal. The creepypasta has been associated with the concept of kenopsia, first coined in ‘The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows’: “the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.” It is a horror born entirely from familiarity going wrong.

Both Kotaku and Tama Leaver, a professor of internet studies at Curtin University, felt that ‘The Backrooms’ was scary because it invites you to interpret what is not shown. While Leaver believed that the “eerie feeling of familiarity” helped draw fans together, Kotaku noted that the horror was partly derived from the subtle “wrongness” present in liminal spaces.

The creepypasta has been cited as the origin and most well-known example of the liminal spaces internet trend, which evokes a sense of nostalgia, lostness, and uncertainty, with the hashtag #liminalspaces amassing nearly 100 million views on TikTok.

The location from which the initial photo was taken was not convincingly identified for years, which served as a testament to its bland, inoffensive, cookie-cutter uniformity. Some suggested it showed a location in Montana, while others argued it was not a real location at all, but rather an image created using a computer algorithm.

The Wisconsin Discovery That Finally Answered the Mystery

For years, the untraceable nature of the original photograph was part of the mythology itself. Then came the reveal. In May 2024, four people from Discord eventually found the real location of the original ‘Backrooms’ image from a photo taken in 2003, discovered through the WayBack Machine.

The image was located at 807 Oregon Street in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, inside a small HobbyTown store. According to the blog showing the image, the caption described a water leak that had occurred before the photo was taken, which explained the temporary walls, fluorescent lighting, and absence of windows.

The shot was taken to document the store’s renovations in the early 2000s, featuring temporary walls, fluorescent lighting, and no windows, which is not unusual for a renovation context. A hardware store dealing with water damage, documented for insurance purposes, became the most unsettling image on the internet.

The discovery both punctured and deepened the legend simultaneously. Knowing the mundane truth behind the image did nothing to reduce the dread it produced. If anything, it made the concept more powerful. Any real place can look like ‘The Backrooms’ under the right circumstances.

Kane Parsons, the A24 Film, and How a Teenager Mainstreamed the Myth

No single contribution transformed ‘The Backrooms’ from niche creepypasta into cultural phenomenon more dramatically than a short film uploaded by a teenager in 2022. In January of that year, then-16-year-old Kane Parsons, known online as Kane Pixels, uploaded “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” to YouTube.

Presented as a VHS tape, it was praised by critics and called “the scariest video on the Internet” by WPST. The series collectively garnered over 197 million views and is credited with lifting ‘The Backrooms’ from obscurity into the mainstream.

Parsons introduced plot elements such as Async, an organization which opened a portal into ‘The Backrooms’ in the 1980s and conducted research within it. His found footage elements and retro aesthetics turned the video into a viral phenomenon even outside the creepypasta community.

Kane Parsons is now directing a feature film for A24, making him the youngest director in A24 history. The film stars Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett, and Lukita Maxwell, and follows a therapist who ventures into an otherworldly dimension in search of a missing patient. It is scheduled to be released in theaters on May 29, 2026, and is based on Parsons’ web series and the original creepypasta.

Despite stiff competition from other summer tentpoles, ‘Backrooms’ is currently tracking toward a 20 million dollar domestic opening weekend. For the feature film, over 30,000 square feet of Backrooms sets were constructed, which reportedly led to people getting lost on set.

‘The Backrooms’ is fictional, its iconic photo is a Wisconsin hobby shop mid-renovation, and its mythology was built by anonymous strangers on the internet. None of that explains why staring at the original image still makes your stomach drop. If you have your own theory about why that yellow hallway gets to people the way it does, the comments are exactly where that conversation belongs.