the backrooms: a blurry photo that changed the internet

be live streaming the event. If you can't watch it in the moment, you can watch it for a full week after if you can't watch that day. And yes, we will be wearing costumes from the substance I bought hair extensions. You're gonna want to see it. Second, please stop messaging me. Yes, I know Hawk to a girl. Haley welch that story as developments, But Sixteenth Minute is a show that gives stuff at least a little bit

of space to breathe before rushing to a conclusion. So it is very likely that I will return to Haley's saga, but not this week. But if you're just tuning in guess what you're in luck, there's something completely fucking different. When I was a kid, two things scared me more than anything. The first was these YouTube videos that people sent around when I was in middle school, where you would get like really close to the screen to look at something mysterious.

My cousin's family's house is over three hundred years old, and our grandfather had told us all kinds of stories about what had allegedly happened there, like in the eighteen hundreds, a man hung himself in the closet in the front room, a rich man named Charles Copeland was said to have blown his head off. He should have slaves who had escaped from the South supposedly hid in the basement. A maid was locked in a closet and clowed her way out,

leaving faint nail in prints on the door. Countless ghosts were spotted by my aunt's, my mom, my grandparents, my cousins, adopted this dalmatian one year that jumped out of a third story window and died. Did any of it really happen? Well, that last one definitely did and traumatized me. But the point is we thought all of it was true. And this was the house that we watched The Ring in

when I was nine. If you haven't had the pleasure, The Ring is a two thousand and three American remake of the Japanese horror movie Ringu, And while Ringo is technically the better movie, it was not the one that I peed myself during, so we're gonna stick with the American one. It stars Naomi Watts as a woman who

watches a cursed video tape. So if you watch the tape, you only have seven days to live before a little girl named Samara climbs out of a well with her hair draped over her face, all wet, and she climbs out of your TV. That you're playing the tape on and.

out of engaging with the VHS technology. It was based on a Japanese folktale that went back three hundred years before Ringu, and originally was a story that followed a samurai who wanted to make his servant girl Okiku, his mistress, which drove her to take her own life and haunt him, crawling out of the well that she drowned herself in, just like Samara climbs out of the well in the movie.

The story was adapted to a novel hundreds of years later in nineteen ninety eight, and it's this version of the story that became a horror hit in the US. And that's kind of the story of horror stories that transform as the ones lucky enough to make the jump from medium to medium survive. By the time The Ring gets to America, it's no longer about a Japanese samurai who wants to rape a young woman in his employment. Instead, it's about a neglected American daughter whose spirit is trapped

in a piece of almost temporary technology. The core anxieties that the story explores are basically the same, but the technology and personal dynamics that communicate them are constantly shifting. Technophobia was a core feature of the early Internet.

anxieties around social networks. I think my favorite in this genre was probably the movie Unfriended, which takes place on a skype call with a killer who hacks in.

or you will die kind of thing. Creepy pastas have been an online community that's waxed and waned for two decades, but there are consistence there. They're tech based horror stories and their absolute catnip for middle schoolers. And in twenty nineteen, one of the most famous modern horror stories put people in a choke hold, beginning only with a photo, one that had been circulating in spooky online communities for years, but didn't find its foothold in the public imagination until

it was posted to four chan. The image isn't high quality. It looks like it was taken by a two thousands era digital camera, you know, crisp, but a little pixely somehow. Still, the colors are oversaturated and the contrast is a bit too high. The space pictured is lit by fluorescent lights in the ceiling. There's not an inch of this space. You can't see in the queasy sort of way that

fluorescent lights allow. The thing is, there's not a lot to see because what we're looking at is a series of empty rooms, eerily empty rooms, and a space of indeterminate size. From our vantage point, which is a little crooked, as if the image was taken carelessly or when someone was surprised, we can see through at least three empty rooms, all with slightly different off white wallpaper that seems old enough to have faded to this sickly kind of yellow.

There's a number of entrances into this space, but no windows and no doors. The molding is the same in every room. There's electrical outlets with nothing plugged in. The carpeting is a flat brown with what looks like the occasional wet spot. In a previous life, it could have been a painfully outdated office space, or maybe a waiting room. It's vacant now, but you can't help but feel like

maybe you've been here before. Ian stopped the music. If you haven't seen the actual image of the back rooms yet, just pause the podcast and look it up. Okay, assuming you've gotten a proper look now. Audio mediums are tricky because memes are famously visual. But hopefully you see what I mean here. Okay, you can start the scary music again.

This image was posted by an anonymous user in response to a prompt asking for images that were somehow off and on May thirteenth, twenty nineteen, for whatever reason, it clicked. Another anon responded to the photo, soon to be known as the back rooms with the lure that would make it famous.

A creepy image that off of a few pixels has exploded into multiple communities, a philosophical community, an ever growing horror fiction community, and a real life mystery. Today we're going to explore all three, and I'll be honest, this episode is a little weird for this show because it

revolves around these freaky existential communities. But it's a freaky existential time, right And if you hang with us until the end of this episode, I can tell you exactly where the photo of the Backrooms was taken and the's actual history. So come with me if you dare to. May twenty nineteen, Lewis Varakhan and Milo Uanapolis are banned from Mark Zuckerberg's platforms. How quaint? Remember when he used

to do that? Harry and Megan had a baby, which really mattered to one girl from your high school who was like, the real family is slaying right now, and you didn't have the heart to reminder about colonialism. And after years of random circulation, a four Chan user gave shape to what exactly made the back rooms so terrifying.

If you haven't looked at the image of the back Rooms yet, I encourage you to look at my Instagram give it a like while you're at it, because unlike a lot of Internet horror, the back Rooms picture hasn't been photoshopped to look scarier than it actually is. The eeriness isn't because there's something scary in frame, but it's the tension, the uncertainty.

of doom that went viral at the right time. But what fascinates me about the back Rooms is just how much this weird picture of a few empty rooms that I can't explain why but I know it smells weird has inspired to the point where I feel the need to explain these separate, opposing camps that devotees of the Backrooms fall into, and they seem to attract audiences at different stages of life. Reading one the slightly older set.

From what I can gather find. The most haunting part of the backrooms is seeing it as a liminal space. We'll call them the liminal backrooms, and I include myself in this camp. The backrooms became the most popular example of this bizarre, familiar but menacing void like image, a perfect example of what many in the late twenty tens

were accumulating and distributing on forums as liminal spaces. This side of the Backroom's fandom appear to agree that there is this feeling of vague danger in this image, but not a danger that implies a monster. What the backrooms are haunted by is absence, the feeling that anyone who spent time there is gone. Now it's mystery, it's nothingness, it's seemingly infinite. Space is where the terror is. And then there is the second camp that younger people seem

to have fallen into during the Backroom's initial popularity. Reading too, this view of the backrooms put overt terror into the space by putting it in a creepy pasta format, so making the backrooms the setting of an extremely online campfire story, sometimes using familiar monsters and story beats from within the creepy pasta community to spin out fan fiction and web series, and almost all of this fan fiction and web series that I could learn about the authors were made by

people about college age or younger. We're gonna call them the Creepy Pasta backrooms. And in the Creepy Pasta Backrooms, you were being pursued through this infinite space by a monster who wants to kill you. You can maybe see why these first two groups tend not to overlap in spite of being inspired by the same blurry picture. One relies on the absence of context in the image, and the other attempts to put something supernatural into that image.

And while there's no definitive view of the backrooms, the Creepy Pasta read is certainly more conducive to internet viral spread. For young creative people. It serves as almost a writing prompt to make something about what you think is going to be lurking behind those walls. But there's a third community,

the lost media backrooms. Unlike the first two, this group isn't interested in the emotions that the backroom's image provokes, but is concerned with finding the location of the actual backrooms. The physical location, a task that takes a lot of patience and diligence, and I'm thrilled to report, Yes, the backrooms have been identified and they're still there, and the

journey defining them was goddamn fascinating. The discovery of the IRL backrooms was a year's long project with hundreds of contributors from the online lost media community and marked one of their hardest spot successes ever. But to fully understand these communities and how they interact with each other, I want to start with reading too the overt horror Creepy Pasta backrooms, which became the most famous space for amateur horror of the last ten years. So what are creepy pastas?

By definition? Their Internet horror folk tales scary stories told from person to person, usually by amateurs, anonymously, and very often both. And while there is now an official creep past A website, the community began in the late nineties into the early two thousands and began pretty decentralized. A number of creepypasta folks would pop up anywhere from boards on four Chan and read it to old school angel

fire sites and blog platforms. The first story to ever formally exist in this space was published online in two thousand and one called Ted the Caver, a series of blog posts that followed anonymous splunkers deeper into a very narrow local cave, who were subsequently driven mad by a supernatural being after discovering new cave passages, higheroglyphics, and start

having nightmares. The story ends with a post saying that the splunkers are planning to bring a gun into the cave next time, and then the blog was never updated again. Part of the appeal of Ted the Caver at the time was the ambiguity to the two thousand and one audience of whether this really happened or not. The story was formatted on an angel fire blog and was updated over a period of two months and included links. It

mimicked the real life blogging craze of the time. It's kind of an internet version of the Blair Witch Project, which came out two years before in nineteen ninety nine.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. This is a very successful creepy pasta story called Jeff the Killer. And what Jeff the Killer is about is a kid named Jeff, and you'll never believe what he does. Here is how the anonymous writer describes Jeff being bullied.

out of me as a kid. But the more I read through these stories, the more it started to connect with me that creepy pastas are a way for creative kids to navigate their fears in the same way that fan fiction is a way for kids to navigate some of their early sexual or just generally out a lesson feelings. The story has depict these experiences of fear and their own bodies that in all likelihood they haven't had yet,

but they think about all the time. For comparison, here is a pull from the classic fan fiction story My Immortal, which was based in the Harry Potter universe, which will become clear very quickly. Here it is.

in the mid twenty tens. And while the back Rooms made its debut a few years after peak Creepy Pasta, they quickly became a popular recurring location in the Creepy Pasta space, not because of its emptiness and scariness, but

because of the infinite possibilities for hiding unseen monsters. The most famous of these were made by a then sixteen year old filmmaker named Kane Parsons on YouTube, who short titled The back Rooms Found footage garnered millions of views when it first dropped in early twenty twenty two, going on to inspire about twenty more sh shorts from Cain

after and these shorts are really fucking good. After no clipping out of reality, something that can be prompted by something as innocuous as a stumble, the mean character ends up in the infinite Rooms.

ton of lore through series like Cain's. In the series, there's a reveal of a big secret corporation that discovered the realm of the Backrooms, and it's told in the same found footage realism style that made successes of the Blair Witch Project and Ted the caver So. At the time of this writing, as I said, the Creepy pasta interpretation of the Backrooms is far more popular than either.

We're going to talk about later in the episode. But what I think makes it special is that, unlike so much of what we see as necessary to make a footprint on the Internet right now, the scam, the recognition, the desperation, honestly that a companies hoping this moment could improve your life during a time that feels so hopeless. While the story is about the void that feeling really

isn't present in the creepypasta backrooms. The online video games designed to walk through the backrooms you can play for free. Caane Parson's work is free to consume, and much of the built out creepypasta lure isn't even attributed to any one person. It's a community built on passion and connection over a shared interest and I guess a shared fear.

And I think that's really cool. We could talk about the types of monsters one finds in the back rooms all day, but I wanted to talk to a true scholar of the creepy pasta form enter Sarah Bimo, author of The Horror of Networked Experience, which is a full look into how creepy pastas and Web two led to stories like this. Here's our talk.

I see it as something that is like kind of the product of maybe like unconscious anxieties surrounding like digital communication that kind of come to fruition and manifest as this new form of horror. And separately, I just like I read it a lot as a kid, and I just like.

grew and grew. This is very similar to folklore practices, wherein uh there's like a kind of distributed anonymous authorship that allows the stories to develop and morph over time, so that the you know, possibly the most interesting or shocking or like memeable elements of them are able to kind of grow and get developed, whereas the boring stuff maybe gets like left to the wayside, So that way they're kind of like bread to be as maybe like

dynamic and as effective affecting as possible. There's also like the Reddit slash the r slash No Sleep forum, where obviously you cannot be as anonymous as you can be fortune. So I think that this kind of sense of authenticity and of you know, urban legendness is fostered through this like collective role play. The folk tale qualities are fostered through kind of different means.

of like campfire stories and stuff. It's like it's something really associated with teenagers and young adults. And also I think it's kind of a sense of a kind of coming of age present through many of these stories.

like childhood TV shows or experiences. So like a big thing is like theme parks that are scary. Handle Cove is about like a kid's TV show that a bunch of people all watched. Within the digesis of the story that turned out to be like demonic and nightmarish. So I just get this kind of strong sense of anxiety of a separation from childhood that is being dealt with or negotiated in some way. People who are full adults are often like probably like more okay with the transition

from childhood to adulthood. You're like more established, And I don't know, it could definitely be like made strange and alienated. It's like a very common topic, but yeah, the particular preoccupation I just a very very teenage, very young adult.

like kind of static web pages, less interactivity. The reason I kind of came to that interpretation was because of this common preoccupation with the affordances of Web two point oh, like the modalities of the Internet and the infrastructure of the Internet itself was like the topic of many of these stories I mentioned before, Like email is often deployed as like a narrative element. Smile Dog, for example, consists of like a cursed image that is shared via email.

And I think this praise upon this kind of fear of surveillance and of exterior forces that can reach you no matter where you are, no matter what time. It is the instantaneity of communication, which is like unprecedented in human history. For example, the telephone, like the telegram, letters, like none of these forms of communication are able to do this.

dark forces like animate the web. But there is this possibility of a non digital like natural life, almost and I think that the backgrounds at least no longer engages with that, or it's not really committed to the idea that there is the possibility for a non digital life.

I say this because I don't think there's the same kind of moralizing of don't do this and you'll be safe, but rather there's like the acceptance that this kind of mode of reality, which is conditioned by technology and by the Internet and by digitalization, is completely pervasive and it's

just now a fundational structure of our lives. The source of fear becomes maybe more sophisticated or more complex in that they're now just engaging with kind of questions of appearance versus reality, like more fundamentally like what is reality? There are still these kind of fears of ghosts and demons and forces that haunt web infrastructures, but it's no longer possible to escape them by getting offline. They are

perhaps more and more endemic and more unavoidable. So I feel like the fear is it feels more existential and more kind of deeply rooted. Again, these are This is just kind of you know, my thoughts on seeing like the backrooms posts.

the same by passing through them. So I think this is also a kind of anxiety surrounding late stage capitalism and the effects it has on kind of architecture and space and identity.

calm down. And we're returning to the Backrooms to get a better look at the second now vibrant online community that helped launch them into fame and stick around because the true story of the Backrooms comes right after this. But first, more Glorious Weirdness listener the Liminal Backrooms. The liminal space community existed prior to the popularity of the backrooms, but for many, including myself, it was through the backrooms that I learned that this community and this term exists

did at all. So unless you're an ap English expat or just a fan of this genre of weird Internet, you might need a better working definition of what a liminal space actually means. Liminal, according to miss Merriam Webster, is.

the feeling that accompanies it. If you search liminal space, it becomes obvious that this feeling of transition is present. Liminal spaces are pictures of places that you would only spend time in on your way to somewhere else. Think hotel hallways in the middle of the night, empty airports, waiting rooms, old malls, rest stops, abandoned parking lots, specific spaces that are associated with a passing through. Very rarely

someone's actual home. And what's another way to say that, oh yeah, thresholds Liminal spaces in this Internet community are defined by the uneasiness one gets when looking at them. They're usually empty, always of people, and often of lighting or objects. If you're in the hotel hallway, you're always alone. The mall is more often than not abandoned, and whatever remains of its stores are sparse and feel from a

past decade. There is an implied nostalgia to many of these liminal spaces by extension, and that's one of the reasons I think they appeal to a slightly older audience, because those are people who can summon the image of something they remember that no longer exists, like chunky cheese

animatronic bands. But there is one small controversy within the liminal backrooms interpretation, and that's whether a liminal space can be strictly one that exists in real life, or if a digital space can be liminal too, And this disagreement appears to be microgenerational. People who associate nostalgia with analog technology tend to be purists and say nothing on a computer could be liminal, while people who grew up online have a much easier time seeing this quality in older

digital images. I'm a little bit on the fence about this one, and I tend to find the photos of old malls and hallways scarier than AI generated infinity spaces. But there are some digital images that I find eerie, not just because of their implied void, but because of the nostalgia I get when I look at them. An example that stands out to me is this old screensaver that would loop in countless elementary school computer labs I

went into when I was a kid. The screensaver is this infinite brick hallway that every few seconds turned to corner after corner, and the walls occasionally turn to concrete for no reason. The screensaver was amazed and nowhere, but every once in a while, this translucent smiley face would appear at the end of one of the hallways like almost like it was saying congratulations, you made it, except

you hadn't made it. You push right through the smiley face and take the next turn into the infinite corridor. It never ends. That to me is an extremely liminal space. But there's also the matter of timing. Remember the back rooms became popular shortly before the pandemic lockdown of twenty twenty and would only become more popular through the early years of the decade, culminating with Kane Parsons series in

twenty twenty two. Kane Parsons would have been about fourteen years old during the pandemic lockdown, So the audience and often the creators of this content were people at a liminal place in their lives adolescence, living in this moment in history that also felt very liminal, because what were the early twenty twenties defined by, if not discomfort, forced isolation,

fear and uncertainty. Fortunately things have improved, of course, This still expanding corner of the Internet didn't invent the idea of spaces, but it sharpened the definition and pinpointed the feeling that a true liminal space is thought to evoke. There are plenty of artists who pre date the Internet who have captured this feeling very effectively, filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick with the long, eerie hotel Hallways of the Shining,

basically all of the work of David Lynch. And there's also the cautionary, very vacant feeling cities of techno dystopia movies like Videodrome and Blade Runner. And this aesthetic has inspired a fair amount of YouTube horror, which I'll specify not the creepypasta corner of YouTube. We'll get there, but these videos and stories around eerie, slow moving, empty landscapes, and as time marched on, the kids that experienced these kinds of liminal spaces grew up and began making liminal

art of their own. Yile Edward Ball and Jane Schoenbrunn are horror film directors. They're both born in the late eighties, and their respectively fantastic movies that reference online horror are both influenced by creepy pasta and the movies in film that influence that culture. So just an araboris of backroom

like spaces. Kyle Edward Ball's first feature is twenty twenty two's skin amerink a terrifying found footage movie about two young siblings who find themselves seemingly alone in the middle of the night, and then the doors and windows of the house begin to disappear. It's liminal to its core and just full of this sense of claustrophobia, of a space where you're supposed to feel safe, you're home, but the space is collapsing within itself. And Ball didn't find

liminality by mistake. He got his start by making horror shorts on YouTube from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty one, and I fanesked what will become his signature style in a series called Fite Sized Nightmares, where he would adapt viewers submitted recaps of their own nightmares and translate them into experiment films to post on YouTube. He told The New York Times about his connection to internet horror back in twenty twenty three.

They also got their start online. Their first project, twenty eighteen's A Self Induced Hallucination, was composed of only found online footage that ended up piecing together a narrative about the history of creepypasta legend the slender Man, and when they moved into films that they shot on their own, we get the mother Load, the best example I've seen of how spaces like the backrooms and Creepy Pasta can shape and define adolescence. Twenty twenty one's We're All Going

to the World's Fair. The movie follows a loner, neglected teenage girl's obsessive journey doing a creepy Pasta style YouTube challenge called the World's Fair Challenge. And for what it's worth, boilers ahead for this movie, so please give ahead a minute or so if you haven't seen it and you want to. It's streaming on Max right now. And while we spend most of the movie thinking that what's happening to her is supernatural, she's flailing in her sleep, she's

smearing paint on her face. It's revealed in a conversation between her and another World's Fair Challenge participant at the end. But this isn't true at all. She's just doing what a lot of teenagers do, usaying her feelings of loneliness and frustration through an alternate reality horror game, something we only learn when the other player worries that she might hurt herself in real life?

that the character exists in is her own bedroom. When asked about the Internet's influence on their work in twenty twenty two in Little White Lies, Schonbrunn said, it's driving as much from the dial up wild West, haunted landscape that was my childhood online as it is from twenty twelve era creepy pasta amateur YouTube aesthetics, and I was of that generation where the computer entered the home and slowly became more and more of a magnet. Especially for

me as a queer creative kid. It was a space that was really important for me because it was hard to be both of those things. Where I was growing up, it was viewed as dark or strange, or danger, risks or wrong. I would wait for everyone to go to bed and stay up on the computer, writing and reading fan fiction, lurking on message boards, and aiming with people from school and weirdos I met online. It was something I never acknowledged or talked about in my real life.

That's the dominant experience I was drawing from emotionally and trying to explore with the film. I have a strong suspicion that combining technophobia with the reality of living in a real, three dimensional dystopia is going to dominate horror in the years to come, especially as go to creatives have a closer and more formative relationship with the Internet, and if that art is anything like Kyle and James,

we're in for some good stuff. So I wanted to talk to someone who deeply understood the academic and contemporary definitions of liminal spaces to get to the core of what the backrooms means better. And we're better to look for someone with this very particular set of skills than the Internet. Peter Heft is a philosopher who spent a hell of a lot of time analyzing the way that we interpret space and how it affects us psychologically. I learned so much about how liminality originated in his paper

Betwixt and Between Zones as liminal and deterritorialized Spaces. Here's our talk.

unknown is this kind of recurring motif. And at the time I was also listening to a very interesting podcast called Weird Studies that kind of tackles similar topics from an academic vein, and I realized, I guess that like this question of zones and liminality was talked about a lot in an anthropological register, also in kind of like the weird fiction and weird theory side of things, But the melding of the two was somewhat there, and I wanted to try to fill some niche.

the traditional anthropological understanding at least. There's also then the kind of Internet account which is quite literally like a space, which would be like an airport or a bus station or things like that, like the copy pasta Reddit post that's like, oh, this is like a scary type of place, right.

And we can kind of see this very literally codified and like the weird legal status of airports, like you're kind of in the country, you're kind of not. It's those are very literally threshold spaces. But I think those are ultimately not all that interesting because they're so rigidly defined, Like they are explicitly defined as spaces in between destinations

are two more codified locales. I think the more interesting instance would be things that are kind of wrenched from their ordinary context, or spaces that are changed depending on how we interact with them. And I think those can become liminal or cease having a level of limonel depending upon how we're interacting with them. And certainly there's more to say on that as well.

clocks on the walls. But our relationship to this space has changed dramatically, and I think that provides it's one instance of kind of like an unsettling feeling.

of religious contexts as well. Like in Judaism, right, you're still a child, but you're almost an adult as you're

learning to read the tara for a barmitzvah. Traditionally, like cultural things, the jump to the kind of physical register in the context of the Internet creepypasta sphere has probably just been an appropriation of terms to some extent, insofar as the Latin lineman just literally means threshold, So I would imagine that there's in that sense just an appropriation of terms, but also perhaps kind of this weird recognition that like, once you perhaps enter these odd spaces, you're

somewhat excluded from whatever you had been in previously, Like you venture into the back rooms and you're no longer in the hotel, or you're no longer amongst the living or whatever.

you can see the entire world that you're in. And that's an example of I guess this like kind of a weird digital version of of the back room. Is that I think that one who is familiar with video games has probably encountered at some point like the world has not fully been rendered yet.

We're making room for the rooms, if you will. I've seen this week, people are taking the lyrics of defining gravity and really holding space with that and feeling power in that. I didn't know that that was happening. In the final read of the back Rooms, as discovered by the online Lost media community, please meet eight o seven Oregon Street in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Oshkosh nineteen twelve a Wisconsin

city named after a menomine chief. It's a small Midwestern city of around thirty three thousand people by the year that the fictional movie Titanic takes place in It was first famous for being the site of a number of lumber mills, but a great fire consumed most of the

city's businesses in eighteen seventy five. They eventually rebuilt, and by nineteen twelve, their local paper, the Oshkosh Northwestern announces there's a new bomb and calend apartment store that'll be built on the south side of town, and it's completed and opened by the end of nineteen thirteen. The second floor of this location where the eventual back room's photo will be taken, because yes, the backrooms are on the

second floor, not a basement. The second floor is said to be devoted entirely to women's ready to wear apparel, millinery, rugs, carpets, draperies, et cetera. Fast forward to nineteen forty five. The store changes its name to Hirschberg's after it's sold and the building is remodeled panty girdles for only two ninety five Sign me up. The building is sold again in nineteen fifty five and is remodeled, this time as Rohner's Furniture,

who expanded the building again ten years later. By the seventies. They installed the carpet that we now associate with the back rooms and installed drop ceilings, those being the dull gray ceiling portions that those freaky fluorescent lights are installed in in offices. I was curious why these panels and lights are so associated with the seventies to me, and after looking into it YouTuber and would you believe it?

A woman I once shared a desk with at the Boston Globe, Hendre Gaylord, made a wonderful video about why this happened. It doesn't make the drop ceilings any prettier, but it does place the back rooms firmly in the story of twentieth century American architecture. Here's the explanation in her video.

By the time that current owner Bob Maza bought the place, eight o seven Oregon had been a department store, a furniture store, and a state scale location, and allegedly had been used at various times for office or storage space. Why are there seven slightly different wallpapers in the backrooms? Well, imagine if a floor of an Ikea was just cleared out. They're intended to look slightly different. They're displays that are

meant to look like somewhat different rooms. It also explains that too many walls and no windows because these weren't real walls, they were separators for furniture departments. And as Kent explains so well, the weirdness of this space is also connected to its many many renovations over the course of nearly a century, leaving this kind of unintentional architectural

charcutery board vibe. When Bob Maza bought eight oh seven Oregon Street and took the picture of what we now call the back rooms, it was on a Sony Cybershot digital camera on June twelfth, two thousand and two, at eight twenty one a m Yes, lost media detectives are that good, and he took the photo with a purpose. He had plans to turn the building into something it

hadn't been up until this point. A hobby store. HobbyTown USA, to be exact, a national chain with about one hundred locations still open today, so the plan for the back rooms were to clear them out and turn it into an RC racer track. If you don't remember, these are remote controlled cars that make this horror flying weird whale

when they move around. That plus RC boats and planes and trains and models were what HobbyTown USA was all about, and Bob's vision was not just to make his location a place to buy stuff, but to have community and really spend time with people who were just as passionate about this stuff. The famous Backram's image wasn't the only

picture he took that morning. While many of them didn't survive, there is still another angle of this same space on the Internet, and you can see more brown carpets some buckets on the ground, but the contrast of this photo is less scary and more normal. These two images are the only ones that survived on the Internet archive. In a blog post Bob made in two thousand and three, which was an announcement that HobbyTown USA Oshkosh was going to include this really cool RC track when it opened,

and in March two thousand and four. It did reopening after Masa's previous location near a Walmart got too expensive with rent, and that HobbyTown is open at eight oh seven Oregon Street to this day, even though the track that was set up in the backrooms is not presently there. From what I could find from video footage taken there over the years, the physical space that the backrooms were used for was actually a space filled with a lot of joy and community where hobbyists spent time together and

you basically know the rest of the story. In twenty nineteen, the backroom's image was posted and one random person on Twitter correctly identified the location immediately, but was ignored. It was ultimately a group of four discord users who found the original backroom's location, almost five years to the day

of it becoming a part of niche internet life. I've been vaguely aware of the Lost Media world for some time because they make these really great annual round up videos basically videos on YouTube that summarize the previous analog or digital media that the group is collectively tracked down and archived within the year. And it seems like there's a pretty wide definition of what constitutes a lost media person.

They can be generalists, or, like the Backroom's folks, can be uniquely honed in on finding one piece of media. Some highlights from the twenty twenty four lost Media video. They found Celebrity number six, a mysterious figure on a two thousands era fabric pattern, finally identified to be an obscure Spanish model, an unaired pilot of the Boondocks, and a previously thought to be lost Bram Stoker short story but no contest. The biggest discovery of the last year

was the physical location of the back rooms. Users named Leon, Semliot, Zarara, and Zaft used a shared discord to organize a series of challenging maneuvers. So all's well, that ends well? Right? Tale as old as time, man takes photo, photo inspires existential paranormal communities, and the image is traced to a shockingly wholesome small business history. But I still had a question.

Did Bob Maza, still the owner of HobbyTown, USA to this day, have any idea that this picture he took on an early morning in two thousand and two had inspired all of this? There is one more chapter to this story. Almost immediately after the backrooms were traced to eight oh seven Oregon Street. Local YouTubers that were either a fan of the creepy pasta or liminal communities started to just show up the HobbyTown USA Oshkosh like they started the next day, what.

do the selfie thing. You know, we just appreciate that they don't spend a lot of time talking to the people at work here to take them away from their jobs.

empty building from before they were born. But the excitement is contagious. There's no denying it. But you can't help but wonder what's in it for Bob. Now there are backrooms teens who were raised on creepypasta and four chan forums who were more interested in the empty room upstairs than buying something from the struggling hobby shop beneath it.

But don't worry. Bob may not be a redditor, but he is a businessman, and he took advantage of the press by star starting a go fundme to fix the roof of the store so that ideally he could help keep the business he loves alive by holding backrooms events. On this GoFundMe, he also shared testimony from people who had been racing our sea cars at HobbyTown over the years and deeply loved the community that Bob made space for.

photo was taken using removable carpets, walls, et cetera. This will allow us to keep the amazing RC tracks available for use on days that a backrooms event isn't happening.

a community around it. And while the back rooms may have become popular as this site for conquering your fears in a poorly written, creepy pasta and the site of existential horror for the lit middle crowd. In real life, The Backrooms is eight o seven Oregon Street, a small business and a community space, a space that, like so many like it, needs help to survive in a world increasingly hostile to community spaces. It remains to be seen

what happens to the Backrooms. Only time will tell if the new roof will make it to Oshkosh, or if Kane's a twenty four movie is going to take the world by storm. Maybe the Backrooms will be a moment in Internet history, the right symbol at the right time. But for all the horrific elements of the Internet we spend so much time on during this show, this freaky, liminal space does give me some hope. From one blurry photo.

There has been so much creativity, so much community built during a time where real life space is to commune wasn't safe. So backrooms people know clipped and ended up finding each other there and maybe, just maybe they will manage to save an RC club in Wisconsin in the process. The back Rooms your sixteenth minute ends now and for

your moment of fun. From Pharaoh Maguire's Wonderful Backrooms video, which is linked In the description, Bob Maza tells Ferrell about his favorite moments in the back rooms homes HobbyTown, USA.