The Backrooms: Lost Media Fans Have Finally Identified Where the Creepypasta Photo Was Taken

“The Backrooms” is that rare 4Chan post that not only became familiar to mainstream audiences, but broke out of the social media bubble to become a fairly mainstream pop culture phenomenon. Originally just a creepy photo, an anonymous user attached it to a short “creepypasta,” and it almost immediately took off. The story of The Backrooms is short, to the point, and basically a perfect creepypasta: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

 In the decade or so since, there has been a webseries adaptation, video games, and A24 is reportedly developing a feature film based on the concept. So, it’s probably not surprising that eventually people started to wonder what the actual story of the photo was. That kicked off a search — which ended yesterday.

A number of Discord users — handles Serrara, Semliot, Xaft, and PerditusRedux — have discovered an Internet Archive link that shows off the very first version of the photo that was posted online. PerditusRedux was key in finding the origins of the photo, and it was actually a fairly simple idea: they took the earliest known filename for the image (one discovered and identified by Serrara), and plugged it into X’s search function. That kicked back a years-old tweet that featured a link to a post from Hobby Town in Oshkosh, WI. 

You can see a pretty great breakdown from YouTuber Farrell McGuire below.

While a number of people after them would find the image liminal, unsettling, or downright creepy, the photo was originally presented without any such context. Instead, the link detailed the process of tearing apart some old display walls from a closed-down furniture store, so they could build a race track for remote control cars.

The furniture store theory was one that had been put forth by McGuire about a month ago, in a video where he speculated that’s why there were so many odd, seemingly false walls, why the walls had a protective rail mounted on them, and why there seemed to be so few plugs for such a large area.

Maybe if we get lucky, A24 can include some creepy RC cars in their version of The Backrooms now…!