The following is from our website The Backrooms Online that will launch later on this year and will contain information on Backrooms history, other Backrooms lores, real world Backrooms and more.
2019: The Beginning
It was 12 May, 2019, a thread was posted on the /X/ – Paranormal board of the infamous anonymous message board 4chan. The thread called “unsettling images” was a call for people to “post disquieting images that just felt off”.
[ Link to original thread on a 4chan archive ]
As part of the first post was an image of what appeared to be an office with yellow walls. The wallpaper seemed like it was from an 80s movie. The carpet looked stained in places. There were fluorescent lights overhead – the type that were common in commercial buildings back in the day. The walls appeared, odd – one of them didn’t reach the ceiling, they seemed to lead to random exits. The photo was taken on a slight angle – often referred to as a “Dutch Angle”. It was not the first time the image had appeared on 4chan, it had been posted a few times over the previous years, but it came and went as just a random image on the internet with no one even commenting on it.
Somewhere else in the world on 13 May, another user replied to the thread with the photo of the office, an aspiring horror writer who was bored at 3am and was looking to get a fix of horror. He wrote:
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 help you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure to hell has heard you
Alongside this text was a photo that isn’t associated with The Backrooms at all – a black and white image of rusty structures in deep water (this was actually an image of Shivering Sands Army Fort, used by the British Army between 1943 and 1958).
The rusty fort image with the Backrooms text only received four responses at the time, for the most part going unnoticed in a thread full of an assortment of photos that seemed creepy or “not right” in some way (interestingly there were a few liminal space images in there as well).
[ Link to the original text written in response to the image, also from the same 4chan archive ]
An Internet Legend
On 14 May – two days after the original thread was posted – a new thread was created on the same /x/ – Paranormal board. The thread had the simple title of “The Backrooms”. Another anonymous user had seen the text written in the previous thread and combined the photo of the yellow office with the text about The Backrooms into one image / meme.
[ Link to the original “The Backrooms” thread on a 4chan Archive ]
With the two parts now easily viewable as one image, the thread exploded.
User after user commented. People commented about the creepiness, how the image didn’t feel right, or speculated about what this mysterious “backrooms” was. Some comments were – in true 4chan manner – people making jokes or even being crude, while others were of a derogatory nature towards the concept and even the original poster. But amongst all of these random comments were people saying that the image looked familiar in some way. There were accounts from some people saying that they had “been there before”. One user recalled being in the army and going into an area full of halls and rooms, only to find his perception of reality had been changed. Some recalled very realistic and vivid dreams. While others talked about a sense of deja-vu simply by seeing the image.
Whatever it was, something about this image had hit a nerve with many people who saw it with this text accompanying it.
An Earlier Date?
If you dig into some of the threads about the original Backrooms post on Reddit, you’ll see people saying that they swear the image and text combination (including the reference to no-clipping) was posted a lot earlier. Some people mention around 2016, while one person thinks it could be as early as 2010 as he was in school at the time (which is why he could recall the year). Another person mentions that they talked about a “Backrooms” type place on old bulletin board systems (but they called it XXX back then), which could date it back to the 90s even.
Unfortunately a lot of 4chan’s archives have been lost over time as due to the size of the message board, a lot of threads were deleted – and no one has ever come forth with a screenshot to prove that the text existed any earlier. So all we have to go on is hearsay. There has also been mention of The Backrooms coming up in places like Tumblr, but again no links. Whether The Backrooms existed long before 2019 will likely forever be an internet myth in itself. Although never say never – no one thought the actual location would be found, and it was!
The now famous image of the yellow liminal space can be traced back to a 4chan thread from 8 April, 2008 – 10 years earlier than the Backrooms threads. This one was posted on the /b/ – Random board in a thread asking people to post “cursed images”. No text accompanied it and it received no replies. It would go on to be posted again on the following dates:
- 9 March 2011 on the /TV/ board ‒ “this is the most horrifying image I’ve ever seen are there any movies like this or is truth stranger than fiction?”
- 29 April 2011 on the /X/ board ‒ “ITT: We post a fear of ours with a pic that illustrates it best.”
- 14 March 2013 on the /r9k/ board ‒ “every time I come to /r9k/ all I see is terrible people who are apparently unaware that they’re lonely because they drive others away unwittingly” (1 reply)
- 8 April 2018 on the /b/ board ‒ Cursed Images? (2 replies)
Once again no one replied to these images. (Note that there likely have been other times, but these too have been lost over time).
Going Viral
On May 15th the image was posted to Reddit at r/greentext, a subreddit where users shared screenshots of posts originating from 4chan. The thread titled Worse than any creepypasta out there gained over 32,000 upvotes and over 1,000 comments when it was posted (currently it’s sitting at over 33,000 upvotes).
Here the response was much the same. User after user commented on this image and text combination with responses similar to the 4chan thread. And here too amongst the responses were some talking about deja-vu, vivid dreams or remembering having been to a Backrooms type place.
Over the next few days, the image had started to spread onto social media sites and other places online. Initially it found its way onto Twitter, with it eventually being shared around Instagram and Facebook as well as countless other online communities. The first memes about it were created and shared only a couple of days after the initial Reddit post.
Such were people interested in talking about The Backrooms that a couple of subreddits were created. r/backrooms was created on 17 May and r/TheBackrooms was created on 18 May. On 20 May the very first Levels were created ― the beginnings of the Extended Universe.
The Backrooms went viral in some corners of the internet… but the biggest was yet to come.
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