How did the image that sparked the internet urban legend 'The Backrooms' come to light?



The Backrooms is an urban legend that originated on the Internet and is about an endless 'empty room' with yellow wallpaper and carpet, where various mysteries and terrifying devices lurk. It was born around 2019 and has since been adapted into films and games, becoming a popular piece of content worldwide. The true identity of the photo that inspired the creation of The Backrooms was revealed in 2024.

'Backrooms' photo of the yellowing office at Oshkosh HobbyTown

https://boingboing.net/2024/05/30/original-backrooms-photo-of-yellowing-office-dungeon-finally-identified-as-oshkosh-hobbytown.html

The Backrooms of the Internet Archive | Internet Archive Blogs
https://blog.archive.org/2024/06/01/the-backrooms-of-the-internet-archive/

'The Backrooms' was triggered by an image posted on the 'unsettling images' thread on 4chan's /x/-Paranormal, an overseas bulletin board site, on May 12, 2019. The room in the image is quite large, but has no furniture, just yellow wallpaper, carpet, and fluorescent lights lined up on the ceiling.



Then, on May 13, 2019, the day after the post, a thread member posted the following: 'If you're not careful, if you get lost in the wrong place, you'll end up in The Backrooms, a place with a terrible smell of old, damp carpet, a yellow color that will make you go crazy, fluorescent lights humming constantly, and you'll be trapped in a random, empty room across 600 million square miles. If you hear anything moving around nearby, that thing will know you're there too. God help you.'



This article prompted 4chan residents to add more and more creepy settings to a single photo, and they started posting their own ghost stories about The Backrooms. In this way, urban legends created and circulated by an unspecified number of people on the Internet are called '

creepypastas '.

The Backrooms was basically just a text and image story, but two months after it was posted on 4chan, a game version was developed by volunteers. Games based on The Backrooms have since been released by various studios.

The Backrooms Game OFFICIAL First Walkthrough Test - YouTube


In addition, in 2022, amateur video maker Kane Parsons released a series of videos on The Backrooms on YouTube. The videos were highly praised and spread rapidly from 4chan to social media such as Twitter (now X), TikTok, and Instagram, which is said to have greatly increased the popularity of The Backrooms.

The Backrooms (Found Footage) - YouTube


While The Backrooms is rapidly expanding with Internet users around the world, the question of 'What kind of photo is the image that originated from The Backrooms?' has not been clarified, and some volunteers have been investigating the details of the image for many years, and finally in 2024, the true identity of the photo was revealed.

It all started when Semliot , who was piecing together old 4chan archives, and Serrara, who was looking through image hashes posted to 4chan, discovered that the same image had been posted to 4chan way back in 2011, even further back than the /x/-Paranormal post. The post showed the original filename, 'Dsc00161.jpg.'



Then,

PerditusRedux , who searched for this file name with X, discovered that the following post was posted on May 19, 2019, one week after the image was posted to /x/-Paranormal. The original URL was written in this post, so the identity of the photo that was the origin of The Backrooms was revealed.



The original source of the photos, hobbytownoshkosh.com , was a toy store website that posted photos of its renovation of a tenant in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. One of these images was the origin of The Backrooms.



According to rkfg_me, who posted the post that held the key to revealing the identity, he used the image search function to investigate its origin when it was posted in 2019, but no one noticed rkfg_me's post at the time. And since the page with the photo had already been deleted around 2020-2021, when The Backrooms started to become famous, it did not even show up in a Google image search.

The basement shown in the photo is apparently a race track for radio-controlled cars, and the yellow wallpaper and carpet are no longer there.


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