Where The Backrooms Really Came From

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]In 2019, a post was made to a paranormal board on 4chan asking users to share images that felt off. Attached to the thread was a photo of a weird empty room with yellow walls and stained carpet.

[00:00:13]The fluorescent lighting looks so harsh you could almost smell the place through the screen. Underneath the image, an anonymous reply read, "If you're not careful and you no-clip out of reality to the wrong areas, you'll end up in the backrooms where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of the mono yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum buzz, and approximately 600 million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.

[00:00:43]God save you if you hear something watching around nearby because it sure as hell heard you." And just like that, the Backrooms creepypasta was born. What started as a single anonymous internet post quickly evolved into one of the most influential horror concepts with expanding lore, inspiring video games, YouTube series, online theories, and now even the highly anticipated A24 film adaptation of the same name. But, despite its growing popularity in the mainstream, one question remained unanswered for years. Where did the original image come from? Despite the image becoming instantly iconic in 2019, the true source of the photograph wouldn't be widely discovered until 2024.

[00:01:25]I'm aware that I've already talked about the origins of the image on my channel, but I feel like it was appropriate to make its own dedicated video on the topic instead of adding it to a compilation video. After all, there is a movie coming out. Also, since I do have your attention, make sure to watch the video till the very end to see if I earned your subscription, and check out the Patreon if you like, and check out my other social medias in the description of the video. Now, let's talk about the origins of the Backrooms photo.

[00:01:55]The earliest known confirmed upload of the image was first spotted on April 8th, 2018 on 4chan's random board B, where it was posted as a creepy image with no additional context added.

[00:02:08]However, during the search for the origins, many internet investigators quickly noticed the image's name file 1234237790136.jpeg.

[00:02:19]To many, this pointed to a possible Unix timestamp. This timestamp appeared to trace as a 2 Sunday, July 15th, 2012.

[00:02:27]With this information, it gave investigators their first lead. While it narrowed down the search to 2010 to 2012, due to 4chan's constant deletion of old threads, finding the image became a bit trickier. With the image gaining more attention, users' obsession with finding the origins of the photo grew.

[00:02:46]Many early speculations were that it might have been an office building, an abandoned furniture store, or a storage facility.

[00:02:54]With these clues, many users started claiming to have found a potential location. In 2020, online sleuths found a listing uploaded to the Collins Cold Storage Google Maps. This led to many calling the company with inquiries about the possible room that the photo was taken in. Eventually, the company came out stating they never had a room of that architecture. It had been part of an internet hoax where users would attach the photo of the backrooms to various Google Map images. In 2022, Reddit user luminal cheese uploaded an image claiming to have found the original backrooms photo. According to the post, the image came from the background of a 2010 vlog by Nick Carr, where he [music] explored abandoned post office buildings in New York. In the image, you can see yellow fluorescent lights shining on the wall opening.

[00:03:44]Peering into the opening, you can see what seemed to be a series of walls resembling the backrooms. And with the timeline speculated to be around 2010 to 2012, the theory seemed plausible at the time, but was unfortunately debunked. At this [music] point, the clues were starting to connect, but the story still didn't fully fit together. After weeks of searching through the archives, the investigation started hitting a breakthrough. In 2024, Discord user Surrera was able to find a 2011 upload to the TV board which featured the image of the Backrooms with a user asking for show recommendations with a similar horrifying vibe. And attached to the image was another file name, BSC00161.jpeg.

[00:04:31]This file name was major. Unlike the other file name pinpointing a date, this name aligned with the naming format used by older Sony digital cameras. The file name also suggested it was saved from the direct source. Due to this discovery, users began shifting their search from 4chan to other internet devices in hopes for another copy still existing. Initially, nothing turned up until user >> [music] >> Purdy Custis Reddix entered the file name into Twitter. While scrolling through searches, he found a tweet from 2019. The link itself no longer worked, but of course, nothing on the internet is gone forever. Using the Wayback Machine, Purdy Custis was able to recover an archive capture of the page from 2004. When removing the file from the link and plugging it back into the Wayback Machine, a 2003 blog post was uncovered. The blog post consisted of updates on a renovation being done to a hobby town store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

[00:05:29]The building was being remodeled to include an indoor RC car raceway. Funny enough, every photo tracking the progress of the renovation was inaccessible except for the Backrooms image and another photo of it from a different angle. What made this discovery even crazier was the realization that the backrooms technically existed decades before the internet ever saw the image. After the Hobby Town lead was uncovered, investigators began digging into older records connected to the building itself. Eventually, archive newspaper scans from the 1970s surfaced showing the exact same maze-like layout while the location was still operating as a Rona Furniture store. Meaning those strange segmented walls weren't built for the backrooms image at all. They were leftover existence for over 20 years before somebody accidentally photographed them during renovations in the early 2000s. And somehow that almost makes the image feel even stranger.

[00:06:30]>> [music] >> For years, people imagined the backrooms had to be some type of abandoned office building, hidden basement, or even a fake image created online. But in reality, it was just an old furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin that later got converted into a Hobby Town RC Raceway. According to later interviews, hundreds of renovation photos were taken during construction and the backrooms image was just one random picture uploaded onto the store's website to document progress. Nobody involved thought anything of it at the time.

[00:07:02]Years later, Jaden Salas would also discover that the man most people credited with taking the famous photo wasn't actually the photographer at all.

[00:07:11]Online discussions originally pointed toward a former Hobby Town owner named Bob. But later visits to the building revealed the image was actually taken by a man named Bill who worked there during the renovations. According to people who visited the location, Bill was surprisingly casual about the entire thing despite unknowingly creating one of the internet's most iconic horror images. Investigators visiting the building also noticed something interesting about the famous outlet visible in the backrooms image. For years, some people genuinely believed the photo had to be CGI or artificially created because of how uncanny the proportions and lighting looked. But, standing inside the actual building confirmed the image was completely real.

[00:07:55]The strange lighting, awkward layout, yellow walls, and endless segmented rooms all naturally existed inside the old furniture showroom before it was demolished during renovation. Some investigators and YouTubers even began traveling to the location themselves after the discovery went public. Walking through the building years later, they described a surreal feeling standing inside a place they had spent years only seeing through a single cursed image online. By the time visitors arrived, the original layout was mostly gone due to renovations, but traces of the old structure still remained. According to the people involved with the search, standing inside the building made the image feel less like a creepy pasta and more like a weird place of internet history accidentally preserved through random photograph. One of the strangest details is how close the image came to being completely lost forever. The famous Backrooms photo only survived because it happened to remain archived on an old webpage documenting renovation progress for the Hobby Town store. If that single image had never been archived, [music] investigators may have never found the real location at all.

[00:09:02]And for years, the original photographer had no idea the picture had become one of the most recognizable horror images on the internet. So, after years of theories, investigations, and dead end leads, one of the internet's most viral images was revealed to be nothing more than a store under construction. And yet, to this day, the image still holds an eerie familiar feeling. Maybe that's why the Backrooms became such a massive phenomenon in the first place. After countless of games and pop culture references, we are finally getting a movie on the Backrooms, which sounds so strange to me because this will always be considered a fortune photo in my heart. It is insane that Kane Pixels is the one directing the movie which makes him the youngest A24 director. In case if you're unfamiliar with his work, he's the one that created the backrooms lore after the photo became a creepypasta.

[00:09:55]If it wasn't for his web series, we would have never gotten the movie or have the photo as recognizable as it is today. Thank you so much for clicking on this video and like I said, it's insane that the backrooms is becoming a movie because one of my first viral videos was actually talking about where did this image come from? That was way before we found the actual origins of the photo so it was just speculation and explaining what a liminal space photo is because it was kind of new at the time. And by the time this video comes out, the backrooms movie has already come out so let me know if you enjoyed it down in the comments below. But thank you so much for clicking on this video and I cannot wait to watch the movie myself. But yeah, that's it for today's video. Check out the Patreon if you guys like and follow me on Instagram. It's literally just morbid for fun on every social media platform. But most importantly, I'll see you guys in my next video. See you guys.