Backrooms Horror
In 2019, a photo of a liminal office space spawned a whole genre of horror called The Backrooms. But what are they, and what entities lurk inside? And are they a real place where some people actually get trapped?
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SOURCES
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2024/05/30/finally-the-internet-found-the-backrooms/
https://www.reddit.com/r/backrooms/comments/1d3o2mk/original_backrooms_post_has_been_found_on_the/
https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/128519113.html
https://kotaku.com/best-creepypasta-what-is-backrooms-tiktok-steam-reddit-1850298058
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-backrooms
https://www.vice.com/en/article/is-the-backrooms-real/
https://abcnews.go.com/US/backrooms-horror-storytelling-online/story?id=92623707
https://www.verywellmind.com/the-impact-of-liminal-space-on-your-mental-health-5204371
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/noclip
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/24/americas/air-canada-passenger-wakes-empty-plane/index.html
https://communityforums.atmeta.com/t5/Talk-VR/Tell-us-your-real-scary-story/td-p/760334
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/may/22/experience-im-stranded-in-a-ghost-town
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-21/tasmanian-bernard-gore-stairwell-death-coronial/13002014**
TRANSCRIPT
Imagine yourself in a room.
It looks like you’re deep in an office building, no windows, no light from the outside world. The walls have a light yellow tinge to them, but it’s hard to tell if that’s the color of the wallpaper, or just from the high powered fluorescent lights buzzing above you It looks like a place where once, a dozen people sent faxes and stapled papers together, but today it’s completely empty.
You walk through the space, over off white berber carpet into another, identical room. You want to get out, of this place and see daylight again, but the further you walk, the more identical rooms you see, it’s like a never ending maze of abandoned office core rooms.
Just then, you hear a noise. Something is trailing you, following close behind as you walk from room to room. You pick up your pace hoping you can find your way out before whatever is in there finds you.
You’re in the backrooms, a mythologized location that started with a picture posted to 4chan in 2019. A picture of the room I just described to you, taken on what seems to be a point and shoot camera from the early 2000’s.
This photo launched a series of creepy pastas and terrifying youtube videos exploring the backrooms, it even inspired the Apple Show “Severance”s design, and is becoming a movie for A24.
The idea for the backrooms, is that they’re a real world just outside of our own, and the way you get to there, at least according to the creepypastas, is by “no clipping” out of reality, basically crossing the precipice of our world into a liminal space. Like purgatory. You can do this by finding a wall or corner of a room that looks off, like the texture is wrong or it’s just a shade too dark and leaning against it. Some people say you’ll get there if you find a door that doesn’t belong and go through it. Or by falling down stairs.
Once you’re in the backrooms, you’ll be subjected to different levels of unsettling liminal spaces, you’ll be the only one there, except for the entity that lives in that level (growl)
The world has become this large horror fiction playscape, but it also launched an internet mystery that needed to be solved. I said the whole series was launched by a single photo, well, no one could figure out the source of the photo. It just showed up on the internet one day, as if it was taken inside the actual backrooms. And it lead many to wonder, is this an actual photo of the backrooms, a purgatory like space that goes on for infinity?
So today I want to talk about the backrooms levels and all of their horror, but I also want to share with you some real life stories where people felt like they fell into the backrooms, that is, no clipped out of reality into a sickening liminal space. And as always, listener discretion is advised.
Welcome to heart starts pounding, I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore
Before we dive into todays episode, i just wanted to remind everyone that on monday, my collab episode with the two girls one ghost podcast is coming out. We spent the night in Salem Massachusetts most haunted air bnb ghost hunting and talking about the spooky history of where we were. Part one will be posted on my feed and part two will be posted on theirs, available wherever you get your podcasts and on Youtube.
I also wanted to shout out our listener LaLounia who works in a French hospital from the 1650’s. Apparently the hospital was THE place to lock up women deemed mad at the time. They would host a big party there called the bal des folles or Ball For The Crazies for the women. Sounds like it would be VERY haunted there, but I’m sure you’re in good company
Anyways, you ready? Because I’m about to take you to the Backrooms (the hum of a fluorescent light getting louder)
On January 6, 2017, Bernard Gore, a 71 year old retiree, was on his way to the Westfield Bondi Junction shopping center in Sydney Australia. He had made a plan with his wife, Angela, to meet outside a grocery store on the mall’s third level around 12:30 p.m. That was a typical plan for them: arrive separately, meet at a designated spot, and continue their afternoon together.
But when Angela arrived at their designated meeting spot, there was no sign of Bernard. This caused her to worry, see, the year before Bernard had vanished while on a night out in Hobart. He was later found but with little memory of how he had gotten there. At a doctors visit later on he was diagnosed with early stage dementia.
So Angela started making laps around the mall, hoping she’d see him, but there was no sign of Bernard. She headed home, maybe remembering how he reappeared just fine the last time, perhaps Bernard returned without telling her. But by nightfall he was still missing.
Angela didn’t know that earlier that day, at the Chanel store in the mall, staff had seen an elderly man who appeared disoriented and upset. He asked for directions to the parking lot but declined further help. Mall employees reported the man to security, and suggested they review the CCTV footage in case he needed assistance. But when they looked at the tapes, they didn’t see any trace of Bernard. And they concluded that he must not have gone to the mall taht day.
By the time Bernard’s family filed a missing-person report, it seemed the 71-year-old had vanished into thin air.
And despite his family’s insistence that Bernard was in the mall, the police weren’t convinced. They broadened their search into the surrounding streets, combing train stations and bus stops. But there was no sign of Bernard.
Three weeks after Bernards disappearance, a mall employee was doing their rounds when they opened up a door in the corner of the mall, just enough out of sight that you would miss it unless you were looking for it. And when he opened it, he started shouting for someone to call the police.
See, What investigators and Bernard’s family didn’t know, was there was an area of the mall that people have referred to as The Backrooms. An place where it feels like you’ve slipped out of reality and into a purgatory, full of nothing but concrete and fluorescent lighting that goes on for 8 miles. A place where many people had gotten trapped before. It would be this part of the mall where Bernard’s body would be found three weeks later.
To understand the horror of the Bondi Junction Stairwell, let me tell you the story of Donnie O’sullivan
Donie had been shopping at the Westfield Bondi Junction in 2014. He was trying to exit the mall but the elevators were packed. So he walked back towards the shops when he saw a door, tucked away in a corner, almost hidden. It must be a stairwell, he thought, as he opened the door and stepped inside
The heavy door slammed shut and he started their way down the stairs. Bright red stenciled letters that wrote out EXIT guided him, but he noticed that the arrows underneath them didn’t always point in the same directions. Were they supposed to be going down or up?
He kept going, flight after flight of stairs , just concrete walls on either side of the tight staircase, no doors or windows to break it up, when finally, he reached a door. but it had no handle. So he made his way back to the door he came from only to realize that that door had no handle either. He could hear the muffled sounds of the mall on the other side , just barely. He pounded on the door hoping someone would come let him back into the mall, but it seemed like even though he could hear the people in the mall, the people in the mall couldn't hear him.
Not knowing what else to do, he started his way up every door along the way was either locked or had no handle. Eventually, he came to a hallway that led to a white door, which was also locked next to it was another stairwell that led down even further. This time when he descended, there were no muffled sounds coming through the doors, just dead silence. Wherever he was, he was no longer in the mall it seemed.
He came to another hallway, and another, each one leading him further into the labyrinth. He had no way of knowing it, but the maze of hallways, stairs, and locked doors added up to 8 miles.
Employees knew about the mall backrooms, and they never dared to go inside. Once a week a mall employee would do a sweep of the area, but that wasn’t official mall policy, that was just something they decided to do to make sure no one was locked back there. But they never swept all 8 miles.
Five days after Donie disappeared through the door, a manager of an office buildings cleaning company was doing a routine check of the area when he found Donie crumpled at the bottom of one of the sets of stairs. Donnie was barely breathing, but he was alive.
He had fallen down 15 stairs, either accidentally or perhaps after becoming disoriented in the maze of stairs.
The spot where he was found wasn’t set to be checked by employees for another two days, it was just chance that the manager did his sweep early. If that had happened, it’s unlikely Donie would have survived.
He spent the next week in the hospital due to dehydration and injuries to his back and head.
And if Donie, a young and fit shopper barely made it out of the stairwell alive, then what did that mean for Bernard? He never had a chance.
When Bernard’s family learned where he had been all that time, their shock turned to anger. His son expressed heartbreak that Bernard died “so close” to where he was supposed to meet his wife. “He just needed someone to open the door,” the son lamented.
After Bernard’s body was found, a 20 year old journalist wanted to be put to the test and see how she would fare in the stairwell, and she found that she had no service the entire time she was in the stairwell, and there were only two ways to exit, one being down six flights of stairs, or up through the roof. None of the exit signs explained that.
But how did Bernard get into the stairwell? Well, after another search through the security systems cameras, it was revealed that there was footage of Bernard entering the mall that day, and then wandering towards the stairwell near the Chanel store.
An autopsy done on Bernard revealed there was no foul play, no injuries to his body. He merely died trying to get out of the stairwell.
That story is particularly scary to me, because it’s not uncommon for malls and other large space to have miles of corridors underneath them.
For instance, underneath the now abandoned Detroit Northland Center mall, there are miles of tunnels that were described by the Detroit Free Press like this
“The tunnel network begins with a winding roadway that branches off into passageways connecting subterranean rooms, decrepit stairwells and non-working elevator shafts. Narrow, barely walkable tunnels extend to the mall's old central power plant as well as a now-closed police substation and a nearby Firestone garage.The entire network runs several miles and includes an astounding 484 rooms,”
Several rooms are still filled with mall leftovers, such as obsolete computer parts and TVs that weren't sold during last year's Northland liquidation auction. Other rooms are locked behind metal doors and might never be opened again.
The rooms are littered with headless mannequins, piles of fur coats, furniture and even a Santa Claus statue. Another room has a mysteriously long conveyor belt and several 1980s arcade games with the electronic innards ripped out.
That could mean that at any mall you go to, you are just one wrong turn from winding up in basically a parallel universe, with no way to get out
And it may seem impossible that a person could vanish in a public building visited by millions. But as we’ll see, Bernard’s story isn’t as unique as one might hope. People can slip into hidden corners of hospitals, office buildings, and malls, never to be seen again
When people heard the story of Bernard and Donnie, they couldnt help but draw parallels to the backrooms. Walking through an out of place door, not being able to escape, falling down stairs.
So, what I want to do right now is explain what some of the levels of the backrooms are, should you ever find yourself in a liminal space. This is coming from the Backrooms Wiki which holds a lot of the lore of the backrooms.
So, Level 0. Level Zero is where you first arrive when you wake up in the backrooms. It is a non-linear space, resembling the back rooms of a retail outlet, and mirrors the first photo that showed up on Four Chan. all rooms in Level 0 appear uniform and share superficial features such as a yellowish wallpaper, damp carpet, and inconsistently placed fluorescent lighting. However, no two rooms within the level are identical.
Linear spaces in Level 0 are altered drastically; it is possible to walk in a straight line and return to the starting point, and retracing your steps will result in a different set of rooms appearing than the ones already passed through. Due to this, and the visual similarity between rooms, consistent navigation is extremely difficult. Devices such as compasses and GPS locators fail to function within the level, and radio communications are distorted and unreliable.
Level 0 is entirely still and completely devoid of life and Presumably, a great number of people have died before exiting, the most likely causes being dehydration, starvation, and psychological trauma due to sensory deprivation and isolation. However, no corpses have been reported from these hypothetical deaths.
No entities are known to exist within the level, including other humans. If you see, hear, or encounter what you believe to be another wanderer, it is not a human.
Hallucinations are common in Level 0, the most common being:
Humming from the lighting increasing to a deafening volume, then abruptly silencing.
The appearance of doors.
The appearance of stairs.
Acute déjà vu.
Human-like speech resembling no known language.
Movement in peripheral vision resembling insects crawling underneath the wallpaper, which disappears once the wall is observed directly.
Insect-like chittering.
You get out of Level 0 the same way you got in, by no clipping, or somehow apparating into the next level. This will never get you out of the backrooms though, just through more levels.
When you get to Level 1, you’ll find a large, sprawling warehouse that features concrete floors and walls, exposed rebar, and a low-hanging fog with no discernable source. The fog often coalesces into condensation, forming puddles on the floor in inconsistent areas. Unlike Level 0, this Level possesses a consistent supply of water and electricity, which allows indefinite habitation by wanderers providing that appropriate precautions are taken. It is also far more expansive, possessing staircases, elevators, isolated rooms, and hallways.
Crates of supplies appear and disappear randomly within the Level, often containing a mixture of vital items (food, Almond Water, batteries, tarps, weaponry1, clothing, medical supplies) and nonsensical objects (assorted car parts, boxes of crayons, used syringes, partially burned paper, live mice, mice in a catatonic state that have been injected with unknown substances, shoelaces, loose change, bundles of human hair). The crates should be approached with caution due to their contents, but are a valuable resource.
In addition, crude paintings and drawings with no apparent origin or meaning appear on the walls and floors. They are known to change in appearance and disappear when not in a direct line of sight or when unlit. The light fixtures within Level 1 are prone to flicker and fail at inconsistent intervals; when this occurs, supplies are liable to vanish inexplicably and hostile entities may appear unexpectedly. These entities rarely attack in groups and tend to avoid light and large gatherings of people. It is advised to carry a reliable light source and sleep holding whatever items you do not wish to lose.
Wandering through this level will get you to level 2
Level 2, once regarded as being one of the main levels of The Backrooms, is an infinite array of complex yet Euclidian maintenance tunnels that range in size, and once had a variety of uses. It’s inhabited by entities like giant deathmoths and Smilers a generally hostile entity identified by their signature reflective eyes and teeth gleaming in the dark. The best way to escape a Smiler is to keep eye contact.
By the time you reach level 2, if you can get away from the smilers, you’ll wish to leave. But you can’t, you’re stuck here forever, and you have 998 levels to go
So Waking up from anesthesia is already a very strange and disorienting feeling. It can be like surfacing from a dreamless void. Medical professionals often compare general anesthesia to a state of deep sleep, but it’s more accurately a form of controlled unconsciousness suspended between life and oblivion. Usually, we come to in a well-staffed recovery ward, knowing that doctors and nurses stand by to ensure a smooth transition back to reality. But for one Canadian firefighter at Fleury Hospital in Montreal, that moment of awakening brought him face-to-face with a far more disorienting nightmare.
It was a normal day at the hospital when the firefighter, who we’ll call Mike, came in for a procedure on his upper chest. Fleury Hospital is a midsize facility that offers emergency services, psychiatric care, and general medicine to thousands of patients each year.
Mike was a little nervous as he got hooked up to the IV that would administer the anesthetic, but the nurses were making it a lot better. They started a countdown and said that he’d be waking up before he knew it. 100, 99, 98, soon, the world around Mike started to get fuzzy, it was like someone was turning down a dial in his brain. And then, everything went black
At about 3:00 a.m., Mike started regaining consciousness. Still groggy from anesthesia, he fluttered his eyes open expecting to see the faces of some of the nurses that were monitoring him.
Instead he was laying in a bed in the middle of a long corridor. Harsh, fluorescent lights buzzed over him, going off at random intervals and as he turned his head to look down the hallway, a metal piece fell off the bed and fell to the floor There was No hospital staff, no other patients, not a single voice echoing through the halls. At first, he thought it might be a strange aftereffect of anesthesia. He felt like he was in the same hospital, the walls were the same off white, the tile on the floor had black speckles, but everything seemed just a bit off. Like the walls were slightly lighter, the floors, a touch less speckled.
Confused, Mike pulled himself out of bed and walked down the hallway. It led to another hallway, full of locked doors. He turned another corner and saw another corridor of harsh overhead lighting and locked doors, vague garbled words came echoing down the hall from some unknown speaker.
Finally, he came upon an empty desk with a phone, he called hospital security and explained what was happening, but they hung up on him—likely believing it was a prank or a simple misdial.
Little did he know, hours earlier and on the 8th floor of the hospital, Mike’s wife was waiting for him to emerge from the surgery. At first when he didn’t emerge she figured they just got started late, then some nurses told her he was probably just wrapping up. But by 1am, Mike had not come through the doors, and she was really anxious. She finally demanded to know where Mike was and an orderly admitted to her that they didn’t know.
Mike was on the third floor of the hospital, a part used for day surgeries that looked almost identical to the 8th floor. The only difference was it was completely shut down at night
The orderly that was assigned to transfer him from the operating room to the correct post-op recovery area had mistakenly brought him 5 floors below where he was supposed to be. And making it even worse, the orderly saw a maintenance worker—possibly wearing scrubs or a similar uniform—and assumed this person was a nurse on duty. Believing Mike was in capable hands, the orderly left and Moments later, the maintenance worker finished up whatever task they were doing and left, leaving Mike alone on the floor.
And that’s why hospitals can kind of feel like the backrooms. The fluorescent lighting, the corridors that go on forever. And unfortunately, mixups and mistakes like this do happen
in 2013, a nurse at San Francisco General Hospital, was checking on patients when she notice that a 57-year-old woman named Lynn Spalding was missing from her bed. A preliminary search by staff was done and Lynn wasn’t found, so the police were called. For over two weeks, the hospital was searched up and down looking for Lynne, who had been recovering from a bladder infection. Her body was eventually found in a rarely used stairwell that hadn’t been checked.
And actually, just a few weeks ago a woman was found dead of hypothermia on the roof of Vista Medical Center East in Illinois. She had been admitted to the hospital for an undisclosed medical issue and found her way onto the roof somehow. There has been no official conclusion as to how that happened.
But luckily for Mike, the anesthesia was wearing off and he was coming more to his senses. Enough to remember his wifes number. He was able to call her and explain where he was, and he made it home safely.
This story shows how quickly a place of healing and order can become a prison if you’re stranded with no means of contact. The creeping isolation, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, and locked doors that refuse to yield—such elements might be the stuff of nightmares or online horror lore. But in these real-life scenarios, the terror is magnified by knowing there should be help nearby, separated from you only by layers of walls or floors that you cannot cross. For the Montreal firefighter, at least, the story ended with rescue and not a body bag. Not everyone shares that luck when they get stuck in these liminal spaces.
In June of 2019, a woman named Tiffany Adams was on an air canada flight making the journey from Quebec to Toronto.
The flight was supposed to be short, less than 2 hours. And when you take takeoff and landing into account, you're at cruising altitude for just about an hour.
Beverage service had just started when she decided to close her eyes for a moment, it was late, and she couldn’t wait to get home to her own bed. The last thing she remembered hearing was the ding as the captain turned off the seatbelt sign
The next thing she remembered was feeling cold. Really cold. And her neck hurt from being at a weird angle. Tiffany opened her eyes. It was nearly pitch black, but she could tell she wasn’t in her bedroom.
Cold plastic was pressed against her face, and she realized it was the window of the airplane.
She snapped up and looked around, she was still on the plane, but no one else was there. All of the lights were off, and she turned to look out of the window to see a pitch black tarmac extending out into what looked like an abyss. Wayyy at the end she could see the lights from the airport, but it looked like she was almost a mile away.
This is a nightmare, this is a nightmare, she kept telling herself. Wake up wake up wake up. But the sensations were too real for it to be a nightmare. The cold metal of her seatbelt pressing into her stomach, her breath forming a foggy cloud in front of her face.
In that moment, it seemed like she had exited reality. It was like she was in a purgatory, reminiscent of the backrooms.
She grabbed her phone, 1% battery. And the plane was off so there was no way to charge it. Tiffany was able to send off a quick text to a friend to say she just woke up on an airplane alone, and then her phone died.
Ok, don’t panic, think. Remember the emergency plan that the flight attendants went over, there’s doors on these planes, they can open. She stumbled her way through the dark to the door near the cockpit, but it was so dark she couldn’t read the instructions on it. She could feel the texture of the door, a handle, a lever, a window, but she had no idea what to do.
So she felt along the wall until she got to the cockpit and the door was open. Inside the cockpit there was a little more light, the moon shined in through the big windshields. Infont of her her were what seemed like 1000 buttons. Any of which could damage the plance if pressed, she thought, but there was also a flashlight.
She grabbed the flashlight and used it to help her open the big exit door of the plane, where she was met by a deadly drop down to the pavement, so she did the only thing she could think of and she just started screaming and waving the flashlight, and eventually, a luggage cart operator located her and got her down.
What happened, as Alaskan air would have to eventually admit, was Tiffany fell asleep on the flight and no one woke her up. When the flight attendance and maintenance were checking the flight at the end of the night, they somehow missed her. The plane was driven to a parking area far from the airport, and shut down with her still inside.
The story is scary to hear about, but Tiffany said she had night terrors after that. Dreams of being caught in that liminal space. An empty, lifeless fuselage with no one close enough to hear you scream.
I think for me, the thing that scares me the most about the backrooms, and liminal spaces, is that we are so close to them. We are one wrong turn, one strange door, and sometimes, one long nap away from finding ourselves trapped in another world with no way to get out.
But if the backrooms are real, what does that mean for the strange photo that was posted on 4chan years ago of the strange, liminal office space. What about that internet mystery.
Well, that was solved just last year.
On May 19, 2024, user tjxz_z sent shockwaves through X formerly Twitter by announcing that a friend had finally solved the Backrooms origin mystery. The friend had searched the Wayback Machine—a digital archive that preserves snapshots of the internet and found the source of the original Backrooms photo. It turned out to be from the rear quarters, or literally the backroom of a HobbyTown in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which had once been a furniture store called Rohner’s in the 1970s. In 2003, that HobbyTown location was refurbished into a kids’ racetrack, and the images were likely shared in 2002 on a blog post chronicling the renovation. The weirdest part is- nearly every other photo in that old post was corrupted, leaving only these bizarre, empty breakroom shots intact.
For believers in the backrooms, this discovery changed nothing. If anything, seeing that such a cold, dreamlike corridor existed in real life only amplified the horror. If a random HobbyTown in Wisconsin housed the real-life Backrooms, then maybe the nightmare could be found in any dingy office or deserted corridor close to home.
Which is kind of what we confirmed in this episode, , the threshold we call “liminal” might be waiting around the very next corner. All it takes is one wrong turn, one strange door, one long dreamless nap for us to wake up in the Backrooms.
If you want to spend more time in the backrooms, check out Kane Pixels on Youtube, he did the designs for whats going to be turned into the A24 movie, I encourage you to check out the backrooms wiki, the lore is so sprawling and it’s created by the community
I’m going to link those and some other backrooms horror to check out in the description of this episode. And until next time, don’t lean against any walls that look off. OoooOOOOooo