the backrooms: a blurry photo that changed the internet

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media Hi Sixteenth Minute listeners. Two things. First, if
you're in the Los Angeles area on March second, my
movie podcast with Caitlin Durante, The Bechdel Cast is having
this big post oscar show and general variety show with
some of our favorite guests from the past eight years
of the Bechdel Cast at Dynasty Typewriter at seven point

(00:25):
thirty right after the Oscars. You can get your tickets
in the description for this episode, or if you don't
live in the area, guess what. We are going to
be live streaming the event. If you can't watch it
in the moment, you can watch it for a full
week after if you can't watch that day. And yes,
we will be wearing costumes from the substance I bought
hair extensions. You're gonna want to see it. Second, please

(00:48):
stop messaging me. Yes, I know Hawk to a girl.
Haley welch that story as developments, But Sixteenth Minute is
a show that gives stuff at least a little bit
of space to breathe before rushing to a conclusion. So
it is very likely that I will return to Haley's saga,
but not this week. But if you're just tuning in

(01:11):
guess what you're in luck, there's something completely fucking different.
When I was a kid, two things scared me more
than anything. The first was these YouTube videos that people
sent around when I was in middle school, where you
would get like really close to the screen to look
at something mysterious.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
The audio would be really quiet, and then all of.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
A sudden.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
He sorry had to The other was the night I
went over to my cousin's house to watch the ring,
and I spent the next seven days convinced that I
was going to die. Like every kid, I liked the
feeling of being afraid, but could not physically handle when
it actually happened. But like every kid, I did it

(02:00):
all the time to show my older cousins that I
was just as brave as them, when objectively I was not.
My cousin's family's house is over three hundred years old,
and our grandfather had told us all kinds of stories
about what had allegedly happened there, like in the eighteen hundreds,
a man hung himself in the closet in the front room,

(02:22):
a rich man named Charles Copeland was said to have
blown his head off. He should have slaves who had
escaped from the South supposedly hid in the basement. A
maid was locked in a closet and clowed her way out,
leaving faint nail in prints on the door. Countless ghosts
were spotted by my aunt's, my mom, my grandparents, my cousins,
adopted this dalmatian one year that jumped out of a

(02:44):
third story window and died. Did any of it really happen? Well,
that last one definitely did and traumatized me. But the
point is we thought all of it was true. And
this was the house that we watched The Ring in
when I was nine. If you haven't had the pleasure,

(03:05):
The Ring is a two thousand and three American remake
of the Japanese horror movie Ringu, And while Ringo is
technically the better movie, it was not the one that
I peed myself during, so we're gonna stick with the
American one. It stars Naomi Watts as a woman who
watches a cursed video tape. So if you watch the tape,
you only have seven days to live before a little

(03:27):
girl named Samara climbs out of a well with her
hair draped over her face, all wet, and she climbs
out of your TV. That you're playing the tape on and.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
She kills you.

Speaker 1 (03:40):
It's classic horror technophobia, a movie that makes a popular
piece of technology forced nine year olds to pee themselves
at their cousin's scary house. But weirdly enough, Ringu and
subsequently The Ring was not originally written to scare kids
out of engaging with the VHS technology. It was based

(04:03):
on a Japanese folktale that went back three hundred years
before Ringu, and originally was a story that followed a
samurai who wanted to make his servant girl Okiku, his mistress,
which drove her to take her own life and haunt him,
crawling out of the well that she drowned herself in,
just like Samara climbs out of the well in the movie.

(04:25):
The story was adapted to a novel hundreds of years
later in nineteen ninety eight, and it's this version of
the story that became a horror hit in the US.
And that's kind of the story of horror stories that
transform as the ones lucky enough to make the jump
from medium to medium survive. By the time The Ring

(04:46):
gets to America, it's no longer about a Japanese samurai
who wants to rape a young woman in his employment. Instead,
it's about a neglected American daughter whose spirit is trapped
in a piece of almost temporary technology. The core anxieties
that the story explores are basically the same, but the

(05:07):
technology and personal dynamics that communicate them are constantly shifting.
Technophobia was a core feature of the early Internet.

Speaker 3 (05:16):
One.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
I remember my parents and my fellow children with secret
MySpace accounts got really scared over were these copy pasta
emails that you had to send to ten friends or
face certain death.

Speaker 4 (05:30):
Every chain has a link. Every link is a life
break the chain lose a life, Send this to five people,
or death will come for you. You have twenty four hours.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
These wouldn't work now, and not just because most of
us would welcome the sweet embrace of death. It's that
the idea of a haunted email sounds kind of silly now.
But chain emails are a good example of Web one
point zero horror stories that explore that the idea of
a computer or the Internet itself was scary. Like we

(06:10):
talked about in our Hawkta series, Web two horror centers
anxieties around social networks. I think my favorite in this
genre was probably the movie Unfriended, which takes place on
a skype call with a killer who hacks in.

Speaker 4 (06:25):
Use.

Speaker 5 (06:26):
Who is that I just tried to hang up on them?

Speaker 1 (06:29):
Can we get rid of this person? I don't know
is here the whole time?

Speaker 6 (06:32):
It's just probably a glitch.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
Well, the glitch just tight. Web three horror is a
hawk Tua era dystopia defined by fears around the blockchain
and the decentralized Internet. So a lot of AI anxiety here.
My favorite so far is probably the movie Megan, You
Gotta Love Megan.

Speaker 7 (06:56):
Research shows if you force chilpy vegetables they'll be less
likely to chose those foods as adults.

Speaker 1 (07:01):
Does that so yes, experts, you can turn off. I
thought we were having a conversation. What's consistent in online
horror is a fairly straightforward oral tradition. These are anonymous
written stories and short films about the corners of the
Internet that are terrifying. Since the early two thousands, a

(07:23):
lot of these have come to be known as creepy
pastas a play on the copy pasta term used to
describe those old copy paste forward this email to ten people,
or you will die kind of thing. Creepy pastas have
been an online community that's waxed and waned for two decades,
but there are consistence there. They're tech based horror stories

(07:47):
and their absolute catnip for middle schoolers. And in twenty nineteen,
one of the most famous modern horror stories put people
in a choke hold, beginning only with a photo, one
that had been circulating in spooky online communities for years,
but didn't find its foothold in the public imagination until

(08:08):
it was posted to four chan. The image isn't high quality.
It looks like it was taken by a two thousands
era digital camera, you know, crisp, but a little pixely somehow. Still,
the colors are oversaturated and the contrast is a bit
too high. The space pictured is lit by fluorescent lights

(08:29):
in the ceiling. There's not an inch of this space.
You can't see in the queasy sort of way that
fluorescent lights allow. The thing is, there's not a lot
to see because what we're looking at is a series
of empty rooms, eerily empty rooms, and a space of
indeterminate size. From our vantage point, which is a little crooked,

(08:53):
as if the image was taken carelessly or when someone
was surprised, we can see through at least three empty rooms,
all with slightly different off white wallpaper that seems old
enough to have faded to this sickly kind of yellow.
There's a number of entrances into this space, but no
windows and no doors. The molding is the same in

(09:17):
every room. There's electrical outlets with nothing plugged in. The
carpeting is a flat brown with what looks like the
occasional wet spot. In a previous life, it could have
been a painfully outdated office space, or maybe a waiting room.
It's vacant now, but you can't help but feel like
maybe you've been here before. Ian stopped the music. If

(09:40):
you haven't seen the actual image of the back rooms yet,
just pause the podcast and look it up. Okay, assuming
you've gotten a proper look now. Audio mediums are tricky
because memes are famously visual. But hopefully you see what
I mean here. Okay, you can start the scary music again.

(10:00):
This image was posted by an anonymous user in response
to a prompt asking for images that were somehow off
and on May thirteenth, twenty nineteen, for whatever reason, it clicked.
Another anon responded to the photo, soon to be known
as the back rooms with the lure that would make

(10:21):
it famous.

Speaker 8 (10:23):
If you're not careful and you no clip 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
harescent lights at maximum hum buzz, and approximately six hundred

(10:46):
million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be
trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering
around nearby, because it's sure as hell has heard you
the back room.

Speaker 1 (11:00):
Your sixteenth minute starts now.

Speaker 9 (11:08):
I'm not.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
Joy stay.

Speaker 1 (11:23):
Six Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we

(11:57):
look at the internet's main characters of the day, speak
to them or this week the people who discovered them,
and what that says about us and the Internet. And
in keeping with the absolute yawning void that many Americans
continue to feel during an absolute brutal start to the year,
I hope everyone is doing okay all things considered. Today,

(12:19):
I want to explore the world of the back rooms.
A creepy image that off of a few pixels has
exploded into multiple communities, a philosophical community, an ever growing
horror fiction community, and a real life mystery. Today we're
going to explore all three, and I'll be honest, this

(12:41):
episode is a little weird for this show because it
revolves around these freaky existential communities. But it's a freaky
existential time, right And if you hang with us until
the end of this episode, I can tell you exactly
where the photo of the Backrooms was taken and the's
actual history. So come with me if you dare to.

(13:06):
May twenty nineteen, Lewis Varakhan and Milo Uanapolis are banned
from Mark Zuckerberg's platforms. How quaint? Remember when he used
to do that? Harry and Megan had a baby, which
really mattered to one girl from your high school who
was like, the real family is slaying right now, and

(13:27):
you didn't have the heart to reminder about colonialism. And
after years of random circulation, a four Chan user gave
shape to what exactly made the back rooms so terrifying.
If you haven't looked at the image of the back
Rooms yet, I encourage you to look at my Instagram

(13:47):
give it a like while you're at it, because unlike
a lot of Internet horror, the back Rooms picture hasn't
been photoshopped to look scarier than it actually is. The
eeriness isn't because there's something scary in frame, but it's
the tension, the uncertainty.

Speaker 8 (14:07):
The God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby,
because it's sure as hell has heard you.

Speaker 10 (14:14):
Of it all.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
And the back Rooms only got more popular as a
site of horror. And there's three or so years to
follow after it was first posted to four chan in
this weird thread, because wouldn't you know it, people were
really susceptible to seeing fear in a lonely room that
they felt trapped in during the year twenty twenty. Impossible

(14:37):
to say why the back Rooms were the right harbinger
of doom that went viral at the right time. But
what fascinates me about the back Rooms is just how
much this weird picture of a few empty rooms that
I can't explain why but I know it smells weird
has inspired to the point where I feel the need

(15:00):
to explain these separate, opposing camps that devotees of the
Backrooms fall into, and they seem to attract audiences at
different stages of life. Reading one the slightly older set.
From what I can gather find. The most haunting part
of the backrooms is seeing it as a liminal space.

(15:23):
We'll call them the liminal backrooms, and I include myself
in this camp. The backrooms became the most popular example
of this bizarre, familiar but menacing void like image, a
perfect example of what many in the late twenty tens
were accumulating and distributing on forums as liminal spaces. This

(15:45):
side of the Backroom's fandom appear to agree that there
is this feeling of vague danger in this image, but
not a danger that implies a monster. What the backrooms
are haunted by is absence, the feeling that anyone who
spent time there is gone. Now it's mystery, it's nothingness,
it's seemingly infinite. Space is where the terror is. And

(16:10):
then there is the second camp that younger people seem
to have fallen into during the Backroom's initial popularity. Reading too,
this view of the backrooms put overt terror into the
space by putting it in a creepy pasta format, so
making the backrooms the setting of an extremely online campfire story,

(16:33):
sometimes using familiar monsters and story beats from within the
creepy pasta community to spin out fan fiction and web series,
and almost all of this fan fiction and web series
that I could learn about the authors were made by
people about college age or younger. We're gonna call them
the Creepy Pasta backrooms. And in the Creepy Pasta Backrooms,

(16:55):
you were being pursued through this infinite space by a
monster who wants to kill you. You can maybe see
why these first two groups tend not to overlap in
spite of being inspired by the same blurry picture. One
relies on the absence of context in the image, and
the other attempts to put something supernatural into that image.

(17:16):
And while there's no definitive view of the backrooms, the
Creepy Pasta read is certainly more conducive to internet viral spread.
For young creative people. It serves as almost a writing
prompt to make something about what you think is going
to be lurking behind those walls. But there's a third community,

(17:37):
the lost media backrooms. Unlike the first two, this group
isn't interested in the emotions that the backroom's image provokes,
but is concerned with finding the location of the actual backrooms.
The physical location, a task that takes a lot of
patience and diligence, and I'm thrilled to report, Yes, the

(18:02):
backrooms have been identified and they're still there, and the
journey defining them was goddamn fascinating. The discovery of the
IRL backrooms was a year's long project with hundreds of
contributors from the online lost media community and marked one
of their hardest spot successes ever. But to fully understand

(18:24):
these communities and how they interact with each other, I
want to start with reading too the overt horror Creepy
Pasta backrooms, which became the most famous space for amateur
horror of the last ten years. So what are creepy pastas?

(18:46):
By definition? Their Internet horror folk tales scary stories told
from person to person, usually by amateurs, anonymously, and very
often both. And while there is now an official creep
past A website, the community began in the late nineties
into the early two thousands and began pretty decentralized. A

(19:08):
number of creepypasta folks would pop up anywhere from boards
on four Chan and read it to old school angel
fire sites and blog platforms. The first story to ever
formally exist in this space was published online in two
thousand and one called Ted the Caver, a series of
blog posts that followed anonymous splunkers deeper into a very

(19:31):
narrow local cave, who were subsequently driven mad by a
supernatural being after discovering new cave passages, higheroglyphics, and start
having nightmares. The story ends with a post saying that
the splunkers are planning to bring a gun into the
cave next time, and then the blog was never updated again.

(19:54):
Part of the appeal of Ted the Caver at the
time was the ambiguity to the two thousand and one
audience of whether this really happened or not. The story
was formatted on an angel fire blog and was updated
over a period of two months and included links. It
mimicked the real life blogging craze of the time. It's

(20:16):
kind of an internet version of the Blair Witch Project,
which came out two years before in nineteen ninety nine.

Speaker 4 (20:22):
Can you Believe the O Cult may be involved in
the disappearance of your son?

Speaker 9 (20:31):
I'm So Scared?

Speaker 1 (20:32):
And the movie created intentional confusion when it presented itself
as a true found footage documentary. This approach would be
replicated in later creepy pastas, but like anything, it really
depends on the writer's skill as to whether these stories
are actually scary. But I will say, as an adult,

(20:54):
the best thing about creepypastas to me is that they're
usually written with this kind of uncanny, amateurist style. And
the reason that is is because it's mostly kids writing them.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about. This is
a very successful creepy pasta story called Jeff the Killer.

(21:14):
And what Jeff the Killer is about is a kid
named Jeff, and you'll never believe what he does. Here
is how the anonymous writer describes Jeff being bullied.

Speaker 8 (21:24):
Early in the story, the kid landed and turned back
to them. He kicked his skateboard up and caught it
with his hands.

Speaker 4 (21:34):
The kid seemed to be about.

Speaker 8 (21:36):
Twelve, one year younger than Jeff. He wears an aeropostle
shirt and ripped blue jeans. Well, well, well looks like
we got some meat.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
Totally exactly and now thankfully, Jeff the Killer later gets
his revenge when he Jeff that kills this bully. Let's
hear how he does it.

Speaker 8 (22:02):
Something inside Jeff snaps, His psyche is destroyed, All rational
thinking is gone. All he can do is kill. He
grabs Randy and pile drives him to the ground. He
gets on top of him and punches him straight in
the heart. The punch causes Randy's heart to stop.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
I hate when that happens. There are hundreds of thousands
of creepypastas, and they revolve around popular characters or popular
ideas like the back rooms, which means that some are
going to be better than others. Here's something from one
of the backroom stories that I liked more.

Speaker 8 (22:44):
I was about halfway done with filling in my information
when I slumped back in my chair. I hadn't gotten
much sleep the night prior, and I was exhausted. As
I slumped back, I noticed something very peculiar. My head
never hit the wall. In fact, it felt like it

(23:05):
went in. I got up, quite frightened and looked at
the wall. Nothing, not a single hole or dent had
been made in the wall by my head. So I
reached to touch the wall and my fingers went through
it pretty good.

Speaker 1 (23:25):
Right, But there are a lot of bad ones. And
I'm not knocking the fact that these stories are amateurish, because,
to be honest, Jeff the Killer's bullies air apostle shirt
and that heart punch probably would have scared the shit
out of me as a kid. But the more I
read through these stories, the more it started to connect

(23:46):
with me that creepy pastas are a way for creative
kids to navigate their fears in the same way that
fan fiction is a way for kids to navigate some
of their early sexual or just generally out a lesson feelings.
The story has depict these experiences of fear and their
own bodies that in all likelihood they haven't had yet,

(24:10):
but they think about all the time. For comparison, here
is a pull from the classic fan fiction story My Immortal,
which was based in the Harry Potter universe, which will
become clear very quickly. Here it is.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
And then suddenly, just as I Draco kissed me passionately.
Draco climbed on top of me and we started to
make out keenly against a tree. He took off my
top and I took off his clothes. I even took
off my bra Then he put his thingy into my

(24:45):
you know what, and.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
We did it for the first time. There is so
much lore around the fan fiction My Immortal, but the
short story is that it was written by a girl
in middle school, and she uses these familiar characters and
formative crushes in order to imagine herself in a sexual predicament.
And so, while the Creepy Pasta and fanfit communities may

(25:10):
not have full overlap, they serve similar functions and both
have crossed over into the mainstream pretty successfully after peaking
in the mid twenty tens. And while the back Rooms
made its debut a few years after peak Creepy Pasta,
they quickly became a popular recurring location in the Creepy

(25:32):
Pasta space, not because of its emptiness and scariness, but
because of the infinite possibilities for hiding unseen monsters. The
most famous of these were made by a then sixteen
year old filmmaker named Kane Parsons on YouTube, who short
titled The back Rooms Found footage garnered millions of views

(25:54):
when it first dropped in early twenty twenty two, going
on to inspire about twenty more sh shorts from Cain
after and these shorts are really fucking good. After no
clipping out of reality, something that can be prompted by
something as innocuous as a stumble, the mean character ends
up in the infinite Rooms.

Speaker 4 (26:17):
What the hell?

Speaker 1 (26:29):
This series places the back Rooms explicitly in the world
of the supernatural, and while purists aren't necessarily happy about it,
Caine Parsons recently signed a deal with A twenty four
to adapt the series into a feature and as with
the Creepypastas before it, like slender Man or other longstanding

(26:49):
alternate reality spaces online, the back Rooms built out a
ton of lore through series like Cain's. In the series,
there's a reveal of a big secret corporation that discovered
the realm of the Backrooms, and it's told in the
same found footage realism style that made successes of the

(27:10):
Blair Witch Project and Ted the caver So. At the
time of this writing, as I said, the Creepy pasta
interpretation of the Backrooms is far more popular than either.
We're going to talk about later in the episode. But
what I think makes it special is that, unlike so
much of what we see as necessary to make a

(27:31):
footprint on the Internet right now, the scam, the recognition,
the desperation, honestly that a companies hoping this moment could
improve your life during a time that feels so hopeless.
While the story is about the void that feeling really
isn't present in the creepypasta backrooms. The online video games

(27:53):
designed to walk through the backrooms you can play for free.
Caane Parson's work is free to consume, and much of
the built out creepypasta lure isn't even attributed to any
one person. It's a community built on passion and connection
over a shared interest and I guess a shared fear.

(28:14):
And I think that's really cool. We could talk about
the types of monsters one finds in the back rooms
all day, but I wanted to talk to a true
scholar of the creepy pasta form enter Sarah Bimo, author
of The Horror of Networked Experience, which is a full
look into how creepy pastas and Web two led to

(28:36):
stories like this. Here's our talk.

Speaker 7 (28:39):
Hi, my name is Sarah Bimo. I'm a PhD candidate
at your university in Toronto, Canada. My research really broadly
is about like kind of like effective experiences of digital life,
so like sinceations, emotions, like forms of knowledge that are
not distinctly rational. Yeah. I love creepy pasta and written

(29:00):
a book chapter about it and working on a follow up.

Speaker 1 (29:02):
The chapter that you sent a long dev it's so fascinating.
It's called the horror of networked existence. But before we
get into sort of the contents of your research, I'm
curious in your field of study, what first drew you
to creepy process.

Speaker 7 (29:18):
I'm kind of like was initially and still am like
another object of study and of interest for me was
the way is that people on social media sites developed
like intuitions of algorithms and algorithmic governance.

Speaker 10 (29:34):
So you're probably.

Speaker 7 (29:35):
Familiar with a lot of these intuitions, like stuff like
I'll go speak, you know, where people self censor themselves
to avoid like the purview of like what feels like,
you know, omnipotent algorithm on.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
A live great sort of that line of.

Speaker 5 (29:49):
Yes, exactly, gotcha.

Speaker 10 (29:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (29:51):
So that's one example of things that I see as intuitions,
like forms of knowledge about technological systems that are not
developed rational and birationally I mean, like necessarily entirely cognitively
and through gaining like true information about like the code
of the algorithm or whatever, but are developed kind of
tacitly and bodily and creepy pasta I see as a

(30:15):
similar kind of phenomenon what I classify as classic creepy
pasta like written let's say, like before twenty ten or so.
I see it as something that is like kind of
the product of maybe like unconscious anxieties surrounding like digital
communication that kind of come to fruition and manifest as
this new form of horror. And separately, I just like

(30:38):
I read it a lot as a kid, and I
just like.

Speaker 1 (30:40):
I say, were you a creepy pasta kid? As well?
You have to out yourself as a creepypasta head, But
it feels like incorrect me if I'm wrong. But the
only sort of creepy pasta that has ever broken through
to the mainstream is the slender Man story.

Speaker 5 (30:56):
Definitely.

Speaker 7 (30:56):
Slender Man is undoubtedly the most popular in.

Speaker 1 (30:59):
The moment, so cynical way possible. It does make sense
to adapt creepy pastas because they're of dubious authorship and
they've already been focus grouped essentially, But to start, where
do creepypastas come from? How do they sort of grow
in popularity over time?

Speaker 7 (31:15):
Creepy pastas are very interesting, and they've often been compared
to like folk tales or legends or myths because classic
ones like the ones that kind of came out in
the early days of the Internet.

Speaker 5 (31:32):
Relatively. By that, I mean like the early two thousands.

Speaker 7 (31:34):
Dish are largely anonymous and often kind of crowd sourced
so collectively authored, so flour chan is the common source
for many of them. I know that slender Man began
on the Something Awful forums where a user named Victor

(31:54):
Surge posted these like photoshop images featuring these like tall
creepy man. But if that's where it started, and then
kind of through collective authorship, they the legend grew and
grew and grew. This is very similar to folklore practices,
wherein uh there's like a kind of distributed anonymous authorship
that allows the stories to develop and morph over time,

(32:18):
so that the you know, possibly the most interesting or
shocking or like memeable elements of them are able to
kind of grow and get developed, whereas the boring stuff
maybe gets like left to the wayside, So that way
they're kind of like bread to be as maybe like
dynamic and as effective affecting as possible. There's also like

(32:41):
the Reddit slash the r slash No Sleep forum, where
obviously you cannot be as anonymous as you can be fortune.
So I think that this kind of sense of authenticity
and of you know, urban legendness is fostered through this
like collective role play. The folk tale qualities are fostered

(33:02):
through kind of different means.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
I think it's also interesting that it seems to sort
of rise to prominence alongside fan fiction forums, which I
know are their own animal altogether, but the idea that like, yeah,
sort of during the web one point zero era, there
are anonymous writers that are sort of building these worlds collectively.
But as far as the Creepy Pasta world goes, what

(33:27):
is drawing people to it? And do you have a
feeling of what sort of age range or demographics participate
in these groups.

Speaker 7 (33:36):
I can't say for certain. My impression is that it's
largely younger people. I have that impression just from you
know the fact that when I was a Creepy Pasta kid,
the intranet was something that like mostly younger people were on.
My parents like would never have had any idea, whereas
now they're kind of like more on social media and stuff.

(33:56):
Also just kind of the quality of the writing. Often,
I think the fact that traditionally this kind of practice
of like campfire stories and stuff. It's like it's something
really associated with teenagers and young adults. And also I
think it's kind of a sense of a kind of
coming of age present through many of these stories.

Speaker 5 (34:14):
Sometimes that's more ambiguous.

Speaker 7 (34:16):
I think there's a sense of being confronted with like
the kind of your raucracy and infrastructures of the adult
world that.

Speaker 5 (34:25):
Is somehow being negotiated in these.

Speaker 7 (34:28):
So in classic creepypasta, there's like often like email is
a source of horror, So that's one example. Then I'm
also thinking of the kind of infrastructural horror ones which
like makes strange the process of like driving or like elevators.
There needs to be like a sense of wonder and strangeness,

(34:49):
making strange of the mundane to you know, be explored
like as thoroughly as it is explored in creepypasta. Another
really common theme is this kind of nightmares nostalgia of
like childhood TV shows or experiences. So like a big
thing is like theme parks that are scary. Handle Cove
is about like a kid's TV show that a bunch

(35:09):
of people all watched. Within the digesis of the story
that turned out to be like demonic and nightmarish. So
I just get this kind of strong sense of anxiety
of a separation from childhood that is being dealt with
or negotiated in some way. People who are full adults
are often like probably like more okay with the transition
from childhood to adulthood. You're like more established, And I

(35:31):
don't know, it could definitely be like made strange and alienated.
It's like a very common topic, but yeah, the particular
preoccupation I just a very very teenage, very young adult.

Speaker 1 (35:39):
And you're right about this as well of a way
of forming the networked self, which you describe as sort
of a Web two point zero innovation, but almost as
a tool to help form identity and navigate anxieties and
fears through this genre. How did you sort of come
to that conclusion as you were.

Speaker 7 (35:56):
Studying Queepypasta as a genre reflects anxieties surrounding the Web
two point oh model of communication, which is marked by like,
for example, more interactivity, kind of platformization, you know, social
media versus Web one point zero, which was characterized by
like kind of static web pages, less interactivity. The reason

(36:19):
I kind of came to that interpretation was because of
this common preoccupation with the affordances of Web two point oh,
like the modalities of the Internet and the infrastructure of
the Internet itself was like the topic of many of
these stories I mentioned before, Like email is often deployed
as like a narrative element. Smile Dog, for example, consists

(36:41):
of like a cursed image that is shared via email.
And I think this praise upon this kind of fear
of surveillance and of exterior forces that can reach you
no matter where you are, no matter what time. It
is the instantaneity of communication, which is like unprecedented in
human history. For example, the telephone, like the telegram, letters,

(37:03):
like none of these forms of communication are able to
do this.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
Now that we've moved into Web three point zero, how
have these stories changed to reflect more contemporary technological anxieties.

Speaker 7 (37:16):
It's interesting, Like I was thinking about how the back
Rooms is similar and dissimilar to like classic creepypasta, because
I think the Backrooms is the natural inheritor of this
tradition and it's also quite popular. Another maybe kind of
similar one is like SCP, like a collaborative wiki wherein
people post articles about like the SEP Foundation, which deals

(37:38):
with like paranorl Moor.

Speaker 5 (37:39):
Threats and stuff.

Speaker 7 (37:39):
I think that classic creepypasta maybe allows for the possibility
of a non digital life in that it's almost kind
of like moralistic, where it's like if you spend too
much time on the internet, if you're always like on
your email, you're more likely to become victim to what

(38:00):
dark forces like animate the web. But there is this
possibility of a non digital like natural life, almost and
I think that the backgrounds at least no longer engages
with that, or it's not really committed to the idea
that there is the possibility for a non digital life.

(38:20):
I say this because I don't think there's the same
kind of moralizing of don't do this and you'll be safe,
but rather there's like the acceptance that this kind of
mode of reality, which is conditioned by technology and by
the Internet and by digitalization, is completely pervasive and it's
just now a fundational structure of our lives. The source
of fear becomes maybe more sophisticated or more complex in

(38:45):
that they're now just engaging with kind of questions of
appearance versus reality, like more fundamentally like what is reality?
There are still these kind of fears of ghosts and
demons and forces that haunt web infrastructures, but it's no
longer possible to escape them by getting offline. They are
perhaps more and more endemic and more unavoidable. So I

(39:10):
feel like the fear is it feels more existential and
more kind of deeply rooted. Again, these are This is
just kind of you know, my thoughts on seeing like
the backrooms posts.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
But that makes a lot of sense. Is I think
a lot of the anxieties or knee jerk reactions to
earlier forms of Internet anxiety is how do I make
this go away? Where now it's more like I can't
make this go away? How can I navigate it in
a way that's comfortable for me? Which is like a
pretty major shift.

Speaker 7 (39:40):
The backrooms is really like a case of like children
yearned for third spaces, because I think that our current
moment is one in which public space has been largely
like neoliberalized and rendered completely sterile and kind of hostile
to forms.

Speaker 5 (39:55):
Of identity formation and community making.

Speaker 7 (39:58):
And the back rooms in the backgrounds I see a
bit of a reflection of this kind of anxiety or
feeling that there's the home, there's the workplace. There's the
domain of nature and there's nothing outside of that. Because
and this relates to the luminality again, these are places
you just kind of like pass through. They have a
standardized architecture, a kind of deindividualized people. Everyone is rendered

(40:22):
the same by passing through them. So I think this
is also a kind of anxiety surrounding late stage capitalism
and the effects it has on kind of architecture and
space and identity.

Speaker 1 (40:33):
Thank you so much to Sarah Bimo. You can find
more of her work in the description of this episode.
So call me Giata deal a Renis on Halloween, because honey,
that was some creepy pasta. Give me some horns. And
when we come back, we're switching gears to the philosophical

(40:56):
the liminal Backrooms. Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I once
got so scared reading a slender Man's story that I

(41:18):
had to watch six consecutive episodes of Family Guy to
calm down. And we're returning to the Backrooms to get
a better look at the second now vibrant online community
that helped launch them into fame and stick around because
the true story of the Backrooms comes right after this.
But first, more Glorious Weirdness listener the Liminal Backrooms. The

(41:46):
liminal space community existed prior to the popularity of the backrooms,
but for many, including myself, it was through the backrooms
that I learned that this community and this term exists
did at all. So unless you're an ap English expat
or just a fan of this genre of weird Internet,

(42:07):
you might need a better working definition of what a
liminal space actually means. Liminal, according to miss Merriam Webster, is.

Speaker 8 (42:17):
Of relating to or situated at a sensory threshold barely
perceptible or capable of eliciting a response.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
So threshold is the key word here. When applied in
a cultural or anthropological space, liminal is something associated with
a ritual around a life marker. So think bar Mitzvah's
kinsinirez Sweet sixteens, religious confirmations, all rituals associated with adolescents

(42:49):
the ugliest, horniest threshold of human life. And the way
that this same word is used in the liminal space
community doesn't ignore the dictionary definie, but it does clarify
the feeling that accompanies it. If you search liminal space,
it becomes obvious that this feeling of transition is present.

(43:12):
Liminal spaces are pictures of places that you would only
spend time in on your way to somewhere else. Think
hotel hallways in the middle of the night, empty airports,
waiting rooms, old malls, rest stops, abandoned parking lots, specific
spaces that are associated with a passing through. Very rarely

(43:34):
someone's actual home. And what's another way to say that,
oh yeah, thresholds Liminal spaces in this Internet community are
defined by the uneasiness one gets when looking at them.
They're usually empty, always of people, and often of lighting
or objects. If you're in the hotel hallway, you're always alone.

(43:59):
The mall is more often than not abandoned, and whatever
remains of its stores are sparse and feel from a
past decade. There is an implied nostalgia to many of
these liminal spaces by extension, and that's one of the
reasons I think they appeal to a slightly older audience,
because those are people who can summon the image of

(44:19):
something they remember that no longer exists, like chunky cheese
animatronic bands. But there is one small controversy within the
liminal backrooms interpretation, and that's whether a liminal space can
be strictly one that exists in real life, or if
a digital space can be liminal too, And this disagreement

(44:42):
appears to be microgenerational. People who associate nostalgia with analog
technology tend to be purists and say nothing on a
computer could be liminal, while people who grew up online
have a much easier time seeing this quality in older
digital images. I'm a little bit on the fence about
this one, and I tend to find the photos of

(45:04):
old malls and hallways scarier than AI generated infinity spaces.
But there are some digital images that I find eerie,
not just because of their implied void, but because of
the nostalgia I get when I look at them. An
example that stands out to me is this old screensaver
that would loop in countless elementary school computer labs I

(45:26):
went into when I was a kid. The screensaver is
this infinite brick hallway that every few seconds turned to
corner after corner, and the walls occasionally turn to concrete
for no reason. The screensaver was amazed and nowhere, but
every once in a while, this translucent smiley face would

(45:46):
appear at the end of one of the hallways like
almost like it was saying congratulations, you made it, except
you hadn't made it. You push right through the smiley
face and take the next turn into the infinite corridor.
It never ends. That to me is an extremely liminal space.

(46:07):
But there's also the matter of timing. Remember the back
rooms became popular shortly before the pandemic lockdown of twenty
twenty and would only become more popular through the early
years of the decade, culminating with Kane Parsons series in
twenty twenty two. Kane Parsons would have been about fourteen
years old during the pandemic lockdown, So the audience and

(46:30):
often the creators of this content were people at a
liminal place in their lives adolescence, living in this moment
in history that also felt very liminal, because what were
the early twenty twenties defined by, if not discomfort, forced isolation,
fear and uncertainty. Fortunately things have improved, of course, This

(46:55):
still expanding corner of the Internet didn't invent the idea
of spaces, but it sharpened the definition and pinpointed the
feeling that a true liminal space is thought to evoke.
There are plenty of artists who pre date the Internet
who have captured this feeling very effectively, filmmakers like Stanley

(47:16):
Kubrick with the long, eerie hotel Hallways of the Shining,
basically all of the work of David Lynch. And there's
also the cautionary, very vacant feeling cities of techno dystopia
movies like Videodrome and Blade Runner. And this aesthetic has
inspired a fair amount of YouTube horror, which I'll specify

(47:38):
not the creepypasta corner of YouTube. We'll get there, but
these videos and stories around eerie, slow moving, empty landscapes,
and as time marched on, the kids that experienced these
kinds of liminal spaces grew up and began making liminal
art of their own. Yile Edward Ball and Jane Schoenbrunn

(48:02):
are horror film directors. They're both born in the late eighties,
and their respectively fantastic movies that reference online horror are
both influenced by creepy pasta and the movies in film
that influence that culture. So just an araboris of backroom
like spaces. Kyle Edward Ball's first feature is twenty twenty

(48:24):
two's skin amerink a terrifying found footage movie about two
young siblings who find themselves seemingly alone in the middle
of the night, and then the doors and windows of
the house begin to disappear. It's liminal to its core
and just full of this sense of claustrophobia, of a
space where you're supposed to feel safe, you're home, but

(48:46):
the space is collapsing within itself. And Ball didn't find
liminality by mistake. He got his start by making horror
shorts on YouTube from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty one,
and I fanesked what will become his signature style in
a series called Fite Sized Nightmares, where he would adapt

(49:07):
viewers submitted recaps of their own nightmares and translate them
into experiment films to post on YouTube. He told The
New York Times about his connection to internet horror back
in twenty twenty three.

Speaker 8 (49:18):
I had a YouTube channel where people would comment on
things that scared them. But as I kept giving that answer,
I realized there are a lot of things that inspired
this movie that I'm not even comfortable to say.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
At the heart of.

Speaker 8 (49:32):
It is pain and sadness and a little bit of anger.

Speaker 1 (49:37):
And then there's the work of Jane Schoenbrun, whose most
recent movie is the incredible I Saw the TV Glow.
They also got their start online. Their first project, twenty
eighteen's A Self Induced Hallucination, was composed of only found
online footage that ended up piecing together a narrative about

(49:58):
the history of creepypasta legend the slender Man, and when
they moved into films that they shot on their own,
we get the mother Load, the best example I've seen
of how spaces like the backrooms and Creepy Pasta can
shape and define adolescence. Twenty twenty one's We're All Going

(50:19):
to the World's Fair. The movie follows a loner, neglected
teenage girl's obsessive journey doing a creepy Pasta style YouTube
challenge called the World's Fair Challenge. And for what it's worth,
boilers ahead for this movie, so please give ahead a
minute or so if you haven't seen it and you
want to. It's streaming on Max right now. And while

(50:40):
we spend most of the movie thinking that what's happening
to her is supernatural, she's flailing in her sleep, she's
smearing paint on her face. It's revealed in a conversation
between her and another World's Fair Challenge participant at the end.
But this isn't true at all. She's just doing what
a lot of teenagers do, usaying her feelings of loneliness

(51:01):
and frustration through an alternate reality horror game, something we
only learn when the other player worries that she might
hurt herself in real life?

Speaker 9 (51:12):
How long until I do it? I need to sure, code,
I promise you was scared.

Speaker 4 (51:33):
I think I need to ask you something.

Speaker 9 (51:39):
Sure?

Speaker 7 (51:39):
What is it? But when we need to go out
of the game first? Is that?

Speaker 4 (51:43):
Is that?

Speaker 7 (51:44):
Okay? Sure?

Speaker 9 (51:48):
What's that?

Speaker 7 (51:50):
That's an expression?

Speaker 4 (51:52):
It means outside the margins of the game.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
World's Fare pinpoints the straddled experiences of the liminal back
rooms and the creepy pasta backrooms. For the whole movie,
the protagonist, Casey, retreats into the perceived horror of being
possessed in order to process the suffering that they're feeling
as an outsider during an extremely liminal stage of her life.

(52:17):
When you take a step back, the actual liminal space
that the character exists in is her own bedroom. When
asked about the Internet's influence on their work in twenty
twenty two in Little White Lies, Schonbrunn said, it's driving
as much from the dial up wild West, haunted landscape
that was my childhood online as it is from twenty

(52:38):
twelve era creepy pasta amateur YouTube aesthetics, and I was
of that generation where the computer entered the home and
slowly became more and more of a magnet. Especially for
me as a queer creative kid. It was a space
that was really important for me because it was hard
to be both of those things. Where I was growing up,
it was viewed as dark or strange, or danger, risks

(53:00):
or wrong. I would wait for everyone to go to
bed and stay up on the computer, writing and reading
fan fiction, lurking on message boards, and aiming with people
from school and weirdos I met online. It was something
I never acknowledged or talked about in my real life.
That's the dominant experience I was drawing from emotionally and
trying to explore with the film. I have a strong

(53:23):
suspicion that combining technophobia with the reality of living in
a real, three dimensional dystopia is going to dominate horror
in the years to come, especially as go to creatives
have a closer and more formative relationship with the Internet,
and if that art is anything like Kyle and James,

(53:44):
we're in for some good stuff. So I wanted to
talk to someone who deeply understood the academic and contemporary
definitions of liminal spaces to get to the core of
what the backrooms means better. And we're better to look
for someone with this very particular set of skills than
the Internet. Peter Heft is a philosopher who spent a

(54:06):
hell of a lot of time analyzing the way that
we interpret space and how it affects us psychologically. I
learned so much about how liminality originated in his paper
Betwixt and Between Zones as liminal and deterritorialized Spaces. Here's
our talk.

Speaker 10 (54:24):
My name is Peter Heft. I'm a doctoral candidate at
the Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism at
the University of Western Ontario.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
What drew you to the idea of liminality and just
sort of realizing that, you know, while there's been a
lot of writing about space just conceptually, there hasn't been
a lot of writing about this phenomenon specifically.

Speaker 10 (54:45):
I think there are I guess a few ways to
answer that. So on the one hand, right, I was
drawn to this topic generally because I was reading the
work of HP Lovecraft, and within his work, this idea
of thresholds and passing beyond on the known into the
unknown is this kind of recurring motif. And at the
time I was also listening to a very interesting podcast

(55:10):
called Weird Studies that kind of tackles similar topics from
an academic vein, and I realized, I guess that like
this question of zones and liminality was talked about a
lot in an anthropological register, also in kind of like
the weird fiction and weird theory side of things, But
the melding of the two was somewhat there, and I

(55:30):
wanted to try to fill some niche.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
The most basic question I could ask here is what
is a classic example of a liminal space of this
threshold like space you're describing.

Speaker 10 (55:44):
There are a few ways to think about it. The
kind of traditional anthropological account, right, is a more personal
or subjective accounting, a mental space where someone is kind
of excluded from a community for the sake of building
themselves up, and then they're reintegrated within the community. And
so this is like a space in a sense of

(56:04):
like a zone of indistinction where they are kind of
part of the community but kind of not. And that's
the traditional anthropological understanding at least. There's also then the
kind of Internet account which is quite literally like a space,
which would be like an airport or a bus station
or things like that, like the copy pasta Reddit post
that's like, oh, this is like a scary type of place, right.

Speaker 1 (56:26):
At least in the Internet sense. A lot of these
limital spaces, Yeah, they definitely look creepy. They're very often
very like monochromatic and empty. But the point you made
was that there are ordinarily places that you don't stay
for very long, rest stops, like waiting rooms, like places
where you're not where you're intended to be between doing

(56:49):
other things.

Speaker 10 (56:51):
One of the things that is interesting, and I was
thinking about this last night, is that I think there's
a distinction between I guess what I would call an
intrinsic or an inherently liminal space and one that is
not in transit clear inherently limital, and the former instance,
I think it would be like bus stops, airports, train stations,
things like that, insofar as they are literally designed to

(57:17):
be threshold spaces between a destination and between destinations, right,
And we can kind of see this very literally codified
and like the weird legal status of airports, like you're
kind of in the country, you're kind of not. It's
those are very literally threshold spaces. But I think those

(57:37):
are ultimately not all that interesting because they're so rigidly defined,
Like they are explicitly defined as spaces in between destinations
are two more codified locales. I think the more interesting
instance would be things that are kind of wrenched from
their ordinary context, or spaces that are changed depending on

(58:00):
how we interact with them. And I think those can
become liminal or cease having a level of limonel depending
upon how we're interacting with them. And certainly there's more
to say on that as well.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
But I mean, what would be an example of a
space like that?

Speaker 10 (58:18):
Yeah, I mean I think a school, I think is
an interesting example, right because on the one hand, right,
you go to like around any school during the academic year,
and there are children running around, and there's like garbage
all around, and there's like bells, drinking and stuff like that, Right,
But once you enter the school during the winter or

(58:42):
the summer. It's the context is very different. There's nobody
running around, it's absent. You hear just the tick of
clocks on the walls. But our relationship to this space
has changed dramatically, and I think that provides it's one
instance of kind of like an unsettling feeling.

Speaker 1 (59:03):
Perhaps I wanted to go back a little bit to
talk about the anthropological definition of liminality versus what we've
seen it sort of evolved into on the Internet, because
it seems like the liminality of anthropology is kind of
a more psychological state. Could you give me some examples
of that, because I know you reference that it's related

(59:26):
to feeling like a ritual or a major change.

Speaker 10 (59:32):
I can't give like a specific example of a like
specific indigenous group where like such a ritual might take place,
because I'm not an anthropologist in that context. Right, it's
a rite of passage insofar as somebody is not wholly
accepted within the group until they complete some certain task
or whatever, and that's like this zone of indistinction where

(59:55):
they're perhaps still a child, not quite an adult, or
I guess we can also think of this in kind
of religious contexts as well. Like in Judaism, right, you're
still a child, but you're almost an adult as you're
learning to read the tara for a barmitzvah. Traditionally, like
cultural things, the jump to the kind of physical register

(01:00:19):
in the context of the Internet creepypasta sphere has probably
just been an appropriation of terms to some extent, insofar
as the Latin lineman just literally means threshold, So I
would imagine that there's in that sense just an appropriation
of terms, but also perhaps kind of this weird recognition
that like, once you perhaps enter these odd spaces, you're

(01:00:43):
somewhat excluded from whatever you had been in previously, Like
you venture into the back rooms and you're no longer
in the hotel, or you're no longer amongst the living
or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
I mean, being thirteen years old kind of does feel
like being in a haunted room. It's extremely lonely and
a little scary. I can see how people get from
A to B there.

Speaker 10 (01:01:05):
You could say that I guess middle school would be
a like that kind of threshold space in a weird way.

Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
Cool, Yeah, is there anything else that you'd like to touch.

Speaker 10 (01:01:14):
On the other thing that I was thinking about, I
suppose is you were. There's also kind of for anyone
that plays video games in your audience, right, there's the
phenomenon of no clipping or clipping out of a map,
which in the context of video games, right, you are
wandering around and given a map that's been created, and
you run up against the edge and there's a glitch

(01:01:36):
and you kind of jump out of the map and
you can see the entire world that you're in. And
that's an example of I guess this like kind of
a weird digital version of of the back room. Is
that I think that one who is familiar with video
games has probably encountered at some point like the world
has not fully been rendered yet.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
Thank you so much to Peter. You can find more
of his work in the description of this episode. And
when we come back, we solve the real life mystery
of the back rooms. Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I've

(01:02:27):
rewritten this episode no fewer than three times, because man,
does the Internet know how to complicate a series of
pixels and buckle in because now that you know the
world built around the backrooms, let's meet the rooms themselves.
We're making room for the rooms, if you will. I've
seen this week, people are taking the lyrics of defining

(01:02:50):
gravity and really holding space with that and feeling power
in that. I didn't know that that was happening. In
the final read of the back Rooms, as discovered by
the online Lost media community, please meet eight o seven
Oregon Street in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Oshkosh nineteen twelve a Wisconsin

(01:03:14):
city named after a menomine chief. It's a small Midwestern
city of around thirty three thousand people by the year
that the fictional movie Titanic takes place in It was
first famous for being the site of a number of
lumber mills, but a great fire consumed most of the
city's businesses in eighteen seventy five. They eventually rebuilt, and

(01:03:37):
by nineteen twelve, their local paper, the Oshkosh Northwestern announces
there's a new bomb and calend apartment store that'll be
built on the south side of town, and it's completed
and opened by the end of nineteen thirteen. The second
floor of this location where the eventual back room's photo

(01:03:57):
will be taken, because yes, the backrooms are on the
second floor, not a basement. The second floor is said
to be devoted entirely to women's ready to wear apparel, millinery, rugs, carpets, draperies,
et cetera. Fast forward to nineteen forty five. The store
changes its name to Hirschberg's after it's sold and the

(01:04:19):
building is remodeled panty girdles for only two ninety five
Sign me up. The building is sold again in nineteen
fifty five and is remodeled, this time as Rohner's Furniture,
who expanded the building again ten years later. By the seventies.
They installed the carpet that we now associate with the

(01:04:42):
back rooms and installed drop ceilings, those being the dull
gray ceiling portions that those freaky fluorescent lights are installed
in in offices. I was curious why these panels and
lights are so associated with the seventies to me, and
after looking into it YouTuber and would you believe it?

(01:05:03):
A woman I once shared a desk with at the
Boston Globe, Hendre Gaylord, made a wonderful video about why
this happened. It doesn't make the drop ceilings any prettier,
but it does place the back rooms firmly in the
story of twentieth century American architecture. Here's the explanation in
her video.

Speaker 3 (01:05:23):
But the other thing that made drop ceilings so popular
in the seventies was the increase in oil prices, and
this renovation was right in between two big ones in
nineteen seventy three and nineteen seventy nine. The lower ceiling
can reduce seating costs, and in a big, old building
like this, I bet that was very enticing. If you
have a drop ceiling in your house or your apartment
and you're wondering when it was added, there's a pretty

(01:05:44):
good chance that had happened right in this period.

Speaker 1 (01:05:47):
Eight oh seven Oregon Street was expanded again in nineteen
seventy seven and then nineteen ninety. By ninety four, Roner's
Furniture went out of business and the space that it
used is subdivided to be used by a series of
small businesses, and after a short stint as the Miles
Kimball Warehouse outlet and as an estate sales space, in

(01:06:09):
two thousand and two the iconic photo of the backrooms
was taken, and all of this explains a lot of
why the back rooms looks as weird as it does.
By the time that current owner Bob Maza bought the place,
eight o seven Oregon had been a department store, a
furniture store, and a state scale location, and allegedly had

(01:06:31):
been used at various times for office or storage space.
Why are there seven slightly different wallpapers in the backrooms? Well,
imagine if a floor of an Ikea was just cleared out.
They're intended to look slightly different. They're displays that are
meant to look like somewhat different rooms. It also explains
that too many walls and no windows because these weren't

(01:06:55):
real walls, they were separators for furniture departments. And as
Kent explains so well, the weirdness of this space is
also connected to its many many renovations over the course
of nearly a century, leaving this kind of unintentional architectural
charcutery board vibe. When Bob Maza bought eight oh seven

(01:07:17):
Oregon Street and took the picture of what we now
call the back rooms, it was on a Sony Cybershot
digital camera on June twelfth, two thousand and two, at
eight twenty one a m Yes, lost media detectives are
that good, and he took the photo with a purpose.
He had plans to turn the building into something it

(01:07:37):
hadn't been up until this point. A hobby store. HobbyTown USA,
to be exact, a national chain with about one hundred
locations still open today, so the plan for the back
rooms were to clear them out and turn it into
an RC racer track. If you don't remember, these are
remote controlled cars that make this horror flying weird whale

(01:08:01):
when they move around. That plus RC boats and planes
and trains and models were what HobbyTown USA was all about,
and Bob's vision was not just to make his location
a place to buy stuff, but to have community and
really spend time with people who were just as passionate

(01:08:23):
about this stuff. The famous Backram's image wasn't the only
picture he took that morning. While many of them didn't survive,
there is still another angle of this same space on
the Internet, and you can see more brown carpets some
buckets on the ground, but the contrast of this photo
is less scary and more normal. These two images are

(01:08:46):
the only ones that survived on the Internet archive. In
a blog post Bob made in two thousand and three,
which was an announcement that HobbyTown USA Oshkosh was going
to include this really cool RC track when it opened,
and in March two thousand and four. It did reopening
after Masa's previous location near a Walmart got too expensive

(01:09:09):
with rent, and that HobbyTown is open at eight oh
seven Oregon Street to this day, even though the track
that was set up in the backrooms is not presently there.
From what I could find from video footage taken there
over the years, the physical space that the backrooms were
used for was actually a space filled with a lot

(01:09:31):
of joy and community where hobbyists spent time together and
you basically know the rest of the story. In twenty nineteen,
the backroom's image was posted and one random person on
Twitter correctly identified the location immediately, but was ignored. It
was ultimately a group of four discord users who found

(01:09:54):
the original backroom's location, almost five years to the day
of it becoming a part of niche internet life. I've
been vaguely aware of the Lost Media world for some
time because they make these really great annual round up
videos basically videos on YouTube that summarize the previous analog

(01:10:16):
or digital media that the group is collectively tracked down
and archived within the year. And it seems like there's
a pretty wide definition of what constitutes a lost media person.
They can be generalists, or, like the Backroom's folks, can
be uniquely honed in on finding one piece of media.

(01:10:38):
Some highlights from the twenty twenty four lost Media video.
They found Celebrity number six, a mysterious figure on a
two thousands era fabric pattern, finally identified to be an
obscure Spanish model, an unaired pilot of the Boondocks, and
a previously thought to be lost Bram Stoker short story

(01:11:00):
but no contest. The biggest discovery of the last year
was the physical location of the back rooms. Users named Leon, Semliot, Zarara,
and Zaft used a shared discord to organize a series
of challenging maneuvers. So all's well, that ends well? Right?

(01:11:20):
Tale as old as time, man takes photo, photo inspires
existential paranormal communities, and the image is traced to a
shockingly wholesome small business history. But I still had a question.
Did Bob Maza, still the owner of HobbyTown, USA to
this day, have any idea that this picture he took

(01:11:43):
on an early morning in two thousand and two had
inspired all of this? There is one more chapter to
this story. Almost immediately after the backrooms were traced to
eight oh seven Oregon Street. Local YouTubers that were either
a fan of the creepy pasta or liminal communities started
to just show up the HobbyTown USA Oshkosh like they

(01:12:07):
started the next day, what.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
The fuck is up, darnn family?

Speaker 11 (01:12:11):
Today, We're actually like, we just like found out that
like the original backrooms photos was tooken in our hometown,
So we're actually going there like like no joke, being
dead ass bro. We were so nervous because we saw
in our friend's story.

Speaker 2 (01:12:25):
We were like, what the fuck?

Speaker 9 (01:12:26):
And it started technically like we.

Speaker 1 (01:12:27):
Should do it, prompting owner Bob Masa to ask the
what rooms. But he doesn't do what I think a
lot of people in his position would have and told
these kids to go away.

Speaker 12 (01:12:39):
Here.

Speaker 1 (01:12:39):
He is on local news station WTAQ with a reporter
Rob Sussman on June nineteenth, explaining why he bought the
building to begin with.

Speaker 6 (01:12:49):
So I started started looking at old buildings in town here,
and this old crept thing was available, and thought, hey,
I could combine the store, move away from we were
out on the highway maybe and if it was popular enough,
the racing program could survive in this place.

Speaker 1 (01:13:07):
So Bob explains that the fake walls that inspired so
much backroom content was thrown away almost immediately by both
him and the volunteer RC enthusiasts who helped him clear
this space for competition. He documented the renovation process on
an early blog because he was a hobbyist and at
the time the Internet was thought of as little more

(01:13:29):
than a gadget. And then over twenty years later, Bob
describes starting to get weird phone calls about this picture.
He has no memory of.

Speaker 6 (01:13:40):
Oh, it was kind of weird, and I, you know,
obviously everybody's done Internet searching and stuff. But we were
in the car heading home and my wife got a
call and took the call, and it was somebody asked
if they knew who Robert was in, which I thought
was kind of weird, but they and they must have

(01:14:01):
gotten you know, that cross connection, you know when you
look up someone's name and it's affiliated phone numbers or whatever.

Speaker 5 (01:14:07):
And they tried calling.

Speaker 6 (01:14:08):
It, and she answered and they started to explain what
it was, and that was the first we had heard
about it. And of course then we just went and
obviously immediately to the internet and you could find it.
It was very easy, and it started to explode right
at that point. We get a lot of calls. For
the most part, most of them been pretty cordial, some

(01:14:29):
of them pretty weird.

Speaker 4 (01:14:30):
You know.

Speaker 6 (01:14:30):
They'll just call up and and even like just ask
some weird question, like you say, like is this the
back room or something, and you're like, you know, this
is this is hobby town, and they're like at that point,
they don't even know what to say, and but yeah,
it's it's been a little bit of an annoyance for
the store. And but we've been you know, we let
people come in and come up and take pictures and

(01:14:51):
do the selfie thing. You know, we just appreciate that
they don't spend a lot of time talking to the
people at work here to take them away from their jobs.

Speaker 1 (01:15:00):
Maso would do a second interview with YouTuber Ferrell maguire,
who was very involved in the discord that was looking
for the backrooms, and the story keeps going. After doing
a little searching, Bob would later provide ninety more photos
from this original cash of early two thousands Sony cybershot

(01:15:21):
data and backrooms fans freaked out when these dropped, which
is extremely charming and also so weird because what they're
rooting for is a series of blurry images of an
empty building from before they were born. But the excitement
is contagious. There's no denying it. But you can't help
but wonder what's in it for Bob. Now there are

(01:15:42):
backrooms teens who were raised on creepypasta and four chan
forums who were more interested in the empty room upstairs
than buying something from the struggling hobby shop beneath it.
But don't worry. Bob may not be a redditor, but
he is a businessman, and he took advantage of the
press by star starting a go fundme to fix the
roof of the store so that ideally he could help

(01:16:05):
keep the business he loves alive by holding backrooms events.
On this GoFundMe, he also shared testimony from people who
had been racing our sea cars at HobbyTown over the
years and deeply loved the community that Bob made space for.

Speaker 8 (01:16:21):
From the GoFundMe, the store I have nearly rebuilt and
cared so deeply for, and that so many online have loved,
would be lost forever. I am asking for help, and
in return, I am committed to preserving the legacy of
both the backrooms and our beloved hobby Store. If the

(01:16:41):
repairs are funded, we will organize and hold some Backrooms
day events where we recreate the room where the iconic
photo was taken using removable carpets, walls, et cetera. This
will allow us to keep the amazing RC tracks available
for use on days that a backrooms event isn't happening.

Speaker 4 (01:17:01):
We would welcome.

Speaker 8 (01:17:02):
Everyone to take pictures and walk around the truly bizarre
layout of that old furniture store. I will be working
with the fans to make these events something truly special,
something that can bring as much joy to them as
this place brings to the local community every day.

Speaker 1 (01:17:20):
This go fund me has made twenty thousand dollars a counting,
but that is not enough to fix the store. So
if you've got a little extra cash, you can donate
to Bob's GoFundMe to replace the roof of HobbyTown at
the link in the description. I made a contribution to
get us started. Bob had no clue that the culture
around the back rooms existed, but he does understand what

(01:17:44):
it's like to obsess over a niche interest and build
a community around it. And while the back rooms may
have become popular as this site for conquering your fears
in a poorly written, creepy pasta and the site of
existential horror for the lit middle crowd. In real life,
The Backrooms is eight o seven Oregon Street, a small

(01:18:06):
business and a community space, a space that, like so
many like it, needs help to survive in a world
increasingly hostile to community spaces. It remains to be seen
what happens to the Backrooms. Only time will tell if
the new roof will make it to Oshkosh, or if
Kane's a twenty four movie is going to take the

(01:18:28):
world by storm. Maybe the Backrooms will be a moment
in Internet history, the right symbol at the right time.
But for all the horrific elements of the Internet we
spend so much time on during this show, this freaky,
liminal space does give me some hope. From one blurry photo.
There has been so much creativity, so much community built

(01:18:53):
during a time where real life space is to commune
wasn't safe. So backrooms people know clipped and ended up
finding each other there and maybe, just maybe they will
manage to save an RC club in Wisconsin in the process.
The back Rooms your sixteenth minute ends now and for

(01:19:20):
your moment of fun. From Pharaoh Maguire's Wonderful Backrooms video,
which is linked In the description, Bob Maza tells Ferrell
about his favorite moments in the back rooms homes HobbyTown, USA.

Speaker 12 (01:19:34):
My favorite memory is and always will be my favorite
memories is of all of the racers and RC airplane
clubs and even just customers that when I call out
back in the day, like twenty years ago, so many
people would come and help. Over the years, the amount
of the friends and the smiling faces that you see

(01:19:55):
coming through the doors, and you know, kids walk in
the store and or you know they're life just awesome
and wow, and that's the kind of stuff that really
keeps you going.

Speaker 13 (01:20:09):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 1 (01:20:20):
The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Grant Crater and pet shout outs to our dog
producer Anderson my Kat's flee and Casper and my pet
rock Bert, who will outlive us all. Bye.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Host

Jamie Loftus

Popular Podcasts

40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season

Dateline NBC

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}the backrooms: a blurry photo that changed the internet