Are the Backrooms Real? The Photo, the Post and Where It Started

Are the Backrooms real?

No. The Backrooms are fiction, but the photo they started from is real. The idea was invented in a 4chan thread in May 2019, and in 2024 fans traced its famous yellow-room photo to a real building in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. There is no endless maze behind the walls of our world, and no one has ever “noclipped” into one.

What makes the question so common is that the Backrooms were built to feel real. The first description reads like a warning from someone who has been there, the fan databases are written like field reports, and the most famous videos pose as found footage. All of it is storytelling.

Where was the Backrooms photo taken?

In a former furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in 2002. The room was being renovated for a new tenant, a branch of the hobby shop chain HobbyTown, and the photo was taken on June 12, 2002, to record the work in progress.

The details came out in May 2024, when a Discord community dedicated to the Backrooms found the photo on an archived web page from March 2003, using the Wayback Machine. Here’s what they found:

• The building: for much of the 20th century, Rohner’s Home Furnishings occupied the site. HobbyTown’s Oshkosh branch took over part of it in 2003.
• The room: a carpeted, open room with yellow wallpaper and fluorescent lights on the second floor, captioned on the shop’s renovation blog as the “East (Oval) room”. The photo is tilted at a slight angle, which adds to the off-kilter feeling.
• The file: it was posted on March 2, 2003, with the plain camera file name “Dsc00161.jpg”, taken on a Sony Cyber-shot.
• What happened to it: the blog described heavy water damage that meant the area had to be cleared. The room as pictured no longer exists; it became a radio-controlled car racing track.

When the link to the Backrooms came out, the owner started a crowdfunding campaign to repair the ageing building. The building and store were sold in 2025, and the shop still operates under a new name.

So if you’re asking “where is Level 0 in real life?”, this is the answer. The fan-written Backrooms Database still uses the Oshkosh photos for Level 0, crediting them as taken “in the original Hobbytown Oshkosh in June 2002”. For what Level 0 is inside the story, see Backrooms Level 0, the Lobby.

Who created the Backrooms?

An anonymous 4chan user, on May 12, 2019. Someone started a thread on /x/, 4chan’s paranormal board, asking for images that “just feel ‘off’”, and posted the yellow-room photo. Another anonymous user replied with a name for the place and the first description of it.

That reply is the whole original Backrooms in one paragraph. If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you end up somewhere with old moist carpet, endless yellow, the hum-buzz of fluorescent lights and about six hundred million square miles of empty rooms. And if you hear something wandering nearby, it has already heard you.

Nobody knows who wrote it. Everything since, from the levels to the entities to the films, was added by other people.

The Backrooms timeline, from one photo to an A24 film

When	What happened
June 12, 2002	The photo is taken during the renovation in Oshkosh, Wisconsin
March 2, 2003	It’s posted on the HobbyTown Oshkosh renovation blog
May 12, 2019	A 4chan /x/ thread posts the photo; a reply names it the Backrooms
Days later	Writers post Backrooms stories on Reddit (r/creepypasta, then r/backrooms)
About two months later	An indie Backrooms video game is released
Following years	Fans build collaborative databases on Fandom and Wikidot, adding levels and entities
January 7, 2022	Kane Parsons (Kane Pixels), 16, uploads “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” to YouTube
February 6, 2023	A24 announces a film based on Parsons’ videos, with him directing
May 2024	A Discord community traces the photo to Oshkosh
2025	The building and store are sold
May 29, 2026	The A24 film Backrooms opens in US cinemas, after a May 7 premiere

How did one post become three different Backrooms?

The 2019 post had no owner, so anyone could add to it, and three big versions grew apart. Today, “the Backrooms” can mean any of them, and they don’t agree with each other.

1. The fan-written Backrooms Database. Within days of the post, people were writing more. Fans imagined extra floors called “levels” and hostile “entities”, and organised them on collaborative websites that work much like the SCP Foundation. This is where Level 0 “The Lobby”, almond water and hundreds of numbered levels come from. Not everyone liked it: a group of fans who preferred the original split off into their own subreddit, r/TrueBackrooms. See Backrooms levels explained.
2. Kane Pixels’ web series. Kane Parsons had seen the original image and caption online but didn’t know a fan community existed. His first video, a nine-minute fake VHS tape, has more than 75 million views, and it grew into a 25-part series with its own story: no numbered levels, just one vast “Complex” studied by a fictional MRI company, the Async Research Institute. Some early viewers told him he was doing the Backrooms wrong. See what Async is.
3. The A24 film. Backrooms (2026), directed by Parsons, keeps strict continuity with his series, not with the fan databases. A furniture store owner, Clark, finds a way into the Backrooms through his own store, which makes a neat echo of the real photo’s former furniture store. It became a major box-office hit.

If you’ve ever seen two “Backrooms” explanations that contradict each other, this is why. Which Backrooms is canon? sets the three side by side.

Is the Backrooms based on a true story?

No. No real disappearances, experiments or places are behind it, apart from the photo. But the stories borrow real things to feel believable, and that blurs the line.

• Noclipping is a real term, from video games: a cheat that lets you pass through walls. In the fan-written Backrooms, it’s how you fall out of reality, slipping through a surface into a dark space between levels.
• Missing people. The Backrooms Database’s Level 0 page claims, in-world, that people from real events, including the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, have been sighted there. That’s fiction told in a deadpan, documentary style.
• Async sounds like a real research lab, but it was invented for Kane Pixels’ series.
• The places feel copied from life because, in Kane Pixels’ version, they are meant to be: the Backrooms there is a dimension made of distorted copies of real places, which the film’s Clark calls “every place that ever was”.

Why do the Backrooms feel so familiar?

Because the photo looks like a place you’ve almost been. An empty, carpeted room with yellow walls and humming lights is ordinary, and seeing it with no people and no purpose makes it feel wrong.

That feeling has a name online: the liminal space aesthetic, empty in-between places that feel “oddly familiar”. The Backrooms is one of its best-known examples, and some writers credit it with starting the trend. One critic pointed to the yellow as part of the effect: a colour of caution, decay and existential distress. Kane Parsons has described his version as a hazy memory of the late 1990s and early 2000s: flash photos, bad lighting and yellow walls. A photo from 2002 fits that perfectly.

Want to know what you’d actually face if the story were true? The episode Backrooms Lore Explained: Why It Sucks To Be Lost in Level 0–2 walks you through it, and until then, start with how to survive the Backrooms or the Backrooms world page.