Endless Thread - Endless Dread: Backrooms And Ghostly Photos

Episode Date: October 15, 2020

In the spirit of Halloween, the Endless Thread team shares spooky stories from Reddit, including the origins of a classic horror movie SFX, the creepy world of r/backrooms, and the mystery surrounding three photos found on someone’s phone.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lap at WBUR, Boston. Ben. Oh, he's still going. He's going. I don't know what you're doing right now, but it's impressive. My cat actually meowed because it was pissed off. And now I have to move my cat out of here because my cat's been pissed off by the sounds that I'm making

and or is concerned about me. Bernie, it's scary story time. She's like, meh-re-re-h. That'll only help this episode, I think. That's true. I feel like, you know, we've been doing some scary stories, but they've been, like, hashtag too real a little bit.

Yeah, I'd say so. And today we're just doing a snack time of, I think, just like, you know, kind of fun. scary stories maybe. Fun for who? I don't know what you have prepared. For the ghosts. My story is probably not so fun for the people who endured this.

Okay. All right. Well, this week, we've got a scary story snack time for you. But it's endless dread style. I'm excited. All right. Who's going to go first? Well, mine are kind of short, so I'll tell you mine.

Okay. I've just got a little, you know, yeah, a little mishmash, a bobbing for apples, if you will, which is the thing that we can't do anymore for obvious reasons. Nobody's bobbing for apples. It's gross that we ever did it, to be honest, but sure. I guess that's true. I guess that's true. A bunch of people putting their mouths on a bunch of random apples floating around in water.

Yeah, not the best. Yeah, but you know. We live, we learn. All right, where's this going? Okay, so in the very beginning, you heard me make a weird sound. Yeah. And it was my impression of the end of one of my favorite movies of scary times, which is John Carpenter's The Thing.

Have you ever seen this film? I haven't. It's on the list. I've officially made a list of all of the scary movies. I finally need to just strap myself down for and watch. I'll get there. So John Carpenter is the thing. The Thing is a great movie in true John Carpenter form and has its like moments of gore. And also is just a great science fiction meets horror movie of like a bunch of researchers at an Arctic facility being stuck with an alien that spoilers can basically appear as any.

anything it wants to, so it can basically take on the form of any organic being that it takes over. Oh, boy. In the end of the movie, the creature does this really blood-curdling roar. And legend has it, at least according to a post in the R-slash-movies subreddit, that the way that John Carpenter imagined this was that the creature was making a scream that was the combination of all of the other creatures it had taken over and murdered effectively all at the same time. Do you want to hear it? Yeah. I'm going to play it for you. What do you think? Creepy? It was beautiful. Beautiful, right? Yeah. Not so creepy out of context. Okay. So that's my,

that's like my thing one. Okay. Thing one. Thing one, so to speak. My last scary story thing is One that I've talked to you about, which is backrooms. You know about backrooms. I know about you knowing about backrooms. This is always where the conversation starts and ends. So do you know what no clipping is? No. Okay.

It's like this video game phrase for a cheat where you, the player, can kind of remove the obstructions of the video game environment and walk through walls and other players and stuff like that. You're kind of, you're like almost like a ghost. But you can also no-clip as part of a glitch in the game, like basically walk through a wall and go off the map into a part of the game that isn't actually meant to be accessed, and you can get stuck there, or so the mythology of this particular subreddit community goes.

So R-slash Backrooms is a subreddit with 83,000 subscribers, and it basically takes this no-clipping, glitching concept from video games, getting stuck outside of the video game world in a no-man's land, environment, and it applies that creepy environment to the real world and says that you can no-clip or glitch out of reality into backrooms. The description of the backrooms sub-reddit is this. 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 fluorescent lights at maximum humbug.

and approximately 600 million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby because it sure as hell has heard you. I'm going to send you a picture of one of these back rooms. Okay. Check that out. Oh, boy. Oh, I hate it. Thanks, you hate it? I hate it.

It's pretty creepy, right? This is just a picture that someone took. Well, Emery, I mean, I'm breaking the fourth wall here, I guess. But yes, that is a picture that someone took in real life. And then they photoshopped like a murderous spider demon coming around the wall in this dim hallway. Yeah. Oh. Yeah.

And the idea is like you might get stuck in here with this creature without any other humans. This looks like it's probably a public transportation. Like a subway stop late at night. subway stop late at night, underground, fluorescent lights. It kind of looks like a cross between your high school gym walls and just like an old airport that should have been closed decades ago. Dimly lit, horrible. Yeah, this is what nightmares are made of. If you want to creep yourself out, go check out R-slash backrooms.

All right. Well, hopefully I have something that will creep you out equally when we come back. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. and hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcasts.

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Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay. My story is from The Truth Is Here, subreddit. Ooh. Ooh. So this was posted five months ago by a user who goes by Whitney Renee B. The title of the post is, My mom called me today with a bizarre story.

Picks included. You know when someone has Picks included that they're legit, something legitimately creepy is going on. Yep, definitely. Okay, so I'm just going to read you the post. My mother, stepfather, grandma, brother, and two sisters live in a house by Lake Draper in Oklahoma. They have neighbors, but the area they live in is kind of rural. A couple days ago, my mom was going through her phone, and she found three pictures. one of her sleeping, one of my stepfather sleeping, and one of my youngest sisters sleeping.

They were taken at the beginning of April, around three in the morning. She has no history of sleepwalking, and every other family member has denied having anything to do with the photos. I know my family very well, and they wouldn't do something like that. I also have doubts that any of them would have been awake at that time. I'm just curious if any of you have experienced something something so. or have a reasonable explanation. I'm including all three pictures, but the strangest one of them all is the pick of my mom.

So, Ben, I'm going to send you this picture. Oh, God. Of her mother that was found in her mother's phone. I don't like it. Can you see it? Yeah. Okay, describe this for me. Okay, it's interesting.

So it's a very close-up shot of a woman sleeping on her side with like it's like half of her face on a pillow and then like a blanket pulled up over her shoulder. And the light is kind of reddish and over her shoulder like on the other side of her there are it's a little weird what looked to be two crosses up on the wall. It's creepy a.F. Yeah, this is a very close up shot. It's almost like the person who took the photo would have had to have been.

right up in her face but a little below her, like they were sneaking up from below the bed to take the picture. And yeah, there's a red light of some sort in the room, which only makes this creepier. Although, can I say one thing, one skeptical, can I be that guy who's watching the horror movie who's like, no, now, now, now can I be that guy?

Yeah. Okay, this is a photo that this person could have taken of themselves. it's close enough to them. You don't see their whole body. They could have taken it themselves. I'm just saying. Like she could be taking it. This could be a selfie.

That'd be a very creepy selfie. Yeah. Okay. But wait. Anyway, I'm just putting that out there. Okay, go on. That's fine. You put that out there.

But there are a couple more pictures to show you because remember her sister and her stepdad were also. All taken around the same time. That's creepy. All taken timestamped all right around. 3 a.m. So I'm sending you the picture of the sister and the stepdad. So take a look at those. Okay. Also creepy. But this definitely could not have been a selfie. No, definitely not. Definitely not. But this same red light in the room. The OP also says, I should also make it clear that they have five dogs, all of which bark at anything and everything. Because of that, confident it wasn't an intruder. Any advice or suggestions are welcome.

My suggestion is lock all the doors and all the windows. That's my suggestion. This poster did also say the pink light you see in their bedroom. That is not pink. That is red. But they say it's from a salt lamp that they keep on at night. Just because, you know, people immediately were like, why is there a red light in the bedroom? Do you have any guesses, though? I'm going to guess an evil spirit that is trapped inside of the salt lamp. Okay. No, I don't know. There are no wrong answers.

There are no stupid guesses. I have no. You know, screw you. I have no, I have no answer to this except that it was staged. Well, that's not getting in the spirit, Ben, but okay. It's the only way I don't freak myself out. I can tell you what Redditors thought. Okay. Yep. I want to hear that.

A little bit of what Redditors thought, a little bit of what I think. Some people pointed out the 3 a.m. time stamp and said, well, you know, 3 a.m. is supposedly the devil's hour from 3 to 4 a.m. So that's one. That's one suggestion. It was the devil, him or herself. Another is, you know, people said even though they have dogs that would have presumably barked at or attacked an intruder, that maybe there's a long-term squatter in the house. And people pointed to a little Academy Award-winning film called Parasite, which I know you've seen. Oh, yeah. And so they wondered if there had. has been a squatter in their house all this time that maybe the dogs would already be used to,

and so they wouldn't bark at this person. Oh, no. But other people said, no, why would a squatter potentially blow their cover just to take some creepy pictures? Because they're escalating. They're escalating the situation until they could murder this family in their house. Maybe they're like, this is too easy. Why is no one taking notice? They're like, please notice me.

That is kind of true, though, right? They say that about serial killers, that they leave clues behind for anyone to potentially catch them just to see if anyone picks up on it. Definitely. But what I'm wondering, and I know the O.P says that their other family members wouldn't do this, but there's only pictures of the mom, the stepdad, and one of the sisters. And if you remember at the beginning of the post, that still leaves another sister, a brother, and grandma in that. house. Like, where was grandma at 3 a.m.? You know? People don't think that they... Grandma's getting witchy. People don't think she could be. People don't think that they sleepwalk, but you could sleepwalk and take some pictures. And the dogs wouldn't, the dogs wouldn't bark at you because you live in the house.

I don't see how else this could have happened. I think someone is a secret sleepwalker and they just don't know it yet. I've heard enough crazy sleepwalking stories that I think that I think, That could totally be what happened here. I also think they should burn that salt lamp and never turn it on ever again. Because if you leave a red light on while you sleep, you're asking for trouble. That's true. You are welcoming the devil into your home. There you go.

Your weekly dose of... I'm going to trim my beard before I get into bed tonight. You know what I mean? Gotta look good. I'm going to brush my teeth with that whitening toothpaste. Are you smiling when you sleep? Are you a sleep smiler? It's funny, actually.

Sarah says that I'm like the most annoying sleeper to watch because I'm just constantly like so like like a cherub, like a happy cherub. Like that's how I sleep basically. It's like I'm just like having like a be used smile on my face all the time. Oh God. Someone should take pictures of me while I said, Guys, come on over, come on over.

You're asking for it. Whatever demon got into this person's house, head out to a woodsy area of Massachusetts and go get Ben. Oh, God, please don't. That's it. That's our spooky snack time. Yeah, hope you liked it. See you next week.

If you dare. Wow. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before we ghost completely, we want to share something very special with you. Some of our colleagues have a brand new show announced just this week. It's called Anything for Selena. If you're a fan of the pop star, or even if you aren't, this show is going to be great. We help to bring it into the world, and now we're bringing the trailer to you.

Take a listen and smash that subscribe button. This journey begins at the border, a place in the in-between where for a long time I felt divided in two. Then I discovered her. Red lips, brown skin, big hoops. She was magnetic, no matter what side of the border she was on. I was a young kid, but I remember what it felt like seeing that one of us had made it. And she brought us with her. A star faded away today.

Tejano music queen, Selena, has been gunned down in Corpus Christi. Then, she was gone. Suddenly, violently, so many of us were marked by her death. And I'll never forget the day. I was four years old. I was six years old. I was eight years old. I remember being in my graduate dorm,

hearing the news and literally just falling to the ground and in shock. For almost my entire life, I've been thinking about why Selena made. matters about what it means to love her. Selena's legacy has shown me some of the biggest revelations about my identity, my community, my country. You did play Selena and you did take a gunshot out. And I'm going to do it again.

And I'm going to do it 20 friggin' time. And I want you to leave my country. No, man. I was born in this country, Homeboy. I had the same equal rights you do, Cardinal. She provides this like validation in these spaces that we weren't welcomed in before and that we're able to bring her with us. This story is personal.

I go deep into Selena's roots. There's more to her and her family's journey. Oh man, Mr. Kintan, I've been dreaming of this moment for a very long time. A lot of people that see the movie, they think I'm a bad guy. I mean that I control my children. I'm on a quest to understand how a working-class girl who began singing to put food on the table changed culture. And the journey has taken me in surprising directions.

And she was just like, I ain't trying to hide that this is what I got. This was definitely the most anybody has ever talked to me about butts before. So that's interesting. Well, you've got to listen to the episode. Yeah, I have a big, you know, a large rear, I guess, for the norm. But, you know, for me it's normal. But what norm? No, because black women have had this bottom all our lives.

Ultimately, this is a podcast about a woman who was unapologetically herself, a woman who inspired a whole movement, a woman who changed my life. If you have a dream, don't let anybody take it away. And you always believe that the impossible is always possible. I'm Maria Garcia, and this is anything for Selena, a podcast about belonging from WBUR and Futudo Studios. Coming January 2021, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you listen.