Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings, and Mysteries - 177. Backrooms Horror: The Creepiest Levels and Darkest Lore

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

In 2019, an anonymous photo of a yellow hallway turned into one of the biggest creepypastas of a generation. Millions of people have since built out the Backrooms. Hundreds of levels, from an infinite black ocean hiding a planet-sized creature to a children's birthday party run by entities that wear your skin. With a new A24 film bringing the Backrooms to the big screen, we're going no-clipping into the most terrifying levels, the strange mythology of almond water and Greasy Marshmallows, and the chilling stories of people who tried to escape. Subscribe on⁠ Patreon⁠ to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on⁠ Tik Tok⁠ and⁠ Instagram⁠ for a daily dose of horror. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to another episode of Hearts Arts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kailen Moore. I hope you're all as excited for the backrooms movie as I am. And to celebrate, I wanted to do a spooky deep dive today into the creepy pasta that started it all. The floors, the lore, the entities galore. And I had a fun idea, if you'll all just humor me for a sec. I thought it was really fun when we did the Where I Listen tag on Instagram. So for this episode, I was thinking you guys should tag me in any liminal space or backroom. photos that you might have. And I know for a fact, you guys have some of these. I've heard from listeners who work in haunted hotels who work in scary hospitals. I've heard from listeners who clean elementary schools in the middle of the night. I know you guys have some very spooky liminal space photos and I want to see them. I have some fun ones from when I get lost in a back hallway of a mall one time. I'm going to share those. And I'll share some of my other favorites from you guys on our Instagram. That's at heart starts pounding. Maybe I'll even send over some free swag to a few listeners. All right, post those photos so I can see them, and let's get into it.

The backrooms began in May of 2019, with an anonymous photo posted to 4chan. The photo was of a hallway with ugly yellow wallpaper, beige carpet, and fluorescent lights. The user accompanied it with a caption. If you're not careful and you know 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 humbuzz, 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.

This one photo captured the imaginations of millions of people online. Within a few short weeks, whole wikis popped up dedicated to telling stories set inside the backrooms. And eventually, forums like Backrooms Wiki and Backrooms fandom were dedicated to user-generated content building on the lore and making it really the biggest modern creepypasa that we have. At its core, the Backrooms is a fictional world of endless, monotonous hallways, doors, columns, and objects where unsuspecting people can become trapped forever after no clipping through a structure in the real world. We've covered this background and some horrifying actual places with similarities to the backrooms in an episode that we did a few years back.

And there we also get into the internet mystery that was this photo. You can look in the description for a link to that episode. But now there is a new A24-produced backrooms film coming out this month from filmmaker Kane Parsons, also known as Kane Pixels on YouTube. Kane is one of many people online who were inspired by the backrooms and told his own stories set inside of that world. With the movie coming out, this is a great opportunity for us to explore together. some of the other levels that were created by the fan base.

Over the years, users have generated hundreds of additional levels of the backrooms for us to get lost in. And of course, within those levels are all sorts of horrors waiting to attack. So let's stick close together as we delve once again into the backrooms. Let's begin today's episode on Level Zero. This is the most iconic level of the backrooms, the one inspired by the real world photograph. Its main components are the beige, moist car.

carpet, the yellow walls, and the humming fluorescent lights. Ceiling is always low, and the majority of the level are these long hallways. But there is some variation. Sometimes there's doors, and when opened, these doors reveal rooms of various sizes, full of random, forgotten office objects. You might see stacks and stacks of old newspapers, office desks, sometimes even moving boxes. People claim the backrooms are a sort of afterlife for buildings. But to me, it kind of feels more like purgator.

like an endless, empty mid-2000s office space that sprawls for an estimated 600 million square miles. Level zero is also known for the random square holes that appear in the ground and walls. It's possible that these might lead to other rooms or levels, but no one is ever seen again after they fall through. The horrible monotony of the yellow walls and the humming lights are enough to drive most people mad, but sometimes level zero can get even worse. The lights will occasionally go out, which you will. would think might be a relief, but stuck in the dark, you can start to hear voices like people whispering in the distance. Or you might hear horrible whales from creatures you can't describe,

even if you see them. When and if the lights come back on, you're actually happy to see the wallpaper again. Sometimes you might catch a glimpse of a spray-painted arrow that wasn't there before, like someone is trying to guide you on where to go. Those who are lucky enough to find an exit on level zero will find themselves next at level one, which is known as the habitable zone. That name might give you some hope because it means now you might be able to make contact with other people that are trapped in the backrooms. Level one has wide open floors filled with infinite concrete pillars and arches, kind of like a parking garage. As you walk, you see strange messages that are left on the floor and the walls, cryptic messages about no clipping, the process

of falling through a soft spot in reality that landed you here. Or long diatribes from people who went mad on this floor. Sometimes these messages are helpful. They might point you towards a stash of items. One of the most useful items you can find on this level is actually a thermos. It's filled with strange pale liquid called almond water. Now, almond water can be found on many floors of the backrooms. No one really knows why, but it can keep you nourished and it can keep you sane.

So you better drink up if you find this. And it's not to be confused with cashew water, which looks the same but comes in a glass bottle. That will zap your strength instead of restoring it. If you want something other than a drink or if you have a nut allergy and you still need sustenance, you can also find a food substance known as greasy marshmallows throughout the levels. They look just like regular marshmallows, but if you eat them whole, they make you feel bloated and lethargic. If you eat more than 40 or so, you risk your skin turning the same consistency as the marshmallows. and if you eat 100, you'll end up dissolving into a puddle of grease on the ground.

Eventually, if you keep moving, the smooth concrete walls of level one start to disappear. In their place are long hallways, filled with electrical wiring, pipes, and junction boxes. The hallways grow darker and darker, and they're only lit by the occasional glowing orange light. This is level two, the abandoned utility halls. It is like every secret space between every city that you've ever been in. Anytime you've seen a locked door behind a subway track or a staircase leading down beneath the bottom floor of a parking garage, it's led here. And unfortunately, this is also the first level where you might hear something that doesn't sound quite human. You might catch a little bit of movement in the corner of your eye, dashing behind a corner.

This is the floor that something lives on, known as an entity. Now, entities can come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are microscopic. there's an entity called the disease that infects survivors and causes them to bleed from every pore in their body. Some entities are huge, like La Camiloha. It's a massive stone humanoid that rises out of the ocean on certain water-filled levels. Entities can be as intelligent and all-knowing as a god or as dumb as a rock, and some of them are friendly, but most of them want to kill you. On these early levels, there's a set variety of entities that you can encounter.

One of the best known ones are the smilers. They appear as a bright white smiley face like a crooked neon kids drawing. They're accompanied by a sharp piercing sound like an electronic shriek. Sometimes you might see a human-like figure crawling around on all fours. These are called hounds. They were people from the front rooms, aka the real world at one point, but they were driven feral by the backrooms. And now they stalk around looking for victims to terror.

to shreds with their sharp teeth. Their faces have morphed to look like canine skulls with massive incisors sticking out, and their bodies are covered in long, ratty strands of hair that drags on the ground, and they're not even the most dangerous creatures in the early levels. That actually would be the death moth.

These massive insects will try and spray you with a corrosive liquid that will incapacitate you. And once you're paralyzed, they'll dismember you and drag you to their hive to be used as raw material. Here on level two, as you're walking down hallway after hallway of pipes and concrete walls, you might pass a door that just says Jerry's room. Do not go inside there. It's a long story,

but Jerry is a parrot and there's a group of people in the backrooms that worship him like a god. I promise you, it's best if you mind your own business when it comes to Jerry. And if you keep going, you might finally come across what you think is another survivor, someone who looks totally human. But as you start talking to them, they seem odd. They jabber in a language that you've never heard before. And if you look closer, you can see that their skin doesn't fit quite right, because that's not their skin at all. This isn't a survivor.

It's a skin stealer, a tall, amorphous creature that wears the skin of its victims. And as terrible as all these things sound, it's important to remember that encountering them is actually very rare. Above all else, your time in the backrooms will be monotonous. You'll walk down endless corridors that remind you of a time and a place that you can't quite remember. And that to me is really at the heart of what makes the backrooms so scary. These levels feel like places that I kind of remember being in as a kid in the late 90s. An empty corridor somewhere in the mall, a stuffy old office with fluorescent lighting and bare white walls.

even the floors that are supposed to be relaxing and chill still give me that sense of existential dread that I can't really explain. This episode is brought to you by Quince. Something that has changed since I've become a mother. I have about four minutes to get dressed in the mornings. And I need everything in my closet to just work. No overthinking, no trying on three outfits anymore. And that's why I keep coming back to Quince.

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This episode is brought to you by FedEx. These days, the power move isn't having a big metallic credit card to drop on the check at a corporate launch. The real power move is leveling up your business with FedEx intelligence and accessing one of the biggest data networks powered by one of the biggest delivery networks. Level up your business with FedEx, the new power move. Eventually, you'll be in the back rooms for so long. You won't remember what the front rooms felt like. You won't even remember that they were called anything other than the front rooms. You haven't seen a window and who knows how long.

you've been confined in spaces with low ceilings and tight corridors. Though the backrooms are infinite, your world has felt more and more claustrophobic. At some point, you'll get to level 37, also known as sublimity, or simply the pool rooms. It's a level of endless, needy water in hallways and caverns lined entirely with pristine, white ceramic tile. The water is lukewarm, so you won't get chilly.

It's also filled with Epsom salts that, when consumed, will relax your muscles and lower your heart rate. The annoying, buzzing and humming of the previous more industrial levels will be replaced by the gentle sloshing of the water. And according to lore on this floor, someone was able to get a recording of this room and bring it back to the front rooms, and this is what that recording sounds like.

Despite having no obvious source, the water never sits completely still. There's always rippling moving across it. Now, some theorize that because this level is so big, the water has its own natural slight current, but when you're looking at it, it almost feels like there's something deep below on this floor that's making the water move. There are no known entities on this level, but that doesn't make it completely safe. Occasionally, you'll notice a tiled staircase going down beneath the water. If curiosity gets the better of you and you decide to try to follow it deep, deep underwater,

you'll find that these staircases can lead to levels that are significantly less relaxing. For instance, if you swim down into the black water, you might reemerge on an earlier level, level 7, also known as the Lasophobia, which is one of the scariest levels to me. This is a water level. It's filled with an endless black ocean beneath a dim cloudy sky. There's no land, so eventually your limbs will wear out and you'll start to drown. Only, you can't drown on this level. Instead, you'll just sink forever. Your lungs will burn, but death will never come.

As you tread water on this level, you might wonder exactly what's beneath your feet. Well, one kilometer below you is a part of the ocean here that's known as the Twilight Zone, and it is full of bones. If you get down far enough, you'll see these bones, and at first they look like human bones, but upon closer inspection, they have some really important differences. For instance, it appears that what, ever beings the bones belong to had flippers as well as larger jaws and very sharp teeth. Perhaps they're from some long extinct people that used to inhabit this level.

There's no real name for the entity that is in the water here. It's simply known as the thing on level seven. Most reports indicate that it's some kind of eel, but no one knows for sure because no one has ever seen all of it. It's believed that the thing is the size of a place. planet, and it goes on forever in the dark water. Now, if you're lucky enough, as you sink down into infinity, you'll come across an underwater cave. This is the exit to a new level, but you never know what horrors might await you. Aside from the thalasophobia level, another level that I

personally would never want to get to is level fun. It's an infinite warehouse of empty ballpits, bouncy castles, and jungle gyms. There's also these really depressing side rooms with low, party decorations for a child's birthday party. It looks like the saddest, biggest, most abandoned Chucky Cheese that you've ever seen. It actually does remind me of a time that I got lost in the Chucky Cheese indoor playground. It was one of those tubes that has the submarine windows, and I couldn't find my way out. I was just going around in these infinite circles, seeing the same view of that animatronic pizza rat over and over and over again. A worker had to eventually come save me. And, you know, to me, that's what this is.

this entire floor is like. If you were on this floor, you would have to get through miles and miles and miles of plastic ball pits and jungle gyms. And as you're walking around, you might find an electronic device on one of the party tables. It's off, but as you pass it, it lights up with a message. It might say something like, I know how to help you. Head north. And the message will always end with a little old school millennial smiley face. You know the one that I'm talking about. the colon with the parentheses. It's important that you do not listen to these messages or trust them as they come in because they are being sent by entities that live on this floor.

One's known as partygoers. Some people describe the partygoers as looking like Gumby if he came from hell. Their bodies are yellow instead of green though, and they have these giant red smiley faces carved into their blocky heads. Other versions of the lore says that partygoers look like human. with yellow sheets over their heads, and they have these self-inflicted wounds that leave bloodstained smiley faces on the sheets,

and it gives them a permanent grin. Now, it's believed that they're infected with something called sanguine festivis virus. If you contract this illness on this floor, you'll become obsessed with locating other people trapped in the back rooms and feeding off of them. Another dangerous level that you might find yourself on is level 33, also known as the Infinite Mall.

It first seems like a normal, a normal, clean, empty mall, but the further you walk, the more it all begins to deteriorate. So you walk farther and farther, and the walls turn black with mold. Weeds grow up through the floor, the lights start to flicker, and then they die. And soon the whole building falls away and you're left with a void of indescribable horrors. I mean, I could talk about these floors for hours. Another couple favorites of mine are Level 116, which is also known as Godspire. It features a small village at the bottom of a hill.

Above them sits their goddess, who is always watching. She's a massive, motionless skeleton with flesh hanging off of her bones. There's Level 250 that features a field of grass beneath the nighttime sky that only has two stars. And if you stare at them, you'll soon realize that those are the eyes of a massive entity staring down at you. It'll try to seduce you and make you feel. stay there forever. And then there's level 943, a single lower class tenement that is host to thousands of parasites and diseases. The home is occupied by a family of giant talking insects that all hate one another. They're known as the rotting folk. Trash always litters the hallways.

The sinks are filled with a dried brown substance. The mattresses are covered in mysterious, sticky yellow liquid. It's recommended that you do not enter this house without a hazmat suit. there are infinite levels with infinite horrors. But there is one final one that we can discuss, simply called the end. Now, the end is not truly the final level of the backrooms. There can be no final level in an infinite place. Technically, it's level 601, but for many, it does represent the end of their journey. The end is actually an infinite library.

It's not something ancient and grand. It's actually kind of defunct and tacky, almost like a boarder's books that that's been closed for years. The shelves are all empty, and above them in the main lobby is a sign that reads, The End is Near. A victim of this level walks through the exit doors and finds themselves back home, back where they first no-clipped out of reality. They reconnect with their friends.

They tell them about where they've been, about the journey they've gone on. They go back to their life, trying to forget the back rooms entirely. But the reality is they're still there. because this isn't the real world that they're seeing. It's not their real life. These aren't their real friends they're talking to. All of it is a mirage created by Level 601, ensuring that its victims never leave.

Now, there's varying lore about how long the backrooms have been around for. Some say forever, and that there's actually references to them in classic literature. Like the Greeks talking about the labyrinth. Some people say that that was actually the backrooms they were describing. As you can see, the creativity that's gone into the description of the levels and the entities within the backrooms is immense. Users pretty much agree on the different number designations that are given in the backrooms,

and that has given rise to an official mythology of it. But one thing that users don't agree on is how you escape the backrooms, or indeed, if escape is even possible. Now, most accounts that I've been able to find seem to suggest that there's really no way to escape the backrooms. One story in particular reinforces this idea that anyone who thinks they found a way out

actually will meet a grisly end inside of the backrooms. This story is known as Phenomenon 13, and it comes to us from a wiki dot user named Iclose. Investigators in the backrooms began to hear stories of a cult called the Brotherhood of Egress. The cult was recruiting members on the premise that they had developed a meditation technique that would allow them to escape.

Their base was in level 63, an infinite blue sky above a series of bridges. The cult would sit on these bridges and look up at the sky, contemplating its infinite blueness as they meditated. Researchers were able to make contact with the cult, and they questioned them about their technique. And these cult members called it the seven-step plan. It went like this.

Step one was to vow to remain celibate for the rest of your life and repeat the Latin phrase, non-cacupiscum seven times into a lit altar. This means I will not covet. Step two was to turn down food and drink seven times, and say the phrase, non-sum galossus, seven days in a row. This means, I am not a glutton. Step three was to burn what few possessions you had acquired in the backrooms

with a seven-pronged torch. Step four was to not sleep or rest for seven days. Step five was to give your most despised enemy in the backrooms seven items or seven requests that they desired. Step six was to work under another survivor you were envious of for seven weeks. And finally, step seven was to live in total isolation for seven months, saying non-habio-surperbia purses some every day and nothing else. This means I have no pride, I am pure. You were then supposed to picture the exact moment that you fell into the backrooms

in as much detail as possible, bringing yourself back to the time and the place where you no-clipped. If you were successful, you would return to where you came from. The researchers observed six different people in their journey to complete the seven-step plan. The first one completed the steps and then disappeared after two minutes of meditation. Just evaporated. The second screwed up on his last day and spoke. However, he still disappeared but after 14 hours of meditation. It said that the third person altered their plan, replacing every seven in the plan with a six.

When he meditated, only the bottom six-sevenths of his body disappeared, which seemed to kill him. Subject four failed to complete step three and four, and as a result, only his clothes and eyes disappeared. Subject five failed to complete every single step. The researchers said that the results were too appalling to describe. And finally, subject six, one of the researchers themselves, completed the ritual steps without issue and disappeared after a few minutes of meditation. These researchers believed that the cult had truly found a way out, and they prepared to share this plan far and wide with whoever they could find in the backrooms. However, other researchers remained pretty skeptical,

and before they started to share this plan, they wanted to search other levels for signs of the subjects, and sure enough, they started to find them, or what was left of them. One cultist was found on level 48, an infinite sandy beach. They were impaled on a palm tree. One was found on level 126, an infinite art gallery. He was trapped, frozen in one of the paintings. Another subject's body was found on level 8, an infinite series of caves.

Personally, one that I would never want to see in 100 million years. The body was full of spiders. And another subject's body was found scattered across multiple levels. The leader of the cults was last seen on an unnumbered, completely gray scale cluster of levels. known as the shady gray. It's a complicated part of the backrooms, but it's believed that if you journey far enough into it, you will arrive at a portal to hell.

So Phenomenon 13, as the researchers later called it, was not a way out after all. Completing this ritual was just sending the cultists to different levels to die horrible, gruesome deaths. But within the lore of the backrooms, there is another method of escape that I have seen mentioned more than once. It's the idea of a swap, using vague, clandestine, mysterious methods to get someone in the real world to swap places with you in the backrooms.

In some stories, they'll do this willingly, but in most, the person has to be forced to take your place. There's a well-known story written about this in 2022 called The Horror of the Backrooms. It's a creepy pasta by a user named Mr. Mills 45. The story goes that in 2006, a 15-year-old named Alex moved into a new house with his parents. parents. He was drawn to a wall in his unfinished basement. He swore he could hear strange sounds on the other side. His parents didn't believe him, but he started conducting experiments at night while they were asleep. He found that he wasn't just hearing things on the other side of the basement wall, but he could actually pass through it. At first, he experimented with small objects,

a broom handle, that kind of thing. But eventually he worked up the courage to step through it on his own, dragging a rope tied to the basement stairs behind him. On the other side of the wall, he found the backrooms. The story describes him finding level zero with its infinite yellow hallways and moist carpet. However, while most accounts of level zero describe it as a place without entities, Alex didn't find this to be the case. He first found a letter written in blood, warning him that something lived on this floor. Eventually, he encountered some type of horrible centipede entity, and he saw it kill another person. But then, just as fast as he found himself in the backrooms, he was out. He woke up inside of a library in the real world, unsure of exactly how

he ended up there. Alex was deeply traumatized by this experience, and so his parents decided to send him to a therapist. He thought the therapist would never believe his story, but much to his shock, she did. And it wasn't just because she was especially open-minded. or anything like that, but she believed him because she had been there too. Alex begged her to share her story, and she wasn't sure if she should, you know, being a therapist and all. She wasn't really supposed to share her personal information with clients, but this was a special case. Her story wasn't that different from his. She had actually grown up with a shed in her backyard, and there was a strange wall inside that shed that she

thought had ghosts behind it. One day, she was looking at the wall, and she pressed herself up to it and fell through it into the backrooms to level zero with the yellow walls and moist carpet. And just like Alex, she encountered an entity there, one that seemed like it wanted to kill her. But according to the therapist, she was able to strike a deal. The entity would show her the way out, but if it allowed her to escape the backrooms, she had to promise to bring someone to take her place. Apparently, some sort of balance was required. If someone went out, someone else had to go back in.

Or that person that left would eventually be brought back in forever. It was then that Alex realized the therapist wasn't just speaking in the abstract. She had learned of his case and made sure to receive him as a patient. She knew he had been in the backrooms before he even arrived in her office. And that's when she drew her gun on him. Forced him to get up and walk across the office to a wall with a curtain. She pulled it back to reveal a dark red, door standing ominously in the center of the wall, and Alex knew exactly where that door led.

With no other choice, walked through it, returning to the one place he had hoped to never go again. This story shows two different ways that you can exit the backrooms. One is if you get lucky and just happen to no clip out, and the other is if you have someone take your place. Now, another terrifying piece of lore that I found while looking into how you exit the backrooms was how you know if someone you love has wound up in the backrooms. There's some other stories where people in the real world have friends or loved ones that just vanish. But then they'll start having strange dreams about that person, even feeling like

they're maybe being haunted by them. Sometimes they would exit their shower to see messages written to them in the steam on the window. In those cases, it's because the person that no clipped into the back rooms was able to make weak contact with them. The person afflicted by these hauntings might eventually be badgered into agreeing to take the lost person's place in the backrooms, or they might just do it out of genuine compassion. Regardless of the story and the method, it does seem like escaping the backrooms is no easy feat. This episode is brought to you by OG. I spent years shopping in the clean beauty section thinking that I was doing the right thing, until I found out that clean doesn't actually mean anything legally. Any brand can print that on a label.

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So there's really no reason to overpay. The everyday earbuds classic are the perfect addition to your everyday routine. Go to buy Raycon.com slash HSP pod to get 15% off. Thanks Raycon for sponsoring. Another question you might be asking is, if so many people go missing in the backrooms, never to be heard from again, then how do we know so much about them?

Well, the lore says that there's an organization that's actively logging information that comes from the backrooms. And a story from wiki.com user StretchSers helps us get to the bottom of this. His story goes, There once was a young boy known only as Stretch, who grew up near a forest in an unknown area.

He had a core group of childhood friends that he would play with in the forest. One day, he and his friends were out playing when they saw something strange in the woods, a glowing, smiling face grinning at them out of the darkness. Stretch was afraid for his friends, and he chased after the face with a stick. But then it disappeared. He then heard his friends screaming and turned around just in time to see one of them disappear into the forest floor. He tried digging through the leaves and the dirt, but they were nowhere to be found. The remaining kids tried to make their way back to their campfire, which was just a small,

glowing dot in the darkness. But no matter how much they walked in that direction, they didn't seem to get any closer to the campfire. It was like the forest had become infinitely big. While they got no closer to their campfire, they did eventually arrive at a cliff face at the edge of the forest, and there built into the side of the mountain was a door. They felt like they had no choice but to open it and see what was inside. Stretch and his friends were then greeted by those nauseating yellow walls and moist carpet that we are all too familiar with.

They heard a sobbing noise and followed it. And eventually they discovered their friend who had no clipped through the forest floor. The group then traveled together through the backrooms, making it through the next few levels where they encountered smilers and skin stealers, but miraculously they were able to work together to fend off these creatures. And it was during one of these fights that they came across a girl named Meg. She was the first person they had encountered in the backrooms. Stretch felt obligated to help her.

He at least had his friends here. He couldn't imagine what it would be like to be trapped in the backrooms all alone. They added Meg to their group, and over the weeks and months and years, they continued to grow a number, finding other wanderers and other children that were lost in the backrooms. Eventually, there were thousands of people in this group, and they were spread across multiple bases on multiple levels of the backrooms. Stretch became their leader and decided to name the organization Meg, after the first girl that they had saved.

It's an acronym that stands for Major Explorer Group. Today, Stretch is still the overseer trying to save as many people as possible. The Meg is the primary storytelling device through which many online writers tell their backroom stories. A lot of these stories take the form of Meg archive entries, which can be presented in creative, interactive web pages. Sometimes the viewer is required to confirm that they want to see classified information by clicking through redacted text.

Some pages have handwritten notes from Meg members and other ephemera from their expeditions. The lore that we have available to us suggest that Meg has existed since 2012. Beneath stretch, there's seven regiments that fulfill, different functions. You have the frontline explorers who delve into the different levels and report back on their findings. They're theoretically where we get a lot of our information from. Personally, I think that sounds like a very scary job to have. Although even worse than that is the entity

removal regimen. They clear different parts of different levels so that survivors can form outposts. The third regiment are the lockbreakers who find and maintain mysterious level keys that open different doors in the back rooms. The keys each have a different level of origin and they can open any door on any level and return the holder to that level of origin. So a key to a safe level, like the pool rooms, is very valuable as it can help a survivor escape a dangerous level and return to a safe one regardless of how many floors away they might be. And beyond these first three regiments, there are rescues and raids, mapping and pathfinding, civil aid and recovery, and communication regiments. So clearly, the Meg is quite the sophisticated

operation. And the Meg's civilization seems to exist across six large outposts located on a variety of safe levels. My favorite of these levels is called the Port of Miss Givings. It's an endless rundown port on a large lake. Survivors have created a cozy little town there where you can eat at a place called the Flying Death Moth Pub. The Meg has even made contact with some friendly entities. The most famous of these entities is Blanche from Level 906. This level is an endless library filled with incomprehensible books, but it's a very beautiful level with elements of Victorian Gothic and Baroque architecture.

The ceiling is stained glass with candelabras hanging from it that somehow light up every inch of the library. And the librarian, Blanche, is a short, pale, blue-eyed entity that resembles an old woman. Blanche wears a variety of fancy outfits and tries to share her knowledge with the Meg. If you misbehave in Blanche's library,

she will send you to the last level that you are in before arriving. And it's worth noting that as I'm telling you all of this, I'm drawing primarily on the most commonly accepted internet lore around the backrooms. There are other canons with their own versions, and not all of them feature the Meg. The most famous of these actually is Kane Parsons' backrooms. Kane created the popular YouTube series and is directing the 824 movie, and his version has a group of researchers called Async, and they methodically explore just level zero. A-Sync is different than the Meg in that they exist in the outside world and they've created a stable portal for entering and exiting the backrooms. This is a somewhat more practical approach to the mythology as it gives us a clear reason why we can now access the various videotapes from their expeditions.

This group is much more grounded in reality. They actually have received a visit from the United States Department of Energy and they've secured government funding for additional research into the backrooms. The researchers of Async are very careful when they explore the backrooms. They use PPE, motion detector cameras, rovers, and other technology to avoid coming in contact with any surprise entities. And it is that lore of Async, as well as the other lore that's been developed by Kane Pixels that is going to be the bedrock of the new A24 movie. And if I can just wax poetic for a moment about creepypastas, I am so excited by all of this. I can't remember popular culture sharing a creepypasta like this since really the days of Slender Man. It feels like we were in a creepypasta desert for a while, and I was so excited when this started catching fire.

And not to mention, this movie is being distributed by 824, which is very, very cool, but also produced by the company I used to work at, Atomic Monster. When I worked there, I would read creepy pastas all day looking for ones that we could turn into shows and movies. And they started developing this one after I left the company, which, to say I'm very jealous as putting it lightly. But I am so excited to see this movie. I hope you are as well. And maybe we'll all catch references to some of the things that we've talked about today.

Hopefully, I provided you with enough of a crash course on the backrooms where you can see the movie, see these references, understand what's going on, but also understand even more of the lore that I'm talking about. At its core, I think the backrooms is somewhat horror nostalgia. Like I said, I remember a lot of these places

from my own childhood, and I'm sure you guys do too. So let me know. What are your favorite levels? Are there levels that I haven't talked about today that you really enjoy? Let me know wherever you listen, and I will see you guys here next week with a new episode, new horrors for us to explore. And until then, be careful not to know clip. Heart size pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore.

Heart size pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Additional research and writing by Greg Castro. Sound design and mix by Red Room Creative. Special thanks to Travis Dunlop, Grace and Treason. journey in and the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request. You can submit on the forum on our site,

hearts arts pounding.com.