Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - the backrooms: a blurry photo that changed the internet

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Our weirdest episode yet? Let's GO. This week, Jamie gets to the bottom of the backrooms, one of the most famous images on the internet -- posted to a horror-themed 4chan board in 2019, one blurry picture of an empty expanse of offices inspired teenage horror fans, online sleuths, and adults sinking into existential dread alike. We're looking at all three corners of the backrooms' history, from its legacy as a monster-filled creepypasta for the teens, a 'liminal space' for doomscrolling millennials, and a place to be tracked down by the detectives entrenched in lost media. Spoiler alert: the REAL backrooms are alive, well, and started a GoFundMe in Wisconsin. Give to the Backrooms GoFundMe here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/https-gofund-me-405dafe1Follow Sara Bimo's work here: https://yorku.academia.edu/sarabimoFollow Peter Heft's work here: https://www.peterheft.com/Watch Kendra Gaylord's video on the backrooms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3cTIn2Z_CkWatch Farrell McGuire's video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqsdKi59VrE&t=1082sSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Quozo Media Hi, 16th minute listeners, two things. First, if you're in the Los Angeles area on March 2nd, my movie podcast with Caitlin Durante, the Bechtelcast, is having this big post-Oscar show and general variety show with some of our favorite guests from the past eight years of the Bechtelcast at Dynasty. typewriter at 730 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 going to want to see it. Second, please stop messaging me. Yes, I know Hawk to a girl, Haley Welch.

That story has developments, but 16th 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, guess what? You're in luck. Here'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. The audio would be really quiet and then all of a sudden.

Sorry you 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 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 300 years old, and our grandfather had told us all kinds of stories about what had allegedly happened there. Like, in the 1800s, a man hung himself in the closet. In the front room, a rich man named Charles Copeland was said to have blown his head off.

Feudiate of slaves who had escaped from the South supposedly hid in the basement. A maid was locked in a closet and clawed her way out, leaving faint nail imprints on the door. Countless ghosts were spotted by my aunts, my mom, my grandparents. My cousins adopted this Dalmatian one year that jumped out of a 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, The Ring is a 2003 American remake of the Japanese horror movie Ringu. And while Ringu is technically the better movie, it was not the one that I peed myself during, so we're going to stick with the American. American one. It stars Naomi Watts as a woman who watches a cursed videotape. So if you watch the tape, you only have seven days to live before a little 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 she kills you. 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 dying VHS technology. It was based on a Japanese folk tale that went back 300 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. The story was adapted to a novel, hundreds of years later in 1998, and it's this version of the story that became a horror hit in the U.S. 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 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 contemporary technology. The core anxieties that the story explores are basically the same, but the technology and personal dynamics that communicate them are constantly shifting.

technophobia was a core feature of the early internet one 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 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 24 hours. 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 1.0 horror. Stories that explore that the idea of a computer or the Internet itself was scary. Like we talked about in our Hocktuahs series, Web 2 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. Hey, Mitch, who's your buddy? Who is that?

I just tried to hang up on him. Can you get rid of this person? I don't know. Does this here the whole time? This is probably a glitch. Well, the glitch just typed. Web 3 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. Research shows if you force a child to eat vegetables, they'll be less likely to choose those foods as adults. Is that so? Yes. Meg, 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 2000s, a lot of these have come to be known as creepypastas. A play on the copypasta term used to describe those old copy-paste, forward this email, the 10 people, or you will die, kind of thing.

Creepypastas have been an online community that's waxed and waned for two decades, but there are consistence there. They're tech-based horror stories, and their absolute catnip for middle schoolers. And in 2019, one of the most famous modern horror stories

put people in a chokehold, 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 it was posted to 4chan. The

image isn't high quality. It looks like it was taken by a 2000s-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 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 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, 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 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, stop the music. If you haven't seen the actual image of the backrooms 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, Ian, you can start the scary music again. This image was posted by an anonymous user in response to a prompt asking for images that were somehow off. And on May 13, 2019, for whatever reason, it clicked. Another Anon responded to the photo, soon to be known as the backrooms, with the lore that would make it famous. 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-yed yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum buzz, 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. The backrooms, your 16th minute starts now. I'm not so bad when you turn up the lights, but I know, well, can be perfect all in the time. Don't make me a start, let's take it too far, then give me one moment. Let's see you. 60 minute of fame, 60 minute of fame, 60 minute of fame, 16 minutes of fame, 16 minutes of fame, 16 minutes of fame, 16 minutes of fame, 16 minutes of fame, 16 minutes of fame, 16 minutes of fame, Welcome to me with me

Welcome back to 16th minute, the podcast where we look at the internet's main characters of the day, speak to them to 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 I want to explore the world of the backrooms, 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 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 room's actual history. So, come with me, if you dare, to May 2019. Louis Farrakhan and Milo Yianopoulos 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 royal family is slaying right now, and you didn't have the heart reminder about colonialism. And after years of random circulation, a 4chan user gave shape to what

exactly made the backrooms so terrifying. If you haven't looked at the image of the backrooms yet, I encourage you to. Look at my Instagram, give it a like while you're at it. Because unlike a lot of internet horror, the backroom's picture hasn't been photoshopped to look scarier than it actually is. The eerieness isn't because there's something scary in frame, but it's the tension, the uncertainty, the... God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you. Of it all.

And the backrooms only got more popular as a sight of horror in their three or so years to follow after it was first posted to Forchan 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 2020. Impossible to say why. The backrooms were the right harbinger of doom that went viral at the right time. But what fascinates me about the backrooms 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 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 1 The slightly older set from what I can gather find the most haunting part of the backrooms is seeing it as a liminal space. 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 2010s were accumulating and distributing on forums as liminal spaces.

This side of the backrooms 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, its seemingly infinite space is where the terror is. And 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 creepypasta format. So making the backrooms the setting of an extremely online campfire story, 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 going to call them the creepy pasta backrooms. And in the creepypasta backrooms, 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. And while there's no definitive view of the backrooms, the creepypasta 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, 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 backrooms have been identified and they're still there. And the journey to finding them was goddamn fascinating. The discovery of the IRL backrooms was a years-long project with hundreds of contributors from the online lost media community and marked one of their hardest-fought successes ever. But to fully understand these communities and how they interact with each other, I want to start with reading two, the overt horror creepypasta backrooms, which became the most famous space for amateur horror of the last 10 years. So what are creepypastas by definition? They're 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 creepypasta website, the community began in the late 90s into the early 2000s and began pretty decentralized. A number of creepypasta folks would pop up anywhere from boards on 4chan and Reddit to old school angel fire sites and blog platforms. The first story to ever formally exist in this space was published online. in 2001, called Ted the Caver, a series of blog posts that followed anonymous Spelunkers deeper into a very narrow local cave, who were subsequently driven mad by a supernatural being

after discovering new cave passages, hieroglyphics, and start having nightmares. The story ends with a post saying that the Spelunkers are planning to bring a gun into the cave next time. And then, the blog was never updated again. Part of the appeal of Ted the Kaver at the time was the ambiguity to the 2001 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. It included links. It mimicked the real-life blogging craze of the time. It's kind of an internet version of the Blair Witch Project, which came out two years before in 1999.

Do you believe the occult may be involved in the disappearance of your son? I'm so scared. And the movie created intentional confusion when it presented itself as a true found footage documentary. This approach would be replicated in later creepypastas, 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, the best thing about creepypastas to me is that they're usually written with this kind of uncanny, amateur-ish 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 creepypasta story called Jeff the Killer.

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 early in this story. The kid landed and turned back to them. He kicked his skateboard up and caught it with his hands. The kid seemed to be about 12. One year younger than Jeff. He wears an Aropostal shirt and ripped blue jeans.

Well, well, well, looks like we got some new meat. Totally. Exactly. And now, thankfully, Jeff the killer later gets his revenge when he, Jeff the kills this bully. Let's hear how he does it. 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. I hate when that happens. There are hundreds of thousands of creepypastas and they revolve around popular characters or popular ideas like the backrooms, which means that some are going to be better than others. Here's something from one of the backroom stories

that I liked more. 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 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, 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 Killers' bullies, Arapostal 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 with me that, Creepypastas are a way for creative kids to navigate their fears in the same way that fanfiction is a way for kids to navigate some of their early sexual or just generally adolescent feelings. The stories depict these experiences of fear and their own bodies that in all likelihood they haven't had yet, 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. 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 you know what, and 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 creepypasta and fanfic communities may not have full overlap, they serve similar functions, and both have crossed over into the mainstream pretty simple. successfully after peaking in the mid-2010s. And while the backrooms made its debut a few years after peak creepypasta, they quickly

became a popular recurring location in the creepy 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 16-year-old filmmaker named Kane Parton, on YouTube, whose short titled The Backrooms, Found Footage, garnered millions of views when it first dropped in early 2022, going on to inspire about 20 more shorts from Kane 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 main character ends up in the infinite rooms.

What the hell? Don't move. This series places the backrooms explicitly in the world of the supernatural. And while purists aren't necessarily happy about it, Kane Parsons recently signed a deal with A24 to adapt the series into a feature. And as with the creepy. pistas before it like Slender Man or other long-standing alternate reality spaces online, the backrooms built out a ton of lore through series like Keynes.

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 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 footprint on the internet right now, the scam, the recognition, the desperation, honestly, that accompanies 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 designed to walk through the backrooms you can play for free. Kane Parsons' work is free to consume, and much of the built-out creepypasta

lore 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. And I think that's really cool. We could talk about the types of monsters one finds in the backrooms all day, but I wanted to talk to a true scholar of the creepypasta form. Enter Sarah Bimo, author of The Horror of Networked Experience, which is a full look into how creepypastas and Web 2 led to stories like this. Here's our talk.

Hi, my name is Sarah Bimo. I'm a PhD candidate at York University in Toronto, Canada. My research really broadly is about like kind of like effective experiences of digital life. So like sensations, emotions, like forms of knowledge that are not distinctly rational. Yeah, I love creepy pasta and I've written a book chapter about it. I'm working on a follow up. The chapter that that you sent along to me, 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 creepypasta?

I am kind of like was initially, and still am, like another object of study and of interest for me was the ways that people on social media sites developed like intuitions of algorithms and algorithmic governance. So you're probably familiar with a lot of these intuitions, like stuff like Algo speak, you know,

people self-censor themselves to avoid like the purview of like what feels like a you know omnipotent algorithm. Unalive grape sort of that line of. Yes, exactly. Gotcha. Yeah. So that's one example of things that I see as intuitions like forms of knowledge about technological systems that are not developed rationally and by rationally 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 similar kind of phenomenon. What I classify as classic creepy pasta, like written, let's say, like before 2010 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 like new form of horror. And separately I just like I read it a lot as a kid. I was to say, were you a creepypasta kid as well? You have to out yourself as a creepypasta kid. But it feels like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the only sort of creepypasta that is ever broken through to the mainstream is the Slender Man story. Definitely Slender Man is undoubtedly the most popular. In the most cynical way possible, it does make sense to adapt creepypastas because they're of dubious authorship

and they've already been focused grouped essentially. But to start, where do creepy pastas come from? How do they sort of grow in popularity over time? Creepypastas are, they're 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 relatively, by that I mean like the early 2000s-ish, are largely anonymous and often kind of crowd. sourced, so collectively authored. So Thorchan is a common source for many of them. I know that Slender Man began on the Something Awful forums where a user named Victor Surge posted these like Photoshop images featuring this like tall, creepyman.

But that's where it started. And then kind of through collective authorship, the legend grew and grew and grew. This is very similar to folklore practices, wherein there's like a kind of distributed anonymous authorship that allows the stories to develop and morph over time 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 in that way, they're kind of like bred to be as maybe like dynamic and as effective, affecting as possible. There's also like the Reddit slash or slash no sleep forum where obviously you cannot be as anonymous as you can be on 4chan. So I think that this kind of sense of authenticity and of, you know, urban legendness is fostered through this like collective roleplay. The folktale qualities are fostered through kind of different means. 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 all together.

But the idea that like, yeah, sort of during the Web 1.0 era, there are anonymous writers that are sort of building these worlds collectively. But as far as the creepypasta world goes, what is drawing people to? And do you have a feeling of what sort of age range or demographics participate in these groups? I can't say for certain. My impression is that it's largely younger people. I have that impression just from the fact that when I was a creepypasta kid, the internet was something that mostly younger people were on. My parents would never have had any idea, whereas now they're kind of like more on social media and stuff. Also just kind of the quality of the writing often, I think also the fact that traditionally

this kind of practice of like campfire stories and stuff, it's like 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. Sometimes that's more ambiguous. I think there's a sense of being confronted with like the kind of bureaucracy and infrastructures of the adult world that is somehow being negotiated in these. So in classic creepypasta, there's 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, 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 nightmarous nostalgia of like childhood TV shows or experiences. So like a big thing is like theme parks that are scary. Handel Cove is about like a kid's TV show that a bunch of people all watched within the diocese 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 adult wood you're like more established in it i don't know it can definitely be like made strange and alienated it's like a very common topic but yeah the particular preoccupation i just see is i don't know very teenage very young adult and you write about this as well of a way of forming the networked self which you describe as sort of a web 2.0 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 studying? Creepypasta as a genre reflects anxieties surrounding the Web 2.0 model of communication, which is marked by, like, for example, more interactivity, kind of platformization, you know, social media versus Web 1.0, which was characterized by like, kind of static web pages, less interactivity. The reason I kind of came to that interpretation was because of this common preoccupation

with the affordances of Web 2.0, 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 of like a cursed image that is shared via email. And I think this preys upon this kind of fear of surveillance and of exterior forces that can reach you no matter or 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, like none of these forms of communication are able to do this. Now that we've moved into Web 3.0, how have these

stories change to reflect more contemporary technological anxieties? It's interesting. I was thinking about how the backrooms is similar and dissimilar to like classic creepy pasta 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 where in people post articles about like the SCP Foundation, which deals with like paranormal moral threats and stuff. 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 whatever 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 is not really committed to the idea that there is the possibility for a non-digital life. 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 foundational structure of our lives. The source of fear becomes maybe more sophisticated or more complex in 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 endemic and more unavoidable so I 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. 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. The backrooms is really like a case of like children. and yearn for third spaces because I think that our current moment is one in which public space has been largely neoliberalized and rendered completely sterile and kind of hostile to forms of identity, formation, and community making. And the backrooms, in the backrooms, 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

liminality. Again, these are places you just kind of like pass through. They have a standardized architecture. They kind of de-individualized people. Everyone, you know, is rendered 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. Thank you so much to Sarah Bimo. You can find more of her work in the description of this episode. So call me Giata DeLaurentis 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, the liminal backrams.

What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison? or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth. Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs.

Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming, and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes it's hard to remember, but...

Going through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of their life. That was my dad, reminding me and so many others who need to hear it, that our trauma is not our shame to carry, and that we have big, bold, and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us. I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Lyotra Tate. On my new podcast, The Unwanted Sorority, we weighed through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like, and sounds like, in real time. Each week, I sit down with people who live through harm, carried silence, and are now reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls, mothering as resistance, and the tools we use for healing. The unwanted sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space.

So, let's lock in, we're moving towards liberation, together. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence. so tiny, you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, got you. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum,

the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out Behind the Flow, a podcast documentary series following the launch of San Diego Football Club. We go behind the scenes and explore the stories of those involved. San Diego coming to MLS is going to be a game changer because this region has been hungry for a men's professional soccer team. We need veteran players and we need young players.

Like you're building a team from scratch and so the succession plan of long-term success needs to be defined. We need to embrace this community. When I was 13, my uncle took me to a qualifier and we watched Ottawa against Chile, pouring rain, just watching the fans jumping up and down. I think that was definitely a watershed moment for me. Not only was that going to be my game, but it was going to be my life. Listen to San Diego FC Behind the Flow.

Now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to 16th minute. I once got so scared reading a Slender Man story that I 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 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 existed at all. So unless you're an AP English expat or just a fan of this genre of weird internet, you might need a better working definition of what a liminal space actually means. Liminal, according to Ms. Merriam-Webster is... Of relating to or situated at a sensory threshold. Barely perceptible or capable of eliciting a response. 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 mitzvahs, kinsigneras, sweet 16s, religious confirmations, all rituals associated with adolescence, 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 definition. But it does clarify the feeling that accompanies it. If you search liminal space, it becomes obvious that this feeling of transition is present. 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 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. 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 something they remember that no longer exists

like chunky cheese animatronic bands. But there is one small controversy within the liminal backroom's 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 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 old malls and hallways scarier than AI-generated infinity spaces. But there are some digital images that I find Erie, 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 went into when I was a kid. The screensaver is this infinite brick hallway that every few seconds turns you corner after corner and the walls occasionally turn to concrete for no reason. The screensaver was amazed to nowhere, but every once in a while, this like translucent smiley face

would appear at the end of one of the hallways, 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.

But there's also the matter of timing. Remember, the backrooms became popular shortly before the pandemic lockdown of 2020 and would only become more popular through the early years of the decade, culminating with Kane Parsons series in 2022. Kane Parsons would have been about 14 years old during the pandemic lockdown.

So the audience and often the creators of this content were people at a liminal place in their lives, adolescents, living in this moment in history that also felt very liminal. Because what were the early 2020s defined by, if not discomfort, forced isolation, fear, and uncertainty? Fortunately, things have improved. Of course, this still expanding corner of the internet didn't invent the idea of liminal 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 predate the internet who have captured this feeling very effectively. Filmmakers like Stanley 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 vague,

vacant-feeling cities of techno-dispopia movies like Videodrome and Blade Runner. And this aesthetic has inspired a fair amount of YouTube horror, which I'll specify, 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 to be able to. making liminal art of their own. Kyle Edward Ball and Jane Schoenbren are horror

film directors. They're both born in the late 80s and their respectively fantastic movies that reference online horror are both influenced by creepypasta and the movies and film that influence that culture. So just an auroboros

of backroom-like spaces. Kyle Edward Ball's first feature is 2022's Skinnamarink, 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 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 2017 to 2021, he finessed what will become his signature style in a series called Bite Size Nightmares, where he would adapt 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 2023. I had a YouTube channel where people would comment on things that scared them. But as I kept giving that answer, I realized, I realized that there are a lot of things that inspired this movie that I'm not even comfortable to say. At the heart of it is pain and sadness and a little bit of anger. 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, 2018's A Self-Induced Hallucination, was composed of only-founded online footage that ended up piecing together a narrative about 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 creepypasta can shape and define adolescence. 2021's, we're all going to the world's fair. The movie follows a loner, neglected teenage girls' obsessive journey doing a creepy pasta-style YouTube challenge called the World's Fair Challenge. And for what it's worth, spoiler's ahead for this movie,

so please skip ahead a minute or so if you haven't seen it and you want to. It's streaming on Max right now. And while 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,

processing her feelings of loneliness 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. How long until I do it? I don't need to share her code, I promise I'm not scared. I need to ask you something. Sure, what is?

Well, we need to go out of game first. Is that okay? Sure. What's that? It's an expression. It means outside the margin. outside the margins of the game. World's Fair pinpoints the straddled experiences of the liminal backrooms and the creepypasta 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. 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 2022 in Little White Lies, Shon Brin said, It's drawing as much from the Dial-up Wild West haunted landscape that was my childhood online as it is from 2012-era creepypasta 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 dangerous 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 a.ming 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 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 Jane's, 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 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 deterioratorialized spaces.

Here's our talk. 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. 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. 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

the known into the unknown is this kind of recurring motif. And at the time, I was also listening to a very interesting podcast called A Weird Stee, 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, the melding of the two was somewhat there. And I wanted to try to fill some niche. 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?

There are a few ways to think about it. The kind of traditional anthropological account, right, is a more personal or subjective account, 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 a community. And so this is like a space in a sense of 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? At least in the internet sense, a lot of these liminal spaces, yeah, they definitely look creepy. They're very often very like monochromatic and empty. But the point you made was that they're 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 other things. 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 intrinsically or inherently liminal. And the former instance, I think it would be like a bus stops, airports, stations, things like that, insofar as they are literally designed to be threshold spaces between a destination, between destinations, right? And we can kind of see this very literally codified in like the weird legal status of airports. Like you're kind of in the country, you're kind of not. Those are very literally threshold spaces. But I think those are ultimately not all that

interesting because they're so rigidly defined, like they are explicitly defined as spaces in between destinations or 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 how we interact with them. And I think those can become liminal or cease having a level of liminality depending upon how we're interacting with them. And certainly there's more to say on that as well. But I mean, what would be an example of a space like that? 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 ringing and stuff like that, right? But, Once you enter the school during the winter or the summer, 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 the space has changed dramatically. And I think that provides one instance of kind of like an unsettling feeling, 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 referenced that it's related to feeling like a ritual or a major change. 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 right 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

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 Torah for a Bar Mitzvah, traditionally like cultural things. The jump to the kind of physical register in the context of the internet creepypastasphere has probably just been an appropriation of terms to some extent insofar as the Latin lineman just literally means threshold. So I would imagine 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 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. I mean, being 13 years old kind of does feel like being in a haunted room that's extremely lonely and a little scary. I can see how people get from A to V there. You could say that, I guess, middle school would be like that kind of threshold space in a weird way. Cool. Yeah. Is there anything else that you'd like to touch 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 a given a map that's been created and you run up against. the edge and there's a glitch 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 the backroom 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. 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 rims. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change.

Every case that is a cold case. that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence

so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Authrum,

the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless. cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York state number, and we own you.

Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training. These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming. and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Sometimes it's hard to remember, but... Going through something like that is a traumatic experience, but it's also not the end of their life. That was my dad, reminding me and so many others who need to hear it, that our trauma is not our shame to carry. and that we have big, bold, and beautiful lives to live after what happened to us. I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leitra Tate. On my new podcast, The Unwanted Sorority, we wade through transformation to peel back healing and reveal what it actually looks like, and sounds like in real time. Each week, I sit down with people who live through harm, carried silence, and are now

reshaping the systems that failed us. We're going to talk about the adultification of black girls, mothering as resistance, and the tools we use for healing. The unwanted sorority is a safe space, not a quiet space. So let's walk in. We're moving towards liberation together. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Check out Behind the Flow, a podcast documentary series following the launch of San Diego Football Club. We go behind the scenes and explore the... stories of those involved. San Diego coming to MLS is going to be a game changer because this region has been hungry for a men's professional soccer team. We need veteran players and we need young players. Like you're building a team from scratch and so the succession plan of long-term success needs to be defined.

We need to embrace this community. When I was 13, my uncle took me to a qualifier and we watched Badawei against Chile, pouring rain, just watching the fans. jumping up and down. I think that was definitely a watershed moment for me. Not only was that going to be my game, but it was going to be my life. Listen to San Diego FC Behind the Flow.

Now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to. 16th minute, I've 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 back rooms, 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 defying 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 backrooms, as discovered by the online lost media community, please meet 807 Oregon Street in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Oshkosh, 1912, a Wisconsin city named after a monominy chief. It's a small Midwestern city of around 33,000 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 1875.

They eventually rebuilt, and by 1912, their local paper, the Oshkosh Northwestern, announces there's a new bomb and callan apartment store that'll be built on the south side of town, and it's completed and opened by the end of 1913. The second floor of this location, where the eventual backroom's photo 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, etc. Fast forward to 1945.

The store changes its name to Hirshberg's after it sold, and the building is remodeled. Panty girdles for only $2.95, sign me up! The building is sold again in 1955 and is remodeled this time as Rohner's Furniture, who expanded the building again 10 years later. By the 70s, they installed the carpet that we now associate with the backrooms, 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 70s to me.

And after looking into it, YouTuber and would you believe it, a woman I once shared a desk with at the Boston Globe, Hendra Gaylord, made a wonderful video about why this happened. It doesn't make the drop ceilings any prettier, but it does place the backrooms firmly in the story of 20th century American architecture. Here is the explanation. in her video. But the other thing that made drop ceiling so popular in the 70s was the increase in oil prices. And this renovation was right in between two big ones in 1973 and 1979.

The lower ceiling can reduce heating 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 good chance that it happened right in this period. 807 Oregon Street was expanded again in 1977. in 1990. By 94, Rohner'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 2002, the iconic photo of the backrooms was taken.

And all of this explains a lot of why the backrooms looks as weird as it does. By the time that current owner Bob Maza bought the place. 807 Oregon had been a department store, a furniture store, and a state-stale location, and allegedly had been used at various times for office or storage space. Why are there seven slightly different wallpapers in the back rooms? 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 real walls. They were separators for furniture departments. And as Kendra 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 charcutory board vibe. When Bob Mazza bought 807 Oregon Street and took the picture of, what we now call the backrooms, it was on a Sony cybershot digital camera on June 12th, 2002 at 821 AM. 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 hadn't been up until this point, a hobby store. Hobby Town, USA, to be exact, a national chain with about 100 locations still open today. So the plan for the backrooms 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 horrifying weird whale 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 about this stuff. The famous backroom'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 the only ones that survived on the internet archive in a blog post Bob made in 2003, which was an announcement that Hobbytown USA Oshkosh was going to include this really cool RC track when it opened.

And in March 2004, it did, reopening after Mazza's previous location near Walmart got too expensive with rent. And that Hobbytown is open at 807 Oregon Street to this day, even though. 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 of joy and community, where hobbyists spent time together. And you basically know the rest of the story. In 2019, 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 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 roundup videos. Basically, videos on YouTube that summarize the previous analog or digital media that the group has 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. Some highlights from the 2024 Lost Media video. They found Celebrity No. 6, a mysterious figure on a 2000s-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. But no contest, the biggest discovery of the last year, was the physical location of the backrooms. Users named Leon, Semleot, Zara, and Zaft used a shared discord to organize a series of challenging maneuvers. So all is well that ends well, right? Tale is 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 on an early morning in 2002 had inspired all of this? There is one more chapter to this story. Almost immediately, after the backrooms were traced to 807 Oregon Street, local YouTubers that were either a fan of the creepypasta or liminal communities, started to just show. up to Hobbytown USA Oshkosh. Like they started the next day. What the fuck is up, darned family? Today we're actually, like, we just, like, found out that, like, the original backroom's

photos was taken in our hometown. So we're actually going there, like, like, no joke, being dead ass, bro. We were so nervous because we saw on our friend's story. We were like, what the fuck? And the sort of texting me, like, we should do it. Prompting owner Bob Maza 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. Here he is on local

news station WTAQ with reporter Rob Sussman on June 19th explaining why he bought the building to begin with. So I started looking at old buildings in town here and this old decrep thing was available and thought, hey, I could combine the store, move away from where we were out on the highway, maybe if it was popular enough, the racing program could survive in this place. 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 the 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 than a gadget.

And then, over 20 years later, Bob describes starting to get weird phone calls about this picture he has no memory of. 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, which I thought was kind of weird. but they must have gotten, you know, that cross-connection. You know, when you look up someone's name and it's affiliated phone numbers or whatever,

and they tried calling 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 have been pretty coarse, some are pretty weird you know 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 hobby town and they're like at that point they don't even know what to say and but yeah that'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 do the selfie thing you know we just appreciate that they don't spend a lot of time talking to the the the people at work here to take them a away from their jobs. Mazzo would do a second interview with YouTuber Farrell 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 90 more photos from this original

cache of early 2000s Sony Cybershot 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 backrooms teens who were raised on creepypasta

and 4chan forums who are 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 starting a GoFundMe to fix the roof of the store so that, ideally, he could help keep the business he loves alive by holding backroom's events. On this GoFundMe, he also shared testimony from people who had been racing RC cars at Hobby Town over the years and deeply loved the community that Bob made space for.

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 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, etc. This will allow us to keep the amazing RC tracks, available for use on days that a backroom's event isn't happening. We would welcome 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. This co-fundee has made $20,000 and 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 Hobby Town at the link in the description.

I made a contribution to get us started. Bob had no clue that the culture around the backrooms existed, but he does understand what it's like to obsess over a niche interest and build a community around it. And while the backrooms may have become popular as this site for conquering your fears in a poorly written creepypot, and the site of existential horror for the liminal crowd. In real life, the backrooms is 807 Oregon Street, a small 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 Cain's A-24 movie is going to take the 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 during a time where real-life spaces to commune wasn't safe. So backrooms people, no-clipped, and ended up finding each other there. And maybe, just maybe, they will manage to save an R.C. Club in Wisconsin, in the process. The backrooms, your 16th minute ends now. And for your moment of fun, from Farrell McGuire's wonderful backroom.

video, which is linked in the description, Bob Maza tells Farrell about his favorite moments in the backroom's homes, Obitown, USA. My favorite memories, and always will be my favorite memories, is of all of the racers and R.C. airplane clubs and even just customers that when I call out back in the day like 20 years ago, so many people would come and help. Over the years, the amount of the friends and the smiling faces that you see coming through the doors and you know kids walk in the storm or you know they're like just awesome and wow and that's the kind of stuff that really keeps you going 16th minute is a production of cool zone media and iHeart radio it is written hosted and produced

by me janey loftus our executive producers are sophia lichterman and robert evans the amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad 13. Voice acting is from Grant Crater. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my cats flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye. I just normally do straight stand-up, but this is a bit different.

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