This Paranormal Life - What are The Backrooms?

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

To celebrate the release of A24’s new Backrooms movie, we wanted to release a new video supercut of our own Backroom’s episode #307, filled with everything you need to know about the lore of the creepypasta - from why it was created, to how you can end up there. Imagine being trapped inside of a strange space with yellow walls, damp carpet, and buzzing fluorescent lights - It looks like our world, but you can feel something's wrong - It’s an endless maze of liminal spaces, unsettling symbols and maybe worst of all… you’re not alone in there. Become a commune member to get access to bonus episodes: https://thisparanormallife.com Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Join our Secret Society Facebook Community⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Buy Official TPL Merch!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Edited by Philip Shacklady Research by Amy Grisdale Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Imagine you're walking through everyday life, when all of a sudden, you blink and you're inside of a room. A simple room, with yellow walls, damp carpet, and buzzing fluorescent lights. It looks like our world, but you can feel that something's wrong. Beyond this room is another room, and another room. It's an endless maze of liminal spaces, unsettling symbols, and maybe worst of all, you're not alone in there. This is the space known as the backrooms.

The backrooms began as a simple horror image posted on an internet forum discussing photos of unsettling liminal spaces. But over the years, it's captured the imagination of thousands. Internet users have expanded on the lore of the back rooms, introducing the different levels, the story behind its origin, and maybe most terrifying of all, the entities that inhabit the space. One of those internet creators was named Kane Parsons, and on his YouTube channel, he did the impossible. He started making films inside the back rooms.

The place that shouldn't really exist. Now we have covered the backrooms on the podcast before on episode 307, but for those of you who are going to see the new A24 movie this week, we wanted to release a super cut of that episode filled with everything you need to know, from how it was created to why its existence is so terrifying. You might even find out how to survive the back rooms if by chance you end up there yourself. So enjoy! If you're not careful and you no clip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the back rooms,

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. miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. Wow. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby. Because it sure as hell has heard you. Damn, that's pretty cool.

This comment changed the game. No one was able to put their finger on why these images were so cursed. Why whenever we walk into certain spaces does it feel so wrong? How can an empty room feel disturbing? Maybe you feel that way because you're really in a liminal space. You've kind of briefly left your own world and ended up somewhere else. Ever seen somewhere like that? Like, you know, sometimes like an airport or...

You know, you say that, but there are a few places. Maybe not airports, but there's a few hotels I've been in before that definitely give off that strange, uncanny vibe. Yeah. Where it's just rows of identical rooms and carpet that goes on seemingly into the horizon. Or you look out a window into a courtyard. that's just surrounded by hotel walls. It's all very artificial and just, yeah, something quite uncanny about it.

Yeah, I feel like Rory in his IGN days was no stranger to hotel rooms and conference centers. In the middle of nowhere, which is trippy because maybe it's a place where you don't even speak the language. You're doing a bit of work, but then you're out there by yourself. Yeah, very, very strange and isolating and a bit creepy at times. It's probably worth saying, actually, because I mentioned this idea of a liminal. space. Now, these two ideas of the backrooms and liminal spaces, they get kind of thrown around and combined online because they're super similar. I had to just clarify myself what a liminal space literally means, because of course, liminal, it literally means like in between, I guess,

two worlds. Yeah. Literally a transition space. So I didn't realize that's literally what it means is like a hotel room is literally a liminal space. It's somewhere you go transitioning from one place, one destination to another. So hotels, airports, hallways, stairwells. These are literally in between spaces. Yeah, because I've seen people be like,

check out this liminal space. It's an abandoned chucky cheese. That's not really what that means. You're just talking about a creepy building that kind of has weird connotations. It's not a liminal space. And I guess it could be, but maybe if it was a chucky cheese in like a truck stop

or something. Right, yeah. You know, like a creepy side of the road. Keep an eye on some of the adults going into that one. That's weird. I went to a chucky cheese at Christmas for the first time in maybe 20 years. Yeah, I saw you spent Christmas Day there. That was pretty sad too.

Yeah, they serve beer. They serve beer, Chuckie Cheese. I don't know if you know that or not drinking. There was actually just one other thing I wanted to explain to our listeners if they didn't understand. Our original poster mentioned no clipping. Can you explain that one to our non-gamer listeners? Yeah, that kind of threw me as well. I think no clipping in the context of video games

is when you kind of glitch your way outside of the map, glitch your way outside of the path you're supposed to be on. So in this context, I guess they're saying, be careful you don't do that in reality and slip into the liminal world, between worlds. So what they're saying is maybe it's possible, that you can fall into the backrooms through a glitch in the physics of our real world. That's genuinely terrifying.

So Rory, have you heard of the backrooms before? I've heard of it before as kind of an online creepy pasta, but I do not know a lot about it, especially the history and the lore or the explanations behind it. But I'm kind of familiar with the imagery of it. It's kind of already our listeners might be sensing. One of the kind of stranger and more conceptual, paranormal cases we've investigated in recent memory, but that doesn't mean we haven't got good old-fashioned witness testimony and physical evidence to show you, Rory. From people who have

glitched out of the world into the backrooms? It wasn't long after the original thread begun that a brave paranormal whistleblower came forward to tell their experience of the backrooms. Clay Kid 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 wrote, it was approximately 1215 when he was, entered the Johnson County Community Health Clinic. I was there for an appointment I had set up weeks ago, just a routine checkup. It wasn't a new place for me. I'd been there a couple of times before. However, the place had a nostalgic feel to it, as if it were a location from my childhood

or something, could never pinpoint exactly what this feeling was or where it came from. I passed the empty waiting area and approached the woman at the front desk. She was sitting in her gray office chair looking at a spreadsheet on the same Windows XP desktop they've had since 2008. I took the form back to the waiting area and filled it out. 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 right through it. I got out quite frightened and looked at the wall. It didn't make sense. Why didn't I feel anything? So I reached to touch it and my fingers went through it. All right. I recoiled in shock.

What the hell was that? What kind of hospital is this guy in? Should we kind of think he's in the wrong one? Maybe. The restraints on my jacket were loosened and I was able to tumble through. I reached to touch the wall again, only to find my fingers went through it once more. Then suddenly I lost my balance, tripped and fell directly through the wall. I fell face first onto some dirty tan carpeting.

Upon getting up, I realized that I was in a completely different room. Or should I say, a set of rooms. The walls were covered in a tan patterned wallpaper. I turned around and tried to put my hands back through the wall, but they wouldn't go through. Jesus. I looked back. There were no windows, no doors, nothing on the walls. It was completely empty, aside from a singular plastic chair.

At this point the only thing going through my mind was fear and the repeating thought of I need to leave. I started running through the rooms, desperately trying to find an exit, but there was no exit. Was this my permanent location until I died? No, there had to be a way out. Then in the distance I heard footsteps, but not those of a human, at least not of a normal human alongside the footsteps was a gurgling snarl i began to run as fast as i could from whatever the hell was approaching me i ran for what seemed like forever but i was always back in the same room i started in

i sat down defeated the feeling of dread filling my body and i started to cry i was going to die here by the way i'm still there i haven't left i accepted my what what I've accepted my fate. In fact, I can hear footsteps again. Who is it? Gotta go! He's coming back. By the way, the beast's name is Michael.

Pretty cool guy. We've been playing checkers in the evening. Tell mother I say hello from the back room. Bro, this is crazy. Wow. Some pretty crazy claims. I hope he got out. This was probably post, well, this was 2019.

It was posted a few years ago. I don't know if you ever made it out, but... That dude's dead. That dude's straight up dead. This is the bit in the horror movie where they find the notebook, where the last line is, I can hear footsteps, dot, dot, dot, and then there's just like a line, a tear on the page. Yeah, a bit of blood splattered on there.

Splattered on the page. And we're like, hmm, the diary entries ended suddenly. I hope he's still alive. I'm sure he's just fine. this guy crashed his car on the way to the hospital and died. That's straight up what happened. And I think he went to hell. I mean, he's on 4chan.

I don't know what's on his internet history, but that dude's in hell by the sounds of it. Right, right, yes. We do have a few context clues by the type of person he might be. Right. And it's not looking good for him. I think that's an interesting point you make,

that this dot, it's giving purgatory. It's giving hell. Yeah, purgatory. Yeah. Serving purgatory. for sure. I gotta say, this is kind of an outlandish claim to make.

Go on. But I'm kind of digging this idea that life just has these corners or moments or little windows where you can actually glitch out of the machine and into like the developer build where they've just been doing a bunch of weird shit in the background. And he's kind of done that where he's like, he went into a level that was never brought into the game

and met a monster that was never turned into an animal because there's a world where like, I don't know, mooses don't exist, mice don't exist and you glitched into a part where it's like, yeah, here's the moose. We were going to put him into Earth,

but we didn't actually. So he's just in the backrooms wandering about and you would freak the fuck out if you saw that thing. I think that's what's fascinating about the backrooms is that it touches on so many different ideas

that are all a little bit interlinked. So it's like if you look at the backrooms through the lens of like, I don't know, ancient beliefs, you might be like, yes, if you reach a certain mind state as told about in the Tibetan Buddhist rituals. Yeah. You can reach the fifth bardo where different entities reside. Or in our modern scientific parlance, you might say, what if like in the matrix life is a simulation. there are literally mathematicians out there who have crunched the numbers and are like, you know,

there's a pretty good statistical chance that we are living in a simulation. So maybe it's not entirely crazy that we could no clip out of it. Yeah, you're like, in some of the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, one of the pharaohs has a sports car. I don't know if that's a glitch.

Or like if he's laughing, but we've seen attack helicopters. We've seen. We're seeing Apache attack helicopters in hieroglyphics. I think we said that was a double note. I don't know. I think we did on the record. But one case that does come to mind

is the case of staircases appearing in the woods. Extremely similar. Which kind of had a very familiar vibe of like, is this just a glitch in the world in reality that these objects that shouldn't exist are kind of like jolting into these random places and then there's bizarre consequences because the code can't handle

when someone goes up the stairs in the woods. Exactly. Now, this thread and this account started a ton of speculation and discussion online of people trying to desperately work out how and why this is happening. What's in the back rooms? Why do you end up there?

How do you get out? Well, these amateur paranormal researchers were able to work out a few different things by piecing together other people's stories and they believe there are different levels within the back rooms. The first, is the endless carpet and retro wallpaper.

Level two and three are more, quote, industrial and dangerous. And if you find yourself in one of those upper tiers, there's definitely no coming back, brother. Level four, it actually was a Chucky Cheese. It was an old abandoned Chucky Cheese. It was pretty creepy. The creature is Chuck. It's Charles E. Cheese. Rory became so sad at Christmas after being abandoned by his family that he no-clipped out of this existence.

into the backroom's Chucky Cheese. But he was such a f***abye buzzkill. They no-clipped him back into our world. Yeah, the f***ing thing is, the other kids that were in that Chucky Cheese, I was the monster to them. We could hear footsteps on the opening of a corona. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this.

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You also get a chance to receive a Tim Hortons Scholarship Award. Ready for what's next? Apply today at careers.timhorans.ca. Now, most think that the three levels is about enough, but some suggest a number of layers is in the thousands. Some even say it's infinite. How many layers does hell have again? Is it like 13?

Oh, yeah. I don't remember. It's not infinite, though. I do remember that. No, no, it's a reasonably small number comparatively. But I forget which depiction of hell originally had these kind of like levels. Where it was kind of, you know, similar to this, but maybe a bit worse where it's like, hey, you know, level one is burning. Level two is spears.

Level three is, I don't know, your happy slapping, whatever. Your loved one's kicking in the nuts, who knows? But I think it gets worse progressively. And that might be what we're seeing with the best. back rooms. Oh, it's Dante's nine circles of hell. Nine. Yes. So, okay, it's actually a little bit more ambiguous here. It goes from

limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy. It's all just that kind of, it's more like, based on your sins. I guess that's where you go. Maximum security, which is diddling, presumably. You know, right, yeah. Right up to petty theft, which is kind of minimum security, hell. Yeah, it's true. So maybe the backrooms are something similar. I mean, if you are a bad person and you clip out of reality,

you're going straight to the f***-iddler dimension. This is Rory circles of hell. I mean, you think that's a funny name. Researcher Amy even found a list online of the entities that can apparently be found in some of these upper tiers of the backrooms. We're talking sentient animatronics. It's the Chucky Cheese! It is the Chucky Cheese!

They didn't even make the connection. Holy shit! We have partygoers, party poopers, doll faces, and lastly, skin stealers. Oh my God. Now, I will concede, you might be getting the picture that a lot of this has become a bit tangled up in myth, as people love discussing it and picking it apart online, which is why we need even more evidence to get to the bottom of this. Rory, what if I told you?

I have video evidence of the backrooms. What? How did people get it out? I guess someone wrote from the back rooms, so video's not impossible. So Rory, this is actually on YouTube. As you can see, the title of the video is just the backrooms brackets found footage. Okay, this is really strange. Looks like people shooting a short movie. Yeah, and this video looks, it's quite old.

It's like VHS style almost. Alright, that was good. I'm thinking we get a wide angle and then we're done. Alright, yeah, cool. Looks like almost like a school project. Whoa! Whoa! So we are definitely, we're balls deep in the backrooms right now.

We are, there, this is yellow walls for as far as the ice. Can see, there's, the humming is unbelievable. Yeah. It's completely silent, completely empty. Hello? Oh, just caught a glimpse of something there. Behind a wall. don't like this at all. Don't like this at all.

It's kind of amazing how something so blank and plain can be genuinely this terrifying. I think the VHS aesthetic really fits into it as well. It does, actually. You're right. I'm like... All right, well, there's one room where there's a hole in the wall with a ladder leading up to the hole. Looks like our protagonist is considering...

He's in the hole. He's in the hole. He's in the hole. The hole is entirely wallpapered too. Oh, this is weird. And crawling through the hole, he's ended up essentially back in an identical room to where he started. Can anybody hear me? Oh, this is the first time we're seeing something different in the back rooms, which is...

Oh, arrow... Arrows painted on the wall. As if someone's already been through here once before and is leading instructions to get to somewhere else. All right, things are ramping up real quick now On the wall, it said, don't move, stay still Jesus Christ, okay, there is something chasing him It's quite loud, it is quite loud Holy shit

That sound is horrible too Yeah, it's so distorted and nasty It seems like he's running back in the direction he came But honestly it's hard to tell Because everything kind of looks the same Oh, this is new Okay, now he's in a an infinite hall of mirrors

going on forever. Jesus Christ, that noise is awful. Can you imagine if this actually happened to you? You're like, what the fuck is going on? I was just on Earth a second ago and now everything I know about the world and the universe is turned upside down. It means really nightmare vibes.

Oh, 100%. Like the rules of physical reality are pretty much out the window and the most unlikely and terrible things are happening. Yeah. Hey, fair play. That is better than some actual Hollywood-produced horror movies that I've seen recently. Yeah, that escalated a lot from our beginnings. What are your thoughts, Rory? Kind of illustrating the backrooms there. I like it. You know, while it may not be physical evidence.

Whoa, I wouldn't... I would say it is, you know, like when people draw a picture of a UFO they saw, it is an artist in terms of a UFO. It is an artist's interpretation. Roy, I think you're going to love this. As a childhood filmmaker yourself, that was created by 16-year-old Kane Parsons from Northern California. Love it!

Super high production value. Unbelievable. Yeah, that was generally incredible. If you were listening to this podcast, you should go watch that video. It was great. And not only that, he's turned it into a whole video series on YouTube. He's got, like, I think, like maybe 12 or more videos.

titled The Backrooms and then like a different thing. So he's like expanding it into a whole backroom's kind of universe. Wow. You know, I was making my own movies when I was 16. It was basically taking the camera to parties and filming you and me and all of our friends doing really dumb f*** up shit. And I'm not saying I or you

was involved in this, but those were borderline pornographic as well. They were not, if they're movies, then Playboy magazines are not. awful, you know what I'm saying? I wanted to tell... It's just me running through the hallways of a house party with kit behind me, high as hell, going... Rahr!

Digital hunking. Trying to get me to pay for my share of the Domino's pizza we just ordered. Rav! 1250 for the pepperoni. I'm like, get away! Through Rory's cold, dark backroom's bedroom. My loveless empty house. Now, I wanted to share that fact with you, one, to I guess tell the truth, but two, to show

just how much the backrooms has captured the world's imagination. There's social media accounts with millions of followers, sharing images, movies getting made, as we just heard, countless videos and reaction videos on YouTube, breaking down the theories. It just goes to show what we've always said on TPL, that the internet coming along in history, hasn't killed people's interest in the paranormal. It's only amplified it and magnified it bigger than ever. But people are just more interested in new things that blend myth and reality like the backrooms or Slender Man or Loab.

They're more interested in that than just knowing about vampires, just knowing about Bigfoot. I forgot about Loap. That was a case that we covered on a bonus episode of this paranormal life, which was the world's first ever AI created cryptic. Yeah. A great case. You know, another paranormal story based around technology.

And if you've enjoyed this episode in the backrooms, definitely check out that bonus episode because it's very creepy. Basically an AI machine creating a monster and then not being able to stop showing pictures of the monster, even if you say, show me a picture of a bunny rabbit. The machine's like, I can't. All I see is lobe now. this horrible woman who haunts my electric dreams.

But Rory, as much as I can big this story up and say it's really exciting and cool and different to some of our other investigations, this is a regular old episode of TPL, which means at the end of it, we have to decide whether our paranormal case is true or not. What are you saying today about the backrooms? It's a no. Oh, fucking hell. On today's episode is a no. Look, what we're dealing with here, folks, is your typical old creepy pasta.

very similar to Slenderman, very similar to the Russian sleep experiment. It's a story that's built, grown, and developed online. And while it is fascinating and paranormal and worth talking about, there is, I mean, you can literally trace back its origins to the point in which it was conceived completely fictitiously.

So while it is an amazing story and great to talk about and a very cool concept, It's going to be a no, unfortunately, for me this week. It is a double no. Whilst the backrooms is, as Roy says, an invention of the internet, by the internet, for the internet. You know, I saw a quote from like some university professor who, you know, researches these kinds of things as they pop up on the internet. And they made the cool point that they were like,

the reason it's survived and become as big as it has and people are so into it, is that even on like maybe Slender Man or things like that, it relies on what is not seen. It relies on what's just around the corner. It relies on with all the what ifs, all the stuff that's improvable. It's kind of genius when you think about it, that you take a photo of an empty room

and you're like, this is a different dimension. And everyone can just see that next time they go to a conference center or an airport and let their imagination run wild. Yeah. I mean, it's the famous, Horror movie saying, never show the monster. The second you show the monster, you lose the fear of not knowing what it is or what it can do.

Thousand percent. And that is the least scary bit about that short film is when you actually get a glimpse of it. Yeah. It's like, oh, okay, yeah, I guess it's a weird little thing. Yeah. Whereas like, when you just catch it behind a corner, you hear that honk. When you hear that honk, it could be anything. Yeah.

So I really like it as a concept. It's cool. It's modernized the modern... It's the fear of the modern man. You know? It is. That and running out of hair gel.

These are the problems facing the modern men of the world. Thank you for listening to this one. Thank you to Amy Grisdale for researching this case and thank you to Philip Shacklady for editing this week's episode. While you're over on YouTube

watching Kane Parsons backroom's video, why not type in this paranormal life into the search bar? Whoa! Why would we do that? kit. Why would they want to do that? Because the motherfuck- boys are in 4K.

Slow down. Was that loud enough? Boys! It was too loud the first time. You're honking like a goose. We're over on YouTube. Again, we always have been, but because we were so focused on other things to do with this paranormal

life, we had to take time off making videos. But we're back, bitch, and we're going away. Of course, patreon.com forward slash this paranormal life is the home of TPL, where you can get all the bonus content in the world. Go check it out if you're in need of your fix of TPL in between our Tuesday episodes. It's also where you can get a shout out right here on the show at the end of an episode.

Thank you for tuning in. And remember to live fast, investigate and die young, baby. You're going to say bitches. I thought you were going to. I thought about it. We'll keep it classy. Keep a classy.