The Backrooms
urban legend and creepypasta
The Backrooms are a fictional location invented in a 2019 thread on the imageboard website 4chan. The Backrooms are usually portrayed as an impossibly large extradimensional complex of empty rooms, accessed by exiting reality. They are one of the best-known examples of the liminal space aesthetic and the creepypasta genre.
The concept began with an anonymous interpretation of a photo showing a large, empty room with an uncomfortable yellow atmosphere. The photo was taken in 2002 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, at a former furniture store while the new tenant was renovating the site, and had been posted on the store's blog. The photo's origin had been widely unknown until it was discovered in 2024.
Internet writers have expanded on the concept, introducing "levels" with distinct characteristics and hostile "entities" which roam these spaces. Fans have adapted both the classic and expanded settings into video games and short films. In early 2022, American YouTuber Kane Parsons published a Backrooms short film on YouTube, which ultimately grew into a 25-episode web series disconnected from the Internet lore. These viral videos have been credited with igniting a surge in Backrooms content and taking the concept into the mainstream.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Backrooms” as urban legend and creepypasta. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as urban legend and creepypasta. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q110904767. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2019, 2002, 2024 and 2022.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Backrooms” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.