the backrooms: a blurry photo that changed the internet

Summary

Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) – Episode Summary: "The Backrooms: A Blurry Photo That Changed the Internet"

Release Date: February 11, 2025
Host: Jamie Loftus
Produced by: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts

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1. Introduction to the Episode

Jamie Loftus opens the episode by reminiscing about childhood fears and introduces the central topic: the Backrooms—a seemingly innocuous blurry photo that has morphed into a multifaceted internet phenomenon. She hints at exploring its origins, the communities it has spawned, and the real-life mystery behind the image.

2. Origin of the Backrooms Concept

At [00:01 – 01:02], Loftus shares a personal anecdote about watching "The Ring" in her cousin’s historically haunted house, setting the stage for the discussion on how horror evolves with technology. She explains how the Backrooms image, first posted on 4chan in May 2019, encapsulates a modern form of horror intertwined with liminal spaces and internet folklore.

Notable Quote:

"The Backrooms picture hasn't been photoshopped to look scarier than it actually is. The eeriness isn't because there's something scary in frame, but it's the tension, the uncertainty."
— Jamie Loftus [07:31]

3. Different Online Communities around Backrooms

a. Liminal Spaces Community

Loftus categorizes a segment of the Backrooms fandom as the "Liminal Backrooms," which appreciate the image for its portrayal of transitional, eerie spaces devoid of overt threats. These environments evoke feelings of endlessness and absence, resonating with those experiencing life’s uncertain phases.

Notable Quote:

"The Backrooms became the most popular example of this bizarre, familiar but menacing void-like image."
— Jamie Loftus [16:15]

b. Creepypasta Backrooms Community

Another faction, the "Creepypasta Backrooms," leverages the image as a setting for horror narratives, infusing it with monsters and survival elements typical of creepypasta lore. This community primarily consists of younger, creative individuals who use the Backrooms as a backdrop for storytelling and fan fiction.

Notable Quote:

"In the creepypasta backrooms, you are being pursued through this infinite space by a monster who wants to kill you."
— Jamie Loftus [25:25]

c. Lost Media Backrooms Community

A third group, the "Lost Media Backrooms," is dedicated to uncovering the real location of the Backrooms image. Their quest exemplifies the collaborative spirit of internet communities, combining detective work with a passion for uncovering hidden histories.

4. Academic Perspective on Creepypastas (Sarah Bimo)

Jamie introduces Sarah Bimo, a PhD candidate who has extensively studied creepypastas. Bimo discusses how these internet-originated horror stories reflect collective anxieties about digital communication and technological advancements.

Notable Quotes:

"Creepypastas are a way for creative kids to navigate their fears, similar to how fanfiction helps them explore adolescent feelings."
— Sarah Bimo [30:40]

"The Backrooms is the natural inheritor of the creepypasta tradition, engaging with existential and technological fears."
— Sarah Bimo [41:22]

5. Real-life Tracing of the Backrooms Location (807 Oregon Street, Oshkosh, Wisconsin)

Loftus delves into the real-life story behind the Backrooms image. The photo was taken by Bob Mazza in 2002 at 807 Oregon Street in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Originally a department store, the location underwent numerous renovations, leading to its distinctive, labyrinthine appearance. In 2019, the image was shared online, sparking intrigue and community-driven efforts to locate the actual space.

Notable Quote:

"The Backrooms is 807 Oregon St., a small business and a community space that needs help to survive in a world increasingly hostile to community spaces."
— Jamie Loftus [85:28]

6. Impact on the Local Business (Hobbytown USA)

Upon discovering the Backrooms’ physical location, Hobbytown USA’s owner, Bob Mazza, experienced a surge of online interest. Fans began visiting the store, drawn by the lore and the eerie atmosphere of the Backrooms. Mazza initiated a GoFundMe campaign to repair the building’s roof, aiming to preserve both the store and its unintended role as an internet landmark.

Notable Quote:

"The Backrooms may have become popular as a site for conquering your fears, but the site is 807 Oregon St.—a space that needs help to survive."
— Jamie Loftus [85:28]

7. Conclusion: Community and Internet Creativity

Loftus reflects on the Backrooms as a symbol of internet-driven creativity and community building. Despite its origins from a single blurry photo, the Backrooms have fostered diverse online communities and real-world collaborations aimed at preserving and celebrating this unique cultural artifact.

Notable Quote:

"There has been so much creativity, so much community built during a time where real-life spaces to commune weren't safe. So Backrooms people noclipped and ended up finding each other there."
— Jamie Loftus [87:44]

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Key Takeaways

• The Backrooms Phenomenon: Originating from a single image, the Backrooms have become a multifaceted internet phenomenon, spawning various communities and narratives.

• Community Diversity: The Backrooms encompass different interpretations—liminal spaces evoking existential dread, creepypasta stories adding layers of horror, and lost media enthusiasts seeking the real location.

• Academic Insights: Experts like Sarah Bimo highlight how creepypastas and similar genres serve as outlets for navigating digital-era anxieties and identity formation.

• Real-world Impact: The discovery of the Backrooms’ actual location has had tangible effects on local businesses and communities, demonstrating the power of internet lore in shaping real-life interactions.

• Cultural Significance: The Backrooms exemplify how a simple image can evolve into a rich cultural symbol, reflecting broader societal fears and the human penchant for storytelling and community building.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Jamie Loftus [07:31]:

  "The Backrooms picture hasn't been photoshopped to look scarier than it actually is. The eeriness isn't because there's something scary in frame, but it's the tension, the uncertainty."

• Sarah Bimo [30:40]:

  "Creepypastas are a way for creative kids to navigate their fears, similar to how fanfiction helps them explore adolescent feelings."

• Jamie Loftus [85:28]:

  "The Backrooms is 807 Oregon St., a small business and a community space that needs help to survive in a world increasingly hostile to community spaces."

• Jamie Loftus [87:44]:

  "There has been so much creativity, so much community built during a time where real-life spaces to commune weren't safe. So Backrooms people noclipped and ended up finding each other there."

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Conclusion

This episode of "Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)" offers a comprehensive exploration of the Backrooms phenomenon, intertwining internet culture, academic analysis, and real-life impacts. Jamie Loftus skillfully navigates through the layers of online communities and the tangible story behind a single photograph, highlighting the intricate ways in which digital narratives shape and are shaped by our real-world experiences.

Transcript

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[Peter Heft]

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[Jamie Loftus]

Easy. They're from dsw.

[Peter Heft]

Because DSW has the exact right shoes.

[Jamie Loftus]

For whatever you're into right now. You know, like the sneakers that make office hours feel like happy hour, the.

[Peter Heft]

Boots that turn grocery aisles into runways, and all the styles that show off the many sides of you from daydreamer.

[Jamie Loftus]

To multitasker and everything in between.

[Peter Heft]

Because you do it all in really great shoes.

[Jamie Loftus]

Find a shoe for every you at your DSW store or dsw.com cool zone media hi 16th minute listeners. Two things. First, if you're in the Los Angeles area on March 2nd my movie podcast with Caitlyn Durante. The Bechtel cast is having this big post Oscar show and general variety show with some of our favorite guests from the past eight years of the Bechtel cast at Dynasty typewriter at 7:30 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 Halley'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 continuing, 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. Fugitive 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 2003American 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 gonna stick with the 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 force 9 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 folktale 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'd 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 us 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. 1 I remember my parents and my fellow children with secret MySpace accounts got really scared over were these copypasta emails that you had to send to 10 friends or face certain death.

[Caitlyn Durante]

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.

[Jamie Loftus]

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 explain explore that the idea of a computer or the Internet itself was scary. Like we talked about in our Hoktua series, Web2 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?

[Peter Heft]

Who is that?

[Jamie Loftus]

I just tried to hang up on him.

[Peter Heft]

Can we get rid of this person?

[Jamie Loftus]

I don't know. He was here the whole time. This is probably a glitch. Well, the glitch just typed web3 horror is a hawk to a 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.

[Peter Heft]

Research shows if you force a child to eat vegetables, they'll be less likely to choose those foods as adults.

[Jamie Loftus]

Is that so?

[Peter Heft]

Yes, experts say.

[Jamie Loftus]

Megan, turn off.

[Peter Heft]

I thought we were having a conversation.

[Jamie Loftus]

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 to 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 consistents there. They're tech based horror stories and they're absolute catnip for middle schoolers. And in 2019, one of the most famous modern horror stories put people, 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, 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 is a series of empty rooms, eerily empty rooms in 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 FL 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.

[Caitlyn Durante]

If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the backrooms where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum 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.

[Jamie Loftus]

The backrooms. Your 16th minute starts now. Give me a start. Let's take it too far and give me one moment. Welcome back to 16th Minute, the podcast where we look at the Internet's main characters of the day, speak to them, or this week, the people who discovered 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 Yiannopoulos are banned from Mark Zuckerberg's platforms. How quaint. Remember when he used to do that Harry and Meghan 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 to remind her 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 backrooms picture hasn't been photoshopped to look scarier than it actually is. The eeriness isn't because there's something scary in frame, but it's the tension, the.

[Caitlyn Durante]

Uncertainty, the God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you of it all.

[Jamie Loftus]

And the backrooms only got more popular as a site of horror in their three or so years to follow after it was first posted to 4chan 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 one 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. Its mystery, its 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 backrooms initial popularity. Reading 2 this view of the backrooms puts 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 creepypasta community to spin out fanfiction and web series. And almost all of this fanfiction 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 Creepypasta Backrooms. And in the creepypasta backrooms, you are 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 backrooms 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 folktales. 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 angelfire 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 are 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 Caver at the time was the ambiguity to the 2001 audience of whether this really happened or not. The story was formatted on an Angelfire 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.

[Caitlyn Durante]

Involved in the disappearance of your son?

[Sarah Bimo]

I am so scared.

[Jamie Loftus]

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 amateurish 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 the story.

[Caitlyn Durante]

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 aeropostale shirt and ripped blue jeans.

[Jamie Loftus]

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.

[Caitlyn Durante]

Something inside Jeff snapshot. 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.

[Jamie Loftus]

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 backrooms stories that I liked.

[Caitlyn Durante]

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.

[Jamie Loftus]

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 Killer's Bullies aeropostale 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 fanfiction 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 fanfiction 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 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 creepypasta space. Not because of its emptiness and scarce 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 Parsons 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 a 24 to adapt the series into a feature. And as with the creepypastas before it, like Slenderman or other long standing alternate reality spaces online, the backrooms built out a ton ton of lore through series like Kane's. 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 creepypasta interpretation of the backrooms is far more popular than 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 back rooms 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 Sara Bimo, author of the Horror of Networked Experience, which is a full look into how creepypastas and web2 led to stories like this. Here's our talk.

[Peter Heft]

Hi, my name is Sarah bemo. 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 creepypasta and I've written a book chapter about it. I'm working on a follow up, the.

[Ian Johnson]

Chapter that you sent along to me.

[Jamie Loftus]

It's so fascinating.

[Ian Johnson]

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 creepypastas?

[Peter Heft]

I am kind of like, was initially and still am like another object of study and of interest for me was the way 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, where people self censor themselves to avoid like the purview of like what feels like a, you know, omnipotent algorithm.

[Ian Johnson]

Unalive grape, sort of that line of.

[Peter Heft]

Yes, exactly. Okay, 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 creepypasta I see as a similar kind of phenomenon what I classify as classic creepypasta, 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 new form of horror. And separately I just like, I read it a lot as a kid and I just.

[Ian Johnson]

I was gonna 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 has ever broken through to the mainstream is the Slender man story.

[Peter Heft]

Definitely. Slenderman is undoubtedly the most popular in.

[Ian Johnson]

The most cynical way possible. It does make sense to adapt creepypastas because they're of dubious authorship and they've already been focus grouped essentially. But to start, where do creepypastas come from? How do they sort of grow in popularity over time?

[Peter Heft]

Creepypastas are very interesting and they've often been compared to like folktales 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 the early 2000s ish, are largely anonymous and often kind of crowdsourced, so collectively authored. So 4chan is a common source for many of them. I know that Slenderman began on the Something Awful forums where a user named Victor Serge posted these Photoshop images featuring this tall creepy man. 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 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, the R. 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 urban legend ness is fostered through this collective role playing. The folktale qualities are fostered through kind of different means.

[Ian Johnson]

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 altogether. But the idea that like, yes, sort of the. 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 it and do you have a feeling of what sort of age range or demographics participate in these groups?

[Peter Heft]

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 more on social media and stuff. Also just the quality of the writing often. I think also the fact that traditionally this kind of practice of campfire stories and stuff, it's something really associated with teenagers and young adults. And also I think 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 like, 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 makes strange the process of driving or elevators. There needs to be a sense of wonder and strangeness making strange of the mundane to be explored as thoroughly as it is explored in creepypasta. Another really common theme is this kind of nightmarish nostalgia of childhood TV shows or experiences. So a big thing Is theme parks that are scary. Candle Cove is about a kid's TV show that a bunch of people all watched within the diegesis of the story that turned out to be 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 probably more okay with the transition from childhood to adulthood. You're 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 as, I don't know, very teenage, very young adult.

[Ian Johnson]

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.

[Jamie Loftus]

How did you sort of come to.

[Ian Johnson]

That conclusion as you were studying?

[Peter Heft]

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. Email is often deployed as a narrative element. Smile Dog, for example, consists of a cursed image that is shared via email. I think this preys upon this kind of fear of surveillance and of exterior forces that can reach you no matter 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.

[Ian Johnson]

Now that we've moved into web 3.0, how have these stories changed to reflect more contemporary technological anxieties?

[Peter Heft]

It's interesting, like, I was thinking about how the backrooms is similar in and dissimilar to like, classic creepypasta, 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 wherein people post articles about like, the SCP foundation, which deals with like, paranormal 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 moralistic where it's like if you spend too much time on the Internet, if you're always on your email, you're more likely to become victim to whatever dark forces animate the web. But there is this possibility of a non digital natural life almost. And I think that the backrooms 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. 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, my thoughts on seeing like the backrooms post, but that.

[Ian Johnson]

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.

[Peter Heft]

The backrooms is really like a case of like children yearn for third spaces. Because I think that our current moment is one in which public space has been largely like neoliberalized and rendered completely sterile and kind of hostile to forms of identity formation and community making. And the backrooms in the background, I see a bit of a reflection of this kind of anxiety or feeling that there's the home, there's the workplace, there is 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 individualize people. Everyone 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 architecture and space and identity.

[Jamie Loftus]

Thank you so much to Sarah Beamo. You can find more of her work in the description of this episode. So call me Giada De Laurentiis 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 backrooms Calling all thrill seekers and gaming fanatics, High 5 Casino is a free to play social casino celebrating 12 years of endless rewards and non stop excitement. Download the High5casino app or visit hi the Number 5 Casino. With over 33 million loyal players, it's clear that High5casino is the most trusted gaming platform available. The excitement of Vegas where you can win and redeem real prizes.

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[Jamie Loftus]

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 back rooms 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.

[Caitlyn Durante]

Of relating to or situated at a sensory threshold barely perceptible or capable of eliciting a response.

[Jamie Loftus]

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, quinceaneras, 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 storage 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 backrooms 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 eerie, 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 look 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 a maze to nowhere. But every once in a while, this, like, translucent smiley face would appear at the end of one of the hallways, like, 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. Adolescence, living in this moment in history that also felt very liminal. Because what were the early 2000 and 20s 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 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 vacant feeling. Cities of techno dystopia, 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 will 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 making liminal art of their own. Kyle Edward Ball and Jane Schoenbrun 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 ouroboros of backroom like spaces. Kyle Edward Ball's first feature is 2022's Skinemarink, 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, your home, but the space is collapsing within itself. And bald didn't find liminality by mistake. He got his start by making horror shorts on YouTube from 2017 to 2021. He finessed what would become his signature style in a series called Bite Sized Nightmares, where he would adapt viewer 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 Internet Horror.

[Caitlyn Durante]

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 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.

[Jamie Loftus]

And then there's the work of Jane Schonbrunn, 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 found online footage that ended up piecing together a narrative about the history of creepypasta legend the Slenderman. And when they moved into films that they shot on their own. We get the mother. 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 girl's obsessive journey doing a creepypasta style YouTube challenge called the World's Fair Challenge. And for what it's worth, spoilers 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.

[Peter Heft]

How long until I do it?

[Jamie Loftus]

I need a shower coated. I promise. I'm not scared. I need to ask you something. Sure. What is it?

[Sarah Bimo]

But we need to go out of game first.

[Jamie Loftus]

Is that.

[Sarah Bimo]

Is that okay?

[Peter Heft]

Sure.

[Jamie Loftus]

What's that? It's an expression. It means 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, Schoenbrun 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 fanfiction, lurking on message boards and aiming with people from school and weirdos I met online. 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, 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 where 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 Zones as Liminal and Deterritorialized Spaces. Here's our talk.

[H]

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.

[Ian Johnson]

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.

[H]

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 H.P. 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 Weird 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. The melding of the two was somewhat there, and I wanted to try to fill some niche.

[Ian Johnson]

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?

[H]

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 the sense of. Like a. 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?

[Jamie Loftus]

At least in the Internet sense.

[Ian Johnson]

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.

[H]

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 bus stops, airports, train stations, things like that. Insofar as they are literally designed to be threshold spaces between a destination between destinations.

[Jamie Loftus]

Right?

[H]

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 or kind of not. It's. 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.

[Ian Johnson]

But, I mean, what would be an example of a space like that?

[H]

Yeah, I mean, I think a school, I think, is an interesting example. Right. Because on the one hand, right, you go to look 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.

[Ian Johnson]

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.

[H]

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 rite 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. 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 creepypasta sphere has probably just been in appropriation of terms to some extent, insofar as the Latin lyman 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.

[Ian Johnson]

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 B there you could say.

[H]

That, I guess middle school would be that kind of threshold space in a weird way.

[Jamie Loftus]

Cool. Yeah.

[Ian Johnson]

Is there anything else that you'd like.

[Peter Heft]

To touch on the other thing that.

[H]

I was thinking about, I suppose. As 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, you are wandering around, 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 kind of a weird digital version of the backrooms 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.

[Jamie Loftus]

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 backrooms.

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[Jamie Loftus]

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 backrooms, 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 Menominee 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 Baum and Callan department 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 backrooms 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 Hirschberg's after it sold and the building is remodeled panty girdles for only two 95 sign me up. The building is sold again in 1955 and is remodeled, this time as Rhoner's Furniture, who expanded the building again 10 years later. By the 70s they installed the carpet that we now associate with the back rooms 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, Kendra 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's the explanation in her video but the other thing that made drop ceilings so popular in the settings 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 and then 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 sale 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 Mazza bought the place, 807Oregon had been a department store, a furniture store, an estate sale 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 the 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 charcuterie 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 12, 2002 at 8:21am 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. Hobbytown 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 +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 backrooms 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 a Walmart got too expensive with Rent and that Hobby Town is open at 807 Oregon Street. To this day, even though the track that was set up in the back room 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 backrooms image was posted and one random person on Twitter correctly identified the location 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 backrooms folks, can be uniquely honed in on finding one piece of media. Some highlights from the 2024 Lost Media video they found Celebrity number six, 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, Semliot, Zurara and Zaft used a shared discord to organize a series of challenging maneuvers. So all is well that ends well, right? Tale as 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 Mazza, 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 Hobby Town USA Oshkosh. Like they started the next day. What the is up? Darn family today we're actually like, we just like found out that like the original backrooms photos was taken in our hometown. So we're actually going there like, like no joke being deadass, bro. We were so Nervous because we. We saw in our friend's story. We're like, what the. And the story texting me like, we should do it. Prompting owner Bob Mazza 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 19, explaining why he bought the building to begin with.

[I]

So I start. Started looking at old buildings in town here, and this old decrepit 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.

[Jamie Loftus]

So Bob explains that the fake walls that inspired so much backroom content was thrown away almost immediately by both him and. 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.

[I]

Oh, it's 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 and which I thought was kind of weird, but they had. 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, 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, 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 cordial, Some of them pretty weird. You know, they'll just call up and even just ask some weird question. Like you say, like, is this the back room or something? And you're like, you know, this is hobby Town. And they're like. At that point, they don't even know what to say. But, yeah, it's been a little bit of an annoyance for the store, 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 people that work here to take them away from their job.

[Jamie Loftus]

Maza would do a second interview with YouTuber Feral 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 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 backrooms events on this GoFundMe. He also shared testimony from people who had been racing RC cars at hobbytown over the years and deeply loved the community that Bob made space for from the GoFundMe.

[Caitlyn Durante]

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 backrooms 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 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.

[Jamie Loftus]

This GoFundMe 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 creepypasta, and the site of existential horror for the liminal crowd in real life, the backrooms is 807 Oregon St. 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 Kane'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 RC club in Wisconsin in the process. The backrooms your 16th minute ends now and for your moment of fun. From Farrell Maguire's wonderful backrooms video, which is linked in the description, Bob Mazza tells Ferrell about his favorite moments in the backrooms homes. Hobbytown USA My favorite memories and always.

[I]

Will be my favorite memories is of all of the racers and RC 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 store and they're, you know, they're like just awesome and wow, that's the kind of stuff that really keeps you going.

[Jamie Loftus]

16Th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad13. Voice acting is from Grant Crater and Pet Shout Outs to our dog producer Anderson. My cats Flea and Casper and my pet Rockbert who will outlive us all. Bye.

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