the Backrooms
The Backrooms is an internet legend about an endless maze of empty, yellow, fluorescent-lit rooms that you can fall into by “noclipping” out of reality. It started with a creepy photo on 4chan in 2019 and grew into a whole fictional universe.
What the Backrooms means
The original image shows a big, empty room with damp-looking carpet and mono-yellow walls under buzzing fluorescent lights. The story attached to it says that if you glitch out of reality in the wrong spot, you end up here, in miles of identical rooms, and you are not alone.
Fans expanded it into numbered “levels,” each with its own rules, and hostile “entities” that roam them. People also call real places “very Backrooms” when they have that empty, yellowish, office-maze feel.
Examples
- “This hotel basement looks exactly like the Backrooms.”
- “Did you watch the Backrooms series? I can’t look at yellow wallpaper anymore.”
- “If I noclip into the Backrooms, tell my mom I love her.”
Where it came from
On May 12, 2019, an anonymous user on 4chan’s paranormal board started a thread asking for “disquieting images that just feel ‘off’” and posted the photo. Another user replied with the first description of the Backrooms, borrowing the video-game term noclip, which means moving through walls. Within days, people were writing Backrooms stories on Reddit, and wikis full of levels followed.
The photo’s source stayed a mystery until May 2024, when fans traced it to a 2002 renovation of a former furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, posted on a hobby shop’s blog in 2003.
In early 2022, YouTuber Kane Parsons released a found-footage Backrooms short that grew into a web series and took the idea mainstream. His feature film adaptation, produced by A24, came out in May 2026.
Related terms
- Liminal space: eerie photos of empty, familiar places.
- Analog horror: found-footage horror styled like old TV.
- Lore: the backstory fans piece together.
- Copypasta: text copied and shared around the internet.
More words from online culture are in our internet slang guide.
Example sentence
That empty yellow office hallway looks like a level of the Backrooms.
Notes
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