Navigating on the web can happen to come across the photos and videos of empty rooms and illuminated with artificial light that, to look at them, could make us feel a slight feeling of nostalgia mixed unease And restlessness. We are talking about the Backrooms (translatable with Rooms on the back), that is, one of the most famous examples of limited spaces that have inspired metropolitan legends, films and video games in recent years. This vein can be traced back to a specific photograph, this:
This photo began to become popular the 12 May 2009when for the first time it was published on one bulletin board dedicated to paranormal within the social network 4chan. On this occasion, a user asked to publish photos of environments “who had something wrong“, And among the various answers there was also this. It was a yellow room, with carpet, wallpaper and office lights. What was popular with it was not so much the photo itself, as its accompanying text, which I report below:
If you are not careful and exit reality in the wrong areas, you will end up in the backrooms, where there is nothing more than the smell of wet carpet, the madness of monochromatic yellow and the infinite background of the fluorescent lights at the maximum of their hum, and about six million square miles of empty rooms segmented in a random way in which to remain trapped.
As it is easy to imagine this immediately captured the interest of the community which, around this story, began to create tales of horror, video games and even films and short films. Among the most passionate, even a challenge started to try to identify this place: various users gave birth to a Maxi-document shared online, within which everyone published what he discovered. For example, analyzing the metadata of the photo, it was possible to trace the type of camera usedwhile studying the measures of the room and the pattern of the wallpaper The type of office and the geographical area was able to delimit, and so on.
At the end of the research – which you can find at the bottom of this article – it was discovered that the photo dated back to September 17, 2003 and was published for the first time on the website of the store of Hobbytown In Oshkosh, in Wisconsin. Specifically it was an article in which the renovation of one of their offices who, at that moment, had been deprived of all the furniture. The “mystery” of backrooms had finally been resolved.
