Origin of Backrooms
The Backrooms is a popular and eerie internet horror concept that began as a piece of “creepypasta” (online horror lore) and has since evolved into a vast collaborative fiction universe, with games, short films, and YouTube series expanding the mythos.
Origin
The idea of the Backrooms originated from a post on the anonymous forum 4chan in May 2019. A user posted an image of a yellowish, low-resolution room with stained carpet, yellow wallpaper, and buzzing fluorescent lights. Another user replied with a haunting description:
"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms..."
This simple message became the seed for the entire Backrooms mythos, which imagines a parallel dimension composed of endless, liminal spaces—places that feel familiar yet unsettling.
What Are the Backrooms?
The Backrooms are described as an endless maze of empty, off-putting rooms and corridors. The spaces are often based on real-world architectural elements like office hallways, basements, empty hotels, or old malls—but they stretch on infinitely and defy logic. The environment is usually dimly lit or bathed in yellow, with the hum of lights constantly in the background.