Are The Backrooms Real? And What Exactly Are They?

• The Backrooms aren’t real, but are instead a fictional setting dreamed up on the popular message board 4chan.
• The Backrooms are described as an environment of endless, monotonous yellow rooms with harsh light and musty carpet. Plus, something lurking in the shadows.
• It’s said that people get to The Backrooms by glitching through reality, though nobody can say for sure how to escape them.

Are The Backrooms real?

The Backrooms aren’t real. That is to say, The Backrooms are a fictional creepypasta, or online urban legend, that don’t actually exist in real life. They’re not a place you can actually go, but they are fun to think and theorize about. Many say The Backrooms evoke eerie feelings of disorientation and isolation that can’t quite be put into words, which might explain their popularity and ability to capture people’s imaginations.

What are The Backrooms?

The Backrooms are a fictional place made entirely of empty rooms. They were originally described as an endless space of monotonous yellow rooms with musty old carpet. Harsh fluorescent lights hum on the ceilings, and the rooms are entirely empty of any objects or distinguishing features. That said, it’s implied that if you find yourself there, you may not be alone—something lurks within the rooms, and it can hear you wander through them. The Backrooms have been described as a sort of fictional “liminal space,” which is a place that has no real purpose of its own, or which you travel through to get to another, and which often evokes strange feelings—think empty airport terminals or deserted buildings.

How do you get to The Backrooms?

People get to The Backrooms by glitching through reality. “No-clipping” is a phenomenon in video games where the player accidentally slips through the game world due to a bug, revealing the “behind-the-scenes” framework of the video game environment. It’s said that people get to The Backrooms when they no-clip through the fabric of reality. This implies that The Backrooms are some sort of hidden area of our current reality, similar to the back rooms of a restaurant or office building, hence the name. Of course, you can’t actually no-clip through reality; it’s just a creepypasta, after all.

How do you escape The Backrooms?

Some say the exit of The Backrooms appears randomly. The original creepypasta doesn’t say how, or if, you can escape, but fan-made creepypastas sometimes center on finding a way out. It’s said that The Way Out, as it’s called, appears randomly to those who find themselves in The Backrooms. It takes a different form for everyone—a door, a staircase, an elevator—but is always bathed in glowing light.

Origin and Spread of The Backrooms

The Backrooms originated on a 4chan thread in 2019. An anonymous user on 4chan, a popular message board, started a thread where users posted “disquieting images” that feel “off” somehow. One user posted an image of what appeared to be a beige-yellow indoor environment lacking any notable features. Another user responded to the image with the following bit of flash fiction, sparking the creation of The Backrooms: "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 six hundred 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”

The Backrooms thread was posted to Reddit, where it gained popularity. A Reddit user posted a screenshot of the 4chan thread to /r/greentext in 2019, where it garnered tens of thousands of hits, and inspired a number of related creepypastas, rocketing The Backrooms to internet notoriety and spreading the creepypasta to Twitter, TikTok, and other social media platforms.

Fans made short films and games inspired by The Backrooms. Soon after The Backrooms became widely popular, fans started make their own Backrooms creations with their own interpretations and even storylines for the setting, some featuring various monsters. In this sense, The Backrooms is a bit of collaborative storytelling where the lines between “canon” and fan-made works are blurred, and anyone can contribute. A number of fan-made video games have also been released, allowing fans to explore The Backrooms themselves One series by creator Kane Pixels titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” became especially popular and featured characters in hazmat suits studying the strange place. On February 6, 2023, it was announced that a full-length film about The Backrooms directed by Kane Pixels is to be released by A24 sometime in the future.