After two years of searching, four Discord users have traced the origin of the infamous “The Backrooms” photos, used in a series of 4chan “Creepypastas,” to a hobby store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The team found the original photo on an archived version of the store’s website from 2003. Pleasantly, “The Backrooms” is now a not-creepy RC car racetrack, and the store is still open.
The Backrooms is a series of creepy stories about this image, and the scary things that happen in this liminal space. The team who found it told me that finding the Backroom was a multi-year endeavor spurred by a February, 2022 YouTube video by Virtual Carbon. In Virtual Carbon’s Discord, four users who go by Leon, Semliot, Serrara, and Xaft began searching.