If we need to name an example of a successful creepypasta, the case of The Backrooms immediately comes to mind. First published in a 4chan thread, this image instantly clicked with the public, spawning all sorts of related projects. However, in recent years there has been a doubt: Where did the initial copy come from? Where is that place? Why was it recorded? An excellent article on the Internet Archive blog takes us to the beginning…
"If you're not careful and you 'noclip' out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where there's nothing but the stench of wet carpets, the madness of the yellow-monkey, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum, and approximately 600 million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms where you'll be trapped. God save you if you hear something wandering nearby, because it's definitely heard you..."
It is merely a humble and relaxed translation of one of the posts that accompanied The Backrooms, when it was published in a thread on the /x/ section of 4chan in May 2019. This area, region, dimension, fed the imagination of users as rarely seen, and today we can find everything from video games to entire wikis, filled with mysterious and disturbing details. Unfortunately, that post had no information about the original location… but the last piece of the puzzle has finally been exposed. This article from the Internet Archive explains it.
The Origin of The Backrooms
All arrows point to a section of the web titled "The New Revolution Raceway - Updates 3/2/03". The vast majority of the images shared there have broken links, but one of those rescued by the Internet Archive's crawling is precisely The Backrooms.
The article mentions that in March 2003, an old furniture store called Rohner’s Home Furnishings in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, was being renovated by its new occupants, HobbyTown (radio control, merchandising, etc.). The humidity damage doesn't seem very extensive, but the original message indicates that the carpets had to be removed anyway. By reading the metadata of this image, we can now confirm that it was taken on June 12, 2002, with a Sony Cyber-Shot camera.
Finally, an additional fact: This is technically a rediscovery. The X-Twitter user "rkfg_me" shared a direct link to the image in May 2019, shortly after its publication on 4chan. Nobody saw this tweet because the creepypasta had not yet exploded, and because it doesn't have any kind of keyword or hashtag to identify it. The link to Reddit below has more details.
Sources: The Internet Archive, Reddit
