By Rob Sussman, Rachel Charniak
OSHKOSH, WI (WTAQ) — An Internet mystery has been solved in Oshkosh.
I asked Bob Mazza, “Are we in a labyrinthine alternate dimension of identical yellow rooms right now?” That’s a really weird question to ask a person you just met, but nevertheless he had some idea as to what I was talking about.
“I think this is where it started,” he replied.
The year is 2019; And an anonymous person is writing a post on an online imageboard dedicated to sharing creepy, paranormal images and stories.
It read:
“If you’re not careful and you noclip[a] 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 original viral “Backrooms” photo. (Unknown, likely either Bob Mazza or a Hobbytown Oshkosh manager)
This post was shared alongside a photo. A photo that’s now infamous. It depicts an eerie, faded yellow room, with a number of visible entryways and exists, but no doors. The wallpaper is ugly. The carpet looks crusty, and the ceiling spotty and water damaged. It’s shot off-kilter, almost as though it’s intentionally shot to be unsettling. Like when the main character of a Stanley Kubrick film finally starts to snap.
That post, made to an anonymous message board over half a decade ago, spawned a multimedia empire. A filmmaker began work on a popular Youtube web series. Multiple video games were developed and published–all taking place in the terrifying world of the Backrooms.
But what, exactly, was in that image? What did it depict? Was it fake? Who shot it? Where is it? What was its story? Why is it so yellow?
Sleuths from across the world put their heads together to figure it out. They crawled through 20 years worth of forum posts, went down rabbit hole after rabbit hole all in the hopes of finding some sign of what the Backrooms photo actually was, and whether or not such a place still exists today.
And somehow, after finding the first posted images over two decades ago, they found it.
The Backrooms, the real location depicted in the photo, is in… Oshkosh. Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Specifically the Oshkosh Hobbytown Store on Oregon Street.
The year is 2003. Bob Mazza has some big ideas about what he wants to do next with his life. He’s a hobby shop owner and RC car racing enthusiast, and he races with a local club a few times a month at a local Eagles club. But the club is looking for a space of its own, and Mazza is looking for a new business opportunity.
“I started looking at old buildings in town here, and this own decrepit thing was available,” said Mazza. “And I thought I could combine the store, move away from where we were out on the highway, and maybe if it was popular enough the racing program could survive in this place. That was 20 years ago.”
This “Old, Decrepit thing” was the former home of Rohner’s Furniture in Oshkosh, which was located in what was once a major department store in the 1920s. That’s where Bob decided to build his hobby shop and racing center, but there was one thing in the way: a very old, water damaged upstairs.
“We came in here and just started ripping it all out. We took six, 20-yard containers full of walls, junk and other pieces out. A lot of rooms and stuff were taken out. We just started building it to do what we wanted to do in here, which was to make it into a big play area where guys could come in every weekend and race,” said Mazza.
It was an extensive renovation, and Bob decided to take pictures of the process with a digital camera and put them on this very cool thing that was starting to get very huge: the Internet. One of those photos–the famous one of the Backrooms–was given the filename DSC00161 by the digital camera used to shoot it. That filename wound up being the major clue that, over 20 years later, finally solved the mystery of the photo when someone was able to trace it back to an archived version of the website Mazza used to upload the photos from the renovation.
“So the infamous picture online; who took that?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” said Mazza. “It was either me or, I had a guy who is one of my best friends and he was my right hand man. It may have been him; he was in control of the website stuff.”
And… that’s it. That’s the entire story of how the Backrooms photo came to be. It’s a completely ordinary photo of a seriously water damaged former furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin that was taken to document the renovations taking place at the building. That’s all.
Why, then, is it so famous? Why is this picture so compelling? It isn’t the six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms filled with eldrich horrors beyond the limits of the imagination that the 2019 imageboard post promised it would be. No. It’s an RC racetrack.
Nothing remains of the Backrooms. The walls are gone. The floor is gone. The yellow–thankfully–is gone. There’s no musty smell.
But as I stood contemplating the relationship between memes and reality, that’s when I started to hear it.
That hum. That unceasing hum. The endless background noise of fluorescent lights–the single thread linking reality to a world of boundless creativity.
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