TWITTER IS HARD PLACE TO FIND ANYTHING...GOOGLE IS LOT BETTER TO FIND THINGS, I WONDER WHO WAS IDIOT BUY TWITTER OUT ?? TWITTER USERS SURE NOT GETTING ANYTHING THEY SAY OUTSIDE POPULATION WHEN TWITTER IS OVER 500 MILLION TWEETS EVERY MINUTE IT BECAME A MESSY SERVER
And then there's all the people who had previously liked that Tweet and chose not to say anything during the search, silently laughing their asses off as everyone went insane trying to find the photo's origin.
I feel this whole situation is a great example of the Butterfly Effect - an entire subgenre of internet culture spawned because someone working for an indoor racetrack in 2002 decided to take photos of a couple rooms before they got renovated. If that one person hadn't done that, the entire Backrooms concept probably would never have happened. Insane how seemingly inconsequential actions can change the course of the future in such dramatic ways.
Considering the infinite ammount of liminal spaces that have gotten popular since then, I am sure this aesthetic would have found one way or another to still get popularized.
I'm not sure I'm glad its real location was found. I like the mystery of it, this special place that spawned a whole genre of horror that could be lurking anywhere. One could even imagine it was an actual picture from the backrooms that somehow made it out and into this realm, and in fact that image was the one thread that linked this incredibly deep genre of fantasy horror to our world in a real and physical way, but that thread has been cut and now the mystery has been killed. I will miss it.
This also feels like a very lucky butterfly effect. There's definitely many more pictures that have the same feeling, but the backrooms photo got chosen by fate to become a pop culture phenomenon. It feels like as if the path for this to happen was like if events perfectly aligned together.
@@alphalax7747 Those are my thoughts almost exactly. If it wasn't this backrooms image, then it could have been many others. This particular image filled an archetypal niche in the collective, societal mind we live submerged in. Yes, it was chaotic or emergent how this particular image became a very popular meme, but so too is anything else like Chrsitianity or other religions when you look very closely at their historical development. And yes, there is something very beautiful about the whole thing. It's a beauty that's difficult to put down in words: perhaps serendipity or providence are close to the feeling I have when I see the universe, planet Earth, or human society develop in these complex ways.
What surprises me the most is how that reply just sat there for years and went completely unnoticed. It makes me wonder what other information is fully out in the open without anyone noticing, just waiting to be discovered.
Well, considering the Filthy Frank Kenya song was found on TH-cam and Ulterior Motives was found on xvideos, I'm willing to bet some other lost media is just sitting in the most obvious websites, but nobody has noticed yet.
@@jakman2179 Google reported all the way back in 2012 that an hour of footage was being uploaded to the platform every second. The sheer volume of content on YT is like an ocean we're all just paddling in the shallows of.
You forgot an amazing detail. In the original 2003 post on their website, HobbyTown refers to the upstairs room itself as "the back room" and even mentions the water damage to the floors. Calls into question if the original 2019 creepypasta poster knew of the website it came from at the time, especially since some random guy on Twitter of the same year was able to just reverse image search to find the source. I desperately want the rest of the photos that weren't archived from the page. Surely there were more angles of The Backrooms.
Knowing how people and their relatives treat computers and data in general, I think the rest of the photos are probably lost to time. Unless the original researcher saved them all, of course.
What would be really cool is if the people who currently occupy that space are really big into the backrooms thing and have even done some searching themselves to figure out it's location -- only to find out that they've been standing in the middle of it for years. Honestly, that would be one hell of a head trip.
If not working at that space, then it definitely has to be cool for anyone in the immediate area. Maybe working next-door or living just down the road. I wonder what (if there is at all) the local community reaction to this is?
Knowing the backstory of the backrooms photo makes it less creepy. The fact it was made into a fun racecar track that probably made many kids happier honestly makes the photo more wholesome.
The backrooms lore will now evolve to where the monster chasing you through the backrooms is like a killer RC car. It's funny, because I've seen various edits/gameplays of the backrooms involving cars over the years, probably because of TH-cam's algorithm in my case, and I guess that sort of hinted at the building's true purpose this whole time.
So you're telling me that the original backrooms photo was taken in a place less than an hour away from where I live this WHOLE time... my head is spinning.
I’ve lived in/near Oshkosh my whole life. I can hardly believe that this famous “backrooms” photo was taken here. Oshkosh has typically only been known for being home to the Experimental Aircraft Association “E.A.A.,” Oshkosh B’Gosh overalls, and perhaps also Oshkosh Corporation.
I JUST drove through Oshkosh a few days ago, the timing coincidence is INSANE! I also grew up wearing Oshkosh B'Gosh clothes all the time as a child lol, ah memories. I always thought the name sounded funny.
I went there last year while traveling all over the US, had no idea it was a real place. Went to the library a minute away, and the cool lakeside park with a big statue of Chief Oshkosh
This backrooms stuff always reminds me of when I was a kid and would wander around convention centers. My parents would attend things at convention centers across Texas in the 90s and I would always find windowless, huge rooms with long corridors. It was scary exploration for me when I was like 10.
I know this feeling. Mine was a house I went to with woods in the back. It’s like I tell my daughter, my childhood felt haunted.not because it was actually haunted, but there was a feeling in the 80-90’s that is indescribable snd the best I can say is the word haunted. Is that what you mean? It’s maybe from not knowing too much about the world. Nowadays everything is so known, so googable, back then a mystery remained a mystery. You wondered if the world was really as cut and dry as they said it was. The possibilities were endless, and my imagination knew no bounds. And so a house with dark woods in back, where I went twice and we drove 2 hrs to get to was mysterious. I live for moments like those. I wish I could put it into writing and crystallize that feeling in a story.
Btw there's a post on reddit with a screenshot of some guy on twitter saying he found the backrooms original photo and provided the same link literally 5 years ago but no one noticed
I enjoy just how ironically normal the backstory of this photo is, like its just a former furniture store being renovated to turn into a RC track. There is nothing unsettling about that
Holy shit...its actually been found. 2024 is the year of finding lost media. Find "The most mysterious song on the internet" and we'll have the holy trinity of lost media...so crazy
The best part is that it fits the original meaning of “liminal space” except it’s not linking in space but in time since it’s a transition photo done in the time period between the furniture store and the hobby store.
This is very poetic. This whole race to find the backrooms image is just so poetic in so many ways though, it was a big surprise that it was found, but a good surprise :)
"Liminal spaces" to my knowledge, already included time as a major theme. Many liminal spaces are nostalgic to many people, or are photos of places being renovated or abandoned, like empty malls.
@@sarkedev The creepypasta is what made the image famous, and from that little blurb a huge community dedicated to liminal space horror emerged and is pumping out tons of content. The most prominent one is Kane Pixels and his videos were so well made and so popular he's actually been picked up by A24 to make a film. Suffice it to say, it's a horror subgenre that gained massive popularity all because of this picture and the paragraph of text attached to it on a random post from 4chan.
The fact that this place is gone and was only momentarily like that is actually really cool, that means it truly is a burning memory and nothing else. A literal liminal photo.
I remember going to Rohner's with my parents:) And I was big into R/C during the 90's and raced at Hobby Town! They tore out the walls, and hauled up two slot car tracks. It's now an indoor drone and road car course. I still go there:)
The backrooms photo has always reminded me of the building where I worked at a weekly coupon clipper in the 90s. The publication is gone now, as it couldn’t compete with the Internet. By my last shift in that building all the sales staff, the production areas, and the warehouse were emptied out like the backrooms. The building is now a community resource centre.
I’m kinda glad that it’s lost forever. If it were still a thing it would become a tourist attraction. The fact that it was once a store then it became something else is the literal definition of liminal.
@@wheedler people selling knock off backrooms creature toys outside a "liminal" room filled with people walking around and touching everything, thereby degrading the place until it eventually is broken
HOLY SHIT. I had a feeling we would track down the photo's origins eventually, but this is a more extensive and satisfying conclusion than I had anticipated. Hard to believe how an innocuous image snapped in passing could spawn such a massive pop culture phenomenon.
Kane Pixels went from a kid making his own video, and later series, based on the backrooms, to now working with A24 on a movie. All because someone at their job took a photo of a room before renovations.
They're probably not going to have the business savvy to see this as a potential tourist spot, let alone a part of Internet history. They'll probably think it has nothing to do with their current business and so want nothing to do with it.
It seems that there is an overlap between typical customers of Hobbytown and the people who would do the internet research. The backroom story will work more or less as a marketing campaign for them.
The area of the indoor racetrack where the photo was taken is probably unsafe to stand now (due to, you know, the racecars), and probably looks nothing like it once did, so there'd be little to no point.
@@Rapture582reverse search, since it was 2019, there wasnt a bunch of backrooms image going on in internet, so it would be easy to find it only by reverse searching, that's what he did
@@Rapture582 The link was still live when he found it and an image search was all you needed back then. The find went unnoticed by most at the time, was forgotten, and then by the time the image became more widely known and the search began again, the link was down and a basic image search no longer worked, thus making it as difficult as it was.
The photo must have still been live on the Hobbytown Oshkosh website in 2019 and maybe it turned up via a simple Google image search. It must have been taken down between then and when anyone else started to seriously look for the original photo.
I find it so odd that only those 2 photos were archived out of 18 total images on the Hobbytown page. If they hadn't been, it's possible the origin of the image would never have been determined.
for real dude shouted out 5 people but not the guy that actually found it edit: if you are wondering, he found it through a reverse image search. it was 5 years ago so the caches changed by now which is why you couldnt find it later.
also, if y’all are wondering the twitter user said they found the post through a yandex/google reverse image search, as it was saved in the search engines cache 5 years ago but got removed
btw the twitter user found it through a reverse image search on google / yandex, it just appeared for him back then because the picture was saved in either search engines cache but was unluckily removed when the hunt actually started lol
The fact that the backrooms photo is literally of an abandoned racetrack for kids is so appropriate. So much backrooms stuff has to deal with nostalgia and abandoned places from childhood memories.
It's like you heard a pool of words and arranged them how you liked them most. It was an old furniture store that was getting renovated into an RC car race track. Not an "abandoned racetrack for kids."
this is so fucking amazing. thank you to everyone who made this possible. the new alternate image and the furniture store pictures could have been lost forever. actually incredible
Wow, just wow. The original 1977 image was the most interesting to me, as it was an authentic black & white photo of the place at a different angle, and it really explains much more. The search was definitely worth it.
WAIT SO if this photo was taken during the renovation of the hobbytown… then that means this image, which spearheaded the trend of liminal spaces, was INHERENTLY LIMINAL ITSELF! THE SPACE WAS BOUND NOT TO LAST I LOVE THAT
If you work in Architecture, you measure "backroom" buildings all the time. It was kinda creepy at times when I was younger, but now I'm on the job. Creepy just gets in way of the budget. I did a indoor racetrack job once too, and it was an old furniture warehouse, same chaotic layout, different interior materials palette, same steel moment frame building with wood roof and open web trusses...
i got a little sad thinking about how the backrooms, in the real world, doesn't exist anymore, given the owners of the building remodeled it. it's eerie to imagine that the photo we have is kind of like a ghost. the backrooms got so mythologized and embedded in culture that it felt alive... how strange to think that it has actually been gone since as early as 2002
To me the idea that the backrooms place is remodeled adds to the backrooms notion even more - it's a space hardly nostalgic but imprinted in so many's memories, yet nonexistent.
it feels so somber to see what the room was originally like, but it also encapsulates the idea of a liminal space perfectly for me. everything in our society is built for a purpose, whether it be our cars, the engines that drive them or the screws that keep them together. everything we build is built for something and the same goes for all these spaces, a restaurant hall is built to be a restaurant and converting it into something like a single family residence or a hospital would be very difficult and not produce very usable results since the space was never meant to be neither of those things. in the same way the backrooms were meant to be a furniture store and seeing it being stripped of it's purpose gives off a very uneasy feeling, as if looking at a dead body (not a bloody scene, just a dead body). i think this is basically uncanny valley but for inanimate things.
Yes! You're the only person I've seen to make the comparison of liminal spaces and corpses. Even the photos in which the places aren't stripped down, there is some element of it being lost to time. Like a photo of someone you knew well who passed away long ago.
It's been found for five years already, that's crazy. Someone else saw that post on Twitter in May 2019 and thought "Neat." then went on with their day. Now here we are in May 2024 and it's been hiding in plain sight for five years almost to the letter. It's like there's a portal that opened in Oshkosh, Wisconsin where people go when they exit The Backrooms.
Now that the picture has been found, it’s bittersweet. I’m happy because at long last the fabled photo has been found, and at the same time I’m sad because that photo was part of my childhood, and now that it’s been found, it feels like the magic and other-worldliness of the backrooms is gone.
the backrooms photo was so nondescript/generic that I swear it would be impossible to find, I genuinely believed that the most likely case for the building from the photo was from a real estate listing and the original building was long gone. But at least the building still stands. Maybe in the future someone will purchase and turn the the place into a museum, like how people are pushing to make the Bliss wallpaper a national park, it would make a really cool landmark.
If you go to the location on Google Maps and look at Fabulous Finds next door (Or just type "Fabulous Finds Oshkosh" into Google Maps) then click see inside, it looks very similar to the photo in the newspaper, even the small stretch of wallpaper looks similar.
I live on the other side of the earth, Starting my journey right now. Let's swarm this place with hundreds of filthy middle aged men who have nothing better to do... Sigh. Yup. ThatÄs how it goes...
WHAT! I actually live in Oshkosh, although I probably shouldn't say that. Just crazy to think that. Also, I might know the room that this was taken in. Right after the entrance, there's a dirt track for RC cars to race on. My brother and one of my friends visit Hobbytown often because they're both into RC cars. I've been in there a few times and I believe there's only one in Oshkosh. If this is true, I can confidently say that I have been to the backrooms. Only, a tad bit later than it's peak form. The second Farrell said "Oshkosh, Wisconsin" I almost jumped out of my chair. I'm still trying to process the fact that I may have stood where the real backrooms once did. 🤯
I imagine the person who started the backrooms, just sitting on their gaming chair looking up at the ceiling, thinking about the legacy they created, and not saying a word about it or telling anybody that they are the one who created this crazy domino effect. A true 🗿
Now I guess it's easy to get in touch with the photographer, to ask him whether he felt any anxiety while he was in The Rooms. There's so many things we still want to know.
ok but seriously, this is amazing! it was false lead, after false lead, after false lead, only for it to be on twitter... sitting there... and only a few lucky people saw it before anyone else... wow. i wish Serrara, Semliot, xaft, Perditus and liam the best!
I like the idea that rooms or buildings being renovated have a thinned barrier between our world and the backrooms, makes the real location all the more interesting
once you said the location it honestly made my jaw drop i went to oshkosh for a funeral in april and i vividly remember passing by a hobbytown going to my grandmothers house after going to a museum with my family
This isn't over. There's potentially two more Backrooms images to be found. The broken ones on the internet archive still have the file names. Dsc00164.jpg Dsc00363.jpg "Above is the West room, before ripping out the old display walls and after cleaning, patching, texturing and a new coat of paint." So according to that description these show more of it, unfortunately if found it may be freshly painted and may not have the backrooms feel. Those two pictures of the "West Room" may still be of interest though.
@@Propane_Cake Not known, they're on the archived site but they're broken, so don't contain an image. It's luck that we have the original backrooms pic not broken on that site and a new one not yet seen. Those are the only two images on the site that aren't broken.
@@frigglebiscuit7484 I am no where near them, other side of the country. I don't think calling them would be wise, as they're probably getting spam called. They did say something on Facebook about the backrooms photo being their location, so they're not mad about it.
ive been keeping up with this since like 3 or 4 years ago when i first heard about the backrooms, that’s so crazy! i remember when david crypt had a series on finding the location, not sure if they ever found anything other than the few leads that all kinda went nowhere, but im glad we can finally say the search is over. hopefully we can say the same about hitogata some day
Man, that's crazy. I actually didn't know the backrooms was a creepypasta, I thought it was just a meme, lol. But that's really cool how they found the actual og picture! I thought it was just another one of those creepy liminal spaces, lol.
This would be a sick game, going to work at Rohners furniture, and then going into the back room to find something, which then leads to a fun backrooms experience.
If there’s anything we learned on this search, it’s that there are a LOT of 70s office buildings and otherwise commercial places that look like the Backrooms image.
Now it fits the theme “liminal space” and “nostalgic” even more. It’s insane that the backrooms origins has finally been found after all this time, also very impressive!
Congratulations on locating where The Backrooms photo was taken, glad this mystery has finally been solved. You or any members of your research team should go pay that store a visit and and tell the owners about The Backrooms story and see if the store has anymore old renovation photos in their archives or possibly even photos from the when it was once a furniture store, worth a shot I think!
6:42 I guess we have another Something Awful user to thank for a quick creepypasta posted in a creepy images thread that turned into a worldwide phenomenon.
Man it blows my fuckin mind that you have only 12k subscribers dude your production quality and content is truly great. Keep killin it my boy imma watch you blow up
On the day this dropped, I started watching your previous video about it, but was too sleepy to make it through, so I took a nap. I woke up a few hours later, looking to finish it, and this one had dropped while I slept. I clicked on it, not knowing it was a different video. Likely, the solving had created a spike in the algorithm before anyone could make a new video, so it's just fun and games with the algorithm, but for a while it was a truly magical experience.
The genre of lost media is hitting its golden age. Everybody knows that, the JTK image origin, Dreams 4ever, and now the backrooms image has been found after years, weeks apart from each other.
man, as an enjoyer of liminal spaces, weirdcore, dreamcore, and related things, the backrooms were probably one of the most formative things i've encountered on the internet, shaping me as a person, so it's really cool to see the original image finally get found and give a real-world location to what i thought was either a back room in a department store or even just a purely computer generated image. this is internet history, and i'm really glad to be here within the first few hours of this video dropping :D
The coolest thing about this is that this is probably the fastest time to discover a lost image or something!(5 years) It took over 10 years for the mario.exe creepypasta image and we still haven’t found the original image for Jeff the killer!
@@alphalax7747 yeah but why didn’t he say anything though? If he knew how popular the search was and everyone was going mad trying to find it, why would he just be sitting back and watching the chaos unfold?
The guy who found the photo in 2019, posted it to Twitter and no one found it, is the real unsung hero
TWITTER IS HARD PLACE TO FIND ANYTHING...GOOGLE IS LOT BETTER TO FIND THINGS, I WONDER WHO WAS IDIOT BUY TWITTER OUT ?? TWITTER USERS SURE NOT GETTING ANYTHING THEY SAY OUTSIDE POPULATION WHEN TWITTER IS OVER 500 MILLION TWEETS EVERY MINUTE IT BECAME A MESSY SERVER
Dude's only gonna shutout his friends who did all the work for him to say "US" and not the real hero who saved us all in 2019
true
And he is even a Mass Effect fan. What a legend!
And then there's all the people who had previously liked that Tweet and chose not to say anything during the search, silently laughing their asses off as everyone went insane trying to find the photo's origin.
I feel this whole situation is a great example of the Butterfly Effect - an entire subgenre of internet culture spawned because someone working for an indoor racetrack in 2002 decided to take photos of a couple rooms before they got renovated. If that one person hadn't done that, the entire Backrooms concept probably would never have happened. Insane how seemingly inconsequential actions can change the course of the future in such dramatic ways.
It’s beautiful isn’t it?
Considering the infinite ammount of liminal spaces that have gotten popular since then, I am sure this aesthetic would have found one way or another to still get popularized.
I'm not sure I'm glad its real location was found. I like the mystery of it, this special place that spawned a whole genre of horror that could be lurking anywhere. One could even imagine it was an actual picture from the backrooms that somehow made it out and into this realm, and in fact that image was the one thread that linked this incredibly deep genre of fantasy horror to our world in a real and physical way, but that thread has been cut and now the mystery has been killed. I will miss it.
This also feels like a very lucky butterfly effect. There's definitely many more pictures that have the same feeling, but the backrooms photo got chosen by fate to become a pop culture phenomenon. It feels like as if the path for this to happen was like if events perfectly aligned together.
@@alphalax7747
Those are my thoughts almost exactly. If it wasn't this backrooms image, then it could have been many others. This particular image filled an archetypal niche in the collective, societal mind we live submerged in. Yes, it was chaotic or emergent how this particular image became a very popular meme, but so too is anything else like Chrsitianity or other religions when you look very closely at their historical development. And yes, there is something very beautiful about the whole thing. It's a beauty that's difficult to put down in words: perhaps serendipity or providence are close to the feeling I have when I see the universe, planet Earth, or human society develop in these complex ways.
What surprises me the most is how that reply just sat there for years and went completely unnoticed. It makes me wonder what other information is fully out in the open without anyone noticing, just waiting to be discovered.
yeah
Well, considering the Filthy Frank Kenya song was found on TH-cam and Ulterior Motives was found on xvideos, I'm willing to bet some other lost media is just sitting in the most obvious websites, but nobody has noticed yet.
Makes me wonder if “ like the wind” is just hidden in plain site on TH-cam somewhere
The number of Various Lost Media that turned out to be on TH-cam already is kind of surprising and funny to me.
@@jakman2179 Google reported all the way back in 2012 that an hour of footage was being uploaded to the platform every second.
The sheer volume of content on YT is like an ocean we're all just paddling in the shallows of.
You forgot an amazing detail. In the original 2003 post on their website, HobbyTown refers to the upstairs room itself as "the back room" and even mentions the water damage to the floors. Calls into question if the original 2019 creepypasta poster knew of the website it came from at the time, especially since some random guy on Twitter of the same year was able to just reverse image search to find the source. I desperately want the rest of the photos that weren't archived from the page. Surely there were more angles of The Backrooms.
creepy as heck! I need answers!!!
Hahaha no way!!! That’s great
Knowing how people and their relatives treat computers and data in general, I think the rest of the photos are probably lost to time. Unless the original researcher saved them all, of course.
@@corwin.macleod they're probably on a hard drive somewhere, but no one knows or cares about them.
@@corwin.macleod Guess what
What would be really cool is if the people who currently occupy that space are really big into the backrooms thing and have even done some searching themselves to figure out it's location -- only to find out that they've been standing in the middle of it for years. Honestly, that would be one hell of a head trip.
If not working at that space, then it definitely has to be cool for anyone in the immediate area. Maybe working next-door or living just down the road. I wonder what (if there is at all) the local community reaction to this is?
Knowing the backstory of the backrooms photo makes it less creepy. The fact it was made into a fun racecar track that probably made many kids happier honestly makes the photo more wholesome.
Still does to this very day. It's still open.
The backrooms died so the new generation of kids could be happy, godspeed backrooms
The backrooms lore will now evolve to where the monster chasing you through the backrooms is like a killer RC car.
It's funny, because I've seen various edits/gameplays of the backrooms involving cars over the years, probably because of TH-cam's algorithm in my case, and I guess that sort of hinted at the building's true purpose this whole time.
Fun, you say? =)
@@emurphy42 be silent, peasant
So you're telling me that the original backrooms photo was taken in a place less than an hour away from where I live this WHOLE time... my head is spinning.
visiting it again knowing would feel so weird
You can now literally visit the backrooms 😂
Same I've been there and didn't evenknow
Yeah man, me too.
LOOOLRAAAAA
No way I have been there IN PERSON and have walked through that same racetrack. Jesus I did not expect the backrooms to be so close to home.
that’s so crazy dude, you’re apart of history how do you feel
@@tigressor pretty good just its surreal having a hobby shop being the center of a huge event in history.
@@WisconsinSouthern58 Tell them so now they can have much more business: Hobby and the ORIGINAL backrooms location!
@@WisconsinSouthern58can you make a video inside there?
I grew up in Oshkosh, I've been in hobby town and never would've imagined it was so close to home!
I’ve lived in/near Oshkosh my whole life. I can hardly believe that this famous “backrooms” photo was taken here. Oshkosh has typically only been known for being home to the Experimental Aircraft Association “E.A.A.,” Oshkosh B’Gosh overalls, and perhaps also Oshkosh Corporation.
wait thats what it stands for??
I go to Airventure every year!
I JUST drove through Oshkosh a few days ago, the timing coincidence is INSANE! I also grew up wearing Oshkosh B'Gosh clothes all the time as a child lol, ah memories. I always thought the name sounded funny.
I went there last year while traveling all over the US, had no idea it was a real place. Went to the library a minute away, and the cool lakeside park with a big statue of Chief Oshkosh
or the oshkosh bath and bodyworks outlet
This backrooms stuff always reminds me of when I was a kid and would wander around convention centers. My parents would attend things at convention centers across Texas in the 90s and I would always find windowless, huge rooms with long corridors. It was scary exploration for me when I was like 10.
I know this feeling. Mine was a house I went to with woods in the back. It’s like I tell my daughter, my childhood felt haunted.not because it was actually haunted, but there was a feeling in the 80-90’s that is indescribable snd the best I can say is the word haunted. Is that what you mean? It’s maybe from not knowing too much about the world. Nowadays everything is so known, so googable, back then a mystery remained a mystery. You wondered if the world was really as cut and dry as they said it was. The possibilities were endless, and my imagination knew no bounds. And so a house with dark woods in back, where I went twice and we drove 2 hrs to get to was mysterious. I live for moments like those. I wish I could put it into writing and crystallize that feeling in a story.
I hate to break it to you, but your parents were clearly into pyramid schemes
Man, Ulterior Motives and Backrooms found within such a short time frame from one another.
Hope to find the original jeff the killer image and "the most mysterious song on the internet" soon as well.
Give me hope for like the wind.
@@awdefgbfrwefThe original Jeff the killer image was already found
dont forget we found alicia!! this year seriously is the year for lost media
Btw there's a post on reddit with a screenshot of some guy on twitter saying he found the backrooms original photo and provided the same link literally 5 years ago but no one noticed
3:57 no problem
your channel doesn't have anywhere near the amount of views and subs that are deserved
bro is him
Lmao
@@vampyra1453 Imagine caring about views and sub numbers for a YT channel that ... isn't yours!?
a lenda ele mesmo
This is the HOLY GRAIL of lost images. I can't believe we've actually found it!
naah the holy grail is jeff the killer this is still awesome
id argue thats the jeff image but this is still an absolute win for the lost images community
@@simm1132 @princembat Alright, fair point, this can be the Ark of the Covenant of lost images then.
Isnt it relatively new tho?
I thought jeff the killer was the true holy grail of lost images origins
IM SO HAPPY
I enjoy just how ironically normal the backstory of this photo is, like its just a former furniture store being renovated to turn into a RC track. There is nothing unsettling about that
I can assure you the original business owners and current ones would’ve never imagined one single room could’ve made such an impact on millions
Holy shit...its actually been found. 2024 is the year of finding lost media. Find "The most mysterious song on the internet" and we'll have the holy trinity of lost media...so crazy
Very true
The backroom
The most mysterious song on the internet
And? Can u tell me the other one
@@muhammadazkanaufal8695 The other that was found this year being Ulterior Motives, another lost media song
@@side-room-21probably EKT/Ulterior Motives
what three?
The best part is that it fits the original meaning of “liminal space” except it’s not linking in space but in time since it’s a transition photo done in the time period between the furniture store and the hobby store.
Why does this make me kinda emotional
This is very poetic. This whole race to find the backrooms image is just so poetic in so many ways though, it was a big surprise that it was found, but a good surprise :)
"Liminal spaces" to my knowledge, already included time as a major theme. Many liminal spaces are nostalgic to many people, or are photos of places being renovated or abandoned, like empty malls.
This is so poetic!!
Yea
Worker takes 1 picture of a hobby town race track area in 2002
The entire internet in 2020:
HobbyTown*
@@Gamxin ty
Lol!
I don't get the fascination. Why this photo? What's the obsession?
@@sarkedev The creepypasta is what made the image famous, and from that little blurb a huge community dedicated to liminal space horror emerged and is pumping out tons of content. The most prominent one is Kane Pixels and his videos were so well made and so popular he's actually been picked up by A24 to make a film. Suffice it to say, it's a horror subgenre that gained massive popularity all because of this picture and the paragraph of text attached to it on a random post from 4chan.
The fact that this place is gone and was only momentarily like that is actually really cool, that means it truly is a burning memory and nothing else. A literal liminal photo.
All photos are liminal.
@@seigeengineso a picture of my booty cheeks is liminal?
Something not existing anymore doesn't literally make it Liminal
I see what you did there
I remember going to Rohner's with my parents:)
And I was big into R/C during the 90's and raced at Hobby Town!
They tore out the walls, and hauled up two slot car tracks. It's now an indoor drone and road car course.
I still go there:)
The backrooms photo has always reminded me of the building where I worked at a weekly coupon clipper in the 90s. The publication is gone now, as it couldn’t compete with the Internet. By my last shift in that building all the sales staff, the production areas, and the warehouse were emptied out like the backrooms. The building is now a community resource centre.
I’m kinda glad that it’s lost forever. If it were still a thing it would become a tourist attraction. The fact that it was once a store then it became something else is the literal definition of liminal.
What have you got against tourist attractions?
@@wheedler people selling knock off backrooms creature toys outside a "liminal" room filled with people walking around and touching everything, thereby degrading the place until it eventually is broken
Its bot that deep lil man
@@FishyFinster it IS lil man.
@@wheedler Have you seen the other found liminal spaces, where people damage and destroy the place?
HOLY SHIT.
I had a feeling we would track down the photo's origins eventually, but this is a more extensive and satisfying conclusion than I had anticipated. Hard to believe how an innocuous image snapped in passing could spawn such a massive pop culture phenomenon.
Kane Pixels went from a kid making his own video, and later series, based on the backrooms, to now working with A24 on a movie. All because someone at their job took a photo of a room before renovations.
That photo + the creepy description = absolute gold
New actuall lead was dropped
I wonder if the building would accept tourists or put up a plaque, or if they wouldn't want any extra attention from internet strangers
Just imagine if they never changed the original backrooms layout and it was just the same
They're probably not going to have the business savvy to see this as a potential tourist spot, let alone a part of Internet history.
They'll probably think it has nothing to do with their current business and so want nothing to do with it.
It seems that there is an overlap between typical customers of Hobbytown and the people who would do the internet research.
The backroom story will work more or less as a marketing campaign for them.
The area of the indoor racetrack where the photo was taken is probably unsafe to stand now (due to, you know, the racecars), and probably looks nothing like it once did, so there'd be little to no point.
@@stevenedwards8353*RC Cars
I love this internet detective shit
literally liminal space, a transitioning place. from furniture store to a racetrack. crazy
Nice find. That Twitter dude deserves all the credit tbh.
Are they gonna ask him how he managed to find it? That's what I wanna know.
@@Rapture582reverse search, since it was 2019, there wasnt a bunch of backrooms image going on in internet, so it would be easy to find it only by reverse searching, that's what he did
@@Rapture582 The link was still live when he found it and an image search was all you needed back then. The find went unnoticed by most at the time, was forgotten, and then by the time the image became more widely known and the search began again, the link was down and a basic image search no longer worked, thus making it as difficult as it was.
The photo must have still been live on the Hobbytown Oshkosh website in 2019 and maybe it turned up via a simple Google image search. It must have been taken down between then and when anyone else started to seriously look for the original photo.
@@ninuvids The bad luck is just insane with that, wow
I still cant believe the ACTUAL BACKROOMS are open and people have been and worked there
i was just in the back rooms last week looking at the gundam kits they sell, like that's so crazy
@@Beea15They are a figure store nowadays?
@@theakiwar9118yes the hobby store mentioned in the video is still open
@@theakiwar9118 the room from the photo is now an indoor racetrack for rc cars
This store is about to be hit hard by a bunch of crazy kids.
I find it so odd that only those 2 photos were archived out of 18 total images on the Hobbytown page. If they hadn't been, it's possible the origin of the image would never have been determined.
if they hadn't, another would have been chosen for the meme
@@tsm688 But the image could have still been picked and lost later.
its the chosen one..
@@tsm688 Would the meme even exist?
@@DerAua It might. If they were looking for a creepy image to make a meme on, they could have found something else. It's a chicken and egg thing.
Amazing how an entire culture complete with stories, fan videos, and even games, can spawn from a single image.
this makes the backrooms less scary and more wholesome lmao
okay, but who is going to acknowledge the twitter user that solved the mystery in 2019?
😂
for real
dude shouted out 5 people but not the guy that actually found it
edit: if you are wondering, he found it through a reverse image search. it was 5 years ago so the caches changed by now which is why you couldnt find it later.
also, if y’all are wondering
the twitter user said they found the post through a yandex/google reverse image search, as it was saved in the search engines cache 5 years ago but got removed
Right?? They did all the work here
btw the twitter user found it through a reverse image search on google / yandex, it just appeared for him back then because the picture was saved in either search engines cache but was unluckily removed when the hunt actually started lol
Finding the image in a Twitter post that nobody looked for is probably the most lost media-like ending this could possibly have.
@dadsa-yf6mqdo you need help
@dadsa-yf6mqFr
The fact that the backrooms photo is literally of an abandoned racetrack for kids is so appropriate. So much backrooms stuff has to deal with nostalgia and abandoned places from childhood memories.
not abandoned, it became a racetrack. still used today.
also not necessarily for kids
You hear what you want but no.
It's like you heard a pool of words and arranged them how you liked them most. It was an old furniture store that was getting renovated into an RC car race track. Not an "abandoned racetrack for kids."
2:49 "Yeah they're called teenagers" is SAVAGE
this is so fucking amazing. thank you to everyone who made this possible. the new alternate image and the furniture store pictures could have been lost forever. actually incredible
Wow, just wow. The original 1977 image was the most interesting to me, as it was an authentic black & white photo of the place at a different angle, and it really explains much more. The search was definitely worth it.
WAIT SO if this photo was taken during the renovation of the hobbytown… then that means this image, which spearheaded the trend of liminal spaces, was INHERENTLY LIMINAL ITSELF! THE SPACE WAS BOUND NOT TO LAST I LOVE THAT
Ironic
@@shroomer3867 That's literally the opposite of irony.
The truth of the matter is that everything is liminal.
@@seigeengineeverything is also ironic
granted it wasnt like hidden that it was in a state of transition with how empty it is
i literally saw ur video about decoding the backrooms photo this morning, and now its been found! excellent!
Really shows how anyone with a computer can track images down with enough spirit, great job to all of you
If you work in Architecture, you measure "backroom" buildings all the time. It was kinda creepy at times when I was younger, but now I'm on the job. Creepy just gets in way of the budget. I did a indoor racetrack job once too, and it was an old furniture warehouse, same chaotic layout, different interior materials palette, same steel moment frame building with wood roof and open web trusses...
i got a little sad thinking about how the backrooms, in the real world, doesn't exist anymore, given the owners of the building remodeled it. it's eerie to imagine that the photo we have is kind of like a ghost. the backrooms got so mythologized and embedded in culture that it felt alive... how strange to think that it has actually been gone since as early as 2002
To me the idea that the backrooms place is remodeled adds to the backrooms notion even more - it's a space hardly nostalgic but imprinted in so many's memories, yet nonexistent.
Sounds just like Michaelsoft Binbows.
it feels so somber to see what the room was originally like, but it also encapsulates the idea of a liminal space perfectly for me. everything in our society is built for a purpose, whether it be our cars, the engines that drive them or the screws that keep them together. everything we build is built for something and the same goes for all these spaces, a restaurant hall is built to be a restaurant and converting it into something like a single family residence or a hospital would be very difficult and not produce very usable results since the space was never meant to be neither of those things. in the same way the backrooms were meant to be a furniture store and seeing it being stripped of it's purpose gives off a very uneasy feeling, as if looking at a dead body (not a bloody scene, just a dead body). i think this is basically uncanny valley but for inanimate things.
Do you think it would be the same amount of uncanny valley if the room was not being stripped and actually serving its purpose
Yes! You're the only person I've seen to make the comparison of liminal spaces and corpses. Even the photos in which the places aren't stripped down, there is some element of it being lost to time. Like a photo of someone you knew well who passed away long ago.
theres a transphobic message in this comment
@@strevortniwhat
@@strevortniwhat
It's been found for five years already, that's crazy. Someone else saw that post on Twitter in May 2019 and thought "Neat." then went on with their day. Now here we are in May 2024 and it's been hiding in plain sight for five years almost to the letter. It's like there's a portal that opened in Oshkosh, Wisconsin where people go when they exit The Backrooms.
Now that the picture has been found, it’s bittersweet. I’m happy because at long last the fabled photo has been found, and at the same time I’m sad because that photo was part of my childhood, and now that it’s been found, it feels like the magic and other-worldliness of the backrooms is gone.
why am i sad about this? Something about not knowing where the picture originated made the concept of the backrooms more magical.
At least you know the picture can never be recreated because the space will never be the same
the backrooms photo was so nondescript/generic that I swear it would be impossible to find, I genuinely believed that the most likely case for the building from the photo was from a real estate listing and the original building was long gone. But at least the building still stands. Maybe in the future someone will purchase and turn the the place into a museum, like how people are pushing to make the Bliss wallpaper a national park, it would make a really cool landmark.
If you go to the location on Google Maps and look at Fabulous Finds next door (Or just type "Fabulous Finds Oshkosh" into Google Maps) then click see inside, it looks very similar to the photo in the newspaper, even the small stretch of wallpaper looks similar.
As someone who is from Wisconsin, my brother just visited the place today. It’s insane.
I live 20 minutes away from Oshkosh, and I grew up there. I may have to take a trip to the backrooms….
I live on the other side of the earth, Starting my journey right now. Let's swarm this place with hundreds of filthy middle aged men who have nothing better to do... Sigh. Yup. ThatÄs how it goes...
@@siobhanmairii The fact that the Revolution Raceway is accessible may turn this into a strange tourist attraction.
WHAT! I actually live in Oshkosh, although I probably shouldn't say that. Just crazy to think that. Also, I might know the room that this was taken in. Right after the entrance, there's a dirt track for RC cars to race on. My brother and one of my friends visit Hobbytown often because they're both into RC cars. I've been in there a few times and I believe there's only one in Oshkosh. If this is true, I can confidently say that I have been to the backrooms. Only, a tad bit later than it's peak form. The second Farrell said "Oshkosh, Wisconsin" I almost jumped out of my chair. I'm still trying to process the fact that I may have stood where the real backrooms once did. 🤯
It's so crazy having been so close to it the whole time. Would have never guessed!
SAME!!!!
I imagine the person who started the backrooms, just sitting on their gaming chair looking up at the ceiling, thinking about the legacy they created, and not saying a word about it or telling anybody that they are the one who created this crazy domino effect. A true 🗿
This is actually insane, first the MARIO image was found, now the backrooms. Congrats to all who managed to pull this off.
Mario image?
What MARIO image??
The mario.exe one? That's an ancient discovery by now
@@Dalek-br6nuI think they mean the infamous "Victim 1" photo. Its actual unedited photo was of a V-Kei group member named "Mario".
What MARIO?
I'm surprised the original image wasn't color shifted or anything, the building was genuinely that creepy
That was pretty much the 70's, lots of yellow and browns
Not an uncommon decor in older buildings, lots of failing fluorescent lights, horrid colours
I think the white balance on whatever camera snapped the image was not calibrated properly.
0:05 bro it looks like the safety hotline game
Now I guess it's easy to get in touch with the photographer, to ask him whether he felt any anxiety while he was in The Rooms. There's so many things we still want to know.
ok but seriously, this is amazing! it was false lead, after false lead, after false lead, only for it to be on twitter... sitting there... and only a few lucky people saw it before anyone else... wow. i wish Serrara, Semliot, xaft, Perditus and liam the best!
FYI that HobbyTown is apparently up for sale as of May 2024. I think the owner is retiring. Someone could buy it and rebuild the back rooms!
Everyone's talking about how great it is that the image was found but I'm just surprised that it wasn't edited at all
I like the idea that rooms or buildings being renovated have a thinned barrier between our world and the backrooms, makes the real location all the more interesting
once you said the location it honestly made my jaw drop i went to oshkosh for a funeral in april and i vividly remember passing by a hobbytown going to my grandmothers house after going to a museum with my family
moment of Internet history
The image synonymous with Liminal Space was a LIMINAL SPACE all along.
bruh, it's a room without furniture. you think someone planned to keep it that way?
I would have never expected that the original backrooms photo was from a place in my state.
i cant believe this 😭 IVE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS MOMENT FOR YEARS.
I'm so glad you were proven right. It WAS a former furniture store. Now all we need is to find JtK and TMMSOTI!
What's TMMSOTI?
@@deadhorsebanditThe Most Mysterious Song On The Internet, aka Like The Wind
@@deadhorsebanditThe Most Mysterious Song On The Internet. Now, what's JtK?
@@Niven42 Jeff the killer. And the song has been found
This isn't over. There's potentially two more Backrooms images to be found. The broken ones on the internet archive still have the file names.
Dsc00164.jpg
Dsc00363.jpg
"Above is the West room, before ripping out the old display walls and after cleaning, patching, texturing and a new coat of paint."
So according to that description these show more of it, unfortunately if found it may be freshly painted and may not have the backrooms feel. Those two pictures of the "West Room" may still be of interest though.
Where can i find these images
could always ask the current owners of the building to look around and see if you could find where the west room was.
@@Propane_Cake Not known, they're on the archived site but they're broken, so don't contain an image. It's luck that we have the original backrooms pic not broken on that site and a new one not yet seen. Those are the only two images on the site that aren't broken.
@@frigglebiscuit7484 I am no where near them, other side of the country. I don't think calling them would be wise, as they're probably getting spam called. They did say something on Facebook about the backrooms photo being their location, so they're not mad about it.
I am having trouble finding the page to search into the wayback machine /:
ive been keeping up with this since like 3 or 4 years ago when i first heard about the backrooms, that’s so crazy!
i remember when david crypt had a series on finding the location, not sure if they ever found anything other than the few leads that all kinda went nowhere, but im glad we can finally say the search is over.
hopefully we can say the same about hitogata some day
man where is david crypt nowadays?
Wow, 2024 is truly the year of found lost media.
Man, that's crazy. I actually didn't know the backrooms was a creepypasta, I thought it was just a meme, lol. But that's really cool how they found the actual og picture! I thought it was just another one of those creepy liminal spaces, lol.
This would be a sick game, going to work at Rohners furniture, and then going into the back room to find something, which then leads to a fun backrooms experience.
Wow. Never thought I'd see the day. It's crazy how a simple renovation picture led to arguably an entire theme.
It's an honor to be here with you all.
You as well
You too
If there’s anything we learned on this search, it’s that there are a LOT of 70s office buildings and otherwise commercial places that look like the Backrooms image.
That's kind of why the image got so popular. It could be anywhere but also felt like nowhere.
So you’re telling me I was 2 miles away from the backrooms original location??
W😊W YORE SO LUCKY
Now it fits the theme “liminal space” and “nostalgic” even more. It’s insane that the backrooms origins has finally been found after all this time, also very impressive!
It felt surreal seeing the other perspective of the backrooms photo
I’m never gonna look at HobbyTown stores ever again after hearing this…
Looking at that old furniture store photo before the renovation is so surreal
First EKT, now backrooms location. I can now finally die in peace.
Soon enough, they’ll find out who made the song “Like the Wind”
I've never felt more proud to live close to Oshkosh
Same😭
Ditto.
Me too 🙋🏻♀️
Same here
Lol I literally just searched for your channel to see if you'd uploaded anything
as someone whos been in the backrooms comunity since 2020, its Absolutely amazing that we finally found it after all this time
this is literally the most exciting thing to me this year
ive known about the backrooms since flamingo mentioned it, literally before some teenage vfx artist popularized the backrooms
Congratulations on locating where The Backrooms photo was taken, glad this mystery has finally been solved. You or any members of your research team should go pay that store a visit and and tell the owners about The Backrooms story and see if the store has anymore old renovation photos in their archives or possibly even photos from the when it was once a furniture store, worth a shot I think!
There is some pretty eerie shit in rural Wisconsin, so I believe it
6:42 I guess we have another Something Awful user to thank for a quick creepypasta posted in a creepy images thread that turned into a worldwide phenomenon.
The Pedro twist is narrative gold
i have literally been to hobby town before, oshkosh, the town i've been to thousands of times, contains the backrooms. how insane
HOLY SHIT. I've literally been to THAT hobbytown. I live 20 minutes away. Wow...
Man it blows my fuckin mind that you have only 12k subscribers dude your production quality and content is truly great. Keep killin it my boy imma watch you blow up
We have found the ultimate lost image! THIS IS INTERNET HISTORY!
According to metadata on the Image it was taken on June 12th 2002 at 08:21
The Backrooms is in the same city as where Tulip was going in Infinity Train? Are you joking?
Yeah that's what I'm thinking! The coincidence is insane!
On the day this dropped, I started watching your previous video about it, but was too sleepy to make it through, so I took a nap.
I woke up a few hours later, looking to finish it, and this one had dropped while I slept. I clicked on it, not knowing it was a different video.
Likely, the solving had created a spike in the algorithm before anyone could make a new video, so it's just fun and games with the algorithm, but for a while it was a truly magical experience.
The genre of lost media is hitting its golden age. Everybody knows that, the JTK image origin, Dreams 4ever, and now the backrooms image has been found after years, weeks apart from each other.
ok... now we need a new image for the next round ^^
Jeff the Killer
man, as an enjoyer of liminal spaces, weirdcore, dreamcore, and related things, the backrooms were probably one of the most formative things i've encountered on the internet, shaping me as a person, so it's really cool to see the original image finally get found and give a real-world location to what i thought was either a back room in a department store or even just a purely computer generated image. this is internet history, and i'm really glad to be here within the first few hours of this video dropping :D
The vibe of liminal spaces, weirdcore and dreamcore really hits different
it's a strange feeling to know that a simple photograph of an emptied furniture store became an icon of horror and existential dread
This is my first time watching a video of yours and I love it!
Wow this feels so surreal. I never thought it would actually be found
The coolest thing about this is that this is probably the fastest time to discover a lost image or something!(5 years) It took over 10 years for the mario.exe creepypasta image and we still haven’t found the original image for Jeff the killer!
The original image is a girl its photoshoped
@@shrekshrekthey found the original edited version (before the jeff edit) but not the ORIGINAL original image iirc
Actually even shorter because it was found right when it got popular
There is a guy in my town, I could SWEAR he IS Jeff the Killer.
@@alphalax7747 yeah but why didn’t he say anything though? If he knew how popular the search was and everyone was going mad trying to find it, why would he just be sitting back and watching the chaos unfold?
I can't believe it, They found it!