The Backrooms have emerged as one of the internet’s most compelling and unsettling modern myths. Described as an endless maze of randomly segmented empty rooms with buzzing fluorescent lights, old moist carpet, and mono yellow walls, this liminal space has captured the imagination of millions.
But as the concept has grown from a simple creepypasta to a sprawling multimedia universe, many have begun to wonder: are the Backrooms real and is no clipping a danger ?
This article delves into the origins, evolution, and psychological appeal of the Backrooms phenomenon, examining the thin line between digital folklore and perceived reality.
The Origin of the Backrooms
The Backrooms concept began with a single anonymous user’s post on 4chan’s /x/ paranormal board in May 2019. The original post featured a disquieting image of an empty office space with yellow walls, accompanied by a thread describing an uncanny realm that exists outside our normal reality:
“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.”
This brief description struck a chord with internet users, who began expanding on the concept, creating their own stories, images, and theories about this mysterious space.
What made the original creepypasta so effective was its combination of mundane elements (office carpeting, fluorescent lights) with existential horror (being trapped in an endless, impossible space).
The Expanding Backrooms Universe
What began as a single thread quickly evolved into a collaborative mythology. Users across platforms like Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok began contributing to the Backrooms lore, developing a complex system of “levels” beyond the original yellow rooms. Each level was given distinct characteristics, dangers, and entities that might inhabit it.
Kane Pixels, a young filmmaker, dramatically expanded the Backrooms’ popularity with his found footage style YouTube series beginning in January 2022.
His videos, which combine analog horror aesthetics with sophisticated visual effects, present the Backrooms as the result of a scientific experiment gone wrong.
Kane Pixels’ interpretation added new dimensions to the concept, suggesting government involvement and scientific explanations for the space’s existence.
The Backrooms have since inspired video games, short films, art projects, and countless stories. This collaborative world-building has transformed a simple creepypasta into a shared universe with its own internal logic and rules—a process that mirrors how urban legends have traditionally developed, but at internet speed.
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The Psychology Behind the Backrooms’ Appeal
To understand why so many people are drawn to the Backrooms concept—and why some might even question if the Backrooms are real—we need to examine the psychological elements that make it so compelling.
Liminal Spaces and Uncanny Feelings
The Backrooms represent what’s known as a “liminal space”—transitional areas that evoke a sense of being between destinations. Think empty shopping malls after hours, abandoned schools, or vacant hotel corridors. These spaces feel unsettling because they’re designed for human presence but are eerily empty.
Dr. Elena Maris, a digital media researcher, explains: “Liminal spaces trigger a specific type of discomfort because they violate our expectations. Our brains are constantly predicting what environments should look and feel like in our current reality , and when those predictions are subtly wrong—like an office space that extends impossibly—it creates cognitive dissonance.”
This uncanny quality is central to the Backrooms’ horror. The setting isn’t fantastical like traditional monster stories; instead, it’s disturbingly familiar yet wrong in ways that are difficult to articulate.
Existential Fear and Control
The concept of being trapped in an endless, meaningless space touches on deep existential fears. The Backrooms represent a loss of agency and purpose—a person can wander forever without finding escape, meaning, or human connection.
“The Backrooms tap into anxiety about losing control,” notes Dr. Jonathan Marsh, a psychology professor specializing in digital communities. “In our highly structured lives, the idea of suddenly falling through reality into a place where normal rules don’t apply represents a profound loss of the frameworks we use to understand our world, which I personally find unsettling .”
This fear is particularly resonant in the internet age, where many people report feeling lost in endless digital spaces, searching for meaning or connection but finding only more content to consume.
Are the Backrooms Based on Real Places?
While the Backrooms as described in the mythology don’t exist as a single location, the aesthetic is drawn from real architectural spaces that evoke similar feelings.
Liminal Architecture in Real Life
Office buildings from the 1970s and 1980s often featured the yellow walls, fluorescent lighting, and patterned carpeting that characterize the original Backrooms image.
These spaces were designed for efficiency rather than comfort or aesthetic appeal, creating environments that could feel dehumanizing and maze-like.
Some have pointed to specific locations that capture the Backrooms aesthetic, such as certain areas of the Winchester Mystery House, with its disorienting layout, or abandoned shopping malls with their empty storefronts and buzzing lights.
Urban explorers occasionally share images of abandoned office buildings or institutions that strongly resemble the fictional Backrooms.
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Google Maps and Virtual Explorations
Some internet users have claimed to find Backrooms-like spaces through Google Maps, sharing coordinates of strange, empty interiors captured by Street View cameras.
While these are real physical locations, they’re typically mundane spaces like office buildings, hotels, or convention centers that happen to share aesthetic elements with the Backrooms concept.
These real-life spaces contribute to the mythology by blurring the line between fiction and reality. When someone can point to an actual location that resembles the Backrooms, it adds a layer of plausibility to the concept.
The “Reality” of the Backrooms in Digital Culture
In discussing whether the Backrooms are real, we must consider different definitions of “reality” in the digital age.
Collective Creation as Reality
In one sense, the Backrooms are absolutely real—as a cultural phenomenon and shared creative space. Thousands of people have contributed to building this mythology, and millions have engaged with it. The concept exists as stories, images, videos, games, and discussions across the internet.
“Collaborative fiction like the Backrooms represents a new form of folklore,” explains digital anthropologist Dr. Maya Chen. “Traditional urban legends spread through word of mouth and evolved gradually.
Digital legends like the Backrooms evolve rapidly through collective creation, with each contributor adding their own elements while maintaining the core concept.”
This collaborative creation process means the Backrooms exist as a shared cultural understanding—when someone references “noclipping into the Backrooms,” others immediately understand what that means, even though it refers to something fictional.
The Backrooms as Metaphor
Many find the Backrooms compelling because they serve as an effective metaphor for real psychological experiences. The feeling of being lost in an endless, meaningless space resonates with experiences of depression, anxiety, or dissociation, leaving little room for hope .
“I’ve had patients describe their depression as feeling like being trapped in something like the Backrooms,” says clinical psychologist Dr. Sarah Winters. “The endless sameness, the feeling that no matter how far you walk you’ll never escape, the isolation—these powerful metaphors for certain mental health struggles can make one feel like dying.”
In this metaphorical sense, the emotional reality of the Backrooms connects to genuine human experiences, even if the physical space doesn’t exist.
The Found Footage Phenomenon: Kane Pixels and Perceived Reality
The Backrooms concept took a significant leap in perceived reality with Kane Pixels’ found footage videos. His first video, “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” has garnered over 44 million views and convinced some viewers that they were watching actual discovered footage.
The Power of Found Footage
Found footage as a format deliberately blurs the line between fiction and reality. By mimicking the aesthetic of authentic discovered video—with imperfect camera work, dated visual quality, and minimal explanation—these videos trigger different cognitive processing than obvious fiction.
“Found footage works by activating our pattern-recognition systems differently,” explains media psychologist Dr. Elaine Kasket. “Our brains are wired to give more credence to apparently documentary evidence than to obvious fiction. Even when we consciously know something is created, the documentary style can bypass some of our critical thinking.”
Kane Pixels’ videos are particularly effective because they combine this found footage approach with sophisticated world-building. By including fictional research documents, scientific explanations, and consistent internal logic, they create a coherent reality that some viewers find convincingly authentic.
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Internet Rumors and Belief
The comments sections of Backrooms videos reveal how some viewers, particularly younger ones, develop genuine uncertainty about whether the Backrooms might exist. Comments like “This can’t be real… right?” and “My friend said his cousin noclipped once” demonstrate how internet rumors can foster genuine questioning.
This uncertainty is amplified by the internet’s tendency to blur fiction and reality in other contexts. In an era of deepfakes, misinformation, and reality-bending technologies, determining what’s real becomes increasingly challenging, especially for digital natives who have grown up in this environment.
The Backrooms Community: Creating Shared Reality
The Backrooms have spawned dedicated communities across Reddit, Discord, and other platforms where users share stories, artwork, and theories. These communities function similarly to those built around other paranormal or supernatural interests, including the idea of haunted houses with a spectrum of belief among participants.
Roleplay vs. Belief
Most participants in Backrooms communities engage with the concept as a form of collaborative fiction or roleplay. They contribute stories and images while basically understanding the fictional nature of the concept. For these users, the appeal lies in creative expression and community building rather than literal belief.
“It’s like a massive improvisational exercise,” says one Reddit moderator from a Backrooms forum. “Everyone adds their piece while respecting the core rules we’ve established. Most people here know it’s fiction, but we suspend disbelief while participating—that’s what makes it fun.”
However, some participants, particularly younger users, may develop a more ambiguous relationship with the material. The immersive nature of these communities, combined with convincing media like Kane Pixels’ videos, can create genuine uncertainty about where fiction ends and reality begins.
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The Tulpa Effect and Collective Belief
Some Backrooms enthusiasts reference the concept of “tulpas”—the idea that sufficient collective belief or thought energy might manifest something into existence on some plane of reality. While this concept lacks scientific support, it represents another way a person can conceptualize the “reality” of the Backrooms.
“Even if the Backrooms don’t exist physically, they exist as a shared mental construct,” explains one forum user. “Millions of people have thought about this space, imagined it in detail. In some sense, that collective imagination creates something real, even if you can’t physically visit it.”
This perspective reflects how digital folklore occupies a unique position—neither entirely fictional nor conventionally real, but existing in a shared imaginative space that has genuine effects on how people think and feel.
Could Something Like the Backrooms Exist?
While the specific endless yellow rooms of the Backrooms mythology don’t exist as described, some scientific and philosophical concepts offer intriguing parallels.
Non-Euclidean Spaces and Spatial Anomalies
Mathematicians and physicists study non-Euclidean geometries—spaces where the normal rules of geometry don’t apply. In these theoretical spaces, parallel lines might intersect, or you might return to your starting point despite walking in a straight line, suggesting a curious vision of the future .
While such spaces don’t manifest in our everyday experience, they represent ways that space could theoretically be structured differently than we perceive it. Some Backrooms enthusiasts point to these concepts as scientific parallels to the impossible architecture described in the mythology.
Simulation Theory and Reality Questions
Simulation theory—the philosophical proposition that our reality might be a computer simulation—offers another framework for considering whether something like the Backrooms could exist.
If our reality is simulated, then the concept of “noclipping” (a term borrowed from video games where players accidentally pass through solid objects) becomes theoretically possible as a glitch in that simulation.
“If we’re in a simulation, then the Backrooms could represent a corrupted or unfinished area of that simulation,” suggests technology philosopher Dr. Nick Bostrom. “While that’s highly speculative, it’s not entirely impossible within that framework.”
The Impact of Believing the Backrooms Are Real
For most people, engaging with the Backrooms concept is harmless entertainment. However, for some—particularly younger or more vulnerable individuals—the fear generated by believing such places might exist can have negative effects, especially if they have heard alarming stories about them .
Digital Literacy and Critical Thinking
The Backrooms phenomenon highlights the importance of digital literacy and critical thinking skills. Being able to evaluate sources, understand context, and recognize fictional formats like creepypasta is increasingly essential in navigating online content.
Educators and parents have used the Backrooms as a teaching opportunity, helping young people understand how convincing fiction can be created and spread online. By examining how the Backrooms mythology developed, students can learn to approach other online content with appropriate skepticism.
When Fear Becomes Harmful
Mental health professionals have reported cases of individuals, especially children and adolescents, developing genuine fear or anxiety related to the Backrooms concept.
For those with existing anxiety disorders or a tendency toward magical thinking, the idea of accidentally “noclipping” into an inescapable realm can become a persistent worry.
“I’ve worked with several young clients who developed specific fears about the Backrooms,” reports child psychologist Dr. Marcus Lee. “While most kids understand it’s fiction, some with certain vulnerability factors can develop real distress.
It’s similar to how children in previous generations might have feared monsters under the bed, but with the added complication of seemingly ‘real’ evidence online.”
Conclusion: The Reality of Unreality
So, are the Backrooms real? The answer depends entirely on how we define “real.” As a physical location that one can visit—no, the endless yellow rooms with buzzing fluorescent lights don’t exist as described.
No one has literally noclipped through reality into this realm, and no scientific evidence supports the existence of such a place, which makes the idea of escape seem even more daunting.
However, as a cultural phenomenon, creative space, and shared mythology, the Backrooms are undeniably real. They exist in stories, images, videos, games, and the imaginations of millions.
They’ve inspired genuine emotional responses, creative works, and communities. They reflect real psychological experiences and tap into authentic human fears.
Perhaps most interestingly, the Backrooms represent a new kind of reality that could only exist in the digital age—a collectively created space that evolves through thousands of contributions, blurring the line between creator and consumer, fiction and fact.
The question of whether the Backrooms are real ultimately reveals more about how we understand reality itself in an increasingly digital world. As our experiences become more mediated through screens and virtual spaces, and as AI and other technologies further blur the line between the created and the authentic, concepts like the Backrooms challenge us to reconsider what “real” means in the 21st century.
Whether you see the Backrooms as simply an entertaining internet story or something more profound, their cultural impact is undeniable—proving that in the digital age, something doesn’t need to physically exist to have a very real presence in our collective consciousness.
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