What if you could visit a place that does not exist on any map? A place whispered about online as though it sits just beyond the edges of our known world. A place known quite simply as, the Backrooms.
The Backrooms are an internet-created fictional setting imagined as an infinite network of empty, fluorescent-lit rooms. The concept centers on the idea of accidentally slipping out of normal reality and becoming trapped in this monotonous, labyrinthine environment with no clear exit.
Since first emerging online in 2019 on the online bulletin board 4chan, the Backrooms phenomenon has expanded across Reddit, TikTok, YouTube and gaming platforms, where users collectively map, narrate and extend its mythology. Common to much of the user-generated content are eerie images and haunting stories of mysterious, yellow wallpapered corridors and empty office-like spaces that exist outside of, or beyond, reality itself.
Much of the interest on the internet circulates around filmmaker Kane Parsons’ viral “found footage” videos on YouTube. Parsons took the phenomenon from low resolution static images into immersive cinematic exploration, helping to establish Backrooms as one of social media’s most recognizable horror environments. With Parsons now adapting the Backrooms for a feature-length horror thriller, the strange fictive world is rapidly entering mainstream discourse.
At first glance, the Backrooms may resemble just another accelerated urban legend (also known as “creepypasta”) such as Slenderman or The Russian Sleep Experiment. But our research suggests something more significant is occurring in terms of changing consumer interest in spaces related to horror or trauma, their mediation, and new ways of experiencing them.
Behind the yellow wallpaper
The Backrooms began with a single unsettling image posted anonymously online: a claustrophobic warren of tawdrily yellow, windowless rooms with aged carpets and harsh overhead fluorescent lights.
Intrigued by the vague mixture of menace and nostalgia that the image evoked, internet users began sharing stories and speculating that the Backrooms is a hidden dimension into which people might accidentally find themselves.
With commercial tourism, social media and vlogging much of today’s world feels overexposed and overexplained, with seemingly every destination photographed, every experience reviewed and all hidden gems channeled into content. The mystery of the Backrooms felt different.
Today, the r/backrooms subreddit contains hundreds of thousands of members, while Backrooms content across TikTok and Instagram continues to attract enormous engagement. Content tagged #backrooms on TikTok exceeds half a million posts, while Instagram fan pages such as @xbackroom, which have hundreds of thousands of followers, further extend the mythology through images, edits and speculative storytelling. Users create maps, fictional diary entries, survival guides, found-footage videos and first-person explorations that collectively expand the world.
This is one reason the Backrooms feel different from traditional horror films or ghost stories. Rather than passively consuming a finished narrative, audiences actively participate in constructing and navigating the environment itself.
Folklore scholar Michael Kinsella has described this kind of online activity as a form of “online legend-tripping” where audiences become contributors, collaborators and world-builders rather than simply spectators.
The horror of familiar places
Dark tourism research reveals that people are drawn to places associated with death, disaster, tragedy and the uncanny, whether former prisons, abandoned sites, or locations connected to unsettling historical events. These locations often involve an encounter with atmospheres that feel emotionally, symbolically or existentially charged.
The Backrooms extend this logic into new and participatory territory. Unlike virtual dark tourism that allows for “armchair travel” to real-world dark heritage sites, there is no physical location anchoring the Backrooms nor any historical tragedy to commemorate. Instead, the Backrooms provide a collectively imagined and online environment of unease, abandonment and liminality.
Interest in the Backrooms persists precisely because they lack a fixed mythology, geographical reality, or narrative history, allowing users to construct meaning around places that, nonetheless, feel uncannily familiar. With their dated decor, hotel-like hallways, overhead ceiling tiles and abandoned office spaces, the Backrooms resemble the overlooked non-places of modern life – spaces many people recognize but rarely notice.
In this sense, the Backrooms reveal how digital culture is beginning to reshape experiences traditionally associated with tourism, allowing for the mundane to become menacing.
The Backrooms operate less like a story people receive and more like a world they enter. Across YouTube videos, video games, VR experiences and TikTok edits, audiences are located inside the environment itself blurring the boundaries between storytelling, role-playing, tourism and online participation.
This boundary-crossing may help explain why the phenomenon resonates so strongly at this cultural moment. The internet is no longer just a network of information or communication platforms; it is gradually evolving into a landscape people emotionally navigate and fully inhabit.
The Backrooms points toward a future where collectively imagined digital worlds function as meaningful cultural environments in their own right: places people travel to, explore, emotionally invest in and repeatedly return to, despite never physically existing at all.