105: Backrooms Horror
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What are the Backrooms and how did they originate?
Imagine yourself in a room. It looks like you're deep in an office building. No windows, no light from the outside world. The walls have a light yellow tinge to them, but it's hard to tell if that's the color of the wallpaper or just from the high powered fluorescent lights buzzing above you. It looks like a place where once a dozen people sent faxes and stapled papers together, but today it's completely empty. You walk through the space, over the white Berber carpet, into another identical room. You want to get out of this place and see daylight again. But the further you walk, the more identical rooms you see. It's like a never-ending maze of abandoned offices. Just then, you hear a noise. Something is trailing you, following close behind as you walk from room to room. So you pick up your pace, hoping you can find your way out before whatever is in there finds you. You're in the Backrooms, a mythologized location that started with a picture posted to 4chan in 2019.
A picture of the room that I just described to you, taken on what seems to be a point-and-shoot camera from the early 2000s. This photo launched a series of creepypastas and terrifying YouTube videos exploring the Backrooms. It even inspired the Apple show Severance's design and is becoming a movie for A24. The idea for the backrooms is that they're a real world just outside of our own. And the way you get there, at least according to the creepypastas, is by quote, no clipping out of reality. Basically crossing the precipice of our world into a liminal space, like purgatory. You can do this by finding a wall or a corner of a room that looks just a little bit off, like the texture is wrong or it's a shade too dark and leaning against it.
Some people say you'll get into the back rooms if you find a door that doesn't belong there and go through it or by falling downstairs. Once you're in the backrooms, you'll be subjected to different levels of unsettling liminal spaces. You'll be the only one there except for the entity that lives on that level. The world of the backrooms has become this large horror fiction playscape, but it also launched an internet mystery that needed to be solved. I said the whole series was launched by a single photo. Well, No one could figure out the source of that photo when it was posted. It just showed up on the internet one day as if it was taken inside the actual backrooms. So today I want to talk about the backrooms levels and all of their horror, but I also want to share with you some real life stories where people felt like they fell into the backrooms. That is no clipped out of reality into a sickening liminal space. And as always, listener discretion is advised. Welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries.
I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. Before we dive into today's episode, I just wanted to remind everyone really quickly that on Monday, February 24th, my collaboration episode with the Two Girls, One Ghost podcast is coming out. We spent the night in Salem's most haunted Airbnb ghost hunting and talking about the town's dark and spooky history. Part one is going to be posted on my feed and part two is going to be posted on theirs. That's going to be available wherever you get your podcasts and also on YouTube. Also, I mentioned that I love hearing from you guys about your darkly curious jobs and hobbies, so I wanted to shout out our listener, LaLunia, who works in a French hospital from the 1650s.
Apparently, the hospital was the place to lock up women deemed mad at the time. They would host these big parties for the women there called the Ball for the Crazies, and it sounds like the building now is very haunted, but I'm sure you're in very good company. Okay, are you ready? Because I'm about to take you into the back rooms. On January 6th, 2017, Bernard Gore, a 71-year-old retiree, was on his way to the Westfield Bondi Junction's shopping center in Sydney, Australia. He had made a plan with his wife, Angela, to meet outside of a grocery store on the mall's third level around 12.30 p.m. That was the typical plan for them.
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