In 2019, a photo of a liminal office space spawned a whole genre of horror called The Backrooms. But what are they, and what entities lurk inside? And are they a real place where some people actually get trapped? Check out Kane Pixels on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@kanepixels Check out the Backrooms Wiki: https://backrooms-wiki.wikidot.com/ Show Notes: https://www.heartstartspounding.com/episodes/bernardgore-backroomshorror Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to bonus content as well as other perks. And members of our High Council on Patreon have access to our after-show called Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. Apple subscriptions are now live! Get access to bonus episodes and more when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Full Episode
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.
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