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/ 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
Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: How did the Backrooms influence media and pop culture?
And so they believed Mike was in good hands and the orderly left. And then moments later, the maintenance worker left as well, leaving Mike alone on the floor. And that's why hospitals can kind of feel like the backroom sometimes, the fluorescent lighting, the corridors that go on forever. And unfortunately, mix ups and mistakes like this do happen.
In 2013, a nurse at San Francisco General Hospital was checking on patients when she noticed that a 57-year-old woman named Lynn Spaulding was missing from her bed. A preliminary search by staff was done and Lynn wasn't found, so they called the police. For over two weeks, the hospital was searched up and down looking for Lynn, who had been recovering from a bladder infection.
Her body was eventually found in a rarely used stairwell that just hadn't been checked. And actually, just a few weeks ago, a woman was found dead of hypothermia on the roof of Vista Medical Center East in Illinois. She had been admitted to the hospital for an undisclosed medical issue and somehow found her way onto the roof. There has been no official conclusion as to how that happened.
Luckily for Mike, the anesthesia was wearing off and he was coming more and more to his senses, enough to remember his wife's phone number. He was able to call her and explain where he was and he made it home safely. But this story shows just how quickly a place of healing and order can actually become a prison if you're stranded with no means of contact.
The creeping isolation, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, and locked doors that refuse to yield. Such elements might be the stuff of nightmares or online horror lore. But in these real life scenarios, the terror is magnified by knowing there should be help nearby, separated from you only by layers of walls or floors that you can't cross.
For the Montreal firefighter, at least, the story ended with a rescue and not with a body bag. But not everyone shares that luck when they get stuck in these liminal spaces. In June of 2019, a woman named Tiffany Adams was on an Air Canada flight making the journey from Quebec to Toronto.
The flight was short, less than two hours long, and when you take takeoff and landing into account, you're really at cruising altitude for just about an hour. Beverage service had just started when Tiffany decided to close her eyes for a moment. It was late and she couldn't wait to get home to her own bed.
The last thing she remembered hearing was the ding of the captain turning off the seatbelt sign. But then she felt cold. Really cold. And her neck hurt from being at a weird angle. Tiffany opened her eyes. It was nearly pitch black, but she could tell she wasn't in her bedroom. Cold plastic was pressed against her face and she realized it was the window of the airplane.
She snapped up and looked around. She was still on the plane, but no one else was there. All of the lights were off and she turned to look out of the window and just saw a pitch black tarmac extending out into what looked like an abyss. Way at the end, she could see the lights from the airport, but it looked like she was almost a mile away. This is a nightmare. This is a nightmare.
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