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Where Was the Original Backrooms Photo Taken? The Real Building, Identified in 2024

Published: 2026-09-06

The Backrooms started with a single photograph: stained wallpaper, fluorescent light, wall-to-wall carpet. For years nobody knew where it was taken. In 2024 the question was finally settled — and the answer turned out to be remarkably ordinary.

The photograph posted to 4chan in 2019 that created the Backrooms — The photograph itself, taken in June 2002 in a building under renovation in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Photo: Bill Magritz (CC0 1.0 (パブリックドメイン)), Source: Wikimedia Commons

It Began With a Post on May 12, 2019

A thread on 4chan's paranormal board asked for images that just feel off. Someone posted the photograph: a room with no discernible purpose, no people, almost no furniture.

Another anonymous user replied with the premise, and the photo became a legend. Noclip out of reality and you fall in here; there is only the hum of fluorescent lights and the smell of damp carpet. That short post was all it took.

For Five Years, Nobody Knew Where It Was

Strangely, for an image this widely circulated, its origin stayed a blank. Who took it, what building it was, whether it was even real — some people argued it had to be a render.

That uncertainty arguably strengthened the legend. Because the place could not be located, it looked like it could be anywhere.

2024: Oshkosh, Wisconsin

In May 2024 internet researchers traced it. Oshkosh, Wisconsin, USA. The photo was taken in June 2002 and had been published in 2003 as part of a renovation log on a HobbyTown USA blog post.

The room was on the second floor of a building that had previously been a furniture store. It was mid-renovation, which is why there were no people and no furniture — only wallpaper and lighting. The space later became a radio-controlled car racing track.

So the room that unsettled the entire internet was, in fact, an ordinary building under construction.

A second frame from the same renovation log — plainly just a construction photo. Photo: Bill Magritz (CC0 1.0 (パブリックドメイン)), Source: Wikimedia Commons

Why It Matters That It Was Real

This is more than trivia. The fact that the room existed confirms that the fear the Backrooms trades in is not supernatural — it comes from the ordinary spaces we walk through every day.

It is almost certainly why the 2026 film makes its protagonist a furniture store owner. The building in the original photograph had been a furniture store too.

There Is Probably a Room Like It Near You

A retail unit mid-renovation, a mall after closing, a building in the gap between one use and the next. Every city has a supply of spaces with the human activity temporarily removed. The original Backrooms room was special only in that someone photographed it and it happened to end up on a message board.

LIMap collects exactly this kind of place: ordinary, and somehow unforgettable.

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