Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad There’s a back story to Backrooms . Since 2011, a creepy photo has circulated on message boards: a slanted entrance into a large empty room, all yellow, with grotty wallpaper, carpet and floating ceiling, lit by oblong fluorescent lights, obscurely seeming to give on to other such rooms. In May 2019, an anonymous user posted it on 4chan, asking others to “post disquieting images that just feel ‘off’” as a contribution to “creepypasta”, a genre of frightening paranormal stories shared online. The next day, inspired by the glitchy moments in a video game when characters pass through a boundary, a fan suggestively named the phenomenon: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms…” A hyperactive online subculture soon developed around this idea. It took five years to identify that the photo was taken in a disused furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. In that time, it had become part of a potent mythology.…