The real Backrooms photo: how the internet traced it to an Oshkosh hobby shop

The file is called Dsc00161.jpg. It is 640 by 480 pixels, shot on a Sony Cyber-shot at 1/30 of a second without flash, and the camera clock inside it reads June 12, 2002, 08:21. It shows chevron wallpaper gone yellow, a drop ceiling, fluorescent panels and a doorway onto more of the same.

That is the original Backrooms photo, and it is a renovation snapshot. It shows an emptied room in a former furniture store at 807 Oregon Street, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, while the local HobbyTown USA and its R/C car club were turning the space into an indoor race track. The store posted it on its own website in an update dated March 2, 2003. Nothing paranormal was ever reported there. A24’s Backrooms (2026) is not a true story: it adapts Kane Parsons’ YouTube series, which grew out of a 4chan post.

How a room became a place

The picture lost its caption long before it gained a name. The earliest known 4chan copy, on the /tv/ board, is dated March 8, 2011. Then it drifted for eight years.

On May 12, 2019, someone on the paranormal board /x/ opened a thread called “unsettling images” with the line “post disquieting images that just feel “off”.” The yellow room was the first image. A later anonymous reply gave it a name:

If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in

Within days fans were adding levels, entities and wikis. On January 7, 2022, Kane Parsons, then 16, uploaded “The Backrooms (Found Footage),” a short made in Blender and After Effects and framed as a 1990s VHS tape, the grammar of found-footage horror applied to a place that does not exist. It had more than 96 million views by October 2026. A24’s feature, which Parsons directed, has taken about $400 million worldwide.

The tweet nobody read

Here is the part that does not fit. On May 19, 2019, one week after the thread, a Twitter user named @rkfg_me posted: “FWIW, I’ve probably found the source image here: [link] EXIF says it’s from 2002.” The link pointed at hobbytownoshkosh.com/Dsc00161.jpg.

Almost nobody noticed. The store’s domain expired that year, and search engines index old tweets poorly. The answer stayed in public for five years while the legend grew over it.

How the trace worked

The search that finally landed began in Virtual Carbon’s Discord after a YouTube video in February 2022. Their public research doc records each step.

Semliot spent about a month in 4chan archives from 2010 to 2012. Most images there are broken, so he matched on file data alone: a 640×480 image of roughly 62 KiB. Liam logged the candidate threads in the shared doc.

Serrara worked the hashes. 4chan stores an MD5 hash for every upload, and archives often keep it after the picture is gone. She took the hash from a 2011 /x/ candidate and ran it through every archive she could reach, about 150 hours by her count. On May 28, 2024, it hit: a 2011 post on 4plebs /tv/, still named Dsc00161.jpg.

That is a Sony camera’s default name, so someone had saved the file straight from its source. Google gave nothing for it, so PerditusRedux searched Twitter instead and found the 2019 tweet. Its link was dead. The Wayback Machine was not: it returned the image, and the bare domain returned the store’s old site. xaft crawled the archive and found the 2003 renovation page, where the photo sits above this caption:

Above is the original view of the East (Oval) room. Notice no windows are visible? You can not see in the pictures the extent of water damage, but it was there requiring all of this material to come out.

Lucia Peters of The Ghost in My Machine then checked the ground with WHOIS history, Street View and newspaper archives tying the building to Rohner’s furniture store.

None of the architectural clues people had studied for years located the room: the North American outlet, the sprinklered drop ceiling, the wallpaper. The file name and the hash did.

Where the room is now

The building is two storeys, at 807 and 811 Oregon Street; the 2003 page gives 811, later sources 807. The track, Revolution Raceway, was finished by April 2004. In 2025 the store changed hands and now trades as John’s Hobbies. Its owner, John Hetzel, told Wisconsin Public Radio in 2026: “There’s nothing up there anymore that even resembles where the picture was taken.”

It is a working shop, and since the find its staff have fielded prank calls. If you go, go to buy something, and leave them alone.

Is the Backrooms movie a true story?

No. The film adapts Parsons’ series, which grew out of the 4chan post. Its lead, Clark, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a furniture store owner, which echoes Rohner’s; nobody involved has said on record whether that is deliberate. The only true thing in the chain is a hobby shop’s photo of a room it was about to gut.

How to trace an image yourself

What worked here is not what usually works, so try both.

1. Reverse search on several engines. Bellingcat’s guide to reverse image search (2019) rates Yandex highest, notes that TinEye “looks for exact duplicates,” and warns that images under 200×200 return poor results. It predates Google Lens; tools change. Here the engines found only reposts: the original lived on a dead site.
2. Read the file, not the picture. EXIF can hold the camera model and capture date. Most social platforms strip it on upload, and it is easy to forge. The 2004 Wayback copy of this photo still carries its full EXIF.
3. Use the fingerprints. File name, size, pixel dimensions and board hashes survive when the image does not.
4. Search where Google does not. Twitter, imageboard archives, forums.
5. Ask the Wayback Machine about every dead link and expired domain.

Traced, made, still lost

The Backrooms photo belongs to the traced kind. So does Momo: the face from the 2018–19 scare is Mother Bird, a sculpture by Keisuke Aiso of the effects company Link Factory, shown in Tokyo in 2016 and thrown away in 2018. Slender Man is the made kind. Eric Knudsen, posting as “Victor Surge,” added a tall figure to two black-and-white photos of children in a Something Awful Photoshop contest on June 10, 2009, the digital heir of the double-exposure spirit photograph. Smile Dog and Jeff the Killer remain lost: their source photos have never been reliably traced.

If you have an image that feels off and want it looked at frame by frame, send it to us.

The person behind the camera

One thing the trace did not find. In December 2024 the store’s manager told the Oshkosh Northwestern that he had asked the owner, who could only say it was either him or one of the men working on the building when they moved in. The camera clock may not even be right. The most famous empty room on the internet still has no photographer.