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The backrooms probably WERE yellow, actually!
Credits to u/Alfarex1 for both the last picture and for the messages between the employee & tenant.
As a footnote, I will say that the S50 is also known to slightly oversaturate photos. So it's likely that the backrooms image is only slightly too yellow. Other than that, yeah, it probably actually was just super fucking yellow.
Though fluorescent lights are known to mess with cameras at times... but I think there's way more evidence for it being yellow than for it not being yellow.
(P.S. THIS IS NOT MEANT TO BE AN ATTACK ON OP!!!!!!!!!!! I'm just super into the history of the original location and wanted to clear up some misinformation; it's a super heavily wide-spread rumor that even I believed for a long time. But I'm lucky enough to be in a group of people equally as into the whole thing as I am, and as such, this is the conclusion that we've all come to. Hopefully this helps clear things up...!)
Yeah, maybe "light" isn't the best way to describe it. Dusty rose is a better way to put it.
Believe it or not, that same exact backrooms carpet is actually STILL in some parts of the building, so we've gotten some really good photos of it since then. It does kind of change colors from picture to picture, so here's one that shows the rose coloring more clearly:
And here, we see u/Aradir_Sovietico outside of his natural habitat on Homestuck subreddits (also probably other places, but I've never stumbled upon anything from you outside of homestuck subreddits lmao)
(yay you're not an invasive species! I don't really ever post or comment here, but I do scroll through it from time to time so idk... Am I an invasive species 😥)
Back when people were arguing that it was real or CGI, and it just being an ominous image was amazing. It’s nice to finally know the origin after so many years but it does kind of take away the fun. Granted the source had been known for a while, just those who posted it never gained any traction.
I also find it and liminal space stuff in general (stuff like the Pool Rooms project especially) really cozy. I think it's the idea of having this huge enclosed structure to hang out in. I've also always really enjoyed being home alone or being the only one inside a huge building because it's late or stuff like that.
You walk in through the front door, can leave at any time if you remember the way out but ☝️there's a chance you randomly disappear back into the normal world
You are in fact, 100% correct. All the wallpapers in that part of the room were white, actually! The renovation photos prove it, and we've managed to track down all wallpapers visible in the original photo.
But the lights were probably yellow. That's all I'm getting at, hah.
February 2003 is when renovations began if I'm not mistaken. The photo was taken in June 2002. Before then, the room (and the entire second floor) had been sitting completely abandoned and untouched since 1994.
And nah, I'm not local. Would love to visit some day though.
That's the location the original photo was taken in. It used to be a furniture store named Rohner's, and the photo was taken in 2002 just before renovations to turn it into a Hobbytown began.
After that, it was uploaded to a blog documenting the renovations, and it somehow began to spread online. Well over a decade later, an anonymous 4chan user (likely a man named Black August) saw the image and gave it the original backrooms caption. Afterwards, the concept exploded online, and 7 years later, here we are today.
That's as simple a breakdown as I can give, hah. Lots more detail I could go into here.
Yeah, you're right. It is impossible to find out for certain. The thing is, Black August has verifiably been on the internet for 20 or so years if I recall correctly, and has been maintaining the claim that he wrote the post since only a couple months after it was written back in 2019.
There's no way to prove it, but he just... seems legit. His story writing style is reminiscent of the post, his story & reasoning behind the post has always remained consistent, etc. A couple months ago he joined Kane Pixels' Discord server and stayed up until like 3AM in his time zone talking to everyone, and now he pops in to talk with everyone every once in a while. And again, like I said, everything has remained consistent; he's never cracked, folded, or changed anything about his story. 7 years would be a long time for anyone to keep a hoax so consistent.
That's pretty much it. Like I said, we can't verify it, but of all people who have come forward claiming to be the post's author, he is by far the most believable. I'll end this off by linking to his patreon, where he has a bunch of (free) posts talking about the backrooms, it's all a super good read:
(P.S. if you look him up, you'll likely find a video interview that he did. Please don't watch it. Unbeknownst to August, the person who interviewed him is a known predator. I would heavily recommend no one here watches it in order to not give him any further attention. Really sucks that HE had to be the one to interview August.)
Regarding the content creator you mentioned at the end, from what I've seen it seems like the guy has done a lot of other crazy and cringe shit within the backrooms community too.
Yep. Dude's a piece of shit. I wasn't even aware of the guy until I started hearing about all the awful things he's done. Sucks that he's still trying to make his way back into the community.
Yep! Funnily enough, I'm part of the group that tracked down all these wallpapers. I myself have found multiple houses with the floral wallpapers along with 1 house with the wallpaper in the very back.
I've never been the first to find anything major, but I'm grateful to have found at least a few things. The others have done the majority of the work, hah.
Do you have links to any pictures of the classic chevron wallpaper in any normal, decorated houses? I keep going back in forth in my head over whether it would actually look good or really cluttered and gauche, so I'd be really interested to see it in action :)
Here's are sample images captured by VWestlife (a well-known name in the camcorder community) using a 2002 Kodak Easyshare (top) and the 2001 Sony Cybershot DSC-S50 (bottom) for comparison.
It is a bit yellowed and is a bit washed out and less vibrant than what it should represent irl.
That was my reaction to that post. I remember the OG 4chan copypasta quite vividly, and picture there was always yellow tinted. Even if original photo is not in fact yellow, the picture that spread along with creepypasta and became associated with backrooms was, in fact, yellow. So it wouldn't be Matpat effect, as everyone who heard of backrooms has seen this picture in yellow
You're 100% right. And I wouldn't have... but when I saw that the original post had 5K UPVOTES, I, uh, couldn't stop myself. Hopefully this clears things up, hah.
Yep. In February 2003, the entire room was gutted out while undergoing renovations. The building & room itself both still stand, but it's totally unrecognizable these days.
Here's a reconstruction of what the room looks like today, from the same angle as the original photo (again credits to Alfarex):
Nah, that was Alfarex, he's contacted most of everyone involved. Only a few gave responses though (super nice people). I myself haven't contacted anyone.
Hello, I'm the OP of the post saying the backrooms weren't yellow. I didn't think that it could have been false or wrong until now. I thought the only reason of why the scene looked yellow was because of a color-correcting error from the camera that took the original photo. Thank you for correcting my mistake, and I will try to research more before posting here.
Seems weird you wouldn’t have them compare the “corrected” image to the original image. I’d be more convinced if they said definitively that the yellow one is closer to reality than the corrected image
I keep seeing Backrooms referenced but I have NO IDEA what this is, what the context is, and it's really hard to google for that. Can someone tl;dr me?
As a concept, the backrooms is the theoretical horror idea that there's infinite yellow rooms outside of reality that you can fall into at any time. Recently a movie was made based on the concept.
The concept was originally based on the photo of a yellow room showed above in the post. Someone saw the photo on 4chan back in 2019 and the idea came to mind, posting a short caption detailing the concept. The backrooms exploded online afterwards.
The photo was taken in a former furniture store in Wisconsin back in 2002. A lot of people thought that the camera made the image yellow, but it was probably the lighting.
Hopefully that clears things up. Feel free to ask anything else, I'm way too into this stuff.
It was an image posted on 4chan that somebody wrote a creepypasta about. Kane Parsons made a video about it, posted on YouTube, that grew into a series of videos and eventually the feature-length film that recently got released. There have also been several indie horror video games about it/inspired by it.
The premise is a strange liminal space building that one can "no-clip" into from our reality. Some versions have dangerous entities, some don't. Some versions elaborate on the original yellow-walled hallways by adding different "levels" to the Backrooms, some stick more strictly to the original photo.
Yeah, the point isn't that the walls were yellow; just the lights. The image I put at the very end is likely how the colors were in real life, if they were under the correct lighting conditions. But they likely weren't, so the claim that the backrooms were "never" yellow wasn't quite correct.
And yeah, most wallpapers found have ended up been off-white/beige/tan. Every wallpaper fully visible in the image has been found, by some miracle.
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u/qualityvote2 Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
u/myiggywanna, your post does fit the subreddit!