105: Backrooms Horror
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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 back rooms 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 purgatory.

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 down stairs.

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. Part one is going to be posted on my feed and

Part two is going to be posted on theirs. That's going to be available wherever you get your podcasts and also on YouTube.

Also, I mentioned that I love hearing from you guys about your darkly curious jobs and hobbies, so I wanted to shout out our listener, LaLunia, who works in a French hospital from the 1650s. Apparently, the hospital was the place to lock up women deemed mad at the time. They would host these big parties for the women there called the Ball for the Crazies, and it sounds like the building now is very haunted, but...

I'm sure you're in very good company. Okay, are you ready? Because I'm about to take you into the back rooms.

On January 6th, 2017, Bernard Gore, a 71-year-old retiree, was on his way to the Westfield Bondi Junction's shopping center in Sydney, Australia. He had made a plan with his wife, Angela, to meet outside of a grocery store on the mall's third level around 12.30 p.m. That was the typical plan for them. They would arrive to the mall separately, meet at their designated spot, and then continue their afternoon together.

But when Angela arrived, there was no sign of Bernard. And this caused her to worry because the year before, Bernard had actually vanished while out for the night in Hobart. He was later found, but he had no memory of how he had gotten there. And at a doctor's visit later on, he was diagnosed with early stage dementia.

So Angela started making laps around the mall, hoping that she would see him, but there was no sign of Bernard anywhere. She ended up going home. Maybe she was thinking about how Bernard had reappeared just fine the last time, and maybe he had just gone home without telling her. But by nightfall, he was still missing.

Angela didn't know that earlier that day at the Chanel store in the mall, staff had seen an elderly man who appeared disoriented and upset. He asked for directions to the parking lot, but declined any further help. Mall employees reported the man to security, but when they came to assist, they couldn't find him.

Later on, Bernard's worried family actually called the mall to let them know that he might be missing inside. Security went ahead and reviewed the CCTV footage, but they didn't see any trace of Bernard in the mall at all. And they concluded that he couldn't still be in there because he never even entered. It seemed like the 71-year-old had somehow vanished into thin air.

Bernard's family kept insisting that he might be in the mall, but the police weren't convinced. They also reviewed the footage and they said that no, he had never even entered the mall that day. They ended up broadening their search into the surrounding streets, combing train stations and bus stops, but still, there was no sign of him. Well...

Three weeks after Bernard's disappearance, a mall employee was doing their rounds when they opened up a door that was off to the side of the elevators. It was in the shadows, partially obscured by a wall. You would miss it unless you were looking for it. And when the employee opened it, he started shouting for someone to call the police.

See, what investigators and Bernard's family didn't know was that there's an area of the mall that people have referred to as the backrooms. A place where it feels like you've slipped out of reality and into purgatory. It's full of nothing but concrete and fluorescent lighting and it goes on for eight miles.

It's a place where many people had gotten trapped before, and it would be this part of the mall where Bernard's body was found. To understand the horror of the Bondi Junction stairwell, let me tell you the story of Donny O'Sullivan. This episode is brought to you by Zola.

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- Donnie had been shopping at the Westfield Bondi Junction Mall in 2014. He was trying to exit, but the elevators were packed. So he walked back towards the shops when he saw a door tucked away in a corner, almost hidden. It must be a stairwell, he thought. And he opened the door and stepped inside.

The heavy door slammed shut and he started his way down the stairs. Bright red stenciled letters that wrote out "exit" guided him. But he noticed the arrows underneath the signs didn't always point in the same directions. Was he supposed to be going down or up?

He kept going regardless, flight after flight of stairs, just concrete walls on either side of the tight staircase, no light besides the harsh fluorescence, when finally he reached a door.

But it had no handle. So he made his way back to the door he came from, only to realize that that door had no handle either. He could hear the muffled sounds of the mall on the other side, just barely, so he pounded on the door hoping someone would come let him out. But it seemed like even though he could hear the people in the mall, the people in the mall couldn't hear him.

Not knowing what else to do, he started his way up. But every door along the way was either locked or had no handle. Eventually, he came to a hallway that led to a white door, which was also locked. But next to it was another stairwell that led down even further. This time when he descended, there were no muffled sounds coming through the doors, just dead silence.

Wherever he was, it seemed he was no longer in the mall. Eventually, he came to another hallway and another, each leading him further into the labyrinth. He had no way of knowing it, but the maze of hallways, stairs, and locked doors added up to eight miles long.

Employees knew about the mall back rooms and they never dared to go inside. Once a week, a mall employee would do a sweep of the area, but that wasn't official mall policy. It was just something they decided to do to make sure no one was locked back there, but they never searched all of it.

Five days after Donnie disappeared through the door, a manager of an office building's cleaning company was doing a routine check of the area when he found Donnie crumpled at the bottom of one of the sets of stairs. He was barely breathing, but he was alive.

He had fallen down 15 stairs, perhaps after becoming disoriented. The spot where Donnie was found wasn't set to be checked by employees for another two days. It was just chance that the manager found him. If another two days had passed, it's unlikely Donnie would have survived. He spent the next week in the hospital due to dehydration and injuries to his back and head.

And if Donnie, a young and fit shopper, barely made it out of the stairwell alive, then what did that mean for Bernard? He never had a chance. When Bernard's family learned where he had been all that time, their shock turned to anger. His son expressed heartbreak that Bernard died so close to where he was supposed to meet his wife. Quote, "'He just needed someone to open the door,' the son lamented."

After Bernard's body was found, a 20-year-old journalist wanted to be put to the test to see how she would fare in the stairwell. And she found that she had no service the entire time she was in there, and there were only two ways out, one being down six flights of stairs and one being up through the roof.

None of the exit signs inside of the stairwell explained that. But how did Bernard get into the stairwell and why wasn't he on the CCTV footage that day? Well, after another search through the security system's cameras, it was actually revealed that there was footage of Bernard entering the mall that day.

and then wandering towards the stairwell near the Chanel store. It was complete oversight by authorities and mall security, and after the event, they vowed to change the system that allowed this to happen. An autopsy done on Bernard revealed that there was no foul play, no injuries to his body. He merely died trying to get out of the stairwell.

So that story is particularly scary to me because it's not uncommon for malls and other large spaces to have miles of corridors underneath them. For instance, underneath the now abandoned Detroit Northland Center Mall in Michigan, there are miles of tunnels that were described by the Detroit Free Press like this. Quote,

The tunnel network begins with a winding roadway that branches off into passageways connecting subterranean rooms, decrepit stairwells, and non-working elevator shafts. Narrow, barely walkable tunnels extend to the mall's old central power plant, as well as a now-closed police substation and a nearby Firestone garage.

The entire network runs several miles and includes an astounding 484 rooms. Several rooms are still filled with mall leftovers such as obsolete computer parts and TVs that weren't sold during last year's Northland liquidation auction. Other rooms are locked behind metal doors and might never be opened again.

And just a side note, but if that interests you at all, you're gonna love our subscriber-only episode for February on abandoned places, ghost towns, and more. And that's for patrons and Apple Podcast subscribers. But this is horrifying because it means that at any mall you go to, you are just one wrong turn from winding up in basically a parallel universe with no way to get out.

And it might seem impossible that a person could vanish in a public building visited by millions. But as we'll see, Bernard's story isn't as unique as one might hope. People can slip into hidden corners of hospitals, office buildings, and malls, never to be seen again.

When people heard the story of Bernard and Donnie, they couldn't help but draw parallels to the backrooms. Walking through an out-of-place door, not being able to escape, even falling down the stairs all seemed to be taken directly from the creepypasta. So what I actually want to do right now is explain what some of the levels of the backrooms are, should you ever find yourself in a liminal space. And this is coming from the backrooms wiki, which holds a lot of the lore.

So we'll start with level zero. Level zero is where you first arrive when you wake up in the back rooms. It's a non-linear space resembling the back rooms of a retail outlet, and it mirrors the first photo that showed up on 4chan. All rooms in level zero appear uniform and share superficial features such as yellowish wallpaper, damp carpet, and inconsistently placed fluorescent lighting.

However, no two rooms within the level are identical. Linear spaces in level zero are altered drastically. It is possible to walk in a straight line and return to the starting point, and retracing your steps will result in a different set of rooms appearing than the ones already passed through. Due to this and the visual similarity between rooms,

consistent navigation is extremely difficult. Devices such as compasses and GPS locators fail to function within the level and radio communications are distorted and unreliable.

Level zero is entirely still and completely devoid of life. And presumably a great number of people have died before exiting. The most likely causes being dehydration, starvation and psychological trauma due to sensory deprivation and isolation. However, no corpses have been reported from these hypothetical deaths.

No entities are known to exist within the level, including other humans. If you see, hear, or encounter what you believe to be another wanderer, it is not human. Hallucinations are common on level zero. The most common being humming from the lighting, increasing to a deafening volume, and then abruptly silencing. The appearance of doors, the appearance of stairs, acute deja vu, human-like speech resembling no known language,

movement in peripheral vision resembling insects crawling underneath the wallpaper, which disappears once the wall is observed directly, and insect-like chittering.

You get out of level 0 the same way you got in, by no-clipping or somehow apparating into the next level. This will never get you out of the backrooms, though, just through more levels. When you get to level 1, you'll find a large, sprawling warehouse that features concrete floors and walls, exposed rebar, and low-hanging fog with no discernible source.

The fog often coalesces into condensation, forming puddles on the floor in inconsistent areas. Unlike level zero, this level possesses a consistent supply of water and electricity, which allows indefinite habitation by wanderers, providing that appropriate precautions are taken. It's also far more expansive, possessing staircases, elevators, isolated rooms and hallways.

Crates of supplies appear and disappear randomly within the level, often containing a mixture of vital items like food, batteries, tarps, weaponry, clothing and medical supplies, and also nonsensical objects like assorted car parts, boxes of crayons, live mice, mice in a catatonic state that have been injected with an unknown substance, shoelaces, and loose change.

The crates should be approached with caution due to their contents, but are a valuable resource. In addition, crude paintings and drawings with no apparent origin or meaning will appear on the walls and floors. They are known to change in appearance and disappear when not in a direct line of sight or when unlit.

The light fixtures within level one are prone to flicker and fail at inconsistent intervals. And when this occurs, supplies are liable to vanish inexplicably and hostile entities may appear unexpectedly. These entities rarely attack in groups and tend to avoid light and large gatherings of people. It's advised to carry a reliable light source and sleep holding whatever items you do not wish to lose.

Wandering through this level will get you to the next, level two.

Level 2, once regarded as being one of the main levels of the Backrooms, is an infinite array of complex yet Euclidean maintenance tunnels that range in size and once had a variety of uses. It's inhabited by entities like giant death moths and smilers, a generally hostile entity identified by their signature reflective eyes and teeth gleaming in the dark.

The best way to escape a smiler is to keep eye contact. By the time you reach level 2, if you can get away from the smilers, you'll want to leave. But you can't. You're stuck here forever. And you have 998 levels to go, winding through the infinite labyrinth of backrooms for the rest of your existence.

So waking up from anesthesia is already a very strange and disorienting feeling. Maybe you've experienced it, but it can be like surfacing from a dreamless void. Usually we come to in a well-staffed recovery ward, knowing that doctors and nurses stand by to ensure a smooth transition back to reality. But for one Canadian firefighter at Fleury Hospital in Montreal...

That moment of awakening brought him face to face with a far more disorienting nightmare. So it was a normal day at the hospital when the firefighter, who we'll call Mike, came in for a procedure on his upper chest. Flurry Hospital is a mid-sized facility that offers emergency services, psychiatric care, and general medicine to thousands of patients each year.

And Mike was a little nervous as he got hooked up to the IV that would administer the anesthesia. But the nurses were making it a lot better for him. They started a countdown and said that he would be waking up before he even knew it. 100, 99, 98. Soon, the world around Mike started getting fuzzy. It was like someone was turning down a dial in his brain. And then everything went black.

At about 3 a.m., Mike started regaining consciousness. Still groggy from the anesthesia, he fluttered his eyes open, expecting to see the faces of some of the nurses that were monitoring him. Instead, he was laying in a bed in the middle of a long corridor. Harsh fluorescent lights buzzed over him, going off at random intervals. And as he turned his head to look down the hallway, a

a metal piece fell off of the bed onto the floor. There was no hospital staff, no other patients, not a single voice echoing through the halls. At first, he thought it might be a strange after effect of the anesthesia. He felt like he was in the same hospital. The walls were still off-white, the tile on the floor had black speckles,

But everything seemed just a bit off. Like the walls were slightly lighter and the floors were a touch less speckled. Confused, Mike pulled himself out of bed and walked down the hallway. That led to another hallway full of locked doors. He then turned another corner and saw another corridor of harsh overhead lighting and locked doors.

Vague garbled words were echoing down the hall from some unknown speaker. The whole thing was really eerie. And finally, he came upon an empty desk with a phone and he called the hospital security and explained what was happening to him. But they hung up the phone, likely believing that this was some sort of prank or maybe a misstyle.

Little did he know, but hours earlier and on the eighth floor of the hospital, Mike's wife was waiting for him to be done with the surgery. At first, when he didn't emerge, she figured they just got started late. Then some of the nurses told her he was probably just wrapping up.

But 1:00 AM comes and goes and he's not there. So she starts getting really anxious. Finally, she demanded to know where Mike was and an orderly came forward and admitted that they had no idea. It turns out Mike was on the third floor of the hospital, a part that was used for day surgeries that looked almost identical to the eighth floor. The only difference was it was completely closed down at night.

The orderly that was assigned to transfer him from the operating room to the correct post-op recovery area had mistakenly brought him five floors below where he was supposed to be. And making it even worse, the orderly saw a maintenance worker, possibly wearing scrubs or maybe a similar uniform, and assumed that that person was a nurse on duty.

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.

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- 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. She kept telling herself, "Wake up, wake up, wake up." But the sensations were too real for it to be a nightmare. The cold metal of her seatbelt pressing into her stomach,

her breath forming a foggy cloud in front of her face. In that moment, it seemed like she had exited reality. It was like she was in a purgatory, reminiscent of the back rooms. She grabbed her phone, 1% battery, and the plane was off, so there was no way to charge it. Tiffany was able to send off a quick text to a friend to say she just woke up on an airplane alone, and then her phone died.

Okay, don't panic. Think. Remember the emergency plan that the flight attendants went over? There's doors on these planes, and they can open. She stumbled her way through the dark to the door near the cockpit, but it was so dark that she couldn't read the instructions on it. She could feel the textures of the door, like a handle, a lever, a window, but she had no idea what to do. So she felt along the wall until she got to the cockpit, and...

The door was open. Inside, there was a little bit more light. The big windshields let moonlight in. And in front of her, there was what seemed to be a thousand buttons, any of which could damage the plane if they were pressed, she thought. But there was also a flashlight.

She grabbed the flashlight and used it to help her open the big door of the plane, the one that people enter through, where she was met by a deadly drop down to the pavement. So she did the only thing she could think of, and she just started screaming and waving the flashlight. And eventually, a luggage cart operator located her and helped her get down. What happened, as Air Canada would have to eventually admit...

was Tiffany fell asleep on the flight and no one woke her up. When the flight attendants and maintenance workers were checking the flight at the end of the night, they somehow missed her. The plane was then driven to a parking area far from the airport and shut down with her still inside.

The story is so scary to hear about, and Tiffany said that she had night terrors after that. Dreams of being caught in that liminal space, an empty, lifeless fuselage with no one close enough to hear her scream.

I think for me, the thing that scares me the most about the backrooms and liminal spaces in general is that we are so close to them. We're just one wrong turn, one strange door, and sometimes one long nap away from finding ourselves trapped in another world with no way to get out.

But if the backrooms maybe are real, or at least a version of them are, what does that mean for the strange photo that was posted on 4chan years ago of the liminal office space? What happened to that internet mystery? Well, that was solved just last year.

On May 19th, 2024, user TJXZ underscore Z sent shockwaves through X, formerly Twitter, by announcing that a friend had finally solved the backroom's origin mystery. That friend had searched the Wayback Machine, a digital archive that preserves snapshots of the internet and...

they found the source of the original backroom's photo. It turned out to be from the rear quarters, or literally the backrooms, of a hobby town in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which had once been a furniture store called Roaner's in the 1970s. In 2003, that hobby town location was refurbished into a kids' racetrack, and the images were likely shared in 2002 on a blog post chronicling the renovation.

The weirdest part is though, nearly every other photo in that blog post was corrupted, leaving only these bizarre empty backroom shots intact. For believers of the backrooms, this discovery didn't change anything. If anything, seeing that such a cold dreamlike corridor existed in real life only amplified the horror. If a random hobby town in Wisconsin housed the real life backrooms,

then maybe the nightmare could be found in any dingy office or deserted corridor close to home. Which is kind of what we confirmed in this episode. The threshold we call liminal might be waiting around the very next corner. All it takes is one wrong turn, one strange door, or one long dreamless nap for us to wake up in the back rooms.

If you want to spend more time in the backrooms, check out Kane Pixels on YouTube. He did the designs for what's going to be turned into the A24 movie. I also encourage you to check out the backrooms wiki because the lore is incredible and so scary and all community made.

I'm going to link those and some other backrooms horror to check out in the description of this episode. And I invite you to join me next week in our Monday episode where I take you overnight to one of Salem's most haunted Airbnbs. And also for our normally scheduled episode where I'm taking you deep into the Shakahola forest to a compound of a cult that was operating in secret for years.

And until next time, don't lean against any walls that look off.