The Backrooms Are Real: 3000 Years Before Kane Pixels People Wrote About the Backrooms

➡ The concept of ‘back rooms’ – mysterious, ancient spaces between reality and the spiritual realm – has been part of various cultures for centuries. The modern interpretation of these rooms started with an anonymous photo posted online in 2019, showing a corridor with yellow wallpaper and lights, and a damp carpet. This image, along with its caption describing a place of 600 million square miles of empty rooms to be trapped in, sparked widespread interest and became an internet phenomenon. However, the true origins of the ‘back rooms’ concept go much deeper, with the idea being linked to human brain function and ancient beliefs about liminal spaces where reality is thin.
➡ This text discusses the concept of ‘liminal spaces’ or ‘thresholds’, which are in-between places that exist beyond our known reality. These spaces, also referred to as ‘no clip’ by gamers, ‘Lyman’ by anthropologists, and ‘event horizon’ by neuroscientists, are believed to be doorways to another realm. Ancient cultures worldwide, from the Bible to the Celts to the Hopi people, have stories about these doorways, suggesting they might be real. The text concludes by questioning whether these shared cultural stories are mere imagination or evidence of a deeper, shared human memory of these mysterious spaces.
➡ When you saw the photos of the yellow hallway, you might have felt a sense of familiarity, as if you knew how to get there. The images may have sparked a curiosity in you, hinting at something more to discover. Thanks for watching the video and stay tuned for more. Blessings to all.

The back rooms are real. Not the way the movie tells it, not the way the internet tells it, because it didn’t start with Kane Pixels or that famous photo from 2019. No. It started a very, very long time ago, because culture after culture, with no way to talk to each other, all talked about the same exact thing. They said that reality? Well, it has thin spots. It has doorways. There are places between reality and the spiritual realm that you can get stuck in. Doorways. Portals. These places that you could cross into, without meaning to, and never be heard from again.

Oh, they’re real. They’re ancient. Older than human history, it’s been growing. Waiting. So, the back rooms. Where did they start? Because it wasn’t with Kane Pixels, and it wasn’t with 4chan back in 2019 when somebody posted an anonymous picture, because by all accounts, that’s where the modern day back rooms started. They started when somebody posted a picture. No name. No location. It was basically a corridor of yellow wallpaper, yellow lights, and damp carpet. And with the type of lights that you can just feel like a humming frequency coming through the photo when you look at it.

And yeah, a photo shouldn’t be able to make you do that. But stay with me, because that’s the whole mystery. And underneath that mystery? A caption that became scripture for a generation of internet horror aficionados. It says a place of 600 million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. Horrifying, right? Except the truth of this picture, the truth of the matter of these so-called back rooms, is actually more horrifying than most people realize. Because that post, it should have died on a message board, but instead it became internet mythology.

Fan wikis, video games, 100 million views under a single hashtag. It became the kind of thing that the movie studio A24 turned into a feature film directed by Kane Parsons, the man who took this picture and built his whole channel around it, Kane Pixels. Because most people think that this is where the story of the back rooms originates, but it’s not. It goes back way deeper, way farther, and it really does have aspects in reality that people are just overlooking. So here’s the receipt before we get farther into it. This is the original image, the original caption, exactly as it was posted back in 2019.

And let me be honest with you, because it’s the real reason why I made this video. When I first saw that photo, I told myself it was just a creepy picture, right? It was just something creepy and I couldn’t get out of my head. I couldn’t stop looking at it. And the more that I dug into it, the less it looked like internet horror, the less it looked like creepy pasta, and the more it looked like something that people have been describing and fearing by the way, and also warning each other about for thousands of years.

Because you felt this too probably, right? The mall after closing, the dead hallway at 3am, the empty stairwell that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up for no reason at all. It’s a feeling that most people can’t name. Some part of you stops at the threshold and refuses to walk through it. It invokes a creepy feeling, naturally. And that reaction is far older than you, because it’s older than all of us. It’s as old as humanity itself, and there’s a very good reason for that. So I stopped asking what the back rooms are, and I started asking the real question.

Why does this same place keep showing up in your brain and in your nightmares, and also in the oldest manuscripts humanity ever wrote? But before we get there, we need to start in your brain, because I think that’s where it all starts. It really does start in your brain, but I promise you, that’s not where it ends. The answer starts with a door. A real one. A real physical door. There’s an actual documented thing that happens to people, so ordinary that you’ve probably become accustomed to it and you stop noticing it.

Have you ever noticed that when you walk through a doorway to go get something like, say, your keys or something like that? Sometimes, not every time, but sometimes, the second that you cross that doorway, it’s gone. The thing that you wanted to get, you forgot why you walked through that door. You stand there with a blank face for a few seconds. You walk back and you, oh, there it is. I remember now. I remember why I walked through this door because I was going to get my keys. The memory returns. But for a split second, you’re just standing there.

You don’t know what’s going on. You’re like, why am I here? What am I doing? Why did I walk through this door? This is a real phenomenon. And guys, that’s not being old. That’s not old age, because a researcher at Notre Dame, Gabriel Radvansky, I think the name was, she proved it in a lab, that crossing a threshold like a doorway or something measurably wipes your working memory. This is a physiological thing, guys, because some part of your mind treats a doorway as a hard boundary and files everything on the other side of that doorway as basically a closed world.

An event boundary is what they say. And you’re never going to believe what this researcher named it. It’s called the event horizon, a point of no return. Now hold on to that for a second. It matters more at the end than it does right now. But that’s not even it, guys. It goes way deeper than that because buried in your brain is a system that builds a literal map of where you are. They’re called grid cells, your own basically internal compass, your own GPS, and two scientists who found them actually won the Nobel Prize.

And that map, it well, it runs on landmarks, edges, corners, and take these landmarks away, make every wall identical, every hall the same. And that map doesn’t just get worse, it comes apart. It disintegrates. And guys, this is proven scientifically because two researchers at Cardiff, they measured this exact thing in 2022. The distortions that spike human dread the hardest are repetition, emptiness, and wrong scale basically. And this is the exact recipe for the back rooms. Now, here’s where the skeptics are going to be right about. And I’ll say it plainly, right? Your brain is built to come apart in places like that.

That’s why it feels creepy. But nobody tells you why it terrifies you because it’s not just a creepy feeling. It’s like this internal dread that comes up that seems to be, you know, something you can’t really put your finger on because the research doesn’t tell you exactly what this place is. Because this is where almost everybody stops and where I think they stop basically one step too early. Because here’s what I couldn’t stop thinking about. And let me be clear real quick about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying there’s a literal yellow maze full of monsters.

It’s what 600 million square miles underneath the floor. Because that part of its internet fiction invented one form post at a time. I’m saying that the thing that the fiction is reaching for is the doorway, the in between space, the place between places, the liminal spaces. And that’s the part that’s older than the fiction. And I don’t think the ancients made it up. I think that they actually recognize there is something really similar to this that is real. And they talked about it. The people who built the back rooms mythology, you know, cane pixels, the kids on forms, there’s no scholars among them.

They came up with a rule how you fall into the back rooms, right? You can only slip through in places where reality is thin, where the barrier is thin enough to pass through, pass through without breaking it. They even compared it to a real physics term quantum tunneling. These are they’re basically teenagers writing video game lore at two in the morning. But what they’re onto here, what they’re breaking into is something far older, far more ancient. And they had no idea that they were coming up with the same ideas that parallel what the ancients believed.

These ideas come directly from the ancient world itself. Now, sit with that for a second. With no theology, no ancient texts, no training, a generation of strangers reinvented the idea that’s thousands of years old, almost word for word. They thought it up. They thought they made it up, but they didn’t. They pulled it from the ether. They pulled it from humanity itself, because there’s something in us that remembers these universal stories. And you might not be conscious of it. But this is the stuff that basically where psychics get their information from.

It’s the spiritual realm. And these kids making up the stories of the back rooms, something in them remembered that this is actually true, unconsciously. Now hold that thought against what the ancients actually wrote, because they didn’t just believe this, they mapped it. So how far back does this go? Guess. Because it’s farther than any photo, way farther than the internet, and farther than almost anything we still remember how to read. Because this goes back to the time before times. Now, let’s start with the word itself. The in between space. It has a name, right? Liminal.

The liminal spaces. It’s from Latin. And it means basically a threshold, a doorway. And in 1909, an anthropologist named Arnold, I think his name was Van Zenip or something like that. He studied rituals on every continent on earth. And he found a pattern that was buried underneath all of them. You leave the known world, you cross into a threshold, and you arrive somewhere new, somewhere else, a new place, a place in between places, a place that you’re stuck in. And across the two places is the middle place, the crossing itself. It was treated as basically as like as the dangerous place, the place that you could get lost.

That’s the back rooms. Exactly. By definition, you leave reality, you enter the threshold, but you never arrive in your location. You’re stuck in the crossing. It’s a doorway that doesn’t let out. So we have three names for this same phenomenon, right? The gamers, they’ll call it no clip. The anthropologists, they call it the Lyman. And the neuroscientists, they call it the event horizon. And none of them were talking to each other, but they’re all describing the same exact doorway, the same place, the same place between places, but the people who saw most clearly weren’t scientists at all.

They were the ancient people. And I don’t think they were writing metaphors. I really don’t. I think they were writing reports about stuff that they saw, stuff that they experienced, stuff that they knew to be part of our reality. So let’s go back thousands of years to the Bible. This is the Bible story. It’s called Jacob’s Ladder. This is a Jacob’s ladder. The Bible talks about portals like this. And there’s a lot of places. One of the most famous one is called Jacob’s Ladder, where Jacob laid down and he saw angels descending and ascending on a ladder to and from heaven.

And the book of Enoch also talks about stuff like this too. It’s a part of the book where scholars call the astronomical book. So basically an angel named Uriel, he takes Enoch up and shows him the architecture of the heavens. Picture it. A guy walking a man along the edge of the sky, pointing here and pointing there. Here are some doors over here. Here’s where the sun comes through. And guys, it’s not poetry. This was structural. He said, I think there was 12 gates, six in the east and six in the west. There are specific openings that the sun, the moon, and different powers pass through in basically in a fixed order.

There are doorways that are built into the fabric of the sky itself, according to the book of Enoch. And guys, this idea isn’t just found in the Bible. It’s not just found in the book of Enoch. It’s found in a lot of cultures worldwide. One of them is the Celts. You’ve probably heard of the Celtic people, right? The Celts? Well, the Celts had a name for this too. They called it the Thin Places. These are spots where the walls between this world and the other world, well, they wear through. Places where you could cross without meaning to by accident.

And if you go all the way through, well, guess what? You’re stuck there. And these stories of places between places, these stories of these doorways, of these thin places, they don’t just stop at the Celts. They go all the way across the ocean to a culture, a group of people that never heard of the Celts. They never heard of the Bible. They never heard of the book of Enoch, to a place that we call America and the native people who lived there long before we did. The Hopi people specifically, they called it the Sipapu, the place of emergence.

That’s basically a doorway that their ancestors would climb through from one world to another, from their world into this world, from the world below our world into the world that we currently inhabit. Anthropologists have documented this more than a century ago, straight from the Hopi elders themselves. One of the elders put it like this, out of the Sipapu we all came and back through it. When we die, we’ll go back there. It’s a ground. And mind you, this is on the opposite side of the planet from every other culture who’s telling this same exact story.

Ancient culture after ancient culture has a version of this story, a doorway, a gate, a place between the spaces of the world where our reality and the other side bleed together. Guys, that’s not a coincidence, you can just wave away. When people who never met on opposite sides of the earth draw the same exact conclusion, the same map, at some point you have to be honest with yourself and ask yourself this, were they actually talking about some place that’s real, or were they just making up the same ideas simultaneously without ever talking to each other? Because the way I see it, they were looking at something real.

Now there’s a scholar who spent his life recovering this data, and his name was Dr. Michael Heiser, and what he showed is that the ancient mind never saw a reality as a flat open room. It was seen as layered boundaries, there were sacred spaces, and beyond it was an unseen realm that pressed right up against our realm with thresholds, with portals, with thin places that people could get lost in, people can transfer from one place to another, from our reality to their reality. To the ancient people, these doorways weren’t a feeling, they weren’t a metaphor, they were a fact, and they were 100% real, and even the King of England documented it.

That’s right. In 1597, I think it was, King James, yes, that King James, the one who wrote the Bible, he also wrote a book called Demonology. It’s basically a field guide to the spiritual realm, and he’s sorted this whole thing not by the name, but by where they appear. The first kind that he wrote are the ones that trouble. Houses or solitary places, empty rooms, he said, thresholds, the spaces in between spaces. Guys, this is coming from the King of England in 1597. Here’s the receipt, in his own words, 400 years ago, the King of England himself cataloging what we now call the back rooms these doorways 400 years ago.

Let me tell you what I think the back rooms actually is, not the website, not the movie, not what Kane Pixels wrote, the thing that’s underneath it. Because I think, like I said, I think it is actually real, and I think it’s a place that the ancients were right about. I think it’s an in between space, call it the unseen realm, call it the other side, call it the spiritual realm, call it the threshold, whatever you want to call it, you can call it that, because we’re all talking about the same thing here.

And I think it’s vast in a way that our minds were never built to understand, to comprehend, basically endless, infinite. There’s no way out, no way out that we would recognize anyway. It was a place that was never built for human occupancy. It was built for spiritual beings, for entities. And it’s pretty interesting that in the Kane Pixels version of the back room, there’s monsters that inhabit it. Because there is monsters that inhabit the real one as well. Because culture after culture described it, they described the same thing, and they all warned about the same exact thing too.

The doorways, the doorways into another world, the thin spots, the thin spots that you can cross into without meaning to. And if you do, good luck to you, because you’re never going to be heard from again. And this is the part that actually stops me cold, because it’s clear that the back room wasn’t invented in 2019. It was a memory, it was a shared memory that all of human history has known. And a stranger posted an empty photo of a furniture store that made millions of people feel this weird dread inside of them.

They felt the ancient alarm bells going off inside of their chest. That’s the part of you that doesn’t want to walk into an empty room at three o’clock in the morning. The part of you that gets creeped out when you’re in an empty building by yourself. Guys, this isn’t a glitch, and I don’t think it’s random. I think it’s a shared memory. It’s wired so deep within us, within our very DNA, that no amount of distractions, no amount of forgetting, no amount of, you know, internet or smartphones or modern culture itself can erase it.

You were built knowing that these doorways are real. You’re just not conscious of it. So here’s the question I want to leave you with. If every culture, almost every culture that’s ever lived throughout history, drew a map of these same exact doorways, the thin place, the infinite room on the other side of reality, what are the odds that they all just imagined it? And what does it mean that the moment that you saw these pictures, or that most people saw these pictures, of this yellow hallway in the back rooms, some people already knew that there is a way into it.

Some part of you deep down already knew the way in. And if this opened a door that you can’t quite close, well, there’s one more that you need to see next. And I think it shows you what’s on the other side. I want to thank you all for watching this video. We’ll see you next time. God bless you all. [tr:trw].