The Backrooms, as an internet horror concept, does not have a single universally accepted “owner,” but the original creepypasta is generally traced back to an anonymous 4chan user who posted the famous yellow, liminal-room photo and caption in May 2019, while the most influential modern expansion of the idea has been done by YouTuber Kane Parsons, known as Kane Pixels, through his Backrooms found-footage web series starting in 2022.

Core origin: the 2019 post

The widely agreed starting point of The Backrooms as a legend is a post on 4chan’s paranormal board (/x/) on May 12, 2019, where an anonymous user shared the now-iconic empty yellow room image and a short unsettling description about “noclipping out of reality.” That combination of image and text gave the space its name, “The Backrooms,” and set up the idea of endless, monotonous office-like corridors as a kind of liminal prison.

Over the following months, users on Reddit and other platforms added more “levels,” monsters, and survival rules, turning the single image into a collaborative, community-driven creepypasta setting rather than a fully authored story by one known person.

The image itself: who took it?

For years, the photo’s origin was unknown, which helped the myth feel more mysterious and “found.” In 2024, online sleuths in a Backrooms-focused Discord tracked it down to an archived 2003 web page showing a renovation of a former furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, later used by a HobbyTown shop. That means the physical photo predates the Backrooms concept by many years and was repurposed by the anonymous 2019 poster, rather than shot specifically “for” The Backrooms.

Kane Pixels and why people call him “the creator”

American filmmaker and YouTuber Kane Parsons (Kane Pixels) kicked off a highly influential found-footage style series with the short film “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” in 2022. Using Blender and visual effects, he built a cinematic version of the setting, adding entities, a research group called Async, and a 1980s–1990s conspiracy tone, which pushed The Backrooms from niche creepypasta into mainstream horror culture and inspired countless copycats and spin‑offs.

Because his series is so popular and polished, many casual viewers assume he “invented” The Backrooms, but even interviews and coverage describe his work as an adaptation and expansion of the preexisting Backrooms creepypasta. In other words, he is the creator of the best-known web series and visual interpretation, not the originator of the entire concept.

Community creation and ongoing debates

On forums and Reddit, fans often argue whether there even is a single creator, since much of the lore—levels, entities, survival guides—was crowdsourced on wikis and subreddits like r/backrooms. Some “purists” prefer a minimal, eerie interpretation closer to the 2019 post, while “expansionists” like the elaborate multi-level mythos, reflecting a broader tension over who gets to define a collaborative internet horror world.

Many fans consciously lean into the ambiguity, enjoying the idea that The Backrooms feel like they “just appeared” out of shared nostalgia, liminal- space aesthetics, and online creativity rather than from any single author’s pen.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.