Big news today for anyone who’s been following the concept of the Backrooms in any of its myriad forms over the past few years: As of May 29, 2024, the source of original Backrooms photo has been found, and the location at which it was shot has been identified. It’s true! The Backrooms are a real place! They’re just… not actually outside of reality; they are, in fact, a hobby shop and RC raceway in Wisconsin.
Credit for the find goes to a handful of extremely dedicated researchers within the Virtual Carbon Discord community: Semliot, Serrara, and PerditusRedux, along with Liam, who moderates the server. The whole process of the discovery has been extensively documented in a Google doc, so if you’re interested in aaaaaaall the nitty-gritty of how they did it — along with info about every other aspect of the search, which has been ongoing for roughly four years at this point — head on over there to read it; it’s well worth it, and these folks deserve all the applause for their exhaustive efforts.
[Like what you read? Check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available from Chronicle Books now!]
Here’s what they ultimately found: The original Backrooms photo was taken at the HobbyTown and Revolution Raceway location at 807 Oregon St. in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. What’s more, the photo is much older than you might think: It was originally uploaded to the internet — specifically to the old Oshkosh HobbyTown website — on March 2, 2003. That’s right: The original Backrooms photo is more than 20 years old.
HobbyTown is a chain of hobby shops originally founded in 1985 in Lincoln, Nebraska. As of 2024, there are 100 HobbyTown franchise locations in the United States spread across 39 states — including Wisconsin.
There are, in fact, a number of HobbyTown locations in Wisconsin; the Oshkosh store is just one of them. The Oshkosh store, however, is unique in that it’s also home to Revolution Raceway, an RC raceway facility — and it seems that it was during the renovation process for that part of the building way back in the early 2000s that the original Backrooms photo was taken.
The Oshkosh HobbyTown location wasn’t always at 807 Oregon St. According to a November 2002 capture of the Oshkosh HobbyTown website, it used to be in a shopping plaza at 2075 S. Koeller Rd. — one referred to as the Walmart Shopping Plaza until March of 2003, at which point it began being identified as Aviation Plaza. (A look at Google Street View reveals that there is not currently a Walmart in this shopping plaza, so I assume the name change had something to do with a Walmart location formerly located there closing.)
A May 25, 2003 capture of the website, however, noted that Oregon Street location was slated to open soon; then, by May of 2004, the store was finally listed as being at 807 Oregon St., where it’s still located today.
Now, here’s the thing: In both of its iterations, the Oshkosh HobbyTown has also hosted and/or facilitated RC racing activities. Early on, races were hosted at the Oshkosh Eagles Club — later called the Studio Hall, and still later the Howard — but when the store moved to the Oregon Street location, a full raceway for the Oshkosh RC community was constructed along with it.
Per the old Oshkosh HobbyTown website, the Oregon Street location was acquired sometime prior to 2003 — likely in 2002 — with the space that would become the RC racing facility, now called Revolution Raceway, having previously been home to a furniture store (Rohner’s Furniture, to be precise). Extensive renovations were required not only to transform the space into an RC raceway, but just to, y’know, get it up to snuff in the first place: The construction diary hosted over at the HobbyTown Oshkosh website noted when renovations began that the space was… not in good repair, with extensive water damage, loads of clutter, and a lot of dirt and grime.
Which brings us back to the original Backrooms photo: It turns out that this image was actually part of a photo dump showing the “before” state of the Revolution Raceway facility at the Oshkosh HobbyTown location — what the former furniture store looked like at the time the space was acquired and before renovations began to transform it into the RC racing haven it is today.
The construction and renovation diary at the Oshkosh HobbyTown website has the infamous photo filed under an entry dated 3/2/03 — that is, March 2, 2003, giving us the image’s date of arrival on the internet. The renovations were complete as of April 4, 2004, according to later entry in the construction diary, and, as I previously noted, the main Oshkosh HobbyTown website had been updated with the new location by May of that year.
So: If the Backrooms photo was just sitting there online for two decades, what made it so hard to find? In short: Link rot. The original website for the Oshkosh location of HobbyTown — the website where the photo lived — is defunct, and has been for quite some time.
According to its historical WHOIS records, the domain that originally housed the Oshkosh HobbyTown store’s website — hobbytownoshkosh.com — was first registered back in 2000; however, the domain registration expired in 2019. This lines up with a gap in the Wayback Machine archives of the site from 2017 to 2020; then, when the captures begin again in 2020, it shows that the domain has been turned into what looks like an SEO spam site, which it remains today.
No trace of the original version of the site — the one that actually did belong to the Oshkosh HobbyTown store — remains live on the internet; the only way to visit it now is to plug the URL into the Wayback Machine to see a preserved snapshot of it. And that’s assuming you even know the URL in the first place, which, y’know… many did not, until very, very recently.
So, how did this photo from the long-defunct website of a hyperlocal hobby store become the centerpiece of a wildly popular meme? Well, we can probably assume that someone somewhere found it when it was still live and saved it to their hard drive; then, circa 2011, it made its way to 4ch for the first time stripped of its context, and well… you know how the internet works. Things spread, particularly mysterious things. We can’t help ourselves.
The Oshkosh HobbyTown store does now have a store profile on the main HobbyTown company website, although it’s more of a database entry than anything else. However! Revolution Raceway has its own site now, too, which also bears HobbyTown branding; it can be found at revolutionraceway.com. This domain was registered in 2011 by the Oshkosh HobbyTown store’s owner, and features not just information about the store, but also about upcoming races and the like.
You’ll note, by the way, that there’s actually a second HobbyTown location listed on the Revolution Raceway site — one in nearby Appleton. This location is no longer open, however; it was run by the same owner as the Oshkosh store, but the Post Crescent reported in 2022 that the owner had decided to close the Appleton store. Just, y’know, FYI.
Also: The Revolution Raceway section of HobbyTown is actually located around the corner from the main HobbyTown entrance; Revolution Raceway’s door is on 9th Ave. I had to wander around a little bit on Google Street View to find it; putting in 807 Oregon St. brings you to the front of the HobbyTown store, which, you’ll note, does not look like the front of Revolution Raceway. For the curious, you can see the actual entrance to Revolution Raceway here. There’s also signage indicating parking for HobbyTown customers.
It’s also perhaps useful to point out that the renovation diary on the old HobbyTown Oshkosh website states at one point that “the actual address [of the Revolution Raceway space] is 811 Oregon St.,” although that was changed to 807 in a later diary entry.
In any event, there you have it: The mystery of the origin of the Backrooms photo has been solved, and we now know where the Backrooms “are,” technically speaking. You won’t see the Backrooms, should you visit HobbyTown or Revolution Raceway now (and, uh, please don’t flood the place with attention, either in real life or on the internet — support the business, of course, but don’t troll or clog up the place if you’re not planning on actually shopping or racing there)… but, when you look at it — when you see the raceway as it is now — you’ll know.
The Backrooms are there.
Even if they’re not real…
…They’re there.
Watch where you step.
You wouldn’t want to noclip out of reality, now, would you?
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Follow The Ghost In My Machine on Bluesky @GhostMachine13.bsky.social, Twitter @GhostMachine13, and Facebook @TheGhostInMyMachine. And for more games, don’t forget to check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available now from Chronicle Books!
the gdoc is wowww so much work went into it