Renovating the space from the sale of furniture
Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2025 4:57 am
In March 2003, there was a former furniture store called Rohner’s Home Furnishings in Oshkosh, Wisconsin whose second floor was being renovated by the (somewhat) new tenants, HobbyTown.
to a new remote-controlled racing car track (among other aspects) meant pulling down partitions and ripping out carpet. This inspired taking photographs of the process, one of which, DSC001561.JPG, was the legendary “Back Rooms” image.
18 times in the last 20 years, crawlers affiliated special database the Internet Archive moved through this page and grabbed portions of it, speculatively, to store for future research and reference. As the whole image was grabbed, reading the metadata of the original image reveals the date it was taken (June 12, 2002), and the camera used (a Sony Cyber-Shot model). The great unknown image, the unsettling photo of a mysterious place and time, was revealed.
However the original, anonymous user stumbled onto this photograph, it appears it was taken from either the Wayback directly, or the Wayback Machine crawled the same site the user had found, and kept that webpage’s preservation for over 20 years.
Emerging, Blinking, Into the Light
Naturally, as news of the Backrooms being “found” travels throughout the world, responses have wildly ranged.
For some, this is a proof that “with enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow”. While we might argue about the relative worth of a given effort, the fact that it is possible for word to travel about a mystery to the point of being solved means that the world is a hair less intimidating and scary. Our shared efforts and cooperation can find the answer to a seemingly impossible-to-answer question. The fact that an image with basically no information and a blurry set of components could be tracked down and revealed is a miracle.
to a new remote-controlled racing car track (among other aspects) meant pulling down partitions and ripping out carpet. This inspired taking photographs of the process, one of which, DSC001561.JPG, was the legendary “Back Rooms” image.
18 times in the last 20 years, crawlers affiliated special database the Internet Archive moved through this page and grabbed portions of it, speculatively, to store for future research and reference. As the whole image was grabbed, reading the metadata of the original image reveals the date it was taken (June 12, 2002), and the camera used (a Sony Cyber-Shot model). The great unknown image, the unsettling photo of a mysterious place and time, was revealed.
However the original, anonymous user stumbled onto this photograph, it appears it was taken from either the Wayback directly, or the Wayback Machine crawled the same site the user had found, and kept that webpage’s preservation for over 20 years.
Emerging, Blinking, Into the Light
Naturally, as news of the Backrooms being “found” travels throughout the world, responses have wildly ranged.
For some, this is a proof that “with enough eyeballs, all problems are shallow”. While we might argue about the relative worth of a given effort, the fact that it is possible for word to travel about a mystery to the point of being solved means that the world is a hair less intimidating and scary. Our shared efforts and cooperation can find the answer to a seemingly impossible-to-answer question. The fact that an image with basically no information and a blurry set of components could be tracked down and revealed is a miracle.