HobbyTown, Wisconsin, and the Hidden Room They Can’t Explain

They say the Backrooms image was just a photo from a HobbyTown renovation in 2002. Case closed, right? Not so fast. We dug into the so called "discovery" of the original Backrooms photo...and something doesn't add up. From strange metadata to a conveniently missing second floor, this isn’t just a story about carpet and wallpaper. It’s a story about a room that was never supposed to be found. Read on if you’re ready to question the official story.

Obscure Arcana Editorial Unit #404

10/12/20252 min read

Let’s get something straight:

The Backrooms didn’t “start” in 2019. That’s just when the phenomenon stopped hiding.

The Photo That “Came From Nowhere”

We’ve all seen it: that yellow-tinted, moist-carpeted nightmare of a room that launched a thousand late-night rabbit holes. For years, no one could track the source of the infamous Backrooms image. It just was. A cursed jpeg. Floating in the digital ether. No metadata. No origin. No explanation.

Until May 2024, when someone on Twitter casually claimed their “friend” found it in a 2002 renovation blog from... HobbyTown USA in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Sure. That checks out. Totally normal.

“Oops! You mean the most iconic liminal image of the internet was just a photo of a midwestern RC car shop getting new walls?”

Yeah. And I’m the King of Level -9.

The Backrooms Were Never Fiction

Let’s break it down:

  • The image appeared on 4chan’s /b/ board as early as 2018 with the cryptic filename 1342377940136.jpg, which might be a Unix timestamp for 2012...but no one knows for sure because, conveniently, 4chan doesn’t archive old threads.

  • It became iconic not because of what it showed...but because of what people remembered when they saw it. A sense of place they’d never been, but felt in their bones.

  • It was reposted, rethreaded, and soon the lore built itself: a purgatory realm of infinite office-like rooms you could fall into by “noclipping out of reality.”

The creepypasta didn’t create the memory. The memory created the creepypasta.

“It’s Just a Store,” They Say

The current story is this:
Some RC car nerds in 2002 took a photo during a renovation. That image was buried in a forgotten blog post until some Discord server found it with the Wayback Machine.

How…convenient.

Let me ask you this:
Why is the room gone now? Why is the entire layout of the second floor erased from existence?
Why did they build a race track over it?

To cover the tear. To seal the leak. To pave over the thin spot.

Because some places were never meant to be photographed.
And once they were, the internet did what it does best:
It remembered.

Something’s Still Missing

Despite the HobbyTown origin story, the metadata and early sightings still don’t quite add up. That filename? The one possibly from 2012? The one we can't trace? Either it's from an older post, or it never came from our internet at all.

And what about the other leads?
The ARGs. The photographer denials. The wrong turns on Google Earth.
All noise? Or all part of the same misdirection?

You don’t hide an office from reality unless it’s hiding something worse.

And I don’t know about you, but I think the RC cars are a distraction.

Stay alert. Stay weird.

And if you ever find yourself in a room that hums too loud and smells too damp...
don’t. move. fast