The Backrooms: where the photograph was actually taken

The internet's most famous nowhere turned out to be the second floor of a furniture shop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The photograph of a yellow corridor under humming strip lights was posted to 4chan on 12 May 2019 in answer to a request for images that felt "a bit off", and the caption underneath it grew into thousands of stories, games and videos about endless empty rooms you fall into by taking a wrong turn. In 2024 internet researchers traced the picture to its source: a 2003 photograph of renovation work on the upper floor of the former Rohner's furniture store, taken for a local hobby shop's website. The building is still standing at 807 Oregon Street, and there is a model shop in it today.

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The Dybbuk Box

A wine cabinet listed on eBay in 2003 with a long description: supposedly it had belonged to a Holocaust survivor and contained a possessing spirit from Jewish folklore. The lot was resold repeatedly, each owner adding fresh misfortunes to the listing, the auction spread across the internet and eventually became a Hollywood film. In 2021 the original seller, the writer Kevin Mannis, publicly acknowledged that the whole thing was fiction he had written — a literary project that accidentally became a modern legend.