How a furniture store in Oshkosh became a portal to another dimension

I can’t stop thinking about the Backrooms. It’s been a chronic obsession with liminal space and how it intersects with the human psyche that started a few years ago when a YouTube series that transmutes the universal feeling of unease being in big, open, seemingly-abandoned spaces into an entire parallel universe lurking just behind the walls of our own. That series of short films earned their creator, Kane Parsons, a film deal with A24 that made him one of the most successful (and youngest) directors in the history of the company.

Parsons was participating in a rich internet fiction project with his series — a somewhat depressing image from a soon-to-be-renovated furniture store in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, paired with an unnerving caption that imagines an entire world extending what we see in the photo:

From there, young creators including Parsons ran wild with the idea, expanding it into short stories, video games, short films and more. For Parsons in particular, the concept weaves a classic sci-fi trope with a unique, unnerving aesthetic that is one part David Lynch, one part dead mall.

There’s a whole lot of internet out there if you hear this concept and want to learn more — more about the Backrooms, more about liminal and analog horror, more about the pool level. But only here, on the PBS Wisconsin blog, can you get my recommendations on where to begin.

If you’re looking to go down an internet rabbit hole, here are my streaming picks on PBS, perfect to prime you for the recent release of Backrooms on streaming platforms.

You wake up on the floor of a sprawling, seemingly endless office space. All you see is yellow wallpaper lining every wall; all you can hear is the hum-buzz of fluorescent lighting. You’ve fallen into the Backrooms, the internet’s favorite ghost story about being trapped in a parallel dimension of endless liminal dread.

This episode of Monstrum explains how a particularly haunting image of an abandoned Wisconsin furniture store became the jumping off point for a whole subgenre of online fiction, including one of this summer’s most popular films.

If you’re like me, thinking about something like a parallel dimension made up entirely of open floor plan office space really begs the question: Could we really fall into an entirely different universe by accident? Thankfully NOVA is on the same wavelength with “Do We Live in a Multiverse?” — a breakdown of the different ways physicists theorize we might fit into an infinite inter-dimensional multiverse, including as part of an infinite cosmic quilt.

Speaking of parallel universes, I spend most of my time in one: Minnesota. So, imagine my surprise when John McGivern and crew paid more than a few of my regular haunts in Northeast Minneapolis a visit for their most recent season of John McGivern’s Main Streets. Can confirm — we have some truly stellar food and dive bars here.