Passageways

I was asked a couple of days ago by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia if I'd ever heard of The Backrooms -- and if so, if I thought there was "anything to it."

I hadn't, but told him I needed clarification about what exactly he was looking for.  "Anything to it" is, after all, a little on the vague side.

"You know," he said.  "Something legitimately creepy.  Something more than just people getting freaked out over nothing, and then making shit up to explain why they're scared."

So I said I'd look into it.

The Backrooms turns out to have originated as a "creepypasta" -- a strange, usually first-person tale related as if it were true, that then gets passed around on the internet and kind of takes on a life of its own.  (Two famous stories that originated as creepypasta are Slender Man and the Black-eyed Children -- both of which I thought were cool enough that I ended up them using in my novels, in Signal to Noise and Eyes Like Midnight, respectively.)  The Backrooms has to do with someone who stumbled into an empty, fluorescent-lit space that didn't obey the regular laws of time and space; partitions changed position, doorways opened up or closed when you weren't looking, angles shifted and turned in unpredictable ways.  (Reminds me of the evil city of R'lyeh from H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, where the geometry is so skewed you can't even tell what's horizontal and vertical.)

It was a place, they claimed, where you could "noclip out of reality" -- "noclipping" being a video game term where a character can pass right through a solid wall.

The original post was accompanied by the following photograph:

Well, the internet being what it is, pretty soon someone found that there was nothing paranormal about the photograph; it was, in fact, an empty furniture sales room in Oshkosh, Wisconsin that was being renovated into a hobby store.  But the garish lighting, sickly yellow cast, and odd angles definitely gives a surreal air to the photograph.

I'm not sure I would want to be alone at night in that place, rational skeptical attitudes notwithstanding.

The Backrooms (at least while it was empty) is a good example of a "liminal space" -- a place that appears to be a mysterious passageway to somewhere else, somewhere not quite of this world.  Consider how often that trope has been used in fiction -- H. G. Wells's "The Door in the Wall," the Wardrobe in C. S. Lewis's Narnia series, the hotel corridors in Stephen King's The Shining, and the weird labyrinth of empty streets leading to the door of Omo's barber shop in the Doctor Who episode "The Story and the Engine" are four obvious examples -- and much of the eeriness comes from the fact that while you're there, you're alone.

Just you and the twisted geometry of spacetime that rules such places.

"Liminal spaces include empty spots, like abandoned shopping malls, corridors, and waiting rooms after hours," said architect Tara Ogle.  "These are spaces that are liminal in a temporal way, that occupy a space between use and disuse, past and present, transitioning from one identity to another.  While there, we are standing on a threshold between how we lived previously and new ways of living, working and occupying space.  It's understandable that we react emotionally to such places."

Liminal spaces, it seems, are to architecture what the uncanny valley is to faces.

Despite my reluctance to attribute any of this to the paranormal, I'm no stranger to the feelings evoked by places that seem to be caught between the real world and somewhere else.  I've described here my odd reaction to spending an afternoon in the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey in northern England, an experience that felt quite real even though there was no scientifically-admissible evidence that anything untoward was going on.

In fact, for a skeptic, I have to admit I'm pretty damn suggestible.  I suspect I went into science as a way of compensating for the fact that my emotions are like an out-of-control pinball game most of the time.  So while on the surface I might seem like a good choice to accompany you into the investigation of a haunted house, I'd probably react more like Shaggy in Scooby Doo, leaping into the air at the first creaking floorboard and then running away in a comical fashion, my feet barely even touching the ground.

Be that as it may, in response to my reader's question: I doubt seriously there's "anything to" The Backrooms and other liminal spaces besides people's tendency to react with fear to being in odd situations, which (after all) includes being in a completely empty, fluorescent-lit furniture showroom at night.  I don't think you're going to end up passing through a doorway into an exciting fantasy world if you go exploring there.

Which is kind of a shame.  On the other hand, you are also unlikely to meet creepy little twin girl ghosts or an evil barber who wants to use your imagination as a power source.  So like everything, I guess it's a mixed bag.

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