Ten Thousand Co-Authors and No One in Charge: Who Actually Owns the Backrooms?
Photo: SuSanA Secretariat, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
In 2019, an anonymous poster on a 4chan board asked for images that felt "unsettling." Someone posted a photo of an empty office with yellowed wallpaper and buzzing fluorescent lights. Another user replied with a paragraph — a description of what happens if you're not careful and you "noclip" out of reality. Within weeks, that paragraph had levels, rules, factions, and fan art. The Backrooms had been born, and nobody could tell you who its parents were.
This is how folklore works now. And the strange thing is, it's how folklore has always worked — just at broadband speed.
The Oldest Technology
Folklorists have a term for the traditional process: oikotype, the local variant. A ghost story crosses a county line and picks up a new detail; by the time it's been told in a dozen taverns, no single teller owns it. The campfire was a distributed editing system. Whoever told it best that night shaped the canon.
The internet didn't invent collaborative myth-making. It industrialized it. A creepypasta like Slender Man went from Something Awful forums to Marble Hornets video series to playground legend to courtrooms, each retelling adding load-bearing walls. The Backrooms got a wiki with hundreds of numbered levels. The skinwalker — lifted, often carelessly, from Navajo tradition — became a TikTok genre where hikers post "cursed" footage and commenters adjudicate what counts as authentic lore.
Canon by Comment Section
What's genuinely new is the mechanism of consensus. Old folklore drifted; new folklore gets voted on. A YouTube video proposes a theory about a backrooms level; if it slaps, thousands of videos adopt it, and within a month the theory is the lore. Analog horror series like Local 58 and The Mandela Catalogue deliberately leave gaps, and the audience fills them — then treats the fills as fact.
It's collaborative fiction with no signup sheet. Thousands of co-authors, zero editors, and a canon that's essentially a live poll. The story evolves in real time, forked and merged like open-source software, except nobody controls the repository.
The Ownership Problem
Which raises a question the old campfires never had to answer: who profits, and who's responsible?
The Backrooms already has a Hollywood deal attached to it, built on a text written by an anonymous stranger and elaborated by thousands of unpaid world-builders. Slender Man's co-creators have spent years in a legal tangle over rights to a being that no one person created. And when a legend causes real harm — as Slender Man tragically did in 2014 — the community that built it has no mechanism for accountability. You can't ask ten thousand co-authors to answer for a story.
There's a cultural borrowing problem, too. The skinwalker craze runs headlong into the fact that Navajo communities consider these stories sacred and not for public remixing. The internet's folklore engine doesn't have a brakes pedal, and some traditions would very much like one.
The Story Outlives the Tellers
Still, it's hard not to be a little awed. American kids in 2024 know the backrooms the way their grandparents knew the hook-armed maniac of lovers' lane. The details differ; the function doesn't. We tell these stories to make the dark navigable, to scare each other in safety, to have something to pass hand to hand.
The campfire is gone. The comment section took its place. And the myths, patient as ever, found a new fire to circle.
