Speaker 1: Also media Hi Sixteenth Minute listeners. Two things. First, if
Speaker 1: you're in the Los Angeles area on March second, my
Speaker 1: movie podcast with Caitlin Durante, The Bechdel Cast is having
Speaker 1: this big post oscar show and general variety show with
Speaker 1: some of our favorite guests from the past eight years
Speaker 1: of the Bechdel Cast at Dynasty Typewriter at seven point
Speaker 1: thirty right after the Oscars. You can get your tickets
Speaker 1: in the description for this episode, or if you don't
Speaker 1: live in the area, guess what. We are going to
Speaker 1: be live streaming the event. If you can't watch it
Speaker 1: in the moment, you can watch it for a full
Speaker 1: week after if you can't watch that day. And yes,
Speaker 1: we will be wearing costumes from the substance I bought
Speaker 1: hair extensions. You're gonna want to see it. Second, please
Speaker 1: stop messaging me. Yes, I know Hawk to a girl.
Speaker 1: Haley welch that story as developments, But Sixteenth Minute is
Speaker 1: a show that gives stuff at least a little bit
Speaker 1: of space to breathe before rushing to a conclusion. So
Speaker 1: it is very likely that I will return to Haley's saga,
Speaker 1: but not this week. But if you're just tuning in
Speaker 1: guess what you're in luck, there's something completely fucking different.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, two things scared me more
Speaker 1: than anything. The first was these YouTube videos that people
Speaker 1: sent around when I was in middle school, where you
Speaker 1: would get like really close to the screen to look
Speaker 1: at something mysterious.
Speaker 2: The audio would be really quiet, and then all of.
Speaker 3: A sudden.
Speaker 1: He sorry had to The other was the night I
Speaker 1: went over to my cousin's house to watch the ring,
Speaker 1: and I spent the next seven days convinced that I
Speaker 1: was going to die. Like every kid, I liked the
Speaker 1: feeling of being afraid, but could not physically handle when
Speaker 1: it actually happened. But like every kid, I did it
Speaker 1: all the time to show my older cousins that I
Speaker 1: was just as brave as them, when objectively I was not.
Speaker 1: My cousin's family's house is over three hundred years old,
Speaker 1: and our grandfather had told us all kinds of stories
Speaker 1: about what had allegedly happened there, like in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: a man hung himself in the closet in the front room,
Speaker 1: a rich man named Charles Copeland was said to have
Speaker 1: blown his head off. He should have slaves who had
Speaker 1: escaped from the South supposedly hid in the basement. A
Speaker 1: maid was locked in a closet and clowed her way out,
Speaker 1: leaving faint nail in prints on the door. Countless ghosts
Speaker 1: were spotted by my aunt's, my mom, my grandparents, my cousins,
Speaker 1: adopted this dalmatian one year that jumped out of a
Speaker 1: third story window and died. Did any of it really happen? Well,
Speaker 1: that last one definitely did and traumatized me. But the
Speaker 1: point is we thought all of it was true. And
Speaker 1: this was the house that we watched The Ring in
Speaker 1: when I was nine. If you haven't had the pleasure,
Speaker 1: The Ring is a two thousand and three American remake
Speaker 1: of the Japanese horror movie Ringu, And while Ringo is
Speaker 1: technically the better movie, it was not the one that
Speaker 1: I peed myself during, so we're gonna stick with the
Speaker 1: American one. It stars Naomi Watts as a woman who
Speaker 1: watches a cursed video tape. So if you watch the tape,
Speaker 1: you only have seven days to live before a little
Speaker 1: girl named Samara climbs out of a well with her
Speaker 1: hair draped over her face, all wet, and she climbs
Speaker 1: out of your TV. That you're playing the tape on and.
Speaker 2: She kills you.
Speaker 1: It's classic horror technophobia, a movie that makes a popular
Speaker 1: piece of technology forced nine year olds to pee themselves
Speaker 1: at their cousin's scary house. But weirdly enough, Ringu and
Speaker 1: subsequently The Ring was not originally written to scare kids
Speaker 1: out of engaging with the VHS technology. It was based
Speaker 1: on a Japanese folktale that went back three hundred years
Speaker 1: before Ringu, and originally was a story that followed a
Speaker 1: samurai who wanted to make his servant girl Okiku, his mistress,
Speaker 1: which drove her to take her own life and haunt him,
Speaker 1: crawling out of the well that she drowned herself in,
Speaker 1: just like Samara climbs out of the well in the movie.
Speaker 1: The story was adapted to a novel hundreds of years
Speaker 1: later in nineteen ninety eight, and it's this version of
Speaker 1: the story that became a horror hit in the US.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of the story of horror stories that
Speaker 1: transform as the ones lucky enough to make the jump
Speaker 1: from medium to medium survive. By the time The Ring
Speaker 1: gets to America, it's no longer about a Japanese samurai
Speaker 1: who wants to rape a young woman in his employment. Instead,
Speaker 1: it's about a neglected American daughter whose spirit is trapped
Speaker 1: in a piece of almost temporary technology. The core anxieties
Speaker 1: that the story explores are basically the same, but the
Speaker 1: technology and personal dynamics that communicate them are constantly shifting.
Speaker 1: Technophobia was a core feature of the early Internet.
Speaker 3: One.
Speaker 1: I remember my parents and my fellow children with secret
Speaker 1: MySpace accounts got really scared over were these copy pasta
Speaker 1: emails that you had to send to ten friends or
Speaker 1: face certain death.
Speaker 4: Every chain has a link. Every link is a life
Speaker 4: break the chain lose a life, Send this to five people,
Speaker 4: or death will come for you. You have twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: These wouldn't work now, and not just because most of
Speaker 1: us would welcome the sweet embrace of death. It's that
Speaker 1: the idea of a haunted email sounds kind of silly now.
Speaker 1: But chain emails are a good example of Web one
Speaker 1: point zero horror stories that explore that the idea of
Speaker 1: a computer or the Internet itself was scary. Like we
Speaker 1: talked about in our Hawkta series, Web two horror centers
Speaker 1: anxieties around social networks. I think my favorite in this
Speaker 1: genre was probably the movie Unfriended, which takes place on
Speaker 1: a skype call with a killer who hacks in.
Speaker 4: Use.
Speaker 5: Who is that I just tried to hang up on them?
Speaker 1: Can we get rid of this person? I don't know
Speaker 1: is here the whole time?
Speaker 6: It's just probably a glitch.
Speaker 1: Well, the glitch just tight. Web three horror is a
Speaker 1: hawk Tua era dystopia defined by fears around the blockchain
Speaker 1: and the decentralized Internet. So a lot of AI anxiety here.
Speaker 1: My favorite so far is probably the movie Megan, You
Speaker 1: Gotta Love Megan.
Speaker 7: Research shows if you force chilpy vegetables they'll be less
Speaker 7: likely to chose those foods as adults.
Speaker 1: Does that so yes, experts, you can turn off. I
Speaker 1: thought we were having a conversation. What's consistent in online
Speaker 1: horror is a fairly straightforward oral tradition. These are anonymous
Speaker 1: written stories and short films about the corners of the
Speaker 1: Internet that are terrifying. Since the early two thousands, a
Speaker 1: lot of these have come to be known as creepy
Speaker 1: pastas a play on the copy pasta term used to
Speaker 1: describe those old copy paste forward this email to ten people,
Speaker 1: or you will die kind of thing. Creepy pastas have
Speaker 1: been an online community that's waxed and waned for two decades,
Speaker 1: but there are consistence there. They're tech based horror stories
Speaker 1: and their absolute catnip for middle schoolers. And in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: one of the most famous modern horror stories put people
Speaker 1: in a choke hold, beginning only with a photo, one
Speaker 1: that had been circulating in spooky online communities for years,
Speaker 1: but didn't find its foothold in the public imagination until
Speaker 1: it was posted to four chan. The image isn't high quality.
Speaker 1: It looks like it was taken by a two thousands
Speaker 1: era digital camera, you know, crisp, but a little pixely somehow. Still,
Speaker 1: the colors are oversaturated and the contrast is a bit
Speaker 1: too high. The space pictured is lit by fluorescent lights
Speaker 1: in the ceiling. There's not an inch of this space.
Speaker 1: You can't see in the queasy sort of way that
Speaker 1: fluorescent lights allow. The thing is, there's not a lot
Speaker 1: to see because what we're looking at is a series
Speaker 1: of empty rooms, eerily empty rooms, and a space of
Speaker 1: indeterminate size. From our vantage point, which is a little crooked,
Speaker 1: as if the image was taken carelessly or when someone
Speaker 1: was surprised, we can see through at least three empty rooms,
Speaker 1: all with slightly different off white wallpaper that seems old
Speaker 1: enough to have faded to this sickly kind of yellow.
Speaker 1: There's a number of entrances into this space, but no
Speaker 1: windows and no doors. The molding is the same in
Speaker 1: every room. There's electrical outlets with nothing plugged in. The
Speaker 1: carpeting is a flat brown with what looks like the
Speaker 1: occasional wet spot. In a previous life, it could have
Speaker 1: been a painfully outdated office space, or maybe a waiting room.
Speaker 1: It's vacant now, but you can't help but feel like
Speaker 1: maybe you've been here before. Ian stopped the music. If
Speaker 1: you haven't seen the actual image of the back rooms yet,
Speaker 1: just pause the podcast and look it up. Okay, assuming
Speaker 1: you've gotten a proper look now. Audio mediums are tricky
Speaker 1: because memes are famously visual. But hopefully you see what
Speaker 1: I mean here. Okay, you can start the scary music again.
Speaker 1: This image was posted by an anonymous user in response
Speaker 1: to a prompt asking for images that were somehow off
Speaker 1: and on May thirteenth, twenty nineteen, for whatever reason, it clicked.
Speaker 1: Another anon responded to the photo, soon to be known
Speaker 1: as the back rooms with the lure that would make
Speaker 1: it famous.
Speaker 8: If you're not careful and you no clip out of
Speaker 8: reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the backrooms,
Speaker 8: where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet,
Speaker 8: the madness of mono yellow, the endless background noise of
Speaker 8: harescent lights at maximum hum buzz, and approximately six hundred
Speaker 8: million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be
Speaker 8: trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering
Speaker 8: around nearby, because it's sure as hell has heard you
Speaker 8: the back room.
Speaker 1: Your sixteenth minute starts now.
Speaker 9: I'm not.
Speaker 2: Joy stay.
Speaker 1: Six Welcome back to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where we
Speaker 1: look at the internet's main characters of the day, speak
Speaker 1: to them or this week the people who discovered them,
Speaker 1: and what that says about us and the Internet. And
Speaker 1: in keeping with the absolute yawning void that many Americans
Speaker 1: continue to feel during an absolute brutal start to the year,
Speaker 1: I hope everyone is doing okay all things considered. Today,
Speaker 1: I want to explore the world of the back rooms.
Speaker 1: A creepy image that off of a few pixels has
Speaker 1: exploded into multiple communities, a philosophical community, an ever growing
Speaker 1: horror fiction community, and a real life mystery. Today we're
Speaker 1: going to explore all three, and I'll be honest, this
Speaker 1: episode is a little weird for this show because it
Speaker 1: revolves around these freaky existential communities. But it's a freaky
Speaker 1: existential time, right And if you hang with us until
Speaker 1: the end of this episode, I can tell you exactly
Speaker 1: where the photo of the Backrooms was taken and the's
Speaker 1: actual history. So come with me if you dare to.
Speaker 1: May twenty nineteen, Lewis Varakhan and Milo Uanapolis are banned
Speaker 1: from Mark Zuckerberg's platforms. How quaint? Remember when he used
Speaker 1: to do that? Harry and Megan had a baby, which
Speaker 1: really mattered to one girl from your high school who
Speaker 1: was like, the real family is slaying right now, and
Speaker 1: you didn't have the heart to reminder about colonialism. And
Speaker 1: after years of random circulation, a four Chan user gave
Speaker 1: shape to what exactly made the back rooms so terrifying.
Speaker 1: If you haven't looked at the image of the back
Speaker 1: Rooms yet, I encourage you to look at my Instagram
Speaker 1: give it a like while you're at it, because unlike
Speaker 1: a lot of Internet horror, the back Rooms picture hasn't
Speaker 1: been photoshopped to look scarier than it actually is. The
Speaker 1: eeriness isn't because there's something scary in frame, but it's
Speaker 1: the tension, the uncertainty.
Speaker 8: The God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby,
Speaker 8: because it's sure as hell has heard you.
Speaker 10: Of it all.
Speaker 1: And the back Rooms only got more popular as a
Speaker 1: site of horror. And there's three or so years to
Speaker 1: follow after it was first posted to four chan in
Speaker 1: this weird thread, because wouldn't you know it, people were
Speaker 1: really susceptible to seeing fear in a lonely room that
Speaker 1: they felt trapped in during the year twenty twenty. Impossible
Speaker 1: to say why the back Rooms were the right harbinger
Speaker 1: of doom that went viral at the right time. But
Speaker 1: what fascinates me about the back Rooms is just how
Speaker 1: much this weird picture of a few empty rooms that
Speaker 1: I can't explain why but I know it smells weird
Speaker 1: has inspired to the point where I feel the need
Speaker 1: to explain these separate, opposing camps that devotees of the
Speaker 1: Backrooms fall into, and they seem to attract audiences at
Speaker 1: different stages of life. Reading one the slightly older set.
Speaker 1: From what I can gather find. The most haunting part
Speaker 1: of the backrooms is seeing it as a liminal space.
Speaker 1: We'll call them the liminal backrooms, and I include myself
Speaker 1: in this camp. The backrooms became the most popular example
Speaker 1: of this bizarre, familiar but menacing void like image, a
Speaker 1: perfect example of what many in the late twenty tens
Speaker 1: were accumulating and distributing on forums as liminal spaces. This
Speaker 1: side of the Backroom's fandom appear to agree that there
Speaker 1: is this feeling of vague danger in this image, but
Speaker 1: not a danger that implies a monster. What the backrooms
Speaker 1: are haunted by is absence, the feeling that anyone who
Speaker 1: spent time there is gone. Now it's mystery, it's nothingness,
Speaker 1: it's seemingly infinite. Space is where the terror is. And
Speaker 1: then there is the second camp that younger people seem
Speaker 1: to have fallen into during the Backroom's initial popularity. Reading too,
Speaker 1: this view of the backrooms put overt terror into the
Speaker 1: space by putting it in a creepy pasta format, so
Speaker 1: making the backrooms the setting of an extremely online campfire story,
Speaker 1: sometimes using familiar monsters and story beats from within the
Speaker 1: creepy pasta community to spin out fan fiction and web series,
Speaker 1: and almost all of this fan fiction and web series
Speaker 1: that I could learn about the authors were made by
Speaker 1: people about college age or younger. We're gonna call them
Speaker 1: the Creepy Pasta backrooms. And in the Creepy Pasta Backrooms,
Speaker 1: you were being pursued through this infinite space by a
Speaker 1: monster who wants to kill you. You can maybe see
Speaker 1: why these first two groups tend not to overlap in
Speaker 1: spite of being inspired by the same blurry picture. One
Speaker 1: relies on the absence of context in the image, and
Speaker 1: the other attempts to put something supernatural into that image.
Speaker 1: And while there's no definitive view of the backrooms, the
Speaker 1: Creepy Pasta read is certainly more conducive to internet viral spread.
Speaker 1: For young creative people. It serves as almost a writing
Speaker 1: prompt to make something about what you think is going
Speaker 1: to be lurking behind those walls. But there's a third community,
Speaker 1: the lost media backrooms. Unlike the first two, this group
Speaker 1: isn't interested in the emotions that the backroom's image provokes,
Speaker 1: but is concerned with finding the location of the actual backrooms.
Speaker 1: The physical location, a task that takes a lot of
Speaker 1: patience and diligence, and I'm thrilled to report, Yes, the
Speaker 1: backrooms have been identified and they're still there, and the
Speaker 1: journey defining them was goddamn fascinating. The discovery of the
Speaker 1: IRL backrooms was a year's long project with hundreds of
Speaker 1: contributors from the online lost media community and marked one
Speaker 1: of their hardest spot successes ever. But to fully understand
Speaker 1: these communities and how they interact with each other, I
Speaker 1: want to start with reading too the overt horror Creepy
Speaker 1: Pasta backrooms, which became the most famous space for amateur
Speaker 1: horror of the last ten years. So what are creepy pastas?
Speaker 1: By definition? Their Internet horror folk tales scary stories told
Speaker 1: from person to person, usually by amateurs, anonymously, and very
Speaker 1: often both. And while there is now an official creep
Speaker 1: past A website, the community began in the late nineties
Speaker 1: into the early two thousands and began pretty decentralized. A
Speaker 1: number of creepypasta folks would pop up anywhere from boards
Speaker 1: on four Chan and read it to old school angel
Speaker 1: fire sites and blog platforms. The first story to ever
Speaker 1: formally exist in this space was published online in two
Speaker 1: thousand and one called Ted the Caver, a series of
Speaker 1: blog posts that followed anonymous splunkers deeper into a very
Speaker 1: narrow local cave, who were subsequently driven mad by a
Speaker 1: supernatural being after discovering new cave passages, higheroglyphics, and start
Speaker 1: having nightmares. The story ends with a post saying that
Speaker 1: the splunkers are planning to bring a gun into the
Speaker 1: cave next time, and then the blog was never updated again.
Speaker 1: Part of the appeal of Ted the Caver at the
Speaker 1: time was the ambiguity to the two thousand and one
Speaker 1: audience of whether this really happened or not. The story
Speaker 1: was formatted on an angel fire blog and was updated
Speaker 1: over a period of two months and included links. It
Speaker 1: mimicked the real life blogging craze of the time. It's
Speaker 1: kind of an internet version of the Blair Witch Project,
Speaker 1: which came out two years before in nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 4: Can you Believe the O Cult may be involved in
Speaker 4: the disappearance of your son?
Speaker 9: I'm So Scared?
Speaker 1: And the movie created intentional confusion when it presented itself
Speaker 1: as a true found footage documentary. This approach would be
Speaker 1: replicated in later creepy pastas, but like anything, it really
Speaker 1: depends on the writer's skill as to whether these stories
Speaker 1: are actually scary. But I will say, as an adult,
Speaker 1: the best thing about creepypastas to me is that they're
Speaker 1: usually written with this kind of uncanny, amateurist style. And
Speaker 1: the reason that is is because it's mostly kids writing them.
Speaker 1: Here's an example of what I'm talking about. This is
Speaker 1: a very successful creepy pasta story called Jeff the Killer.
Speaker 1: And what Jeff the Killer is about is a kid
Speaker 1: named Jeff, and you'll never believe what he does. Here
Speaker 1: is how the anonymous writer describes Jeff being bullied.
Speaker 8: Early in the story, the kid landed and turned back
Speaker 8: to them. He kicked his skateboard up and caught it
Speaker 8: with his hands.
Speaker 4: The kid seemed to be about.
Speaker 8: Twelve, one year younger than Jeff. He wears an aeropostle
Speaker 8: shirt and ripped blue jeans. Well, well, well looks like
Speaker 8: we got some meat.
Speaker 1: Totally exactly and now thankfully, Jeff the Killer later gets
Speaker 1: his revenge when he Jeff that kills this bully. Let's
Speaker 1: hear how he does it.
Speaker 8: Something inside Jeff snaps, His psyche is destroyed, All rational
Speaker 8: thinking is gone. All he can do is kill. He
Speaker 8: grabs Randy and pile drives him to the ground. He
Speaker 8: gets on top of him and punches him straight in
Speaker 8: the heart. The punch causes Randy's heart to stop.
Speaker 1: I hate when that happens. There are hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of creepypastas, and they revolve around popular characters or popular
Speaker 1: ideas like the back rooms, which means that some are
Speaker 1: going to be better than others. Here's something from one
Speaker 1: of the backroom stories that I liked more.
Speaker 8: I was about halfway done with filling in my information
Speaker 8: when I slumped back in my chair. I hadn't gotten
Speaker 8: much sleep the night prior, and I was exhausted. As
Speaker 8: I slumped back, I noticed something very peculiar. My head
Speaker 8: never hit the wall. In fact, it felt like it
Speaker 8: went in. I got up, quite frightened and looked at
Speaker 8: the wall. Nothing, not a single hole or dent had
Speaker 8: been made in the wall by my head. So I
Speaker 8: reached to touch the wall and my fingers went through
Speaker 8: it pretty good.
Speaker 1: Right, But there are a lot of bad ones. And
Speaker 1: I'm not knocking the fact that these stories are amateurish, because,
Speaker 1: to be honest, Jeff the Killer's bullies air apostle shirt
Speaker 1: and that heart punch probably would have scared the shit
Speaker 1: out of me as a kid. But the more I
Speaker 1: read through these stories, the more it started to connect
Speaker 1: with me that creepy pastas are a way for creative
Speaker 1: kids to navigate their fears in the same way that
Speaker 1: fan fiction is a way for kids to navigate some
Speaker 1: of their early sexual or just generally out a lesson feelings.
Speaker 1: The story has depict these experiences of fear and their
Speaker 1: own bodies that in all likelihood they haven't had yet,
Speaker 1: but they think about all the time. For comparison, here
Speaker 1: is a pull from the classic fan fiction story My Immortal,
Speaker 1: which was based in the Harry Potter universe, which will
Speaker 1: become clear very quickly. Here it is.
Speaker 2: And then suddenly, just as I Draco kissed me passionately.
Speaker 2: Draco climbed on top of me and we started to
Speaker 2: make out keenly against a tree. He took off my
Speaker 2: top and I took off his clothes. I even took
Speaker 2: off my bra Then he put his thingy into my
Speaker 2: you know what, and.
Speaker 1: We did it for the first time. There is so
Speaker 1: much lore around the fan fiction My Immortal, but the
Speaker 1: short story is that it was written by a girl
Speaker 1: in middle school, and she uses these familiar characters and
Speaker 1: formative crushes in order to imagine herself in a sexual predicament.
Speaker 1: And so, while the Creepy Pasta and fanfit communities may
Speaker 1: not have full overlap, they serve similar functions and both
Speaker 1: have crossed over into the mainstream pretty successfully after peaking
Speaker 1: in the mid twenty tens. And while the back Rooms
Speaker 1: made its debut a few years after peak Creepy Pasta,
Speaker 1: they quickly became a popular recurring location in the Creepy
Speaker 1: Pasta space, not because of its emptiness and scariness, but
Speaker 1: because of the infinite possibilities for hiding unseen monsters. The
Speaker 1: most famous of these were made by a then sixteen
Speaker 1: year old filmmaker named Kane Parsons on YouTube, who short
Speaker 1: titled The back Rooms Found footage garnered millions of views
Speaker 1: when it first dropped in early twenty twenty two, going
Speaker 1: on to inspire about twenty more sh shorts from Cain
Speaker 1: after and these shorts are really fucking good. After no
Speaker 1: clipping out of reality, something that can be prompted by
Speaker 1: something as innocuous as a stumble, the mean character ends
Speaker 1: up in the infinite Rooms.
Speaker 4: What the hell?
Speaker 1: This series places the back Rooms explicitly in the world
Speaker 1: of the supernatural, and while purists aren't necessarily happy about it,
Speaker 1: Caine Parsons recently signed a deal with A twenty four
Speaker 1: to adapt the series into a feature and as with
Speaker 1: the Creepypastas before it, like slender Man or other longstanding
Speaker 1: alternate reality spaces online, the back Rooms built out a
Speaker 1: ton of lore through series like Cain's. In the series,
Speaker 1: there's a reveal of a big secret corporation that discovered
Speaker 1: the realm of the Backrooms, and it's told in the
Speaker 1: same found footage realism style that made successes of the
Speaker 1: Blair Witch Project and Ted the caver So. At the
Speaker 1: time of this writing, as I said, the Creepy pasta
Speaker 1: interpretation of the Backrooms is far more popular than either.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about later in the episode. But
Speaker 1: what I think makes it special is that, unlike so
Speaker 1: much of what we see as necessary to make a
Speaker 1: footprint on the Internet right now, the scam, the recognition,
Speaker 1: the desperation, honestly that a companies hoping this moment could
Speaker 1: improve your life during a time that feels so hopeless.
Speaker 1: While the story is about the void that feeling really
Speaker 1: isn't present in the creepypasta backrooms. The online video games
Speaker 1: designed to walk through the backrooms you can play for free.
Speaker 1: Caane Parson's work is free to consume, and much of
Speaker 1: the built out creepypasta lure isn't even attributed to any
Speaker 1: one person. It's a community built on passion and connection
Speaker 1: over a shared interest and I guess a shared fear.
Speaker 1: And I think that's really cool. We could talk about
Speaker 1: the types of monsters one finds in the back rooms
Speaker 1: all day, but I wanted to talk to a true
Speaker 1: scholar of the creepy pasta form enter Sarah Bimo, author
Speaker 1: of The Horror of Networked Experience, which is a full
Speaker 1: look into how creepy pastas and Web two led to
Speaker 1: stories like this. Here's our talk.
Speaker 7: Hi, my name is Sarah Bimo. I'm a PhD candidate
Speaker 7: at your university in Toronto, Canada. My research really broadly
Speaker 7: is about like kind of like effective experiences of digital life,
Speaker 7: so like sinceations, emotions, like forms of knowledge that are
Speaker 7: not distinctly rational. Yeah. I love creepy pasta and written
Speaker 7: a book chapter about it and working on a follow up.
Speaker 1: The chapter that you sent a long dev it's so fascinating.
Speaker 1: It's called the horror of networked existence. But before we
Speaker 1: get into sort of the contents of your research, I'm
Speaker 1: curious in your field of study, what first drew you
Speaker 1: to creepy process.
Speaker 7: I'm kind of like was initially and still am like
Speaker 7: another object of study and of interest for me was
Speaker 7: the way is that people on social media sites developed
Speaker 7: like intuitions of algorithms and algorithmic governance.
Speaker 10: So you're probably.
Speaker 7: Familiar with a lot of these intuitions, like stuff like
Speaker 7: I'll go speak, you know, where people self censor themselves
Speaker 7: to avoid like the purview of like what feels like,
Speaker 7: you know, omnipotent algorithm on.
Speaker 1: A live great sort of that line of.
Speaker 5: Yes, exactly, gotcha.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So that's one example of things that I see as intuitions,
Speaker 7: like forms of knowledge about technological systems that are not
Speaker 7: developed rational and birationally I mean, like necessarily entirely cognitively
Speaker 7: and through gaining like true information about like the code
Speaker 7: of the algorithm or whatever, but are developed kind of
Speaker 7: tacitly and bodily and creepy pasta I see as a
Speaker 7: similar kind of phenomenon what I classify as classic creepy
Speaker 7: pasta like written let's say, like before twenty ten or so.
Speaker 7: I see it as something that is like kind of
Speaker 7: the product of maybe like unconscious anxieties surrounding like digital
Speaker 7: communication that kind of come to fruition and manifest as
Speaker 7: this new form of horror. And separately, I just like
Speaker 7: I read it a lot as a kid, and I
Speaker 7: just like.
Speaker 1: I say, were you a creepy pasta kid? As well?
Speaker 1: You have to out yourself as a creepypasta head, But
Speaker 1: it feels like incorrect me if I'm wrong. But the
Speaker 1: only sort of creepy pasta that has ever broken through
Speaker 1: to the mainstream is the slender Man story.
Speaker 5: Definitely.
Speaker 7: Slender Man is undoubtedly the most popular in.
Speaker 1: The moment, so cynical way possible. It does make sense
Speaker 1: to adapt creepy pastas because they're of dubious authorship and
Speaker 1: they've already been focus grouped essentially, But to start, where
Speaker 1: do creepypastas come from? How do they sort of grow
Speaker 1: in popularity over time?
Speaker 7: Creepy pastas are very interesting, and they've often been compared
Speaker 7: to like folk tales or legends or myths because classic
Speaker 7: ones like the ones that kind of came out in
Speaker 7: the early days of the Internet.
Speaker 5: Relatively. By that, I mean like the early two thousands.
Speaker 7: Dish are largely anonymous and often kind of crowd sourced
Speaker 7: so collectively authored, so flour chan is the common source
Speaker 7: for many of them. I know that slender Man began
Speaker 7: on the Something Awful forums where a user named Victor
Speaker 7: Surge posted these like photoshop images featuring these like tall
Speaker 7: creepy man. But if that's where it started, and then
Speaker 7: kind of through collective authorship, they the legend grew and
Speaker 7: grew and grew. This is very similar to folklore practices,
Speaker 7: wherein uh there's like a kind of distributed anonymous authorship
Speaker 7: that allows the stories to develop and morph over time,
Speaker 7: so that the you know, possibly the most interesting or
Speaker 7: shocking or like memeable elements of them are able to
Speaker 7: kind of grow and get developed, whereas the boring stuff
Speaker 7: maybe gets like left to the wayside, So that way
Speaker 7: they're kind of like bread to be as maybe like
Speaker 7: dynamic and as effective affecting as possible. There's also like
Speaker 7: the Reddit slash the r slash No Sleep forum, where
Speaker 7: obviously you cannot be as anonymous as you can be fortune.
Speaker 7: So I think that this kind of sense of authenticity
Speaker 7: and of you know, urban legendness is fostered through this
Speaker 7: like collective role play. The folk tale qualities are fostered
Speaker 7: through kind of different means.
Speaker 1: I think it's also interesting that it seems to sort
Speaker 1: of rise to prominence alongside fan fiction forums, which I
Speaker 1: know are their own animal altogether, but the idea that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: sort of during the web one point zero era, there
Speaker 1: are anonymous writers that are sort of building these worlds collectively.
Speaker 1: But as far as the Creepy Pasta world goes, what
Speaker 1: is drawing people to it? And do you have a
Speaker 1: feeling of what sort of age range or demographics participate
Speaker 1: in these groups.
Speaker 7: I can't say for certain. My impression is that it's
Speaker 7: largely younger people. I have that impression just from you
Speaker 7: know the fact that when I was a Creepy Pasta kid,
Speaker 7: the intranet was something that like mostly younger people were on.
Speaker 7: My parents like would never have had any idea, whereas
Speaker 7: now they're kind of like more on social media and stuff.
Speaker 7: Also just kind of the quality of the writing. Often,
Speaker 7: I think the fact that traditionally this kind of practice
Speaker 7: of like campfire stories and stuff. It's like it's something
Speaker 7: really associated with teenagers and young adults. And also I
Speaker 7: think it's kind of a sense of a kind of
Speaker 7: coming of age present through many of these stories.
Speaker 5: Sometimes that's more ambiguous.
Speaker 7: I think there's a sense of being confronted with like
Speaker 7: the kind of your raucracy and infrastructures of the adult
Speaker 7: world that.
Speaker 5: Is somehow being negotiated in these.
Speaker 7: So in classic creepypasta, there's like often like email is
Speaker 7: a source of horror, So that's one example. Then I'm
Speaker 7: also thinking of the kind of infrastructural horror ones which
Speaker 7: like makes strange the process of like driving or like elevators.
Speaker 7: There needs to be like a sense of wonder and strangeness,
Speaker 7: making strange of the mundane to you know, be explored
Speaker 7: like as thoroughly as it is explored in creepypasta. Another
Speaker 7: really common theme is this kind of nightmares nostalgia of
Speaker 7: like childhood TV shows or experiences. So like a big
Speaker 7: thing is like theme parks that are scary. Handle Cove
Speaker 7: is about like a kid's TV show that a bunch
Speaker 7: of people all watched. Within the digesis of the story
Speaker 7: that turned out to be like demonic and nightmarish. So
Speaker 7: I just get this kind of strong sense of anxiety
Speaker 7: of a separation from childhood that is being dealt with
Speaker 7: or negotiated in some way. People who are full adults
Speaker 7: are often like probably like more okay with the transition
Speaker 7: from childhood to adulthood. You're like more established, And I
Speaker 7: don't know, it could definitely be like made strange and alienated.
Speaker 7: It's like a very common topic, but yeah, the particular
Speaker 7: preoccupation I just a very very teenage, very young adult.
Speaker 1: And you're right about this as well of a way
Speaker 1: of forming the networked self, which you describe as sort
Speaker 1: of a Web two point zero innovation, but almost as
Speaker 1: a tool to help form identity and navigate anxieties and
Speaker 1: fears through this genre. How did you sort of come
Speaker 1: to that conclusion as you were.
Speaker 7: Studying Queepypasta as a genre reflects anxieties surrounding the Web
Speaker 7: two point oh model of communication, which is marked by like,
Speaker 7: for example, more interactivity, kind of platformization, you know, social
Speaker 7: media versus Web one point zero, which was characterized by
Speaker 7: like kind of static web pages, less interactivity. The reason
Speaker 7: I kind of came to that interpretation was because of
Speaker 7: this common preoccupation with the affordances of Web two point oh,
Speaker 7: like the modalities of the Internet and the infrastructure of
Speaker 7: the Internet itself was like the topic of many of
Speaker 7: these stories I mentioned before, Like email is often deployed
Speaker 7: as like a narrative element. Smile Dog, for example, consists
Speaker 7: of like a cursed image that is shared via email.
Speaker 7: And I think this praise upon this kind of fear
Speaker 7: of surveillance and of exterior forces that can reach you
Speaker 7: no matter where you are, no matter what time. It
Speaker 7: is the instantaneity of communication, which is like unprecedented in
Speaker 7: human history. For example, the telephone, like the telegram, letters,
Speaker 7: like none of these forms of communication are able to
Speaker 7: do this.
Speaker 1: Now that we've moved into Web three point zero, how
Speaker 1: have these stories changed to reflect more contemporary technological anxieties.
Speaker 7: It's interesting, Like I was thinking about how the back
Speaker 7: Rooms is similar and dissimilar to like classic creepypasta, because
Speaker 7: I think the Backrooms is the natural inheritor of this
Speaker 7: tradition and it's also quite popular. Another maybe kind of
Speaker 7: similar one is like SCP, like a collaborative wiki wherein
Speaker 7: people post articles about like the SEP Foundation, which deals
Speaker 7: with like paranorl Moor.
Speaker 5: Threats and stuff.
Speaker 7: I think that classic creepypasta maybe allows for the possibility
Speaker 7: of a non digital life in that it's almost kind
Speaker 7: of like moralistic, where it's like if you spend too
Speaker 7: much time on the internet, if you're always like on
Speaker 7: your email, you're more likely to become victim to what
Speaker 7: dark forces like animate the web. But there is this
Speaker 7: possibility of a non digital like natural life, almost and
Speaker 7: I think that the backgrounds at least no longer engages
Speaker 7: with that, or it's not really committed to the idea
Speaker 7: that there is the possibility for a non digital life.
Speaker 7: I say this because I don't think there's the same
Speaker 7: kind of moralizing of don't do this and you'll be safe,
Speaker 7: but rather there's like the acceptance that this kind of
Speaker 7: mode of reality, which is conditioned by technology and by
Speaker 7: the Internet and by digitalization, is completely pervasive and it's
Speaker 7: just now a fundational structure of our lives. The source
Speaker 7: of fear becomes maybe more sophisticated or more complex in
Speaker 7: that they're now just engaging with kind of questions of
Speaker 7: appearance versus reality, like more fundamentally like what is reality?
Speaker 7: There are still these kind of fears of ghosts and
Speaker 7: demons and forces that haunt web infrastructures, but it's no
Speaker 7: longer possible to escape them by getting offline. They are
Speaker 7: perhaps more and more endemic and more unavoidable. So I
Speaker 7: feel like the fear is it feels more existential and
Speaker 7: more kind of deeply rooted. Again, these are This is
Speaker 7: just kind of you know, my thoughts on seeing like
Speaker 7: the backrooms posts.
Speaker 1: But that makes a lot of sense. Is I think
Speaker 1: a lot of the anxieties or knee jerk reactions to
Speaker 1: earlier forms of Internet anxiety is how do I make
Speaker 1: this go away? Where now it's more like I can't
Speaker 1: make this go away? How can I navigate it in
Speaker 1: a way that's comfortable for me? Which is like a
Speaker 1: pretty major shift.
Speaker 7: The backrooms is really like a case of like children
Speaker 7: yearned for third spaces, because I think that our current
Speaker 7: moment is one in which public space has been largely
Speaker 7: like neoliberalized and rendered completely sterile and kind of hostile
Speaker 7: to forms.
Speaker 5: Of identity formation and community making.
Speaker 7: And the back rooms in the backgrounds I see a
Speaker 7: bit of a reflection of this kind of anxiety or
Speaker 7: feeling that there's the home, there's the workplace. There's the
Speaker 7: domain of nature and there's nothing outside of that. Because
Speaker 7: and this relates to the luminality again, these are places
Speaker 7: you just kind of like pass through. They have a
Speaker 7: standardized architecture, a kind of deindividualized people. Everyone is rendered
Speaker 7: the same by passing through them. So I think this
Speaker 7: is also a kind of anxiety surrounding late stage capitalism
Speaker 7: and the effects it has on kind of architecture and
Speaker 7: space and identity.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much to Sarah Bimo. You can find
Speaker 1: more of her work in the description of this episode.
Speaker 1: So call me Giata deal a Renis on Halloween, because honey,
Speaker 1: that was some creepy pasta. Give me some horns. And
Speaker 1: when we come back, we're switching gears to the philosophical
Speaker 1: the liminal Backrooms. Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I once
Speaker 1: got so scared reading a slender Man's story that I
Speaker 1: had to watch six consecutive episodes of Family Guy to
Speaker 1: calm down. And we're returning to the Backrooms to get
Speaker 1: a better look at the second now vibrant online community
Speaker 1: that helped launch them into fame and stick around because
Speaker 1: the true story of the Backrooms comes right after this.
Speaker 1: But first, more Glorious Weirdness listener the Liminal Backrooms. The
Speaker 1: liminal space community existed prior to the popularity of the backrooms,
Speaker 1: but for many, including myself, it was through the backrooms
Speaker 1: that I learned that this community and this term exists
Speaker 1: did at all. So unless you're an ap English expat
Speaker 1: or just a fan of this genre of weird Internet,
Speaker 1: you might need a better working definition of what a
Speaker 1: liminal space actually means. Liminal, according to miss Merriam Webster, is.
Speaker 8: Of relating to or situated at a sensory threshold barely
Speaker 8: perceptible or capable of eliciting a response.
Speaker 1: So threshold is the key word here. When applied in
Speaker 1: a cultural or anthropological space, liminal is something associated with
Speaker 1: a ritual around a life marker. So think bar Mitzvah's
Speaker 1: kinsinirez Sweet sixteens, religious confirmations, all rituals associated with adolescents
Speaker 1: the ugliest, horniest threshold of human life. And the way
Speaker 1: that this same word is used in the liminal space
Speaker 1: community doesn't ignore the dictionary definie, but it does clarify
Speaker 1: the feeling that accompanies it. If you search liminal space,
Speaker 1: it becomes obvious that this feeling of transition is present.
Speaker 1: Liminal spaces are pictures of places that you would only
Speaker 1: spend time in on your way to somewhere else. Think
Speaker 1: hotel hallways in the middle of the night, empty airports,
Speaker 1: waiting rooms, old malls, rest stops, abandoned parking lots, specific
Speaker 1: spaces that are associated with a passing through. Very rarely
Speaker 1: someone's actual home. And what's another way to say that,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, thresholds Liminal spaces in this Internet community are
Speaker 1: defined by the uneasiness one gets when looking at them.
Speaker 1: They're usually empty, always of people, and often of lighting
Speaker 1: or objects. If you're in the hotel hallway, you're always alone.
Speaker 1: The mall is more often than not abandoned, and whatever
Speaker 1: remains of its stores are sparse and feel from a
Speaker 1: past decade. There is an implied nostalgia to many of
Speaker 1: these liminal spaces by extension, and that's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I think they appeal to a slightly older audience,
Speaker 1: because those are people who can summon the image of
Speaker 1: something they remember that no longer exists, like chunky cheese
Speaker 1: animatronic bands. But there is one small controversy within the
Speaker 1: liminal backrooms interpretation, and that's whether a liminal space can
Speaker 1: be strictly one that exists in real life, or if
Speaker 1: a digital space can be liminal too, And this disagreement
Speaker 1: appears to be microgenerational. People who associate nostalgia with analog
Speaker 1: technology tend to be purists and say nothing on a
Speaker 1: computer could be liminal, while people who grew up online
Speaker 1: have a much easier time seeing this quality in older
Speaker 1: digital images. I'm a little bit on the fence about
Speaker 1: this one, and I tend to find the photos of
Speaker 1: old malls and hallways scarier than AI generated infinity spaces.
Speaker 1: But there are some digital images that I find eerie,
Speaker 1: not just because of their implied void, but because of
Speaker 1: the nostalgia I get when I look at them. An
Speaker 1: example that stands out to me is this old screensaver
Speaker 1: that would loop in countless elementary school computer labs I
Speaker 1: went into when I was a kid. The screensaver is
Speaker 1: this infinite brick hallway that every few seconds turned to
Speaker 1: corner after corner, and the walls occasionally turn to concrete
Speaker 1: for no reason. The screensaver was amazed and nowhere, but
Speaker 1: every once in a while, this translucent smiley face would
Speaker 1: appear at the end of one of the hallways like
Speaker 1: almost like it was saying congratulations, you made it, except
Speaker 1: you hadn't made it. You push right through the smiley
Speaker 1: face and take the next turn into the infinite corridor.
Speaker 1: It never ends. That to me is an extremely liminal space.
Speaker 1: But there's also the matter of timing. Remember the back
Speaker 1: rooms became popular shortly before the pandemic lockdown of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty and would only become more popular through the early
Speaker 1: years of the decade, culminating with Kane Parsons series in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two. Kane Parsons would have been about fourteen
Speaker 1: years old during the pandemic lockdown, So the audience and
Speaker 1: often the creators of this content were people at a
Speaker 1: liminal place in their lives adolescence, living in this moment
Speaker 1: in history that also felt very liminal, because what were
Speaker 1: the early twenty twenties defined by, if not discomfort, forced isolation,
Speaker 1: fear and uncertainty. Fortunately things have improved, of course, This
Speaker 1: still expanding corner of the Internet didn't invent the idea
Speaker 1: of spaces, but it sharpened the definition and pinpointed the
Speaker 1: feeling that a true liminal space is thought to evoke.
Speaker 1: There are plenty of artists who pre date the Internet
Speaker 1: who have captured this feeling very effectively, filmmakers like Stanley
Speaker 1: Kubrick with the long, eerie hotel Hallways of the Shining,
Speaker 1: basically all of the work of David Lynch. And there's
Speaker 1: also the cautionary, very vacant feeling cities of techno dystopia
Speaker 1: movies like Videodrome and Blade Runner. And this aesthetic has
Speaker 1: inspired a fair amount of YouTube horror, which I'll specify
Speaker 1: not the creepypasta corner of YouTube. We'll get there, but
Speaker 1: these videos and stories around eerie, slow moving, empty landscapes,
Speaker 1: and as time marched on, the kids that experienced these
Speaker 1: kinds of liminal spaces grew up and began making liminal
Speaker 1: art of their own. Yile Edward Ball and Jane Schoenbrunn
Speaker 1: are horror film directors. They're both born in the late eighties,
Speaker 1: and their respectively fantastic movies that reference online horror are
Speaker 1: both influenced by creepy pasta and the movies in film
Speaker 1: that influence that culture. So just an araboris of backroom
Speaker 1: like spaces. Kyle Edward Ball's first feature is twenty twenty
Speaker 1: two's skin amerink a terrifying found footage movie about two
Speaker 1: young siblings who find themselves seemingly alone in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night, and then the doors and windows of
Speaker 1: the house begin to disappear. It's liminal to its core
Speaker 1: and just full of this sense of claustrophobia, of a
Speaker 1: space where you're supposed to feel safe, you're home, but
Speaker 1: the space is collapsing within itself. And Ball didn't find
Speaker 1: liminality by mistake. He got his start by making horror
Speaker 1: shorts on YouTube from twenty seventeen to twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: and I fanesked what will become his signature style in
Speaker 1: a series called Fite Sized Nightmares, where he would adapt
Speaker 1: viewers submitted recaps of their own nightmares and translate them
Speaker 1: into experiment films to post on YouTube. He told The
Speaker 1: New York Times about his connection to internet horror back
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 8: I had a YouTube channel where people would comment on
Speaker 8: things that scared them. But as I kept giving that answer,
Speaker 8: I realized there are a lot of things that inspired
Speaker 8: this movie that I'm not even comfortable to say.
Speaker 1: At the heart of.
Speaker 8: It is pain and sadness and a little bit of anger.
Speaker 1: And then there's the work of Jane Schoenbrun, whose most
Speaker 1: recent movie is the incredible I Saw the TV Glow.
Speaker 1: They also got their start online. Their first project, twenty
Speaker 1: eighteen's A Self Induced Hallucination, was composed of only found
Speaker 1: online footage that ended up piecing together a narrative about
Speaker 1: the history of creepypasta legend the slender Man, and when
Speaker 1: they moved into films that they shot on their own,
Speaker 1: we get the mother Load, the best example I've seen
Speaker 1: of how spaces like the backrooms and Creepy Pasta can
Speaker 1: shape and define adolescence. Twenty twenty one's We're All Going
Speaker 1: to the World's Fair. The movie follows a loner, neglected
Speaker 1: teenage girl's obsessive journey doing a creepy Pasta style YouTube
Speaker 1: challenge called the World's Fair Challenge. And for what it's worth,
Speaker 1: boilers ahead for this movie, so please give ahead a
Speaker 1: minute or so if you haven't seen it and you
Speaker 1: want to. It's streaming on Max right now. And while
Speaker 1: we spend most of the movie thinking that what's happening
Speaker 1: to her is supernatural, she's flailing in her sleep, she's
Speaker 1: smearing paint on her face. It's revealed in a conversation
Speaker 1: between her and another World's Fair Challenge participant at the end.
Speaker 1: But this isn't true at all. She's just doing what
Speaker 1: a lot of teenagers do, usaying her feelings of loneliness
Speaker 1: and frustration through an alternate reality horror game, something we
Speaker 1: only learn when the other player worries that she might
Speaker 1: hurt herself in real life?
Speaker 9: How long until I do it? I need to sure, code,
Speaker 9: I promise you was scared.
Speaker 4: I think I need to ask you something.
Speaker 9: Sure?
Speaker 7: What is it? But when we need to go out
Speaker 7: of the game first? Is that?
Speaker 4: Is that?
Speaker 7: Okay? Sure?
Speaker 9: What's that?
Speaker 7: That's an expression?
Speaker 4: It means outside the margins of the game.
Speaker 1: World's Fare pinpoints the straddled experiences of the liminal back
Speaker 1: rooms and the creepy pasta backrooms. For the whole movie,
Speaker 1: the protagonist, Casey, retreats into the perceived horror of being
Speaker 1: possessed in order to process the suffering that they're feeling
Speaker 1: as an outsider during an extremely liminal stage of her life.
Speaker 1: When you take a step back, the actual liminal space
Speaker 1: that the character exists in is her own bedroom. When
Speaker 1: asked about the Internet's influence on their work in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two in Little White Lies, Schonbrunn said, it's driving
Speaker 1: as much from the dial up wild West, haunted landscape
Speaker 1: that was my childhood online as it is from twenty
Speaker 1: twelve era creepy pasta amateur YouTube aesthetics, and I was
Speaker 1: of that generation where the computer entered the home and
Speaker 1: slowly became more and more of a magnet. Especially for
Speaker 1: me as a queer creative kid. It was a space
Speaker 1: that was really important for me because it was hard
Speaker 1: to be both of those things. Where I was growing up,
Speaker 1: it was viewed as dark or strange, or danger, risks
Speaker 1: or wrong. I would wait for everyone to go to
Speaker 1: bed and stay up on the computer, writing and reading
Speaker 1: fan fiction, lurking on message boards, and aiming with people
Speaker 1: from school and weirdos I met online. It was something
Speaker 1: I never acknowledged or talked about in my real life.
Speaker 1: That's the dominant experience I was drawing from emotionally and
Speaker 1: trying to explore with the film. I have a strong
Speaker 1: suspicion that combining technophobia with the reality of living in
Speaker 1: a real, three dimensional dystopia is going to dominate horror
Speaker 1: in the years to come, especially as go to creatives
Speaker 1: have a closer and more formative relationship with the Internet,
Speaker 1: and if that art is anything like Kyle and James,
Speaker 1: we're in for some good stuff. So I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk to someone who deeply understood the academic and contemporary
Speaker 1: definitions of liminal spaces to get to the core of
Speaker 1: what the backrooms means better. And we're better to look
Speaker 1: for someone with this very particular set of skills than
Speaker 1: the Internet. Peter Heft is a philosopher who spent a
Speaker 1: hell of a lot of time analyzing the way that
Speaker 1: we interpret space and how it affects us psychologically. I
Speaker 1: learned so much about how liminality originated in his paper
Speaker 1: Betwixt and Between Zones as liminal and deterritorialized Spaces. Here's
Speaker 1: our talk.
Speaker 10: My name is Peter Heft. I'm a doctoral candidate at
Speaker 10: the Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism at
Speaker 10: the University of Western Ontario.
Speaker 1: What drew you to the idea of liminality and just
Speaker 1: sort of realizing that, you know, while there's been a
Speaker 1: lot of writing about space just conceptually, there hasn't been
Speaker 1: a lot of writing about this phenomenon specifically.
Speaker 10: I think there are I guess a few ways to
Speaker 10: answer that. So on the one hand, right, I was
Speaker 10: drawn to this topic generally because I was reading the
Speaker 10: work of HP Lovecraft, and within his work, this idea
Speaker 10: of thresholds and passing beyond on the known into the
Speaker 10: unknown is this kind of recurring motif. And at the
Speaker 10: time I was also listening to a very interesting podcast
Speaker 10: called Weird Studies that kind of tackles similar topics from
Speaker 10: an academic vein, and I realized, I guess that like
Speaker 10: this question of zones and liminality was talked about a
Speaker 10: lot in an anthropological register, also in kind of like
Speaker 10: the weird fiction and weird theory side of things, But
Speaker 10: the melding of the two was somewhat there, and I
Speaker 10: wanted to try to fill some niche.
Speaker 1: The most basic question I could ask here is what
Speaker 1: is a classic example of a liminal space of this
Speaker 1: threshold like space you're describing.
Speaker 10: There are a few ways to think about it. The
Speaker 10: kind of traditional anthropological account, right, is a more personal
Speaker 10: or subjective accounting, a mental space where someone is kind
Speaker 10: of excluded from a community for the sake of building
Speaker 10: themselves up, and then they're reintegrated within the community. And
Speaker 10: so this is like a space in a sense of
Speaker 10: like a zone of indistinction where they are kind of
Speaker 10: part of the community but kind of not. And that's
Speaker 10: the traditional anthropological understanding at least. There's also then the
Speaker 10: kind of Internet account which is quite literally like a space,
Speaker 10: which would be like an airport or a bus station
Speaker 10: or things like that, like the copy pasta Reddit post
Speaker 10: that's like, oh, this is like a scary type of place, right.
Speaker 1: At least in the Internet sense. A lot of these
Speaker 1: limital spaces, Yeah, they definitely look creepy. They're very often
Speaker 1: very like monochromatic and empty. But the point you made
Speaker 1: was that there are ordinarily places that you don't stay
Speaker 1: for very long, rest stops, like waiting rooms, like places
Speaker 1: where you're not where you're intended to be between doing
Speaker 1: other things.
Speaker 10: One of the things that is interesting, and I was
Speaker 10: thinking about this last night, is that I think there's
Speaker 10: a distinction between I guess what I would call an
Speaker 10: intrinsic or an inherently liminal space and one that is
Speaker 10: not in transit clear inherently limital, and the former instance,
Speaker 10: I think it would be like bus stops, airports, train stations,
Speaker 10: things like that, insofar as they are literally designed to
Speaker 10: be threshold spaces between a destination and between destinations, right,
Speaker 10: And we can kind of see this very literally codified
Speaker 10: and like the weird legal status of airports, like you're
Speaker 10: kind of in the country, you're kind of not. It's
Speaker 10: those are very literally threshold spaces. But I think those
Speaker 10: are ultimately not all that interesting because they're so rigidly defined,
Speaker 10: Like they are explicitly defined as spaces in between destinations
Speaker 10: are two more codified locales. I think the more interesting
Speaker 10: instance would be things that are kind of wrenched from
Speaker 10: their ordinary context, or spaces that are changed depending on
Speaker 10: how we interact with them. And I think those can
Speaker 10: become liminal or cease having a level of limonel depending
Speaker 10: upon how we're interacting with them. And certainly there's more
Speaker 10: to say on that as well.
Speaker 1: But I mean, what would be an example of a
Speaker 1: space like that?
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean I think a school, I think is
Speaker 10: an interesting example, right because on the one hand, right,
Speaker 10: you go to like around any school during the academic year,
Speaker 10: and there are children running around, and there's like garbage
Speaker 10: all around, and there's like bells, drinking and stuff like that, Right,
Speaker 10: But once you enter the school during the winter or
Speaker 10: the summer. It's the context is very different. There's nobody
Speaker 10: running around, it's absent. You hear just the tick of
Speaker 10: clocks on the walls. But our relationship to this space
Speaker 10: has changed dramatically, and I think that provides it's one
Speaker 10: instance of kind of like an unsettling feeling.
Speaker 1: Perhaps I wanted to go back a little bit to
Speaker 1: talk about the anthropological definition of liminality versus what we've
Speaker 1: seen it sort of evolved into on the Internet, because
Speaker 1: it seems like the liminality of anthropology is kind of
Speaker 1: a more psychological state. Could you give me some examples
Speaker 1: of that, because I know you reference that it's related
Speaker 1: to feeling like a ritual or a major change.
Speaker 10: I can't give like a specific example of a like
Speaker 10: specific indigenous group where like such a ritual might take place,
Speaker 10: because I'm not an anthropologist in that context. Right, it's
Speaker 10: a rite of passage insofar as somebody is not wholly
Speaker 10: accepted within the group until they complete some certain task
Speaker 10: or whatever, and that's like this zone of indistinction where
Speaker 10: they're perhaps still a child, not quite an adult, or
Speaker 10: I guess we can also think of this in kind
Speaker 10: of religious contexts as well. Like in Judaism, right, you're
Speaker 10: still a child, but you're almost an adult as you're
Speaker 10: learning to read the tara for a barmitzvah. Traditionally, like
Speaker 10: cultural things, the jump to the kind of physical register
Speaker 10: in the context of the Internet creepypasta sphere has probably
Speaker 10: just been an appropriation of terms to some extent, insofar
Speaker 10: as the Latin lineman just literally means threshold, So I
Speaker 10: would imagine that there's in that sense just an appropriation
Speaker 10: of terms, but also perhaps kind of this weird recognition
Speaker 10: that like, once you perhaps enter these odd spaces, you're
Speaker 10: somewhat excluded from whatever you had been in previously, Like
Speaker 10: you venture into the back rooms and you're no longer
Speaker 10: in the hotel, or you're no longer amongst the living
Speaker 10: or whatever.
Speaker 1: I mean, being thirteen years old kind of does feel
Speaker 1: like being in a haunted room. It's extremely lonely and
Speaker 1: a little scary. I can see how people get from
Speaker 1: A to B there.
Speaker 10: You could say that I guess middle school would be
Speaker 10: a like that kind of threshold space in a weird way.
Speaker 1: Cool, Yeah, is there anything else that you'd like to touch.
Speaker 10: On the other thing that I was thinking about, I
Speaker 10: suppose is you were. There's also kind of for anyone
Speaker 10: that plays video games in your audience, right, there's the
Speaker 10: phenomenon of no clipping or clipping out of a map,
Speaker 10: which in the context of video games, right, you are
Speaker 10: wandering around and given a map that's been created, and
Speaker 10: you run up against the edge and there's a glitch
Speaker 10: and you kind of jump out of the map and
Speaker 10: you can see the entire world that you're in. And
Speaker 10: that's an example of I guess this like kind of
Speaker 10: a weird digital version of of the back room. Is
Speaker 10: that I think that one who is familiar with video
Speaker 10: games has probably encountered at some point like the world
Speaker 10: has not fully been rendered yet.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much to Peter. You can find more
Speaker 1: of his work in the description of this episode. And
Speaker 1: when we come back, we solve the real life mystery
Speaker 1: of the back rooms. Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I've
Speaker 1: rewritten this episode no fewer than three times, because man,
Speaker 1: does the Internet know how to complicate a series of
Speaker 1: pixels and buckle in because now that you know the
Speaker 1: world built around the backrooms, let's meet the rooms themselves.
Speaker 1: We're making room for the rooms, if you will. I've
Speaker 1: seen this week, people are taking the lyrics of defining
Speaker 1: gravity and really holding space with that and feeling power
Speaker 1: in that. I didn't know that that was happening. In
Speaker 1: the final read of the back Rooms, as discovered by
Speaker 1: the online Lost media community, please meet eight o seven
Speaker 1: Oregon Street in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Oshkosh nineteen twelve a Wisconsin
Speaker 1: city named after a menomine chief. It's a small Midwestern
Speaker 1: city of around thirty three thousand people by the year
Speaker 1: that the fictional movie Titanic takes place in It was
Speaker 1: first famous for being the site of a number of
Speaker 1: lumber mills, but a great fire consumed most of the
Speaker 1: city's businesses in eighteen seventy five. They eventually rebuilt, and
Speaker 1: by nineteen twelve, their local paper, the Oshkosh Northwestern announces
Speaker 1: there's a new bomb and calend apartment store that'll be
Speaker 1: built on the south side of town, and it's completed
Speaker 1: and opened by the end of nineteen thirteen. The second
Speaker 1: floor of this location where the eventual back room's photo
Speaker 1: will be taken, because yes, the backrooms are on the
Speaker 1: second floor, not a basement. The second floor is said
Speaker 1: to be devoted entirely to women's ready to wear apparel, millinery, rugs, carpets, draperies,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Fast forward to nineteen forty five. The store
Speaker 1: changes its name to Hirschberg's after it's sold and the
Speaker 1: building is remodeled panty girdles for only two ninety five
Speaker 1: Sign me up. The building is sold again in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty five and is remodeled, this time as Rohner's Furniture,
Speaker 1: who expanded the building again ten years later. By the seventies.
Speaker 1: They installed the carpet that we now associate with the
Speaker 1: back rooms and installed drop ceilings, those being the dull
Speaker 1: gray ceiling portions that those freaky fluorescent lights are installed
Speaker 1: in in offices. I was curious why these panels and
Speaker 1: lights are so associated with the seventies to me, and
Speaker 1: after looking into it YouTuber and would you believe it?
Speaker 1: A woman I once shared a desk with at the
Speaker 1: Boston Globe, Hendre Gaylord, made a wonderful video about why
Speaker 1: this happened. It doesn't make the drop ceilings any prettier,
Speaker 1: but it does place the back rooms firmly in the
Speaker 1: story of twentieth century American architecture. Here's the explanation in
Speaker 1: her video.
Speaker 3: But the other thing that made drop ceilings so popular
Speaker 3: in the seventies was the increase in oil prices, and
Speaker 3: this renovation was right in between two big ones in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy three and nineteen seventy nine. The lower ceiling
Speaker 3: can reduce seating costs, and in a big, old building
Speaker 3: like this, I bet that was very enticing. If you
Speaker 3: have a drop ceiling in your house or your apartment
Speaker 3: and you're wondering when it was added, there's a pretty
Speaker 3: good chance that had happened right in this period.
Speaker 1: Eight oh seven Oregon Street was expanded again in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven and then nineteen ninety. By ninety four, Roner's
Speaker 1: Furniture went out of business and the space that it
Speaker 1: used is subdivided to be used by a series of
Speaker 1: small businesses, and after a short stint as the Miles
Speaker 1: Kimball Warehouse outlet and as an estate sales space, in
Speaker 1: two thousand and two the iconic photo of the backrooms
Speaker 1: was taken, and all of this explains a lot of
Speaker 1: why the back rooms looks as weird as it does.
Speaker 1: By the time that current owner Bob Maza bought the place,
Speaker 1: eight o seven Oregon had been a department store, a
Speaker 1: furniture store, and a state scale location, and allegedly had
Speaker 1: been used at various times for office or storage space.
Speaker 1: Why are there seven slightly different wallpapers in the backrooms? Well,
Speaker 1: imagine if a floor of an Ikea was just cleared out.
Speaker 1: They're intended to look slightly different. They're displays that are
Speaker 1: meant to look like somewhat different rooms. It also explains
Speaker 1: that too many walls and no windows because these weren't
Speaker 1: real walls, they were separators for furniture departments. And as
Speaker 1: Kent explains so well, the weirdness of this space is
Speaker 1: also connected to its many many renovations over the course
Speaker 1: of nearly a century, leaving this kind of unintentional architectural
Speaker 1: charcutery board vibe. When Bob Maza bought eight oh seven
Speaker 1: Oregon Street and took the picture of what we now
Speaker 1: call the back rooms, it was on a Sony Cybershot
Speaker 1: digital camera on June twelfth, two thousand and two, at
Speaker 1: eight twenty one a m Yes, lost media detectives are
Speaker 1: that good, and he took the photo with a purpose.
Speaker 1: He had plans to turn the building into something it
Speaker 1: hadn't been up until this point. A hobby store. HobbyTown USA,
Speaker 1: to be exact, a national chain with about one hundred
Speaker 1: locations still open today, so the plan for the back
Speaker 1: rooms were to clear them out and turn it into
Speaker 1: an RC racer track. If you don't remember, these are
Speaker 1: remote controlled cars that make this horror flying weird whale
Speaker 1: when they move around. That plus RC boats and planes
Speaker 1: and trains and models were what HobbyTown USA was all about,
Speaker 1: and Bob's vision was not just to make his location
Speaker 1: a place to buy stuff, but to have community and
Speaker 1: really spend time with people who were just as passionate
Speaker 1: about this stuff. The famous Backram's image wasn't the only
Speaker 1: picture he took that morning. While many of them didn't survive,
Speaker 1: there is still another angle of this same space on
Speaker 1: the Internet, and you can see more brown carpets some
Speaker 1: buckets on the ground, but the contrast of this photo
Speaker 1: is less scary and more normal. These two images are
Speaker 1: the only ones that survived on the Internet archive. In
Speaker 1: a blog post Bob made in two thousand and three,
Speaker 1: which was an announcement that HobbyTown USA Oshkosh was going
Speaker 1: to include this really cool RC track when it opened,
Speaker 1: and in March two thousand and four. It did reopening
Speaker 1: after Masa's previous location near a Walmart got too expensive
Speaker 1: with rent, and that HobbyTown is open at eight oh
Speaker 1: seven Oregon Street to this day, even though the track
Speaker 1: that was set up in the backrooms is not presently there.
Speaker 1: From what I could find from video footage taken there
Speaker 1: over the years, the physical space that the backrooms were
Speaker 1: used for was actually a space filled with a lot
Speaker 1: of joy and community where hobbyists spent time together and
Speaker 1: you basically know the rest of the story. In twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: the backroom's image was posted and one random person on
Speaker 1: Twitter correctly identified the location immediately, but was ignored. It
Speaker 1: was ultimately a group of four discord users who found
Speaker 1: the original backroom's location, almost five years to the day
Speaker 1: of it becoming a part of niche internet life. I've
Speaker 1: been vaguely aware of the Lost Media world for some
Speaker 1: time because they make these really great annual round up
Speaker 1: videos basically videos on YouTube that summarize the previous analog
Speaker 1: or digital media that the group is collectively tracked down
Speaker 1: and archived within the year. And it seems like there's
Speaker 1: a pretty wide definition of what constitutes a lost media person.
Speaker 1: They can be generalists, or, like the Backroom's folks, can
Speaker 1: be uniquely honed in on finding one piece of media.
Speaker 1: Some highlights from the twenty twenty four lost Media video.
Speaker 1: They found Celebrity number six, a mysterious figure on a
Speaker 1: two thousands era fabric pattern, finally identified to be an
Speaker 1: obscure Spanish model, an unaired pilot of the Boondocks, and
Speaker 1: a previously thought to be lost Bram Stoker short story
Speaker 1: but no contest. The biggest discovery of the last year
Speaker 1: was the physical location of the back rooms. Users named Leon, Semliot, Zarara,
Speaker 1: and Zaft used a shared discord to organize a series
Speaker 1: of challenging maneuvers. So all's well, that ends well? Right?
Speaker 1: Tale as old as time, man takes photo, photo inspires
Speaker 1: existential paranormal communities, and the image is traced to a
Speaker 1: shockingly wholesome small business history. But I still had a question.
Speaker 1: Did Bob Maza, still the owner of HobbyTown, USA to
Speaker 1: this day, have any idea that this picture he took
Speaker 1: on an early morning in two thousand and two had
Speaker 1: inspired all of this? There is one more chapter to
Speaker 1: this story. Almost immediately after the backrooms were traced to
Speaker 1: eight oh seven Oregon Street. Local YouTubers that were either
Speaker 1: a fan of the creepy pasta or liminal communities started
Speaker 1: to just show up the HobbyTown USA Oshkosh like they
Speaker 1: started the next day, what.
Speaker 2: The fuck is up, darnn family?
Speaker 11: Today, We're actually like, we just like found out that
Speaker 11: like the original backrooms photos was tooken in our hometown,
Speaker 11: So we're actually going there like like no joke, being
Speaker 11: dead ass bro. We were so nervous because we saw
Speaker 11: in our friend's story.
Speaker 2: We were like, what the fuck?
Speaker 9: And it started technically like we.
Speaker 1: Should do it, prompting owner Bob Masa to ask the
Speaker 1: what rooms. But he doesn't do what I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people in his position would have and told
Speaker 1: these kids to go away.
Speaker 12: Here.
Speaker 1: He is on local news station WTAQ with a reporter
Speaker 1: Rob Sussman on June nineteenth, explaining why he bought the
Speaker 1: building to begin with.
Speaker 6: So I started started looking at old buildings in town here,
Speaker 6: and this old crept thing was available, and thought, hey,
Speaker 6: I could combine the store, move away from we were
Speaker 6: out on the highway maybe and if it was popular enough,
Speaker 6: the racing program could survive in this place.
Speaker 1: So Bob explains that the fake walls that inspired so
Speaker 1: much backroom content was thrown away almost immediately by both
Speaker 1: him and the volunteer RC enthusiasts who helped him clear
Speaker 1: this space for competition. He documented the renovation process on
Speaker 1: an early blog because he was a hobbyist and at
Speaker 1: the time the Internet was thought of as little more
Speaker 1: than a gadget. And then over twenty years later, Bob
Speaker 1: describes starting to get weird phone calls about this picture.
Speaker 1: He has no memory of.
Speaker 6: Oh, it was kind of weird, and I, you know,
Speaker 6: obviously everybody's done Internet searching and stuff. But we were
Speaker 6: in the car heading home and my wife got a
Speaker 6: call and took the call, and it was somebody asked
Speaker 6: if they knew who Robert was in, which I thought
Speaker 6: was kind of weird, but they and they must have
Speaker 6: gotten you know, that cross connection, you know when you
Speaker 6: look up someone's name and it's affiliated phone numbers or whatever.
Speaker 5: And they tried calling.
Speaker 6: It, and she answered and they started to explain what
Speaker 6: it was, and that was the first we had heard
Speaker 6: about it. And of course then we just went and
Speaker 6: obviously immediately to the internet and you could find it.
Speaker 6: It was very easy, and it started to explode right
Speaker 6: at that point. We get a lot of calls. For
Speaker 6: the most part, most of them been pretty cordial, some
Speaker 6: of them pretty weird.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 6: They'll just call up and and even like just ask
Speaker 6: some weird question, like you say, like is this the
Speaker 6: back room or something, and you're like, you know, this
Speaker 6: is this is hobby town, and they're like at that point,
Speaker 6: they don't even know what to say, and but yeah,
Speaker 6: it's it's been a little bit of an annoyance for
Speaker 6: the store. And but we've been you know, we let
Speaker 6: people come in and come up and take pictures and
Speaker 6: do the selfie thing. You know, we just appreciate that
Speaker 6: they don't spend a lot of time talking to the
Speaker 6: people at work here to take them away from their jobs.
Speaker 1: Maso would do a second interview with YouTuber Ferrell maguire,
Speaker 1: who was very involved in the discord that was looking
Speaker 1: for the backrooms, and the story keeps going. After doing
Speaker 1: a little searching, Bob would later provide ninety more photos
Speaker 1: from this original cash of early two thousands Sony cybershot
Speaker 1: data and backrooms fans freaked out when these dropped, which
Speaker 1: is extremely charming and also so weird because what they're
Speaker 1: rooting for is a series of blurry images of an
Speaker 1: empty building from before they were born. But the excitement
Speaker 1: is contagious. There's no denying it. But you can't help
Speaker 1: but wonder what's in it for Bob. Now there are
Speaker 1: backrooms teens who were raised on creepypasta and four chan
Speaker 1: forums who were more interested in the empty room upstairs
Speaker 1: than buying something from the struggling hobby shop beneath it.
Speaker 1: But don't worry. Bob may not be a redditor, but
Speaker 1: he is a businessman, and he took advantage of the
Speaker 1: press by star starting a go fundme to fix the
Speaker 1: roof of the store so that ideally he could help
Speaker 1: keep the business he loves alive by holding backrooms events.
Speaker 1: On this GoFundMe, he also shared testimony from people who
Speaker 1: had been racing our sea cars at HobbyTown over the
Speaker 1: years and deeply loved the community that Bob made space for.
Speaker 8: From the GoFundMe, the store I have nearly rebuilt and
Speaker 8: cared so deeply for, and that so many online have loved,
Speaker 8: would be lost forever. I am asking for help, and
Speaker 8: in return, I am committed to preserving the legacy of
Speaker 8: both the backrooms and our beloved hobby Store. If the
Speaker 8: repairs are funded, we will organize and hold some Backrooms
Speaker 8: day events where we recreate the room where the iconic
Speaker 8: photo was taken using removable carpets, walls, et cetera. This
Speaker 8: will allow us to keep the amazing RC tracks available
Speaker 8: for use on days that a backrooms event isn't happening.
Speaker 4: We would welcome.
Speaker 8: Everyone to take pictures and walk around the truly bizarre
Speaker 8: layout of that old furniture store. I will be working
Speaker 8: with the fans to make these events something truly special,
Speaker 8: something that can bring as much joy to them as
Speaker 8: this place brings to the local community every day.
Speaker 1: This go fund me has made twenty thousand dollars a counting,
Speaker 1: but that is not enough to fix the store. So
Speaker 1: if you've got a little extra cash, you can donate
Speaker 1: to Bob's GoFundMe to replace the roof of HobbyTown at
Speaker 1: the link in the description. I made a contribution to
Speaker 1: get us started. Bob had no clue that the culture
Speaker 1: around the back rooms existed, but he does understand what
Speaker 1: it's like to obsess over a niche interest and build
Speaker 1: a community around it. And while the back rooms may
Speaker 1: have become popular as this site for conquering your fears
Speaker 1: in a poorly written, creepy pasta and the site of
Speaker 1: existential horror for the lit middle crowd. In real life,
Speaker 1: The Backrooms is eight o seven Oregon Street, a small
Speaker 1: business and a community space, a space that, like so
Speaker 1: many like it, needs help to survive in a world
Speaker 1: increasingly hostile to community spaces. It remains to be seen
Speaker 1: what happens to the Backrooms. Only time will tell if
Speaker 1: the new roof will make it to Oshkosh, or if
Speaker 1: Kane's a twenty four movie is going to take the
Speaker 1: world by storm. Maybe the Backrooms will be a moment
Speaker 1: in Internet history, the right symbol at the right time.
Speaker 1: But for all the horrific elements of the Internet we
Speaker 1: spend so much time on during this show, this freaky,
Speaker 1: liminal space does give me some hope. From one blurry photo.
Speaker 1: There has been so much creativity, so much community built
Speaker 1: during a time where real life space is to commune
Speaker 1: wasn't safe. So backrooms people know clipped and ended up
Speaker 1: finding each other there and maybe, just maybe they will
Speaker 1: manage to save an RC club in Wisconsin in the process.
Speaker 1: The back Rooms your sixteenth minute ends now and for
Speaker 1: your moment of fun. From Pharaoh Maguire's Wonderful Backrooms video,
Speaker 1: which is linked In the description, Bob Maza tells Ferrell
Speaker 1: about his favorite moments in the back rooms homes HobbyTown, USA.
Speaker 12: My favorite memory is and always will be my favorite
Speaker 12: memories is of all of the racers and RC airplane
Speaker 12: clubs and even just customers that when I call out
Speaker 12: back in the day, like twenty years ago, so many
Speaker 12: people would come and help. Over the years, the amount
Speaker 12: of the friends and the smiling faces that you see
Speaker 12: coming through the doors, and you know, kids walk in
Speaker 12: the store and or you know they're life just awesome
Speaker 12: and wow, and that's the kind of stuff that really
Speaker 12: keeps you going.
Speaker 13: Sixteenth Minute is a production of Pool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 13: It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Speaker 13: Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 1: Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
Speaker 1: from Grant Crater and pet shout outs to our dog
Speaker 1: producer Anderson my Kat's flee and Casper and my pet
Speaker 1: rock Bert, who will outlive us all. Bye.