Damp yellow walls, buzzing fluorescents, no exit. For years nobody knew where the photograph was taken. It was a hobby shop, documenting its own renovation, and the room was halfway to becoming a racetrack.

The image is one of the most reproduced photographs of the last decade: a wide, low room, carpet the colour of nicotine, walls the same, fluorescent tubes going off into a corner that doesn’t resolve. It reached 4chan and started the Backrooms in 2019 — an entire genre of internet horror built on the premise that this room goes on forever and that you can fall into it. A24 released a film based on the mythology on Memorial Day this year. None of it was shot here.

The location was identified in May 2024, and the answer is funnier and better than the legend. A group of people who had been looking for years found an old blog about a building renovation. The building is 807 Oregon Street, Oshkosh, Wisconsin. In 2003 it housed HobbyTown, run by Bob Mazza, and Bob’s friend Bill — an upstanding member of the local RC car community, which is exactly the phrase the record uses — was photographing the work in progress. Before, during, after. The store posted them.

So the yellow room is not a void. It is a construction stage. The second floor was being converted into an RC car racetrack, and what the photograph captures is the moment after the old furniture-store fittings came out and before the track went in: an empty floor, primer on the walls, temporary lighting. Every quality the meme reads as dread — the flatness, the bad light, the sense of a room that hasn’t decided what it is — is a room that genuinely had not decided what it was yet, because the carpenters weren’t finished.

The track opened as Revolution Raceway and still runs under that name. Bob Mazza has since retired and sold the business to John Hetzel, from Hartford, Wisconsin, who kept the staff and the services and renamed it John’s Hobbies — which is why the current occupant and the sign in most photographs of the building don’t match, and why the store’s own history is a little harder to trace than it should be. Hetzel’s summary of what happened to his second floor is the correct one: “Stories were made up about ghosts being in there… it was made up that this was a never-ending room.”

You can go. It is a hobby shop on a street in Oshkosh, open normal hours, selling puzzles and rockets and trains, with a working RC track upstairs where the most frightening room on the internet used to be. That’s the whole appeal — not that the place is eerie, but that it comprehensively isn’t.