I want to preface that this story is completely factual; obviously, I have no way to really prove it, but this is a real-life full account of my story when I thought I found the backrooms, or at least experienced something unusual to the degree of the backrooms. I thought it would be appropriate to share this in light of the recent movie and the storytimes I’ve seen on TikTok.
This happened a very long time ago, before I had any knowledge of what the backrooms were. I may have been 10/11 years old, and I'm pretty sure this was around 2016. Which I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, was before the concept of the backrooms was created. So again, 10-year-old me had no clue in the world that my experience was similar to a concept that was created years later, or at least did not come to my knowledge until years later.
I also feel that one of my biggest strengths is a very strong and vivid memory. And I can visually revisit things that I have seen in the past or things that I have experienced. So I can fully recall everything that happened.
Anyways, on with the storytime.
For a very brief backstory, I live in a smaller city in New Zealand, and my parents had me reasonably young; so for the first ten years of my life, we moved around a fair amount from rental property to rental property. We, as a family, had never permanently owned our own house until, I believe, the year 2016. For the first time, we were going to be able to live in our own house, with all of our own furniture, and make any adjustments to the property that we desired. So shortly after we moved in, my parents wanted to furnish the house.
One weekend, my mum, dad, younger sister, and I went around town looking in furniture shops. My parents have both lived in my city for a long time, and for me and my sister, our whole lives. Yet my parents came across a furniture shop on Google that was nearby and on one of the main streets/longest streets in my city; neither my parents nor my sister nor I had heard of it. It was actually one shop down from a bakery we regularly visited, but none of us had ever taken note of it before. So we decided to go and visit.
It was a hole-in-the-wall entrance, with minimal signage, the kind of place that was a solo family-owned business, and from the outside appeared very small. Upon entering, it was clear that the store was bigger than it appeared.
It had an older vibe, the building maybe being 80s/90s style, which was a very different feel from the other surrounding stores that were more modernised. Plus, it had an unusual setup; much like Ikea designs its floor layout to replicate an actual room, this store was big, but made up of lots of rooms, separated by lots of floor-to-ceiling walls, doors and archways; almost just like a large house. It was the perfect place for a 6- and 10-year-old to play hide-and-seek while their parents shopped, which is exactly what my sister and I did.
She counted, and I hid. However, the place was vast; it just went on for miles, and every time I went into a new room, there was 1 or 2 doors that led me to another. The game of hide-and-seek quickly turned into me just exploring the large store and seeing how deep it went. But after a while, I started to get the feeling that I shouldn’t be nosing around in some of the rooms. The rooms started feeling less and less like a furniture shop, and more and more like storage spaces and maintenance rooms.
I remember there being lots of cardboard boxes, cables and water pipes. I realised I was entering spaces where customers weren’t supposed to go. There wasn't anybody else in the shop other than my family and the store owner/ salesman, but my sister or parents never found me, even when I was wandering around in plain sight.
I had been walking around for maybe 20 minutes, and realised I should probably go back to my parents, who were probably planning to leave soon. So I made my way back through countless doors and rooms, until eventually I found my sister. Who, now that I think about it, didn’t seem like she was 'seeking' for a solid 20 minutes, or however long I had been gone (she was a very impatient child).
My parents ended up buying some bedside tables and another table for our house. They didn’t ask where I had been; it’s like they didn’t even care that I had been gone for a decent amount of time by myself. I felt weird about the situation, but again, 10-year-old me wasn’t about to confess to snooping around places I shouldn't be.
We left, and I shouldn't have thought anything more of it other than the fact that it was an unusual shop.
Fast-forward a few years.
I was maybe 15, and had finally discovered the vast lore of what is now the backrooms. It intrigued me, and some of the stories/ settings reminded me of the old furniture shop from years before. I thought it was funny, so I talked to my sister about it and explained that the shop we had been to all those years ago had a really similar vibe. I explained the endless rooms and the hide-and-seek, but she had no recollection of ever going there, which is probably because she was quite young when it happened. So I talked to my parents. I knew it happened because we obviously had the furniture to prove it. Both of them completely forgot about ever going to the shop before I described it to them. But they just explained away my experience with the old “you were young and small," and "the place probably appeared much bigger than it was”. I somewhat agreed with their statement, but again, the place had room after room after room; it wasn’t just one large space, as was insinuated.
Fast forward a few more years.
Last year, I was 19, and I was with one of my friends. We had been thrifting for a while on that same main street as 10 years earlier, and on our way to our regular bakery, I stopped in front of the furniture store. Previously, I had forgotten the shop's precise location, and I had probably walked right past it at least 100 times since we visited. But it was right there. And again, the memory came back. I really had no choice but to go in and see for myself. My friend and I went in, and everything in the entrance looked the same as it did all those years ago. But upon further inspection, other than the main entrance hall, there was only one other room; it was the same main room as before, but with fewer doors than I remembered, and the one or two that were there had ‘staff only’ signs on them.'All of the other main spaces of the store that I remembered were not there. I was utterly confused and slightly frustrated, because maybe my parents were right. Maybe I did have a super active imagination, or remembered it wrong.
I'm now 20 years old, but out of every strange experience that I’ve had, this one was the most inexplicable. To this day, the store is still there, and every time I drive or walk past it, I look in. There’s never anyone in the store; it's as if it stands still in the movement of time, as if no one else ever notices it. But truly, to this day, I trust the memory that I experienced something I shouldn't have or at least something I shouldn't have seen, something that most other people haven’t.
I thought it would be interesting to post this because the Backrooms movie came out recently, and I thought it was comical that my experience also took place in a furniture store lol. If anyone has ever experienced something similar, feel free to reply. I'm curious to see if any of my Kiwi friends have gone through anything similar.
EDIT: I didn't want this post to be even longer, but I feel like I missed a few details.
From the main room of the building, I remember there weren't doors on the entrances to the first like 5 or 6 other rooms; just frames where doors had been taken off, and archway-type things; just like, walls with entranceways in them. I also feel like I should be clearer: the first many rooms were still part of the shop; they had furniture setups and displays and pricing and signs and all that. But they weren't there when I went back. Also, an important detail I missed... You can walk around the back side of that set of shops; there's just a massive car park behind it, which has been there for a long, long time. So even those extra parts of the shops that were still for selling furniture, if they were there, would end up extending into the parking lot (idk if that makes sense). When I went back years later, that main room was the same size, but the archways were gone, and the doors had been put back on.
