I guess the reason all that Backrooms stuff has never really fazed me is because I worked in on-site networking support for a while, and literally every city's downtown district is just Like That once you get off the beaten path. Not just the really big cities, either; the one I'm currently living in has a population of less than 250 000 – metro area included – and a downtown area about six blocks across, and the service corridors still manage to do some House of Leaves shit. At one point I was trying to map the route of a misbehaving network cable, started out in a shopping mall parking garage, and ended up surfacing in the basement of the casino across the street. Totally unsecured – apparently neither the mall's administration nor the casino's managers knew that particular service corridor existed.
Like, I once bumped into a fully stocked and operational Coke machine in an unlit maintenance corridor twenty feet below ground level. Its display lighting was the only illumination for a hundred yards in either direction. I don't even know what it was plugged into.
Somewhere below this city there's a room the size of a high school gymnasium filled floor to ceiling with rotting mattresses. I've seen it with my own eyes – and, more importantly, smelled it with my own nose. I can't recommend the experience.
(That last one isn't even mysterious. The room in question is within easy walking distance of the basement of a major hotel, if you know where you're going; I imagine the hotel started stashing their old mattresses there at some point rather than pay to have them hauled away, and over the ensuing decades the situation got out of hand.)
In response to a couple of recurring questions in the notes:
I don't have any experience with the weirder corners of university campuses – my work in that particular job just never happened to take me there. I did, however, once have to do a cable trace in the basement of a former Christian elementary school. It had haphazardly been subdivided into numerous tiny rooms, some as little as ten feet across, with no central hallways or apparent floor plan. Every single room was, for reasons that were and remain unclear to me, full of broken kitchen appliances. One room in particular contained an enormous industrial freezer unit that was larger in its smallest dimension than any of the doors leading to it. Was it delivered in pieces and assembled on site? Did they build the room around it? That one still bothers me a little bit.
No, I did not drink the Morlock Tunnel Coke. What are you, nuts?
Old telecomms infrastructure.
In the transition from old strowager analog to early digital to modern digital huge huge huge huge machine floors emptied out, and people started throwing up rooms in random ass patterns with the corridors slowly becoming the fractal spaces in between them.
And they all connect down into the ducting and cableways, in larger cities on this daft island they connect to the old subways and communication tunnels where infrastructure rubs shoulders with random unconnected subfloors in uneasy coexistence and it's pure this-aesthetic.
I used to find all kinds of things, though (thankfully) I never stumbled into a mattress graveyard of eternal stench
In old very old office buildings from a certain era, it’s not uncommon to, if you want your break to be in someplace that nobody ever is, all you need to do is go around some weird corner and find some room that had maybe a tiny bit of rubble. How safe that is? Who knows. But literally “oh this is the room with the big windows and the debris in it! Quiet place to hang out for lunch.”
It’s so easy to find forgotten places. And right now more than ever in the era of Covid, where more folks are working from home, office buildings are more empty than ever. There’s so much unused space. It’s insane. It’s infuriating. There are people on the streets and these pillars of empty space just sit there.
