The popular creepypasta known as The Backrooms has added its latest entry on TikTok which has taken inspiration from someone’s real-life injury on playground equipment that previously went viral.
For those not in the know, The Backrooms is an extended bit of internet lore that originated in someone’s paranormal explanation for an otherwise innocuous photo of bland yellow-stained rooms washed in fluorescent light. The original creepypasta began as a photo caption on 4chan in 2019, as Know Your Meme notes. The original narrative positions The Backrooms, which look like your average church conference room that has been empty since a recent fumigation, as a kind of purgatory that you’ll find yourself in should you glitch through the fabric of space-time by accident.
Since its inception, the lore of The Backrooms has only grown, with it getting a surge of popularity thanks to a series of CGI-produced videos that are made to look like found-footage VHS tapes from the 1990s, only with unholy and indescribable shadowy creatures lurking around every corner. The latest iteration of this crowd-sourced nightmare includes the addition of mysterious slides. When you go through them, you see more of the monsters terrorizing the world in different rooms, as can be seen in a TikTok video by @backrooms _guides.
A subtle moment at the end of the video includes one of the hazmat suit-wearing explorers getting spit out of a slide in a violent fashion. People immediately began to notice it heavily resembles a viral video of a cop who succumbed to a similar fate on a playground.
The video in question of the real-life person disastrously exiting a slide was originally uploaded by the user @jstmichele. As you can tell, the rag-doll nature of the cop’s exit heavily resembles The Backrooms video, right down to clanging against the side of the playground equipment before being ejected across the ground.
While many TikTok users found both the reference in The Backrooms video and its source material amusing, it’s important to point out that the seemingly dangerous nature of the newly installed slide at Boston’s City Hall Plaza playscape has inspired some to petition for more restrictions, as FOX 59 reported.
The officer in question reportedly sustained “minor injuries,” but nonetheless had to dip into his “own personal medical insurance” as a result, the report said. Not only that, but this isn’t even the first time someone has been injured from the slide.
A teacher, Terri Ilana, also went viral on TikTok earlier this year when she posted a video of herself going down the slide and similarly rag-dolling out the other side.
Ilana later made an update revealing the baseball-sized welt it left on her forehead. While she admitted the first video was funny, she now believes the slide shouldn’t be allowed for children, despite an age limit being posted for it. As she explained to FOX 59:
“I don’t want to be a party pooper. I don’t think [the slide] should come down. I just think there should be a sign that’s a little more honest […] I guess all I would say is, ‘Enter at your own risk.’”
Even a Boston city councilor, Erin Murphy, shared on X (formerly Twitter) a similar video of herself going down the slide in a rough manner, which included the caption “be careful.” Despite these warnings, the piece of playground equipment has become a local attraction known as the “cop slide,” drawing lines of adults eager to take a turn down it. Things have gotten so out of hand that the Mayor of Boston Michelle Wu had to weigh in on the issue, telling reporters:
“We want all of our public spaces to be beloved and if it looks like we need to make sure that there’s more signage that this is for children or something, we can do that too.”
According to a study made available via the National Institutes of Health, data suggests “over 350,000 children ≤5 years of age were injured on slides from 2002 to 2015.” In the study’s conclusion, the article noted smaller children riding on another person’s lap were particularly at risk of injury.