An Elsewhere Anthropologist Issue 3: Dancing with Ghosts

It starts with a song. One that sounds a little familiar. You've heard it somewhere before, maybe. Or you feel you might have, in some distant past. It echoes through the corridors of memory. It warbles with distortion, like an old gramophone has been warped by time. It flickers like candlelight.

This is how I first encountered the Backrooms. Not with a photo, but with music.

The first piece I heard was "It's just a burning memory", by The Caretaker, followed then by the rest of the album, Everywhere at the End of Time (2016). The image that occurred to me as I first listened was very specific: walking through the corridors of a grandiose but decaying old theatre or hotel and coming upon a ballroom in which were forever dancing the spirits of the dead.

White Bay Power Station Entertainment Room. Photo by Brett Patman, https://lostcollective.com/

In this issue of An Elsewhere Anthropologist, I start with the Caretaker's haunting musical journey through dementia and decay, connecting it to one of the internet's most unsettling phenomena: the Backrooms. From a single 4chan photograph of yellow-walled office space that spawned an entire horror subgenre, discover how these familiar-yet-uncanny spaces tap into our deepest anxieties about modern life. Why do endless office corridors, fluorescent lighting, and corporate environments feel so deeply disturbing? Through the lens of architectural theory, internet folklore, and cultural criticism, this piece reveals how the Backrooms aren't just empty rooms but spaces haunted by the ghosts of futures that never came to pass—the optimistic modernism of past generations now decaying in endless loops, trapped between what was promised and what was delivered.

Read it here: https://elsewhereanthropologist.substack.com/p/dancing-with-ghosts