Nowhere, Specifically

1. Overview

What is a liminal space?

If you look online, you'll find hallways, empty pools, or malls with the lights off. You scroll through and experience the same eerie feeling each time: "This feels off. It feels like something is wrong, but I can't pin it down."

The feeling is real and the good news is that you're not alone. There's a real reason these places do that to you, and it turns out the word we all use for them is describing something else entirely. I've felt a strong connection with liminal spaces my whole life and I wanted to sit down here and write about it for a while, similar to The Night Feeling, which I wrote recently.

2. Where It Happens

A hotel hallway at 3 AM.

A bus station lounge between connections.

A parking ramp stairwell, lit by a lone sodium lamp, flooded with yellow light.

Imagine yourself standing in one of these locations. Look around and picture the carpet, the silence or the sounds of strangers somewhere in the distance, the light and shadows bouncing off the walls. Nothing is happening. Nothing was ever supposed to happen here; the room was built for you to walk through it, and yet you stopped.

I often find myself standing on an empty street, meant to be bustling with traffic, looking around at the pure absence as I exist in that space by myself. The lamps shine down, flickering and glowing yellow. The bugs chirp and make sounds throughout, letting you know that there are hundreds or thousands of creatures around you, but it feels empty nonetheless.

3. The Feeling

It's not fear, or loneliness, or nostalgia. You're simply somewhere you have no reason to be, at a time nobody intended for you to be there. Or you're in a place you'll never think of again. Or a place where you know no one has ever stood still.

It's strange, because these are the same conditions I wrote about loving at night: empty space, no one asking anything of me. At night that emptiness felt like permission to be alone in my own space, but here it feels like a mistake.

4. The Effect

These spaces are built to move people through them, accounting for the nonstop movement of crowds. Take the crowds out of the picture and suddenly the room is useless. The airport terminal without people is a room without a purpose. When you stumble upon one of these rooms, this is where you encounter that uneasy feeling.

A big factor in this uneasy feeling is that they're built for large groups of people. Mall hallways are meant to support crowds of people moving quickly in all directions, popping in and out of shops. When you find them empty, or with a single person in them, the spaces feel enormous.

These places aren't built to belong anywhere. A hotel hallway in one city looks like a hotel hallway in any other city, because neither one was meant to tell you where you are. The anthropologist Marc Augé called these non-places: motorways, hotel rooms, airports, malls. A real place gives you an identity and a reason to be there. A non-place gives you neither. When you stop in one, there's nothing in the room to tell you where you are, and the uneasy feeling grows.

Part of the strangeness is that you recognize these rooms without ever having been in them. The drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, and commercial carpet are the same in thousands of buildings, so any one of them looks like all the others you've walked through. You end up with a place you can recognize but never identify. This is also how dreams can work, which is why people so often describe these images as dreamlike.

The missing people are the focal point of the experience. People have described these spaces as an uncanny valley of architecture: familiar enough to read as normal, empty enough to read as wrong. A room built for hundreds with nobody in it suggests that something happened to everyone else, or that you're the only one left. Nothing in the room says that, but you feel it anyway.

Most of these interiors come from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, which means they're the childhood environments of the people making and sharing the images. The mall, the school hallway, the motel pool are all places you spent time in before you had any say about where you went. Then COVID emptied real public space for everyone at once, and the whole thing stopped being a niche interest.

5. The Backrooms

The best known version of all this is the Backrooms. In May 2019, someone on 4chan's paranormal board asked for images that "just feel off," and one of the replies was a photo of a room with pale yellow walls, fluorescent lights, and a tilted camera angle. Another user wrote a caption about noclipping out of bounds in real life and ending up there. That was the whole thing, and it worked: a room built for people, with no people, that you can recognize and can't place.

From there, it has grown exponentially. People added levels, then rules, then monsters. Kane Parsons' YouTube shorts in early 2022 turned it into a full horror franchise and took it mainstream.

Something got lost in that. The original photo is unsettling because nothing is there. Once you put a creature in the room, the emptiness isn't doing the work anymore; the monster is. It becomes a normal horror story that happens to be set in a hallway, and the specific feeling that made anyone care about the photo in the first place is gone.

6. Liminal Is the Wrong Word

That brings up the word itself. Liminal comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep used it in 1909 to describe the middle stage of a rite of passage: you're separated from your old role, you spend time in between, and then you're brought back in with a new one. Victor Turner picked the idea up in the 1960s and it spread from there.

The important part is that liminality describes a person, not a room. It's a state you're in while you're changing from one thing into another, and it ends when the change is done. A graduation is liminal. A funeral is liminal. A hallway isn't.

So the spaces in these photos aren't liminal. They're non-places, and the feeling you get standing in one is the absence of the crowd they were built for. Calling that liminal borrows a word for something that was never about rooms at all.

7. Oshkosh, Wisconsin

In 2024, people finally tracked down where the original Backrooms photo was taken. It's the second floor of a building on Oregon Street. That address held Rohner's Furniture until 1994, and HobbyTown bought it in 2002 and started remodeling. Someone photographed the empty upstairs that June and posted it to the store's renovation blog the following year.

That's it. The most reproduced image of dread on the internet is a hobby shop's construction photo. Nobody was trapped there and nothing was wrong with the room. It was a store that wasn't finished yet. The building is a hobby shop again today, and the spot where the photo was taken is now a carpet racetrack for radio controlled cars.

Nothing in that photo was between one thing and another except the store. The room was never liminal. You were.