RARE PHOTOS: Eerie liminal places | Rare Historical Photos

A liminal space, at its simplest, is a place of transition. It is the space between where you were and where you're going. A corridor. A waiting room. A stairwell. An empty car park at the edge of a shopping centre. These places exist to serve a function, and that function is movement.

The problem is that when the movement stops, the people disappear, and the space is left to exist on its own. The place continues to look exactly as it should, but it feels completely wrong. It's recognizable, but off. Familiar but hollow. And it is that specific combination (the recognition without the comfort) that makes liminal spaces so deeply, stubbornly unsettling.

The word liminal comes from the Latin "limen," meaning threshold, quite literally, the strip of floor beneath a doorway. The concept was first explored academically by French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in the early 20th century, who used it to describe the transitional middle phase of ritual ceremonies, the moment between who you were and who you were becoming.

Anthropologist Victor Turner later expanded on the idea, describing liminal periods as times of ambiguity, where normal social structures dissolve, and identity becomes temporarily uncertain. What began as an academic concept eventually drifted far beyond the lecture hall, finding a new and very enthusiastic home on the internet, where it attached itself to the feeling that something about an empty room is not quite right.

If the feeling that liminal spaces produce goes beyond mild unease and tips into something closer to deep dread, there's a name for that: liminophobia. Defined as the fear of liminal spaces and threshold experiences, liminophobia sits in a fascinating and relatively newly documented corner of anxiety research.

The response can include a racing heart, shortness of breath, an overwhelming urge to leave, and a persistent feeling of being watched or followed, even in a completely empty space. What makes liminophobia particularly interesting is that it isn't really a fear of the space itself; it's a fear of what the space represents. The absence. The ambiguity.

The unsettling suggestion that something should be here and isn't. It is, at its core, a fear of the in-between, of existing in a place that has no clear identity, no clear purpose in the moment, and no clear indication of what comes next. In that sense, liminophobia might be less of an irrational quirk and more of an extremely honest response to one of the most uncomfortable feelings a human being can have.

In 2019, an anonymous user posted a single image on 4chan. It showed a yellow-carpeted room, fluorescent lighting humming overhead, no windows, no doors visible, no people, just an infinite-seeming series of identical walls stretching in every direction. The caption read: "If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms."

And with that, one of the internet's most enduring pieces of collective mythology was born. The Backrooms captured something that millions of people apparently already felt but hadn't had language for. It spawned thousands of stories, images, and videos. Then, in 2022, a teenage filmmaker named Kane Parsons uploaded a found-footage short film set in the Backrooms that was so convincingly eerie it went viral almost immediately.

Hollywood noticed. A24, one of the most respected studios in modern cinema, picked up the feature film adaptation with Parsons attached to direct, making him one of the youngest filmmakers ever to land a major studio deal, off the back of a concept that started as a single unsettling photograph of an empty room.

For most of human history, liminal spaces have been a niche experience, something you encounter briefly, move through, and leave behind. Then COVID-19 arrived, and overnight, the entire world became one. Times Square, which had never in living memory been anything other than overwhelming and loud and aggressively full of people, sat empty.

The Colosseum in Rome, which sees millions of visitors a year, stood in complete silence. Airports, train stations, stadiums, theme parks, city centres, all of the places specifically built around the presence of people, suddenly and completely without them. The photographs taken during lockdown have a quality that is very difficult to describe.

Familiar landmarks rendered almost unrecognizable by the simple absence of crowds. They are some of the most striking liminal images ever captured, not because they were designed to be unsettling, but because the world itself had temporarily become one enormous in-between space, frozen at the threshold between before and after.

If a liminal space is a place of transition, then its opposite is what theorists call a "place" or, in some frameworks, a manifest space. These are the spaces that hold meaning, identity, and permanence. Your kitchen. Your local pub. The park bench you've sat on so many times it feels like yours. Manifest spaces are saturated with presence, with memory, routine, and the accumulated weight of time spent there.

They feel inhabited even when they're empty, because the people who belong to them have left something behind. The difference between a liminal and a manifest space is not always architectural. The same room can feel like either one, depending on context.

A school hallway full of children is a manifest space. The same hallway in August, lights off and lockers empty, is something else entirely. The space hasn't changed. The presence has. And presence, it turns out, is doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting.

For all the unease they produce, liminal spaces are not purely negative experiences, and psychologists are increasingly interested in what happens to the human mind when it enters a state of transition. Liminal periods, whether physical or psychological, have long been associated with creativity, openness, and the loosening of fixed thinking.

When the normal rules of a space are suspended, the mind becomes more flexible, more receptive, and more willing to entertain new ideas. There's a reason that some of the best thinking happens in transitional moments: the long drive, the late-night walk, the quiet airport at 4 a.m.

Removed from the familiar anchors of daily life, the brain wanders in ways it otherwise wouldn't. Liminal spaces, at their best, are not just eerie backdrops. They are permission slips, an invitation to exist, briefly, outside the structure of normal life and see what turns up in the quiet.

There is something quietly profound about the fact that the spaces which unsettle us most are not the dangerous ones, the dark ones, or the overtly threatening ones. They are the ordinary ones, emptied out, slightly too still, waiting for something that hasn't arrived yet. Liminal spaces hold up a mirror to a very human anxiety: the fear of being between things, of existing in the gap without knowing what comes next.

And perhaps that's why they've captured the internet's imagination so completely. We live in a world that moves fast, that demands certainty, that doesn't leave a lot of room for the in-between. Liminal spaces are the in-between made visible. They are the pauses between sentences. The held breath before the answer.

And if they keep you up tonight, staring at the ceiling and thinking about empty swimming pools and hotel corridors that go on too long, well. You were warned. The light is still on, we hope.

Do liminal spaces do something to your brain chemistry that you can't quite explain? Share your feelings with us in the comments!