Empty swimming pools. Deserted airport terminals. Stairwells that seem to go on longer than they should. School hallways in summer. Parking garages at midnight. These are places the human brain recognizes but cannot quite settle into, spaces that carry the ghost of human presence without the actual humans, and something deep and primal in our psychology responds to that absence with unease.
The internet discovered liminal spaces as an aesthetic a few years ago and has been collectively unsettled by them ever since. The photos you are about to see are all real places. Completely ordinary, completely harmless places. So why do they feel like the opening scene of something you don’t want to watch alone? That’s the question. We don’t have a comfortable answer. Turn a light on, maybe.
#1 Descending Into The Abyss
Image source: Niikuro
#2 So I Was Searching For My Car And Suddenly
Image source: filo_chiri
#3 Italian School
Image source: Hadiq
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.
#4 Bliss Under Stoplights
Image source: Medical-Rest8149
#5 I Was The Last To Board The Plane Today And Turned Around
Image source: LPineapplePizzaLover
#6 Is This An Image On The Wall Or Hole?
Image source: doggo-business
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.
#7 A Hallway In A French Hostel
Image source: bikealjackson
#8 Took This Photo Inside An Abandoned Settlers Cottage Near The Coast In Rural South Australia
Image source: PoliteBrick2002
#9 A Stop For A Bus That Never Comes
Image source: sSuversa
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.
#10 House In Berlin, My First Liminal Space Picture, Taken Yesterday
Image source: JustRatingStuff
#11 Is This One Of Those Liminal Spaces That’s Popular With The Kids?
Image source: ZackLikesToRamble
#12 This Neighborhood Made Up Of Copy And Paste Homes
Image source: reddit.com
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.
#13 The Clouds And Horizon Viewed From Our Airplane Appear To Be Perfectly Flat
Image source: rarebluemonkey
#14 Ever Get That Sinking Feeling?
Image source: lopix
#15 My Hometown Movie Theater
Image source: toothgrinder90
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.
#16 The Indoor Pool At Hearst Castle
Image source: PlanetHealerAli
#17 Another Day At School
Image source: DigitalSuplex
#18 My Friend Lives In A Mall That Was Converted To Apartments
Image source: mrwho1999
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.
#19 My Office Has Been Empty Since March 2020. I Am The Only Person Still Working Here
Image source: ilikesixtiesthings
#20 This “Lounge Area” In A Local Hotel Makes Me Uneasy
Image source: TTungsteNN
#21 1st Of December
Image source: tanjabaunsgaardsand
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.
#22 Funky And Trippy Hotel In Belgium
Image source: madking20
#23 Is My Hotel Liminal?
Image source: Intelligent-Ad-6889
#24 This Mini-Golf Course At A Resort I’m Staying At
Image source: CalvinVanDamme
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!
#25 Bouncy Castle Park In Germany. I Was The Only One There
Image source: cringelord91
#26 This Area At Work Makes Me Feel Like I’m Being Watched
Image source: LordEldritchia
#27 Something About This Place Felt Off
Image source: Liminal_Vibes
#28 Actual Backrooms I Found Above A Car Dealership I Did Some Work For
Image source: Endurbro_mtb
#29 I Was Walking Out In A Corn Field This Morning, It Was Foggy And Overcast, And I Thought This Was Pretty Creepy. No Wind. Silent
Image source: Under_Ach1ever
#30 This Tiny Escalator In Vienna
Image source: hartertobakk
#31 There Are Tunnels That Connect The Buildings And Parking Garages Within A Couple Blocks Of My Job So On Rainy Days I Can Get Around And Stay Dry
Image source: DjLungMustard
#32 This Huge Restroom In A San Antonio TX Store
Image source: lorde_ofthephlies
#33 Cafeteria In An Old Canadian Nuclear War Bunker
Image source: lopix
#34 Between Embankment And Charring Cross Tube Stations In London
Image source: YoungKeats
#35 Going To A Movie Theater At 10:30am On A Wednesday
Image source: buggleton
#36 Pic I Took Inside A Washington State Ferry At Night
Image source: Objective_Pipe8784
#37 The Subway At 6 Am
Image source: ok-ox
#38 Strange Neighborhood
Image source: lmnl_files
#39 On A Night Walk, Southwestern Ontario Canada
Image source: Defiant-Ad-6646
#40 The Hotel Floor I’m Staying On Has A Hallway With Stairs That Lead To Nowhere
Image source: AlienMyers
#41 Liminal Pics I Took On A Walk
Image source: No-Dragonfruit-2052
#42 My Son In The Door Of Our Hotel Room
Image source: _Cinza
#43 I Work A Delivery Job And I Hate Getting Apartments With Hallways Like This. How Do People Live Here?
Image source: FitAd1136
#44 Polka Dot Wear Pattern Under Removed Cubicles
Image source: BabelfishWrangler
#45 Closing Day Of A Grocery Store
Image source: asiancury
#46 Moving Truck With A Single Arcade Cabinet In It
Image source: Shoopedydoopedy
#47 This Roof Shingled Closet At An Otherwise Normal House’s Open House
Image source: OfficeChair70
#48 My Local Theater Has A Screening Room With A Playground In It
Image source: i__hate__you__people
#49 Bathroom Pods At A Bar I Went To In London
Image source: Apprehensive-Seat639
#50 The Hospital Wing I Stayed At For 3 Months
Image source: ok-ox
#51 My BF Went To The Bathroom Of A Cafe, Sent Me This Pic
Image source: runaway_potato
#52 The One Place You Visited Years Ago
Image source: girlyygirlpop
#53 There’s Something Beautiful And Dystopian About This
Image source: dystopicvida
#54 My Home For The Next Few Nights
Image source: lexev0nt
#55 Weird Picture I Took On Öland (Sweden)
Image source: Xeno_rRex
#56 A Jar Of Beetroot Leaked In The Fridge And It Looks Like A Kubrick Movie
Image source: bushontheradio
#57 Burj Al Babas: A $200 Million Disney-Style Nightmare In Turkey. Over 500 Identical, Abandoned Chateaux Rotting In The Middle Of A Forest
Image source: reddit.com
#58 Down The Corridor Of A Storage Facility Under Construction
Image source: WillBeBannedSoon2
#59 What Should I Do With This Space?
Image source: mrsaffell
#60 Liminal Church
Image source: VintageVVitch
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