liminal space

In internet slang, a liminal space is a photo of an ordinary place, a hallway, an empty mall, a hotel corridor, a pool at night, that feels eerie, dreamlike or nostalgic because nobody is there. The emptiness is the whole point.

What liminal space means online

The classic liminal-space image shows somewhere built for passing through or for crowds: a stairwell, a waiting room, a school after hours, a playground at dusk. With no people in it, the place looks familiar and wrong at the same time. Some people find these pictures comforting. Others find them deeply unsettling. A lot of people feel both.

Online use is looser than the original idea. Not every “liminal space” is literally a place of transition; sometimes it’s just a normal room without the people or activity you’d expect to see there.

Examples

• “An empty airport at 4 a.m. is the most liminal space there is.”
• “This photo of my old school hallway is giving liminal space.”
• “Why do empty indoor pools feel so liminal?”

Where it came from

The word comes from anthropology. Arnold van Gennep described a liminal phase in rites of passage in 1909, and Victor Turner later described it as being “betwixt and between.”

The internet aesthetic took shape in 2019, when people on 4chan, Reddit and Tumblr shared images that just felt off. The Backrooms, a creepypasta born on 4chan in May 2019, became its best-known example. Interest jumped in March 2020, when lockdowns emptied real public spaces. By late 2022, the r/LiminalSpace subreddit had more than 500,000 members and #liminalspaces had passed two billion views on TikTok.

Why they feel so strange

Commentators point to missing context: a place built for people, shown without them. In a 2022 study, psychologists Alexander Diel and Michael Lewis found that small deviations from familiar architectural patterns can trigger an uncanny-valley response, the same unease people feel at almost-human robots.

Related terms

• The Backrooms: the endless empty-office legend.
• Dreamcore: soft, surreal, dreamlike imagery.
• Weirdcore: deliberately off-putting, low-fi visuals.
• Analog horror: horror styled like old TV broadcasts.

More looks with names are in our aesthetics guide.