The internet's obsession with empty malls, fluorescent pools, and infinite hotel corridors is hardly a clear aesthetic trend. Some may call it a mass recognition event. Across platforms — from Reddit's 852,000-member r/LiminalSpace to TikTok's two-billion-view #liminalspaces hashtag — millions of people are independently identifying the same ancient phenomenon that shamans, alchemists, and threshold gods have always known: certain spaces exist where the membrane between worlds grows permeable.

In 1909, anthropologist Arnold van Gennep identified the "liminal phase" — the threshold between states of being where initiates are neither what they were nor what they will become. In 2019, an anonymous 4chan user described "noclipping out of reality" into an infinite yellow office with humming fluorescent lights. Same phenomenon. Same dread. Same recognition that transitional zones are where the rules break down.

A Photograph Taken in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Became a Portal

On June 12, 2002, someone snapped a photograph during renovations inside a former Rohner's Furniture store at 807 Oregon Street, Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The Sony Cyber-shot captured yellowed wallpaper, aged carpet, fluorescent tubes blazing from a dropped ceiling, cheap dividing walls creating a labyrinth of purposeless space. The image was uploaded to a HobbyTown USA blog as "Dsc00161.jpg," and forgotten.

It could have stayed forgotten, but fate brought it through to the Noosphere's final totality via internet chatboards. By April 2018, it surfaced on 4chan's /x/ board. Then on May 12, 2019, an anonymous poster used the image macro to describe "noclipping out of reality" into "the Backrooms" — six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms. The response was volcanic. Within days, the r/backrooms subreddit materialized. Within weeks, a collaborative fiction universe expanded outward — Level 0, Level 1, Level 37 (the Poolrooms). Entities populated the spaces. Multiple wikis catalogued hundreds of levels and their haphazard lores.

The COVID-19 pandemic detonated the trend into the mainstream. As lockdowns emptied the world's airports, schools, and shopping malls, people photographed their suddenly liminal reality and uploaded it. Real life had become the Backrooms. The subreddit r/LiminalSpace swelled past 800,000+ members. On Twitter/X, @SpaceLiminalBot amassed over 1.2 million followers posting nothing but liminal photographs.

Then came Kane Parsons. This self-taught filmmaker uploaded "The Backrooms (Found Footage)" to YouTube on January 7, 2022. First week: 16,500 views. By March 2026: over 73 million views. On May 29, 2026, A24 releases a feature-length Backrooms film directed by Parsons.

To review: A furniture store photograph. A 4chan post. A pandemic. A teenager with Blender. A major motion picture. The trajectory of our latest episode of hyper-reality.

The Anthropologists Found It First and Called It the Threshold

The Latin word limen means threshold. In 1909, French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep used it to describe the middle phase of ritual transition in Les Rites de Passage. Van Gennep saw society as "a house divided into rooms and corridors" and argued that all major life transitions follow the same tripartite structure: separation from the previous state, liminal transition through an ambiguous middle zone, and incorporation into the new state.

British anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983) spent decades expanding this insight through fieldwork among the Ndembu people of Zambia. His observation is foundational: liminal entities are neither here nor there — they are betwixt and between all fixed positions. Liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness. The liminal zone was dangerous precisely because it was potent — a realm of pure possibility where the old self died and the new self had not yet formed. Structure dissolved. Anything could happen. Liminality can be dangerous yet transformative.

Mary Douglas added a crucial dimension in her 1966 Purity and Danger: danger lies in transitional states because transition is undefinable. The margins of classification systems are where pollution and taboo cluster — not because the margins are empirically dangerous, but because they threaten the integrity of the cognitive order. Douglas's insight connects directly to liminal space imagery: the images disturb because they show spaces that have slipped between categories — neither occupied nor abandoned, neither functional nor ruined. Should humans be there anymore? Should anyone be seeing this?

Scholar Bjørn Thomassen has warned of permanent liminality — a state characteristic of late modernity in which the transitional phase never resolves. It's all over the social spheres: Precarious employment, extended adolescence, perpetual uncertainty, pandemic disruption, economic cycles of glory and despair, endlessly livestreamed warfare. Hypothesis: The liminal space aesthetic is a mirrored escape for the imagination from the condition at the End of History now breaking apart. Are we even supposed to be here? Where the hell are we going?

Your Brain Knows Something Is Wrong Before You Do

The brain is a prediction machine. It continuously generates models of what it expects to encounter and compares these against incoming sensory data. When you see a school hallway, your brain predicts children, teachers, noise, movement. When it receives silence, emptiness, and stillness, a massive prediction error fires upward through the processing hierarchy. The space is recognized at the structural level but wrong at the social level. This dual state — confirmed yet violated — maps precisely onto the uncanny.

In 2022, researchers at Cardiff University demonstrated for the first time that an uncanny valley effect exists for built environments — not just faces. Structural deviations from expected architectural patterns drive a nonlinear drop in comfort. Crucially, they found that human presence decreased uncanniness — confirming that it is the absence of people, not the architecture alone, that produces the liminal effect.

Research shows humans can recognize a scene’s “gist” at over 80% accuracy after just 36 milliseconds. The parahippocampal place area categorizes the scene almost instantly, generating expectations that subsequent processing either confirms or violates. The brain does not merely notice that the school is empty. It stumbles and then struggles to cognitively persist against the aesthetic irruption.

The amygdala’s extended network responds not only to explicit threats but to ambiguity itself. The bed nucleus of the stria terminalis preferentially activates during ambiguous, uncertain threat assessments — thus producing the sustained, diffuse anxiety characteristic of liminal space encounters. An empty space designed for crowds reads, at the subcortical level, as a space from which everyone has fled.

Related: There is the notion of kenopsia — coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling but is now abandoned — an emotional afterimage that makes it seem not just empty but hyper-empty, with a total population in the negative. Mark Fisher independently formalized the same insight in The Weird and the Eerie (2016), defining the eerie as arising from a failure of presence — something missing where something should be.

Every Tradition Placed Its Guardians at the Threshold

Here is where the intelligence briefing enters uncomfortable territory. The psychological mechanisms above explain why liminal spaces feel wrong. They do not explain why virtually every human culture, independently and without contact, placed supernatural entities specifically at thresholds, crossroads, and transitional zones.

The crossroads is the ur-liminal space. Hecate, the Greek goddess of crossroads, was depicted in triplicate — three faces gazing down three converging roads, stone hekataia placed at every three-way intersection across the ancient world.

In Yoruba tradition, Eshu-Elegba resides at the crossroads as the trickster mediator between mortal and divine. In Haitian Vodou, Papa Legba opens the gate between worlds — the intermediary without whom no communication with the lwa is possible. Robert Johnson vanished as a mediocre guitarist and returned with preternatural skill. The legend holds he met the Devil at a crossroads at midnight.

Hermes — the Greek god of boundaries, transitions, travelers, and thresholds — is the archetype of the liminal deity. His stone pillars marked every boundary and crossroads in Attica. He traveled freely between Olympus and the Underworld. As psychopomp, he guided souls between worlds. Later fused with Egyptian Thoth as Hermes Trismegistus, he became the patron of the tradition whose foundational axiom — As above, so below — posits that thresholds between levels of reality are navigable.

John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies, formalized the Fortean version with his concept of window areas — geographic zones where paranormal phenomena of all types cluster: ghosts, cryptids, UFOs, poltergeist activity. He proposed a “superspectrum” — an extradimensional energy continuum outside normal spacetime — and theorized that window areas are locations where this spectrum bleeds through. The Celtic Christian tradition independently identified the same phenomenon as thin places — geographic locations where the veil between this world and the Otherworld narrows.

Primary question: What makes superspectral energy congregate in an area?

The pattern repeats with mytho-mechanical precision throughout time: Janus at every Roman doorway. Ganesha stationed at entrances. The Scorpion Men guarding the mountain passage in Gilgamesh. The Sphinx outside Thebes. The mezuzah on every Jewish doorpost. Joseph Campbell formalized it in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: the “Crossing of the Threshold” is a universal stage where the hero encounters a threshold guardian — never the true enemy but a test of readiness.

The Initiates Have Always Passed Through the Dark Corridor

The esoteric traditions make the connection explicit: transformation requires passage through a liminal space, and the passage is dangerous by design.

The Eleusinian Mysteries — celebrated near Athens for over a thousand years — enacted this principle as ritual drama. The ancient writer Themistius recorded the experience: first, wandering and weariness through the dark as one uninitiated. Then all the terrors — shuddering, trembling, sweating. Then, suddenly, a marvelous light. Initiates progressed from mystes (“blind man”) to epopt (“one who beholds”) — from darkness to revelation, through a corridor of terror.

In alchemy, the nigredo (blackening) is the first stage of the Great Work — the dissolution and putrefaction of the old form before the new can emerge. The motto solve et coagula (dissolve and coagulate) is a technical description of the liminal process: old structure must be completely destroyed before new structure can crystallize. Carl Jung interpreted alchemical nigredo as psychological individuation — the dark night of the soul, the dissolution of the ego that precedes integration into the Self.

Robert Anton Wilson named the modern version: Chapel Perilous. In Cosmic Trigger I, he described it as a stage where your maps turn out to be totally inadequate for the territory and you’re completely lost. Two exits only: you come out stone paranoid or an agnostic. Chapel Perilous cannot be located in the space-time continuum; once inside, there seems no way out, until you discover it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought.

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life encodes the liminal principle structurally. The ten sephiroth are connected by 22 paths — each a liminal passage requiring transformation in transit. Two veils interrupt the Tree: the Veil of Paroketh and the Abyss. Between them sits Da’at — the hidden non-sephirah, meaning “Knowledge” — a threshold where ordinary consciousness dissolves into supernal awareness. Da’at is Chapel Perilous rendered in Hebrew, the Backrooms theology.

The Architecture Was Designed to Be Forgotten

French anthropologist Marc Augé (1935–2023) identified the non-place — airports, highways, hotel rooms, shopping malls — defined by transience, anonymity, and the absence of organic social life.

Non-places are governed by solitary contractuality: you interact with them through tickets and credit card terminals, not through genuine human connection and the meaningfulness of true memory-making (usually, of course anything can happen anywhere that suddenly makes it Real). Generally speaking, these places are designed to be passed through, not inhabited. Designed with forgetfulness and efficiency in mind.

The internet’s canonical liminal spaces are almost exclusively Augé’s non-places. When a non-place — already stripped of relational meaning — is further stripped of its last remaining function (human traffic), it becomes a space that has fallen entirely outside the human categorization. Douglas’s “matter out of place” applied to architecture itself.

Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa diagnosed the deeper pathology: modern architecture privileges vision above all other senses, producing environments that look rational on paper but feel alien in the body. When you strip away tactile, acoustic, olfactory, and temporal cues, you create spaces that the surveying eye recognizes but the interactive organism rejects.

The dead mall sits at the intersection of all these forces. American shopping malls were originally third places for teens to chill and moms to shop. Eventually, after the 80s-90s boom, they devolved into anonymous commercial transit, built with fluorescent lighting, linoleum floors, institutional color palettes, and a series of gimmick stores and shiller kiosks.

For a few generations before, malls were the formative communal spaces of childhood. When these spaces die — restaurants closing, anchor stores shuttering, corridors emptying, arcades going dry — they become kenopsic in the most literal sense. Dan Bell’s Dead Mall Series on YouTube documents these spaces with a combination of research narration and vaporwave soundtracks that produces what he describes as “conflicting feelings” — nostalgia and decay melding together.

The Signal Beneath the Noise

This report has traced a single thread through seven domains — internet culture, anthropology, neuroscience, Fortean research, esoteric tradition, architecture, and visual aesthetics — and the thread does not fray but instead tightens.

Consider the convergence. The brain’s predictive processing system generates massive errors when encountering empty functional spaces — but this is merely the neurological substrate of something deeper. Every human culture independently identified thresholds as sites of power, danger, and supernatural encounter. Hecate at the crossroads. Hermes at the boundary stone. Papa Legba at the gate. The Kabbalists placed two veils across their map of reality and warned that crossing them without preparation invites disintegration. The alchemists made dissolution the mandatory first stage of transformation.

The internet rediscovered the liminal space through the only ritual practice available to a secular, atomized, permanently liminal generation: the collective curation of images. The r/LiminalSpace subreddit, with its strict rules, functions as a kind of digital mystery school — a community devoted to the systematic identification and contemplation of threshold zones.

Keel’s window areas. Celtic thin places. The Abyss on the Tree of Life. The Backrooms. Different cultural framings of the same ontological feature — locations, physical or psychological, where the membrane between states of being becomes permeable.

Robert Anton Wilson would recognize what is happening. Millions of people have wandered into Chapel Perilous through their phone screens. They are looking at images of threshold zones and feeling the ancient, precognitive recognition that here, in the corridor, in the empty pool, in the dead mall at 3 AM, the rules are different.

We may end up in one of those places one day; we might just be in one of those zones right now.

The threshold is open. The guardians watching. The lights hum. Where are you?