Curiosities,Creepy WorldJUN 23, 2026

“Descending Into The Abyss”: 60 Liminal Spaces So Deeply Unsettling We’re Sorry In Advance

Ingrida Jasiukevičiūtė and Louise Pieterse

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.

#21 On A Night Walk, Southwestern Ontario Canada

An unsettling liminal space: a white 'END OF SIDEWALK' sign in a dark, grassy field at night.

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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 Cafeteria In An Old Canadian Nuclear War Bunker

Empty cafeteria food court, an unsettling liminal space.

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#23 Is This An Image On The Wall Or Hole?

Two armchairs in a room with a window overlooking a vast expanse of clouds, an unsettling liminal space.

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#24 Between Embankment And Charring Cross Tube Stations In London

An eerie, tiled underground passage with exposed pipes, characteristic of a deeply unsettling liminal space.

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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!