“This Place Was Such A Trip”: 50 Liminal Places That Look Like The World Glitched

There's something profoundly unsettling about a completely empty mall at 3 AM, or a fluorescent-lit hallway that seems to stretch forever, or a parking garage where your footsteps echo too loudly. These are liminal spaces, and the internet has developed an almost obsessive fascination with them. In internet aesthetics, liminal spaces are empty or abandoned places that appear eerie, forlorn, and often surreal, commonly places of transition.

The term comes from the Latin word "limen," meaning threshold, and encompasses locations that are transitional by nature: hallways, waiting rooms, parking lots, and rest stops. They're the places you're supposed to pass through quickly, not linger in, and certainly not contemplate at length while feeling inexplicably anxious.

What makes these spaces so deeply weird is that they exist in a kind of functional limbo. A hotel corridor at 2 AM isn't meant to be experienced as a destination, its infrastructure, the connective tissue between places that actually matter. When you strip away the human activity that gives these spaces purpose, what remains is strangely uncanny. Places and things that once had purpose but now stand unused or forgotten generate a tension of abnormality, as though something is just about to happen. It's the architectural equivalent of hearing someone say your name when you're home alone, nothing is technically wrong, but everything feels off.

The internet's obsession with liminal spaces has a surprisingly specific origin story. On May 12, 2019, a user on 4chan's paranormal board called for posts of disquieting images that just feel "off," and the images posted gave rise to what is today popularly known as liminal space. From that single thread, an entire aesthetic movement was born, spawning countless subreddits, YouTube compilations, and even fictional universes like "The Backrooms", an infinite maze of empty office spaces that you supposedly access by accidentally clipping through reality itself, which is exactly the kind of nightmare fuel the internet loves.

But the explosion in the popularity of “liminal spaces” wasn't just about a creepy 4chan thread. Part of the appeal has been due to the coinciding of their boom in popularity with the COVID-19 pandemic and adjacent nostalgia for a time before the new normal, which made people more aware of transitional spaces and the emotions they evoke. Interest in the liminal space aesthetic surged thanks to the many images of empty streets and vacated public places that proliferated online when widespread lockdowns were necessitated by the pandemic. Suddenly, everyone was seeing spaces that were never supposed to be empty, Times Square with no people, airports with no travelers, schools with no children. The entire world briefly became one giant liminal space, and the eerie familiarity of these images resonated with millions of people experiencing collective dislocation.

There's also something about liminal spaces that taps into a very specific kind of nostalgia. Many of the most popular liminal space images feature aesthetics from the 1980s through early 2000s, old-school malls with dated architecture, arcade carpet patterns, vintage pool areas. For millennials and Gen Z, these spaces trigger memories of childhood, but warped through a lens of abandonment and decay. It's nostalgia tinged with melancholy, the recognition that the spaces we remember from youth are either gone or fundamentally changed, which is a pretty good metaphor for growing up in general.

The appeal also touches something primal. The aesthetic triggers a fear that predates the internet by thousands of years. Empty spaces where there should be people might indicate danger in our evolutionary past, a deserted village could mean disease, predators, or other threats. Our brains are wired to find human absence in human spaces deeply wrong, which is why a photograph of an empty shopping mall hits differently than a photograph of an empty forest. One is natural, the other screams wrongness.