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cmc <hello@cleberg.net> · 2026-09-13 07:32 UTC

publish new post: nowhere-specifically

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	1	#+date: [2026-09-13 Sun 00:37:10]
	2	#+title: Nowhere, Specifically
	3	#+description: Liminal spaces confirm one thing: you're not supposed to be here...
	4	#+slug: nowhere-specifically
	5	#+filetags: :personal:
	6
	7	* Overview
	8
	9	What is a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_space][liminal space]]?
	10
	11	If you look online, you'll find hallways, empty pools, or malls with the lights
	12	off. You scroll through and experience the same eerie feeling each time: "This
	13	feels off. It feels like something is wrong, but I can't pin it down."
	14
	15	The feeling is real and the good news is that you're not alone. There's a real
	16	reason these places do that to you, and it turns out the word we all use for
	17	them is describing something else entirely. I've felt a strong connection with
	18	liminal spaces my whole life and I wanted to sit down here and write about it
	19	for a while, similar to [[https://cleberg.net/blog/the-night-feeling.html][The Night Feeling]], which I wrote recently.
	20
	21	* Where It Happens
	22
	23	A hotel hallway at 3 AM.
	24
	25	A bus station lounge between connections.
	26
	27	A parking ramp stairwell, lit by a lone sodium lamp, flooded with yellow light.
	28
	29	#+caption: An empty hallway after hours
	30	#+attr_html: :alt Empty interior corridor at night with a brick wall on the left, recessed ceiling lights, a speckled floor, and a single wooden door at the far end
	31	[[https://img.cleberg.net/blog/20260913-nowhere-specifically/liminal.webp]]
	32
	33	Imagine yourself standing in one of these locations. Look around and picture the
	34	carpet, the silence or the sounds of strangers somewhere in the distance, the
	35	light and shadows bouncing off the walls. Nothing is happening. Nothing was ever
	36	supposed to happen here; the room was built for you to walk through it, and yet
	37	you stopped.
	38
	39	I often find myself standing on an empty street, meant to be bustling with
	40	traffic, looking around at the pure absence as I exist in that space by myself.
	41	The lamps shine down, flickering and glowing yellow. The bugs chirp and make
	42	sounds throughout, letting you know that there are hundreds or thousands of
	43	creatures around you, but it feels empty nonetheless.
	44
	45	* The Feeling
	46
	47	It's not fear, or loneliness, or nostalgia. You're simply somewhere you have no
	48	reason to be, at a time nobody intended for you to be there. Or you're in a
	49	place you'll never think of again. Or a place where you know no one has ever
	50	stood still.
	51
	52	It's strange, because these are the same conditions I wrote about loving at
	53	night: empty space, no one asking anything of me. At night that emptiness felt
	54	like permission to be alone in my own space, but here it feels like a mistake.
	55
	56	#+caption: An empty parking deck under the University of Melbourne. Photo by [[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Melbourne_Uni_underground_carpark_interior.jpg][Canley]], [[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/][CC BY-SA 4.0]]
	57	#+attr_html: :alt Empty underground parking deck with rows of flared concrete columns, painted bays, and no cars in the foreground
	58	[[https://img.cleberg.net/blog/20260913-nowhere-specifically/garage.webp]]
	59
	60	* The Effect
	61
	62	These spaces are built to move people through them, accounting for the nonstop
	63	movement of crowds. Take the crowds out of the picture and suddenly the room is
	64	useless. The airport terminal without people is a room without a purpose. When
	65	you stumble upon one of these rooms, this is where you encounter that uneasy
	66	feeling.
	67
	68	A big factor in this uneasy feeling is that they're built for large groups of
	69	people. Mall hallways are meant to support crowds of people moving
	70	quickly in all directions, popping in and out of shops. When you find them
	71	empty, or with a single person in them, the spaces feel enormous.
	72
	73	#+caption: An empty mall concourse at night. Photo by [[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Interior_of_City-Center_empty_of_people_on_a_night_in_January_2025.jpg][JIP]], [[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/][CC BY-SA 4.0]]
	74	#+attr_html: :alt Empty shopping mall concourse at night, lit shop windows along one side, a juice bar along the other, and no people anywhere in the frame
	75	[[https://img.cleberg.net/blog/20260913-nowhere-specifically/mall.webp]]
	76
	77	These places aren't built to belong anywhere. A hotel hallway in one city looks
	78	like a hotel hallway in any other city, because neither one was meant to tell
	79	you where you are. The anthropologist Marc Augé called these [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-place][non-places]]:
	80	motorways, hotel rooms, airports, malls. A real place gives you an identity and
	81	a reason to be there. A non-place gives you neither. When you stop in one,
	82	there's nothing in the room to tell you where you are, and the uneasy feeling
	83	grows.
	84
	85	#+caption: A hotel corridor in Butte, Montana. Photo by [[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Finlen_Hotel_hallway,_Butte_America,_January_2020_01.jpg][Montanabw]], [[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/][CC BY-SA 4.0]]
	86	#+attr_html: :alt Empty hotel corridor with dark patterned carpet, pale green walls, globe pendant lights, and doorways receding into the distance
	87	[[https://img.cleberg.net/blog/20260913-nowhere-specifically/hotel.webp]]
	88
	89	Part of the strangeness is that you recognize these rooms without ever having
	90	been in them. The drop ceilings, fluorescent lights, and commercial carpet
	91	are the same in thousands of buildings, so any one of them looks like all the
	92	others you've walked through. You end up with a place you can recognize but
	93	never identify. This is also how dreams can work, which is why people so often
	94	describe these images as dreamlike.
	95
	96	The missing people are the focal point of the experience. People have described
	97	these spaces as an uncanny valley of architecture: familiar enough to read as
	98	normal, empty enough to read as wrong. A room built for hundreds with nobody in
	99	it suggests that something happened to everyone else, or that you're the only
	100	one left. Nothing in the room says that, but you feel it anyway.
	101
	102	Most of these interiors come from the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, which means
	103	they're the childhood environments of the people making and sharing the images.
	104	The mall, the school hallway, the motel pool are all places you spent time in
	105	before you had any say about where you went. Then COVID emptied real public
	106	space for everyone at once, and the whole thing stopped being a niche
	107	interest.
	108
	109	#+caption: A school corridor with nobody in it. Photo by [[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lorain_High_School_hallway.jpg][Matt Dempsey]], [[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/][CC BY-SA 2.0]]
	110	#+attr_html: :alt Empty school corridor with glazed tile walls, fluorescent ceiling lights, a polished terrazzo floor, and an exit sign at the far end
	111	[[https://img.cleberg.net/blog/20260913-nowhere-specifically/school.webp]]
	112
	113	* The Backrooms
	114
	115	The best known version of all this is the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Backrooms][Backrooms]]. In May 2019, someone on
	116	4chan's paranormal board asked for images that "just feel off," and one of the
	117	replies was a photo of a room with pale yellow walls, fluorescent lights, and a
	118	tilted camera angle. Another user wrote a caption about noclipping out of bounds
	119	in real life and ending up there. That was the whole thing, and it worked: a
	120	room built for people, with no people, that you can recognize and can't place.
	121
	122	#+caption: The original backrooms photo, released into the public domain by Bob Mazza ([[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HobbyTown_USA_Oshkosh_interior_under_construction_2002_%28The_Backrooms%29.jpg][CC0]])
	123	#+attr_html: :alt Empty second-floor room with pale yellow patterned wallpaper, tan carpet, and rows of fluorescent lights, photographed during renovation
	124	[[https://img.cleberg.net/blog/20260913-nowhere-specifically/backrooms.webp]]
	125
	126	From there, it has grown exponentially. People added levels, then rules, then
	127	monsters. Kane Parsons' YouTube shorts in early 2022 turned it into a full
	128	horror franchise and took it mainstream.
	129
	130	Something got lost in that. The original photo is unsettling because nothing is
	131	there. Once you put a creature in the room, the emptiness isn't doing the work
	132	anymore; the monster is. It becomes a normal horror story that happens to be set
	133	in a hallway, and the specific feeling that made anyone care about the photo in
	134	the first place is gone.
	135
	136	* Liminal Is the Wrong Word
	137
	138	That brings up the word itself. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality][Liminal]] comes from the Latin =limen=, meaning
	139	threshold. The anthropologist [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_van_Gennep][Arnold van Gennep]] used it in 1909 to describe the
	140	middle stage of a rite of passage: you're separated from your old role, you
	141	spend time in between, and then you're brought back in with a new one. [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Turner][Victor
	142	Turner]] picked the idea up in the 1960s and it spread from there.
	143
	144	The important part is that liminality describes a person, not a room. It's a
	145	state you're in while you're changing from one thing into another, and it ends
	146	when the change is done. A graduation is liminal. A funeral is liminal. A
	147	hallway isn't.
	148
	149	So the spaces in these photos aren't liminal. They're non-places, and the
	150	feeling you get standing in one is the absence of the crowd they were built for.
	151	Calling that liminal borrows a word for something that was never about rooms at
	152	all.
	153
	154	* Oshkosh, Wisconsin
	155
	156	In 2024, people finally [[https://boingboing.net/2024/05/30/original-backrooms-photo-of-yellowing-office-dungeon-finally-identified-as-oshkosh-hobbytown.html][tracked down]] where the original Backrooms photo was
	157	taken. It's the second floor of [[https://pbswisconsin.org/article/how-a-furniture-store-in-oshkosh-became-a-portal-to-another-dimension/][a building on Oregon Street]]. That address held
	158	Rohner's Furniture until 1994, and HobbyTown bought it in 2002 and started
	159	remodeling. Someone photographed the empty upstairs that June and posted it to
	160	the store's renovation blog the following year.
	161
	162	That's it. The most reproduced image of dread on the internet is a hobby shop's
	163	construction photo. Nobody was trapped there and nothing was wrong with the
	164	room. It was a store that wasn't finished yet. The building is a hobby shop
	165	again today, and the spot where the photo was taken is now a carpet racetrack
	166	for radio controlled cars.
	167
	168	Nothing in that photo was between one thing and another except the store. The
	169	room was never liminal. You were.

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