I wrote this a few months ago while thinking about liminal spaces and the then-upcoming Backrooms movie. It’s just a little piece of autobiographical creative writing, I suppose, reflecting on childhood and the popular phenomenon of uncanny liminal spaces. Enjoy!

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Culminating in the release of the film Backrooms this past month, an appreciation of “liminal spaces” has grown online in recent years, with many atmospheric photos of uncannily empty places-between-places being widely shared and inspiring all manner of creepy media. These eerily vacant hallways, courtyards, and roadways hauntingly resonate with me in the same way they do many others, and there are pangs of nostalgia with photos of less liminal places that are nevertheless uncanny due to the absence of life and activity, such as abandoned seating areas in 1990s-styled fast food restaurants or vacant, poorly lit indoor amusement parks.

I can’t speak for others, but in my mind these spaces exist more online than in reality. Sometimes an empty hallway is just an empty hallway, especially when you’ve got somewhere to be. It is through a media lens that they can be turned into something eerie; they’re given a mythic quality. This is what makes it most fascinating to experience such phenomena firsthand, though for me it is primarily in retrospect. It makes you realize that something that’s not quite reality very much can be, and in my case it once was many years ago.

In the house I grew up in, there was a hallway just behind the dining room that connected to all of the bedrooms, the bathroom, and a closet. It wasn’t an especially big hallway, but what made it strange to me was that it had its own door, which could separate it from the dining room. So, more than once, my brothers and I would crowd into the hallway with the light on and just close all the doors. Suddenly, this small liminal space, a junction for the rooms where much of our lives really played out, became a room in and of itself: a room of doors.

There was something strangely thrilling about this, though for a long time I couldn’t have articulated why. I didn’t even really think about it as anything remarkable until the rise of liminal spaces as a topic, which dredged up these memories I’d almost forgotten. There we were, back in the 1990s, appreciating the idea before it ever became what it is now in the cultural consciousness.

Somehow, our imaginations (or at least mine) ran wild with the idea that we weren’t merely huddled and giggling in a mundane room made a little strange. Somehow, perhaps, we were trapped in a space between spaces. What if the doors were locked and there were no ways out? It was oddly thrilling, and I can recall playing this unusual game of pretend more than once, though they probably lasted all of 10 minutes. Sometimes, the light would be switched off (perhaps my older brother pushing it to be scarier), and we would reckon with the space by flashlight alone.

It seems such a senseless thing to have done, especially more than once, but I can’t help thinking about how the modern trend and appreciation of liminal spaces indicates that perhaps it really wasn’t that strange. We were immersing ourselves in a common experience that was felt by others in innumerable ways but without an existing avenue to make that shared experience known, to give it a name. Beyond that, I marvel a little at how easy it was at the time to experience wonderment at the mundane being tilted just ever so slightly. Maturity necessitates that we become more practical, and the newness and lustre of the world wears off with time, making us jaded even without cynicism.

I could enclose myself in the same hallway again, had I access to it, but it wouldn’t be quite the same. I’m sure I could recall some of the same uncanny feeling, but surely what would wash over me even more would be an odd sense of nostalgia, remembering a little boy I used to be who enclosed himself with his brothers in a hallway in their childhood home, somehow transporting him to an unnatural place that hid the great unknown behind doors he only imagined to be locked.