An empty mall. A deserted office hallway. A hotel corridor that seems longer than it should be. Liminal spaces are transitional environments — places designed for movement, not stillness. But when those spaces become empty, something feels… wrong.

Transcript

Host:

An empty mall, fluorescent lights humming overhead escalators still running. Every storefront is dark. A school hallway at night, lockers are closed, footsteps echoing, but only yours. A hotel corridor that seems longer than it should be.

Nothing is broken. Nothing is threatening. Nothing is happening. And that’s exactly why it feels so wrong. Have you ever visited the backrooms? Have you ever visited the pool rooms? We’ve got something very special tonight on the midnight drive because tonight we’re going to be talking about liminal spaces.

The word liminal comes from the Latin word for threshold. It describes something transitional, an in-between state. Not where you start, not where you end, but the space in between. Airports, parking garages, office lobbies, hotel hallways, waiting rooms. These are spaces designed for movement. You’re not meant to linger there, not for too long.

You pass through them on the way to somewhere else and that’s what makes them feel stable. Purpose gives them comfort, but remove the movement, remove the people, remove the reason for being there. And the space begins to feel suspended, paused, almost like it forgot what it was built for. See, there’s a specific kind of unease that happens in these environments.

It isn’t a fear of danger, but it’s a violation of expectation. Your brain is a prediction machine. When you walk into a mall, your brain expects voices, music, footsteps, life. When those signals are missing, your brain doesn’t relax.

It starts scanning. It starts looking for a reason. Something must explain the absence, but there is no explanation. It’s just emptiness. The emptiness feels unnatural because humans are rarely alone in places built for crowds. A school hallway without students feels like a building abandoned, just mid-sentence. An office building after midnight feels like it’s waiting for something.

Even a playground at dusk feels ever so slightly off. None of these places are haunted. They’re just incomplete. There’s also a bizarre nostalgic layer to all of this.

Many liminal spaces resemble places from childhood. Generic carpets, beige walls, pattern tile, corporate art, the hum of the fluorescent lights, or even the hum of CRT monitors. Do you remember those? The old computers? Old TVs?

They feel familiar, but unplaceable, like a memory that you almost recognize. That partial recognition can create a strange emotional distortion. You feel like you’ve been there before, but you can’t say when or why.

Online, there are entire communities that have formed around this feeling. Images of empty malls, abandoned arcades, deserted swimming pools, hotel corridors with repeating doors.

The aesthetic isn’t horror, it’s stillness. But stillness becomes incredibly eerie when it’s prolonged.

Because you see, we’re not built to exist in transition. We move, we arrive, then we leave. We don’t stay in the threshold, we don’t just hang around.

A liminal space is unsettling because it represents a pause. It’s a tangible pause, it’s a literal pause in space and in time. And we as humans are ridiculously uncomfortable with pauses in general, especially when they’re so tangible as liminal spaces.

See, we prefer a narrative. We like progression. We like knowing where we are in the story. Heck, even just day to day, we like to have purpose.

As a matter of fact, many of us live for purpose. To have somewhere that we’re going. But there’s something about liminal spaces. They feel like you’ve stepped outside of the story entirely.

Almost like you’re existing in a loading screen for a video game. But the game hasn’t resumed. That’s the foundation. And from that foundation, something else emerged.

Over the course of our next segment, we’re going to be going into some journals that we’ve acquired from the backrooms. Something that we’ve never done before. I don’t know that it has been done before. It’s very exciting going to be reading them for the first time on the air to all of you.

And hopefully we’ll be able to stretch this out over the course of the next several weeks. If you have a backrooms experience or if you have some strong feelings about the backrooms, please feel free to reach out to us on our Midnight Drive number 402-610-2836.

You can talk to us about the backrooms. You can talk to us about sleep paralysis, alien abduction, ghosts, monsters, cryptids, anything. We’d love to hear from you. So please, the Midnight Drive, 402-610-2836.

As I mentioned before, up next we’ve got journals from the backrooms. We’re going to do a deep dive into what happens in those spaces in between. Where did they come from?

Will we find out? I’m not sure. Will we know where we’re going? It’s hard to say. Up next on the Midnight Drive. And we’re back on the Midnight Drive. Tonight we’re talking about liminal spaces. And for this segment we’re going to be getting into some found journals from the backrooms.

Without any further ado, let’s get into it.

Entry one. I don’t know how long I was out. I remember walking somewhere. I remember fluorescent lighting. I remember carpet.

And then I woke up on the floor. The carpet is industrial. Beige. Patterned. Slightly damp. The kind of carpet that exists to survive coffee spills and office chairs.

I was lying face down between cubicles. I didn’t feel any pain. There wasn’t any blood. There wasn’t even any sign that I had fallen. I was just awake. The lights above me hum. Not loudly, but constantly. A thin electrical vibration that fills the air like static.

It’s the first thing I notice after I stand up. The second thing I notice is the sound of my own breathing. It’s too loud. Every inhale echoes off the low ceilings and partition walls. Every exhale feels like I’m disturbing something. But there’s no one here. It’s an office.

I wouldn’t even call it office space because it’s an office. There are rows of cubicles. Identical desks. Identical monitors. There’s CRT monitors. You know, the thick kind.

The kind that used to warm an entire room. Every single one of them is on. They’re not displaying screensavers, but they’re not blank. They’re just on. There’s something weirdly familiar about them. Something about the color of the desktop.

That teal blue desktop. It’s Windows 98. The faint static hum that used to live in every computer lab. It hasn’t existed in decades, yet here it is. And it’s eerie because every cubicle is immaculate. No coffee mugs. No sticky notes. No photos of families. No spouses. No kids. No friends.

No calendars. No pens. No pencils. The custodial staff must be very proud of themselves. It looks maintained. It looks preserved. It looks like the space is waiting. The central air kicks on. It’s so loud when it starts. A mechanical groan and a steady rush of air through unseen vents. It stops just as abruptly.

The silence afterward is almost worse. All the office chairs are pushed neatly into their desks. All except for one. Three rows down. Second cubicle from the end.

The chair is pulled slightly back. Not dramatically. Just enough. As if someone stood up recently. Or as if someone was expecting someone else to come and sit down. I tell myself I’m not going to. I walk past it a couple times.

But then the hum of the computers starts pulling at me. The glow of the screens. They feel warm. There’s something familiar about it. I haven’t touched Windows 98 in decades.

But I remember it. The icons. The start menu. The way the mouse used to lag just a little bit before catching up. I caved and I sat down. The chair rolls easily. Too easily.

The seat cushion feels unused. It’s like a brand new rolling chair. I put my hand on the mouse. The plastic is warm. Not hot. Just warm. Like it’s been used recently.

I move the mouse. The cursor flickers. There’s no internet browser open. No documents. Just the desktop. And Minesweeper. And Solitaire. And a folder labeled work.

I don’t click that one. Instead I open Solitaire. The cards flip with that old hollow digital sound. And something shifts in me. It’s not fear. It’s memory.

Brings me back to my childhood home. A rainy Saturday afternoon. Our computer room with the window cracked open. The smell of wet leaves. The glow of the monitor reflecting on the walls.

Hours passing without consequence. The hum of the machine louder than any conversation. I feel it in my chest. Bliss. But there’s something else.

Sorrow. And it hit without warning. A wave. Because that feeling is gone. Or it was gone. Until now. I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here.

The central air kicks on again. The lights never flicker. They just hum. Steady. Unbothered. There are no clocks on the walls. No windows. No exit signs. Just corridors of cubicles stretching farther than they should. I stand up. The chair doesn’t roll back this time. It stays exactly where it is.

Waiting. The monitor glow lingers in my vision. Like an after image burned into my eyes. I realize something. This place isn’t hostile. It isn’t chasing me. It isn’t threatening.

It’s almost like it’s offering me something. A loop. A memory. A version of myself I can sit with. Forever. And that might be worse. Because I want to stay just a little bit longer. Just long enough to remember everything I forgot.

But I also know if I sit down again I might not get back up. The hum continues. My breathing is still too loud. And the office stretches on in every direction.

All right this is where entry one ends. I don’t know about you guys but I think I need to go and look for some stairs. Or a door. Or just something. Something to prove that uh that I’m not trapped in the space. Maybe you need to look for for something that proves that you’re not trapped in the space that you’re listening from. You never know what to expect here on The Midnight Drive. Good night.