Liminal spaces

[headspace-hotel]

I am learning to imagine the future:

My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now

I am learning to imagine the future. There is a crack in the wall of this prison, of this machine, of this darkness, and through it, I see a tree.

[headspace-hotel]

[headspace-hotel]

[headspace-hotel]

today

[drawnsnake]

What if backrooms... but eepy

[prokopetz]

Apologies if you've answered this before, but is Skifree an early liminal horror game?

More of a parallel evolution.

A lot of early video games didn't have defined end points, instead simply continuing either until something structural broke because the developers didn't expect anyone to get that far, or until the game's difficulty curve mechanics went off the rails in a way that rendered further progress impossible – for example, a game where the baddies get faster with every level eventually reaching a point where they simply teleport directly to the player's location as soon as the level starts. These failure points are colloquially known as "kill screens".

Many contemporary liminal horror games are playing with similar ideas, often directly inspired by the creators' childhood experiences with video game kill screens. The notion of there being some inherent boundary built into reality beyond which the rules that are necessary for human life to exist break down pre-dates video games by a fair span, of course, but "what if real life had a kill screen?" is a very handy metaphor, and many liminal horror games make good use of it.

SkiFree, meanwhile, is parodying the phenomenon of video game kill screens by having a literal kill screen – i.e., a specific point in the game's progression where a big hairy monster just randomly shows up in an otherwise monster-free game and eats you.

[nabakovian]

i'm sorry i don't know the source of this because it was posted on reddit without credit but i'm obsessed with this

[enki2]

[fakesleepwalking]

prev tags too good not to save

[orcboxer]

[sera-moving-time-deactivated202]

[start ID image 1: a picture of a dark grocery store with milk containers splayed on the ground. the only sources of light are the cold drink shelves. it's captioned with "do NOT buy milk at the dark grocery store". / end ID image 1.]

[start ID image 2: tags reading, "#ngl I would go out of my way to stop at the dark grocery store # the viiiiiiiibes #the disembodied child's voice crying for their mother #Na'garth the night stalker #Steven the night stocker". / end ID image 2.]

[start ID image 3: tags reading, "#liminal spaces minimal prices". / end ID image 3.]

[thera-theadventurist1-deactivat]

@black-suns-rim @queenlybeastly yall down to go? LMFAO

[queenlybeastly]

GET IN THE CAR KIDS, MOMMAS DRIVING TO THE SPOOKY STORE AND WE ARE N O T STOPPING FOR MCDONALDS

[thera-theadventurist1-deactivat]

[zooliminology]

An entity found alone in the Far Plane. The entity seems to do nothing in its environment except exist. Its relationship with the plant-like organisms that grow around it is currently unknown.

[flinxypie]

@thatmooncake

[gallusrostromegalus]

Might I inquire as to what, precisely, a Mustain't is? (Aside from a string of letters I hesitate to Google in that order.)

In October 2014 I went on a road-trip to the Dryest Place In America.

I was having a rough year, very depressed from having dropped out of college for the third time. I decided a road trip was in order to re-set my brain and get a little distance. Being that it was October, and therefore all the campgrounds in the American Southwest were filled with people who have the good sense to camp in reasonable temperatures, I elected to take my parent's minivan so I could car-camp anywhere suitably isolated, and looked up some of the southwest's geographic extremes- the highest place I could drive to (Pikes Peak), the lowest place (Badwater Basin), and for fun, the Dryest Place in the continental US, which turned out to be the Pinacate Volcanic field just west of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. It gets rain maybe twice a century and has no standing water, despite being less than 100 miles from the gulf of California.

It's a startlingly beautiful and alien place. The ground is a deep chocolate brown to black volcanic sand, and in mid October, the rabbit brush is turning bright yellow as it shifts to autumn, the organ pipe cacti are a dark green and stand, partially concealed in the brush at exactly human height. The air is alive with birds and insects and bats at night. The stargazing is like looking into the eyes of God.

You get there by driving down a little dirt road called "El Camino Del Diablo", or "The Devil's Road".

I drove out about three hours from Glendale, AZ to get there, arriving at sunset, and felt a profound sense of peace. I stargazed, listening to the bats hunt and sing, and slept peacefully for the first time in months.

I stayed out there for three days, sketching and painting the landscape, taking strolls through this almost alien landscape, and enjoying the light and sound and total absence of human intrusion besides myself.

On the fourth night, it was a new moon, and I awoke in the middle of the night. Something was amiss, and it took me a while to realize it was because I could NOT hear the bats. I was sleeping inside the van with the rear windows rolled halfway down rather than trying to set up the tent, so I when I sat up, I looked out of the van's reflective windows to discover what at first appeared to be A Horse.

It was something between pale gray and bright white in the starlight, standing maybe a dozen feet from the van, sniffing curiously. It made sense- I was in the middle of mustang country and there was quite a bit of foliage in the area for it and it did look like a truly wild horse- lumpy where the bones were jutting out, dusty about the hooves and face.

I was instantly seized by the sort of paralytic fear Sleep paralysis is made of. I couldn't move. It wasn't quite looking at me because it couldn't quite see through the windshield into the shadowy into the shadowy interior, but I had the distinct impression that if I looked away, it would know, and get me.

I already had problems with horses. My beloved Aunt Helen's Prize mare tried to kill me on two separate occasions, and the year before I had to carry my sister-in-law backwards out of a slot canyon whilst reciting the Saint Crispin's Day Speech as loudly as possible to keep a mustang from trampling us to death.

This is approximately what it should have looked like:

Instead, it was... off. like trying to draw a horse from memory.

The waist tapered in.

The legs were slightly too long or the torso slightly too short, probably both.

The ears were Triangular.

The head wasn't quite right- Too narrow and the jaw wasn't heavy enough.

The tail was too long and arced unnaturally away from the body.

The neck arched.

The nostrils were too high and close

The mouth too long.

Whatever this is, a Mustang it Ain't.

I watched it from the back seat as it sniffed around the front of the van, curious with about the side mirrors. It moved around the van, nibbling experimentally on the front door handle. It came up to the side windows, sniffing like a dog, and it's breath didn't fog up the glass.

Finally, it came up to the rear window, which was rolled halfway down to let the fall night air in. Not even half a pane of glass and two feet of air between us, and I could clearly see it's bright blue eyes.

Horses have Elongated pupils to give them a wide field of vision, and eyes that rotate sideways in their sockets so the pupil remains parallel to the ground. Rather creepy to watch, especially the ones with blue eyes.

A real horse that was curious about the interior of the van would have come up to the window more or less sideways, and looked at me with something like this:

Instead, the damn thing walked up and faced the back window head on, staring back at me with this:

I'm not sure how long we watched each other like that, eyes locked. My eyes burned. I couldn't blink. My mouth was dry. I couldn't swallow. My throat began to ache. I couldn't make a sound. My skin began to twitch, like I was severely dehydrated. I couldn't move. My lungs burned. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move. I couldn't move.

Something was touching the side of my hand on the seat next to me. It's my water bottle.

The realization must have broken the terrible paralysis in the lower parts of my brain first, because by the time I consciously realized I could move again, I was already flinging my water bottle out the window at it.

The top was open, and splashed out the window at the Mustain't.

I've never heard such a scream out of an animal. Something halfway between the sound of unquenchable rage vibrating in someone's chest and the way rabbits cry out to God when the dogs catch them.

It jumped back, pivoting away from the van, snarling at the water bottle. I don't think you're supposed to be able to see All of a horse's teeth at once, no matter how angry it is.

I watched it run into the night for some distance, it's pale body visible against the black sand and the dark gray shadow of the ancient volcanic cone it was headed for.

When the blood stopped pounding in my ears, I could hear the bats again.

I debated leaving right then, but I didn't want to get out of the van with that thing in the area, nor litter by leaving the water bottle out there. I also had the awful idea that if I left now, it might somehow be able to follow me home. I ended up staying up three hours to watch the sunrise, shaking and trying to figure out if I'd woken up from a vivid dream, if my meds had stopped working, or if that had really happened. I didn't dare move until I actually felt the temperature rise, before stepping out of the van to grab the bottle. I had my camera ready- I was still using a DSLR back then- to take pictures of the hoofprints, to show how close it had gotten to the van.

No hoofprints.

Beetle tracks in the soft sand around the van, and the clear foot-and-wing prints of a bird that had hopped around then taken off. But no hoofprints.

I went over the entire campsite with the tent broom, to make sure I removed every scrap of evidence I had ever been there, including my footprints, grabbed my water bottle, and drove the three hours back back to Glendale, then decided to do seven more hours of driving to Moab, Utah just to put more than 500 miles, the state line and at least nine things that could be considered "running water" between me and the Mustain't.

-

I still have that water bottle. It has a dent in the bottom from hitting something, but that could have happened at any time. Strange thing though. I can't drink that bottle dry. I'll have it on me, drink whatever I've put in there- water, juice, iced coffee- and eventually feel like I've drunk the whole think and that it's empty. But I open it up and it's still at least a quarter full. I drink that. I get thirsty. I open it up again. ...and there's always a mouthful left.

Not sure what the side effects of drinking from a bottle cursed by a Mustain't to always have some left are, but it lives in the Emergency Breakdown Kit in my car now, just in case I meet another one.

---

(I'm a disabled artist and make my living telling stories, please consider supporting me on Ko-Fi or Pre-order the Family Lore book on Patreon)

[lalulutres]

[wizard0rb]

should i post the walmart comic

or should i simply wait

[wizard0rb]

If no one responds then I will have no choice

[wizard0rb]

one sec

[wizard0rb]

here it is. the surreal horror walmart comic i made in eighth(?) grade.

[kengi-bengi-alt]

8TH  GRADE?!?!!?!?

[aropride]

"nothing is real atoms never touch each other youve never touched anything in your life" ok. well when i pet my dog he is soft and when he licks my hand it is wet and that is far more real to me than whatevers going on at an atomic level

[aropride]

what my atoms are doing is their fucking business man i'm busy trying to stop my dog from eating tissues directly out of the box

[duckbunny]

nuclei don't touch, but the nucleus is not the core of reality. reality is made of electrons dancing. reality is made of bonds.

you pet your dog and the atoms that are you brush up against the atoms that are him, and the electrons that are you press into the electrons that are him, and both of them change their movement.

electrons of course are not really particles and do not really move.

you pet your dog and the electron-orbitals of your skin overlap with the electron-orbitals of his fur, and both are changed by the contact. you are not made of little motes floating alone in a void. you are a single unfathomable chord formed of a trillion vibrations, and so is he. and the note you play is changing at every moment by what you touch and how you breathe, and so is his. and atoms do not really have edges, and to touch is to interact, and when you put your hand on your dog the universe does not know that you are separate. the song expands to hold you both.

[cosmonautroger]

Windows 98 Plus, Mystery Theme

[l0stvegas]

[sufficientlylargen]

God I hate these fucking floating monoliths. They always go, like, 10mph below the speed limit and if you try to pass them they just fucking distort reality around them until you're back behind them again. One of them cut me off on the highway once and when I honked it banished me to a hoary netherworld where I wandered, lost and alone, for untold centuries, trapped in the liminal space between what could have been and what never was, black stars dotting the bright infinity yawning out around me as I drove out of thought and time, through endless ruined cities and blighted lands unmarked by the sun's cold rays, and when I finally got out I was more than 20m late for my dentist appointment and they had to reschedule me.

[somitomi]

[l0stvegas]

Hey? Hey holy shit

[unexplained-events]

Visit Original Link

In 1995 WKCR 89.9, a NY FM radio station’s transmission was interrupted by something very strange.

The interruption was a loud screech (about 15-ish seconds into this audio) followed by some creepy breathing noises. It got even more creepy when the strange noises were followed by a female voice reading the names and time of death of random people in NY.

SOURCE

[person918x]

[nyonyia]

i found something today and instantly recognized it

[prismatic-bell]

For that "glitch in the matrix" thing going around

Not me, but my mom.

In 1972, she ran away from home. She was gone for several months, and when she got home my grandmother started shaking her and screaming about how someone had told her my mother had no shoes and my grandmother was sure it meant my mom was dead.

She finally calms down, and they piece it together: my grandmother had gotten a phone call from someone who breathed two or three times, said “Cathy’s in bare feet,” and hung up. Except that’s not what they said–my grandmother had written the date in on her calendar, and on that date my mother was in Bare Feet, Arizona. She knew definitively that she was in Bare Feet because on that date she called home to talk to my grandfather, who told her Uncle Jim had died–“got himself shot”–and that she had missed the funeral. Ready for the glitch in the matrix part? Here we go:

–My grandfather had no recollection of the conversation–which would have been a strange conversation indeed, since Uncle Jim was still alive and, in fact, didn’t die until 2009, eight years after my grandfather. However, my mom did miss the funeral, thanks to a delayed flight. Cause of death? Supposedly, it was suicide, but there were enough indications for the family to believe that was a pile of horseshit, not least that shooting himself in the head with the rifle indicated would’ve been near-impossible.

–My mom was going by the name Patricia Danko when she was on the run–she had a fake ID and everything. She hadn’t called herself “Cathy” since leaving home and nobody knew she was traveling under an alias.

–According to my mom, she never gave a name for herself–either Patricia or Cathy–when she was in Bare Feet, and she would’ve had no reason to. Bare Feet had maybe a hundred people in it, and they were just stopping for food and gas.

–This isn’t just an account from my mother–my dad was with her at the time, and he remembers both the phone call and the truckstop.

But that’s not the weirdest nor the creepiest part, which is this:

–I’ve been trying for three years to find Bare Feet, Arizona–on the Internet, on old maps, by talking to old Arizona cowboys, and there was never a Bare Feet, Arizona. My mom convinced my dad to drive “through Bare Feet” on the way back from Texas in 2013 and there was no town anywhere along the highway, not even the abandoned bones of one. I’ve looked for Bare Feet, Barefeet, Bear Feet, Bare Feat, Bare Foot, Barefoot, and Bear Foot. None of these exist.

My mother stopped in a town that doesn’t exist, ate in a restaurant that never was, made a phone call that could not have happened and was apparently answered by a ghost from 40 years in the future, and later that night someone called my grandmother from a number that turned up on her phone bill only as a pay phone in Arizona to say that single sentence, “Cathy’s in Bare Feet.”

[sweater--child]

I saw a long thread of these on Insta and just had to add, because I’ve lived in a tiny ditch Arizona town my whole life and I’ve got STORIES (I haven’t included them all here but maybe in the future?):

I’m starting with this one because it’s not really a creepy thing but more just weird? So, like I live in a small town. Literally, was just a truck stop, the doctor’s office, the post office, and the schools. That was it. Within like a year, the town like tripled in size. And no one really remembers the construction?

I went to this one churn a couple times as kid, but stop going because my mom thought it was creepy. A bus came and picked you up and took you to the church. It was a “children’s church”, so parents weren’t allowed. I liked it cause they had a fancy park? But they were kinda weird and I didn’t really believe in the things they were saying so I didn’t care that I stopped going. I heard later it got shut down, but a year or so ago I got to talking about it and realized I didn’t even know where the church was or why it shut down (beyond just being creepy). There’s no record of it? My friend who went there asked her parents and they don’t even remember it. Anyone who was an adult at the time doesn’t remember, and no one knows like anything about it?

One of the weird things about Arizona is that if you grow up here, you don’t realize these things aren’t normal? This became very obvious to me when I was driving at night with a friend who was from the east. There are weird lights in the sky sometimes, they’re all kinds of colours. They move around a bit, blink, bounce around, change size. All kinds if things. As kids, me and my sisters thought they were great, ufos and stuff. It never occured to me that they were anything but a joke. Until I’m driving along with my friend, and theres one of those lights doing it’s thing, and my friend goes whats that. I immediately responded with a UFO and when she asks again I was real confused and just said it was light. My ignorant butt didn’t think anything of it, and she starts losing her shit. Because apparently that is not a normal thing?

Was driving along one night, jamming. Out of nowhere, a guy appears in front of me and I slam on the brakes. I stop real hard, but he’s gone. The car that had been coming the opposite way had stopped as well, and she gets out asking where he went. We looked, to make sure he wasn’t hurt, but there was nobody.

There’s a broken, old prison in the desert near my house. Like old, and there’s nothing left but the foundation and a couple cell doors laying in the dirt. Sometimes the neighbors will report hearing an alarm or siren coming from the desert.

My brother’s friend got attacked by something. He said it was a chupacabra, but I just thought he was joking and trying to scare me. Then he showed me a video of a thing. Not quite a coyote, and it more sat in a kind of squat than anything else. My mom tried to play it off as a feral dog, but I’ve never been convinced nor do I think was she.

There’s a hotel in the next town over that has the darkest history. People die there, a lot. They rename the hotel almost every time, but I swear the place is cursed. They shut down about a year ago, but there was recently a car accident that resulted in a death right outside the building.

The convenience store closest to my house swears that the store fixes itself

Cows appear out of nowhere

Street names seem to randomly change? Like everyone will thing a street is called one thing, and it turns out thats not what its called, and no street named that exists.

Theres a house that burns down every so often, no one lives in and no one has ever seen it being rebuilt. It seems to just appear again just to be burnt down again.

Theres supposedly an old abandoned internment camp up on the mountain that no one has been able to find.

There are several stories of hikers going missing, and being found massive distances away that they could not have traversed in the time they were missing.

Theres a building that people swear moves. Its this little antique store, and its not just the store. Like the whole building. The same outside, and set up inside. It will jump over half the city, and it’s never in the same place when someone goes back. You find it purely by accident. People talk about this place but never see each other there. There’s never more than 3 people in the store, and never the same worker. The only time I ever tried to buy something was a porcelain doll and the old woman who was working looked at the doll and goes “oh no dear. You don’t want that one, she’s troubled” looked me dead in the eye and goes “he’s already too close”. I was nearly hit by a car the next day, like dont know how I survived kind of nearly hit. I haven’t seen the shop since, and if I did I don’t know that I would enter.

[prismatic-bell]

Hi, I’m OP, I live in Arizona and moved here from a tiny town in Pennsylvania and I’m here to tell you rural areas are all that unhinged.

[pez-uzi-deactivated20160424]

Places where reality is a bit altered:

• any target • churches in texas • abandoned 7/11’s • your bedroom at 5 am • hospitals at midnight • warehouses that smell like dust • lighthouses with lights that don’t work anymore • empty parking lots • ponds and lakes in suburban neighborhoods • rooftops in the early morning • inside a dark cabinet

[solareveille]

playgrounds at night

rest stops on highways

deep in the mountains

[ghostfiish]

early in the morning wherever it’s just snowed

trails by the highway just out of earshot of traffic

schools during breaks

those little beaches right next to ferry docks

bowling alleys

[genesisdoes-moved]

unfamiliar mcdonalds on long roadtrips

your friends living room once everybody but you is asleep

laundromats at midnight

[coolpepcat-deactivated20190924]

what the fuck

[ringingofraevolution]

galeries in art museums that are empty except for you 

the lighting section of home depot

stairwells

[doomgeneration1995]

•hospital waiting rooms •airports from midnight to 7am • bathrooms in small concert venues

[midtownsparker]

I just got the weirdest feeling I swear

[the-crepes-of-wrath]

OK LISTEN THERE ARE REASONS FOR THIS!!!

A lot of these places are called liminal spaces - which means they are throughways from one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms, airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves, but the things before and after them. They have no definitive place outside of their relationship to the spaces you are coming from and going to. Reality feels altered here because we’re not really supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and when we do they seem odd and out of place.

The other spaces feel weird because our brains are hard-wired for context - we like things to belong to a certain place and time and when we experience those things outside of the context our brains have developed for them, our brains are like NOPE SHIT THIS ISN’T RIGHT GET OUT ABORT ABORT. Schools not in session, empty museums, being awake when other people are asleep - all these things and spaces feel weird because our brain is like “I already have a context for this space and this is not it so it must be dangerous.” Our rational understanding can sometimes override that immediate “danger” impulse but we’re still left with a feeling of wariness and unease. 

Listen I am very passionate about liminal spaces they are fascinating stuff or perhaps I am merely a nerd. 

[sp1ne-sh0t]

I, for one, appreciate your passion for liminal spaces and thank you for explaining it to the rest of us.

[stimman3000]

.

[inclines]

This is ‘Clinamen’, by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (it’s an installation artwork). I got to see it in person and it’s stayed with me since.