Liminality: What It Is, and Where It’s Found
A limen is a threshold — the Latin word for the strip of ground under a door. Liminality is the state of standing on it: no longer in the room you left, not yet in the one you are going into. The idea started in anthropology, spread into folklore studies and, around 2019, became one of the internet’s favourite kinds of unease. It is also most of what horror is made of. This guide covers where the word comes from, what people mean by a “liminal space”, where folklore has always put its thresholds, and why a city in South Yorkshire is named after one. For the genre this feeds, see the dark-fantasy field guide.
Where the word comes from
The Belgian-French folklorist Arnold van Gennep introduced the term in Les Rites de passage (1909). He noticed that rituals marking a change of status — birth, coming of age, marriage, death — share a structure, whatever the culture. There is a rite of separation, which takes a person out of their old place. There is a liminal phase in which they belong nowhere: no longer a child and not yet an adult, no longer alive in the ordinary way and not yet settled among the dead. Then there is a rite of incorporation, which puts them back into society in their new place.
The British anthropologist Victor Turner took the middle phase and made it the main event. His phrase for the person in it was betwixt and between. In the liminal phase the normal rules are suspended, rank falls away, and the people going through it together form what Turner called communitas: an intense sense of equality and togetherness that ordinary life doesn’t allow. Turner also argued that industrial societies, which have fewer formal rites of passage, push the same experience out into art, leisure and entertainment. He called those liminoid. A festival is liminoid. So is a horror film, and so is a solo game played at midnight about a place where the rules have stopped working.
“Liminal spaces”: the internet version
Online, “liminal space” usually means a photograph of somewhere built to be passed through, shown empty: a hotel corridor, a school at night, a shopping-centre car park after closing, a motorway services at four in the morning. The unease comes from the mismatch. These places only make sense with people moving through them, and without the people they stop being anywhere at all.
The best-known example is the Backrooms. It began on 12 May 2019 on 4chan’s paranormal board, in a thread asking for images that just felt “off”. Someone posted a photograph of an empty room with yellowed walls, and a reply invented a place to go with it: an endless maze of damp carpet and buzzing strip lights that you reach by slipping out of reality in the wrong spot. It has since grown into a whole collaborative mythology. The Backrooms is van Gennep’s middle phase with the exit taken away: a separation and no incorporation, forever.
Where folklore puts its thresholds
Long before the internet, folk belief treated the in-between as dangerous, and it marked the places and times where one thing becomes another.
Doorways and hearths. In early modern England, people who believed they were bewitched made witch bottles — usually filled with pins, nails, hair and urine — and buried them under the threshold or the hearth, the two openings by which something could get into a house. Around three hundred have been found and recorded in England, about half of them under a hearth.
Crossroads. A crossroads belongs to no single road, and English custom used that. For centuries a suicide could be refused burial in consecrated ground and was buried at a crossroads instead, often with a stake through the body. The Burial of Suicides Act of 1823 ended it, after a crossroads burial in London that June held up the King’s carriage.
Boundaries and edges. Shorelines, riverbanks, treelines, parish edges and the walls of cemeteries all turn up in British folklore as places where things cross over. The ghosts of the Sheffield S6 ghost guide are mostly found on them: a cemetery between a river and a railway, a common where the road ran past a gibbet, a hospital ward left behind by a building that changed its purpose.
Times. The same thinking applies to the calendar and the clock: dusk, midnight, the night the year turns. These are moments that belong to neither side, when the usual rules are thought to be at their weakest.
A city named after a boundary
Sheffield takes its name from the River Sheaf, and the Sheaf takes its name from the Old English scæð, a boundary. The Sheaf, the Limb Brook and the Meers Brook once marked the frontier between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria. On that frontier sits Dore, whose name comes from the same root as door: the gateway between the two kingdoms. In 829 (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle dates it 827), King Egbert of Wessex led his army to Dore to receive the submission of Eanred of Northumbria there, at the door.
So the city sits on a threshold, in its name and on its first maps. Most of the Sheffield folklore that grew up around it keeps to the edges too: dragons on the crags, outlaws in the woods, the river that broke its dam.
Liminality in Hellsborough
Hellsborough is built on this idea. It is a darker Sheffield that shares the same ground, and the way in is a crossroads: a five-way junction where a river and the old trolleybus line run through the same crowded space. Crossroads are liminal places, and this one spans the gap between one world and the next. Things leak through at the junction. Sometimes people do.
The bestiary keeps the same rule. The longleg is a liminal warden that holds treelines, broken walls and the places where two territories meet, herding the lost back in. The murk wraith stands in the fog where a person should be and asks one question before it lets you pass. And the gabbleratchets come first for the newly dead, the ones caught halfway between.
Using it at the table
For a solo game, liminality is less a theme than a design rule: put the danger on the threshold. A few ways to do it:
- Make crossing the encounter. A wall, a bridge, a shoreline or a cemetery gate should cost something to cross, and the thing guarding it should care what you carry.
- Suspend one rule there. On the threshold, something that normally works — rest, the map, your own name — doesn’t.
- Leave the exit uncertain. The Backrooms frightens because there is no incorporation phase. A scenario that asks how you get back out is scarier than one that asks how you get in.
- Use real edges. The real boundaries of a real place — a parish line, a river, an old railway — give a game the sense that the strangeness belongs there.
Foked and the free Postcard Adventures are built this way: solo, one location, real Sheffield and Peak District ground, and the most dangerous moment in most of them is the crossing. The Peak District folklore guide covers the moorland side of the same thresholds.
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