Liminal space
A place neither fully one thing nor another — a doorway, a coastline, an empty hallway at 3am. Encounters cluster here.
Definition
“Liminal” comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. A liminal space is a place in between — a hallway between rooms, a stretch of road between towns, a coastline between land and water, the hours between night and morning when most people are asleep.
A surprising fraction of the encounters in this guide happen in liminal space. The Black-Eyed Children appear at car windows and front doors. The Beast of Bray Road walks beside rural roads. The Mothman was last seen on a bridge, at night, hours before that bridge collapsed.
Whether this clustering is causal (these places attract such things) or perceptual (humans are most attentive and most vulnerable in transitional states), it shows up reliably enough that it functions as a survival rule: be most careful at the thresholds.