Why Empty Spaces Feel Weird?

An inquiry into the psychology of absence

Have you ever felt the weight of emptiness? Not just being alone, but the kind of emptiness that fills a space where people are supposed to be — the kind that seems to amplify every quiet sound into something unnerving. I think I was 16 the first time I truly understood that feeling.

I was one of those kids who stayed back at school long after most had left, the kind that found comfort in the routine of homework, often finishing it in the silence of an empty classroom.

But on that day, something changed.

The minutes slipped away from me, and before I realized it, I had missed the last bus home.

And there I was, left alone in a school that had shed its usual bustling energy, replaced instead by a vast, echoing silence.

That silence wasn't peaceful — it was empty, and that emptiness brought a strange kind of fear.

I think there are some places that are never meant to be empty. Places where people are an immeasurable yet important part of the equation.

An empty mall is scary because it feels like a ghost town. Like something that has its soul ripped out and has become something inherently unnatural. The bright colours and pretty lights now seem out of place and jarring. And the final closing piece is the silence. Emptiness has its own brand of quiet. A quiet that feels like a heavy blanket on your shoulders.

The same sorta thing happens at a playground. The swings creak softly in the wind, swaying back and forth as if still being ridden by the ghosts of the children who came before. It feels alien.

There is a reason why foggy, quiet, empty ghost towns seem so scary even when there is nothing obviously supernatural about them.

So all I ask is..why? Why do empty spaces feel so strange?

The Evolutionary Reason

A dense forest teeming with things with far-too-sharp teeth is..empty of human life. A deep, dark cave triggering claustrophobia in every man in a 10-mile range is empty of human life. An abandoned mall, perfect for shaky cam documentaries, is empty of human life.

These empty spaces—whether filled with threats unseen or an eerie quiet—tap into our evolutionary instinct for survival. An empty space is often the absence of safety, a void where danger can lurk unseen, and the discomfort we feel is a survival mechanism hardwired into our DNA.

Behind every action and reaction, behind every reasoning and logic is one simple goal. And that’s to survive. You may have a death wish and the survival instinct of an average house cat, but your body knows.

I suppose this is what we call instinct. An unidentifiable and impossible-to-measure sense which becomes the final line of defence.

But the complete absence of people somewhere is often a very clear indicator that said place is not safe. If no one is there, it’s for a reason—a danger they sensed or a risk they avoided. This primal knowledge runs deeper than conscious thought. We instinctively know that the emptiness isn't a neutral state; it’s a signal that something is wrong, that something out there, hidden from our view, is best avoided.

And this helps us understand why we fear ghost-towns, if we wrap back to that example. Because what’s more scary than a place that used to be a place of life, but is not just something abandoned and discarded.

So the first reason (in a long list of reasons) why we dislike emptiness is due to evolution. It’s this idea that our ancestors learned to thrive by avoiding the voids where unseen threats could hide.

As we navigate our modern world, that instinct persists, guiding us through the unsettling silence of empty spaces and reminding us that in every absence, there lies a story.

The Uncanny Valley

According to Wikipedia, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized psychological and aesthetic relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object.

Aaaaand what does that mean?

Well, quite simply put, the uncanny valley is the relation between something that seems and looks human, and how we respond to it.

In most contexts, the uncanny valley is used to explain why that doll looks creepy, why that particular billion-dollar CGI puppet looks..off or why circus clowns freak us the fuck out.

But I think this effect can go beyond.

Tell me something, do you know how your room is? I would guess yes. So if one day you wake up to it being slightly different, how would you react?

Let’s say tomorrow you sit up in bed and find that your walls are the .. incorrect shade of lilac, or that particular lamp sitting on your desk is ..kinda smaller than it should be. Nothing is obviously out of place, but still somehow wrong.

This subtle change can create a dissonance that triggers a sense of unease. We can stretch this idea to a place as well. When it comes to public places like a playground or a shopping mall, we all have sort of a mental map ready. And this map includes not just the tangible locations but also the intangible nature of the place.

A completely empty shopping mall feels creepy for the same reason a food court filled with people who aren't eating but instead silently chanting would feel strange.

It's just not meant to be like that.

The Silence Of It All

We think that it's the lack of one sense that makes another…more. Like how the blind sometimes can hear things most others do not.

But I think, I think that the lack of one sense does also heighten itself. Of course, this won’t work on the sightless, they simply cannot see. But you notice how the inability to see in the dark helps us see more, and how it sometimes makes us see things that simply do not exist?

This can happen not just to our eyes but also to our ears, not just to our eyes but also to our minds.

Is it hallucinating? I am not sure, but it sure can feel like it.

And in the quiet of an empty space, it's oh-so-easy to fool our brains. Your own footsteps on the bright white polished marble sounds like it’s coming from behind you.

Your own breathing, be it smooth or steady, or panicked and gasping, feels..forced. It’s almost like the very natural things become something different.

Pure, uninterrupted silence does something to you. It makes you want to fill the blank with things that aren’t there. When we lack sensory input, our brains instinctively step in, creating details to make sense of the emptiness.

So now you’re left in a position where there is nothing to hear and nothing to see. Is it a surprise we get scared?

In The In-Between

There was a clinic I used to visit whenever I was sick as a kid. The doctor was good enough, I suppose, but what stands out the most in my memory is the waiting room. It was a drab, clean, whitewashed space—something that felt almost like it belonged in a dream.

It was so... empty.

Sitting there alone for what often felt like endless minutes, sometimes nearly an hour, always felt strange. I was always, always alone. With the AC humming steadily, the door closed, and the windows shuttered, it felt like I was completely cut off from the rest of the world.

The best way I can describe it is that it felt as though the room was somehow separate from everything else—like it existed in its own little bubble, detached from reality.

Liminal spaces are anywhere that exists in a state of transition, like empty airports, staircases, hallways, or waiting rooms. These spaces are not quite destinations, but they carry an uneasy energy precisely because they are neither here nor there.

And that waiting room was exactly that—a place that wasn’t really anywhere, just a pause between being sick at home and seeing the doctor. It wasn’t a destination, and it wasn’t a part of my everyday world.

It was something in between, where time felt distorted, and I felt suspended, just waiting. It was as if the room itself held its breath, existing without purpose until someone walked in to give it meaning again.

That uneasy energy, the sense of being in limbo, is what made it so strangely memorable—like the world outside had ceased to exist, and I was left in this quiet, disconnected moment, unsure when it would end.

Not every empty space is a liminal space, and liminality as an idea can stretch beyond just a place. But it’s this emptiness that makes liminal spaces like that waiting room feel so unsettling. It’s not just that the room was physically empty of people; it was emotionally empty too, devoid of the warmth and purpose that filled other spaces.

In that absence, all that remained was the sense of being between moments, suspended in a place that had lost its meaning.

Time Isn’t Real

You know those university classes that felt like they dragged on endlessly, stretching each minute into what seemed like an eternity. Why is that?

And then there are those vacations that vanish in an instant, slipping away like sand through your fingers. Why is that?

Interestingly, there’s a scientific reason behind it. When you’re having fun and fully engaged in what you’re doing, time seems to fly by. Conversely, when you’re not enjoying yourself, time crawls at a snail’s pace.

Got it?

Now, consider what happens when there’s nothing to engage with at all. Not only are you disengaged, but you find yourself in a situation where there’s literally nothing to engage in. This represents the extreme end of the unsavory spectrum, where time feels unbearably stagnant.

It’s strange to think of yourself stuck in an empty school, bored. I can’t quite recall if I was, but it wouldn’t be that much of a shock.

But apart from simply being bored, you can also feel..stuck. Our perception of suspended time can evoke a feeling of being “stuck”. So while you know logically that time is moving and you will eventually get out, it feels like you’re suspended in a moment that refuses to pass.

In those empty spaces, without the usual buzz of activity—people chatting, laughter echoing, or even just the sound of footsteps—time seems to lose its structure. It becomes harder to gauge how long you've been waiting or how much longer you might be there. This distortion can heighten feelings of anxiety and unease, tapping into a primal fear of being trapped in a situation without purpose or direction. It's not just about boredom; it's about that existential dread of being stuck in a moment that feels like it could stretch on forever.

So yep, if you find yourself stuck in an empty mall at 10 in the evening, being bored may just be the better of the devils.

It’s Not Meant To Be

Some places are meant to be quiet and empty. Libraries, churches and temples, museums, cemeteries - places that should ideally never be crowded and noisy. And hence an excessively crowded temple feels strange, a busy library seems out of place and a noisy cemetary is..concerning.

There are two elements to this. Firstly is the simple fact that any place that goes against its nature is unsettling. The second is the concept of de-familiarzation, where something familiar is presented in an unfamiliar way, making us perceive it differently.

When a library is filled with chatter or a museum becomes overly crowded, we are forced to experience these spaces in a way that contradicts our mental image of them.

Essentially, the uncanny valley effect, when applied to places, is about the dissonance between how a place is and how we perceive it.

An empty airport, an empty school, an empty mall—these feel scary not because there's something inherently supernatural in them, but because they defy our expectations of what those spaces should be.

They are meant to be alive with people, bustling with activity, full of noise and purpose. When that energy is stripped away, we're left with a void that our minds struggle to understand. The silence becomes heavy, the emptiness unsettling.

It’s in this absence—of purpose, of people, of familiar life—that the unease creeps in, reminding us that perhaps the scariest thing about emptiness is the story it leaves untold.