Where Places Become Strange: Liminal Spaces, Abandonment and Uncanny Folklore
Why are we drawn to the places we are not meant to linger?
An underpass after dark. An empty office awaiting demolition. A railway bridge between neighbourhoods. A deserted shopping centre, an overgrown path or a house standing abandoned with traces of its former occupants still inside.
These are places in transition: caught between destinations, purposes or identities. Some are designed only to be passed through. Others have lost the function they once possessed but have not yet become something new. Often described as liminal, they can feel thrilling, melancholy and full of possibility, but also curiously unsettling.
In this talk, psychologist, writer and photographer Dr Steph Lay explores why abandoned and in-between places exert such a powerful hold over the imagination. Drawing upon psychology, psychogeography, folklore and her own experiences of walking and photographing neglected urban landscapes, she asks what happens when the ordinary rules of a place begin to loosen.
Why does an empty building invite us to invent stories about what occurred there? Why can a familiar footpath become uncanny at dusk? What makes thresholds, bridges, roadsides and the edges of settlements such persistent settings for supernatural encounters? And when a place loses its official purpose, who gets to decide what it means next?
Throughout the talk, Steph will return to Milton Keynes, the modern planned city at the centre of her ongoing paranormal research. Its redways, underpasses and new estates all layered over older landscapes reveal how even the most rationally designed environments can produce their own mysteries, myths and haunted spaces.
Some places belong firmly to the world we know.
Others seem to wait somewhere in between.
Speaker Bio:
Dr Steph Lay is a writer, researcher and cognitive psychologist based in Milton Keynes. Her doctoral research explored the uncanny valley and why certain near-human faces can feel so unsettling.
She is the creator of City of Secrets and its ongoing Revenants on the Redway project, gathering local stories of the unexplained and exploring the hidden histories, folklore and uncanny possibilities of Milton Keynes.
Behind the scenes, Steph also works with Peter Laws on the YouTube channel Into the Fog. She curates first-hand paranormal accounts submitted by viewers and creates atmospheric artwork and visual storytelling to help bring those stories to life.
Across her work, she brings together psychology, place, folklore and the paranormal, exploring not only why strange experiences unsettle us, but why they matter to the people who live through them.
Curated & Hosted by
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience, Lena’s New Book – Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon
Don’t worry if you can’t make the talk live on the night – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
