In the early 1980s, baseball pro Gary Thomasson was winding down his seven-season career with various MLB teams. In 1981 he moved with great fanfare to Japan to play for the Yomiuri Giants in the Nippon Pro Baseball league. But in the final two seasons of his career, he totally ate it, nearly setting the league strikeout record and ending his career with a knee injury.

Inspired by the story of this lauded baseball player who ended up doing nothing, a Japanese artist came up with the concept of Hyperart Thomasson. These refer to useless architectural features, such as stairways to nowhere, death doors, building shadow, and so on, with some increasingly weird Japanese terms.

Once I learned about this concept, I started to realise that I've been seeing Thomassons all over the place, and had even come up with my own names for some of them (as seen in the list above).

Let me share with you some of the Thomassons I've seen, and feel free to have a look at the Wikipedia page and add your own.

Stairs to nowhere


Death doors




Building shadows






The previous three building shadows were all next to each other; this one isn't.


Now your turn!

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Found in a building in Cleveland, can't remember which one.
I love the idea of creating these phenomenons to confuse bad spirits for the purpose of protecting a home/property. This trope shows up in a lot of animes and similar superstitions in other cultures all over the world.

Very interesting historic tidbits but I think a lot of these come from renovating historic buildings and some things just don't have uses anymore but its an added expense to remove lol

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While me and my pal were next to the city's police headquarters looking for drains to explore, we found this peculiar sidewalk situation. It is a set of stairs that we think may have met up with an older guy sidewalk configuration. I am unsure if this counts, but I believe it might.