Various research has explored the distribution of reflexives in typical syntactic environments, but few have addressed their atypical distribution. To this end, I examine their distribution in locative prepositional phrases. The first phase uses three corpora to examine reflexive pronoun distribution in: next to, above, in front of, within, and inside. The second phase is an experimental study examining English speakers’ (N = 37) acceptability judgements of reflexives in the same environments via a rating scale survey. Results indicate that non-reflexives are the most recurrent and acceptable pronominal choice for natives. Physical closeness or distance does not depend on their pronominal choice, but rather on other factors. Moreover, speakers slightly accepted the reflexive pronoun with the preposition within and inside, while they strictly accepted non-reflexives with the other set of prepositions. These findings oppose theoretical claims postulating the relevance of reflexives to encode physical closeness and non-reflexives to encode physical distance. This study reports on data relevant for this type of anaphoric distribution and connects it to the importance of having native intuition on such occurrences prior to determining any theoretical patterns of this distribution. In conclusion, the centrality of natural data to linguistic theory and the tenability of its assumptions is highlighted.