Trick-or-Treat? Top Ten Towns with Halloween Names
Monday, 31st October 2011 by Ian Brown
Ah... October 31st, the day when children everywhere1 get to dress up in scary costumes and extort candy from homeowners under threat of terrible consequences! To celebrate, Google Sightseeing invites you to join us on a harrowing and haunting2 trip around the world to visit our (totally arbitrary) top-10 towns with Halloween names.
At number ten the small town of Scary, West Virginia. Having the main street called Scary Road wasn't frightening enough, so they named another street Big Scary Road!
At numbers nine and eight, we can just about make up the popular Halloween activity, by visiting Trickum Road and Treat Mountain Road, both in rural Georgia. Sadly they don't intersect.
In the Netherlands we have a town named after a popular Halloween costume - Monster - which is number seven on our list. I'm not sure if it's real graffiti, a real monster, or just an artifact of Google's blurring efforts, but the town sign appears to have a ghoulish claw attached to the letter M!
Number six continues our monster theme. A touch of green face paint and a fake plastic bolt through the neck brings us to the tiny village of Frankenstein, Missouri.
Wikipedia claims that the town wasn't actually named after Mary Shelley's novel or its characters, but for a Gottfried Franken who donated land for the construction of a Church.
At number five we have one of the more popular decorations for Halloween parties - Spiderweb, South Carolina.
At numbers four and three we have a ghostly sound and a startled response - Boo, Sweden and Eek, Alaska.
Many children dress as pointy-hatted, wart-riddled old hags for Halloween, so (bending the rules slightly to include bodies of water as well as towns) at number two we have Witch Lake, Michigan.
We provide this handy graphic to help you understand how it got its name! Note the bonus Halloween content with Bat Lake just to the north-west!
No Halloween celebration would be complete without a gourd-like squash of the genus Cucurbita, carved into a gruesome face and lit from within by a candle. So tied for number one we have a pair of communities called Pumkpintown - one in South Carolina, the other in Tennessee.
Happy Halloween from all of us at Google Sightseeing! If you know of other Halloween-named towns, please post them in the comments.
About the author
Ian Brown lives in Ottawa, Canada, and spends his spare time perusing maps to find new routes to ride on his orange bicycle.
Not sure whether it’s Google putting them in there, but the claw marks are the logo of Monster energy drink (http://www.monsterenergy.com/). Bit strange, that..
definitely someone pasted it over the real letter M.
yay! The Boo marker is right next to my fathers house. His name is Bo 😀
Thanks for the explanation folks. I wasn’t previously aware of the world of ‘hard core’ energy drinks. My guess is a local teenager pasted the sticker on the sign.
And Bjomp – that’s awesome. I love it when we post sights that people are closely connected to. Bo from Boo is a fantastic combination! Please tell him he’s now famous on Google Sightseeing!
I live in a town in southern IL named Goreville.