8 Towns With Truly Bizarre Names (and How They Got Them)

This one you may actually remember happening. For most of its life the place was called Hot Springs, a small spa town in Sierra County built around the warm mineral water that bubbles up out of the ground there. Then, in March 1950, Ralph Edwards — host of the popular NBC radio quiz program Truth or Consequences — made an offer on the air. He would broadcast the show’s tenth-anniversary episode live from the first town in America willing to rename itself after it.

Hot Springs took the dare. On March 31, 1950 the residents voted 1,294 to 295 to become Truth or Consequences, and Edwards broadcast from the newly rechristened town the very next evening. He kept coming back, too — returning for a fiesta the first weekend of every May for the next fifty years. Locals still call the place T or C, which is probably what you would do as well.

Hell is a tiny unincorporated spot about an hour west of Detroit, and the honest truth is that nobody can prove exactly how it got its name. A man named George Reeves settled there in the 1830s and ran a sawmill, a gristmill, a distillery, and a tavern — and the stories tend to circle back to him. One version says he paid his farmhands in whiskey, so often that their wives would grumble their husbands had “gone to Hell again” when supper went cold.

The other favorite is gentler. A pair of German travelers are said to have passed through and remarked that the place was so schön hell — “so beautifully bright.” And then there is the plainest version of all: when asked what the settlement should be called, Reeves supposedly shrugged and said they could name it Hell for all he cared. They took him at his word. The town has made a cheerful living off it ever since, right down to couples who drive out just to get married there.

Here is the reassuring part: Boring is not a judgment on the place. It is a surname. William H. Boring was a Union veteran of the Civil War who had been badly wounded at the siege of Vicksburg, and in 1874 he and his wife Sarah settled on a stretch of farmland about a dozen miles east of Portland. When William donated land for the community’s schoolhouse, the settlement that grew up around it simply took his name.

Boring has leaned into the joke with real affection. In 2012 it paired up with the village of Dull, Scotland as sister communities — an idea dreamed up by a Scottish traveler who happened through — and the two have been swapping good-natured ribbing ever since. You will find both towns on that list, which tells you something about how these pairings happen.

Out in the Sonoran Desert, where State Route 85 met State Route 86, the two highways once came together in a distinct Y shape. When the little community there needed a name, the shape of that junction was the obvious answer, and folks wanted to call it simply “Y.”

As the story goes, Arizona law at the time required a place name to have at least three letters, so a single Y would not do. The workaround was elegant in its own stubborn way: spell it out as Why. The old Y-intersection is long gone — the highway department rebuilt it into a safer, more ordinary junction years ago — but the name on the map never budged.

Up in the mountains of western Maryland sits a town that owes its name to a clerical muddle from the 1780s. The popular account traces it to a land survey around 1786, when two friends from Prince George’s County were out marking claims in the same wooded country. The way the story is told, one of them — by accident — staked out a parcel the other had already surveyed.

The slip became a kind of shorthand for the tract, and the name simply stuck to the place that grew there. Accident was eventually incorporated in 1916, and it has worn the name without apology ever since. It is the sort of origin that makes you glad nobody tried to tidy it up.

The town in southern Indiana started out as Santa Fe. The trouble came in 1856, when the townsfolk applied for a post office and were told the state already had a Santa Fe — pick something else. They wanted to keep the festive spirit of the name, and the story goes that the one thing everyone could agree on was Santa Claus.

There is a prettier legend too, about the debate unfolding on Christmas Eve and a door blowing open to the sound of sleigh bells, a child crying out that Santa had come. True or not, the name was made official that same year. The town has since turned Christmas into its whole identity, and every December the local post office still handles a mountain of letters addressed to the big man himself.

Dull is a hamlet of only a few dozen souls tucked into the hills of Perthshire, and despite the name, there is nothing grim about it. The word most likely comes from an old Gaelic term for a meadow or a water-meadow — a mild, green sort of meaning that has simply weathered into something that looks glum in English.

Its moment of fame came in 2012, when a cyclist passing through noticed the sign and thought of Boring, Oregon back home. The two tiny places agreed to become a pair, mostly for the fun of it, and a town called Bland in Australia later joined in. A trinity of tedium, somebody called them — which is exactly the kind of name none of them actually deserves.

No, it was not named after the comic-book hero — and in fact the city got there first. Batman is a provincial capital in southeastern Turkey, and it took its modern name in 1957 from the Batman River that runs nearby. The river name itself is thought to be a worn-down version of Batı Raman, “West Raman,” after the range of hills above it.

The town was a sleepy place called Iluh until oil was discovered in the region, which drew people and money and gave the city its reason to grow. The caped crusader, by contrast, first appeared in 1939, so when people imagine some connection between the two, they have the chronology backward. Still, you can hardly blame a traveler for doing a double-take at that road sign.