Phantom Settlements: The Places on Google Maps that Don't Exist

After what felt like a long and heavy sleep, you finally drift back into consciousness and find yourself squinting into the morning sun. You appear to be lying down fully-clothed in a deserted field in the middle of nowhere. You’ve got a banging head, at least two black eyes, an empty wallet, and your clothes are smeared in blood and vomit. More importantly, you have absolutely no memory of the previous night, and no idea where you are or how you got here.

It was different in the days before smartphones could track your location, and Google Maps could give you a clue as to how to get home again. Back in the old days, you just had to keep wandering around until you hopefully bumped into a farmer or a murderer who might be able to give you helpful directions. But let’s say this happened to you in 2008. The GPS tracking on your phone has given you a good starting point, and now you’ve pulled up Google Maps to figure out the route home. You’re apparently in a little town that goes by the name of Argleton, situated between the A59 road and Town Green Railway Station, not too far away from the market town of Ormskirk in Lancashire, England.

This in itself is a little bit of a worry, as you started your night out at the ‘Aqua Bar and Nightclub’ in Key West, Florida. It’s gonna be a long voyage back home. Still, let’s not panic. A quick search online reveals that Argleton boasts a doctor’s surgery, a golf club, a hairdresser salon, and much more besides.

If only you had some money left, you could go and get a haircut and then enjoy a quick round of golf with the natives whilst you try and figure out the details of your return journey. But as you begin exploring the town, you discover something quite curious. There’s nothing here at all. Just more, dry empty fields stretching out into the distant horizon.

Not so much as a hot dog stand or a signpost or a cow.

You don’t realise it yet, but you are nowhere. Argleton might have appeared on Google Maps, Google Earth, and online business directories, but it’s a town that does not exist. You’re caught in a map trap. You can’t walk out. And this will inevitably lead to the brewing of dark thoughts in deeply suspicious minds.

The Mystery of Argleton

But what were Google playing at? How did a patch of nothing manage to attract so much local business? And why is history littered with so many fictional locations and phantom settlements that don’t exist outside the boundaries of the map?

There are naturally plenty of theories as to how Argleton ended up on Google Maps: It’s the construction site for the proposed UK equivalent of Area 51, and Google accidentally let the alien cat out of the space helmet. It’s the real location of Hogwarts. It’s an ancient settlement which mysteriously disappeared under tragic circumstances thousands of years ago, but resurfaced in 2008 after a journey through a time portal. It hides a secret meaning with earth-shattering consequences known only to Google.

It was a simple cock up.

Whichever way Argleton found its place on the map, it was first brought to public attention in late 2008 by blogger Mike Nolan who worked as Head of Web Services at Edge Hill University, just around the corner in Ormskirk. Mike had grown up in the area, and was puzzled when he spotted the name Argleton on Google Maps, mainly because this was his old stomping ground and he knew for a fact that there was nothing there except for a field and maybe a footpath.

The following year, Mike’s colleague Roy Bayfield – the Head of Marketing at the same Edge Hill University – took it upon himself to go several steps further. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Roy made his way to the exact location referenced on the map and wrote an entertaining travelogue on his epic trip to the epicentre of Argleton, during which he tried to find hidden meanings in breathtaking sights such as some broken fencing which looked a bit like a rune. Roy later revealed: “I started to weave this amazing fantasy about the place - an alternative universe, a Narnia-like world. I was really fascinated by the appearance of a non-existent place that the internet had the power to make real and give a semi-existence.”

Leaving aside the rune-shaped fencing – clearly a throwback to the days when the town was populated by German dwarves versed in the dark arts of geometric magic – Roy actually found little more than a few empty fields. And a footpath. And yet lurking somewhere in these supposedly empty fields was a buzzing hotspot of local business enterprise.

You see, Argleton appeared to expand from its humble roots on Google Maps, as it made the leap into various online directories during 2008 and 2009. Aside from the aforementioned golf club, hairdresser salon, and doctor’s surgery, a quick online search for Argleton would also throw up a hotel, a local plumber, and a chiropractor. You could look for jobs in the town, and browse property that was available to buy or rent.

You could even keep an eye on the weather forecasts for Argleton. After all, you don’t want to be planning an afternoon of golf with the local plumber and chiropractor if you’re all just likely to get caught in a typical Argleton hailstorm.

How Phantom Towns Generate Real Business

But how did a phantom town manage to drum up so much commercial activity? Were all the businesses just as fictional as the place? Well, that’s one mystery we can solve straight away. The listed businesses – including Hope Street Hotel and Mossack Hall Golf Club – are very much real. They’re just not quite in Argleton.

Some breeds of business software and online information services extract crucial data from Google, and in this case, the name of the town - along with the genuine L39 postcode - had been lifted from the map and matched up with businesses and online services which shared the same postcode. So, any online searches and queries relating to Argleton would often throw up results relating to businesses and property and weather forecasts within that genuine postcode, even though they fell outside of the silent, empty fields of the town that never was. If an Argleton resident is ever in need of a good local plumber or chiropractor, they’re screwed.

Still, after the story was picked up by global media, the town generated some very real interest and merchandising opportunities online. By the end of 2009, you could buy a wide range of Argleton products, including t-shirts which bore the slogan: “I visited Argleton and all I got was this lousy t-shirt!”

A comical website was set up at Argleton.com which suggested that it was run by the forgotten citizens of the town who were now being widely dismissed as a figment of a map maker’s imagination, and who were angrily demanding back their identity. The site delved into the fictional background of the town, took a look at some of the most famous Argletonians from history, and dished up spoof news stories along the lines of: “Last Remaining ‘Woolworths’ Store Still Going Strong in Argleton.”

Meanwhile, ‘The Stanley Arms’ pub in nearby Ormskirk joined in the fun by serving ‘Argleton Ale’ to tourists. The landlord refused to reveal the source of the ale, but hinted that the deliveries just magically appeared around the back of the pub every Monday morning. ‘The Stanley Arms’ also added ‘Argleton Pie’ to the lunchtime menu, a dish notable for its unusual ingredients which were cheekily listed as “Nothing at all.” But whilst the idea of an invisible town was raising a few giggles and flogging a few t-shirts, the mystery still remained as to why exactly Google had started populating its maps with places that don’t even exist.

A History of Phantom Locations

This is certainly not the first time in history that misleading maps have pointed everyone in the wrong direction by creating locations which are pretty tricky to track down in real life.

The Mountains of Kong

It’s one thing for a fictional location to make a brief appearance on a map in cyberspace. But it’s something else entirely when a fictional location finds itself printed on hundreds of commercial maps for the best part of a century. And that was the case with The Mountains of Kong.

If you pick up any map of Africa produced between 1798 and 1888, there’s a good chance you’ll spot The Mountains of Kong on there. Stretching from West Africa near the source of the Niger River in Tembakounda in Guinea, all the way east to the Central African Mountains of the Moon – which don’t exist either, but let’s not got bogged down with confusing trivial detail – the snow-capped Mountains of Kong were said to boast foothills glistening with gold. This should perhaps have served as a big clue that they weren’t really there.

Many 19th century explorers attempted to reach the mythical mountains of gold to loot its remarkably well-hidden treasure, and some dubious souls even claimed that they crossed the mountains. It wasn’t until 1888 that the French explorer Louis Gustave Binger officially ‘undiscovered’ the mountains during an expedition which led him down the Niger River. He certainly found the town of Kong which was a thriving little trading hub.

But the mountains were conspicuous by their complete absence. And following this undiscovery, the phantom mountains began to crumble into fictitious boulders and tumble into the sea, as they completely disappeared from commercial maps by the end of the 19th century.

It had all been the fault of the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, and particularly the cartographer James Rennell who were collaborating on a book by the name of Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa. The book revealed the epic tale of Mungo’s expedition to West Africa, during which he was told of the existence of the mountains. In his own words: “People informed me that these mountains were situated in a large and powerful kingdom called Kong.” It’s worth emphasising that he never actually claimed to have explored the mountains or even seen a glimpse of them from afar. He’d just picked up some gossip about them.

But when the cartographer James Rennell drew up the accompanying maps for the book, he included this unseen mountain range as it fitted in neatly with his own theories on the flow of the Niger River. James couldn’t understand why the river didn’t flow south of the Gulf of New Guinea, and he assumed this was because there was a load of mountains in the way, dripping with gold. It was Mungo’s name that was slapped on the cover of the book, so he must surely have given his thumbs-up to the map design. Both Mungo and James were so highly respected that nobody seemed to question their made-up mountains for nearly a hundred years until Louis Gustave Binger finally set the record straight.

Yet they didn’t disappear completely. In 1928, they mysteriously re-emerged in John Bartholomew’s Oxford Advanced Atlas, whilst they also made a surprise guest appearance in Goode’s World Atlas published in 1995.

Sandy Island

Sandy Island is another fictional location which has been making regular appearances on maps since the 18th century. Despite the fact that its existence was largely discredited in the 1970s, it was still showing up on Google Maps as late as 2012.

This body of land out there in the eastern Coral Sea was meant to be around three miles wide and fifteen miles long, and was sandwiched midway between Brisbane in Australia and New Caledonia. Sandy Island was first supposedly spotted in 1772 by explorer Captain James Cook, but didn’t find its way onto British, American, and Russian maps until the turn of the 20th century after its existence had been confirmed by British sailors on board the whaling ship Velocity in 1876.

It’s possible that Captain Cook and those sailors may have been knocking back too much rum and ended up losing their bearings. Or it could have been a simple navigational error, as positioning at sea was obviously a bit more primitive and not entirely reliable back then. Perhaps it’s more likely that they were all actually observing the floating remains of a submerged volcano and mistook it for an exotic island.

But some people had lost faith in the existence of Sandy Island by the 1970s, largely because it had not been spotted for nearly a century. The French were the first to remove the island from their hydrographic maps in 1974, and other countries began to follow suit in the 1980s. But not everyone got the memo.

Sandy Island could still be spotted on Google Earth well into the 2000s, and it continued to stubbornly make its presence felt on digital databases including the World Vector Shoreline Database which is used by the US military. It seems that at some point during the conversion from hard copy maps to digital maps, an outdated physical map which still displayed the fake island was erroneously used, giving a new digitised lease of life to the nowhere island. It’s a good job that they weren’t using really old maps, otherwise the US could still be factoring The Mountains of Kong into their military manoeuvres.

The myth was finally quashed once and for all in 2012 when a crew of scientists aboard the Australian research vessel Southern Surveyor were studying plate tectonics in the Coral Sea, and discovered that their maps didn’t agree with each other. On the one hand, their scientific charts – which pulled information from the World Vector Shoreline Database – seemed to indicate that Sandy Island was meant to be on the horizon. Google Maps concurred with those findings. Yet the physical navigation charts weren’t having any of that nonsense. They insisted that there was nothing there at all aside from the deep blue sea, and maybe an abandoned shopping trolley or two.

Sandy Island was finally wiped away from the digital maps after Southern Surveyor confirmed that the physical navigation charts had proved to be the most reliable. Crew member Dr Maria Seton revealed: “We all had a good giggle at Google as we sailed right through the island.”

Beatosu and Goblu

Some maps are the result of people clearly just pissing about. Two new towns suddenly popped up out of nowhere on the 1978-1979 edition of the official map for the state of Michigan. The curiously named towns of Beatosu and Goblu had been planted not in Michigan itself, but just over the border in the neighbouring Ohio. And this raised a few quizzical eyebrows in both states as neither town had existed in the 1977-78 edition.

There were a couple of odd things about the new towns. The names weren’t capitalised like every other location on the map, and there were no specific markers or boundary lines to ascertain their precise location. But the oddest thing of all is that the cartographer had actually been under strict instructions to include the fake towns, purely to piss off supporters of the Ohio State Football team.

Peter Fletcher was a lifelong resident of Ypsilanti in Michigan, and a massive supporter of The Wolverines – the football team representing the University of Michigan who enjoyed a fierce rivalry with the Buckeyes – the team representing Ohio State University. Peter was also an entrepreneur, a Republican activist, and more significantly, he was a chairman of the Michigan State Highway Commission who had a personal say in what exactly appeared on the official maps.

The towns of Beatosu and Goblu were nothing more than a cheeky dig at his football team’s arch-rivals. Goblu was a reference to the chant “Go Blue!” which echoed around the stadium in support of the blue shirts of the Wolverines, whilst Beatosu simply stood for “Beat Ohio State University!”

Many Ohio residents expressed their distaste for the gag and demanded a corrected reprint, and even some Michigan residents complained that it was a waste of taxpayers’ money to print up three million of these mirthful maps. That seems a little harsh, considering that it can’t have cost more than a few dollars to scribble down two new town names on a Michigan map, and it didn’t actually affect anything inside the boundaries of Michigan anyway. The fact that Peter always declined his annual salary of $60,000 as chairman of the State Highway Commission should have more than compensated for the extra three minutes of work that went into the maps.

The towns disappeared for the following year’s edition, whilst this 1978-1979 edition is now a highly prized collector’s piece for fans of the Wolverines. And the fake towns may have provided a bit of inspiration for Peter’s team, as the Wolverines thrashed the Buckeyes 14-3 in that year’s clash.

Soviet Map Falsification

On a slightly more disturbing note, it was practically impossible for a citizen of the Soviet Union to buy a local map that made any kind of sense between the late 1930s right through until 1988. And that’s because the map information was deliberately falsified for a period of over fifty years. Only the military were allowed to get their hands on real maps, whilst everybody else had to make do with comedy concoctions that were about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.

There was a reason behind the deception. The Soviets were so worried about the threats of aerial bombing and enemy intelligence operations that they placed cartography under control of the security police. The cartographers were instructed to distort boundaries, miss out significant geographical features, move rivers and roads around a bit, and fabricate entire streets, all in the name of protecting the Motherland.

To be fair, it proved to be a pretty effective strategy. During the Second World War, General Gunther Blumentritt led his German troops into an attempted invasion of the Soviet Union, but came a bit unstuck when he realised that the maps they were using in no way corresponded with reality. After getting lost and wandering around in circles for hours, his troops eventually managed to get all their vehicles stuck in the unexpected mud of a chunk of remote countryside that wasn’t meant to be there.

The problem is that tourists and citizens were also getting hopelessly lost for fifty years, and it makes you wonder why The Soviet Union even bothered to continue producing maps at all. American diplomats and journalists working in Moscow figured out that the best way of getting hold of a reliable map of The Soviet Union was to have one imported from almost any other country in the world.

It wasn’t until 1988 that The Soviet Union finally admitted to falsifying maps, and agreed to start producing new maps with more of a focus on accuracy and truth. This put an end to regular high-profile complaints about the useless fake maps, including this observation in the evening paper Vechernaya Moskva: “‘You can get maps of our country in many countries of the world except for the USSR. From whom, one wonders, are we keeping secrets? From ourselves?”

Copyright Traps and Paper Towns

However, it’s the story of the fictional town of Agloe in New York which perhaps provides a compelling clue to the origins of our equally fictional town of Argleton. The thing about Agloe is that it really was a trap. A paper trap.

Many maps purposefully contain certain distinctive and fictitious details that don’t really exist, hidden away in the alleyways and darker corners of the globe. These are a cunning attempt to prevent copyright violation. After going to all that effort of crafting your own map, the last thing you want is for somebody else to come along and steal it.

It’s usually pretty easy to figure out that somebody has plagiarised, say, a piece of original fiction like a novel or a movie script. But it becomes much harder when you start dealing with the details of reality found in maps and encyclopaedias. If some other unscrupulous company out there ever decides to take a devious shortcut and simply replicates your existing map instead of producing their own, it can be difficult to argue your case as you’re dealing with the mapping of real locations, and you can’t claim copyright over facts.

But you could always try laying down a sneaky trap for the unwary copycat by planting small fictitious details in your own map. If these same details pop up on a commercial map produced by another company, it’s easier to prove that they’ve pretty much just stolen your work. These copyright traps are often called Paper Towns, Trap Streets, or Mountweazels. (This last name relates not to a paper town or a paper mountain, but a paper person. The 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia features a bogus entry named ‘Lillian Virginia Mountweazle’ which was designed to catch out plagiarists. This woman who never existed was supposedly a fountain designer turned photographer who met a tragic end when she died during an explosion whilst working on an assignment for Combustibles magazine.)

Not many map producers openly admit to using trap streets in their work, although it’s alleged that popular publications such as London’s A-Z Street Atlas contains no less than a hundred different traps in just a single city. But when I first heard about all this, I started to feel a little concerned. Couldn’t these paper towns potentially lead to complete confusion at best, and outright danger at worst?

Well, apparently this should never happen, as the traps are usually more subtle than that. Instead of fabricating entire streets and villages and towns and countries, the sensible map makers are content to plant their small copyright traps in alleyways or dead-end streets or somewhere completely out of the way. Some of the traps will be as small and discreet as an extra cul-de-sac or an exaggerated bend in a road. Just something that will be distinctive enough to prove plagiarism, but not big enough to get their customers walking into walls and falling down wells.

Yet some map makers have been known to take things a little too far. And in the case of the entire paper town of Agloe in upstate New York, a well-prepared trap didn’t quite spring as planned.

The Strange Case of Agloe, New York

The town of Agloe first appeared on road maps in 1937. In reality, the location was nothing much more than a desolate dirt track which sat between the town of Rockland and the Beaverkill river. But on paper, this small stretch of nothing had been given the name of Agloe by the major mapmakers General Drafting Company. It had been decided that this was the perfect quiet spot to drop a copyright trap which was named after the initials of the company’s director and his assistant – Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers.

This fake town was still appearing exclusively on General Drafting Company road maps by the 1950s, at which point the famous map company Rand McNally appeared to fall right into the trap. They produced a new map of their own which included the phantom town of Agloe. The lawyers for the General Drafting Company must have been rubbing their hands with glee. This was surely an open-and-shut case. Rand McNally had been caught red-handed, and now these blatant copycats would have to cough up a small fortune for daring to venture into a town that was created by their competitors.

Or at least that’s what you would think. But Rand McNally completely got away with it. A few years after the General Drafting Company first put Agloe on the map, a fishing lodge had popped up near that desolate dirt track which had been proudly christened Agloe Lodge. And by the 1950s, a new store had apparently opened near the location, and this business very briefly traded under the name of Agloe General Store.

I say very briefly, because it didn’t stay open very long at all, possibly because the owner had foolishly decided to open a general store slap bang in the middle of nowhere.

In both cases, the proprietors had apparently picked up a General Drafting Company map from their local Esso gas station and decided to name their new business ventures after the relevant location clearly labelled on the map. Rand McNally claimed that when they were crafting their own map, they had noted the names of the businesses operating in the area, and concluded that Agloe must indeed be a real place. Although I couldn’t dig up concrete confirmation, it would appear that the courts agreed, and Rand McNally was cleared of any wrongdoing.

An alternative version of the story which rarely gets reported was put forward by Darlene Beers who lived nearby and whose great-great-grandfather owned the original version of the fishing lodge. Darlene claimed that the general store never existed. She also claimed that the fishing lodge was only given the name Agloe after her great-great-grandfather sold it to a mysterious entity by the name of Agloe Associates in the 1950s. The implication seems to be that Agloe Associates was allegedly a front for Rand McNally who had come to the conclusion that it was cheaper to rebrand an old fishing lodge than it was to lose a lawsuit for copyright infringement.

But whatever the finer details, the rise and fall of Agloe is a fascinating tale, as it’s the story of a paper town which essentially took on a life of its own and became real for well over seventy years until it sadly blinked out of existence again. Agloe continued to appear on maps and travel guides right up until the 2010s, although it now seems to have disappeared, and it was finally pulled from Google Maps in 2014. Maybe the old dirt track at least deserves some kind of commemorative plaque or something. This is a move which has been supported over the years by Agloe Truthers, but the only problem is that nobody can agree on where exactly they should put it.

Was Argleton a Copyright Trap?

Many people seem to have reached the conclusion that all this helps to explain how Argleton in Lancashire briefly flickered into existence. Argleton was nothing more than a trap town cooked up by Google in a bid to detect any copyright violation. It’s been suggested that they even left small clues in the name Argleton which is an anagram of “Not Real G,” with the G supposedly representing Google.

That sounds a little unlikely, though. For starters, it’s a shit anagram. If Google really was having a private giggle with the naming of a paper town, I think they would have come up with something a bit more fun like Booby Pit. Or perhaps Gamgo Chuttabay Hishicongo which is an anagram of “Gotcha, you cheating scumbag.” But I also think that Google would be considerably cleverer in capturing counterfeit copyright crooks.

Almost two decades before the appearance of Argleton, the Ordnance Survey mapping agency in Great Britain won a considerable payout from the Automobile Association after it caught them copying maps that dated back to the early 1990s. The case dragged on until 2001 when the AA eventually agreed to pay a settlement of no less than £20 million after the motoring club conceded that their processes in producing the 500 different maps and atlases in dispute had not been as robust as they could have been.

But the copyright traps laid down by Ordnance Survey had in no way involved the creation of entire towns or streets. Instead, they had used rather more sophisticated ‘fingerprint’ techniques which focused more on subtle stylistic features such as the details in proportioning and the specific width of roads, rather than anything that could potentially mislead a customer. Considering that Ordnance Survey had this kind of thing cracked by the 1990s, it seems incredibly unlikely that a big tech company like Google would resort to clumsily slapping a whole fictional town onto their maps in 2008 as an effective strategy to protect copyright.

The Most Likely Explanation

Perhaps the most likely explanation for Argleton is one that was actually suggested right back at the very beginning when local blogger Mike Nolan first spotted it on the map in 2008, although the suggestion was swiftly dismissed by many: It was just a simple cock up.

Mike pointed out that the real village of Aughton is only a few hundred metres away from the rogue town, and a misspelling of this may have been keyed into Google. The two words ‘Aughton’ and ‘Argleton’ would have looked very similar, particularly if the cartographer had been working from an old document written in cursive text.

Professor Danny Dorling – former president of The British Cartographic Society – agrees that it was probably just an embarrassing blunder. He observed: “I would bet that this is an innocent mistake. In other words, it was not intentionally inserted to catch out anyone infringing the map’s copyright, as some are saying. But the bottom line is that we don’t know what mapping companies do to protect their maps or to hide secret locations, as some are obligated to do.”

However, the reason that this is often dismissed is because the name Aughton also appeared on the Google Map. So it wasn’t as if Argleton was an erroneous replacement for a real village. It was more like a new neighbourhood that existed very near the clearly visible Aughton. But if you dig a little deeper into the local geography, you’ll see that it gets a bit confusing.

Aughton is the name of an estate and a village and a civil parish. There are residents who technically live in Aughton Park Estate in the village of Aughton in the civil parish of Aughton. The location of Argleton still doesn’t make complete sense on the map, but maybe the cartographer got just as confused as every other normal person who lives on proper streets and villages and parishes that bother to come up with different names for everything around them.

It might have helped make things clearer if Google had provided a half-decent explanation. Instead, they appeared to acknowledge that mistakes can happen, but passed the buck to the Netherlands based company Tele Atlas who were responsible for providing them with the data. But they didn’t seem to know how it happened, either. The vice president recently admitted that they can usually track down exactly where they sourced their data from, but in the case of Argleton, all records have been mysteriously lost. And I don’t know about you, but as soon as I hear about records getting mysteriously lost, I immediately assume that we’re talking about a government cover-up involving alien crop circles.

Sadly, Google won’t give you directions to Argleton today. The location was briefly marked as ‘Closed’ by Google before it was removed in 2010, reappearing just very briefly a few years later as an ‘Historical Landmark’ before permanently sinking from view like an invisible island in the eastern Coral Sea.

But here’s a closing thought; If it wasn’t a simple mistake, then maybe it really was a copyright trap after all. A copyright trap that Google themselves fell into. Perhaps the company got fed up with crafting their own maps and decided to just copy an old map they found in a dusty cupboard which had been created by the famous explorer Captain George Litigious-Trousers in 1789.

As soon as they realised their mistake, they quickly covered it up and pretended that it never happened, hoping that Captain George Litigious-Trousers would probably be too dead now to launch a lawsuit anyway. But I’d care to wager every last speck of gold on them there foothills of The Mountains of Kong that this was a case of human blundering rather than map trap plundering.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Argleton?

Argleton is a phantom settlement that appeared on Google Maps, Google Earth, and online business directories, but it does not exist in reality. It was a town that was caught in a map trap.

How did Argleton end up on Google Maps?

There are several theories about how Argleton ended up on Google Maps, including it being a construction site for a UK equivalent of Area 51, the real location of Hogwarts, or a simple mistake. The most likely explanation is that it was a misspelling of the nearby village of Aughton.

Who first brought Argleton to public attention?

Mike Nolan, a blogger and Head of Web Services at Edge Hill University, first brought Argleton to public attention in late 2008.

What businesses were listed in Argleton?

Argleton appeared to have a doctor’s surgery, a golf club, a hairdresser salon, a hotel, a local plumber, and a chiropractor, among other businesses. However, these businesses were actually located in nearby areas with the same postcode.

What is a paper town?

A paper town is a fictitious detail planted in maps to prevent copyright violation. These are used to catch out companies that plagiarize maps by including distinctive and non-existent details.

What is the story of Agloe?

Agloe is a paper town in upstate New York that was created as a copyright trap by the General Drafting Company. It appeared on maps but was actually a desolate dirt track. The town briefly became real when a fishing lodge and a general store were named after it.

What are some other examples of phantom settlements?

Other examples of phantom settlements include The Mountains of Kong in Africa, which appeared on maps from 1798 to 1888, and Sandy Island in the eastern Coral Sea, which was removed from maps in 2012 after being confirmed as non-existent.

Why did the Soviet Union falsify maps?

The Soviet Union falsified maps between the late 1930s and 1988 to protect against aerial bombing and enemy intelligence operations. They distorted boundaries, moved rivers and roads, and fabricated entire streets to mislead potential threats.

What happened to Argleton on Google Maps?

Argleton was briefly marked as ‘Closed’ by Google before it was removed in 2010. It reappeared briefly a few years later as an ‘Historical Landmark’ before being permanently removed.

What is the most likely explanation for Argleton’s appearance on Google Maps?

The most likely explanation for Argleton’s appearance on Google Maps is a simple mistake, possibly a misspelling of the nearby village of Aughton.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Phantom Settlements: The Places on Google Maps that Don’t Exist
• Hero image source by Amanda Slater from Coventry, West Midlands, UK / openverse, by-sa.