Argleton and other places that became famous for bizarre reasons
What makes a place famous? The reasons are manifold, the most common ones being natural value, artistic excellence and historical significance. But there are some places famous for weird and bizarre reasons, like the US town that completely disintegrated after its general store burned down, or the UK laneway that pranksters overran, or the expanding Australian mountain peak. Here is a list of three places renowned for strange reasons.
Argleton: The phantom village of the UK
Experts are baffled by Argleton, a ‘phantom village’ in Lancashire, UK that shows on Google Maps and online directories but doesn't exist in reality. If you search for Argleton on Google Maps, a village with that name appears next to A59 major road of Lancashire, just south of Ormskirk. That's not all, you'll also find availability of doctors, open job positions, rental houses, real estate and a golf club too. The non-existent town not only appears on the map but claims to have amenities too. Imagine how weird that is!
However, Roy Bayfield, author of Desire Paths: Real Walks to Nonreal Places, was the first person who followed the coordinates (in February 2009) where Google says the town sits, and ended up in a barren, vacant muddy field with wooded areas. Google and the company providing the mapping data for this region of Britain could not explain how this ‘phantom town’ ended up on Google Maps.
Edge Hill University employee Mike Nolan first learned about phantom town in September 2008. The place has spawned souvenirs, mementoes and merchandise, similar to big cities like New York or London. T-shirts with printed phrases like "I visited Argleton and all I received was this T-shirt" are available online today. One explanation for Argleton's inclusion on the map is that it was done deliberately to trap anybody who copied it and violated copyright. Sometimes fake streets are added to Maps for this purpose, although it is uncommon to discover a whole non-existent town of this kind.
Monte Kaolino: A ski field with no snow
Can you imagine a ski field without layers of white snow? Monte Kaolino is the world's only ski arena without snow. Found in Hirschau, Germany, the field is a 110-metre-high artificial man-made sand dune for skiing!
The ski field was named after historically mined kaolinite quartz, the problematic by-product formed during the production of the minerals used in several industrial and medical fields.
This slag-pile of sand had grown so high by the mid-1950s that one localite grabbed the skis and used the mountain for ski practice. A ski club was formed in 1956 using approximately 35,000,000 tons of sand (the end product of kaolinite manufacture) by sportspersons who wanted to practise their downhill moves on the pile of sand. Today, the world's sand boarding championships are held at sand mountain, which now boasts of a ski lift, campground, trails and water park. Although the field is covered with snow in winter, you can visit Monte Kaolino for sand-skiing only in summer!
Coober Pedy: An underground town
Welcome to Coober Pedy, an underground city in the Australian Outback, where chimneys emerge from the sand and large red signs of ‘unmarked holes’ caution tourists to avoid accidents. Coober Pedy gets its name from the Aboriginal phrase "Kupa-piti," which means "whitefella hole." The township is filled with holes excavated by eager white men, and most of the town still resides in these holes. Eighty per cent of the population lives in holes. Some homeowners have hammered and picked out bookshelves, underground church, and even a pool in the underground living room. The Coober Pedy that was covered in ocean 150 million years ago, has today become an underground city of Opals.
Currently home to 1,800 people, Coober Pedy is still a unique mining town. It has a drive-in theatre and signs cautioning people not to bring explosives. It has a golf course, but the players use glow-in-the-dark golf balls. The landscape is covered with holes that are reminders of old opal dig outs.