House of horrors
From ‘Cackle Cottage’ to ‘Wizard Way’, we have revealed the nation’s spookiest street and house names inspired by all things macabre.
To mark Halloween, we analysed our Address Management Unit, which covers over 30 million addresses, for spooky themed entries.
Nearly 3,000 streets and houses spread across 748 individual towns and cities across the UK boast a scary name.
‘Cemetery’ is the most popular term for morbid monikers, appearing in over 800 addresses nationwide. Properties linked to ‘Owls’, ‘Cobwebs’, ‘Dark’ (230 addresses) and ‘Hanging’ (122) closely follow.
From ‘Pumpkin Towers’ near Hereford, to ‘Cobwebs Court’ near Canterbury, places with a strong historical link tend to have a higher concentration of spooky-themed street and house names. Overall, Suffolk (50 addresses) is the county with the largest number of related addresses.
The UK’s spookiest towns and cities, by address:
- London (62)
- Norwich (40)
- York (39)
- Bristol (36)
- Manchester (28)
- Reading (24)
- Ipswich, Suffolk (22)
- Doncaster, Yorkshire (19)
- Hereford (18)
- Boston, Lincolnshire (17)
- Southampton (17)
- Chesterfield, Derbyshire (17)
- Chichester, West Sussex (16)
- Ashford, Kent (14)
- Salisbury, Wiltshire (13)
- Taunton, Somerset (13)
- Diss, Norfolk (13)
- Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk (12)
- Bridgwater, Somerset (11)
- Canterbury, Kent (11)
Some of the more outlandish names that arose from the research include ‘Cackle Cottage’ in South East England, ‘Goblin Farm’ in Wales and ‘Bleeding Wolf Lane’ near Stoke-On-Trent.
Steve Rooney, head of our address management unit, said: ‘Named addresses are very often inspired by national or local history, so as a nation fascinated by the macabre, it is perhaps unsurprising that terms linked to this feature so highly in our research.’
