While not all that dire, but still not terribly desireable either, there are some names on the Peninsula in the Bay Area involving “Pulgas” - a major street called “Alameda de las Pulgas”, the Pulgas Water Temple, etc. They derive from the name of the old Spanish land grant that covered the area - Rancho de las Pulgas. “Pulgas” means “fleas”.
(There are conflicting stories about where the name came from. One states that the Ohlone Indian’s name for their settlement in the area was “Place of the Vermin”, which the Spanish translated as “fleas”. Another states that the Spanish explorers found an old Ohlone encampment they attempted to occupy massively infested with fleas.)
Sunrise Maryland seems wonderfully evocative.
Although about the only thing in American Corners Maryland is a store it sounds like a stereotypical 50’s town.
Maybe it’s a little morbid but I always thought that the name Fresh Kills was a great name for the final resting place of the World Trade Center rubble.
There’s a wonderful map out there on the net somewhere, with location names ‘translated’ using the etymology of the words that make them up. They sound well and truly fantastical.
Seriously though, a lot of place names (“toponyms” if you wanna get fancy) really follow Fantasy Naming Conventions, at least in an older version of the local language. And so you have a world stuffed examples like Black Forests and Mother Mountains and Middle Seas and HillHillHill Hill.
Here’s a fun list–tautological names, where the name in one language is imported and then “river” or “hill” or whatever is added on. Lots of rivers in interior Alaska are called “The Xxxxxna River”, where the Athabaskan Indian root “Na” means river. So Chena River, Tanana River, Chitna River, Nenana River, and so on.
We have Desolation Flat, Dead Man Flats, The Devil’s Head, Mt Indefatigable, Fatigue Pass all in the Rockies just west of Calgary here. I am sure there is more; lots of great place names in the mountains.
In town we have the less prosaically named ‘Nose Hill’ but supposedly it is named for a fight that cost someone their nose so that’s got to be worth something. The Blackfoot seem like colourful - and often harsh names for places and even people. Some real eyebrow raising given names in the Cluny area.
Or the the Tar Tar Pits (sic). That or the real name isn’t very fantasy, but the countless dead are beneath the pitch. And not all may be dead but some just resting…
Matanza can refer to that of animals, though: la matanza del cerdo, for example (the butchering of the pigs, which back before industrial butchers was a whole-village affair; I’ve taken part in a couple of them and if you don’t geroff my lawn I’ll make you work the mincing machine).
Several Ríos called Seco in Spain (Dry River), specially along the Mediterranean coast. Barrancos del Muerto (Dead Man’s Gulch) and Puentes del Diablo (Devil’s Bridge, pretty much any ancient one) abound, as do Cuevas del Diablo (Devil’s Caves). There is both a gulch in Navarre and a town in Seville called Dos Hermanas, Two Sisters; for complicated reasons I never quite learned, people from that town are called Nazarenes.
Add any rivers in Spain whose name begins by Guadi… to the list of tautological ones: Guadi comes from the Arabic for River. And we also have mountains with a similar problem, such as Montejurra or Moncayo (monte and montaña mean mountain).
Sierra Nevada (both the original and the New World one); Snowy Mountain Range. And from my house I can see Sierra del Perdón, Forgiveness Mountain Range.
The Middle Ages produced a ton of Villanuevas (New Town) and Villafrancas (Free Town). It also gave us a lot of paired towns and even a famous monastery with “Upper” and “Lower” in the name, including my favorites Cerezo de Arriba and Cerezo de Abajo (Upper and Lower Cherry Tree).
Did you read the link? In the case of Matanzas, Cuba, it refers specifically to the killing of 30 Spanish soldiers by the Indians during the conquest of the island.
Yes, I know. (I used to watch the TV show when I was a kid.) It used to be Hot Springs. But today it’s the official name of an actual place, so I think it counts.
