The Maps That Were Deliberately Wrong
Here is a question worth sitting with: what do you do when someone steals something that looks exactly like the real thing?
This was the problem facing cartographers for most of the 20th century. A map is extraordinarily expensive to make — surveyors, draughtsmen, researchers, years of painstaking work — and extraordinarily easy to copy. In the age before digital databases and satellite imagery, the only way to make a map was to go out and measure things. The only way to copy one was to... copy one. And if you were subtle about it, changing the fonts and the colours, how could anyone prove you'd done it?
The cartographers' solution was elegant, devious, and — in at least one case — backfired magnificently.
They started hiding lies inside the truth.
What Is a Trap Street?
A trap street is a fictitious element deliberately inserted into a map — a street that doesn't exist, a town that was never built, a river with a slight extra bend in it, a road that dead-ends where no road does. It serves as the cartographer's secret signature: invisible to anyone using the map in good faith, but devastating as evidence if a competitor's map contains exactly the same invented detail.
The idea is simple. If I invent a small cul-de-sac called Mulberry Close and tuck it into an otherwise accurate map of Bristol, and your map of Bristol also contains Mulberry Close — well. You didn't survey it. You copied it. And I can prove it.
Trap streets go by several wonderful names in the trade: copyright traps, cartographic Easter eggs, paper towns, and — most evocatively — mountweazels, after a fictitious entry in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia for a photographer named Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, who had supposedly died in an explosion while on assignment for a magazine called Combustibles. She never existed. She was there to catch plagiarists. The name stuck.
Agloe, New York: The Town That Became Real
The most extraordinary story in the history of map traps begins in the 1930s, in the offices of the General Drafting Company in New Jersey.
Two cartographers — Otto Lindberg and Ernest Alpers — were working on a road map of New York State. They decided to insert a copyright trap: a fictitious hamlet placed at the intersection of two dirt roads in the Catskill Mountains, in Delaware County, north of a real town called Roscoe.
They named it Agloe — an anagram of their initials: OGL and EA, rearranged.
Agloe appeared on the General Drafting map. It appeared on no other map, because it didn't exist. And then, some years later, it appeared on a Rand McNally map of New York.
General Drafting prepared to sue. Rand McNally's defence was extraordinary: they hadn't copied the map. They'd got the name from the county records. Because, in the interim, someone had built a general store at the intersection of those two dirt roads — and, seeing Agloe on the only map that showed the area, had named it the Agloe General Store. The county had recorded it. The fictitious town had bootstrapped itself into existence.
The lawsuit went nowhere. Agloe had become real, and you cannot claim copyright on a real place.
Agloe eventually disappeared from maps when the general store closed. It was briefly resurrected on Google Maps in the 2000s, presumably by someone who knew the story and thought it deserved to persist. It is currently not on Google Maps. Whether it exists is, at this point, a genuinely interesting philosophical question.
The London A-Z: Over 100 Secrets
The publishers of the London A-Z — the iconic street atlas that Londoners have navigated by for decades — once admitted that their maps contained over 100 trap streets. One hundred fictitious or subtly altered streets hidden in plain sight across one of the most mapped cities on Earth.
Most of these are never identified. They serve their purpose quietly: a small false turn here, an invented footpath there, nothing that would cause anyone to get lost, but enough to be unambiguous proof of copying. The traps are the index to the honest map — invisible to the honest user, fatal to the thief.
Argleton: Google's Ghost Town
The tradition of paper towns didn't end with the digital age. In 2008, a phantom settlement called Argleton appeared on Google Maps, apparently located in a field in Lancashire, near the real town of Ormskirk. It had no streets, no postcode, no history — just a name, floating over empty farmland on what was supposed to be the most accurate map in the world.
Google quietly removed it in 2009 without ever fully explaining how it got there. The leading theory is that it was a data error that entered via a third-party supplier — an accidental rather than deliberate phantom. But the internet had already fallen in love with Argleton. For a brief period, it had a Wikipedia page, a fan community, and people claiming to have visited it.
Whether it was a trap or a mistake, it demonstrated that the impulse to invent places on maps — and the tendency for those inventions to take on a kind of life — didn't die with the paper atlas.
Beatosu and Goblu, Ohio
Not all trap streets are purely commercial. In 1978 and 1979, someone at the Michigan State Highway Department — working on official state road maps — inserted two fictitious towns into Ohio. They named them Beatosu and Goblu. This is, in case it's not immediately obvious, "Beat OSU" and "Go Blue" — a reference to the University of Michigan's rivalry with Ohio State University.
The traps were discovered. The official responsible was reprimanded. The towns were removed. They remain, objectively, the funniest thing that has ever happened in the history of official cartography.
The End of the Trap Street
Digital mapping has largely killed the trap street as a practical tool. OpenStreetMap, satellite imagery, and GPS have made it possible to verify almost any geographic detail independently. The economics of cartography have also changed: data is now the product, and copyright traps work differently in databases than they do in printed atlases.
But the tradition persists in spirit. Digital maps have their own copyright traps — subtle data fingerprints, slightly adjusted coordinates, street names with imperceptible spelling variations — embedded in the databases that power navigation apps. The methods are more sophisticated, but the principle is identical. If you steal a map, the map knows.
A Brief Defence of the Honest Map
There is something quietly wonderful about the trap street as a concept — the idea that an accurate map contains, hidden within its accuracy, a deliberate untruth. That the very honesty of the enterprise requires a small act of deception to protect it.
It's a reminder that maps are not neutral documents. They are made by people, with interests and ingenuity and, occasionally, a sense of humour. The Catskill Mountains road map that contained Agloe was not just a functional object. It was a trap, a joke, a claim, a signature.
Every map has a perspective. The best ones are honest about everything except, perhaps, one small invented hamlet in Delaware County, New York.
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