Sunday, December 10, 2006

Georgia Erases 519 Places Off the Map

So, what happens when the place where you live disappears from the map? This can be an intriguing start to a senario for your modern horror games. What if someone was trying to actively hide a town from the rest of the world? Somewhere, off of the official maps, are places with names like Arkham, Innsmouth, Gotham are out there waiting to be discovered again. But why have they been hidden so thoroughly, and who benefits from their hiding?

Georgia Erases 519 Places Off the Map
Poetry Tulip has vanished. So have Between and Climax. Cloudland and Roosterville are gone, too.

A total of 519 communities have been erased from the newest version of Georgia's official map, victims of too few people and too many letters of type.

Georgia's Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere 'placeholders,' generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau.