Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
In this Halloween edition of the Rural Index, I mapped rural places named after Satan, Lucifer, hell, and the devil. There are 26 swamps named after Satan himself. Thirteen Devil Creeks range from Montana to Tennessee. Seven islands in Maine, Wisconsin, Alaska, Montana, and Iowa contain the word “Devil.” Twenty-two of these devilish places are towns, from Devil Town, Ohio, to Seven Devils, North Carolina. Click on the interactive version of the following map to explore the Satanic phenomena yourself.
The data for this map comes from the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), a federal database containing millions of American place names. I downloaded spreadsheets corresponding to the following search terms – devil, hell, lucifer, satan – then matched their coordinates to nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties.
In the last Rural Index, I used the GNIS to tell a story about the town of Sugar Tit, South Carolina. We’re returning to my home state in this edition. But this time, my opening anecdote takes place in the murky swamps of South Carolina’s midland region.
Hell’s Half Acre is a historic community backed up to the Savannah River Swamp near the Georgia border in rural Barnwell County, South Carolina. Bootleggers gathered at Hell’s Half Acre during the Prohibition era because the nearby swamp gave them an escape from law enforcement, according to a 2019 article in the Columbia Metropolitan. “The actual phrase’s connotation is either a desolate place or one that requires a long, frustrating trip to find,” wrote Columbia Metropolitan reporter Deena C. Bouknight.
Swamps tend to have a bad reputation in pop culture references about the American South. Tropes include characteristics like dense fog, diseases, serpents, slime, and Spanish moss.
Growing up in the foothills, my maternal grandmother SueSue disliked the midland region of South Carolina, which she said was “built on hell and sinking.” She despised the heat and humidity that she thought characterized the flatlands. She especially disliked the capital city of Columbia. “The only thing between Columbia and Hell is a screen door,” SueSue used to say. SueSue had a lot of one-liners about Hell.
Swamps get a bad reputation, and our learned hatred of them is tied to our nation’s history of white supremacy. Southern swamps served as safe havens for people escaping chattel slavery, as well as alternative routes for other marginalized people on the run. The Great Dismal Swamp is currently undergoing a National Heritage Area for its role as a central hub of the Underground Railroad. “You can think of the swamp as a place of resistance,” said historian Dan Sayers of American University in an interview with the Wilderness Society.
Perhaps another reason we’ve been influenced to hate swamps is because they are untamable. Swamps are difficult to farm and develop. And we like to demonize ecological features that don’t bend easily to the wills of the market. Twenty-six swamps are named after Satan, from the Big Devil Swamp in Kalkaska County, Michigan, to Tate’s Hell in the Florida Panhandle.
But swamps aren’t the only demonized American places. There are 1,231 Satanic place names in the GNIS. Some of these names originated from the way white settlers vilified people of color, while others came from quirky local legends or mining boom towns with dangerous traverses. The origin stories of many place names are seemingly lost to history, without any results appearing in my online archival searches.
Like I mentioned in my recent Rural Index edition on anatomical place names, geography is inherently political. What place names get recorded in federal geographic databases (and which ones don’t) is all about power, knowledge, and control. What places get relegated to the realm of the haunted, spectral, or ghostly, is also political. It’s no surprise that a lot of these marginalized places are rural.
(My colleagues Susannah Broun and Anya Slepyan explored this theme in the Rural Horror Picture Show, a five-part podcast series produced by the Daily Yonder that examines rural tropes in scary movies.)
The politics of haunting is something human geographers refer to as “spectrality.” Past trauma or loss frequently define these spectral landscapes. “A haunted place is an assemblage where the past must live in the present, permeated by currents of contested colonial histories, affective flows, and political tensions,” wrote the editors of a special edition of the academic journal Tourism Geographies.
While some places are haunted by past humans, others are haunted by extinct species that once defined the landscape. Whether the ghost is human or animal, the scholarship on spectrality explores ways in which the past is still with us, entrenched in current power structures. Places named after Satan are examples of how old prejudices and fears are still with us.
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