Phantom settlement

Phantom settlements often result from copyright traps, also known as Mountweazels, which are false entries placed in literature to catch illegal copiers. Agloe, New York, was invented on a 1930s map as a copyright trap. In 1950, a general store was built there and named Agloe General Store, as that was the name seen on the map. Thus, the phantom settlement became a real one.

There are also misnamed settlements, such as the villages of Mawdesky and Dummy 1325 in Lancashire on Google Maps.

There is a satirical conspiracy theory that the German city of Bielefeld is a phantom settlement, despite its population of over 300,000. Another example is Leiria, Portugal, (pop. 128,640), which even gave rise to a song "Leiria não existe". In the same spirit, around 2015 a meme started circulating in Italy about the alleged non-existence of one of its regions, Molise (which some jokingly called Molisn't, a portmanteau between the name of the region and the English isn't).