America's Spookiest Streets

Tis the season to know “it’s coming from inside the house” but you still stay in the house. It’s the time of year when teenagers are alone in their convertible at makeout peak while there’s a monster on the loose. The air is getting chilly, the leaves are falling, and people are moving into known haunted houses without a care in the world.

So it just makes sense that we should look at some address data.

There are some extremely famous addresses (or at least streets) in the “scary movie” genre. You gotta wonder if they were named after real places. Maybe the script writer lived on Elm Street. Or maybe the playwright had a bitter lover who was known to frequent Fleet Street. I guess I could dig into the lives of these writers, but I’d rather have these questions answered:

1. How many Elm Streets are there in the United States?
2. Do you think the people who live on an Elm Street are more afraid of Freddy Krueger than folks who don’t live on Elm Street?

Well, Smarty’s address data can answer one of those questions.

We dug into the data and found that in the United States there are 5,337 Elm Streets! That’s a lot of nightmares.

You’re more likely to live on an Elm Street if you live in Illinois, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, or New York as they have the most Elm Streets.

You’re going to be much less likely to live on a Fleet Street—the street on which Sweeney Todd’s barber shop and Mrs. Lovett’s meat pie shop were located—in part because that story took place in London, but also because there are only 69 Fleet Streets in the United States.

If you’re afraid of a barber killing you, California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Washington are the states to watch for Fleet Streets. Or at least barbers that are on that street.

There is so much information that can be found in a single address, and interesting tidbits surface when we look at other movie addresses.

For example, there is only one (1) Fury Road and it’s in Summerhill Pennsylvania. There are only four houses on that street, and they’re probably furious about it.

And the creepiest bit of information we have to offer you: There is in fact a Terror Drive. It’s in West Virginia and there is only one house on it. And it’s non-postal.

Oooooo….. spooky.