Supernatural Hotspot Town

A town or city that attracts supernatural elements on a regular basis. The town may have something within its borders that draws the supernatural from outside the city into it, like a beacon. The supernatural phenomenon may be a well-guarded dark secret that few are privy to, or a distant memory in the town's past its inhabitants never paid any attention to it.

Possible explanations include that the town might sit atop a Hellgate or Indian Burial Ground.

Sometimes crosses over with Town with a Dark Secret, which does not necessarily have a supernatural explanation for its sinister side. Compare to Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe and Big Applesauce, in which major, but not necessarily supernatural, elements or entities are drawn to a major city, usually Tokyo or New York. Location version of Weirdness Magnet. If the supernatural allure is limited to one building, it's usually a Haunted House. Compare with Eldritch Location. May overlap with Aliens in Cardiff if the town is based on a real-life location.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Bleach: Karakura Town is a home for main characters and also the biggest place of spiritual activity that attracts Hollows, Arrancars, Fullbringers, Quincy, etc (as long as it has a spiritual force). It was revealed that the town is situated on the current Jureichi - the point in the Human World that possesses the greatest concentration of spiritual beings.
• Ghost Stories takes place in an unnamed Japanese town infested with ghosts that the main characters try to stop using a diary written by Satsuki's mother Kayako. These range from a hand in the toilet to a ghostly piano player to a rabbit brought back to life by a dark ritual.
• Good Luck Girl!: Ichiko's hometown becomes one as more and more gods descend upon the place, either getting caught in the crossfire of Ichiko and Momiji's feud or having their own machinations involving Ichiko.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The town of Morioh as seen in Diamond is Unbreakable becomes a hotspot for Stand users especially after the Bow and Arrow is introduced, unlocking the potential among the townsfolk — though other supernatural phenomena exist as well, such as a man who may or may not be an actual extraterrestrial. Its counterpart in JoJolion is no stranger to weirdness either, being home not just to Stand users which range from regular humans to an actual street, but also serving as home to many of the enigmatic Rock Humans.
• Junji Ito's Uzumaki brings us the seaside town of Kurôzu-cho, which is plagued by supernatural events related to spirals, ranging from people turning into snails to Body Horror based around bicycle springs and hair curls, and it's all linked to a spiraling structure beneath the town.
• Yo-kai Watch: Played for comedy, since it is an all-ages show. The first season occurs in Springdale, a modern port town where Nate Adams lives. When he goes to the mountains to catch bugs, he finds a gachapon machine and a youkai named Whisper inside. Whisper gifts the boy a Yokai Watch, which he can use to detect other yokais (Japanese spirits/ghosts). The series's premise is that there are yokais everywhere (school, mall, subway, downtown, etc.), but the anime mostly focus on Nate's misadventures around his hometown.

Literature

• Undisclosed from John Dies at the End has shadow-people able to erase real people from existence, teleportation portals all throughout, a parallel universes' multiple world spanning conspiracy to replace its inhabitants with doubles... infected if possible, zombie outbreak, government conspiracy to cover it all up, and the Soy Sauce — a living substance that kills most of those that come into contact with it and is not much better for those it doesn't.
• Stephen King's Castle Rock is a small Maine town that's the setting of several of his novels, thus serving as a hotspot for the supernatural and paranormal. From the devilish Leland Gaunt setting up a novelty shop that's actually a malevolent charm designed to drive its customers into murderous insanity in Needful Things, a twelve-year-old girl given a strange box capable of improving her life and causing tragic events across the world from a mysterious stranger in Gwendys Button Box, a young boy being visited by the titular Man in the Black Suit who happens to be the devil to strange, unexplainable events happening to a house in the town, which seems to be taking a life of its own in "It Grows on You" and so on.
• Arkham, Massachusetts from the works of H. P. Lovecraft is arguably an Ur-Example. Citizens of Arkham have encountered manifestations of the Great Old Ones, brain-stealing Mi-Go, a house that exists in four dimensions, zombies revived by mad science, graveyards infested by ghouls, the local university is one of the only places in the world where you can find an intact copy of the Necronomicon... and that's not even getting into the surrounding communities of Dunwich, Innsmouth, and Kingsport.
• Reading, Berkshire, UK as it's portrayed in Nursery Crime is... interesting. It's home to all sorts of Persons of Dubious Reality ranging from Punch and Judy to Humpty Dumpty to anthropomorphic pigs, wolves, and bears, on top of having the titan Prometheus living there to avoid extradition to Olympus, every alien visitor that's ever come to earth, and crimes so formulaic that detectives are able to cite specific plot devices to use when solving them.

Live Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Sunnydale (and more specifically, Sunnydale High School) is built on a Hellmouth, a portal to Hell, that routinely attracts vampires and demons. The Mayor of the town is revealed to have built the town specifically to draw humans to the Hellmouth as food for demons. Giles also reveals that there's another Hellmouth in Cleveland, but Buffy doesn't travel there until the sequel comic book series.
• The small town of Eerie, Indiana is always attracting peculiar inhabitants and strange mysteries. The smart young protagonist generally investigates and solves said mysteries, but the series finale ventures into meta-terrority with a unique revelation.
• The titular town from Eureka is a super-scientific variety of this; having so many geniuses in one place with access to advanced technology ranging from plasma weapons to prototype time machines leads to all sorts of bizarre circumstances. One of the more mild examples is having the second episode begin with the revelation that a character that died in the pilot was a clone, and when the original one shows up in Eureka, chaos ensues.
• Haven, Maine from the Haven is loosely based off of the works of Stephen King. Its local brand of supernatural phenomena takes the form of The Troubles, curses passed along family lines that pop up once every twenty-seven years and take the form of everything from losing one's senses of touch and pain, to attracting bullets, forcing people to become cannibals, causing Groundhog Day Loops and full-scale Biblical reality warping.
• Once Upon a Time: Storybrooke is a quaint little port town in Maine. 10-year-old Henry Mills drags his birth mother Emma Swan there, thinking his adoptive mother, the local mayor, Regina Mills, is the Evil Queen from the Snow White fairy tale, and his school teacher Mary Margaret, is the princess herself. Turns out, the boy is right: the town was created when the Evil Queen cast a Dark Curse on their fairy tale world to bring them all to "A Land Without Magic". The 1st season is about Emma dealing with mysterious happenings in the town and how she fits into the overall narrative. After the curse is broken at the end of season 1, pawnbroker Mr. Gold (who is Rumplestiltskin) brings magic to town, and the place becomes a veritable magnet to other fairy tale, literature and legendary characters, like Captain Hook, Peter Pan, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Snow Queen, Cruella de Vil, and King Arthur.
• Riverdale's interpretation of the titular town from Archie Comics turns into this in later seasons; while the first few seasons have a thriller storyline, the plots of later seasons involve cults, parallel universes, and Archie and his friends getting superpowers.
• The fictional Australian town of Port Neranda was the setting for Round the Twist, where the Twist family encountered bizarre supernatural phenomena every week; due to more lax censorship standards in Australia, things could happen on the show that simply could not be gotten away with on an American program, ranging from haunted toilets to underwear that gives people superpowers to a frog capable of jumping so hard that it reaches escape velocity... and then lands unharmed, blowing up a competing frog in the process.
• Smallville, Kansas as portrayed in the first four seasons of Smallville has quite a bit of this due to the amount of Kryptonite in the area that fell to earth along with Clark Kent causing "meteor freaks" to appear with powers ranging from precognition to disintegrating organic matter. After Season 4, when the action moves to Metropolis, this conceit is largely dropped and more of the larger DC Universe is explored.
• Stranger Things: Hawkins, Indiana is directly connected to an alternate dimension, and the contents of said other dimension frequently leak out into the real world. This leads to all sorts of monsters attacking innocent people around town, or dragging people into said other dimension. This includes its fair share of Eldritch Abominations, and it's up to a girl with Psychic Powers to stop all of them.
• Teen Wolf: Beacon Hills attracts the werewolf packs (Derek's), the wolfhunters (the Argents), and other assorted supernatural characters. In the third season it's revealed that this is due to the Nemeton, an old and powerful tree that was chosen by settler druids to represent "the center of the world". Even though it was cut down in 1943, the stump itself still has enough energy that it acts as a magnet drawing in all manner of supernatural beings.
• Twin Peaks: Twin Peaks may seem like just a quirky small rural town in the Pacific Northwest, but it is the epicenter of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, surrounded by an Enchanted Forest.
• Wynonna Earp takes place in Purgatory within the Ghost River Triangle, somewhere in western Canada, just north of the US Border. The town is plagued by revenants that are linked to a curse put on noted lawman Wyatt Earp's family line, of which the titular Wynonna is the latest inheritor; all seventy-seven of them must be felled by Wynonna in order for the curse to be broken. The Revenants can't leave the Ghost River Triangle without basically bursting into flames. Other supernatural entities pop up as the series goes on, ranging from a pair of demonic sisters to Bulshar, the demon who cursed Wyatt in the first place.

Podcasts

• Sibylline Sounds: Many of the audios take place in a town called Burnel which has a lot of magical activity due to being set atop several Ley Lines. The most noticeably magical thing about the town is a bookstore that connects to many other worlds and randomly enchants some of its books to inflict temporary transformations on people.
• Welcome to Night Vale: The titular desert town, where everything paranormal is true, a Faceless Old Woman secretly lives in your home, the city council is a hive mind of eldritch abominations, five-headed dragons get arrested for insurance fraud, the host of the community radio station has apparently been reporting since the 1800s, and the only roads going out of town loop back in on themselves.

Tabletop Games

• Mage: The Awakening: Invoked by one Cult that worships the Prince of Ten Thousand Leaves, an Eldritch Abomination in the form of a living Alternate History. By collecting enough of the Prince's artifacts, its reality has bled into the Cult's hometown of Savior's Rock, creating an Eldritch Location where unnatural powers and creatures can slip into the universe from the Abyss beyond.

Video Games

• Alan Wake takes place in Bright Falls, a town in the Pacific Northwest with a caldera lake at its center; said lake houses the Dark Presence, an entity capable of invoking Art Initiates Life on anything from a painting to music to a novel manuscript; the sequel shows that this even applies retroactively, by magnitudes of decades, as Alan is able to write about the lives of the Old Gods of Asgard during the late 70's. It actively attempts to use the protagonist to free itself from underneath the lake and wreak havoc on reality.
• Dragalia Lost: Much like how Euden himself is a gigantic Weirdness Magnet, The Halidom, the castle that he and his friends reside in, seems to always attract oddities, even for a setting where dragons and monsters (or, "Fiends" as they're called) are the norm. From haunted libraries to zombie invasions to surprisingly frequent demon attacks, something always seems to be happening at The Halidom. There's actually an explanation: The Halidom is home to all kinds of people, like Sylvans, dragons, robots, fairies, people from the future, and many more, and together, these different people give the Halidom an unusual mana not seen anywhere else. It's this mana that is implied to attract the various oddities that occur at The Halidom.
• The city of Kirkwall which serves as the setting of Dragon Age II has frequently experienced supernatural phenomena such as the easy use of blood magic and demonic activity among other things due to the Veil (a metaphysical barrier between the land of Thedas and the Fade) being very thin in Kirkwall. It is very heavily implied that Kirkwall was the site where the mages of the Tevinter Imperium entered the Golden City of the Maker, although some including the Grey Wardens have hypothesized that the presence of Corypheus near the city may also be responsible.
• Night in the Woods brings us the town of Possum Springs, with a heavy dose of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane mixed in. The protagonist, Mae, has vivid dreams featuring monstrous animals, including one where she talks to a cat claiming to be god that shows her just how insignificant she is, but Mae is also the victim of untreated psychoses that could explain these dreams. Newspaper articles Mae can find alongside Bea talk about gas leaks from the mines causing vivid hallucinations, but that doesn't eliminate the fact that there is a cult operating in the town, a member of which has seemingly supernatural powers. Said cult is sacrificing citizens they consider blights upon society to something in the old mines... but they may just be throwing them down a pit to their deaths.
• Inaba is a bucolic town in the Japanese countryside from Persona 4. Televisions within the town display the "Midnight Channel", which broadcasts directly as a result of people being dragged into the world inside the television; people seen on the Midnight Channel turn up dead if something isn't done about them.
• In Pokémon Red and Blue and Pokémon Let's Go, Lavender Town is home to the Pokémon Tower, a massive tomb containing the bodies of hundreds of deceased Pokémon. While this obviously means you encounter ghost-type Pokémon in the tower, you also encounter an entity known as "the ghost", which turns out to be a Marowak that was killed by Team Rocket in their attempt to take over the tower. Several of the trainers in there act as if they have been possessed by ghosts, an otherworldly fog pervades the tower, and an NPC just to the north of it asks about a white hand on your character's shoulder.
• The backstory for Psychonauts indicates that a village called Shaky Claim once existed in the area; people were driven insane due to the psitanium deposit, causing the government to evict the residents and flood the area, forming Lake Oblongata.
• The Secret World:
  • Solomon Island has been a hotbed of paranormal activity for centuries prior to colonization, and by the 21st century, its central settlement of Kingsmouth has become infamous for unusual occurrences. Among other things, it features The Illuminati's premier Wizarding School, an abandoned Amusement Park of Doom run by a Bogeyman, a Haunted House once home to a wrongfully accused witch, a literal Hell Hotel, forests infested with Wendigos and Sasquatches, farmlands patrolled by a serial-killing Plant Person, and an Abandoned Mine that seems to bring doom on anyone trying to reopen it... and this was all present before the Zombie Apocalypse hit Solomon Island. It turns out that the weirdness of the island is due in no small part due to the Gaia Engine hidden under it - either causing the oddities directly or attracting the supernatural to it, most commonly in the form of greedy Secret Worlders who Dug Too Deep.
  • Harbaburesti, a small Romanian hamlet, has been surrounded by the supernatural since the reign of Vlad Dracula. Among other things, there's an ancient shapeshifting wise woman watching over the town, the area is dotted with derelict Soviet-era laboratories that were testing everything from vampire super-soldiers to "phantom cosmonauts," and the nearby forest is home to all manner of entities including fauns, gnomes, and even a god. By the time you arrive, of course, a vampire army is besieging Harbaburesti and the previously secret entities have been forced out into the open in defence of the town. Perhaps not so surprisingly, there's a Gaia Engine in the Carpathian Mountains just beyond the forest.
• Silent Hill: The titular town was built by demon cultists, perpetually covered in fog, and home to horrific monsters that manifest as the crimes and regrets of those who visit it.
• Oakmont in The Sinking City is home to several different cults, with cultists walking around the unflooded parts of the city in broad daylight. It's also full of refugees from Innsmouth, one of the upper class families is the result of a union between a human and an ape, and grottos around the city contain ruins pertaining to the Great Old Ones.

Web Animation

• Spooky Month: The unnamed town the series takes places in is home to a variety of ghosts and ghouls, such as actual ghosts, a supernaturally powered Serial Killer, zombies that rise from the dead at the mere mention of Spooky Month only to die when told it's not, a Magical Flutist that leads people to their deaths, an Eldritch Abomination whose eyes are the stars that dot the night sky, and a cult that worships said eldritch being. "Unwanted Guest" also introduces the Happy Fella toys, dolls that are specifically made as ghost trappers first and children's toys second.

Webcomics

• El Goonish Shive: The town of Moperville is the center of magical weirdness. There's an unnatural amount of magic energy around the town, turning it into a Place of Power where magic is much easier to do and monsters and extradimensional visitors are commonplace. There's also the issue of an insane Immortal going around and giving as many people magic powers as possible. All of this makes it a hotspot for conspiracy theorists and government agents. It's later revealed that the magic buildup was caused by that same Immortal, who was using it as a way to eventually create an Unmasqued World where her son could be free to live as himself.
• Widdershins: The titular town is the site of a natural Anchor where magic enters the world, so magic is much more active there. Loose spirits, rogue wizards, and dangerous magical artifacts are such frequent problems that Widdershins has its own Adventure Guild.

Web Original

• The SCP Foundation has a concept called "Nexuses" which are essentially cities that attract anomalous phenomena to them. Among these are Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin (an ordinary midwestern town run by narrative logic), Hy-Brasil (a mythical island off the coast of Ireland run entirely by The Fair Folk), Boring, Oregon (a city that attracts anomalous wildlife) and the tribal communities surrounding Lake Huron in Canada.

Western Animation

• Archie's Weird Mysteries has another incarnation of Riverdale, this one predating the live action version by eighteen years. This version has Riverdale plagued by monsters ripped straight out of B-Movies as a result of an experiment in the school's physics lab going awry, with anomalies including a Whole-Plot Reference to Christine, werewolves, a mummy's curse, and superheroes.
• Ben 10: In Original Continuity, Bellwood is considered to be the main target of aliens, supervillains, magic users, supernatural creatures from another universe, etc. It could be blamed on the fact that it's protagonists' main base and hometown ... before it was revealed in Ben 10: Omniverse that it's capital of Masquerade on the Earth for centuries (the Undertown - the biggest city of aliens on the Earth is built directly under Bellwood).
• Danny Phantom has Amity Park, the main home of our main heroes that has a tendency to get attacks from ghosts who end up escaping the Ghost Zone through the Fentons' ghost portal, forcing Danny himself to transform and take care of them.
• Gravity Falls: The titular town is home to all manner of anomalies, including gnomes, sea monsters and an Eldritch Abomination named Bill Cipher. This is explained in the finale due to the town's Natural Law of Weirdness Magnetism, which not only draws strange creatures to the town, but also keeps them there.
• The Life and Times of Juniper Lee: Orchid Bay City is a nexus of magic, where various supernatural creatures secretly live alongside humans (humans are unable to see these creatures). Because of its concentration of magic, evil monsters are naturally drawn to the city. Juniper is the Te Xuan Ze, a supernaturally powerful warrior tasked with protecting Orchid Bay City from evil and maintaining balance between its human and non-human inhabitants. Juniper eventually learns that there is a magical barrier called the Veil surrounding Orchid Bay City that wards off evil magic, makes supernatural things invisible to humans, and prevents the current Te Xuan Ze from ever leaving.
• The Real Ghostbusters had the episode "Nobody Comes to Lupusville", where the Ghostbusters investigate the titular town in the countryside. It turns out to be in the middle of a Fur Against Fang conflict, with the original werewolf inhabitants having been imprisoned by vampires. The episode ends with vampires and werewolves biting each other, creating hybrids and forcing the Ghostbusters to quarantine the town by bursting a dam, as vampires Cannot Cross Running Water.
• In Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, every single mystery Scooby and the gang solve happens in their hometown of Crystal Cove. It's eventually revealed that this because the conquistadors that founded the town brought along a cursed treasure that included a crystal sarcophagus imprisoning a being known as the Nibiru Entity, who for centuries compelled people into committing outrageous acts dressed as monsters while also bringing together a mystery team consisting of four people and a pet, all to ensure it would one day be freed. Upon its destruction, all the evil it caused throughout the centuries was erased and everyone it had ever affected had much happier lives.
• The titular town of South Park, Colorado is always attracting oddities, to the point that aliens, monsters, mutants, and the like are what's considered mundane. Celebrities frequently come to the South Park, where it's usually revealed just how messed up they are, or how something is always out to kill one main characters. "Quiet Mountain Town" really is the last way that one would describe South Park.
• Steven Universe: Steven's hometown Beach City is frequently attacked by Corrupted Gems, monsters of various shapes and sizes that wildly lash out at anything around them. The monsters are attracted to the town because the Crystal Gems live there, more specifically because their home base contains a Gem device known as a Warp Pad, as stated by the Gems themselves in "Rising Tides, Crashing Skies". This element is less focused on as the series shifts from a Monster of the Week Slice of Life to an ongoing story encompassing far more than Beach City limits, though things still occur in the town simply because Steven lives there.
• Summer Camp Island: The titular island is secretly home to various magical creatures, including witches, monsters, yetis, elves and the like. It is, in fact, the source of all magic in the world, which was once plentiful but is now confined to the island. The campers are actually latent magical creatures brought in to replenish magic and keep it from disappearing altogether.
• The Venture Brothers: The Venture compound, the isolated home of the eponymous family, is naturally home to all manner of bizarre scientific phenomenon owing to the "super-science" the family has been engaged in for generations. However, it also has its fair share of supernatural elements as well. It is revealed to be built atop an Indian Burial Ground (forcing the family to call in a necromancer once a year on the anniversary of a battle to quell their spirits), it attracts an alien visitor in the Grant Galactic Inquisitor (who is later killed by a different alien who comes through a portal the family builds), and the giant graveyard (containing the many villain henchmen killed there over the years as well as numerous dead Hank and Dean clones) is accidentally brought back as zombies in the Halloween episode.