Exorcism and the City Trivia Quiz

Answer: The first powered flight of a heavier-than-air craft

That's right: the Wright Brothers' first flight was from Kill Devil Dune. Kitty Hawk often gets the credit because the telegram announcing their success was sent from there, but the Wright Brothers National Memorial marks the right spot.

Some six thousand people live in Kill Devil Hills, located by the sea in North Carolina's outer banks. Its name is usually credited to rum -- either moonshine or salvage from shipwrecks -- that was purportedly strong enough to kill the devil. One tale, though, traces the name to a legendary hermit who sold his soul to the devil, then trapped him in quicksand when he came to collect. Just the kind of creative thinking an exorcist needs!

Answer: Pasadena

Pasadena, home of the California Institute of Technology and the Rose Bowl football tournament, is a separate city of about 140,000 in Los Angeles County. Skid Row, part of downtown Los Angeles, is famous as a poor, rough neighborhood where many homeless people find a place to sleep at night. Hollywood, on the other side of the coin, is famous as the land of movie magic, where dreams take flight; located northwest of downtown, it's home to 100,000 people and host to innumerable tourists. MacArthur Park, part of the Westlake neighborhood northwest of downtown, became a household name after Jimmy Webb wrote a song about it; Richard Harris and Donna Summer, among others, both saw chart success with the single. "Someone left the cake out in the rain..."

Answer: Blue Ridge Mountains

The Blue Ridge Mountains form the easternmost part of the Appalachian Mountains, which run up and down the East Coast of the U.S. They get their name from the bluish haze on their slopes; the color is thought to result from the particular hydrocarbons emitted by the local trees.

The town of Seven Devils was incorporated in 1979 with the aim of supporting the Seven Devils resort, which had then been active for fourteen years. The name borrowed slightly from local folklore (seven nearby mountain peaks, winters "cold as the devil") but was largely a clever marketing ploy: a name like that piques the curiosity of trivia mavens and potential visitors alike. By the 2010 census, the population was 129, but there are many more seasonal residents.

Answer: La Crosse

The convergence of La Crosse (the city) with lacrosse (the sport) is not a coincidence: it seems that an early nineteenth-century explorer named the area "Prairie La Crosse" after watching Sioux and Winnebago men play the game now known as lacrosse. (The similarity between "lacrosse" and "cross" isn't a coincidence either: French explorers thought that the sticks used in the game looked like a bishop's "crosse", or crozier.) The modern city of La Crosse was founded in the 1840s as a fur-trading outpost, though its economy nowadays is more focused on medicine and education.

Answer: New England

The Connecticut River is the largest river in the New England region, flowing south from a New Hampshire Lake to the Long Island Sound. Northfield, Massachusetts, a city of some 3000 people, straddles the river just south of the state border with Vermont. Satans Kingdom is a tiny, unincorporated place inside Northfield; the protected area of the same name covers 1,305 acres. Don't confuse Satans Kingdom, Massachusetts with Satans Kingdom, Vermont, which is a part of the town of Leicester some 113 miles away.

History does not record exactly how these places arrived at their memorable names, but one assumes that public relations firms were not closely involved. The area was settled by Puritans, who lived strictly regimented religious lives; the most popular explanation for the names is that the Puritans took one look at the wild, wooded landscape and decided fearfully that it must be the home of the devil.

Answer: North Dakota

Fargo and Grand Forks are the biggest and third-biggest cities in North Dakota; Devils Lake, with a population of around 7,000, just missed the top ten in the 2010 census. The city, incorporated in 1884, sits on what was originally Dakota (Sioux) land. The Dakota name for the lake translates literally as "water spirit bad". That "bad" was probably a commentary on the fact that the lake water is not drinkable: since the lake normally has no outlet, its water is quite salty. European settlers made a quick connection to "bad" or devilish spirits, however, and the English name stuck.

Devils Lake, while popular as the "Perch Capital of the World," has proven to be a poor neighbor: when water levels rise, the lake can expand a great deal, since it isn't naturally drained by creeks or rivers. Ironically, it overran nearly the entire town of Churchs Ferry in the 1990s and 2000s.

Answer: Washington

Puget Sound is a huge estuary in Western Washington; the city of Seattle is on the Sound about 40 miles south of Priest Point. Everett, the seat of Snohomish County, has been home to a tremendous Boeing facility - the largest building in the world as measured by square footage - since the late 1960s. The massive, slow-moving airplane assembly line is well worth a trip.

Priest Point itself is a quiet unincorporated town right on Tulalip Bay, home to around 800 people as counted by the 2010 census.

Answer: Michigan

Fewer than 300 people live in Hell, which started out as a sawmill, gristmill and tavern built and operated by one George Reeves. He's often credited with the town's unusual name: when state officials came by in 1841 and asked what the town was called, he supposedly said, "Call it Hell for all I care, everyone else does." (The mosquitoes are usually blamed for this.) Nowadays, the town gets a lot of mileage out of its name and its self-deprecating humor; it markets itself as a destination wedding site ("A marriage made in Hell has nowhere to go but up!" the town's website proclaims), and offers the title of "mayor of Hell for a day" for a mere one hundred dollars.

A distant cousin of mine once lived in Hell, and would call up my grandmother every winter to tell her exactly when Hell had frozen over.

Answer: Casper

Casper, Wyoming, began life as a U.S. army fort that protected pioneers heading west. The fort was eventually named Fort Caspar, after a soldier who had been killed in action, but the second A was accidentally rendered an E when the town was registered. Casper's position on the railway was a major factor in its early expansion; so was the discovery of oil forty miles away, in 1889.

Casper the Friendly Ghost, a charming child spirit who wears his heart on his sleeve, began appearing in Paramount cartoons in the 1940s; he's also starred in comic books and in a live-action movie in 1995.

Answer: New York City

Hell's Kitchen is near Manhattan's midtown, stretching from 34th Street in the south to 59th Street (or maybe 57th, depending on who you ask) in the north, and from Eighth Avenue in the east to the Hudson River in the west. By the end of the 1800s, the area was generally poor, crowded, and riddled with gang violence. ("West Side Story," set a little further north, tells part of that story, but with better singing and dancing.) In the 1980s, a number of high-profile racketeering convictions made the neighborhood significantly safer. It's now been largely gentrified, but realtors' attempts to change its name to a safer "Midtown West" or "Clinton" have largely failed.

It's unclear where the neighborhood's celebrated name came from, but it dates back to the nineteenth century. It may have originated as a slur on the largely immigrant population; it may have been a reference to the heat, both literal and metaphorical, of such a dense and violent place. One legend describes a pair of cops watching a riot. The rookie observed that "This place is Hell itself." "Hell's a mild climate," the veteran cop is said to have replied. "This place is Hell's Kitchen."