6 Fictional Places You Didn't Know Actually Existed

There's definitely a troll under that big wheel on the left.

So, when it came time for Tolkien to create a homeland for the most evil being in his fantasy world, he just channeled the Black Country into his writing, renaming it "Mordor" because that sounded less like a racist old debutante's description of Africa.

For a while, Tolkien lived with his aunt in a section of Birmingham called Edgbaston -- an area that was known for having two very distinct towers in it:

Of course, nearly all the orcs have moved off to London by now.

Those are the Edgbaston Waterworks Tower and Perrott's Folly. The former would even periodically billow smoke out into the air, as if fantasy siege engines were being constructed deep in the earth beneath it (or as if steam were coming out of a waterworks tower).

At another point in his childhood, Tolkien lived in Sarehole (a hamlet right outside of Birmingham). It provided much of the inspiration for what eventually became the Shire. It even was said to have large tunnels running beneath it that could've easily been the basis for Bag End, Bilbo's home (and incidentally also the name of Tolkien's aunt's farm in the area). Sarehole and nearby Moseley Bog look ... well ... look like something out of The Lord of the Rings:

There's one Ringwraith stalking about, but he's pretty old and overweight.

Arkham Asylum is one of those places that could only exist in a comic book universe, the sprawling insane asylum/haunted house where supervillains are imprisoned after being caught by Batman.

The Real Thing:

You'd be kind of disappointed to go here and not be murdered by ghosts.

Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts.

Arkham is of course well-known for both its creepy atmosphere and its atrocious security, which make it kind of a shitty asylum. Even without the costumed villainy lurking inside, Arkham Asylum is pretty over the top. Its looming structures and labyrinthine hallways lean heavily toward the macabre, almost to the point of absurdity.

On the plus side, real estate nearby is super cheap.

It's like a caricature of a haunted house, pulled straight from a turn of the century horror story. That's because it is literally from a turn of the century horror story, specifically from the work of H.P. Lovecraft's stories set in Arkham, Massachusetts, which included (along with cosmic insanity beasts) Arkham Sanitarium. But the sanitarium in Lovecraft's writing was based on a real place: Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts.

So yes, to the horror of comic book fans everywhere, Gotham City appears to be located in New England.

And true to its representation in D.C. Comics, Danvers comes off as a stereotypical haunted house, with such standard fixtures as ominous tunnels that, by the way, make a great video game setting.

Don't just stand there, man -- press "X"!

Look familiar?

We would not go down there without a batarang.

It's a vast complex of shadows, arched doorways and exposed brick. It would be a cliche, if it weren't real:

It's like someone designed the perfect hallway for monster ambushes.

And how about the over-the-top, spooky patient rooms tucked away in the Arkham Asylum video game:

No way a real building is going to top that, right?

Yeah, Danvers' decaying patient quarters are now, without question, home to the shrieking spirits of the damned:

Dear Lord, it's nearly as terrible as a nice college dormitory.

You don't really find any pictures from inside this building.

So if for some reason you want to visit Silent Hill in real life, you totally can. We'll wait in the car.

If it were wired for FIOS, this would be the ideal supervillain lair.

The city remains perhaps the single most jaw-dropping surviving masterpiece of rock-cut architecture on the planet, boasting a theater, a monastery, numerous tombs and, at the end of a narrow passage, Al Khazneh: the treasury.

Yep. It's a friggin' bank.

Looks like Mother Nature's compensating for something.

A particularly stunning example is China's Shunan Bamboo Sea, which stretches over an area covering more than 500 hills:

Without question, each one of those hills is like a Pez dispenser full of samurai warriors. There are several more examples all over the Eastern hemisphere, each picturesque landscape just begging for a decades-old blood feud to be settled among their branches.

The soil here is fertilized with fallen legends.

But all that is beans compared to the town in Cars. The history of Radiator Springs and its struggle with the tourism industry was directly inspired by the real-life town of Amboy, California, but the physical locations in the movie were taken from places all over the Western United States. And by "taken" we mean directly copied.

Guess which one is a great place to buy meth.

The left photo is Ramone's body shop from the film. The right is the U-Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas. Then there's the Cozy Cone Motel:

Motto: No leg room!

Which is clearly based off the Wigwam Motel in Arizona:

If we know our road motels, at least a third of those wigwams are active crime scenes.

There's even a subtle reference to a famous billboard for the Jack Rabbit Trading Post, also in Arizona (on the right there):

Honestly, it seems like Pixar just drove along Route 66 and put all the most interesting sights in the movie.

Even the speedway at the beginning of the film was based off of the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee:

Now somebody take us to that volcano island fortress Syndrome had in The Incredibles.

Jacopo della Quercia is the proud author of "Go @#$% Yourself!" - An Ungentlemanly Disagreement, by Filippo Argenti and "The Sound of Laughter" in Wordplague's The Four Humors. David is a freelance writer and aspiring screenwriter, follow him on Twitter or check him out over at Film School Rejects.

For more fiction that became reality, check out 7 Real World Heists That Put 'Ocean's 11' to Shame and 5 Real Bank Heists Ripped Right Out of the Movies.

And stop by LinkSTORM to learn where the hobbits are.

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