History Main / TownWithADarkSecret

* In ''Series/TalesFromTheCrypt'', Stueksville (pronounced "Sticksville"), where the episode "Let the Punishment Fit The Crime" takes place, is this... for the outsiders who are here, as residents with the place seem to know well enough about how the rules and regulations work to stay out of trouble, whereas the outsiders who end up here (and stuck here) find themselves in a FateWorseThanDeath, having to work in [[KangarooCourt a court system that is rigged against defendents]] [[GroundhogDayLoop over and over]].[[note]] That's assuming the place ''is'' a real town in the first place...[[/note]]

* The village in the Brecon Beacons in the ''Series/{{Torchwood}}'' episode "Countrycide". They're cannibals.

* ''VideoGame/TheSecretOfMonkeyIsland''. The island seems pretty peaceful (even the cannibals eventually bargain with you). That is, until you discover [[spoiler:The hellish labyrinth beneath the giant monkey head.]]

** In ''Series/StargateSG1'' episode "Nightwalkers", the team arrives in a mysterious town to investigate the disappearance of a scientist. The townspeople are alternatively friendly and hostile towards the protagonists and it is revealed that the whole town was taken as a host by Goa'uld symbiotes, including the scientist who had originally given the alarm. However, the townspeople themselves were not aware of this as the symbiotes take control only at night.

* ''Series/TheXFiles'' episode "Our Town". The Arkansas town of Dudley is entirely made up of cannibals who kidnap, kill and eat human beings in order to maintain their youth. They accidentally eat a victim who has Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and become infected with that syndrome.

* Podcast/WelcomeToNightVale: not Night Vale itself (it's not a secret that the City Council is a bizarre gestalt entity and there are hooded figures in the dog park, after all) but their rival town of Desert Bluffs, which appears to be Night Vale's opposite in every way. It's always sunny! Everything is wonderful! And everyone worships a Smiling God...

* The eponymous Maple Creek of ''The Ghosts of Maple Creek'' in the ''VideoGame/{{Enigmatis}}'' series. Some people who visited previously said it was nice, but the locals tended to act rather strangely. Of course, it's more the [[spoiler:local preacher]] you have to watch out for...

* ''Fanfic/BeyondTheWall'': The forest village is a lovely, friendly place where everypony has everything they need, and everypony is happy and cares for one another...but there's a giant wall surrounding the village, which prevents anypony from entering or leaving it. [[spoiler:Because Gaea doesn't love anything or anypony outside the wall, [[spoiler:intruders are killed on sight, and any villager that tries to leave is killed and buried within the village grounds so Gaea will still love them]].

* ''Fanfic/BeyondTheWall'': The forest village is a lovely, friendly place where everypony has everything they need, and everypony is happy and cares for one another...but nopony can enter or leave the place due to the giant wall that surrounds it. Because Gaea doesn't love anything or anypony outside the wall, [[spoiler:intruders are killed on sight, and any villager that tries to leave is killed and buried within the village grounds so Gaea will still love them]].

* ''Fanfic/BeyondTheWall'': The forest village is a lovely, friendly place where everypony has everything they need, and everypony is happy and cares for one another...but no one can come in, and no one can go out. Because Gaea doesn't love anything or anypony outside the wall, [[spoiler:intruders are killed on sight, and any villager that tries to leave is killed and buried within the village grounds so Gaea will still love them]].

* ''Fanfic/FalloutEquestria'': Arbu advertises itself as the "friendliest town in the wasteland." [[spoiler:It's actually a town of cannibals, and only ponies who eat their first hearts are marked as members of the town and allowed to vote.]]

%%%* [[spoiler: Arbu]] in ''Fanfic/FalloutEquestria''.

* ''Series/{{Haven}}'', Maine: A small town that hosts various cursed individuals. The mysterious 'Troubles' have recently returned, causing the deadly powers of some citizens to reactivate with horrible consequences. Loosely based on (well, uses some names from) a novella by Creator/StephenKing.

* Matt Murdock finds himself run afoul of one of these in ''ComicBook/{{Daredevil}}: Reborn'' -- there's an old quarry filled with corpses, and he almost gets added to the pile after the sheriff discovers who he is.

* ''Literature/{{Another}}'', the secret is not with the town itself but contained entirely in Class 3-3. Each school year, the class has one extra person in it - [[DeadAllAlong someone who has died]]. Nobody, not even the "extra" themself, remembers their death or that they shouldn't be on the class roster, but since their presence means there is one too many people in the class, the universe tries to balance things out by killing members of the class (and their family and friends) in increasingly improbable and gruesome accidents. The class in turn try to stave off the calamity by selecting one member of the class and pretending they don't exist for the duration of the school year, a countermeasure which is dubiously effective at best.

* Many of the towns that Kino visits in ''LightNovel/KinosJourney'' have a dark secret somewhere along the line. Sometimes it isn't an actual secret, but just something that casual travelers won't notice at the first sight, while at other times it's played dead straight.

* In ''LightNovel/SundayWithoutGod'', Ai feels like her village is keeping some kind of secret from her, but she isn't sure what. So instead she performs her gravekeeper duties by digging graves for when the villagers eventually die. [[spoiler:She later learns that [[DeadAllAlong every villager was actually already dead]], meaning she was the only living person in the whole village.]]
* ''Anime/SwordArtOnline'' has the game ''Alfheim Online'', which was released during the time that thousands of players were trapped in SAO. The game quickly proved popular for being a VRMMO that was not dangerous to the players. Little do the players know, the game is actually being used to conduct illegal experiments in how to use VR to rewrite memories.

* ''ComicBook/RobinSeries'': Tim discovers that a quiet now almost empty town in the Appalachian Mountains is trying to hide the fact that they unknowingly survived off on human meat for an untold period of time while a HumanoidAbomination they thought was human was running a survivalist compound in town.

** In ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion'', there's a minor town you have to visit after a merchant's daughter disappears there. The Church has a book dedicated to "the Deep Ones", and people say things like "the Brethren don't take kindly to strangers. I'd leave before they find out you're here." If you spend the night in the inn after asking questions, [[spoiler:you wake up in the middle of the night to find yourself under attack by some cultist, then can find your way into the underground to discover that the shopkeeper's daughter is about to be sacrificed for an unknown reason. Not even unknown ''daedric'' reasons - the "Deep Ones" are something else entirely.]]

* ''Wiki/SCPFoundation''

[[folder:Films — Animated]]

[[folder:Films — Live-Action]]
* In Herschell Gordon Lewis' splatter epic ''Film/TwoThousandManiacs!'' the inhabitants of the mysterious Southern town turn out to be the ghosts of civilians who were slaughtered by corrupt Union soldiers during the Civil War. The town reappears every one-hundred years so that the residents of it can take their revenge on any Yanks who stumble upon it.

* ''Film/{{Evolution2015}}'' is set on an unnamed island village whose population, strangely, consists only of adult women and their young sons, with no signs of any young girls or adult men. [[spoiler:It turns out that the "women" are some kind of [[SeaMonster mutant sea-life]] who are using the boys as [[MisterSeahorse surrogate mothers]] [[WombHorror against their will]], a process that they don't always survive.]]

* ''WebAnimation/SpookyMonth is set in [[WhereTheHellIsSpringfield an unnamed small town somewhere in the United States]], which (despite looking like an average suburban city) isn't really a normal or pleasant place to live in. In addition to the surprisingly high level of crime (for such a small town) with robbers, kidnappers, and murderers running around at night, it's also a WeirdnessMagnet for occult and supernatural activity; with various monsters suddenly appearing with little or no explanation (like the dancing zombies in the hospital morgue), along with being the home base of a [[ReligionOfEvil mysterious evil cult]] that worships an EldritchAbomination lurking under the town's surface, plotting sinister schemes for their unknown agenda in the background.

* ''WesternAnimation/KingOfTheHill'' revealed that Arlen has one in "Harlottown," though it gets subverted in that it isn't so much a secret as it's something everyone simply forgot. Peggy discovers that Arlen was originally called "Harlen," and that it was founded by only women. [[spoiler: Harlen was originally a town run by and populated by prostitutes, and its actual name was Harlottown. The name got shortened because, as Peggy put it, "People were in such a rush to get there, they didn't have time to say the whole name."]]

* In an episode of ''WesternAnimation/KingOfTheHill'', it's revealed that Arlen, Texas was originally a watering hole on the Chisholm Trail. A group of eleven enterprising women invested in a tent and a cot, and the site eventually formed into a town-wide brothel dubbed Harlottown until the prostitutes decided to make the brothel into a prospering town and start their own legitimate businesses and even get involved in politics. The name of the town used to be called "Harlen" in the past, which came from the even further back name "Harlottown", which Peggy discovers from old newspapers. Apparently "People were in such a hurry to get to Harlottown that they didn't have enough time to call it such." The many visitors to Harlen included President Garfield, the Terry's Texas Rangers, the 1884 University of Notre Dame football team and Mark Twain.

* ''Film/FirstBlood'': Hope, Washington. This quiet and boring little town's dark secret is that the entire police force are {{Dirty Cop}}s who are prejudiced against Vietnam war veterans and drifters and abuse them under custody. John Rambo, a former Green Beret and sole survivor of his unit who endured torture at the hands of the Vietcong is their latest victim. While trying to shave him, [[TraumaButton he snaps]] and becomes a OneManArmy.

* One of the central themes/plot lines of ''Series/BatesMotel'' is how the town of White Pines Bay is full of people with secrets. For starters the town's economy is based on illegal marijuana farming, and the shady business of that means no one looks for other things, like prostitution and gun running. It makes the Bates' activities easy to fly under the radar.

* ''Series/Dark'': The town of Winden is home to a nuclear power plant, but it has a big secret: there is a wormhole in the underground caves that allows one to travel in time. Various characters try to keep mysterious disappearances, murders and strange events secret to avoid people interfering with the timeline and sabotaging the universe.

* ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'' favors the Planet With A Dark Secret approach instead, with roughly even odds of Chaos, Eldar, Genestealers, and/or Necrons being said secret. Since we're talking about planets here, there's plenty of room for multiple dark secrets to be hiding out, all of them unaware of one another.

* Personville (known as "Poisonville")in the novel ''Literature/RedHarvest'' by Creator/DashiellHammett. It is a small town where Elihu Willsson, a local industrialist, has found his control of the city threatened by several competing gangs. Elihu had originally invited those gangs into Personville to help him impose and then enforce the end of a labor dispute.

* ''VideoGame/EldenRing'': Dominula, Windmill Village. At first glance, a small farming town celebrating a festival. Then, you might notice the lack of non-celebrants, the spirit desperately pleading for someone not to skin him, aggro the celebrants and get their drops of bloodstained dresses and weapons made of human bone, and figure out that something is ''very, very'' wrong here. [[spoiler: The references to flaying and the presence of a Godskin Apostle field boss nearby hints that the Dominulans are Godskin Cultists and use their festival to flay demigods and men alike to turn into clothing for the Godskin Apostles and Nobles.]]