Why was I here poking around Bear Lake, PA? Because it happens to pop up as the only listing under the name Happy Town in our government’s Geographic Name Information System (GNIS) database. I came across an article here explaining the variant name’s history.
Ernest Miller’s Place Names in Warren County also refers to a “Happy Town” that was “a former small settlement located half in the borough of Bear Lake and half in Freehold Township; it is three-quarters of a mile east of the center of the village of Bear Lake.
“In earlier years, there were nine houses, a blacksmith shop, and an out-of-doors dance platform where Saturday-night dances were held. It is thought the location was named when a reveler remarked, ‘Oh, it’s a happy town on Saturday nights!’ A dirt road, known and marked as Happy Town Road, turns from the village location south where it meets Route 957.”
And the reason I was looking up Happy Town in this way in the first place is because it’s the name of a prominent location in Osamu Sato’s LSD Dream Emulator video game from 1998, basically forgotten shortly after its release in Japan but now an internet hit thanks to a Youtube fueled revival. Good ol’ Youtube — serving me well lately for uncovering gems of creativity. Happy Town is the most colorful of the 14 locations of the game, and one of the largest and most frequently visited and recalled. With its cheerful, vibrant nature, Happy Town presents the opposite of gloomy, perpetually dark and gray Violence District with its odd appearances of bloodied bodies and headless or hanged women. Then at some point I guess we should talk about the Gray Man, the most famous element of Sato’s game. According to the LSD Dream Emulator’s fandom wiki, Gray Man appears most often in Happy Town amongst the game’s locations. He’s been seen as the main antagonist of LSD, but some also put forth the theory that he’s instead its protagonist.
Happy Town description from the wiki:
https://dreamemulator.fandom.com/wiki/Happy_Town
Gray Man from the same:
https://dreamemulator.fandom.com/wiki/Gray_Man
Gray Man in Happy Town
(to be continued)
Sunklands 
