While the suburbs creep out many urban loft-dwellers, sending shivers down their gentrified spines, only one intersection in this city can be described as positively paranormal -- Mulder Avenue and Scully Way.
For years, the signs have mystified residents of King's Pointe, the development in the city's east end that is home to the supernatural street signs.
"People ask about it all the time. It's the first thing they comment on," said Judy Letourneau, who bought her house on the corner of Mulder Avenue and Scully Way five and a half years ago, when it was brand new.
For the uninitiated, FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully were the two main characters on The X-Files, one of the most popular science-fiction television series ever.
Ms. Letourneau's husband, Rob, was a fan of The X-Files, while she was not, though the address didn't add or detract from her decision to purchase the house, where she says very few things out of the ordinary occur.
"The only thing is that even though everyone comments on the name, for some reason, people can never find the place," Judy said.
Coincidence? Probably. The intersection is, after all, in a fairly remote area of the city, just off the intersection of Trim and Innes roads.
Still, once their befuddled guests finally arrive, the Letourneaus have no answers regarding the origin of their address.
But as any true X-phile would attest, the truth is out there -- though, perhaps not surprisingly, it is not at City Hall.
"The former township of Cumberland would have dealt with those street names," said Barre Campbell, a City of Ottawa spokesman, when asked about the street names' origins.
Mr. Campbell said that the responsibility for giving streets their monikers falls with the area's developer.
"Obviously, the builder or developer must have been a big X-Files fan. Or it's a crazy coincidence. Or maybe something happened in the middle of the night and the signs got mysteriously changed," said Mr. Campbell, who, like Mulder, clearly "wants to believe."
But in a vindication of Scully's skepticism that would have been rare on the show but is pretty common in reality, it turns out that the street names were not the result of supernatural phenomena but rather the rules that govern street naming in Ottawa.
"It's kind of tough to come up with street names now, and the people who do it sometimes find inspiration in odd places," said Neil Malhotra, the vice-president of Claridge Homes, the developer responsible for King's Pointe.
Since duplicate or similar-sounding names could cause confusion for people -- not to mention emergency crews -- street names have to be cleared with the city's director of building code services, Mr. Campbell explained.
To aid developers in coming up with original street names, the former City of Cumberland used to provide a list of names not yet taken. And in 2001, one of those unclaimed names was "Scully," according to Paul Rothwell (not, he stresses, Roswell), the former planner for Claridge Homes who is responsible for the geographical homage.