Did you know this? For decades, Stephen King has had a funny answer when people ask where he gets his ideas: Utica, New York.

It’s a joke he’s returned to again and again over the years. Sometimes he’s said the ideas come in the mail from Utica. Other times, he’s described a “used idea shop” in Utica where he supposedly gets them.

Why Utica? That’s the mystery. King doesn’t seem to have ever explained exactly why he picked the city. Maybe he simply liked the sound of it as an oddly specific answer to a question writers get asked all the time.

The Utica joke goes back at least to the early 1990s. By 1998, The New Yorker described “Utica, New York” as King’s standard reply when asked where his ideas came from.

And Utica has actually made its way into King’s fiction. Bobbi Anderson, the central character in his 1987 novel The Tommyknockers, is from Utica.

So, apparently, somewhere in Utica is a little shop full of used ideas, and Stephen King has known about it for decades.