The "real life" Mystery Mile is in Industry Borough, PA, where the stories of strange phenomena exist on two adjacent roads: Wolf Run Road, and Kelly Road.
The title of the film is borrowed from the work of Parmenides, a Greek philosopher and poet from Elea. In his only surviving work, On Nature, Parmenides describes two states of reality: The Way of Truth, and The Way of Seeming (or "opinion" in some translations). In the work, he argued that the accepted way of seeing the world at large (the way of seeming) was erroneous, and argued to accept the way of truth, that nothing comes from nothing and that the reality of the world is one being, unchanging. The idea that what people see is an illusion is a major story point in the film.