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Gothic Baby Names: 49 That Are Actually Rising

Forty-nine gothic girl names that are more common than a decade ago — with real ranks, and the 21 that are projected to still be rare in 2030.

If you have an October due date, you have probably already noticed that the internet’s “spooky baby names” lists are mostly made up. They’re vibes with no numbers attached — half the entries have never been given to an American baby in measurable quantities, and the other half are secretly enormous.

So here is the version with the data in it. Every one of the 49 names below is genuinely gothic-adjacent — Victorian, mythic, literary, or just a little bit haunted — and every one of them is more common now than it was ten years ago. No names in decline made the list, which rules out a lot of the usual suspects.

But “rising” is the easy part. The thing most people actually want to know about a name like this is whether it will still feel uncommon by the time the kid is in school.

Which of these are still rare in 2030

Twenty-one of the 49 are projected to stay under 500 births a year through 2030 — meaning they keep the rarity that made you look at them in the first place, even as they climb. Here’s the rarest end of that group:

The rest of the still-rare-in-2030 group: Verity, Storm, Isadora, Odessa, Onyx, Serafina, Winifred, Guinevere, and Eleanora.

A caveat, because it matters: these are model projections, and our own backtest puts the average error at roughly a third for names down in the 500–1000 rank range — worse for the truly obscure ones. Read them as direction and rough scale, not as a number to plan around. A name at 25 births a year is not going to become common by 2030 under any plausible error bar, and that’s really the claim.

The hundred-year names

Twelve names on this list peaked before 1950 and are climbing back now, which is the most reliably gothic story there is — a name that was ordinary for your great-great-grandmother and reads as deliciously strange today.

• Agatha — peaked in 1918 at 218 girls, sank, and is at 120 now. Christie did not hurt.
• Elvira — peaked in 1920 at 592. Up 138% in a decade despite carrying possibly the most specific pop-culture association on this entire page.
• Lenore — peaked in 1926 at 460, down to 98 now. The Poe name, and the only one here where the literary association is unambiguously the reason it exists at all.
• Wilhelmina — peaked in 1916 at 320. Enormous, formal, and shortens to Willa, Mina, or Billie depending on your mood.
• Winifred — peaked in 1918 at 1,593, now 284 and up 78% in ten years.
• Eudora — peaked in 1923 at 71 girls, which tells you it was never common even at its height. At 25 births last year it is the rarest name on this list by a distance.
• Estella — the near-miss story. It peaked in 1921 at 638 girls and is at 581 today, which puts it within a rounding error of reclaiming a 105-year-old record. Dickens fans, your moment is close.

Odessa (1920, 464), Rosaline (1928, 88), Mabel (1915, 3,683), Genevieve (1918, 3,304), and Josephine (1918, 8,682) round out the century club.

The mythic and literary end

This is where the fastest growth on the list is hiding, mostly because these names started from almost nothing.

Octavia is up 461% in ten years and sits at #308. Nyx, the Greek goddess of night and about as on-theme as a name can be, is up 325% — from a base so small that it’s still only 68 births. Circe (+367%) and Bellatrix (+383%) are in the same bracket: real growth, tiny absolute numbers, which is exactly the combination that keeps a name feeling like a find.

Ophelia is the one that has genuinely broken through — up 329% in a decade to #264, and no longer a name anyone will consider unusual in a few years. Marceline (+473%) and Elowen (+847%) are the two steepest climbers on the whole page, both at all-time highs in 2025.

Selene, Seraphina, Theodora, Guinevere, Lilith, and Minerva fill out the middle of this group — all rising, none common.

The ones that already arrived

Some of the best gothic names are now genuinely popular, and it would be dishonest to put them on a “spooky and rare” list without saying so.

Luna is #27 with 6,076 girls. Nova is #46, Delilah #51, Josephine #53, Maeve #76, and Juniper cracked the top 100 exactly, at #100. These are all still climbing — Maeve is up 348% in ten years — and they are all names your daughter will plausibly share with someone in her grade.

That’s not a strike against them. Luna is a lovely name and six thousand families a year are not wrong. It just means you’re picking it because you love it rather than because it’s undiscovered, and those are different purchases.

All 49

Luna · Nova · Delilah · Josephine · Maeve · Juniper · Evangeline · Genevieve · Ember · Sage · Mabel · Wren · Ophelia · Lilith · Octavia · Sabrina · Thea · Matilda · Raven · Willa · Marceline · Salem · Estella · Mina · Seraphina · Selene · Theodora · Elowen · Eleanora · Guinevere · Winifred · Serafina · Odessa · Isadora · Onyx · Storm · Verity · Wilhelmina · Agatha · Elvira · Lenore · Minerva · Rosaline · Marnie · Vesper · Nyx · Bellatrix · Circe · Eudora

Forty-nine names, every one of them rising, and twenty-one still projected to be rare five years from now. That second number is the one worth saving.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data, 1880–2025.