Hoot Owl was incorporated in 1977 by a family of three in order to "keep trespassing hunters and other towns from encroaching on their land."

In 1992, the town filed to be dissolved after a bank foreclosed the property and the towns two residents mayor and founder William R. Bradley Jr. and his son, city clerk Robert Bradley, both voted in favor of dissolution.

[4] According to the United States Census Bureau, the site has a total area of 0.1 square miles (0.26 km2), all land.

The town is located at 36.35995 N, 95.12137 W. Mapping services put it off Oklahoma State Highway 20, on the eastern shore of Lake Hudson on "Hoot Owl Road," but the narrow dead-end road is simply designated as No.

A census official explained "We don't have specific information that informs us that there is exactly one person in this town, rather our estimates production programs are designed to allocate fractional shares of the county population to its component place parts, and in this instance, a fractional share is rounded to one person as our estimated total for the town.