My Day Visiting Stephen Kings Bangor Maine

My Day Visiting Stephen King’s Bangor, Maine

I became a fan of Stephen King in 1982. I had just returned from a year in Australia. Unbeknownst to me, 16 is a formative year for high school students. While I had been in the Outback, gaining the skills of pickling snakes, shearing sheep, and constructing walls and roofs out of sheep shit, my American counterparts had been dressing up for winter formals and going to Friday night football games where they would smoke pot and make out under the bleachers to Motley Crue records. We had grown differently.

Upon my return, I found myself with few options and fewer friends. Walking between ‘Home Room and the lockers’, I would be asked, “So, how was Australia?” I would begin to relate the tales, soon discovering the only audience left would be the picture of Andy Gibb taped inside my locker door. I soon learned to answer the question: “Awe, it was all right, Mate,” eventually remembering to drop the words all right and Mate, and condensing my Australian year to: “It was good.”

Additionally, I had missed the vital bonding and sacred locker calling ceremonies. I was never asked the all-important question: “Do you wanna share lockers?” This query defined the high school hierarchy; hence, I was subjected to the humiliation of being ‘assigned’ a locker by the school administration, who firmly placed me at the bottom of the hierarchy.

And then, from the hand of another high school outcast, my assigned locker mate, I discovered Stephen King. In all truth, I only discovered him when I noticed the book that took up a solid quarter of our locker space. It was over 1000 pages, making it thick and unwieldy and providing me with the perfect opportunity to bury my nose in its pages, engrossing myself so deeply that I would deliberately miss high school.

The Stand should have gotten me through at least six months. It got me through five days, two of which were the weekend. What started as a remedy for high school humiliation became a full-blown obsession. I devoured everything he wrote. To this day, I still read everything King, but his nonfiction goes straight to my heart.

I had the opportunity to visit Maine, Stephen King’s home, and it was here that I created my own Stephen King Tour. There are plenty of King novels set outside of Maine–i.e., The Stand and Desperation belong to the American West, The Shining and Misery belong to the mountains of Colorado, Christine and From a Buick 8 belong to the roads of Pennsylvania, but some of his best-known stories are rooted in Maine; specifically Derry, a fictionalized town in Maine.

So, for a King fan like me, setting foot here was an homage, a chance to recall days past, when I was a young kid crouched under covers, reading his horror stories, and now, as an adult, walking his streets, hoping for a glimpse into a creative process.

First Stop Stephen King’s House:

His house is an old Victorian mansion with a gate covered in wrought iron spiders and bats. It feels like the perfect place to begin an exploration of Stephen King’s Maine. The inside has become an archive for scholars wanting to learn more about him, but it’s tough to access.

Second Stop Thomas Hill Standpipe:

Thomas Hill Standpipe is the haunted and dangerous water tower in King’s 1986 novel IT. King wrote most of the story on a park bench under the tower’s shadow. The tower, built in the 19th century and about 50 feet tall, is only open to the public four times a year. Against an April grey sky, it feels eerie.

Third Stop The Drainpipe:

At the corner of Union and Jackson Streets, you’ll see the sewer drain into which the evil clown Pennywise lured young Georgie Denbrough (and ripped off his arm) at the outset of “It.”

Fourth Stop Paul Bunyan Statue:

This brings me to the Paul Bunyan statue. The Bangor Metro recounts its history from its origins to current times, but in a nutshell, the statue is 26+ feet high. According to the Metro, the statue “stood smiling down at the car and pedestrian traffic in Outer Canal Street from the edge of the City Center lawn….”

Some people love that statue, and some people hate it. Stephen King brought it to life in IT, where it chased a young Richie Tozier down the street attacking him. By the time Richie had grown up, so had the statue, becoming Pennywise, who attacked an adult Richie. Today, the statue stands in front of the Cross Insurance Center across from the Hollywood Casino. You don’t have to look too close to see Pennywise lurking behind the garish smile?—?or is it just me?

Fifth Stop Mount Hope Cemetary:

In 1983, Pet Sematary was released, and, like King who has gone on record saying this is the one ‘which genuinely scared him the most,’ I was terrified to the bones, losing sleep and checking under my bed for some animal that had been brought back to life “fundamentally wrong”. Don’t even get me started on Gage. So, as one of America’s oldest cemeteries and the setting for the horror ride to Pet Sematary, Mount Hope Cemetery, is iconic, recognizable, and terrifying. After being disappointed far too many times, I rarely watch movies made from King’s books, but the iconic scene–(and if you know the terror tale, that’s all that needs to be said) was filmed here.

Sixth and Final Stop Dysart’s Truck Stop:

Dysart’s truck stop in nearby Hermon, a place recognizable by King fans as the setting for Dreamcatcher and the short story Trucks, which was a good and scary tale, where machines, beginning with trucks, take over the world, killing, maiming, and slaughtering the humans in their way. It subsequently became a terrible movie–Maximum Overdrive–and remains one of the reasons I can’t watch King’s book-to-movie evolutions to this day.

For a King fan, this was a fantastic day. Have you visited Bangor? Have you seen any of these places? I would love to hear your favorites.

Until next time, thank you for reading.

Cheers, & Have a great day.