As a kid, I sometimes took for granted how amazing it was to grow up where I grew up. I think most kids do. After all, I was a huge Stephen King fan from a very early age and I was not only growing up in Maine, but growing up right in the heart of the locations of some of his most well known stories. It didn’t really sink in until I was around 10, when they began filming Storm of the Century in my home town, how truly lucky I was as a fan to live where I lived. It’s never not amazing to me the passion fans have around the world for the places King has described on the page and the real-life inspirations behind them. People come from all over to take the Stephen King tour in Bangor and visit all of the real-life locations behind Derry, especially with the success of the new film. I also can’t describe the extra impact that those books have when King’s describing a clown lurking in a drain in a town you know the ins and outs of, a place that is completely concrete and real to you. With major landmarks and restaurants being places you can instantly recall from memory.
People have a fascination for the locations behind King’s books and movies and I get why. With the exceptions of things like Dark Tower, The Stand and The Eyes of the Dragon, most of King’s stories are set in a world that feels incredibly real, with characters you feel like you could bump into on the street. But there are some that are far, far more talked about than others. A lot of people have taken a look at the locations that inspired IT and Pet Sematary in particular. One of my all-time favorite King books, though, never seems to get that level of interest or recognition (outside of this fantastic blog post I’m very grateful for) even though it has just as many real world influences.
I’m talking, of course, about Salem’s Lot. This book hinges on those real world influences because they were the entire reason for writing it in the first place. King famously said to his wife, Tabitha, while teaching Dracula in high school, “What would happen if the Count came back now?” And she joked that he’d take a step to cross the street in Times Square and be flattened by a bus. That got him thinking about what would happen if the vampire returned not in the city, but in one of any number of small Maine towns where no one would really even notice if people started to disappear. Thus, Salem’s Lot was born.
To make the town feel as real as possible, King must have taken a lot of influence from the world around him, some of which has been well documented from the author himself, the rest of which can be inferred from the descriptions in the novel and a general knowledge of the state.
Naturally, to start a spotlight on the locations of Salem’s Lot, you have to start with the location of the town itself and the inspirations behind it. Surprisingly, the geographical location of Salem’s Lot in the novel—particularly its relative distance to Cumberland—is made pretty clear. If you were to match that up with the actual state, then the town of Jerusalem’s Lot pretty well matches up with the actual town of Yarmouth. There’s even a strong visual similarity with the way the town is described. Yarmouth might not exactly be a ghost town, but it’s still pretty small and secluded. It’s easy to buy this as the “real” Salem’s Lot just at a first glance.
Just by the fact of being a significantly smaller book, Salem’s Lot doesn’t have quite as many seminal locations as IT, but there are still some that stand out that any fan of the material might instantly think of when thinking about the book or either adaptation. One of the first that comes to mind, which was seen on screen as recently as last year’s Castle Rock, is Harmony Hill cemetery. In the novel, this is where Danny Glick is buried after becoming a vampire and where he in turn bites Mike Ryerson, who has been charged with burying him. Mike is hypnotically lured into the grave because he feels like it’s looking at him and it’s one of the most uncomfortable moments in the book without actually showing anything. The same is true of Mike’s death, later, when we’re simply hearing the child vampire suck Mike’s last remaining drops of blood out from Matt Burke’s perspective.
The scene in the Tobe Hooper miniseries terrified me for completely different reasons at a young age, as it was the image of Danny Glick popping up with his eyes shining silver that scared the living hell out of me and nothing was implied. This cemetery, as it turns out, is very real. More than that, it hails from Stephen King’s actual hometown of Durham. This makes sense, given King’s fascination for Southern Maine in those early novels as he had grown up in that general area and was still living around there at the time. The actual Harmony Hill Cemetery is called Harmony Grove Cemetery. It’s a small little cemetery located behind a church, even smaller than the cemetery in King’s novel, which served the whole town.
Considering the Lot as basically a fictionalized Yarmouth, let’s also take a look at a couple of important town locations that could match up pretty well. First, there’s Eva Miller’s boarding house which is where our protagonist takes up residence after he has discovered that the Marsten House has been sold. There’s nothing that really served as a concrete inspiration for this house, as far as I know, but the historic Capt. Reuben Merrill House is a very close approximation. It’s a notable Yarmouth landmark that has the necessary size but also a generally quaint vibe that feels appropriately homey.
Then, of course, there’s the shop that spells the death of the entire town, Barlow & Straker’s antique store. Much like the Salem’s Lot of the novel, there’s actually not a whole lot of downtown Yarmouth. Had Barlow & Straker’s actually existed, it almost certainly would have been located in the Upper Village, about as downtown as Yarmouth gets, located alongside the bookstores and local jewelry shops that always attract tourists, even in Maine’s most out-of-the-way towns. This section of town fits and actually matches up with the book’s geography pretty well.
When it comes to Salem’s Lot, though, there is one location that immediately comes to mind, that’s just the thing you think of when you hear the title, and that is of course the Marsten House. There are actually two inspirations for the Marsten House and one of them once again comes from King’s home town of Durham. The first was an unnamed, abandoned and supposedly haunted house located on Rt. 1 in Brunswick. Given that it was already abandoned when King was a young writer, it’s completely gone today.
The primary inspiration, though, has a lot more history behind it. Located in Durham, the Shiloh Chapel is in some ways exactly what the Marsten House was in the book. It’s just the local haunted house, the local place where something bad happened and that badness still seems to cling to it to this day. Even creepier—and perhaps intentional as it matches up so well—the Shiloh Chapel’s origin actually echoes the founding of Jerusalem’s Lot itself.
As a brief refresher, the fictional town of Jerusalem’s Lot was founded by a cult leader named John Boon. Openly embracing witchcraft, he began to sacrifice his own flock and though the Lot became an incorporated township in 1765, it was abandoned by 1789 after Boon and his followers completely disappeared. This was much more likely a direct homage to the disappearance of the colonists at Roanoke, Virginia, something that has influenced several Stephen King works, Storm of the Century most explicitly.
But, there are some surprising parallels to the foundation of the Shiloh Chapel that shouldn’t be ignored. It was founded as the Shiloh Temple by an evangelical cult leader named Frank Sandford. Although only one surviving building remains, it was built as an impressively sized commune where Sandford and his followers could live free from, basically, the modernity and godlessness of the world around them. In 1893 Sandford left his ministry in Topsham to evangelize the world, growing his cult over a period of years before the construction of the temple began. At one point, it had space for more than 1,000 residents. Life inside the compound adhered to a strict set of rules, and nothing could happen without Sandford’s say-so. He called himself a prophet, the new Elijah, and even forced most followers to sever themselves of all their earthly ties and possessions before they could be accepted into the Temple.
In 1911, Sandford took a crew on a missionary trip to Greenland for which he was charged with manslaughter on his return. The trip was utterly undersupplied, and six of his crew died on the voyage, mostly from scurvy and related illnesses. In 1920, after the mysterious death (ruled a suicide) of one of its residents, the Shiloh Temple was permanently shut down. Most of the buildings were demolished in the 1950s, leaving only the Chapel standing as a historic landmark to this day. George W. Higgins, one of the cultists at Shiloh, is largely believed to be the last person publicly tarred and feathered in the state of Maine after he relentlessly beat a child that he claimed to be possessed by a demon and refused an order to leave town.
According to King in Danse Macabre, he and his friends would play around the abandoned Chapel as children, just as young Ben Mears and his friends did with the Marsten House in the novel.
Given the local history and subject matter, it’s worth noting that Maine was no stranger to the vampire epidemic that swept through New England in the late 1800s, largely in the 1880s-90s, around the same time that the Shiloh Temple was being constructed. The most famous incident of the New England vampire epidemic was undoubtedly the case of Mercy Brown of Rhode Island. Her family and the town became convinced that, after her death of a long illness, she had returned as a vampire to inflict a similar fate on her remaining family members, particularly her young siblings. What remains shocking about this is that this was the 1890s, just before the turn of the twentieth century, and at least a century removed from the widespread belief in vampires. This was only five years before the publication of Dracula, a book that hinges on the notion of an ancient folkloric creature that no one believes in anymore being unleashed on the modern, civilized world.
There were several other well documented cases of supposed vampirism throughout New England in the mid-late 1800s, most of them coming from Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont. Maine doesn’t have nearly as many documented, known records of vampirism without having to dig through the town records manually, but there are a couple here and there and one particularly morbid one that stands out. Capt. James Purrington was a farmer and respected member of the community of Hallowell, who one night murdered his wife and six of his eight children with an ax before turning it on himself. Most of the ties to vampirism come from local stories and poetry, with the acknowledgment that Purrington was buried at a crossroads, which was common practice when one was suggested of being a vampire as it was believed they would be unable to rise again. There’s more evidence, however, that Purrington was buried in an unmarked grave in Mount Vernon Cemetery in Augusta, with other reports claiming that he was buried standing up, another common practice for suspected vampires. One thing that seems confirmed, perhaps most morbid of all, is that he was buried with the murder weapon.
While Salem’s Lot doesn’t have a walking tour or really anything at all spotlighting its real-life locations, it’s still one of Stephen King’s most beloved and most horrifying works, and it remains my personal favorite. Hopefully, this served as an effective starter guide to not only the actual locations that inspired some of the most prominent places in the novel, but also to the local history that—whether an intentional inspiration or not—served as an appropriate precursor to King’s genuinely frightening story of a vampire invasion in Maine.
I think, having dug deep into these real world places, that Salem’s Lot remains scary for the same reason it’s always been scary. It works because as impossible and unlikely as it would be, if it did happen, to that or any number of small Maine towns, would anyone truly even notice?
