I’ve read Stephen King since I was old enough to know I probably shouldn’t be reading Stephen King. So when we planned our New England trip in October, Bangor wasn’t optional. It was the whole point.
We drove in from Portland and checked into our hotel with one goal: walk the streets King wrote into his novels. Not a guided tour. Not a bus. Just my husband and I, a Google Map I’d spent way too long planning, and 3.2 miles of sidewalks that I’d already walked a hundred times in my head through IT, Insomnia, and Bag of Bones.
The first afternoon, we started at Cedar Street off Main. If you’ve read King, you know these streets, not because he describes them in detail, but because he makes them feel like something’s slightly off. Like the houses are watching back. Walking them in person, I understood why. Bangor is quaint. It’s beautiful, actually. But there’s a weight to it. The houses are old. The trees lean in. And in late October, with Halloween decorations on every other porch, the line between “charming New England town” and “setting for a supernatural murder” is razor thin. LOL!
I walked Jackson Street. Union Street. I found the storm drain, the storm drain, or at least the one everyone agrees is close enough. Yes, that circle one! The one where a little boy named George met a clown and the rest of us never looked at sewer grates the same way. It’s just a curb drain. Nothing special. That’s what makes it work.
The plan was to walk the Kenduskeag Stream Trail the next afternoon, the river, the Barrens, the geography of Pennywise’s hunting ground. We started. The trail was beautiful in that sharp October way, fall color everywhere, the stream running cold and clear. And then the sun disappeared.
In Maine, in late October, “afternoon” becomes “night” without warning. One minute you’re admiring the foliage, the next you’re walking along a river in the dark in the town that invented Pennywise.
Rashid looked at me. I looked at him. “We’ll come back in the morning.“
We did not need to discuss it further.
Instead, we found The Butcher The Baker, a restaurant that has no business being this good in a town this small. Hearty, warm, the kind of meal that makes you forget you were just speed-walking away from an imaginary clown. For a person who’s eaten across Europe, I’ll say this without apology: the food was genuinely good.
The next morning, on our way south toward Rhode Island, we went back to the river. In daylight. Like adults. The Kenduskeag in the morning is peaceful- the kind of place you’d bring a book and a coffee and sit for hours. It’s hard to reconcile with what King made it in his fiction. But that’s the trick, isn’t it? The scariest places in his books are never abandoned asylums or haunted mansions. They’re the places that look normal until they don’t.
Bangor is exactly that. A quiet, beautiful Maine town that just happens to feel like something’s breathing under the surface.
I loved every second of it.
All Around The World 