EXPLORE BANGOR’S HAUNTED HOUSES AND KING LANDMARKS
BANGOR, Maine — Stephen King’s house practically screams “Boo!”
Forget the idyllic vision of the Maine cottage with its white picket fences. King’s Bangor manse has a black wrought-iron fence embellished with spread-winged bats and spiderwebs.
It’s a magnet for King fans. In years of driving past the home, I can’t remember a time when there wasn’t a fan (or two or more) on the sidewalk outside the batty gate, cameras fairly smoking from taking photos of the 23-room Italianate villa.
The house is also a magnet for a certain black cat named Monty. He doesn’t belong to King, guide Stu Tinker of SK Tours told me. Monty lives a few blocks away but will turn up at King’s gate, then amble up to the writer’s porch for a nap. Must be the vibe.
The house, built in 1858, stands on West Broadway, a leafy street lined with the 19th century mansions of lumber barons. In the 1800s, Bangor was known as “the lumber capital of the world”; then its timber trade slowed considerably as logging headed west. But Bangor supplied California with timber during the Gold Rush. There’s even a Bangor, Calif., founded in 1855 and named by settlers from Bangor, Maine.
King bought the home in 1980 for $135,000. As he pondered the purchase, he reportedly asked the previous owner whether the house was haunted.
She is said to have responded: “Well, sir, if you want the house to be haunted, you’re certainly the one that could do it.”
From this villa, it was only five blocks — but light years away in ambience — from the run-down digs he occupied as a struggling writer in the early 1970s. The dingy wood house at 14 Sanford St. is still on Google Maps, but it was torn down a few years ago. There King, his wife, Tabitha, and their two children rented a four-room, second-floor apartment in 1973.
It was in that apartment that King got the call that would change his life: The paperback rights for “Carrie” — the novel about a bullied high school girl who ends up using her telekinetic powers against her tormentors — had sold for $400,000. King was on his way. Nowadays he owns a winter home in Sarasota, Fla. (Bangor’s winters make snowbirds of many residents), and a summer place in Center Lovell, a mountain- and lakes-filled area in western Maine near the New Hampshire border.
But Bangor still has a hold on King. In a speech to the Bangor Historical Society in 1983, as he was working on his novel “It,” he ex- plained his attraction to Bangor, saying it felt “like the right place.”
The book, King told the society, is about “a city named Derry which any native of this city [Bangor] will recognize almost at once as Bangor” — although to my knowledge Bangor has no evil creature that terrorizes children.
For King, part of Bangor’s appeal is the townspeople’s respect for his privacy. Over the years, I’ve seen him several times at Nicky’s Cruisin’ Diner ( www.nickysdiner.com), a place that’s frozen in the ’50s and ’60s. I once asked one of the longtime waitresses at Nicky’s — where comfort food is king — whether customers ever pestered the author.
“None of the locals bother him,” she said. “People here leave the guy alone.”
Yet another reason Bangor is King’s kind of town: The place gives him ideas. Maybe it has to do with the people. They’re friendly but reserved, which can seem mysterious. Or it could be Bangor’s rough-and- tumble, lumber-laden past and all the rowdiness that goes with a boom town. (Think bars and bloodshed.)
As King himself once said, “The streets fairly clang with stories.”