Runaround Pond is also where Johnny Smith has his formative accident on the ice at the beginning of The Dead Zone, so obviously this real-life setting was important to King. but he freely admits that "the leech incident" really happened here. As far as I know, King has never spoken about that particular incident. Chesley suggests that King's memory of this event may have inspired the novella "The Body," which was later turned into the film STAND BY ME. Just beyond the graveyard is Runaround Pond, a swampy watering hole where King and Chesley supposedly saw a dead body for the first time. The impressions of that night on the future horror author may now be more timless than the headstones. King and his childhood friend Chris Chesley knew, and according to Chesley they were once bold enough to spend a night camping out among the stones. It's a small burial ground that no one would be likely to notice unless they already knew it was there. Just down the road from Methodist Corners is Harmony Grove Cemetery, the inspiration for Harmony Hill Cemetery, where Mike Ryerson digs up undead Danny Glick in the novel 'Salem's Lot. And because rural Maine had such a strong, 19th century life, remaining rather quiet in this century, the architecture prominent when an area was first settled - or when it found prosperity - endures, even now." Presumably King likes writing about towns like Durham because, in the modern world, such places seem a little bit unreal to begin with. Massachusetts, by comparison, has an average of 765 people living on each square mile. Even if we consider a more realistic count that eliminates Maine's vast tracts of uninhabited forest, there are still only 200 people per square mile. Here's how one local writer explains it: "With only 40 people per square mile, the population pressure is not very intense. This is one of the great things about the rural areas of Maine: they do seem to be sort of timeless. Now a private residence, but the neighborhood he knew as Methodist Corners looks more or less the same. The church is no longer in use and the one-room schoolhouse is Noted that things haven't changed much over the years. King returned to the neighborhood in 1999 for a BBC documentary, and From about age 11, he lived with his mother and his older brother David in a small house on Runaround Pond Road, between the historic West Durham United Methodist Church and a one-room grammar schoolhouse. Naturally that affected my initial impressions of the place.Īs it happens, King came of age just a few miles upriver from Bath, in a town called Durham. I spent my childhood in Virginia, and most of what I knew about Maine came from Stephen King novels. Growing up, I knew very little about these ancestors and even less about Maine. His son Frederick Kingsbury also worked as a riveter in the same factory. My great-great-great grandfather Lewis Kingsbury was a resident of Bath, Maine, and he worked there for most of his life at the Iron Works near the mouth of the meandering Androscoggin River. Continued from PART 3: ORONO, ORRINGTON, LUDLOW & LITTLE TALL ISLANDĪ few years ago, I took a trip to Maine to visit the home of some of my ancestors.
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