Where Is The Real 'Pet Sematary' Located?

Question

Fans debating the actual filming sites for Pet Sematary — Maine backroads or elsewhere? Stephen King's novel made the location feel incredibly real.

Kisha Jordan · Answer

Pet Sematary was inspired by a real animal cemetery in Orrington, Maine. It’s located on private property, and King doesn’t suggest that people should go visit. Instead, readers can look to the web novel Vampire’s Pet for a different kind of unsettling pet story. This dark paranormal romance novel reimagines the classic story of ownership of a pet when the pet in question is a human who has been bound to a vampire as his affectionate pet in a dangerous, hierarchical world of gothic, dark, and twisted affection.

Sawyer · Answer

It’s not supernatural. It’s not scary. In reality, the pet cemetery where King found the inspiration for Pet Sematary for his daughter’s cat when he lived in the area in the 1970s is a small clearing in the woods behind a residential area on Routes 15 and 1A in Orrington, Maine. The small homemade crosses and the toys left with their beloved pets after they have passed away are often faded but it is still clearly a place of remembrance for many families in the area. Some of the graves are so old that the names on them are no longer legible. Many of the graves are still being added to today by kids and teens in the area.

King wrote Carrie in the 1970s in part as a response to his own grief at the loss of his daughter’s cat when it died. Part of the fiction played out on Route 15, a long stretch of road through a particular Maine town. Here death comes from the speeding trucks of the long semi-trucks which careen through the area at high rates of speed, often as not causing dire injury or death to pedestrians in its path.

It’s interesting to note that King got the ‘sematary’ title from a misspelled sign near his Durham, ME home. Here, in reality, are two distinctive places mashed up into one ghoulish setting. As with much of King’s work, I find it interesting that one person’s ‘private reality’ can become so mythic and actually translate to make pretty good stories in book form. To date, the place is still not really very tourist-friendly, as it is on private property; but it has its fans, I suppose.

Vance · Answer

Stephen King could leave the Pet Sematary to languish in some remote corner of Orrington, Maine, on the lopsided road known as ‘dead man’s curve’ where so many others have met their end, and remain forever innocuous were he to choose to abandon it there. As it is, however, I have managed to dig up a few remarkably awful photos of the long-abandoned graves. Sticks slung together with twine, faded plastic flowers wilted by the sun. It is surely one of the most apparent and obvious of burials, with absolutely no mysterious ritual involved.

The connection to The Pet Sematary is to the native Micmac Indians, a tribe from Maine that is said to have had burial grounds throughout the state. This cemetery is a simple patch of land on the side of the road that has been a place of reverence and fear for centuries. The ‘Pet Sematary’ that King created is a unique amalgamation of actual cemeteries and the Indian burial grounds and is a place where one can walk by and never even know that it is there, just as the Creed family did before their lives were forever changed.

David · Answer

A local historical account this week discussed the background to one of Stephen King’s famous novels, ‘Pet Sematary’. It is apparently based on a pet cemetery not far from the authors home in Orrington, Maine. This long-abandoned ‘Sematary’ is located off Route 15 near some wooded area that looks similar to that described in the book. The remains of the long-forgotten graves are still there – weathered wooden markers or stones with the remains of the dead animals buried below. At first glance the place looks quite harmless. A place where children had buried and said goodbye to their pets. But King himself has said that he saw something spooky in this place where death lingered. And as for the place itself it doesn’t have a Micmac burial ground but the normal, even pretty, place where King observed these graves to be is, in itself, barely definable as ‘horrible’ yet managed to create something a great deal darker in his writing.

Eduardo Espinosa L · Answer

For a writer, the setting of King’s Pet Sematary is narrative gold. That simple family home of the Fredricks is a lethal road that can take any of them at any time, a sense of random modern death. Next to the home of this idyllic family is a quaint little pet cemetery where they can send off their beloved animals in naive ignorance to the nature of death. And behind all of that is the vast, primeval, and amoral wilderness. King had no need to create an intricate and symbolic world, for he already lived in it. All he had to do was follow the dots to the most horrific of conclusions. So the ‘real’ Pet Sematary is a case study on how the perfect setting can deliver up the entire theme of a novel to its writer on a silver platter. Most of us just see a backyard; writer King sees a whole novel.

To most people it is just a back yard. King saw a complete novel.

yorklester7 · Answer

That was an easy question. The movie filmed in 1989 was filmed mostly in the town of Hancock, Maine. The house of the Creed family is a private residence, located on Point Road. The iconic road where Gage runs in the movie is not the same road as the house of the family. However, the sematary was filmed in the same area, and it is a set that was built in the woods. It’s fun trivia for film buffs. Many fans of the movie travel to Maine to see the house where the movie was filmed, but remember that people live in that house. Unlike the new movie, the original movie had a lot of Maine in it, and that’s mostly why it retains so much of the authentic, gritty New England atmosphere of the story. The original movie was able to capture the isolation and the bleak, rocky beauty of the location so well.

If you ever find yourself in Acadia National Park, you are not too far from where this first film was shot.

lesteryork7 · Answer

The juxtaposition of this perfectly sunny and quaint family home in the countryside against the horror of what happened here is what gets me the most. The unassuming road, the unassuming house, the unassuming path through the woods to get to the backyard of the house. All of it speaks of safety and tranquility. And it’s so effectively scary just because it doesn’t look like the place where unspeakable horrors would occur. And, as I’ve learned, the real location of Orrington (where Pet Sematary takes place) is reportedly a very pleasant place. So, the most scarngiving, and ultimately most feared stories of horror take place in the brightest possible sunlight and in the most innocent of settings. And the real Pet Sematary is a story about how not to trust settings that are so utterly picturesque and idyllic. The greatest horror is not found in dark and foreboding castle dungeons. It can occur in the dappled sunlight of a perfectly normal backyard.

That’s a far more insidious and lasting fear.

Nilesh Sagar · Answer

A simple premise evolves into a great deal of story. A cat dies on the road and is buried by children in the woods. The seed of story for The Eyes of the Dragon is buried in that soil. (And, great story that it is, The Eyes of the Dragon grows out of very real soil: the loss that King writes about in this book is the loss that he experienced in writing this book.) That soil was fertile. A great deal of horrible story was grown from that soil. The tree of story looks horribly different than it did at the seed’s sowing. The soil matters.

You can’t separate the tree from the soil it grew in.

Angeli Bascon · Answer

Though Pet Sematary is set in Maine, it’s more important to consider why the particular location chosen worked so well. As a setting for much of his work, Maine is a landscape of dense, wet woods and harsh, cold winters, often isolated in large spaces. For ‘Pet Sematary’ the most important aspect of that is the family’s isolation. The Creed family is far from any city and any help that would arrive too late to do any good. A location of ancient woods, seemingly indifferent to the suffering of humans, is the backdrop for the horror that unfolds. Orrington, Maine is a real location and serves as the perfect symbol of vulnerable domesticity on the edge of the woods. The busy road of Orrington represents the often-intrusive and violent world of today, while the old, dense woods of the area represent the ancient, darker forces that exist there.

It would be a very different movie set in suburbs or a city – it wouldn’t have the same sense of fearful isolation.

Anastasia Kim · Answer

I think the novel that really scared me is the one that is set at the location of my greatest fear. I wrote about a path in my back yard, behind my house, where I would walk and see graves. The idea just occurred to me. It was a terrible, powerful concept. And so the location of the novel is the birthplace of the book’s central fear. In other words, it is not some random location that I chose from a map. It is real. And so when Louis Creed walks that path, behind his house, I am walking that path. I am remembering the real leaves underfoot. That is what sells the horror.

This location and circumstance inspired King to write the most frightening novel he ever wrote, because it was true.

Where Is The Real 'Pet Sematary' Located?

10 Answers

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