As we’ve noted several times before, there are lots of people who think Maine is a made-up place. It’s not, as the actual fact of our existence proves — but then again, can you blame people for thinking we’re not real, given the preponderance of fictional Maine towns in movies, TV, books and video games?
Here are six of the most iconic fictional Maine towns — not real, but that still loom large in people’s imaginations.
Don’t see your favorite town on this list? Send an email to [email protected] with your suggestions. We’ll do another story sometime later in the year.
Derry, from the works of Stephen King
Some would argue that the town of Castle Rock is the more famous place in Stephen King’s epic fictional version of Maine. But being that we’re the Bangor Daily News, we’re quite partial to Derry, the bizarro version of Bangor that’s the setting for “It,” among King’s most popular books and the subject of two filmed adaptations.
Derry — also a setting for novels like “Insomnia,” “Bag of Bones” and “11/22/63” — is just enough like Bangor for it to be extra freaky. Like Bangor, it has a statue of Paul Bunyan, cool old canals running through the downtown, and even a water tower called the standpipe. Unlike Bangor, it also has a malevolent extra dimensional being lurking within its sewers. As far as we know, the real Bangor is lacking such a resident.
Cabot Cove, from “Murder, She Wrote”
Cabot Cove, the picturesque coastal Maine town that amateur sleuth and novelist Jessica Fletcher calls home in the beloved TV series “Murder, She Wrote,” may be even more deadly than Derry. We don’t have an exact body count, but given the number of murders Fletcher investigates in the show, Cabot Cove, population 3,500, may in fact be a more dangerous place than Derry, home of Pennywise.
The general consensus among fans seems to be that Cabot Cove is located in the southern midcoast, likely on a peninsula somewhere between Damariscotta and Brunswick, possibly in the Boothbay area. The show was filmed in northern California, so the palm trees that sometimes can be seen in the background on some episodes can be chalked up to either laziness or artistic license.
Crabapple Cove, from “M*A*S*H”
Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce pines for his hometown of Crabapple Cove in Maine in both the Robert Altman-directed movie and throughout the long run of the “M*A*S*H” TV series, as he’s stationed on the other side of the planet as a surgeon during the Korean War. He regularly waxes poetic on its natural beauty and rough hewn people, and at the series end, he returns there to work as a doctor. Richard Hooker, who wrote the original book the show was based on, wrote a follow up novel, “M*A*S*H Goes to Maine,” about Pierce’s post-war experiences in Crabapple Cove.
Hooker owned a home in the Lincoln County town of Bremen, just south of Waldoboro, and Crabapple Cove bears a great deal of similarity to it. In the book and series, Pierce says his family has been there for generations.
Empire Falls, from the book and miniseries
Where many fictional Maine towns are postcard-perfect coastal villages, Empire Falls, the setting for Richard Russo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name and the subsequent HBO miniseries, is a working class inland community, a gritty former mill town struggling to survive. Russo’s unvarnished yet sensitive portrayal of its residents is what makes his beautiful book so compelling and realistic.
Empire Falls, while not real, bears resemblances to many different mill towns in Maine, like Rumford, Millinocket and Lisbon Falls. But the real community it is most readily connected to is Skowhegan, where the 2005 miniseries starring Ed Harris, Paul Newman and Helen Hunt was filmed in 2003.
Silent Hill, from the video game franchise
The Maine seen in fictional works runs a wide gamut between the scenic and charming, and the ominous and terrifying. The Silent Hill horror video game franchise, which spans multiple games, books and movies, is squarely in the latter. While the plot of each game is different, it generally centers around the mysterious Maine town of Silent Hill, a protagonist who is stranded there, and an occult group that practices dark rituals to summon an evil god. There are monsters, and they are really scary.
While “Silent Hill” is beloved by gamers, its Maine setting isn’t exactly accurate. The original developers of the franchise were a Japanese team that drew on many common American small town tropes, though you can easily imagine that Stephen King’s Maine was on their minds when they came up with the concept.
Storybrooke, from the TV show “Once Upon a Time”
This goofy but entertaining fantasy series aired on ABC for seven seasons between 2011 and 2018, and is set in another unusually perfect coastal Maine town: Storybrooke. In this case, the town’s residents are actually fantasy and fairy tale characters transported to our reality and wiped of their memories. Snow White, Peter Pan, the Wicked Witch of the West, King Arthur and Aladdin all show up at one point or another.
Storybrooke’s location in Maine is kept very, very vague in the show, and the show itself was filmed in British Columbia, Canada. An obsessive fan devoted a long Tumblr post to trying to pin down its location in the state, and landed on Blue Hill as the most likely real-life place it was based on, though Thomaston and Ellsworth were close runners up.
