And if the new series has you thinking about booking a trip to Derry, well, there is just one answer to that: You can’t. The evil place (and hero of an HBO Stephen King short-story compendium) Welcome to Derry is a make-believe Maine town that the horror master created wITh the very specific intention of focusing everyday fears, small-town history and supernatural dread into one encompassing map tack.
What and where Derry is in Stephen King’s mythology
On the page and on screen, Derry is a northern Maine river town sharing street corners with old mills and older secrets — just the kind of place that never has to let a long memory remember.
In King’s mythology, the town reappears over generations, its fortunes ascending and descending every 27 years, which is also the interval fans become far too familiar with.
The real-world inspiration behind Derry: Bangor, Maine
Bangor was the city in which King lived while writing IT in the 1980s, and Derry is presided over by an entity simply known as “It.” “Bangor became Derry,” he said in interviews, noting something close to a one-to-one translation of geography and mood and lore. The population of Bangor in 2020 stood at just under 31,700, by the U.S. Census Bureau — big enough for a vibrant — even lively on occasion — set of neighborhoods, but small enough that you have a sense of everyone knowing every headline two days before it hits print.
You can feel that one-foot-in-reality quality throughout Bangor. The street grid, the rivers, the hilltop water tower: King rejiggered them with thin veils and supercharged their histories into gothic overdrive. Local historians have long noticed how the city’s abundance of logging wealth, stories of floods, and 20th-century booms and busts reverberate through Derry’s imagined past.
Landmarks that straddle fiction and reality
Two of Bangor’s landmarks in particular seem like they strolled right out of a Derry establishing shot. The 31-foot-tall Paul Bunyan statue of 1959 presides over Main Street with a grinning, folklore-size swagger — a familiar image to readers or viewers who have made it this far. And the Thomas Hill Standpipe, constructed in 1897, contains a steel tank that can hold about 1.75 million gallons of water, according to the Bangor Water District. Its wood-clad profile matches the spooky motif that has hovered over generations of fans of King.
There’s also the Kenduskeag Stream, a meandering waterway that cuts through downtown before flowing into the Penobscot River. It’s an obvious inspiration for the Barrens, where the Losers first come together. Trudge along its banks on a foggy morning and you’ll grasp how genuine sites can cast fictive shadows.
Where HBO films Derry on screen for the series
Though Derry is Bangor in spirit, the cameras do not always roll there. The Ontario towns — most notably Port Hope — used for the IT films stood in as Derry’s Victorian storefronts and leafy side roads. Trade publications and local permits have indicated a similar Ontario footprint for Welcome to Derry, which makes sense both as a practical matter — there’s studio infrastructure in the area, as well as talent across the border — and from an aesthetic standpoint, given how the episodes will begin to resemble Muschietti’s films (he executive produces the series alongside Warner Bros. Television and HBO).
That fusion of Bangor’s template with Ontario’s preserved main streets lends the show a lived-in Americana that’s tough to fake. Production designers layer in period signage, battered sewer grates, and municipal details so persuasively that lifelong New Englanders do double takes.
Derry in the Stephen King universe and canon
Derry is not just a setting — it’s one of King’s most dependable characters. The town plays home to novels like Insomnia and Dreamcatcher, turns up in 11/22/63, and gets name-checked left and right by short stories and novellas. That recurrence deposits a statistical weight on the place: readers have already spent thousands of pages there, learning its traffic patterns and scuttlebutt, so every new on-screen visit is imbued with the twin excitement and danger of returning home.
Can you visit Derry, and how to approximate the town
Not literally. But there are a couple of ways you can approximate it. In Maine, you can visit Bangor landmarks, take guided tours provided seasonally by the Bangor Historical Society, and see landscapes from King’s fiction around Broadway and Thomas Hill. In Ontario, the tourism office in Port Hope has been encouraging self-guided walks past filming façades that appeared in the IT movies, a tradition that locals expect to be ongoing when episodes of Welcome to Derry are released.
And the series itself, whose episodes premiere on HBO and stream on Max, offers viewers a look at how the show stitches together real geography, production craft, and King’s long memory for small-town dread.
So no, Derry is not on the map — but it’s not hard to find when you know where to look.
