The Canal Days Festival

The Canal Days Festival was a week-long celebration held in Derry, Maine, from July 15th to July 21st, 1984, marking the centenary of the Canal's opening. It was a rousing success for the city's morale, image, and pocketbook, and it ended with the ritual sacrifice of Adrian Mellon, a gay man who was beaten and thrown off the Main Street Bridge by three teenagers, and then killed by the entity known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

Origins and Purpose

The festival was pegged to mark the centenary of the opening of the Canal which ran through the middle of downtown. It had been the Canal which had fully opened Derry to the lumber trade in the years 1884 to 1910; it had been the Canal which had birthed Derry's boom years. The town was spruced up from east to west and north to south. Potholes which some residents swore hadn't been patched for ten years or more were neatly filled with hottop and rolled smooth. The town buildings were refurbished on the inside, repainted on the outside. The worst of the graffiti in Bassey Park—much of it coolly logical anti-gay statements such as KILL ALL QUEERS and AIDS FROM GOD YOU HELL-BOUND HOMOS!!—was sanded off the benches and wooden walls of the little covered walkway over the Canal known as the Kissing Bridge.

Events and Attractions

A Canal Days Museum was installed in three empty store-fronts downtown, and filled with exhibits by Michael Hanlon, a local librarian and amateur historian. The town's oldest families loaned freely of their almost priceless treasures, and during the week of the festival nearly forty thousand visitors paid a quarter each to look at eating-house menus from the 1890s, loggers' bitts, axes, and peaveys from the 1880s, children's toys from the 1920s, and over two thousand photographs and nine reels of movie film of life as it had been in Derry over the last hundred years. The museum was sponsored by the Derry Ladies' Society, which vetoed some of Hanlon's proposed exhibits (such as the notorious tramp-chair from the 1930s) and photographs (such as those of the Bradley Gang after the notorious shoot-out). There was a huge striped refreshment tent in Derry Park, and band concerts there every night. In Bassey Park there was a carnival with rides by Smokey's Greater Shows and games run by local townfolk. A special tram-car circled the historic sections of the town every hour on the hour and ended up at this gaudy and amiable money-machine. It was here that Adrian Mellon won the hat which would get him killed, the paper top-hat with the flower and the band which said IDERRY!

The Final Event and Aftermath

The festival officially ended with the ritual sacrifice of Adrian Mellon. On the last night, July 21st, 1984, Mellon and his boyfriend Don Hagarty were leaving the Falcon bar. They were confronted by three teenagers: John "Webby" Garton, Steven Dubay, and Christopher Unwin. Garton, enraged by Mellon's hat and his sexuality, attacked him. The three beat Mellon, stabbed him, and threw him over the Main Street Bridge into the Canal. Under the bridge, Pennywise the Dancing Clown was waiting. Hagarty and Unwin both reported seeing a clown under the bridge, who was holding balloons and who dragged Mellon away. Mellon's body was found floating against one of the pilings of the Main Street Bridge. The three teenagers were convicted of manslaughter, but at their trial, no one mentioned a clown. The festival's end was a dark mirror of the town's history, a ritualistic feeding for the entity that haunted Derry. The event prompted Mike Hanlon to begin his research into Derry's history and the cycle of violence that plagued the town, ultimately leading him to call his childhood friends back to Derry in 1985.