Hampden

Hampden is a town in Maine that appears in the landscape visible from Prospect Hill, the rise behind the Creed family's new home in Ludlow. On the late-summer day when Jud Crandall leads Louis, Rachel, Ellie, and Gage up the path to the Pet Sematary for the first time, they pause at the top of the hill to take in the view. Looking west, the land falls away into a golden and dozy late-summer dream, and Louis can make out Hampden on the far side of the Penobscot River, along with Winterport and the black, river-paralleling snake of Route 15 stretching nearly all the way to Bucksport. The town is part of the broad, peaceful river valley that the Penobscot River flows through, where loggers once floated timber from the northeast down to Bangor and Derry. Later, in the dreamlike vision of the Vulture kite soaring high above Mrs. Vinton's field on the day Louis and Gage fly it together, the kite's imagined perspective sees Hampden on the other side of the river, a cool gray band of steel with chunks of ice still floating in it, along with Newburgh, Winterport, and a ship at dock. Hampden thus functions as a fixed point in the familiar, everyday geography of the region, a landmark that anchors the Creed family's new home within a recognizable New England landscape, even as the story descends into horror and the supernatural. It is a place name that signifies the ordinary world, the world of towns and rivers and roads, that stands in contrast to the dark, ancient woods and the Micmac burying ground beyond the Pet Sematary.