Ridgeway is the section of Bergenfield where Thad Beaumont lived as a boy, a neighborhood that returns in his visions of the sparrows and links his childhood medical crisis to the novel’s later supernatural events. First recalled as a familiar residential landscape, it becomes, in Thad’s trance, a dead country under a sky darkened by birds.

Identity and Setting

Ridgeway is identified as the neighborhood of Thad’s childhood in Bergenfield. In the vision that overtakes him, its houses, lawns, and streets are covered with sparrows. The place is recognizable, but its ordinary details have been transformed: the whole world seems dead, with the birds the only living presence.

The Childhood Incident

The later account of Thad’s operation connects Ridgeway to the sparrows’ first ominous appearance. Thad remembered seeing and hearing birds everywhere across the neighborhood before his surgery. His doctor, Dr. Pritchard, checked the hospital charts against reports of the flock striking the hospital: the impact occurred at about 2:05, and Thad woke at around 2:10, perhaps earlier. A nurse thought the sound of breaking glass had awakened him. The timing does not explain the connection, but it makes the neighborhood vision part of the same unresolved episode as the hospital attack.

Ridgeway’s Return in Thad’s Vision

Years later, an itchy sensation radiates from the hole in Thad’s hand as his inner vision returns to Ridgeway beneath a mild white spring sky. The year is 1960; the neighborhood has become a dead landscape, and the sparrows take flight until their wheeling mass darkens the sky. The repeated image culminates in the recognition that the sparrows are flying again, binding the childhood scene to the present danger without making the vision a simple memory.

From Remembered Place to Supernatural Geography

Ridgeway’s importance extends beyond Thad’s recollections: the birds later gather in immense numbers at Gold’s Junkyard and Auto Supply, where Thad and Rawlie DeLesseps find them covering the discarded vehicles. They appear without having been heard arrive, and Rawlie recognizes them as psychopomps. Elsewhere, at the Williamses’ driveway near Castle Lake, a sparrow lands on Alan Pangborn’s shoulder and then his hand; after it hops away, he sees birds filling the trees. He suspects the flock is holding back, as though the slope were a staging area. These later encounters give the Ridgeway vision an unsettling reach: the birds are not confined to the neighborhood of Thad’s childhood, but recur as a coordinated presence in the living world.

Narrative Significance

Ridgeway functions as a point of return rather than a refuge. Its domestic streets and lawns are the setting of Thad’s earliest remembered bird-vision, while the later flock makes the image recur as an immediate threat. At the novel’s climax, the psychopomps serve as George Stark’s escort back to the land of the dead. The movement from Ridgeway’s imagined sky darkened by sparrows to the birds’ eventual role in Stark’s fate gives Thad’s childhood vision the shape of a warning whose meaning becomes clear only as the story unfolds.