‘Widow’s Bay’ shows why New England is the ‘creepy attic of America,’ experts say
Why are horror stories from Stephen King classics to recent Apple TV+ hit “Widow’s Bay” take place in New England? It’s about more than the Salem witch trials, historians and folklorists say.
From sea hags and immortal knife-wielding killers to witches and dark curses, there is something wrong in Widow’s Bay.
The fictional New England island that gives the recent hit horror-comedy TV show its name is the site of countless terrors, but for anyone familiar with New England’s on-screen reputation, that’s probably not shocking. From the demons and monsters that fill the pages of Stephen King’s books to the on-screen horror of movies like “The Witch,” the region is fodder for storytellers looking to make things go bump in the night.
There’s a good reason for that, according to historians and folklorists: New England has a real history of horror.
“Widow’s Bay,” which follows the town’s local mayor as he tries to turn his clearly cursed island into a tourist destination, is fiction, but it draws on very real stories and folktales, from the Salem witch trials of the 1700s when scores of people were tried and prosecuted for alleged sorcery to the 1890s case surrounding Lizzie Borden, who was acquitted of brutally murdering her father and stepmother with an ax.
These events have seeped into New England’s cultural firmament, becoming folklore that takes on a life and meaning of its own. Over the years, telling these stories has helped make New England “the creepy attic of America” and turn these legends into powerful reminders of the past, said Jeff Belanger, an author, folklorist and host of the Emmy-nominated PBS series “New England Legends.”
“A legend is a living, breathing thing,” Belanger told Northeastern Global News. “Around here, we share these stories, we tell these stories. There’s something with our past we’re still grappling with, and that’s why we keep those stories alive.”
There are a few obvious New England horror touchstones in “Widow’s Bay” that draw on the region’s history.
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The Salem witch trials are one of the better-known chapters in New England’s darker history, and witchcraft is woven throughout “Widow’s Bay.” Between 1692 to 1693, over 100 people were accused of witchcraft, and 20 were executed in a mass hysteria caused by religion, superstition and rising tensions around immigrants, religion, race and land.
“Religiosity has dropped off a lot in New England, but when you have that ethos embedded in a regional culture for a very long time, at a certain point it’s just part of the culture and not inherently about the tendency to look for supernatural explanations, although there is still some of that,” said Jessica Parr, a history professor of the practice at Northeastern University.
Parr also pointed to a vampire panic that consumed New England in the 18th and 19th centuries, when people believed tuberculosis was caused by dead people consuming the lives of their surviving relatives.
“One piece of lore in that period had people cut out the hearts of the corpse and burn it to make sure they stayed dead,” Parr said.
The character of New Englanders themselves also plays a role in the region’s supernatural allure. Especially in rural New England towns, people were historically quite insular and slow to trust outsiders, Parr said. It led to some of the paranoia around “insiders” and “outsiders” during the witch trials.
New England’s preservationist streak, embodied by America’s oldest and largest preservation organization, Historic New England, also helps keep these stories alive in the public imagination, Belander explained. The work done to preserve New England towns much as they looked in centuries past means the sites where many of these darker events took place are still in the collective memory of people today.
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“I think we have this pragmatic way of looking at some of these legends,” Belanger said. “If I said, ‘Oh yeah, that old building over there? That’s haunted. The one next door not so much,’ people would just go, ‘Ok, but how’s the food. Is there a lunch special?’”
These events and the legends that follow in their wake have become normalized in New England to the extent that things like curses can still have power.
Superstition gripped Boston Red Sox fans after the team lost baseball legend Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1920 and didn’t win a championship for 86 years. The Curse of the Bambino, in reference to Ruth’s nickname, wasn’t vampiric but still held a chokehold on fans for decades, Belanger said.
Coastal communities throughout history have also been hotbeds of folklore and superstition, and New England is no exception, Parr noted. “Widow’s Bay” seizes onto this with abandon in its seaside setting and encounters with sea hags and sea monsters.
“Every culture, not just in the U.S. but everywhere, has stories about sea hags or sirens,” Parr said.
The dangerous nature of sailing, combined with vast amounts of downtime on ships, created the perfect conditions for superstitions to spread among sailors who needed a way to pass the time and believe they could guarantee a safe voyage, Parr added.
Much of the superstition has been drained from these stories today. But Balenger said the popularity of horror stories like “Widow’s Bay” shows that New England folklore still holds a power over people and still serves a valuable purpose centuries removed from its origins.
“These legends are literally a sermon from our past,” Belanger said. “These stories, these haunts, these legends allow us to celebrate the unknown and explore it and have discussions that you just can’t have otherwise. When we talk about ghosts or vampires, we can really talk about death and mortality without it being uncomfortable.”
