The Real Cemetery Behind Pet Sematary
Stephen King’s most famous graveyard movie was filmed in one of the oldest garden cemeteries in America. Its real story is better than the fiction.
By James Kent · Vassalboro, Maine · November 13, 2026
Millions of people have seen Mount Hope Cemetery without knowing its name. When Paramount filmed Stephen King’s Pet Sematary in Maine in the late summer and fall of 1988, the human cemetery scenes were shot at Mount Hope on State Street in Bangor. King himself turns up there in a small cameo, as the minister presiding over a funeral.
Horror fans still come looking for the spot. What most of them don’t realize is that they are standing in one of the most important historic cemeteries in the country.
America’s Second Garden Cemetery
Before the 1830s, most New Englanders were buried in a crowded town burying ground or churchyard. Then, in 1831, Boston opened Mount Auburn Cemetery: a landscaped “garden” cemetery of winding paths, ponds and trees, meant to be visited like a park. It started a national movement.
Bangor was close behind. In 1834, the year Bangor became a city, a group of citizens bought fifty acres on the north bank of the Penobscot River for a cemetery of the same kind. Local architect Charles G. Bryant drew the plan, modeled on Mount Auburn, setting aside part of the land for burials and part for planting. The cemetery was consecrated on July 21, 1836. Mount Hope still calls itself “America’s Second Garden Cemetery,” and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
Today Mount Hope covers about 300 acres and holds more than 30,000 burials. Among them are Hannibal Hamlin, Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president, several Civil War generals, and Al Brady, the gangster whose gang was cut down by federal agents on a Bangor street in 1937.
Where the Movie Was Filmed
The filming spot is on the State Street side of the cemetery, against a steep hill with a stone staircase cut into it. According to visitors who have tracked it down, the grave-digging scene was filmed to the left of the stairs as you go up, near the Bragg family plot.
The other famous locations are not at Mount Hope. The Creed family house is a private home in Hancock, and the pet cemetery itself was a set built behind the Colonial Inn in Ellsworth. It has long since disappeared.
What to Look For While You’re There
Once you’ve seen the movie spot, take an hour to walk the older sections. Mount Hope is an outdoor museum of nineteenth-century memorials:
- Marble tablets and obelisks from the 1830s through the 1880s, many now softened by a century and a half of rain.
- Family plots with a central monument and small individual markers, sometimes with granite curbing, the hallmark of the garden cemetery.
- Victorian symbols: urns, weeping willows, clasped hands, lambs for children and broken columns for lives cut short.
- Polished granite monuments from Maine’s own quarries, which took over from marble after about 1880.
If you photograph a stone you’re curious about, our free AI stone assessment can tell you what it’s made of and what shape it’s in.
Read More
Mount Hope has its own full-length history, Mount Hope Cemetery of Bangor, Maine: The Complete History by Trudy Irene Scee. For more books on old cemeteries, visit our Cemetery Bookshelf. And if a stone in your own family plot needs care, The Gravestone Guardian’s Manual shows how to do it safely.
Sources
- Mount Hope Cemetery Corporation, “History,” mthopebgr.com.
- National Register of Historic Places, Mount Hope Cemetery, Bangor, Maine (listed 1974).
- Bangor Daily News, “As a remake hits theaters, Mainers remember the filming of the original ‘Pet Sematary’” (April 3, 2019).
- Atlas Obscura, “Pet Sematary Filming Sites.”