most of you have seen the flick. my wife asked me tonite, after watching it is there really a Shawshank prison in upstate Maine?? well lets find out. a tale of murder and horror in real life story
I watched a series called Haven, which took place in Maine. (Good show, but that's another topic.) In it, the police in Haven, Maine -- which does not exist in real life -- repeatedly refer to Shawshank prison. I thought that Maine had only one prison when we moved here in 2001, but I thought that perhaps I was wrong, and there really IS such a place. So I went digging around on the internet and among friends. But no. There's not. Just Maine State Prison, which many people still call "Thomaston," despite the fact that they moved it to Warren in 2002.
Although they placed it in Maine, the Ohio State Reformatory is what was used for Shawshank in the movie. I don't know that King had any particular prison in mind as far as the books go, but he names Shawshank prison in more than a dozen of his books. He may have had the original Thomaston Prison in Maine in mind. He has a habit of taking locations from throughout the state and mixing them into one, as far as his books go. For example, in Dreamcatcher, the buses that they use to transport people are from Millinocket Schools, but I think the area he describes is from around Greenville, I think. In other words, he will take places from several Maine towns and put them all in the same fictional town, for the settings of his books.