It’s common knowledge that in the horror world, Stephen King is the king. He’s the man behind so many iconic horror stories, be it Carrie, The Shining, or It. His stories are rife with horrifying detail and intricately woven tales of terror that unfold in spectacular ways, so few argue with him regarding the content of his work. He’s well-acclaimed for a reason. But one of his stories has been the subject of conversation, not for its content, but for its title, and its purposeful misspelling.

Pet Sematary is a famous King story, about a pet cemetery built upon an ancient burial ground that has the power to bring anything buried there back to life. The concept is cool on its own, but things take a twist for terror when a family’s young son is killed in a tragic accident, leading father Louis Creed (Dale Midkiff) to bury him in the cemetery in hopes he’ll come back to life. Only, as Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne) puts it, “Sometimes dead is better,” and the Creed family learns the hard way that they shouldn’t mess with the circle of life, when their son comes back as an evil entity. It’s a fascinating story by King, but many have wondered why the word “cemetery” is spelled incorrectly in the title.

The Pet Sematary Is Real — Kinda

If you scour Stephen King’s website, you can find the inspiration for all of his books, and Pet Sematary is no exception. But while some of King’s ideas came to him in dreams, Pet Sematary was based on a real cemetery. In 1979, King was working as a writer-in-residence at the University of Maine, and was living in a rented house in Orrington. The house was right near a major trucking route which would often claim the lives of dogs and cats. This happened so often that, in the woods behind his house, local children created a pet cemetery to honor the fallen pets. One day, his daughter’s cat was hit by a truck, and he decided to bury the cat in the pet cemetery.

After he explained the situation to his daughter, King said that he began to wonder what would happen if a family lost their family pet, and rather than telling their children, simply buried the pet in the pet cemetery. He expanded upon that by imagining what would happen if the pet was then to return the next day, alive but completely different. He went on to share that he also had a scare with his son running toward the road, and the two experiences just came together in his mind.

“I can remember crossing the road, and thinking that the cat had been killed in the road — and, I thought, what if a kid died in that road? And we had had this experience with Owen running toward the road, where I had just grabbed him and pulled him back. And the two things just came together–on one side of this two-lane highway was the idea of what if the cat came back, and on the other side of the highway was what if the kid came back–so that when I reached the other side, I had been galvanized by the idea, but not in any melodramatic way. I knew immediately that it was a novel.”

As is the case with many of King’s stories, he later had a dream of a reanimated corpse walking down the road outside his house, which fully sold him on the idea of the book.

‘Pet Sematary’s Title Origin Adds To the Story’s Devastation

King also shared that the sign for the pet cemetery by his house was spelt “Pet Sematary” since it was created by children, and well, they’re not the strongest spellers. This is given a similar explanation in the book. Local children found the cemetery and took it upon themselves to become its caretakers and create a sign for it, spelling “cemetery” incorrectly in the process.

The innocence of the sign being misspelled because it was made by children adds to the devastation of the story’s plot. The Pet Sematary is a place where families bury their beloved pets, and also where the Creed family patriarch decides to bury his son. It’s a resting place for innocent souls, whose loved ones aren’t ready to say goodbye, yet they come back as such cruel and horrific versions of themselves. It all drives home the point of the novel, that death and the circle of life are not something to be messed with. The Pet Sematary is a resting place for household pets, who are, by all accounts, innocent creatures brought into loving homes to provide a little extra joy, yet such brutal things awaken from it. The childlike innocence of the spelling just makes that element of the story all the harder to stomach.