Fog-shrouded Victorian hillside cemetery that served as Stephen King's Harmony Hill in the 1979 Salem's Lot miniseries — and now hosts ticketed ghost tours
500 Ocean Ave, Ferndale, CA 95536
Research updated June 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$
Flashlight tours: children $20, adults $30. Storytelling and sunset tours: children $15, adults $25.
Access
Limited Access
Steep rhododendron-covered hillside; uneven cemetery paths and grass.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1868 · Ferndale Victorian-era burial ground · Salem's Lot (1979) filming location — Harmony Hill Cemetery · Ferndale Cemetery Association
Ferndale was incorporated in 1878 but the town's cemetery dates to 1868, carved into the steep hillside above the settled valley floor. The graves of the Victorian era's dairy farming and lumber families fill the hillside under a canopy of rhododendrons and coastal conifers, with headstones that have settled and tilted over more than 150 years.
The cemetery is administered by the Ferndale Cemetery Association, which has operated tours as a seasonal fundraiser. The tours begin at the Ferndale Visitor Center on Main Street and walk visitors up Ocean Avenue to the cemetery gates, covering about 50 minutes of guided time.
In the summer of 1979, the production crew for director Tobe Hooper's television adaptation of Stephen King's Salem's Lot selected Ferndale as its primary location, drawn by the Victorian village's intact nineteenth-century streetscapes. The cemetery was used for the production's Harmony Hill Cemetery — the haunted burial ground in King's narrative from which the dead return as vampires. The Danny Glick funeral scene was among the sequences filmed among the actual headstones, though many of the cemetery sequences were completed at a Los Angeles studio location. The 1979 miniseries remains the association between this hillside and horror cinema that most visitors arrive already knowing.
A 2024 Salem's Lot remake also drew renewed attention to Ferndale and the original filming locations, prompting new visitors to compare the cemetery against the 1979 footage.
Sources
The Ferndale Historic Cemetery's haunted reputation is substantially cinematic in origin. When director Tobe Hooper's crew chose this hillside for the 1979 CBS miniseries based on Stephen King's Salem's Lot, they selected it because it already looked like the kind of place where the dead come back. The cemetery's steep slope, Victorian headstones, rhododendron cover, and the coastal fog that rolls off the Pacific made it a natural stand-in for fictional Salem, Maine's notorious burial ground.
The Harmony Hill Cemetery scenes — in which the dead of Salem's Lot rise as vampires and claw out of the earth — secured the real location a permanent association with one of the twentieth century's most widely seen horror productions. TripAdvisor reviewers and visiting Salem's Lot fans have written about the experience of standing in the same ground where those scenes were staged, describing the site as genuinely unsettling outside the context of the film.
Locally generated ghost lore for the cemetery itself is thin in the documented record. The Cemetery Association runs flashlight, storytelling, and sunset tours in October, but these tours cover the Victorian Village's ghost stories broadly rather than focusing on specific in-cemetery apparition accounts.
The isolation and terrain — steep enough that the cemetery feels cut off from the village below it — generate the atmosphere that visitors describe as haunting, regardless of any specific paranormal tradition.
Media Appearances
Evening tours led by guides from the Ferndale Visitor Center. Includes a keepsake flashlight. Tours depart at 6:00 pm and 7:00 pm on Friday evenings in October. Advance reservations required. Concludes with complimentary appetizer at The Victorian Inn.
Daytime tours exploring the ghost stories of the Victorian Village, departing from the Ferndale Visitor Center. Saturday afternoons in October. Advance reservations required.
A walking tour of the historic cemetery during golden hour, departing from the Ferndale Visitor Center on Sunday evenings in October. Advance reservations required.
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