'Twilight' Tourism: How Forks, Wash., Is Still Enjoying a Vampire Boom
Before it became a place where vampires hid in the gloom and sparkled in the sun, Forks, Wash., was not a town accustomed to tourists. With a population of 3,500, Forks lies on the far edge of Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula and is almost a four-hour drive from Seattle. Despite that distance, tourists will descend in droves and covens this week for the town’s 10th annual festival devoted to Twilight, the blockbuster series of books and movies about the romance between a teenage girl named Bella Swan and an ageless vampire named Edward Cullen. In both the novels by Stephenie Meyer and the films, Bella and Edward live in Forks, a fictional plot point that has made all the difference to the real-life place. “It was unbelievable!” said Marcia Bingham, a former resident who worked at the Forks Chamber of Commerce, recalling the early days when Twilight was first becoming popular. “It was such a huge gift to a depressed little community in a rainy area.”
How big a gift? Well, the town keeps track of people who stop by the visitor’s center every year. In 2005 — the year the first novel was published and before most of the world had heard about Edward’s tousled bronze hair — around 5,500 tourists signed the guest book. By 2010, when the four novels were all bestsellers and the movie series was in full swing, that number had jumped to nearly 73,000. And while the numbers have dropped since the height of Twilight mania, 2015 still saw 38,000 visitors, with more than that expected by the end of 2016 — and this is four years after the final movie, Breaking Dawn, Part 2, hit theaters. “There is a world map at the visitor’s center, and we invited people to put pins in there right after I started,” said Bingham. “There is not a country that is not extremely well-represented on that map.”
How a remote, rain-soaked, economically struggling logging town ended up as vampire central is almost as big a part of Twilight lore as the novels’ explanation of werewolf imprinting. It’s a story fans know well: Stephenie Meyer was a stay-at-home mom living in Arizona when she had a dream about a conversation between a human girl and a vampire boy. That vision became the germ of the first novel, which Meyer set in Forks — a town she’d never visited before — because she needed an exceedingly rainy place to match her dream. In the Twi-verse, vampires don’t burn in the sunlight — they sparkle. So in order for the Cullen clan to pass as undazzling humans, they needed to settle in a place that’s permanently overcast.
“I went on Google and looked up ‘rainy’ and got ‘Olympic Peninsula — rainiest place in the U.S.’” Meyer said in a 2005 interview. (Forks isn’t actually the rainiest place in America, but it’s up there, averaging almost 10 feet and 212 days of rain per year.) After some more Internet research, Meyer had her novel’s setting, and for a time, its title: The book was actually called Forks before she and her agent settled on Twilight. (She’d finally visit Forks in 2004 and would later write on her website how relieved she was the town matched her imaginings: “This really was like walking around inside of a dream.”) Multiple rejection letters later, Meyer’s book was published in October 2005. And soon after that, unsuspecting Forks residents began hearing tales about vampires and werewolves in their tiny town.
“There’s not a Barnes & Noble around here, so that’s not something that we see all the time to say, ‘Oh, new book,’” says Charlene Cross, who runs Leppell’s Flowers and Gifts in Forks. Soon enough, though, she started seeing strangers in town — often girls with their mothers — who seemed inexplicably thrilled at the sight of Forks High School, where Bella and Edward attended school. “Then they would start to get a little brave, and they would poke their head in the flower shop and say, ‘Do you have any Twilight stuff?’” she said. “And I’m thinking, ‘What the heck is Twilight stuff?’” Cross soon learned — her store was one of the first to stock Twilight souvenirs, both official (like T-shirts that said “Hot Dog” in honor of the novel’s heroic Quileute werewolf Jacob Black) and homemade (like scrapbook cutouts of wolves, bonfires, and Edward’s silver Volvo.)
When the Chamber of Commerce realized that Twilight tourism was already happening, they wanted to make sure visitors had plenty to experience. Restaurants started adding Twilight-themed items to their menus, like the Bella Burger at local restaurant Sully’s. The Forks chief of police at the time got used to signing autographs as Bella’s dad, the fictional police chief Charlie Swan. And the post office dutifully collected all the letters addressed to the characters, including a wedding invitation for Bella and Edward from a couple in Kentucky. “We arranged for tours, and we created places in Forks that matched with what the books said,” said Bingham. “We would have 200 to 300 people a day come into the offices. And they were so excited; you can’t believe how much electricity was running through the air. They kept referring to characters in the book: This is where Jacob stood! This is where Edward lived!”
Eventually, bus tours showed off the “Cullen house” (the Miller Tree Inn, which mostly fits the novel’s description) and the “Swan house,” a split-level whose very game owners got used to overzealous fans showing up at — and sometimes inside — their door. Marcia Yanish, a longtime volunteer at the Chamber of Commerce remembers that even the local hospital played along. (Elder vampire Carlisle Cullen is a doctor there in the books.) “People were coming into Admitting asking if Dr. Cullen was there,” she said. “The administrator put up a parking spot for Dr. Cullen, because they realized they can’t have these tourists running all over. They’ve moved it about three times now, so it’s not blocking the ambulance.”
By most accounts, Forks residents had a blast with the vampire boomlet, but it wasn’t just for fun. The lumber industry on the Olympic Peninsula has been in decline since the 1990s, and just last year, the last major mill in the area closed. As Yanish points out, the Twilight connection may have kept some businesses afloat. “I’m not sure that the restaurants and motels would have survived the meltdown in 2008, because people just don’t stay overnight in motels or eat out as much — especially the local people,” she says. Lissy Andros, the current director of the Chamber of Commerce, agrees. “New York City could not have paid for the amount of advertising that little Forks, Wash., has gotten,” she said. “It keeps restaurants open year-round. It keeps stores staffed.”
The biggest bummer in this spooky story may be that Forks never got its close-up on the big screen. When it came time to film the movie version of Twilight, starring Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, in 2008, director Catherine Hardwicke scouted places in Forks. “I went to all the cool locations, like the funky diner. I went out to the forest and looked at a lot of the houses…. It was really fun for me to soak up all these things,” remembered Hardwicke, shortly before the release of her movie Miss You Already last year. In the end, though, Forks had limited facilities and no tax incentives, so the production ended up in Oregon (which had its own Twilight tourism surge for awhile.) “It did kind of break my heart, because I really like authenticity,” said Hardwicke. “I actually got inspired by the [Forks] diner, so I added the diner into the movie. … I kind of expanded the world by going there.”
Big-screen disappointments aside, Forks will still host hundreds of people this week for the Forever Twilight festival, which started out as Stephenie Meyer Day and was centered around Sept. 13 (that’s Bella’s birthday, for all you Twi-nots.) Meyer herself showed up last year for the 10th anniversary of the first novel. This year, the four-day fest includes a breakfast featuring the actors who played Volturi guards Demetri and Felix in the two Breaking Dawn films, appearances by the shirtless cosplaying group the Alpha Males, and a guided Vampire Habitat Walk through the nearby Hoh Rainforest.
The Hoh is part of the Olympic National Forest, a national park that dominates most of the peninsula. Entering it is like parting a heavy curtain and walking into a mist-shrouded, moss-coated land of towering pine trees. Meyer used these woods as the hunting grounds for her vampires, who would leap between the treetops. “It’s very mysterious here,” said Andros. “I think that if vampires and werewolves could live somewhere, by God, this is the place they could live.”
Watch the trailer for ‘Twilight:’
