The cursed island at the heart of Apple TV's Widow's Bay doesn't exist — but you can stand in every one of its filming locations without leaving Massachusetts. Matthew Rhys plays Tom Loftis, the ambitious mayor of a small New England island trying to market the town as a tourist destination while locals insist the place is cursed. The whole series was shot in the Bay State, split between the rocky Cape Ann coast and a cluster of small towns northwest of Boston.
Rockport does the heavy lifting. White Wharf in the town's old harbor hosts the opening scene with the mayor's teenage son, and Bearskin Neck — once a fishing village, now a busy strip of shops and seafood spots — doubles as the town streets when the tourists arrive, plus the exterior of the Salty Whale bar. Gloucester chips in with Lane's Cove (also seen in CODA), the crescent of sand at Half Moon Beach in Stage Fort Park, and the Eastern Point Lighthouse, an 1890 brick tower still run by the Coast Guard and closed to visitors.
Inland, the show borrows civic and historic buildings across the region. Berlin's 1870 Greek Revival Town Hall plays the town hall; the museum interiors were shot at Shirley Center Town Hall, and the museum exterior is a house built around 1690 that was moved from Bedford to Harvard in the 1980s. The Widow's Bay Inn is Lorenzo Maynard's 1873 Second Empire mansion in Maynard, now apartments. Even the church is a curiosity: Martha-Mary Chapel in Sudbury, a white clapboard chapel built in 1940 by Henry Ford on the grounds of Longfellow's Wayside Inn.
The show's darkest history leans on real witch-trial country. The 1702 village flashback in episode six was filmed at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers — the preserved 17th-century home of a woman executed in the 1692 Salem witch trials, set on a 28-acre farm with a family cemetery and a reconstruction of the 1672 Salem Village meetinghouse. Other stops include Vincent's, a Worcester bar famous for its meatball sandwich, standing in for the Barnabus Tavern; Johnson's Restaurant and Dairy Bar in Groton as the Driftwood Diner; and Mirror Lake in Devens doubling as the beach.
For fans, this is a rare filming-location haul you can actually string together on a road trip: Cape Ann for the harbor-and-lighthouse day, then an inland loop through Harvard, Berlin, Shirley, Maynard, Ayer and Groton, with Danvers as a Salem-trials detour. Most exteriors are private homes, so admire from the street — but Rockport's Bearskin Neck and Gloucester's beaches are built for lingering.
