Currently watching: Widow’s Bay 📺
Widow's Bay is one of those shows where the haunted lore feels lived-in because it basically is.
Creator Katie Dippold spent nearly 20 years building this world, pulling from Stephen King's small-town New England atmosphere, John Carpenter's The Fog, and the DNA of Jaws — a stubborn mayor refusing to believe his island is in danger while everything around him says otherwise. She even tapped Hiro Murai, the director behind Atlanta's unforgettable "Teddy Perkins" episode, to helm half the series. If anyone knows how to make something funny and deeply unsettling at the same time, it's him.
The writers' room built original lore on top of all that — sea shanties, island legends, artifacts, a history of cannibalism. Even the show's name has roots: wives waiting on docks for fishermen husbands who mostly never came home. Dippold also drew from a visit to a diner in Marblehead, Massachusetts that she said felt like it crawled straight out of a King novel.
The result is a horror-comedy that critic Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com called —
“The wonderfully demented Widow’s Bay plays out almost like an anthology of Stephen King short stories… It is truly unlike anything else on TV.”
He's not wrong. I've watched all three episodes and I'm hooked. Each week brings a new haunt story, and I'm already impatient for the next one. New episodes drop Wednesdays on Apple TV+.
If you haven't started it yet — what are you waiting for?
The haunts so far — episodes 1–3
The soul-stealing fog — rolls in off the water in episode 1. A sailor named Shep disappears into it, eyes turned blank white.
The Breakwater Inn — the haunted inn no local will go near. Tom spends the night in episode 2 to prove it's tourist-safe. It is not.
Willy the killer clown — the ghost of a clown-themed serial killer. Tom runs into him at the inn. Wyck's reaction: "The clown — that's what got you, huh?"
The Sea Hag — episode 3's centerpiece. An old woman who scratches lonely men and uses their skin to track and kill them. The lore goes back to old sailor songs.