Delia Deetz is less frightened of ghosts than she is of irrelevance. “The only thing that scares me is being embarrassed in front of the few hip people I can get to set foot in this part of Connecticut,” she tells her daughter before welcoming “a woman who writes for Art in America” to her grotesquely renovated victorian in Winter River. When the ensuing dinner party turns into a calypso-inflected disaster and Delia’s guests scurry back to the gothic comforts of Manhattan, she excoriates her submissive husband for dragging her into exile. But he’s the only one seeing clearly: Farm country is for the creative class.

Winter River is not a real town, but it is a real place. Though the exteriors for Beetlejuice were shot in North Essex, Vermont – which reprised its role for the new, critically praised Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – it’s clear from signage (taxis say “Torrington”), the rural setting, and the directions given to out-of-towners (the Cross Bronx Expressway is one of the movie’s unseen horrors) that this is Northwest, Connecticut, presumably Litchfield County. 

A cluster of charming hamlets bumping up against the New York and Massachusetts state lines, Litchfield County was a fairly obscure spot in 1988 when Beetlejuice Tked. Now? Not so much. In 2022, Art News, which gobbled up Art in America in 2015, ran the following headline: “A Sparse Connecticut County Has Become The Secret Center of the Art World.” 

Delia Deetz won in the end. But how could British auteur and pop expressionist weirdo Tim Burton have seen that coming? He probably drove down Painter Hill Road.

In 1933, the semi-surrealist sculptor Alexander Calder moved to the Litchfield town of Roxbury and set up an art studio, where he could fabricate large metallic forms, some of which he painted black and installed on his farm (and in front of the town library) – giant spiders against a backdrop of goldenrod. It’s clear from Delia Deetz’s work, which is similarly creeping and cantilevered, though less successfully executed, she was a fan.

Post-Calder, a litany of artists moved to Litchfield. The list of hip people who live in that part of Connecticut includes painters Cleve Gray, Katharine Rhoades, Richard Stalter, and Shannon Blanton and actors Dustin Hoffman, Mia Farrow, Conan O’Brien, Kevin Bacon. Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell once owned a Victorian home in Roxbury remarkably similar to the property purchased by the Deetz’s for $220,000 in 1988 (the house went for $260k in 1994), but she sold it for $1.4 million in 2022 and moved to the Hamptons. 

There are still artists in the area, but Litchfield is increasingly popular with private equity executives willing to shell out for simple New England charm. 

Simply put, Mr. Deetz had good instincts.

But the tale here remains a bit morbid. The rich people followed the hip people followed the L.L. Bean people. Delia Deetz got what she wanted – an artistic demimonde–only to watch it dissolves into a series of freshly installed in-ground pools. To the degree to which there is a moral to the story, it’s surely this: Artists never possess a town, they only haunt it for a while. After they leave, their creations continue that spooky work. Big spiders crouch in the wildflowers.