I.

 I don’t like cherry pie. But I loved this cherry pie.

I was in North Bend, Washington, sitting at the counter of Twede’s Cafe, which played a starring role as the Double R Diner in David Lynch’s genre-bending early ’90s television series Twin Peaks. My legs dangled from the swivel stool, my arms leaned against the Formica countertop, one hand holding a fork, the other going for a cup of black coffee. 

It was the February weekend of an annual fan festival that has taken place in various forms for three decades. I was surrounded by people with Twin Peaks tattoos, Twin Peaks T-shirts, Twin Peaks rings. Everyone seemed to be eating cherry pie.

It tasted like Twin Peaks, those red cherries in their gooey sauce, under a flaky roof of sugar-glittered crust. I had the sensation of entering into a kind of religious communion, a Lynchian eucharist where the pie and coffee turned into something more, something fantastical. Amid the clinking of forks on plates and cups against counters, the world of Twin Peaks was being called into existence around me.

It was like stepping into a television show. Because the show was all around me: The diner. The railroad tracks. The smokestacks. The sheriff’s station. The Douglas firs. The twin peaks, fog rolling down their ridges, rain pounding down from their heights. It was as if I’d entered a node between my world and Lynch’s own mind.

Disclaimer: I’m not the kind of person to get swept up in this kind of thing. I’ve never attended Comic-Con. I don’t dress up for Halloween. I’m not spiritual.

But I felt something wonderfully uncanny. Even Ray Wise, the actor who portrayed Leland Palmer, told me that returning to the area still stirred something in him, more than 35 years after first filming here. “It’s a vibe that I get,” he said. “It’s a feeling that I get that something is out there in the woods.”

It was almost as if Lynch himself were present. A month earlier, the filmmaker had died of emphysema, and a fan memorial was still outside of Twede’s Cafe: flowers, cans of Coca-Cola, photos, handwritten cards, cigarettes (a nod to Lynch’s lifelong smoking habit). Wise had attended the celebration of life at Lynch’s home in Los Angeles, where bowls of M&Ms — Lynch’s favorite — were set all around the house.

“When I found out he died, I felt it more deeply than I thought I would,” Wise said at the festival. “I didn’t realize the depth of feeling I had for this man. And that once he wasn’t there, it didn’t seem right. And now there’s this period at the end of his work. But he didn’t fear death. He felt that your spirit — your energy, whatever you want to call it — goes on forever, comes back again. So David’s gonna come around again. If anybody can do it, Mr. Lynch will.”

Fans had come from around the country and globe: Belgium, India, Finland, France. Many described their visit as a pilgrimage to the center of the Lynchaverse, their “Mecca.” And I was here chasing some questions: What happens to a fictional world when its creator dies? Was this cheap and vacuous commercial tourism, or a deeper form of myth-making? And might it really be possible to physically step into Lynch’s world?

II. 

I was jetlagged, sleep-deprived, and high on nostalgia. Twin Peaks was unique among television shows in celebrating a specific sense of place in the Pacific Northwest, helping make it “the kind of cult object that compels fans to enter its world,” according to the critic Dennis Lim (2015). I’d watched the series multiple times, read companion books by Jennifer Lynch and Mark Frost, and spent years circling the show’s mysteries, which only revealed more layers, including connections to Lynch’s lifelong practice of Transcendental Meditation. What was he really up to in this campy, anti-ironic, enigmatic show?

Each time someone from Twin Peaks died, I was tugged toward that world. Julee Cruise, the ethereal singer who performed in the show, died in June 2022. Angelo Badalamenti, composer of the haunting theme music, died six months later. The actors Peggy Lipton (Norma Jennings), Walter Olkewicz (Jacques Renault), and Al Strobel (the One-Armed Man) had all passed in recent years. When Lynch died in January 2025, I wanted to fill his loss with the festival. It would be a chance to be surrounded by people who obsessed over the show even more than I did, to feel whatever Lynch and Frost felt when they dreamed up this strange world of cherry pie and coffee. 

So, on a Friday afternoon, after teaching a few college English classes in Providence, I took a bus into Boston, caught a one-way flight across the country, navigated my way out of Sea-Tac and onto I-90 East, and rolled into the mountain town of North Bend at midnight. I was staying at the Mt. Si Motel, a filming location from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the prequel movie to the television series. I tried to book the room where Lynch filmed scenes between Leland Palmer and the prostitute Teresa Banks (Pamela Gidley) but it was already taken. So I stayed a few doors down.

I also canceled my Monday classes so I could stay for the town-decreed Twin Peaks Day on February 24th, 2025. The plan was to take a redeye back east Tuesday night, wake up in Logan Airport early Wednesday, commute by bus and car back to my college, change clothes in a campus bathroom, and resume teaching.

I paid $425 for an all-access ticket to The Real Twin Peaks festival, which has taken place every year since 2022 — and was itself the successor to Twin Peaks-themed festivals that operated here from 1992 to 2019. The number of attendees was around 200, a noticeable bump from previous years. “I think David Lynch passing had a big thing to do with it,” Mary Hütter, a longtime fan who helped revive the festival, said of the increase in attendance. “People just really needed to come.”

Because I arrived late Friday, I missed that day’s memorial service to Lynch, where the singer Rebekah del Rio — who would die in June 2025 — reprised her version of “No Stars” from Twin Peaks: The Return, Lynch’s 2017 relaunch on Showtime of the original series. I also missed a panel about Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive, the 25th annual trivia contest hosted by Josh Eisenstadt, a screening of RoboCop with Wise, and a karaoke afterparty with the actor.

My festival started Saturday morning at the North Bend cafe Pressed on Main, where I picked up my packet: a T-shirt, a “Let’s Rock” beanie, and candy cigarettes. Taped to the front door was a mugshot of the villain BOB (Frank Silva) and the phrase, “Have You Seen This Man?” The posters were scattered throughout town, as if North Bend itself was dressing up as Twin Peaks.

I drove to another cafe for a panel on “fun facts about filming locations” led by Steve Miller and Vinnie Guidera —longtime chroniclers of Twin Peaks geography and lore. The room was packed. I shared a table with David Guarente, who proudly showed me the Venus de Milo statuette (alluding to a key visual from the Twin Peaks narrative) he’d won in the previous day’s trivia contest. He’d beat out some 50 people to take home about $1,000 in prizes, including a VIP ticket to the next festival. “Very nerve-racking,” Guarente said of the contest. (Example question: In Fire Walk With Me, how many people wore the green jade ring? Answer: Three.) He added “2025 Winner of the Annual Real Twin Peaks Ultimate Trivia Challenge” to his email signature.

“David Lynch’s death was an impetus to come this year,” Guarente said.

We were joined by Chase Bucklew, a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin who was taking an academic approach to it all. Her master’s thesis, “Twin Peaks and the Necroaesthetic” (2018), had evolved into a book chapter called “The House at the End of the World: Seriality, Death, and the Collapse of Meaning in Twin Peaks”(2023). She was with her friend Mags Moratto, who worked in security at Chicago O’Hare International Airport. They’d met in 2024 when Bucklew passed through the airport and spotted Moratto’s green jade ring. Moratto had then pulled up a pant leg to reveal Fire Walk With Me socks. Bucklew upped the ante, saying she had “Fire Walk With Me” tattooed across her ankles.

Now at the festival, Bucklew and Moratto would both be getting Twin Peaks tattoos together. I was quickly getting out-geeked.

III.

Around North Bend and Snoqualmie, it seemed like every business and store was selling a version of Twin Peaks: T-shirts, sweatshirts, ornaments, stickers, hats, posters, artwork. There was an active embrace of the show, which hadn’t always been the case.

John Thorne, co-creator of the fanzine Wrapped in Plastic, remembers when locals were less enthusiastic about their town being overrun with Twin Peakers who wandered the streets, trampled on lawns, and took photos of everything and everybody, as if they were all props from the television show. He attended the first fan-run festival in 1993, a year after New Line Cinema had organized a promotional event for the North American premier of Fire Walk With Me. Thorne now had decades-long friendships with people he saw once a year.

“There was a time when we would come up here for these festivals, and the local merchants and the local people were like, ‘We don’t want to have anything to do with you,’” said Thorne. It was easy to imagine the working-class residents looking at the Twin Peaks-fanatics as crazies who’d lost touch with reality. Didn’t these people have lives?

Town dynamics changed. As North Bend and Snoqualmie were absorbed into the Seattle–Tacoma orbit of Amazon, Microsoft, and Boeing, younger transplants moved into housing developments along the new parkway. With them came a Starbucks, premium shopping outlets, a brewery, and a casino. As Twin Peaks Sheriff Harry Truman (Michael Ontkean) said, “The world’s just caught up to us” (“Wounds and Scars,” 1991). The area became more accepting of visitors, especially those who spent money. A few Twin Peakers bought homes, sent kids to the schools, and helped convince business and political leaders that it was in the towns’ interests to support the festival.

“It’s been a slow burn to drive local business awareness,” said Karl Reinsch, a Real Twin Peaks committee member who lived down the road from Snoqualmie Falls. “The beautiful thing about this place is you can come here and visit so many locations where they shot the show. You hit something like 15 filming locations in a mile.”

A software engineer who arrived in 2008 by way of Texas, Reinsch began writing letters to the mayor suggesting that the town declare February 24th an official Twin Peaks Day. In 2018, it happened. Reinsch himself drafted the proclamation.

“There’s actually quite a few people who have moved here just because of the show,” said Hütter. “It just has that vibe, you know — the trees and the fog and all of that. You’re living here, and it really does feel like Twin Peaks.”

When Hütter’s husband was offered a job at Amazon in 2014, Hütter saw it as a chance to live in Lynch’sworld. She’d attended her first festival in 2006, an event she calls “the best weekend of my entire life,” placing third in the costume contest and winning the trivia comp, which earned her a cameo in the bonus features of the Twin Peaks Gold Box Set. She had several Twin Peaks tattoos, including an Owl Cave symbol tattoo above her navel, “in the same place Courtney Love had the K for Kurt.”

Hütter became a kind of preservationist. When she learned that the Fall City Grill in Fall City, Washington, was slated to be demolished and along with it a counter that had appeared in Fire Walk With Me, her friend Anita Rehn paid $300 for the counter and Hütter stored it in her garage for four years before donating it to the Fraternal Order of the Eagle social club, where she was a member (which allowed her to rent space for festival gatherings, including that evening’s costume contest). Hütter sat by the counter as we spoke.

“My thing was just trying to get the local businesses to understand that the Twin Peaks people are not here to be jerks,” Hütter said. “They’re here because they love this thing. And you can make extra money if you sell something with an owl on it.”

To her point, in Snoqualmie’s old downtown, the Art Gallery of SnoValley was filled with Twin Peaks-themed artwork that weekend. “I work from the spirit owl’s point of view,” said Charlene Burley, one of the local artists, showing me a painting she’d done of owls emerging from the landscape. She showed me another painting she’d done of the Log Lady.

“It’s not good art,” Burley sighed. “But it means something to people that like the Log Lady.”

North Bend Mayor Mary Miller told me the festival had done “a ton” for the local economy and was their biggest tourism event that time of year (the valley also swarms with hikers and mountain bikers in warmer months). Jessica Self, executive director of the North Bend Downtown Commission, estimated that each visitor would be spending $500 to $1,000, or more if they were coming from abroad.

Among those international visitors were Frédéric Buntinx and his best friend Boris Lubicz, who’d traveled from Brussels. They estimated having spent several thousand dollars each. They’d first watched Twin Peaks in French when it premiered on television, back when they were students at Brussels University. They’d been talking about the show ever since, passing it down to their children. When Buntinx mentioned FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) at home, his daughter responded, “Damn fine coffee.”

“We live Twin Peaks every day in Belgium,” Buntinx said.

“You had Beethoven, Mozart, and David Lynch,” Lubicz said.

“For us, he’s the master,” Buntinx said. 

That night, Lubicz dressed up as BOB for the Twin Peaks-themed prom at the Fraternal Order of the Eagle club. He’d carried the wig across the Atlantic.

IV.

On Sunday evening — after a three-hour tour of the show’s filming locations, an afternoon panel with season two’s props department head, and a Twin Peaks-inspired concert at the North Bend Theatre, which also hosted the Fire Walk With Me premiere in 1992 — I returned to Twede’s Cafe for another slice of cherry pie. I spotted a young man lingering by the register, admiring the fan art for sale (magnets, postcards, t-shirts, all designed by a waitress under the tag TrashbyCash). He wore a green jade ring. He looked like he was under a spell. His name was Nicholas Hernandez, he was from Omaha, and he hadn’t slept in 24 hours.

“My reality is totally fucked up right now,” Hernandez said with a goofy grin. A month earlier, when he’d heard that Lynch had died, he knew he had to come for Twin Peaks Day. His airfare, rental car, and hotel were costing about $2,000 — all his savings, plus money borrowed from his parents — but worth it. After all, his home apartment was already a “shrine” to Twin Peaks, with a black-and-white chevron-patterned floor and walls of fan art.

“It’s so weird being here,” Hernandez said. “This show is my life, honestly. It’s taken me to where I am. It’s dreamlike.”

Upon arrival in Washington, he had first driven to Everett to visit the house of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee), where he crouched under hedges to reenact a scene from Fire Walk With Me. He pocketed a piece of broken cement from the walkway, because this was not just some rocky crumble. It was a relic that had been stepped on by the feet of Lynch, Lee, and MacLachlan. Then he took a ferry to Bainbridge Island to see the Kiana Lodge, where Laura Palmer’s corpse (“wrapped in plastic”) was discovered in season one, episode one, beside a driftwood log (“Northwest Passage,” 1990). The log had rotted and shifted over decades, and it was now chained to the beach, but it was still there. Hernandez slipped a piece of the log into his pocket — another relic. Then he drove an hour to Snoqualmie, stood below the thundering waterfall that appears in the opening credits of the show, and cried.

It was as if Hernandez had leaned so far into his television that he’d fallen in and popped out on the other side. The expressions on faces, the way locals drove, the sway of the stoplights, it was as if reality and fiction were swirling together. It was otherworldly. It also felt like home. “I always joke with my friends, ‘I might run away and just stay here,’” Hernandez said.

He didn’t want to view Twin Peaks passively. He wanted to enter the story. And now, at some level, he really had. He was like the cosplayers who experience pleasurable feelings of comfort when they escape into a different character, but in an inverted way (Casanova, et al., 2020). He wasn’t escaping into a character. He was remaining himself and escaping into another world.

Lynch’s filmmaking style has been called “world-making” (Lim, 2015), and he was so good as to convince you that it was something you could actually, physically enter. Even the analytical software engineer Reinsch acknowledged that, on occasion, it felt like he had stepped into Lynch’s creation. One evening in 2018, he and a group of friends had rented out Twede’s Cafe, dressed up as Double R Diner staff, and served coffee to anybody who showed up. It was cosplay. It was also one time that reality blurred. “It’s a powerful feeling,” he said. “It’s pretty rare.”

Others felt it when Cruise performed at the 2002 festival, in a barn on a stage that resembled the Roadhouse. “I felt like I suddenly was in the world,” Thorne recalled. “Truly. She was singing, and the music has such a powerful effect, so for a moment I lost myself. It was a really strange feeling. It was great. I loved it. Never had it happen again, but for a moment I didn’t quite know where I was.” (Cruise also performed at the 2016 festival.)

Now, some visitors again sensed something in the air. Charlene Weiss, a television producer and actor with a bit part in Lynch’s Lost Highway, had a three-hour flight delay from Los Angeles because of stinky fish in the cargo hold. She’d thought of the well-known Twin Peaks line: “There was a fish! In the percolator!” (“Northwest Passage,” 1990) She switched planes. Another delay came when a woman named Teresa Mulholland failed to reboard — a mashup of the character Teresa Banks and Mulholland Drive. After arriving, a fire alarm went off at Salish Lodge (aka The Great Northern Hotel) — fire being central in the show.

“He’s in the electricity, he’s in the ether, he’s with us all,” said Weiss.

Because of the delays, Weiss had missed Friday’s memorial, where she had planned to say that Twin Peaks had allowed her to see life in full color, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (a film that Lynch credited as a major influence and explored in the 2022 documentary Lynch/Oz). “It opened my whole mind,” Weiss said. “I would have said I’m grateful to him. I feel so lucky and grateful for how he impacted my life.” She had even skipped her 10th wedding anniversary to be there that weekend.

V.

It was Monday, February 24th, 2025 — Twin Peaks Day — and my wife hadn’t spoken to me in days. No “How’s it going?” No “Having fun?” No “What’s it like?” Nothing. No doubt she felt abandoned with our kids — ages 3 and 5 — while I wandered into my land of make-believe. And part of me agreed with her. What kind of dad skips out on his family to go solo to a TV fan festival? Was I a bad person for shirking work and skipping out on family for five days, all so that I could live in a Lynch fantasy?

I was wrestling with my own relationship to Twin Peaks, to which I felt a debt. Like many people, I had drawn inspiration from the show. The musician Moby, who has a cameo in The Return, sampled music from the show in his breakthrough 1991 hit, “Go” (Moby, 2025). David Foster Wallace said Mulholland Drive “helped me a lot with my own work” and that he found Lynch’s art more broadly to be “instructive and useful” (interview with Charlie Rose, 1997). Louis C.K. once wrote a letter telling Lynch that his television and film works encouraged him “to commit to the stories, moments, feelings, characters, moods, open questions and colors that I might have otherwise let my fears and other people’s fears talk me out of” (Lynch & McKenna, 2018).  

Twin Peaks is credited with inspiring shows from The Sopranos to Mad Men (Jurgenson, 2025), and on a personal level, it also shaped my own work. I wrote a nonfiction book called The Quiet Zone, based on years of reporting in the National Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia (Kurczy, 2021). It was a logging region with secretive government operations, possible extraterrestrial contact, cults, unsolved murders, and even a kind of Log Lady who claimed to have preternatural abilities. It was a place of layers and facades, where darkness lurked in the forests.

The way Lynch unspooled Twin Peaks informed how I framed my narrative, and I referenced the show several times in my book. Then I was criticized for it. How dare I insert a “burst of made-for-TV backwoods exoticism” by quoting from “David Lynch’s hackneyed-yet-gnomic TV study in rural gothic menace,” according to one reviewer (Lehmann, 2021). The criticism was that I’d projected television onto Appalachia and thus done a disservice to the reality of the place. Another reviewer, one who was apparently less of a Lynch hater, had said, “It’s like Twin Peaks but for real” (Woodruff, 2021). But the negative comments stuck.

To be sure, I was guilty of projecting television onto Appalachia. We each see the world through a filter, and mine has been shaded by Lynch. In going to the festival, I wanted to own the criticism. I wanted to pay homage to a show that helped me find my way through my story.

At 11:30 a.m. on February 24th, I stood at the roadside bend where Cooper first drove into town in 1990 and said into his voice recorder, “11:30 a.m., February 24th, entering the town of Twin Peaks.” Dozens of cars lined the roadside and more than a hundred people stood in the rain as Snoqualmie Mayor Katherine Ross issued a proclamation that it was officially Twin Peaks Day. She invited “people everywhere to celebrate by giving yourself a present of donuts, cherry pie, and fine coffee” (Gorenflo, 2025).

That sounded damn good to Krishnan Manon, who had come all the way from Pune, India. The 29-year-old had been planning this trip since November, but really, he’d been planning it for more than a decade. “The first time I saw the show, I was like, ‘I have to come over here.’”

A software engineer, Manon was taking a month away from work for a David Lynch tour that also included a visit to the filmmaker’s haunts in Los Angeles. Friends and family thought he’d lost touch with reality.

“They were like, ‘This is an insane trip, you’re just going there for a fictional show,’” Manon said. “But it’s more than a fictional show for me. It’s kind of like a lifestyle. Twin Peaks has been part of my life for the last 10 years. So this is kind of like a pilgrimage for me.”

VI.

Twede’s Cafe — aka the Double R Diner — sold 700 slices of cherry pie during the festival, including at least one plate to Wise, who said it was “not quite the same” as in 1989 (“but the coffee was just as good”). The diner served 101 slices on Friday, 175 on Saturday, 115 on Sunday, plus 20 pies for a festival-related event (translating to another 120 slices), and 190 slices on Monday. The daily normal was 50 to 75 slices.

Before I left town on Tuesday, I stopped by Twede’s for a final taste. But the lights were off, and smoke was wafting out the front door. The entire town had lost power because of high winds, meaning that the exhaust fans in Twede’s kitchen had also stopped filtering out all the smoke from the bacon and eggs. Staff rushed to air out the place and salvage perishable foods. In the kitchen, washing dishes by hand, was Max Spears, the co-owner. 

“There are times you forget that we’re a tiny little mountain town and then power goes out for huge stretches and you’re like, ‘Oh, right, we’re a teeny tiny little mountain town,’” Spears said, taking a break from the sink. Not your typical diner owner, Spears earned his doctorate in 20th-century European philosophy from Purdue University in 2019. A year later, seeing thin job prospects in the study of reality, he had purchased Twede’s Cafe with his wife Rachel Bennett, who was from the area.

“I don’t know that I would want to own literally any other restaurant,” Spears said. “In part because of the location in a place I want to be, but also because of it being part of this really cool world that’s also intellectually stimulating. It gets to be part of the whole Lynchaverse.”

Spears’ graduate focus was in phenomenology, the study of how humans come to understand their world, how we become conscious of our surroundings, how some things rise to the forefront while others fade into the background. It was a theme that he also saw in Lynch’s work.

“That’s always been really interesting to me, the idea that things are concealed so that something else can rise up and be revealed,” he said. “And that is a huge part, I think, of how David Lynch liked to tell stories. I got to talk to Ray Wise about that a little bit, which was cool because it was one of the things he brought up immediately. It’s not just about what you see. It’s so much more about what’s held back.”

A fan goes into Twede’s Cafe and is filled with nostalgia from the cherry pie. Of course, the menu includes many non-pie options. But that’s not what rises to the forefront. The cherry pie fills your view.

“Fandom is inherently nostalgic,” Spears said. “It’s about you watching something, and it’s over, and you try to find a way to get back into it, to have the feelings that you had while you were experiencing it the first time. And this is how I often describe this place in general.”

“People want to be able to have this feeling of stepping back into something that they love that now exists in the past,” Spears continued. “And I think they can get that here. And I think the cherry pie becomes a key to an even more interior door of that world they can step back into. When they can sit and have the coffee and pie and do the things that Dale Cooper and Harry Truman and these other characters did, it’s like an even more interior room of this nostalgic house of art that they’re trying to find their way back into, however they can.”

VII.

Before flying home on my redeye, I drove north of Seattle to the town of Everett, the site of the Palmer house. In preparation, I had rewatched the last episode of Twin Peaks: The Return. In the final scene, Cooper walks up the Palmer house steps, knocks on the front door, and a woman who identifies herself as Alice Tremond (Mary Reber) answers.

Now I was on the same house steps, now I was knocking at the same door, and now the very same actor who played Tremond — wearing a similar cream-colored blouse, her platinum blond hair falling straight down as it did in the show — was opening the door, giving me the same half-smile that she had given Cooper. Twin Peaks theme music played behind her.

“I’m giving you a look like, ‘This is weird,’” I said. “You must get that a lot.”

“I do,” said the woman, who seemed to be enjoying my confusion. Was this reality or fiction?

I was face-to-face with Mary Reber, the actual owner of the house. Lynch had cast her for the part of Tremond, as if he were pushing the idea that fiction and reality do overlap and swirl together, as if every reality is just another dream.

Lynch once told a French interviewer that he appreciated the television medium because it reached people in the privacy of their homes, where “they’re well placed for entering a dream” (Lim, 2015). Now, at the home of Laura Palmer, it was like Lynch’s dream was folding back on my world. Because in a literal way, I had entered the show.

Dominique Chateau, an emeritus professor of aesthetics and cinema at the Sorbonne in Paris, described The Return as “the film that dreams” in the way the narrative subverts everyday logic with its dreamlike structure (2018). In watching the show, Chateau argued, the viewer “can have the experience of a dream.” By extension, it would seem that visiting Laura Palmer’s home could, and perhaps should, be dream-like. I sure was in it.

Reber had offered fan tours since 2016, welcoming hundreds of strangers into her house from around the country and abroad, as far as Japan. It began taking up so much time that Reber started charging. A one-hour tour cost $100. A 90-minute tour with a “damn fine cup of coffee” cost $125. For $225, Reber would sit with you and watch Fire Walk with Me. She’d even serve a slice of cherry pie.

Reber had fallen somewhat accidentally into her role as Twin Peaks spirit guide. In 2014, she’d purchased the home for $500,000 from Marilyn Pettersen, who’d lived here when Lynch first came to film in 1989. At the time, Reber had never seen Twin Peaks, and she was only interested in the address because her bid on another property down the street had fallen through. Since then, Reber had embraced the show, and the show had in turn driven market interest to the neighborhood. A nearby house was for up for sale, marketed with the fact that it was “just 2 doors from the famous ‘Twin Peaks’ home featured in the popular TV series” (Zillow, 2025).

Within two months of moving in, Reber found a notice on her door from a film scout. Then on January 1st, 2015, Reber looked out her window and saw Lynch getting out of a car with Sabrina Sutherland, executive producer of The Return. He poked around for 40 minutes. Before he left, Reber built up the courage to ask a question.

“Gordon Cole was my favorite,” Reber had said to Lynch, referencing the FBI director that he played in the original series. “Is he going to be in season three?”

“Now we’re not talking about that, Mary,” Lynch had responded. Then he gave Cole’s signature thumbs-up gesture. The following October, when Lynch returned to film for 12 days, he asked Reber, “Are you an actress?”

“No,” she said.

“Have you ever acted?”

“No,” she said.

“Would you like to do a small part in the movie?”

“Sure,” she said.

Reber welcomed me into the parlor, which still had the nicotine-stained curtains, pink wallpaper, and gold carpet from when Lynch had filmed here. In The Return, there is a scene where Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) repeatedly stabs a framed photo of Laura, which had actually belonged to Reber. A replacementon Reber’s end table was signed by Zabriskie: “To Mary, so wonderful acting with you.” Next to it was an ashtray filled with cigarette butts left behind by Reber’s late son, who had died a few years earlier.

As if her personal story were interwoven with the show, Reber’s shelves were decorated with a mix of family photos and Twin Peaks fan art and mementos. In the TV room, photos of grandchildren were propped beside a fan-made Lego recreation of Reber’s scene from The Return. Upstairs in Laura Palmer’s bedroom, the character’s prom photo was next to an old Bible, which was next to the book Unmasking the Jezebel Spirit, which Reber had read while going through divorce.

Back downstairs, merchandise was spread out on the dining table: mugs, pins, fan art, fan books. Reber was selling pieces of her bathroom floor for $75 per tile, because it had been in a scene from Fire Walk With Me. She wanted to replace the tile anyway. She’d already sold 40 bricks from her walkway for $100 a pop, which covered the cost of redoing it. If she ever renovated her kitchen, she said she planned to sell it for pieces, too. In the moment, I was actually tempted to fly home with a brick in my suitcase, a tangible piece of Lynch’s dream world.

On an end-table, I spotted a handwritten card from a 10-year-old New Jersey girl whose mother had visited: “Dear Mrs. Reber,” it read, “thank you so much for making my mom so happy. One day I hope I can come to Twin Peaks also and meet you to” [sic].

VIII.

Hütter lived in Snoqualmie for seven years, a time that coincided with Lynch returning for six weeks to film The Return. She spoke with him several times, including at the Salish Lodge and when she was downtown walking her dog Yoda. The last night of filming, Hütter stayed out until dawn, loitering at the edge of the set, hoping for glimpses of the action. She finally went home at 5:00 a.m. to wake her kids for school. When she came back, the crew was gone. She hadn’t realized it was the final shoot. She was heartbroken.

When the 18-episode season premiered in 2017 to widespread acclaim (and head-scratching), Hütter was excited to dive back into her favorite world. But The Return never really returns to the old world of Twin Peaks. The protagonist, Agent Cooper, spends most of the season lost, wandering through Las Vegas and an alternate dimension of “non-existence.” Hütter wanted to go back to her favorite place, but Lynch had refused her that pleasure. It seemed like the director was telling her that there was no going back, that nostalgia is an illusion. 

“I wasn’t ready for that message,” Hütter said. “I was looking forward to more Twin Peaks to make me feel good, you know? And it was not that.”

Hütter left Washington in 2021. The cost of living in North Bend-Snoqualmie had risen, their house value had doubled, her husband disliked his job at Amazon, and family was pulling them to Michigan. But she still tried to return every year for the festival she now helps organize.

Driving back toward Seattle in my rental car, 200-foot-tall Douglas fir trees towered over both sides of I-90 — “big, majestic,” as Cooper described them. I was on a ridge of trees, framed by another ridge, framed by another — layers of treed ridges that thinned into suburban sprawl, my reality. I carried with me an 8x10 film still of Leland Palmer sitting in a chair of the mysterious Red Room and looking up at Agent Cooper. Wise had signed it: “Stephen — Find Laura.”

I keep searching for answers in Twin Peaks. I would attend several more Lynch retrospectives back in the Northeast, I would teach my kids how to talk backwards like Lynch’s characters in the Red Room, and I would rewatch episodes looking for more clues.

The show had made me want to visit the place, which made me want to rewatch the show, which would make me want to revisit the place.

Nor did the visit to the Pacific Northwest cure the Belgian friends Frédéric Buntinx and Boris Lubicz of their obsession, which only deepened. Now they would rewatch the series “with a different eye, because of the locations that we saw, because of the festival, because of the people we met,” said Lubicz. 

We had sat in the Double R Diner. We had walked across Ronette Pulaski (Phoebe Augustine) Bridge. We had stood above Snoqualmie Falls.

I had knocked on Laura Palmer’s door. I feel like Cooper, stuck in an endless cycle, looking for something that can’t be found.

And on a more concrete level, the Belgians hadn’t made it to Bainbridge Island on this trip because of bad weather.

“So we have to come back,” said Lubicz.

“Yeah,” agreed Buntinx, “we have to.”

References

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Bucklew, C. (2025). Interview with Stephen Kurczy. 22 February, Snoqualmie, Washington.

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