The Real Girls Who Inspired Stephen King's 'Carrie'

Stephen King’s debut novel Carrie was published in 1974, and went on to become a classic of modern horror literature. Yet if not for a lucky decision by King’s wife, Tabitha, it might have remained in the wastebasket forever. 

After penning the first few pages of the book, King threw them in the trash—but his wife plucked them out and told him she wanted to see what happened next, and the rest is history. As it turns out, the ideas King used in those first few pages came from some real-life experiences.

The girls who inspired Carrie

Anyone who has attended grade school probably wouldn’t find it too hard to see what may have inspired King to write a story about an ostracized student’s revenge. For the author, there was one particular girl he knew in elementary school who became the blueprint for his famously bloodstained anti-heroine. 

“Before I had completed two pages, ghosts of my own began to intrude; the ghosts of two girls, both dead, who eventually combined to become Carrie White. I will call one of them Tina White and the other Sandra Irving,” King wrote in an essay for The Guardian.

Tina, he continued, was a girl who was constantly excluded and bullied. “There is a goat in every class, the kid who is always left without a chair in musical chairs, the one who winds up wearing the KICK ME HARD sign, the one who stands at the end of the pecking order. This was Tina,” he wrote. “Not because she was stupid (she wasn't), and not because her family was peculiar (it was) but because she wore the same clothes to school every day.” 

There was another classmate who played a pivotal—if inadvertent—role in bringing those first few pages of the novel to life, though. That was Sandra, who lived close to King’s home in Durham, Maine. 

One day, her mother hired King to help with moving furniture. “I was struck by the crucifix hanging in the living room, over the Irving couch. If such a gigantic icon had fallen when the two of them were watching TV, the person it fell on would almost certainly have been killed,” King recalled. 

The event made him imagine what would have happened if Sandra’s mother had been sitting on her couch when the crucifix fell. After the encounter, he went home and typed up the first few pages of the novel. He then threw them away, unhappy with the results, but Tabitha discovered them while cleaning the wastebasket, shook off the detritus of King’s cigarettes, and sat down to read them. 

Bathrooms and telekenisis: Other inspirations for Carrie

The image of the gym bathroom where Carrie is tormented after getting her period came to King while he was cleaning the girls’ bathroom during a stint as a janitor at Brunswick High. He noticed the shower’s pink curtains, a feature that the boys’ bathroom did not have, and later, that memory returned to him.

“I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains or privacy,” he wrote. “And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn't know what it is, and the other girls—grossed out, horrified, amused—start pelting her with sanitary napkins … The girl begins to scream. All that blood!”

While considering that story, he recalled an article he read in LIFE Magazine about telekinesis. It mentioned that there was some evidence that adolescent girls could have these powers, particularly around the moment of their first periods. 

This idea, combined with the image of the shower curtain, gave him the basis for Carrie. As he began to write, he thought of his young classmate who had been severely bullied and recalled the moment he’d almost been killed by a crucifix. All the pieces came together, and Carrie was born.