Drivers keep hitting this Walmart stop sign in Maine. Now ‘it’s a local celebrity’
Every city has its own attraction. Los Angeles has the Hollywood sign. New York, the Empire State Building.
For Auburn, Maine — located about 30 miles southwest of Augusta — a stop sign in the local Walmart parking lot is what draws visitors.
“It’s a local celebrity,” Holden Weathers, the moderator of a popular Facebook group titled “The Auburn Walmart Pole Strikes Again,” told McClatchy News. “It’s always been like a subreddit joke or a little urban legend if you will…it’s just incredible.”
The seemingly unremarkable stop sign started garnering attention years ago as drivers kept hitting it with their cars, often leaving the pole standing at a 45-degree angle.
“This has apparently been going on for almost a decade,” Weathers, 32, said. “It’s been hit almost 200 times. It’s been replaced numerous times and repaired just as many times.”
The Facebook group dedicated to the pole, which boasts over 7,000 members, documents many of the accidents that occur. People also post memes and pictures of themselves standing next to the sign, including several who drove hours to marvel at the infamous attraction.
Jeydon-Xavier Smith, a former Walmart employee and creator of the Facebook group, told McClatchy News, “I’m honestly astounded with how fast it’s grown. I started this thinking it was just going to be friends and some mutuals and now we have people from all over the world even.”
Someone even made a short documentary about the pole and the uncanny amount of accidents that it’s been involved in. The video has nearly 20,000 views on YouTube.
“This pole has been a menace to this parking lot for years,” the narrator says.
An employee of a town auto shop has testified to the havoc the pole has wreaked, saying multiple cars have been damaged by it — even some which were totaled, according to News Center Maine.
The repeated accidents have caused some to call for the pole to be taken down. One woman’s 2021 obituary even requested for donations to be put toward “the removal of the notorious Auburn Walmart pole that has led to the needless destruction of countless vehicles.”
Not everyone wants the sign to come down, though.
“I hope it stays,” Weathers said. “People take pictures with it; there’s even people talking about who’s going to get married there.”
When reached by McClatchy News, an employee of the Auburn Walmart declined to comment on the pole.
McClatchy News reached out to the Auburn Police Department but did not immediately receive a response.
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