u/PadreMontoya

I'm writing a horror/comedy novel set partly in Davis, along with San Leandro and a rural stretch near Live Oak. I want Davis to feel like a real character in the book, not just a backdrop, and I'd love input from people who actually live there.

Full disclosure: my only exposure to Davis was a single visit in 2002, dropping a girlfriend off at UC Davis. My impression - clean, chill, safe, orderly - was almost certainly just the campus bubble, especially compared to my own childhood in South Sacramento.

So I'm turning to you all: what's Davis actually like to live in? A few things I'm curious about:

• How much does the university dominate daily life, versus the "real" town underneath it?
• Any weird stuff? Local legends, ghost stories, odd landmarks, or "everyone in Davis knows about X" type things?
• What do people actually do for fun, where do they eat/drink, what's the traffic/bike culture really like day-to-day?
• Is Davis as uniformly comfortable as it seemed to outsider-me, or are there rougher edges; parts of town that feel different from the postcard version?
• Pet peeves about how Davis gets stereotyped or misrepresented?
• Since it's horror/comedy, I'm especially interested in anything that has an eerie or uncanny edge. Abandoned buildings, isolated roads at night, weird local history, unexplained incidents, that kind of thing.

Any details, even mundane ones, are genuinely useful. The small specific stuff is what makes a setting feel lived-in rather than researched.