Location from Stranger Things by The Duffer Brothers
A quiet small town in rural Indiana where something terrible lurks beneath the surface of 1980s normalcy.
Hawkins is the quintessential nowhere town — a place people pass through on the way to Indianapolis, population just enough to support a single high school and a handful of businesses that haven't changed since the '70s. It smells like cut grass and woodsmoke in the fall, chlorine from the community pool in summer. But Hawkins sits on a wound. The Department of Energy laboratory on its outskirts has been quietly tearing holes between dimensions, and the town's veneer of Americana keeps cracking open. Kids go missing. Power grids surge and die. The woods feel wrong after dark. Residents rationalize it — chemical leaks, teen runaways, bad wiring — because the alternative is unthinkable. The town itself is a character: stubborn, ordinary, and slowly being consumed by something it refuses to see.
Tree-lined streets with clapboard houses and chain-link fences. Strip malls and diners with neon signs, rusted pickup trucks in driveways, and lawns that all look the same. The kind of town where everyone knows everyone and nothing ever happens — until it does. In autumn the woods press close, fog rolls through the quarry, and the streetlights flicker in ways that have nothing to do with the wiring.
Also known as: Hawkins, Hawkins Indiana, the town