By the time “Stranger Things” finally wraps up next year, the Netflix juggernaut will have been on (and off) the air for nearly a decade. That means it’s been nearly 10 years of Halloween costumes featuring Eggo waffles and fake nosebleeds. It’s also been just as long since the show put the midwest state of Indiana on the map by setting its otherworldly action and spookiness in the fictional town of Hawkins, IN.
For series superfans, the streets, forests, and shops of Hawkins could probably be drawn from memory. Matt and Ross Duffer’s show loves to make its sets look recognizable and feel instantly classic — like the stuff Universal Studios horror mazes are made of. There’s one problem: the show isn’t actually filmed in Indiana, and any fan making a trek there will be sorely disappointed.
Instead, Hawkins is largely made up of Atlanta, Georgia and its surrounding areas. As the show’s storylines have begun to fork, so have its settings, and its most recent season also features major shooting locations both in a Southwestern state and across the pond. If you want to do a “Stranger Things” filming tour, start saving up for plane tickets now, because in real life, the world of the show spans thousands of miles of travel distance.
Most of the Hawkins scenes in Stranger Things are filmed in Atlanta, Georgia
A map made by Atlanta Magazine places over two dozen filming locations used in the first three seasons of “Stranger Things” in the greater Atlanta area. A building in Stockbridge that formerly housed Patrick Henry High School has been used as a stand-in for Hawkins High, while the old Georgia Mental Health Institute is used as Hawkins Laboratory. Opened in 1965, the psychiatric hospital was built on the former estate of Coca Cola heir Asa Candler Jr. It’s a good thing the Hawkins Lab plots have mostly wrapped up, because according to an article from 2022, the building is due to be demolished.
Other filming locations near Atlanta include a Jackson street that “Stranger Things” has transformed into downtown Hawkins, the Gwinnett Place Mall that serves as the setting of much of season 3, and the South Bend Pool, where Cara Buono’s Karen Wheeler made her bombshell entrance in the summer-set season. There are also several real cemeteries, hospitals, and restaurants used for the show, with a place called Tiffany’s Kitchen standing in for Benny’s Burgers, the restaurant where Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) was first discovered. The autumnal second season spends a lot of time around the suburban cul-de-sacs where our young heroes live, and their houses can be found mostly in East Point, per Atlanta Magazine. Atlanta even stood in for downtown Chicago when El met her long-lost “sister” in one of the show’s most polarizing episodes.
Stranger Things’ greener scenes are shot around Stone Mountain, Georgia
The “Stranger Things” kids go traipsing through the woods a lot (classic ’80s behavior), and many of the show’s more forested scenes take place in the Stone Mountain area of Georgia. Stone Mountain Park is just a short drive east of Atlanta, but it offers a completely different set of visuals that the show has used to underscore its adventure elements several times. When Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Steve (Joe Keery) talk about his Farrah Fawcett hair while walking along train tracks, that’s in Stone Mountain Park.
Poor Bob (Sean Astin) was laid to rest at the real-life Stone Mountain Cemetery in season 2, and fans have been known to document their pilgrimages to the cemetery (which also housed Billy’s fake gravestone during filming) on TikTok. One of the show’s best scenes, in which Max (Sadie Sink) fights off Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) while Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” plays, also takes place at the cemetery. Stone Mountain has been used for several wooded sequences, and it’s also home to the house used as the Mayfield-Hargrove home in the show. Interestingly, the dramatic bully face-off scenes set at the scenic overlook in season 1 weren’t actually filmed at Stone Mountain, but at Atlanta’s Bellwood Quarry.
New Mexico plays the role of California in Stranger Things season 4
It’s safe to say that pretty much every America-set sequence in “Stranger Things” that wasn’t filmed in Georgia was shot in New Mexico. The website Filmed in NM even crafted a “Stranger Things Trail” that visitors to the Albuquerque area can take to stop by all the key shooting areas from the show’s partly California-set fourth season. Surfer Boy Pizza, where stoners Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Argyle (Eduardo Franco) work to make a buck, is actually a local business called Aliberto’s Mexican Food, while the Byers’ new house, which exploded in a massive shootout in season 4, is actually still intact and has since become a “Stranger Things”-themed Airbnb.
Other Albequerque-set scenes in season 4 include Max’s flashback to the skate park (actually a part of Snow Park) and Eleven’s violent showdown with bully Angela (Elodie Grace Orkin) at the retro roller rink (called Skate-o-Mania in real life). Series production designer Chris Trujillo told Traveler that the area also stood in for the Nevada desert, which appeared in some climactic and emotional season 4 scenes. “As soon as I got out there, I knew we could definitely find that world around Albuquerque,” he explained. “The beautiful foothills outside of Albuquerque very much look like parts of Southern California.”
Stranger Things season 4’s Russia scenes were filmed in Lithuania
If you’re wondering how the “Stranger Things” team could’ve possibly recreated a Russian work camp in Georgia or New Mexico … well, they didn’t. Instead, the cast and crew traveled all the way to the Baltics to make the fourth season’s most dreary and dragging plotline (which was first revealed in a post-credit scene of season 3) look realistically cold and miserable. Hopper (David Harbour), Joyce (Winona Ryder), and Murray (Brett Gelman) all traipse around the unforgiving climate after Hopper is imprisoned by a group of Russians attempting to study their own Demogorgon.
“With Lithuania, we were trying to find this Russian flavor of wilderness, as well as looking for some Tsarist-era architecture,” Trujillo told Traveler when discussing season 4 shooting locales. “[The city of] Vilnius was so surprising. It was so beautiful and historically incredible in terms of the architecture.”
Trujillo says the scouting team took “long road trips through the countryside” to find the places that would eventually be transformed into a Gulag. According to Cosmopolitan, the building the show ultimately used was Lukiškės Prison, which local outlets report closed in 2019 but was historically home to a Catholic monastery, a prison based on Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the all-seeing panopticon, and a World War II prison housing Jewish Holocaust victims.
“Stranger Things” may be a horror series, but the histories behind the cemeteries, Nazi prisons, and mental institutions the production has used as sets are scarier than even the worst monsters from the Upside Down.
