By the time Stranger Things finally ends next year, the Netflix juggernaut will have been on (and off) the airwaves for nearly a decade. That means almost 10 years of Eggo waffle Halloween costumes and fake nosebleeds have passed. It's also been just as long since the show put the Midwestern state of Indiana on the map, setting its otherworldly action and gore in the fictional town of Hawkins, IN.

For series superfans, Hawkins' streets, forests and shops could probably be jogged from memory. The Matt and Ross Duffer Show wants its sets to look recognizable and feel instantly classic—like the stuff Universal Studios' horror mazes are made of. There's one problem: the show isn't in fact filmed in Indiana, and any fan who travels there will be sorely disappointed.

Instead, Hawkins is largely made up of Atlanta, Georgia and its surrounding areas. As the show's stories began to evolve, so did its settings, and its final season also featured major filming locations in both the Southwest and across the pond. If you want to take a Stranger Things filming tour, start saving for plane tickets now, because in real life, the world of the show involves thousands of miles of travel.

Map made from Atlanta Magazine places over two dozen filming locations used in the first three seasons of "Stranger Things" in the greater Atlanta area. The Stockbridge building that formerly housed Patrick Henry High School was used as a stand for Hawkins Hayek, while the old Georgia Institute of Mental Health is used as the Hawkins Laboratory. Opened in 1965, the psychiatric hospital was built on the former property of Coca Cola heir Asa Candler Jr. 2022 articlethe building should be demolished.

Other filming locations near Atlanta include Jackson Street, which Stranger Things turned into downtown Hawkins, Gwinnett Place Mall, which serves as the setting for much of Season 3, and South Bend Pool, where Cara Buono's Karen Wheeler did its bomb entrance. in the summer season. There are also several real cemeteries, hospitals, and restaurants used in the show, and a place called Tiffany's Kitchen stands in for Benny's Burgers, the restaurant where Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) was first discovered. The fall second season spends a lot of time around the cul-de-sac in the suburbs where our young heroes live, and their houses can be found mostly in East Point, according to Atlanta Magazine. Atlanta even made a stop in downtown Chicago when Elle met her long-lost "sister" in episode one the most polarizing episodes.

The kids on Stranger Things do a lot of tramping through the woods (classic '80s behavior), and many of the show's wooded scenes take place in the Stone Mountain area of ​​Georgia. Stone Mountain Park is a short drive east of Atlanta, but offers a completely different set of visuals that the show has used to emphasize its adventure elements several times. When Dustin (Gathen Matarazzo) and Steve (Joe Currie) talk about his Farrah Fawcett hair while walking the rails, it's in Stone Mountain Park.

Poor Bob (Sean Astin) was buried in the real Stone Mountain Cemetery in Season 2, and fans have been known to document their pilgrimages to the cemetery (which also housed Billy's fake headstone during filming) on ​​TikTok. One of the best scenes of the seriesin which Max (Sadie Sink) battles Vecna ​​(Jamie Campbell Bauer) while Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" plays, also takes place in a cemetery. Stone Mountain was used for several wooded sequences and is also home to the house that was used as the Mayfield-Hargrove home in the show. Interestingly, the dramatic bully confrontation scenes set on stage view in Season 1 were not actually shot at Stone Mountain, but at Atlanta's Bellwood Quarry.

It's safe to say that almost every American sequence in Stranger Things is it wasn't shot in georgia shot in new mexico. The Recorded in NM website even did a "Stranger Things Trail" that visitors to the Albuquerque area can drive through to stop at all the key filming areas from the fourth season of the series partially set in California. Surfer Boy Pizza, where stoners Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) and Argyle (Eduardo Franco) work to make money, is actually a local business called Alberto's Mexican Food, while the Byers' new house, which exploded in a big shootout in season 4 . it's actually still intact and has since become a Stranger Things-themed Airbnb.

Other Albuquerque Season 4 scenes include a flashback to Max at the skate park (actually part of the Snow Park) and Eleven's violent showdown with bully Angela (Ellodie Grace Orkin) at the retro ice rink (called Skate-o-Mania in real life). . ). Series Production Designer Chris Trujillo Traveler stated that area also stands in the Nevada desert, which appeared in some climactic and emotional scenes of Season 4. "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 look a lot like parts of Southern California."

If you're wondering how the Stranger Things team could recreate a Russian work camp in Georgia or New Mexico... well, they didn't. Instead, the cast and crew traveled all the way to the Baltic to make season four's bleakest and most poignant line (which was first revealed in season 3's post-credits scene) seem realistically cold and miserable. Hopper (David Harbour), Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Murray (Brett Gelman) all get stuck around an unforgiving climate after Hopper is imprisoned by a group of Russians trying to study their own Demogorgon.

"With Lithuania, we were trying to find this Russian flavor of wilderness, as well as looking for imperial-era architecture," Trujillo told Traveler when discussing the Season 4 filming locations. “(The city of) Vilnius was so surprising. It was so beautiful and historically amazing in terms of architecture."

Trujillo says the scouting team made "long trips through the countryside" to find the places that would eventually transform into the Gulag. According to Cosmopolitanthe building that the play ended up using was Lukishkesh prison, which local outlets The site 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 Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Stranger Things may be a horror series, but the stories behind the cemeteries, Nazi prisons and mental institutions the production used as sets are scarier than even the worst monsters from Inverted.