Before Hawkins, before the Demogorgon, before a girl named Eleven opened a portal with her mind, before all of it, there was Montauk — a real coastal town on the edge of Long Island that has spent decades wrapped in rumour and mystery.
After nearly three years of anticipation, Netflix finally released the first four episodes of Stranger Things’ (2016) fifth and final season this November, sparking the last wave of the show’s global craze.
But have you ever wondered where the Duffer brothers — creators of the show — first got inspiration for a story like this? Viewers love Stranger Things for its character chemistry, its themes, and the pure thrill of the storytelling. But the show’s real power stems from something deeper than just clever writing. Stories this eerie do not appear out of thin air; they are molded by real fears and, occasionally, real history.
Behind the show’s neon-washed nostalgia lies a history that looks far less comforting when separated from fiction. The Duffer brothers first wanted to call the show “Montauk.”. This is because the show’s central storyline surrounding Hawkins Lab is inspired by the rumours and theories you may have briefly stumbled upon — secret government facilities, psychic experiments on children, and what is infamously known as “The Montauk Project.”
At first, there were whispers and what-ifs, but now there are fleshed-out theories and insights on this mysterious project. The infamous book Montauk Project: Experiments in Time (1992) by Preston B. Nichols and Peter Moon puts into print what a lot of folks living in or around Montauk have long suspected — that the old military base may have once been the site of some of the most secretive and disturbing experiments and research projects in modern American history.
Any serious investigation will show that a Montauk Project did, in fact, exist.
The Montauk Project is a conspiracy theory that refers to a set of alleged secret experiments carried out by the U.S. government on mind control and time manipulation, believed to have taken place at the former Montauk Air Force Station in New York. Scrutiny of this theory has only increased after the popular book by Nichols and Moon came out in 1992, which claimed the authors had recovered memories of being unwilling participants in these experiments.
The book opens with an ominous introduction: most of what follows is made up of “soft,” or “gray” facts — claims drawn from memory, rumour, and testimony rather than real, verifiable evidence. The authors acknowledge that proper documentation is nearly impossible to obtain, given the secrecy and security they believe surrounded the project. The book is based on Nichols’ recollections, with the author assuring their accuracy while also acknowledging that his memories may be distorted by trauma or misconception.
Montauk is portrayed as the culmination of a history of secret research that stretches back to the 1943 Philadelphia Experiment. This was a Navy invisibility test said to have torn a ship out of space-time and damaged the crew in terrible ways. According to the book, Montauk’s mission was to pick up where those experiments left off, focusing not on ships but on people: how powerful electromagnetic fields could influence the human mind, body, and reality itself.
Nichols claims he eventually recovered memories of serving as Montauk’s technical director in a labyrinth of underground labs, living in some sort of alternate reality he could not initially explain. There, researchers allegedly developed the “Montauk Chair,” a device designed to amplify psychic abilities through electromagnetic frequencies. Its primary subject, Duncan Cameron, was said to project thoughts and open portals.
The book also describes children — runaways, youth with no paper trail — being used as experimental subjects, put through psychological conditioning and, in some accounts, sent through “time tunnels” that linked Montauk to other eras and even other worlds.
The project’s end supposedly came in 1983, when Duncan, sitting on the psychic chair, manifested a monstrous creature that tore through the base, a deliberate act meant to collapse the experiment. What followed, according to the book, was a rapid shutdown: tunnels sealed, equipment destroyed, and the base abandoned.
There is no hard evidence and many contradictions, yet its imagery of abducted children and psychic experiments gone wrong is unmistakably like Stranger Things. That is what makes this origin story unsettling: some of the show’s most thrilling ideas began as claims someone believed were true.
While celebrating the show’s nostalgia and spectacle, we tend to forget the darker anxieties surrounding it. Stranger Things turns those fears into entertainment, but the real tales that inspired it were born from suspicion, distrust, and covered-up information.
Perhaps that is why the Montauk legend is still so intriguing, not because it can be proved, but because it gestures toward the uneasy space between imagination and reality.
As Stranger Things’ final season arrives, let’s raise a final question: what does our fascination with Stranger Things say about our willingness to accept, or even overlook, the darker histories that actually inspire it?
.png){kind=small}
