The Creel family moves to Hawkins in 1959 in Stranger Things: The First Shadow. That year places the stage play 24 years before the television series begins with Will Byers’s disappearance in 1983.
The play follows Victor and Virginia Creel and their children, Henry and Alice, as they seek a fresh start in Hawkins, Indiana. Henry arrives as a troubled freshman at Hawkins High, where he meets Patty Newby and becomes entangled in the town’s strange events.
The 1959 setting lets the story explore Hawkins before the laboratory’s later experiments and before the main series’ younger protagonists are born or established. Young Joyce Maldonado, Jim Hopper, and Bob Newby also appear in the town’s earlier history.
Viewers sometimes confuse 1959 with 1943, the year used for the prologue involving the USS Eldridge, or with 1983, when Stranger Things Season 1 begins. Those are separate points on the show’s timeline.