Stranger Things fans have been speculating the location of Hawkins, Indiana, for a long time, but they need speculate no more. The official companion book Worlds Turned Upside Down provides the answer. The book includes an 11″x15″ map of Hawkins, and at the bottom shows the town’s location in Indiana. It’s is in the northeastern part of the state, about halfway between Indianapolis and Fort Wayne. I plugged it on the following map in red.
That just so happens to be where I situated Hawkins in my fanfiction trilogy: about an hour and a half drive northeast from Indianapolis. (See this chapter in particular.) It’s interesting that most fans favored either a northwestern or southwestern location. (See this Reddit discussion.)
As for the map itself, it doesn’t indicate the homes of individual characters, like the Wheeler residence, the Byers residence, etc., but I took the liberty of putting those in, using my liberal imagination.
World’s Turned Upside Down was released the day before Halloween, but it’s a perfect Christmas gift for anyone who hasn’t obtained it yet. I recommend it highly. Fanbase Press provides more details.
The Busybody 
This is in the exact location of my hometown of Fairmount, Indiana. Also the hometown of James Dean.
Hawkins is almost exactly half way between South Bend and Fort Wayne. Using Lake Tippecanoe as a landmark, you’ll find it just north of a town called Warsaw.
Which is exactly where I live. There was a crappy documentary film made at our highschool in 2008. And YouTuber IAmWildCat went to our highschool.
Not true. Hawkins is not halfway between South Bend and Ft. Wayne. also, Hawkins is many miles to the south of Warsaw Indiana.
I guess this makes since for travel times, but makes zero sense as far as geography goes. The land here is very flat and would be more cornfields than the forests we see. I could see it a little further north in gas city/Marion but it’s still very flat land in general. I always assumed more of a Martinsville or terre haute made more sense geographically.
Geographically, that area seems more close to how Hawkins would look rather than the more “flat” mid-northern Indiana. It’s actually a similar area to where the Resident Evil’s fictional Raccoon City is located. I’ve actually guessed Raccoon City would be located where Bloomington is (maybe RE’s world is an alternate realm where Raccoon CIty IS their version of Bloomington). The whole lakes, mountains, hills and forests check out, and Raccoon City, like Hawkins, is supposed to be in the Midwest. The problem is, to check off all those on the checklist, you’d be more likely to find them in the West(Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada), South(Ozarks), East(Appalachians) and North(the ones far into Canada), not the Midwest. It’s slim pickings, so what areas DO fall into those categories are few and far between, so they tend to be the more likely spots.
The Hawkins map is just a map of Marion with labels changed and some locations added. The descriptions from the show put it at about Marion and the town of Marion has the same population size and a mall. Zoom in on google maps. You’ll see the main highways through town and the train tracks match perfectly.
Marion Kansas?
I agree that the geography doesn’t fit, and most of the roads we see in the series curve around the hilly terrain as opposed to the flat, grid pattern that we see on the map. Geographically, it’d fit better between Indianapolis and Bloomington, where the hilly terrain matches closer with the Atlanta area where the series was filmed.
What about when that Sheriff WALKED through the woods from that property Illinois to Hawkins, Indiana (or maybe the other way around)? That was sure a LONG WALK and he must have just JUMPED over the Wabash river, too. 🙂