On November 6, 1983, in the sleepy town of Hawkins, Indiana, a scientist in the Hawkins National Laboratory, operated by the Department of Energy, was suddenly attacked by an unseen menace. Elsewhere, a young boy named Will Byers, aged 12, was engrossed in a game of Dungeons & Dragons with his close-knit group of friends - Mike Wheeler, Lucas Sinclair, and Dustin Henderson. After the game, Will hopped on his bicycle to head home, only to encounter the mysterious creature from the laboratory, vanishing without a trace.
The following day, Will's mother, Joyce, and his older brother, Jonathan, noticed his unexplained absence. Joyce frantically contacted the town's police chief, Jim Hopper, who initially dismissed her concerns, claiming that nothing out of the ordinary ever occurred in Hawkins and assuming Will had probably gone to his father's. However, Joyce persisted, and Hopper, along with his deputies, reluctantly searched the nearby woods. There, they stumbled upon Will's abandoned bicycle, sparking Hopper's suspicion that something sinister might indeed be afoot.
Meanwhile, Mike's older sister, Nancy, was embroiled in a rapidly intensifying romance with the town's high school heartthrob, Steve Harrington. Despite the warnings of her best friend, Barbara Holland, who suspected Steve was only interested in Nancy for her physical attributes, Nancy's attempts to meet Steve in secret were thwarted by Will's disappearance. Nancy and Mike's mother, Karen, refused to allow Nancy to venture out unsupervised until Will was found.
Elsewhere, a young girl with a buzz cut and clad in a hospital gown stealthily stole food from a local diner. The diner's owner, Benny, took pity on her and fed her before calling social services. Upon noticing a tattoo on her arm, he discovered her name was Eleven. Suddenly, a woman posing as a social worker arrived and brutally murdered Benny. A group of armed men then stormed the diner in search of Eleven, but she managed to elude them.
That evening, Joyce thought she heard Will's voice on a distorted phone call, but the phone short-circuited, cutting off the connection. Meanwhile, Mike, Dustin, and Lucas, determined to find Will themselves, embarked on a search of their own. As they ventured deeper into the woods, they stumbled upon the mysterious Eleven.
