How Many Times Was The Upside Down Opened In Stranger Things? ( Photo Credit – Instagram )
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The Upside Down of Stranger Things is a sentient nightmare. And like any living thing, it finds ways to break through. Since Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) first made contact with it in Hawkins Lab, the borders between dimensions have never been sealed for long. Every gate that’s opened has come at the cost of lives, traumas, and even realities. But each rift has also revealed something new: about Vecna, Eleven, and how thin the veil really is.
From secret government experiments to psychic attacks, the Upside Down’s presence on Earth has never been static. With Season 5 looming, a full-scale invasion feels inevitable. But to understand where it’s going, we must look back every time the gate was breached. Here’s every gate to the Upside Down we’ve seen so far, how it opened, who caused it, and what it left behind.
The Hawkins Lab Gate (Season 1)
The first gate was born in 1983 inside Hawkins National Laboratory. It wasn’t the result of an experiment gone wrong. It was the result of an experiment that went too far. While spying on a Russian agent in a sensory deprivation tank, Eleven made contact with the Demogorgon. That psychic link didn’t just breach dimensions; it cracked the wall between worlds.
The gate ripped open in the lab’s basement, a pulsing wound into the Upside Down. Scientists tried to contain it, but the damage was done. Hawkins was compromised. This gate wasn’t closed until the end of Season 2, when Eleven returned to shut it by force using her amplified powers. This gate was also the root of all the tunnels terrorizing Hawkins in Stranger Things Season 2.
Demogorgon’s Gates (Season 1)
In Season 1, it initially seemed like only Eleven or Hawkins Lab could create gates to the Upside Down. But as the story progressed, it became clear that the Demogorgon was tearing open portals on its own. This ability raises questions, especially when even the Mind Flayer later required the Russians’ help to breach dimensions, and the far more evolved Demogorgon variant in Season 4 showed no such power. How this seemingly mindless creature could move so freely between realms remains one of the series’ most underexplored mysteries.
The Starcourt Mall Gate (Season 3)
This gate wasn’t natural. It was engineered. Built beneath Starcourt Mall by a secret Russian task force, the machinery was designed to punch through dimensions with brute force. They knew about the gate from the Hawkins Lab and were determined to open one of their own. The result was explosive.
The gate didn’t last long. After a massive showdown in Stranger Things Season 3, Hopper destroyed the machine and sealed the rupture. But it proved something chilling: the Upside Down could be accessed with the right science and enough ambition. Governments were no longer just studying the gate. They were weaponizing it.
Vecna’s Psychic Gates (Season 4)
These weren’t gates in the traditional sense. Vecna tore holes in the fabric of reality by killing. Each murder wasn’t just brutal, it was surgical. The deaths of Chrissy, Fred, and Patrick, as well as the attack on Max created psychic ruptures that connected the victims’ locations to the Upside Down. Vecna’s killings functioned like rituals, creating portals that bypassed the need for science or machines.
We saw two gates on-screen. Firstly, the Mother-gate where Patrick was killed, and then the actual “Upside-Down” gate at Eddie’s trailer. The most horrifying came with Max’s near-death, which tore the largest gate yet: a full-scale fracture that split Hawkins apart.
The Original Gate? (Season 4)
The earliest chronological link to the Upside Down occurs in 1979, during the Hawkins Lab massacre. After overpowering 001, Eleven hurls him into another dimension, creating what appears to be the first rift between worlds. But what she opened is still up for debate. Was it truly the Upside Down? Or another space entirely, possibly Dimension X? The show hasn’t confirmed what lies beyond that tear, only that it predated all other gates seen so far.
