Locals Share Terrifying, Haunting Memories Of The Real-Life Montauk Camp Hero That Inspired Stranger Things
MONTAUK, NY — “Stranger Things” fans glued to the final episode heard the character of Hopper, played by David Harbour, ask his Joyce — portrayed by Winona Ryder — if she’d consider moving to Montauk to begin their new lives.
It was a full circle moment for the smash sci-fi horror series, which was originally named “Montauk” when first presented by “Stranger Things” creators, the Duffer brothers.
And what many still don’t realize is that all the terror that unfolded during “Stranger Things,” from the Upside Down to reported kidnapping of, and scientific experiments on, children, to wormholes, time travel and mind control were all rumored to have taken place in real life at Camp Hero in Montauk.
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Camp Hero State Park, which has belonged to the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation since the ’80s, has a rich history and was a Revolutionary War cannon practice site.
According to Camp Hero State Park information, the camp itself was established in 1943 as a coastal defense site during World War II; the camp was demilitarized in 1949, and in 1951, the U.S. Air Force used the site for anti-aircraft artillery training.
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But “Stranger Things” shone a new spotlight on the site, at first glance a sprawling 700-plus-acre expanse of trails, parkland, and dramatic bluffs dropping to the Atlantic Ocean beneath and beyond — not to mention the stunning view of the Montauk Lighthouse.
“Stranger Things” left scores of viewers wondering just what exactly happened at Camp Hero, where a radar tower creaks in the wind and where signs warn visitors not to venture past the fence that surrounds the structure.
By all accounts, there’s a feeling visitors get, at Camp Hero, a chill; some describe hearing screams, others feel as though they’re being watched. Followed.
“Stranger Things,” a Netflix series that debuted in 2016, combined horror, the supernatural, humor and a soundtrack of ’80s pop hits. The show takes place in Hawkins, Indiana, where not everything is as it appears — a place where a group of “Dungeons and Dragon”-playing kids find themselves front and center in the midst of a mystery involving Demogorgon, a wormhole into the “upside-down” alternate universe, and a mysterious laboratory where experiments are reportedly taking place on a group of children.
Many local residents, however, have stories about Camp Hero that rival even the most-horrifyingly well-scripted episode.
Rumors of what may have happened at Camp Hero have been swirling since around 1992, when the book “The Montauk Project: Experiments In Time,” by Preston Nichols unveiled a sinister world where experiments on local kids, “The Montauk Boys,” reportedly took place in the secret tunnels and bunkers.
Real-life ‘upside down house’
Montauk resident Joe Loffreno spoke with Patch about stories that he personally vows are true — memories he’s gleaned after undergoing hypnosis.
Lisa Finn / Patch
Loffreno, 58, who worked at Camp Hero for 20 years, beginning in 2002 — he retired in 2022 — was employed to handle maintenance and security, cutting trails and building bridges.
“It was lots of work but I loved my job,” he said.
During those years, Loffreno reported finding “holes in the ground that would go to nowhere. We’d report them and then they’d fill them in with a concrete a couple of days later.”
Over the years, Loffreno heard stories from people who’d dived down into the tunnels under the base wearing scuba gear. He can speak intimately of Battery 113, a source of fascination for scores of curiosity seekers who’d come to Camp Hero and try to smash through the cement openings with crowbars. It wasn’t until a large, steel door was erected that the attempts to circumvent security stopped, he said.
Loffreno himself has walked the tunnels many times to make sure they were clear before the entrances were cemented over, again and again. “We never wanted to lock anyone in,” he said.
One tunnel, he said, inside Battery 113 is about 630 feet, cement, with rooms off to the sides; the tunnel had its own water filtration system and generators that still exist, he said. One room had a hole in the ground with a ladder that plunged down about 15 feet to the bottom; that hole consistently flooded, he said.
“Battery 113 is the only access point to the underground that still exists,” he said. “All the divers who’ve told me they’ve gone in had said there are rooms down there.”
Despite the dizzying parallels to “Stranger Things,” Loffreno said he has only watched two or three episodes. “It was so disturbing to me to watch it — it was memories,” he said. “When I’m watching ‘Stranger Things,’ I started feeling the energy of Camp Hero. Because they were dead-on with a lot of the rooms they had in ‘Stranger Things.'”
Hawkins Lab, he said, “is pretty accurate.” Loffreno specifically remembers the observation deck with a steep drop shown in the series. “It was really described and shown almost to a T,” he said.
“‘Stranger Things’ is not just a TV show,” he said. “It’s a depiction of things that actually did go on in Montauk. These people did their research. They must have hung out at bars late at night and spoken to a lot of people — they know too much.”
There are specific incidents in his own life that he believe lend truth to the rumors about Camp Hero. Loffreno underwent hypnosis twice, once with Nichols in 1994 and later, in 2016 — and since those episodes, he said, core memories have emerged.
“I described going into it an upside down house, basically a sunken house. The way I described it in hypnosis, the roof was level with the ground and it was slimy. That happened during my very first memory of being brought to base when I was a kid,” he said.
Reflecting on his own real-life Camp Hero experiences, Loffreno said he and his brother lived a life much like what was depicted in “Stranger Things.”
“We all used to have BMX bikes back then, in 1982,” he said. “Our story was the ‘Stranger Things’ story; they literally made this show after events that really happened to kids in Montauk in the late 70s, 80s. We all had the BMX bikes, we were all running around all over the place,” he said. “Our parents wouldn’t know where were — we’d leave in the morning and show back up at night. We’d take peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or go to Ronnie’s Deli. We’d ride our bicycles on the beach and the cliffs by Ditch Plains. We would basically disappear. There were no cell phones. No one even cared because Montauk back then was very safe — or so we thought.”
Lisa Finn / Patch
During hypnosis, one specific memory emerged: “We were at the arcade near the 7-Eleven in Montauk. I told my brother I’d met this kid and I was going to riding with him,” he said.
The young man he’d met, he said, had black, curly hair, and was a few years older than he was at the time; Loffreno was just 13 on that pivotal day.
“He lured me out to the base. He introduced me to these two people wearing civilian clothes and I was thinking I was a big kid, shaking hands. I didn’t know this place had even existed.”
Loffreno said he remembers bicycling on a dirt trail to the back of the radar tower where there was a wall. “In that wall there was a doorway; the door was either missing or just open,” he said.
Remembering, Loffreno continued: “It was really dark in there. The other boy said, ‘Joe, I’m going to go in there, follow me,'” he said. “Then he disappeared into the darkness. I thought, ‘I’m 13, I can’t be a wimp,’ so I followed him. No flashlight, nothing. At the end of this tunnel, about 75 to 100 feet ahead, I can see a little light coming from above. I kept on walking; it was a cement tunnel, probably a cement floor. I get to the end and the kid is not there. I thought, ‘He must have gone down.’ Things were deteriorating around me. There was a roof around me — it was like a house that’s been buried, there were levels of roofs. I called it the ‘upside down house.'”
And that was years before the Duffer brothers brought their Upside Down to life, he said.
Loffreno described what he saw. “It was slimy. There was water dripping down from above. It was disgusting, slimy and dangerous.”
Trying to find the other young man, he climbed down a few levels; it became darker and harder to see and Loffreno remembers screaming for the kid, crying out, “Hey, where are you?”
Looking down, he said the drop was so steep and far that he could not hear a rock drop to the bottom. Eventually, he said, he knew he had to get out.
“I don’t remember anything after that,” he said. “But that was my first memory of the weirdness.”
Life went back to normal for some time, he said; he spend days biking around Montauk with his brother and friends.
But eventually during hypnosis later in life, another memory emerged: “We were lying on massage tables. They didn’t have head rests,” he said. “There were other boys and we had wires hooked up to us.”
He added: “It gets even weirder. I wake up and everyone is lying there like zombies, hooked up. I can see other boys; I don’t know how many. It was poorly lit. But there were wires coming off me. I couldn’t get up, I had no ability to escape — and I didn’t want to. I felt that this was my job now, we were all there for a purpose. I had no desire to escape, and no fear. I was just curious about what I was doing there.”
After he finally met Preston Nichols, Nichols hypnotized him for roughly five hours, he said. He said he remembers being asked by Nichols about himself and a woman in a lab coat. His memories of how many other boys were there first centered on the number 50; under his second hypnosis, he said he remembers seeing about 70.
Loffreno said it is possible that he was one of the “Montauk boys.” He first met Peter Moon, who asked him how old he’d been in the 80s. “I began to think, ‘Maybe there’s something to this,'” he said. “Peter Moon told me I was definitely a candidate for being a Montauk boy and told me I should meet Preston.”
Loffreno went to East Islip, where Nichols had a garage, “Space Time Labs.” He added: “I thought it was a little kooky but I was young at the time and had nothing better to do. And that’s when he hypnotized me.”
When he was hypnotized a second time, years later, Loffreno remembers being transported back from 2016 to 1981, and being able to turn his head — seeing the dozens of boys in that room.
“I started to cry because I knew that everyone in that room was screwed. I couldn’t save them. And then I came out of hypnosis, and I lost them. I lost everyone. I couldn’t save anyone,” he said, still visibly stricken by the dark memory.
Loffreno said he is not sure if it was the government or someone who contracted the space from the government to conduct the rumored experiments. He’s never found any paperwork.
But there’s an energy, he said, a grid point where, over the years, other groups would come to “summon energy and try to access other dimensions.”
Camp Hero reflections
Loffreno wasn’t the only person who told Patch they’d felt something amiss at the Camp Hero site. The stories swirl, happenings that have no explanation, situations too disturbing to dismiss.
Lisa Finn / Patch
Camp Hero was originally a coastal defense station disguised as a fishing village. Today, the faux fishing village buildings still stand, abandoned, an eerie representation of a town that never existed at all.
Lisa Finn / Patch
Scott Goldberg, of East Marion, is a filmmaker, photographer and videographer. “My first recollection of Camp Hero was 20 years ago where my filmmaker friend Christopher Garetano, myself and others took a trip out to Montauk to check out the location,” he said.
Lisa Finn / Patch
He added: “I believe anything is possible, especially with the myths of children being kidnapped and experimented on. Back then, in the 80s as we see in the television show, ‘Stranger Things’, it was a different time. Since 9/11 there is much more surveillance, more cameras, technology with cell phones in everyone’s pockets — back then, there was none of that. Definitely more of an opportunity for bad people to do bad things and not get caught. I’ve heard stories of kids and teenagers being taken off the street, etc.”
Lisa Finn / Patch
Goldberg said he, alongside many other filmmaker friends “have definitely explored Camp Hero. We’ve seen the radar tower up close. It’s even been featured in our docudrama, ‘Off The Grid: Survivalism and Frugality.’ Some of my actors and I traveled out in a huge snowstorm back in 2019 to Camp Hero and it was surreal to see everything covered in snow as well as it being very dangerous. There were something very eerie about such an abandoned location in the middle of winter. Do I think anything happened there decades ago? I am not entirely sure. Anything is possible.”
Scott Horowitz, longtime Southampton Town Trustee president, spoke to Patch in 2021 about his Camp Hero experience.
Horowitz, who used to work at Camp Hero, said at one point he was alone on the site when four or five men “clearly broke into the radar building. I was working by myself. It was tense. They were dismantling components. They clearly flew in from out of town as the vehicles were not official; they were rentals. It was strange.”
The incident is not something he’s shared often, he said. Speaking of the incident, he said: “There wa a certain danger to it They had large tools, and they outnumbered me — and I was in a solid building with no reception. I was armed with a Smith & Wesson and they clearly understood I meant business. In that building, in the area where I found them, there were a lot of components but I was focused on my own safety.”
Horowitz has notes from the experience and some of the names written on that day in the mid-80s were names mentioned in the “Montauk Experiment,” including Nichols and Al Bielek, he said.
Later, Horowitz said: “I got a call in 1986 from some police brass, that basically said, ‘Nice police work. You arrested a watchdog agency working for the government that was doing an investigation. And then, all the paperwork disappeared.”
Former News 12 reporter Drew Scott told Patch that, as part of his responsibilities, he was often assigned to cover stories in Montauk.
When he was at Camp Hero, he said: “Every time I was there I would discover oddly I could never call my desk by cellphone, reception was always zero! Either I would resort to waiting until I got back into East Hampton or ask someone I was interviewing to use their ‘corded’ phone. Verizon and other companies would never explain the lack of reception despite the existence of cell towers.”
Greenport resident Jeff Goubeaud told Patch: “When I was in the Coast Guard working buoys off of Shagwong Reef, about five miles from Camp Hero, every time the radar would sweep us, all of our electronics would beep. My radar screen would flash all white. That goes to tell you how much radio frequency (rf) is being emitted from it. A lot.”
Former Riverhead Town Supervisor Yvette Aguiar said she had a co-op near Camp Hero for 10 years; she read all the books about the conspiracy theories and also about the area’s rich history. The tunnels, she said, were where soldiers transported equipment during WW1. “All armories in the U.S. are connected by rail,” she said.
Allen Schneider of the Hampton Bays Fire Department remembered Camp Hero. “When that radar was still in operation, every time it swept over Montauk, all of the radios and TVs in the area would buzz —and the TVs would have a vertical line go across the screen. Can you imagine people putting up with that today?”
Lisa Finn / Patch
When asked if he believes he was a victim of the rumored, sinister experiments, Loffreno said: “Something happened. I just don’t know what happened. I believe there were definitely kids being experimented on. And I would say I was involved with something.”
Lisa Finn / Patch
Years later when he worked at Camp Hero, Loffreno was able to, with a coworker, find the spot where he’d entered the “upside down house,” overgrown, but with the foundation still there. “I knew then that I was telling the truth and it had been confirmed by someone who had no claim to Montauk. It was confirmation that I wasn’t insane. Was it real? Something was real.”
Lisa Finn / Patch
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