Fans of Netflix‘s Stranger Things will probably have to wait until 2019 to see the third season of the show, but if you’re looking to be freaked out and confused in the midwest, this farm has you covered.
Hawkins, Indiana, might not be a real place, but Lafayette, Indiana, totally is. Purdue University, one of the nation’s top agricultural schools, is nearby, so maybe it’s not surprising that a local farm figured out how to build an incredibly detailed, 20-acre Stranger Things-themed corn maze.
The photographs above have not been retouched. The maze is actually that detailed.
It’s part of Exploration Acres, a tourist farm in Northwest Indiana that also features a pumpkin patch, fire pits, and a “corn cannon”—a device that “uses compressed air to hurl ears of corn up to 500 feet. Kids will love it!”
The maze is certainly the farm’s crown jewel, though. It’s already incredibly impressive, but it becomes even more so when you learn that the field was not cut to make the pattern; rather the corn was planted in June and grew into the shape of the maze.
“The whole maze was actually planted at night in the dark using GPS guidance from satellites in lunar orbit,” Tim Fitzgerald, president of the farm, told Indiana Public Media. “A tractor with a special planter, equipped with an iPad and special software was used to plant the seeds in a dot matrix pattern. It’s similar to how an inkjet printer head works, but we used a planter.”
Fitzgerald said that his daughter encouraged him to check out Stranger Things and he quickly became a huge fan. He started talking to Netflix back in January about building the maze based on the show, and the company was not only on board, it worked with him on the design.
He said his favorite part of the maze is the depiction of Eleven (or Jane, as we now know her first name to be), who he says “looks like a sorcerer commanding energy from the Shadow Monster overhead.”
“If you look closely, we were able to create a special effect that looks like pulsating energy around the lightning bolts,” he told the publication. “That was only possible with the new planter technology. It could never have been tilled to produce that effect.”
And perhaps the strangest thing of all? The farm has been constructing mazes for over a decade, and this just happens to be number 11.
Tickets are $9.50 for adults and $7 for kids ages 6-12. Children under 6 are free. You can buy your tickets now, but the farm doesn’t officially open until Sept. 14.
