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Murder At The Starcourt Mall
Why malls like Gwinnett Place, the backdrop for Stranger Things season 3, likely can’t come back from their ugly history.
There’s a scene towards the end of Stranger Things 3 in which a newspaper headline dismisses the season’s climactic Mind Flayer battle in the food court as “the Starcourt Mall fire”, presumably attributing it to a gas explosion.
What some may not know is that Gwinnett Place Mall, a shopping centre on the outskirts of Atlanta that was repurposed as Starcourt, is home to a tragedy of its own. A grisly incident that occurred, coincidentally, in the food court.
In late 2017, the body of a Georgia State University student named Silling Man was found in the backroom of an abandoned Subway. By the time Man’s body was discovered, around 2 weeks after her death, it was badly decomposed.
How did a decaying corpse go undetected for so long? With swathes of vacant storefronts and a food court that’s long been empty, this 1.25 million square foot shopping centre is a ghost mall.
Simply put, there was no-one there to find her.
From Subway to Hawkins Heroes
The murder remained unsolved for a significant amount of time until Man’s…
