Stranger Things: Vecna’s Identity and Origin Revealed

In Stranger Things Season 4, Vecna is the main villain. This is established very early on in the first episode itself. However, after seeing creatures like the Demogorgon and the Mind Flayer, this was the first time we saw someone remotely humanlike as a villain.  

Fans began to question who was the person or character behind Vecna. What were Vecna’s identity and origin story? Well, let me help you answer that.  

Vecna is Peter Ballard aka 001 Henry Creel. He is the first experiment subject of Dr. Martin Brenner aka Papa. In a Season 1 fight with Eleven, she flings him so hard that a gate to the Upside Down is created. His entire outer skin burns, and he turns into Vecna.  

Vecna is by far the scariest villain we’ve seen so far in the Stranger Things universe. One reason for this could be that he’s more human than others, and hence everything he says and does in this season hits us harder.  

The origin story of Vecna begins with Victor Creel. After the war, the man and his family shifted to Hawkins and bought a house there. For the first month, everything seemed to be well. However, soon after, his daughter, his wife, and he started having disturbing visions.  

He also mentioned how his son was a “sensitive” person, and he wasn’t all right either. According to Victor Creel, these visions were the work of a satanic spirit who was the epitome of evil.  

Soon, they started occurring more frequently. The family also started having nightmares, and eventually, there came a time when the entire family died in the same house, except for him. His wife and daughter’s bodies were disfigured and broken, and their eyes weren’t even in the sockets.  

However, his son, Henry, was merely unconscious. He was then admitted to a hospital, but he too succumbed to his injuries a few days later.

Another aspect of the story is Eleven’s quest to regain her powers. She is made to relive her past trauma and the events that led her to gain her powers for the first time and escape the facility.  

When Eleven was a kid, she had a friend called Peter Ballard. This was an elder boy, called the Orderly, who helped through the various exercises meant to train the kids in the facility.

Peter had telekinetic powers where he could move things with his mind and, to a great extent, even control people’s minds. However, he had an inhibitor chip that controlled these powers. Somehow, he managed to convince Eleven of two things. One was to destroy this inhibitor chip, and the other was to escape from Martin Brenner and the facility.  

However, things took a dark turn when Peter started mercilessly killing all the children in the facility. He tried to convince El about how kids and humans are unfit for this planet. He even said that the world is meant for evolved human beings such as himself.  

He wanted someone to be his partner to help him destroy the world, but El disagreed with his plans. The two got into a fight, and that’s when she got her powers. She flung him into a wall and kept him stuck there for a while before pushing him so hard that she created the first gate to the Upside Down and threw Peter into it.  

Peter’s entire outer skin burned. He turned into Vecna and was left to reside in the Upside Down. But we still didn’t know who Peter Ballard was until the show revealed it in the final moments of Season 4 Part 1. 

Vecna is trying to kill Nancy, and while he does so, he tells her his story. Vecna says that he is none other than Henry Creel, Victor Creel’s son. He explains how he and his family had come to Hawkins after the war. He was different from them and had certain powers, which he perfected by killing a rabbit, destroying a clock, and more.  

After a while, he befriended some black widow spiders and realized that the world, its systems, and the mentality of humans are just too sick and twisted for him. However, before he shifted here, his mom wanted him to see a doctor who could help him with whatever he was going through.  

As a result, he slowly tortured his entire family and ended up killing them. In the process, he became unconscious because it was all too much for him. Hence, he couldn’t kill his father, Victor Creel.  

When he woke up in the hospital, he saw Dr. Martin Brenner, who got his idea for the experiment that started it all. This meant that unlike what Victor Creel thought, his son wasn’t dead. In fact, he was the one who killed his entire family. Henry Creel aka Peter Ballard thus became the first subject of Dr. Martin Brenner and came to be known as 001.  

This revelation was indeed a shock that none of us had expected. It also answers some questions, such as how the first gate to the Upside Down opened and brought us closer to the show’s main villain. Stranger Things Season 4 Part 2 releases on July 1, and I just cannot wait!

About Stranger Things

Stranger Things is an American sci-fi horror TV series created by The Duffer Brothers for Netflix. 

Set in the 1980s in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, the show follows the story of a young girl called Eleven, who has superpowers and her adventures with her group of friends. These dangerous adventurers include surviving in and saving a town that has an evil parallel universe attached to it called the Upside Down.

It stars Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo, Sadie Sink, Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, and Maya Hawke. The show has been renewed for a fifth and final season.