Centralia: The Pennsylvania ghost town with a 50-year-old fire

Hidden in Northeast Pennsylvania, there’s a once-booming mining community that now stands as one of the most unsettling ghost towns in the United States.

Some could describe Centralia, PA, as standing on top of a quite literal gate to an infernal underground. However, reality is more mundane, though equally horrifying.

If you visit Centralia now, you will find empty, decaying streets, ragged roads, and a mysterious smoke and fire that billows from the underground.

A fire broke out in one of the town’s many coal mines in 1962. Local authorities, unable to deal with a blaze of such magnitude, thought that it would eventually die out. They were wrong.

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Six decades later, the fire still rages on, with stacks of smoke cracking from the ground and sinkholes being a danger for the few visitors.

Smithsonian Magazine describes how sulfurous steam emanates from hundreds of holes and fissures across the town. Dead trees, ruined vegetation, and utter despair is the landscape that makes up Centralia.

Coal, which once was Centralia’s life force, ultimately has become its doom. The town went from having 1,000 inhabitants in the early 1960s to 5 in 2020, per US Census data.

Movies, such as 'Nothing But Trouble' and 'Silent Hill', have taken inspiration in the eerie nature of Centralia to depict strange, twisted villages.

Let’s go back and understand how a tiny mining community turned into something that looks like a potential setting for a Stephen King story.

The history of Centralia has been marked by the coal industry since its foundation in 1866, for the better or the worse. Usually for the worse.

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Alexander Rae, the town fonder, was murdered in the nearby woods in 1868 by the Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society seeking to protect the rights of poor Irish immigrants working in the local mines.

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Despite the clash between local authorities and the Molly Maguires, Centralia prospered thanks to its coal mines.

In The town’s zenith was in the 1890s when reportedly the population reached almost 3,000 denizens, mostly working on 14 coal mines.

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The town of Centralia suffered a major blow by the Wall Street Clash of 1929, however, that was not enough to kill this Pennsylvania village.

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According to the History Channel website, in May 1962 the town council decided to clean Centralia’s garbage dump in preparations of Memorial Day.

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One of the town’s abandoned mines was used by the locals as a garbage dump, and the method the local government decided to clean the waste? Fire.

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Fire soon spread out to a coal seam underneath Centralia, reaching to the other mines. Local mines had to close due to deadly carbon monoxide levels.

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There were many attempts to excavate and put out the fire. They all failed, since it was nearly impossible to determinate how far and deep goes the underground blaze.

The website Cracked has described that the fire that burns underneath Centralia is as hot as Mercury and as poisonous as the surface of Saturn, pictured here. Truly something of this world.

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Now the infernal underground fire continues on as Centralia, Pennsylvania stands still as a ghost town out of a horror movie.