Laura Wright 
There are ghost towns abandoned because the railroad moved.
Others disappeared when the mines closed, the timber ran out, or industry simply left them behind.
Centralia, Pennsylvania, is different.
The town was abandoned because the ground beneath it caught fire.
It is still burning.
For more than sixty years, an underground coal-mine fire has moved through the abandoned workings beneath Centralia, producing toxic gases, opening dangerous fissures and causing the earth itself to collapse.
Most of the houses are gone.
Most of the people are gone.
Even the highway that once carried travelers through the area had to be abandoned.
Centralia has become one of America’s strangest ghost towns, but there is nothing supernatural about the force that destroyed it.
The truth is considerably more unsettling.
The fire is real, and nobody knows exactly when it will finally go out.
Before the Fire
Centralia lies in the anthracite coal region of Columbia County, Pennsylvania.
Settlement in the area preceded the borough itself. A community known as Bull’s Head and later Centreville existed there early in the nineteenth century. Coal mining began in the area by the 1840s, and Centralia was officially incorporated as a borough in 1866.
Coal shaped the town.
Generations of families lived among the mines that provided their livelihoods. Churches, businesses and homes filled the streets. At its height, Centralia was an ordinary Pennsylvania mining community.
That ordinariness is important.
Centralia wasn’t constructed over some mysterious natural inferno.
People lived there for generations before anything unusual happened.
Then came May 1962.
The Fire Begins
The familiar explanation begins with garbage.
Centralia used an abandoned strip-mining pit near the edge of town as a dump.
In May 1962, a fire was burning in the refuse there. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection says the fire reportedly originated when residential trash was deliberately burned in the abandoned pit. Unfortunately, the old mining excavation had not been adequately separated from nearby coal-bearing material.
The garbage fire reached combustible material.
Then it reached coal.
From there, it entered the abandoned mine workings beneath the area.
A routine attempt to dispose of trash had ignited something vastly more difficult to control.
A Fire Beneath the Earth
A coal-seam fire is not like a burning building.
You cannot simply point a hose at it.
Centralia sat above a complicated network of abandoned mines, tunnels and coal seams. Once fire entered that subterranean maze, it could move underground through passages that were difficult even to map accurately.
Attempts to stop it began almost immediately.
Workers tried excavating burning material.
They attempted to seal areas.
They drilled holes and pumped in mixtures intended to deprive the fire of oxygen.
Trenches were dug in attempts to isolate it.
Millions of dollars were spent.
Nothing worked permanently. Between 1962 and 1978 alone, state and federal authorities spent approximately $3.3 million attempting to control the fire.
Centralia had acquired an underground furnace.
And it was growing.
At First, It Was Almost a Curiosity
One of the strangest things about the Centralia disaster is how gradually the danger became apparent.
The town didn’t suddenly disappear beneath flames.
For years, people continued living above the fire.
Heat escaping from underground produced peculiar effects. Smithsonian later recorded the recollection of a resident who remembered harvesting tomatoes around Christmas because the soil had become unnaturally warm. Snow sometimes melted where heat escaped from below.
Those effects could almost seem amusing.
Then residents began losing consciousness inside their homes.
Carbon monoxide was entering buildings.
The novelty was over.
Something dangerous was moving beneath Centralia.
The Gas Station
In 1979, gasoline station owner John Coddington reportedly became concerned about the temperature of fuel stored underground.
He lowered a dipstick into one of his tanks.
It came back hot.
The temperature of the gasoline was reportedly measured at approximately 172 degrees Fahrenheit.
A gas station sitting above an underground coal fire is not a situation anyone wants to contemplate for very long.
But an even more dramatic event would finally convince many people that Centralia itself had become unsafe.
The Ground Opens
On Valentine’s Day in 1981, twelve-year-old Todd Domboski was walking through his grandmother’s yard when the earth suddenly collapsed beneath him.
A sinkhole opened.
Todd fell into it.
The opening was reportedly around four feet wide and rapidly expanded beneath the surface into a much larger cavity. Hot gases were rising from below.
Todd survived because his cousin managed to pull him out.
The gases emerging from the hole contained potentially lethal concentrations of carbon monoxide. The incident became a turning point in public perception of the Centralia fire.
The danger was no longer hypothetical.
The ground beneath someone’s backyard had tried to swallow a child.
Moving Centralia
By the early 1980s, officials faced an increasingly difficult reality.
Extinguishing the entire fire might cost an extraordinary amount of money.
A 1983 study estimated that doing so could require approximately $663 million.
Moving the town would be cheaper.
In 1984, Congress appropriated $42 million for voluntary property acquisition and relocation.
Between 1985 and 1991, 545 residences and businesses were acquired, and their occupants were relocated.
Families left homes they had occupied for generations.
Businesses closed.
Buildings were demolished.
A town didn’t disappear because everyone decided to leave.
It was deliberately dismantled because continuing to live there had become too dangerous.
Some People Refused to Go
Not everyone agreed.
For some residents, Centralia wasn’t simply real estate sitting above a fire.
It was home.
Families had lived there for generations. Their relatives were buried there. Their lives were tied to the town long before anyone accidentally ignited the coal beneath it.
Some residents questioned whether every portion of Centralia faced equal danger. Others objected to government efforts to condemn their properties.
Legal battles continued for years.
Eventually, an agreement allowed a small number of remaining property owners to live out their lives in Centralia, after which their properties would pass through eminent domain.
The town therefore never became completely empty.
Centralia became something stranger.
A nearly abandoned town where a handful of people continued living among the empty streets.
Route 61
The fire eventually attacked the roads as well.
Pennsylvania Route 61 once passed directly through the affected area.
Heat and subsidence damaged the pavement.
The road cracked.
Sections buckled.
Steam escaped through openings.
Authorities repaired the highway, but the underground movement continued. In 1992 the damaged section was closed, and by 1993 traffic was permanently rerouted.
The abandoned section eventually became one of Centralia’s most famous landmarks.
People began covering it with graffiti.
Eventually it became known simply as the Graffiti Highway.
The Graffiti Highway Is Gone
For years, photographs of the abandoned highway became almost synonymous with Centralia.
Visitors walked along a deserted roadway covered from edge to edge with enormous painted names, pictures and messages.
Steam occasionally escaped through cracks.
Trees encroached from both sides.
It looked wonderfully post-apocalyptic.
Then, in 2020, the privately owned section was covered with enormous quantities of dirt to discourage trespassing.
That is worth updating from the older version of this article.
The famous Graffiti Highway visitors remember from photographs is no longer openly exposed in its former condition.
And there is a good reason not to go searching for dangerous alternatives.
Centralia Is Not a Safe Tourist Attraction
Centralia’s reputation has attracted photographers, paranormal enthusiasts, urban explorers and people simply curious to see an American town destroyed by an underground fire.
But the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection is remarkably direct about the danger.
The area affected by the mine fire can contain dangerous gases, and the ground is susceptible to sudden collapse.
The agency strongly discourages people from entering the immediate fire area.
That isn’t bureaucratic melodrama.
Remember Todd Domboski.
Solid-looking ground can have empty mine workings beneath it.
Centralia is interesting precisely because the danger cannot always be seen.
Is Centralia Still Burning?
Yes.
The Pennsylvania DEP continues to list the Centralia mine fire as active and monitors its environmental impact. Its official chronology states simply that from 1993 to the present, the fire continues to spread.
Older estimates suggested the fire could continue burning for 250 years along an underground area extending for miles if eventually left to exhaust the available coal.
That number shouldn’t be interpreted as a countdown clock.
Underground fires don’t behave that neatly.
Conditions change.
Fuel varies.
Sections may extinguish while others remain active.
The unsettling fact is simpler.
Nobody alive when the Centralia fire began in 1962 should have expected it to remain active more than sixty years later.
Yet it does.
Could It Spread to Other Towns?
The original version of this article suggested that the fire might eventually consume all the underground coal and force surrounding towns to evacuate.
That needs some qualification.
The Centralia fire has spread through connected underground workings and also affected Byrnesville, another nearby community that was eventually abandoned and demolished.
But that does not mean the fire is destined to travel indefinitely beneath every neighboring town.
Underground geology, mine configuration, available coal and barriers all influence where a mine fire can travel.
The situation is serious enough without turning Centralia into a subterranean fire monster slowly consuming Pennsylvania.
Reality has already supplied plenty.
Centralia and Silent Hill
Centralia is frequently described as the inspiration for Silent Hill.
There is some truth here, but the story requires an important distinction.
The original Silent Hill video games were not created from Centralia.
The connection came later.
Director Christophe Gans used Centralia as an inspiration when adapting the game into the 2006 film Silent Hill. The film’s version of the town therefore incorporated the idea of an underground mine fire and an abandoned community.
That association became so strong that people subsequently began claiming Centralia inspired the entire franchise.
It didn’t.
Centralia influenced the movie adaptation, not the original Japanese game.
Ironically, Centralia hardly needed Silent Hill.
It was already strange enough.
A Real Town Becomes an Imaginary One
The comparison is easy to understand.
A deserted street disappears into the distance.
Empty lots mark places where houses once stood.
Roads terminate unexpectedly.
Smoke or steam sometimes rises from the ground.
Signs warn of poisonous gases and subsidence.
Beneath everything is a fire nobody can see.
Centralia possesses the atmosphere horror writers spend considerable effort trying to invent.
But unlike Silent Hill, the town’s tragedy didn’t require monsters.
It required geology, abandoned mines, one badly placed fire and a series of failed attempts to contain it.
Is Centralia Haunted?
Centralia inevitably accumulated ghost stories.
How could it not?
It is literally a ghost town.
Visitors have described strange feelings, unexplained sounds and the sensation of being watched. Abandoned mining communities throughout Appalachia and Pennsylvania frequently generate similar stories.
There is no compelling evidence demonstrating that Centralia possesses unusual paranormal activity.
But it would be a mistake to think the town has no ghosts simply because we cannot measure them.
Not necessarily supernatural ones.
Centralia is filled with absence.
A driveway remains, but the house is gone.
A sidewalk goes nowhere.
Trees grow where families once lived.
Streets survive after the neighborhoods they served have disappeared.
Those places can produce an extraordinarily powerful psychological effect because the landscape itself tells you something is missing.
The Cemeteries Remain
Perhaps the most poignant remnants of Centralia are its cemeteries.
The living were relocated.
Many of the dead remained.
Graves belonging to generations of residents still occupy ground around the nearly vanished community.
Smithsonian described one remaining resident looking toward St. Ignatius Cemetery while smoke and steam escaped from fissures near the graves.
There is something almost mythological about that image.
A town destroyed by fire beneath the earth.
The houses disappear.
The streets empty.
But the cemetery remains.
If someone were writing Centralia as fiction, an editor might complain that it was a little too obvious.
Hell Beneath the Town
That imagery naturally produced descriptions of Centralia as a kind of hell on Earth.
Fire burns underground.
Poisonous gases emerge from cracks.
The earth opens without warning.
Smoke rises from cemeteries.
Roads buckle.
A town disappears.
Yet the cause isn’t supernatural.
That may actually make Centralia more disturbing.
There is no curse to lift.
No restless spirit to appease.
No demon to exorcise.
The thing beneath Centralia doesn’t know the town exists.
It simply burns.
What Really Destroyed Centralia?
It is tempting to say the fire destroyed Centralia.
That’s only partly true.
The fire started the process.
But Centralia disappeared through a combination of the underground disaster, failed control efforts, government relocation, property condemnation and demolition.
People argued bitterly about whether evacuation was necessary and whether more could have been done to extinguish the fire earlier.
By the time authorities committed fully to relocation, saving Centralia itself was no longer considered economically practical.
The town therefore became a casualty not of one dramatic catastrophe but of a disaster unfolding over decades.
That slow destruction is part of what makes the story so strange.
There was no single day when Centralia died.
It simply became less of a town every year.
A Town Above a Fire
Today, Centralia survives in an extraordinary state somewhere between existence and disappearance.
The borough still has a name.
Roads still cross the landscape.
A few structures and residents remain.
Cemeteries preserve the names of people who lived there before the fire.
But most of the town has been erased.
Underneath it, the Buck Mountain coal seam continues burning. Pennsylvania authorities still monitor the fire, more than six decades after it began.
Eventually it will stop.
Perhaps the remaining coal will be exhausted.
Perhaps geological conditions will isolate portions of the fire.
Perhaps some future technology will make extinguishing it practical.
But Centralia itself is unlikely ever to return to what it was.
That town belongs to another time now.
There is something appropriately haunting about the thought.
In 1962, someone set fire to garbage in an abandoned mining pit.
Nobody standing there could have imagined that the flames would still be burning in the twenty-first century.
They certainly could not have imagined that the fire would eventually consume not the buildings above it, but the town’s future.
Centralia didn’t burn down.
It burned under.
And more than sixty years later, somewhere beneath those empty Pennsylvania streets, it is still burning.
Want to learn more about this mysterious place? Here are some links:
- Centralia, Pennsylvania @ Wikipedia
- Centralia, Pennsylvania- Photographs and accounts.
About the Author
Very intriguing. I have heard about abandoned towns in the northeast. A famous one is in the northwestern area of Connecticut. I forgot the name. Witnesses over the years have claimed that it is a very disturbing, even scary, place. I don’t recall it’s name right off, but it is well known. I have never visited the area, but I have seen pictures. The only evidence of its haunted nature is the oppressive, “I-feel-as-if-I’m-being-watched” feeling that visitors have experienced while there. Perhaps that was due to tricks of the mind spurred on by the area’s legendary status and ongoing stories, or there may possibly be some other possibility, not excluding the paranormal but also taking into account natural phenomena.
Have you heard about this?
Hi!
No, I haven’t heard of any that far north, but have heard of many out West. I know PA is supposed to have several, not on fire like Centrilia, but abandoned coal towns. I’m in VA and there are many, many abandoned coal towns in the region. I’ve wanted to visit them for years, but haven’t gotten to it. I’ve just seen photographs. I’d imagine they’re feeling as if they’re being watched for a reason. I always thought any place, be it a factory or coal field, where the workers were brutally treated (and killed), would have some sort of activity. I don’t know how they couldn’t have activity. Well, it’s the same with asylums, I’ve always believed they would naturally be a hotbed of paranormal activity due to the extremities involved when they were inhabited.
agree. Those locations that have a harrowing history of violence, pain, mistreatment and death, such as Waverly Hills, are likely to leave behind remnant elements of some sorts that are paranormal in nature; at least that’s what the patterns show. The theory goes that the spirits of those who die traumatic deaths are likely to
stick at or near the location of their death, trapped or confused. Detractors, however, suggest that locations filled with historic stories and legends of death seem paranormal because the imagination takes flight. If this is the case, why have a number of people experienced or encountered the same phenomena? Each
person’s imagination is different, so no two people are likely to experience or encounter the exact same thing. This is where the number of witness come into play and why it’s important that those investigating such locations not be subject to them in solitary.
As for the abandoned towns in question, the fact that a number of people have experienced similar sensations lends credence to the belief that such sources of discomfort lie outside the imagination. Still, does that mean that the conclusion has to be paranormal in nature? I wouldn’t exclude it, but I would not exclude anything non-paranormal either. If such phenomena are non-paranormal, what can these sources be?
R1
I think if a number of people report the same thing, there must be something there. People will always have stories and I’m sure a few will be influenced in some way. But, thinking you might’ve heard a voice here or there, or see a shadow, is far from physical encounters or physical touch, which is what you often hear in such cases (i.e. someone’s shoulder was touched, someone had some kind of physical contact). I’m sure that will always be argued from skeptics as they have to assume a contrary position. When you can’t find a substantial argument, you resort to imagination or some mental challenge that honestly can’t be proven one way or the other.
I would accept it as paranormal, but expect that others won’t. Many people have an innate sense of the paranormal, whether you want to call it psychic ability or not. We just sense it. But, until the closed-minded are convinced (or retire :-)), we’ll probably have these same battles to wage anytime something extraordinary does happen. But, that’s okay. Progress, even in a tiny amount, is still progress.