Centralia:
The American Town That Has
Been on Fire for 60 Years
Centralia, Pennsylvania used to be a town. Population around 1,000 in its peak years — a coal mining community in the mountains of Columbia County, unremarkable except for what lies beneath it. The Mammoth Vein of anthracite coal, running for miles under the town and the surrounding hills, had been the reason for Centralia's existence since the 1860s. The mines brought people. The people built a town. The town had churches, schools, a post office, a fire company, the ordinary machinery of American small-town life.
In 1962, somebody set fire to the town landfill. The landfill was in an old strip mine pit at the edge of town, and the fire burned down through the garbage and into a coal seam. The coal seam connected to the Mammoth Vein. The fire spread underground.
Nobody has been able to put it out since. The fire has been burning for over sixty years. It will continue burning, geologists estimate, for at least another two hundred and fifty years. It will outlast everyone alive today. It will outlast everyone alive today's grandchildren. Centralia is gone, and the fire that took it is not finished.
How a Town Disappears
For the first decade, the fire was a nuisance rather than a catastrophe. Carbon monoxide readings in some basements were elevated. The ground was warmer than it should be in places. The town's residents were aware of it but not alarmed — mine fires were not unheard of in coal country, and the assumption was that it would eventually be contained or burn itself out.
It did neither. By the mid-1970s, the fire had spread significantly. Gas station owners began reporting that their underground storage tanks were heating their fuel. Gardens grew in January because the ground below them was warm. In some areas, the snow melted immediately after falling. Dogs refused to walk on certain sections of ground.
Then, in February 1981, a twelve-year-old boy named Todd Domboski was walking across his grandmother's backyard when the ground gave way beneath him. He fell into a sinkhole that had opened above a burning coal seam. The temperature at the bottom of the hole was over 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Carbon monoxide was pouring out of it. His cousin, who was nearby, pulled him out by his hands before he died. The hole was four feet wide and 150 feet deep.
"I heard him scream and I ran over and he was just — gone. There was a hole where he'd been standing. I couldn't see him. I got down and reached in and grabbed his wrist and just pulled. The heat coming out of that hole was unbelievable. I pulled him up and we ran. When we looked back the hole had gotten bigger. The ground around it was sinking."
— Todd's cousin, interviewed 1981The Evacuation
Congress allocated $42 million in 1984 to relocate Centralia's residents. Most took the offer. Their houses were demolished after they left. The streets remained — the grid of roads that had organized the town is still there, leading to empty lots where houses used to be. Street signs still stand at intersections that now go nowhere. The sidewalks lead to foundations, then grass.
A few residents refused to leave. They were eventually given lifetime rights to remain in their homes by the state of Pennsylvania, with the understanding that when they died, the properties would revert to the state. There are currently fewer than ten people living in Centralia. They live among the ruins of a town that is literally burning beneath their feet. They have lived there for decades. Some of them say they will die there.
What It Looks Like Now
Route 61, which used to pass through Centralia, was rerouted in the 1990s after the road became too damaged to use. The old section of highway is still there — a stretch of cracked asphalt that buckles and heaves where the heat and subsidence have worked on it from below. Steam and smoke rise from cracks in the pavement on cold days. The graffiti that visitors have been adding to the road for decades covers every visible surface. People come to see it from all over the world.
Walking the old Route 61 is one of the stranger experiences available to tourists in the United States. The road looks normal from a distance — just cracked and buckled, as old roads get. As you walk further, the cracks become larger and more frequent. The pavement begins to feel warm underfoot, even through shoes. On cold days, wisps of smoke emerge from fissures in the asphalt. The smell is sulfurous — not overwhelming, but present, reminding you that what you're walking on is a thin layer of material above something that has been burning continuously for longer than most people have been alive.
The hill above the road sometimes has steam rising from the ground itself — not from vents or pipes, but from the grass, from the soil, as if the earth itself is sweating. In winter, the hill stays green while the surrounding landscape is covered in snow. The temperature differential is visible from the road. You can see exactly where the fire is.
Silent Hill and the Legacy
The video game Silent Hill, released in 1999, and its 2006 film adaptation drew explicit inspiration from Centralia — a town consumed by underground fire, abandoned, shrouded in ash and smoke, populated only by things that should not be there. The game designers have confirmed the connection. The town in the game, like Centralia, is a place where something went wrong underground and the surface world never recovered.
Whether Centralia is haunted in the traditional sense is a question that visitors answer differently. There are no documented ghost sightings, no paranormal history in the usual sense. What there is instead is something harder to categorize: the experience of walking through a place that was a functioning community within living memory, where the only remaining residents are people who refused to leave a town that is actively on fire, where the road ends in steam and the ground is warm and the coal beneath your feet has been burning since 1962 and will be burning long after everyone who reads this sentence is dead.