Centralia: The Pennsylvania Town That Has Burned for Sixty Years

The road you are driving simply gives up. Ahead of the barrier the asphalt is buckled and split, and from the cracks, on a cold morning, rise slow ribbons of steam. There is no town at the end of this road anymore. There is, however, still a fire under it.

Centralia sits in Columbia County, in Pennsylvania's anthracite coal region, and in 1960 it was an unremarkable borough of about a thousand people, with churches, taverns and a legion hall sitting on top of a honeycomb of old mine workings. In May 1962, in the most widely accepted account, a fire set to tidy up the town landfill before Memorial Day was lit in an old strip-mine pit near the Odd Fellows Cemetery. The pit had an unsealed opening into the abandoned mines below. The trash fire found the coal seam, and the coal seam has been burning ever since.

The slow eviction

For nearly twenty years the fire was a nuisance rather than a catastrophe. Containment attempts, trenches, flushing the mines with wet fly ash, all failed or ran out of money, and the burn front kept creeping under the town. Residents noticed warm cellar walls and wilting vegetation; carbon monoxide monitors started appearing in living rooms. The turning point came on February 14, 1981, when twelve-year-old Todd Domboski was crossing a backyard and the ground opened under him, a steaming subsidence hole that he survived by catching hold of a tree root until his cousin pulled him out. The plume from that hole was later found to carry lethal levels of carbon monoxide, and Centralia became a national story.

In 1983, after engineers estimated that stopping the fire would cost more than the town was worth, Congress funded a voluntary relocation of roughly forty-two million dollars. Most residents took the offer. In 1992 the state invoked eminent domain on the holdouts; in 2002 the post office revoked the town's ZIP code; and in 2013 a legal settlement allowed the last handful of residents to stay in their homes for the rest of their lives, after which the properties revert to the state. The borough that had over a thousand people in 1960 now has a population you can count on your fingers.

What a visitor actually finds

Centralia today is a grid of paved streets with almost nothing on them, curbs and driveways serving houses that no longer exist, which is precisely why it became a pilgrimage site for urban explorers. The abandoned stretch of Route 61, nicknamed the Graffiti Highway once every inch of it had been spray-painted, was buried under truckloads of dirt by its owner in 2020 to end the traffic. The Ukrainian Catholic church on the hill still holds services; the cemeteries are still tended, and steam still rises among the headstones in winter, which does the atmospheric work no ghost story could improve on. The screenwriter of the 2006 Silent Hill film has cited Centralia as an inspiration for the game's adaptation, and the association stuck.

There is nothing paranormal about any of it. Coal-seam fires are a known, global phenomenon; the Jharia coalfield fires in India have burned for over a century, and Burning Mountain in Australia is thought to have smoldered for millennia. Estimates for Centralia's remaining fuel run to a century or more of burning. The eeriness is entirely human in origin, which has never once stopped a visitor from feeling watched on those empty streets, and the town has accumulated its share of testimony, shadows against the steam at dusk, figures in the treeline along the buried highway, told by people who went looking for graffiti, not ghosts.

Our readers file reports from places like this, abandoned towns, dead roads, buildings that outlived their reasons, and the jury below votes each one True, Fake or Not sure. If Centralia has taught you anything about how a place can feel occupied after everyone leaves, weigh in on their cases.