Centralia, Pennsylvania

We love apocalypse stories: ghost towns, barren streets, and that air of absolute mystery makes us feel giddy and excited. Centralia is a real-world ghost town and it’s about as close to a literal hell on Earth as you’re likely to find. A coal-mining powerhouse in its heyday, a ferocious fire tore the town apart and started a chain-reaction underground which has burned ever since. Poisonous smoke filters up through the ground to this day but has long since killed of any sign of plant life on the surface. The toxic carbon monoxide that flooded the town started an evacuation of the entire population and has left nothing but a barren wasteland in its wake. Home now only to graffiti and occasional daredevil sightseers, Centralia is one of the most deadly places on earth. To this day the ground is still warm to the touch, even in the depths of winter… Barring Chernobyl, Centralia is probably the most famous of these "waste lands," and proves just as interesting. Centralia was a mining town where locals labored tirelessly in anthracite coal mines. Unfortunately, the network of coal mines that brought wealth to the region also became the towns demise. A fire started in the mine directly beneath the town, forcing the inhabitants to find new communities. The fire has been burning beneath the pavement of Centralia since 1962 and shows no sign of slowing down. It will likely burn for generations to come. It’s not known for sure what started the fire that eventually drove a city of more than 1,000 residents down to just a handful. The best theory is that it was started at a nearby landfill. In 1962, the city hired a volunteer fire crew to clean out the town landfill in a local strip mine—an endeavor which involved burning trash. After the crew extinguished the intentional fire they realized that a vein of coal had ignited. The ensuing blaze engulfed the extensive coal mines but residents were unaware of the dangers posed by the fire until the late seventies. Locals grew concerned in 1979 when a gas station owner noticed that the gas he was pumping was hotter than normal and when he lowered a thermometer it came back reading 172 degrees Fahrenheit. It took years of complaints about headaches and dizziness before it finally came to light why the residents were so sick, the subterranean fire was pumping carbon monoxide into the air. In 1981, a 12-year-old boy almost fell to his death down a sinkhole that opened in his backyard. National media attention motivated Congress to allocate funds for a relocation effort. The majority of residents accepted offers to move to neighboring communities. Humans are remarkably resistant to being pushed out of their homes, and a handful of dedicated residents have remained in Centralia in the decades since that first spark. Most famous are the Lokitis, profiled in the 2007 documentary The Town That Was they are joined by approximately ten additional residents who have refused to leave their family homes. The funny thing is Centralia isn't the blasted hellhole that you might imagine. It’s not a town shrouded in Silent Hill-esque smoke, killing and choking all who enter. By all accounts there are cracks in the surface of the ground and smoke does billow forth but it’s hardly all-encompassing. All it takes to get to Centralia is to drive up Highway 61 from nearby Ashland, and while the road is technically closed it’s open enough for Google Street View cars to pass through. On a nice day, you may even run into a handful of tourists. With the obvious visual signs of the disaster being comparatively tame you can see why some hard-core residents think the disaster has been exaggerated. For years the remaining locals have been fighting the eminent domain seizure, citing evidence that the fire is receding or almost out. Some residents even assert that the whole push to evict Centralia is actually part of a conspiracy to gain access to the rich anthracite coal mines beneath the town. As the inferno is pegged to rage on for at least two centuries the cost of defeating it continues to mount. We can only imagine the cost of extinguishing the Centralia fire now—in 1981 it was pegged at $660 million—it’s costly enough that the state of Pennsylvania would rather oust the town’s residents than fight it. Only a few buildings are left in the ghost town, among invisible carbon monoxide fumes and cemeteries which receive far fewer visitors. Centralia may be lost to the flames but it will continue to stand as one of the deadliest towns in the United States.