Centralia Is Still Burning Underground Since 1962

In 1962, someone in a small Pennsylvania coal town decided to burn the municipal dump, the way it was done every year right before Memorial Day. That supposedly routine bonfire never quite went out. It slipped through a crack into an old abandoned strip mine and found a coal seam stretching more than eight miles. More than sixty years later, that fire is still burning underground. Even so, the town, Centralia, is technically still on the map; almost nobody lives there anymore.

A fire that’s still burning underground and ate an entire town

Centralia once had more than 1,000 residents at its peak. Back then it had shops, churches, and generations of mining families. There’s a competing theory about how the fire actually started — that it had really been smoldering since an unextinguished 1932 blaze. Still, what nobody disputes is what happened next: the fire, fed by the very coal that had built the town’s economy, crept slowly through the underground tunnels for years with nothing able to stop it. Firebreaks, flooding the tunnels, drilling — none of it worked. Coal is, basically, more fuel than you’d ever need to keep something like this from ever going out on its own.

The hole that changed everything

For nearly two decades, plenty of residents shrugged the whole thing off; smoke seeping out of cracks in the ground had practically become part of the scenery. That changed on Valentine’s Day, 1981, when a 12-year-old boy named Todd Domboski was walking through his backyard and the ground opened beneath him. He dropped several feet into a sinkhole that turned out to be nearly 150 feet deep and filled with lethal levels of carbon monoxide. Luckily, he survived by grabbing onto tree roots until his cousin managed to pull him out.

As a result, the scare sped up what was already coming. In 1984, the U.S. Congress approved more than $42 million to relocate residents, and in 1992 Pennsylvania declared every property in town subject to eminent domain and seized it. By 2002, Centralia had even lost its official zip code.

The graffiti highway that no longer exists

A stretch of State Route 61, directly above the fire that’s still burning underground, had to be closed in 1994. The asphalt was cracking, steam was venting from the ground, and parts of the road were literally sinking. For years, that mile of abandoned blacktop became a giant canvas known as the Graffiti Highway, drawing curious visitors from across the country. In 2020, the landowner had it covered with dirt and rock to keep people away. Still, today not a trace of those colors is left.

Did it really inspire Silent Hill?

This is the question that comes up most about Centralia, and the honest answer is “only half true.” The original 1999 video game wasn’t actually based on Centralia — its Japanese creators looked at abandoned towns around Chicago for inspiration instead. But Christophe Gans, who directed the 2006 Silent Hill film, confirmed something more specific. According to Looper, screenwriter Roger Avary drew directly on Centralia’s story to build the fog-and-fume-choked ghost town in the movie.

What’s left today

In 2013, the last eight residents who had refused to leave reached a settlement with the state: they would receive $349,500 in compensation and would be allowed to live out their lives in their homes. That said, once they’re gone, the state reclaims and demolishes the property. Still, today only a handful of residents remain in a town that, on paper, shouldn’t really exist anymore.

And that fire — still burning underground — hasn’t gone anywhere. According to mining engineers’ estimates reported by Mining.com, there’s enough coal left in the seam to keep it burning for another 50 to 250 years. Therefore, the only way to fully put it out would be to excavate the entire coal field beneath the town, a project estimated at around $600 million. So for now, Centralia will keep quietly smoldering for generations to come, long after the last resident who remembers it as a living town is gone too.

If you like stories about unusual American towns, don’t miss Whittier, the Alaska town that fits inside a single building.