There’s a town in Pennsylvania where, on a cold day, you can walk through the woods and stumble on a crack in the ground breathing hot steam. It’s not a geyser, and it’s not a roadside gimmick: Centralia burns underground, nonstop, since May 1962, fed by a coal mine fire. The town once had over a thousand residents; today, four houses are still standing.
A trash fire that was only supposed to last an afternoon
The most widely accepted version of events is almost too absurd to be true. In May 1962, Centralia’s town council hired volunteer firefighters to burn off the municipal dump ahead of Memorial Day, something the town did every year without incident. The catch was that this particular dump sat inside an old open-pit mine. That pit, in turn, had a crack running straight down into a coal seam connected to the maze of mining tunnels underneath the town.
Nobody fully put that fire out. The embers worked their way through the crack, found the coal, and within weeks a routine cleanup burn had turned into an underground fire no hose could reach. To make things worse, anthracite coal is unusually dense and burns extremely slowly, which is exactly the kind of fuel you don’t want catching fire if you ever plan on putting it out.
From a thousand neighbors to four houses
Through the 1970s, while Centralia burns underground largely unnoticed below their feet, residents started noticing things were off: the ground stayed warm and snow melted where it shouldn’t. In 1981, a 12-year-old boy nearly died when his backyard suddenly opened up beneath him, swallowing him into a sinkhole until a cousin pulled him out by grabbing tree roots. That sinkhole, more than 100 feet deep and filled with scorching gas, was the wake-up call the government couldn’t ignore any longer.
Congress approved over $42 million to relocate nearly everyone. In 1992, the state of Pennsylvania also used eminent domain to seize every remaining property in the borough. In 2002, the Postal Service pulled the town’s own ZIP code (17927) — there was no longer any point keeping one for roughly twenty people. A small group of holdouts refused to leave, and after a legal fight that dragged on until 2013, the state granted them the right to stay in their homes until they die, at which point the properties revert to the state. A handful of houses remain today, scattered along streets that no longer appear on any map.
So why does Centralia still burn underground?
According to mining engineers cited by History.com, the fire has enough fuel left to keep burning for another 100 to 250 years if left alone. Putting it out for good, however, would require excavating the entire coal seam under the region — a price tag nobody is willing to pay. So the official plan, for decades now, has basically been: let it burn, and keep an eye out for new sinkholes.
Centralia also owes part of its fame to a rumor that isn’t quite true. It’s often said the town inspired the Silent Hill video game (1999), but the series’ own art director, Masahiro Ito, has said the original games weren’t based on it. What’s actually confirmed is that the 2006 Silent Hill movie did draw directly on Centralia for its foggy landscapes, smoking cracks, and empty streets. Sometimes reality doesn’t need Hollywood to improve on it — it just needs a badly extinguished landfill fire and sixty-some years of geological patience.
The old “Graffiti Highway” that once cut through town — a road covered for years in visitors’ spray paint — was buried under dirt in 2020 to keep tourists away. You can’t see it from the surface, but Centralia burns underground still, quietly, between the trees that have taken back the streets where houses used to stand. If you like unusual American towns, you might also enjoy the story of Begich Towers, Alaska’s entire town in one building.