Centralia
A Pennsylvania town abandoned over a coal-seam fire that has burned underground for decades.
Overview
Centralia is an eerie modern ghost town in Pennsylvania, almost entirely abandoned because of a coal-mine fire that has been burning beneath it since 1962. Ignited in the underground anthracite coal seams that the town was built to mine, the fire spread through the labyrinth of old workings and proved impossible to extinguish, releasing toxic gases, opening smoking sinkholes, and making the ground dangerously unstable.
Over the following decades the government bought out and relocated nearly all of Centralia's residents and demolished the buildings, leaving a haunting grid of empty streets reclaimed by vegetation, with smoke and steam still venting from the ground. The fire is expected to burn for another century or more. Centralia's surreal landscape — including a graffiti-covered abandoned stretch of former highway — has made it a magnet for the curious and an inspiration for fiction.
Media
Ghost Town Data
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