The city of Centralia in the state of Pennsylvania in the United States is above all reminiscent of a horror film or a video game, prohibited for children under 16. And rightly so.
People today? Five.
Centralia has been burning with a thousand fires for 60 years.
Centralia was a small, beautiful town in 1915, and the future was bright.
At the start of the 20th century, around 2,500 people lived in the town and almost all of them worked in the 14 coal mines that lay on the city limits. But from the 1960s most of the nearby were closed, many lost their jobs and the population fell to 1000 people.
The area around Centralia turned into a dumping ground when nearby towns began dumping trash there.
The city becomes a dump
The municipality of this small town was full of despair, not only more than half of the population had left, but there was little hope for new inhabitants with garbage everywhere.
It was therefore decided to remove all the waste and dig a pit 15 meters deep but the width of half a football pitch, just in case. But after only a few months the hole was full and the garbage started to spill out.
Centralia is shrouded in smoke, but the last residents are still stubborn.
In May 1962, the city council decides that the only way is to burn the pit. The project was well thought out. The city fire department cordoned off the area and then set it on fire on the evening of May 27, 1962.
By morning all the garbage had burned down and water was poured over it to be safe.
But two days later the pit started to burn again, and a month later the fire continued to grow, despite the city authorities’ efforts to bring the blaze under control.
Smoke and stench
It was dug all the way around the pit and it turned out that there was an old tunnel between the pit and a coal mine that had been closed decades earlier. The tunnel had been covered in debris, so firefighters hadn’t noticed.
In the old mine there was still a huge amount of coal to be found, enough to keep the fires going for a long time.
It has now been burning for 60 years and sees no end to it.
Always burning with no end in sight
Gradually, a cloud of smoke began to form over the city and residents complained of a bad smell that managed to seep into all homes and workplaces. The fog was getting more and more intense and the inhabitants could barely see the sun.
State authorities sent inspectors to the site who said the mines still open should be immediately closed, all residents evacuated due to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and even the main road that ran along the city was destroyed. and rebuilt from a safe distance.
But most Centralia residents strongly protested the decision and adamantly refused to leave their homes.
Millions and millions
And since it was not possible to force people to move, everything was tried to put out the fires. Two decades later, in 1983, no less than 7 million dollars had been invested in the project.
But without success and the fire had spread more than the other.
Two years earlier, a 12-year-old boy had nearly died when the ground split open beneath him, but he managed to grab a tree root and his uncle pulled the boy up.
Centralia is a ghost town.
The remaining residents didn’t make a big difference, saying the coal pollution had been with them all their lives. They had learned to live with smoke, heat and dirt and in media interviews they said they tried to see the positives, for example it was possible to grow tomatoes in the garden in the dead of winter, they never had to do it, heating homes and plowing snow was a thing of the past.
But the poisoning continued to take its toll as the ground beneath residents’ homes burned further. The population began to disappear, the flowers, trees and other vegetation had practically disappeared, and tomato cultivation lasted only a short time.
The sidewalks and streets were also collapsed and the fire could be seen below.
The authorities surrender
Authorities officially abandoned the firefighting operation in 1984 and offered residents $42 million to buy the farm. All buildings were to be demolished and residents moved to new homes in a safer location.
Tourists in Centralia.
Most of them accepted the offer, but a small group refused to budge and split the city into two factions which fought bitterly. The next ten years were spent in disputes and lawsuits, and the town newspaper even began to publish weekly who had left town and exactly how many townspeople there were that day.
By 1993, there were only 63 residents left, enough that the town couldn’t be destroyed, and they absolutely refused to move even as life in Centralia had become, so to speak, unbearable.
The county had by then taken over the town and the residents technically no longer owned their homes but were considered squatters. But they still refused to leave their homes.
In 2013, the population was only ten inhabitants.
Incredible stubbornness
But those ten were more stubborn than anything and went to court against the faction they had won. The state of Pennsylvania was ordered to return their housing and promised that the residents would be left alone until they died.
It wasn’t until the last inhabitant of Centralia died that the city could be destroyed.
The real Centralia church is on the left, while the one on the right is from the Silent Hill video game.
The latest figures, as of 2021, indicate that Centralia’s population has fallen to five.
But these five undoubtedly have enough to do for Centralia to be a popular stopover for tourists today, and for the city and its surroundings to be regularly used for filming.
Abandoned houses, cracked streets and fire scenes are like a director’s dream when it comes to making movies.
And then mainly horror movies, as well as the city served as a model in video games, including the very popular Silent Hill, but the city in games, as well as the films that followed, is, so to speak, a complete replica of Centralia.
But maybe it’s better to hurry, people intend to visit Centralia, because they will probably soon discover that the last inhabitant will disappear and with him the ghost town.
