It turns out that my posts about strange places I have visited are far more popular than posts about my misbegotten novels, so I’ve decided to give people what they want. Following in the footsteps of the post about my trip to Prypiat/Chernobyl and Cesky Krumlov, here is a chronicle of my trip to Centralia, Pennsylvania.
It’s a place you probably haven’t heard of before, but the curse that fell upon this now abandoned town is the story that inspired the creators of the Silent Hill series of video games* and movies. Want to know what happened? The story is told below, through the captions in these pictures. Like Chernobyl, the story of Centralia is one we all know–it is the story of the folly of man. Click on the pictures below to embiggen them and get the full story.
*Turns out that it only inspired the movie.
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- If a visitor to central Pennsylvania should depart from the well-traveled path of the interstate and find himself on Highway 61, he will come upon a place where the road turns sharply right for no apparent reason or purpose.
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- Most people simply drive on, but if you stop and climb over the earthen berm, you will find yourself on the road to Centralia.
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- This was the mining town of Centralia in the 1970s.
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- This is Centralia today.
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- Centralia, like most places in central Pennsylvania, was built on coal. For years, the city grew wealthy and the coal flowed.
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- But then a fire started in one of the mines. No one knows how or who. The town fathers could have extinguished that fire for a mere $50,000.
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- But even though they were siting on nearly a billion dollars of black gold, they decided not to pay. Instead they buried the fire and the problem. And for decades, all seemed well.
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- But the fire did not die. Instead it grew, burning through the coal seams. Growing hotter and bigger as it went. Then the rats came.
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- They covered the town in a rodent wave. But no sooner had the pestilence arrived than it died away.
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- It wasn’t until a gas station attendant recorded a temperature of 180 degrees in his underground tank that it all became clear. The fire that the town had buried all those years ago had returned. In fact, it had never gone away.
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- Highway 61 went first.
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- Some places the road melted.
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- Other places it simply cracked from the heat.
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- One could never know whether the road might sink beneath them.
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- Or whether it would buckle and rise from the roaring heat below. When a 150 foot deep sinkhole almost swallowed a boy in his back yard, the town’s fate was sealed.
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- Some houses burned.
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- Others sank into the earth. Most were simply bulldozed when eminent domain was exercised by the state.
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- The people of Centralia were mostly Eastern European.
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- This Orthodox church they built still watches over the town. It was the model for the church seen in the Silent Hill films.
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- They buried their dead here, and the cemetery remains well kept.
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- But the gesture is an empty one. Most of the experts who study this area agree that the graves beneath these monuments have subsumed, the bodies plunging to the fiery abyss below.
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- The fire still burns.
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- It has moved from the area beneath what is now known as Destroyed Highway 61.
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- But it has not fled far from the surface.
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- It burns on, and nothing can grow where the heat is at its worst.
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- On cold days, the smoke is so thick that you can’t see your feet.
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- But even on a hot summer day, the evidence of the fire is everywhere.
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- The ground itself burns, and the heat can be unbearable.
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- Some spots have been known to have recorded temperatures of in excess of 500 degrees.
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- One must be constantly on the lookout for uneven earth or spots where the ground may collapse.
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- Evidence of the town’s efforts to fight the fire remains. Here is a metal pipe used to vent poisonous gases.
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- These efforts were in vain, of course, and did nothing but provide fresh air for the fire.
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- A handful of Centralia’s residents still refuse to leave, despite the state’s best efforts.
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- The town has lost its zip code, and the streets themselves have disappeared from the maps.
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- Poisonous gases fill the lowlands, and visitation is discouraged.
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- The municipal building, where the decision that damned the town was made all those years ago, is one of the few buildings that still stands.
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- Traces of the city remain.
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- But only traces.
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- The town’s desolation is complete.
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- Centralia is a city out of time, a place where the past and present collide.
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- Ironic, eh?
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- And so we left Centralia behind. But the fire lives. It will burn for another 1000 years.
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- The mysterious photographer…
Beware The Shadows 
Wow… I never saw Silent Hill but now I want to. What a neat place to visit! Great post!