Centralia, PA: Subterranean Burning Pennsylvania Ghost Town

There’s a small town in Eastern Pennsylvania that looks like it’s been hit by an apocalypse, and in truth, it has. The town of Centralia, PA was abandoned after an underground coal mine fire forced citizens to flee for good.

Centralia Mine Fire

In 1962, city planners turned an old strip mine into a dump before setting an enormous collection of trash on fire. As bad luck would have it, the fire spread to an unsealed opening leading into an adjacent underground coal mine, igniting a massive seam of coal that has been burning ever since.

Burning 300 feet below the surface, the fire now stretches some seven and a half miles and burns underneath an area of 9.3 square miles. Authorities believe that the fire has enough fuel to burn for another 250 years.

The accidental coal fire continued to rage unchecked into the 1980s, issuing giant plumes of smoke and deadly carbon monoxide gasses billowing from fissures in the ground. The local highway—now known as Graffiti Highway—cracked and collapsed, petrifying nearby trees that surround each active vent.

Who Lives in Centralia, PA?

After estimating the cost of extinguishing the fire—over $1.3 billion in today’s currency—state and federal authorities opted to raze the town and relocate its residents. 1,000 Centralians accepted government relocation money and fled, leaving just five residents to live on in the abandoned town, despite the fact that all of its uninhabited dwellings and infrastructure have long since been torn down. All real estate in the town was claimed under eminent domain in 1992, and later condemned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Centralia today is visited mainly by curious tourists, adding their artwork to the ever-expanding Graffiti Highway, which is reminiscent of the Cadillac Ranch west of Amarillo, Texas, where 10 half-buried Cadillacs were once thought to be abstract art, but have now officially fallen to the tagger’s spray can.

While smoke still billows from fissures in dense woodland areas, the abandoned roads that once made up Centralia no longer issue once dense columns of smoke. Even the smoke from the surrounding woods has lessened over time, but it can still be seen on cold winter days, when warm subterranean smoke bellows up into freezing cold air.