The Peculiar Truth about the Burning Ghost Town

• US Highway 81 runs north and south along the Adirondack Mountains. As it winds through Pennsylvania, the major route passes within ten miles of Centralia, PA.

• Seventy years ago, the small mining town had a population of roughly 1,400 people. The number shrank over the decades as folks left and never went back. The population in 2020 was believed to be down to just five residents. If that. Maybe no one.

• That’s because the small town has been on fire since May 1962.

• The major industry in that part of Pennsylvania and in many other counties throughout the Adirondacks was - and is - coal mining. Anthracite coal was found in Centralia in the mid-1800s. That particular type is denser with carbon than other forms of coal, which means it burns more efficiently. Generations of Centralia’s residents made their livings from digging anthracite out of the ground. So it went for over 100 years.

• In the 1860s, coal country saw the rise of a secret organization of Irish immigrants called the Molly Maguires.

• Conditions for miners throughout Pennsylvania were dire and dangerous, and a unionization movement grew. When improvements didn’t appear, the Molly Maguires committed acts of violence and intimidation, including murders and assaults. The group was accused of killing Centralia’s founder as well as a local priest. They gained strength during the Civil War but lost their power by the 1870s after leaders of the Molly Maguires were executed.

• Life carried on in Centralia. The population grew, and generations of local folks worked the mines. That all changed in the spring of 1962.

• Memorial Day was approaching, and the town council proposed cleaning up the local dump. The landfill was overflowing and, for some reason, it was thought best to rectify the matter before the upcoming holiday.

• Their boneheaded plan for “cleaning” it was to set the dump on fire.

• The ground beneath Centralia was and still is a maze of abandoned coal mines. They’d been dug over a century. Fires in coal seams are not uncommon, and once they’re started they’re hard, if not impossible, to stop.

• The burning of the town’s landfill most likely set fire to a coal seam. That then spread to the many underground mines.

• Initial attempts to quell the fires failed. Nothing worked. It would take a Biblical flood, more water than the town could ever acquire, to snuff out the underground flames. The only thing to do was let it burn.

• As a result, the abundance of coal beneath Centralia has been on fire for nearly 65 years. There’s now sign of it ending.

• Smoke rises out of cracks in pavement and holes in the earth. Carbon monoxide levels soar. The underground temperature has reached as high as 900 degrees. Cemeteries sunk into the ground, as did some home foundations. The air reeks of smoke.

• Yet for many years, some residents refused to go. They sued to stay. But they lost in court. Homeowners were forbidden to sell their properties. It took an act of Congress to get the stubborn locals to move, and then it was only because the government paid for them to go elsewhere. Congress even rescinded the town’s zip code.

• Centralia is off limits now, a hellish wasteland of gutted buildings and acrid smoke. To this day, the ground beneath the ghost town is still on fire. Some estimates say it could keep burning for another hundred years.