In Brief
Centralia, Pennsylvania is a borough with almost no town left. A coal fire has burned in the mines beneath it since 1962, the streets run through empty brush, and steam still curls up between the headstones on cold mornings.
The Full Story
Centralia, Pennsylvania isn't haunted by a ghost. It's haunted by a fire. A coal seam has been burning in the abandoned mines under the borough since at least May 27, 1962, and at its current rate it is expected to keep burning for over 250 years. Core temperatures down in the seam have run past 1,000 degrees.
It started small. In May 1962 the town hired men to burn off the landfill in an old strip-mine pit on the edge of town. They had done it before. This time the fire wasn't fully put out, and it slipped through an unsealed opening into the coal below, where it found enough fuel to last centuries.
For years it was a problem, not a death sentence. That changed on February 14, 1981, when the ground opened under a 12-year-old named Todd Domboski in his grandmother's backyard. The hole was 4 feet wide and 150 feet deep, and the steam venting out of it carried a lethal level of carbon monoxide. He caught a tree root on the way down and held on until his 14-year-old cousin, Eric Wolfgang, reached in and pulled him out. The image of a boy nearly swallowed by his own backyard is what turned the rest of the country toward Centralia.
After that the town emptied. Congress put up more than 42 million dollars in 1983 to move people out; over 1,000 left and 500-plus buildings came down. Pennsylvania took what remained by eminent domain in 1992, and the Postal Service killed the ZIP code, 17927, in 2002. The population went from 1,012 in 1980 to 63 in 1990, then 21, then 10, then five by 2020. The streets are still paved and named, but most of them run through empty brush now, past lots where houses used to stand. Centralia ended up with more people buried in it than living in it.
Three cemeteries still sit tended on the hills above town, and on cold mornings the smoke from the fire rises up through the ground between the headstones. Visitors near them report muffled voices they can't place, the smell of sulfur, cold spots, the sense of being watched. The line that gets repeated, the one nobody can put a name or a date to, is the same two words: leave this place.
There was a curse, too. The story goes that a priest named Father Daniel McDermott cursed the town in 1869, after he was assaulted in the cemetery, and swore it would be erased from the earth. He was mostly wrong about the details. He was not wrong about the town.
