The OddWay News
Case Study No. 11 · · 3 Min Read
A coal seam under a Pennsylvania borough caught fire in 1962 and is still burning. Five people live there. Most of what visitors turn up looking for was buried in 2020.
In May 1962, Centralia burned rubbish in a pit near the Odd Fellows Cemetery, the way it had before. The pit was an abandoned strip mine. Underneath it was an exposed coal seam, and underneath that, the labyrinth of worked-out anthracite tunnels the town had been built to serve.
The fire went into the seam and never came out.
It is still burning. It burns at depths reaching three hundred feet, across something like eight miles of old workings, and by most estimates there is enough coal down there to keep it going for another two hundred and fifty years.
Slowly, and then not slowly at all.
Residents noticed smells. Steam came up through gardens. For years it was a nuisance rather than an emergency, and the state made several attempts to trench ahead of the fire and cut it off, each of which underestimated how far it had already travelled.
The moment that changed the argument was ordinary. In 1979 a gas station owner called John Coddington lowered a thermometer into his underground fuel tank to check a reading, and found the gasoline sitting at 172 degrees.
Carbon monoxide readings followed. Then sinkholes.
Congress put up around $42 million for relocation in 1984, and most people took it. In 1992 the state condemned every building in the borough under eminent domain. The Postal Service withdrew the ZIP code in 2002 — a small administrative act that is somehow the coldest thing on the list.
A handful of residents refused throughout. In 2013 they won the right to stay until they died, after which their properties pass to the state.
The 2020 census counted five people.
Two things, and both matter if you are thinking of driving there.
The Graffiti Highway does not exist. The abandoned mile of Route 61, buckled by the heat and painted end to end over three decades, was buried under fill by the landowner in April 2020 after crowds during the pandemic made the trespass problem untenable. People still arrive looking for it. There are earthen mounds and no-trespassing signs.
People live there. Centralia is a borough with residents, not a set. It gets written up as an abandoned ghost town and photographed as one, and the handful of people who fought for decades to stay in their own houses have to live alongside that.
The hazards are also not decorative. Ground temperatures reach several hundred degrees in places, subsidence can open without warning, and carbon monoxide vents from the ground in the southern part of the borough — colourless, odourless, and lethal in enough concentration. The state issues warnings about this because it is real.
The 2006 film borrowed Centralia's situation for its setting. The games did not — they were made in Japan years earlier and have their own sources.
This gets repeated so often that it is worth separating, because it is the reason a good number of people turn up. They are visiting a film location that was never a film location, in a town where five people are trying to live.
You can legally drive the current alignment of Route 61 through the borough and look from the road. That is the whole of the legal access. The cemeteries are still maintained and still used, and are not a photo opportunity.
It is a twenty-minute detour off I-81 and worth taking, provided you understand that the interesting thing here is not a ruin. It is a place where the ordinary explanation — a rubbish fire, a coal seam, sixty years — is worse than any story anyone could invent about it.
