This is Centralia.

On the surface, it looks like a quiet little town in the middle of Pennsylvania's coal country.

But look a little closer and you'll notice something is off.

If you walk the abandoned roads here, sometimes they'll crack open without warning and spew steam and smoke.

Some are even hot to the touch.

In other areas, you can see where sinkholes have opened up and in some cases swallowed entire homes.

Suffice it to say, you have to be careful where you step in the town that's been burning for sixty years.

As always, viewer discretion is advised.

If you walk down the old Route sixty one, near the heart of Pennsylvania's coal country, there's an area we might think you'd taken a wrong turn into a post apocalyptic movie set.

The road there is buckled and cracked open, and at one time was completely covered in graffiti, although it's since been covered by dirt as you take a closer look.

Though weirdly, it's also surrounded by holes in the earth where smoke literally seeps out of the ground.

This is an area known as Centralia, or more accurately, what's left of it.

It was once home to more than fifteen hundred people, but Centralia now holds barely a handful of residents, in fact, just five of them by the most recent count in twenty twenty.

There are also no stores, schools, post offices, or much of anything else for that matter, but importantly there were at one time.

Most of the buildings have since been demolished decades ago, leaving only faint outlines on the ground where homes, churches, offices and businesses used to stand.

Nature has also since swept in to erase the edges, as vines come over, fire, hydrants and wildflowers bloom through the ash fall.

As you men imagine, with so little going on, it's a quiet place, but it's not a regular kind of quiet.

There's an unsettling kind of silence, like the irrequiet that comes after something has gone terribly wrong.

And that's fitting considering that's exactly what happened, and as a result, underfoot a fire has been burning for more than sixty years.

To make things even weirder, Walking through the former streets of Centrality, you'd never see even a flicker of a flame.

That's because this fire is deep on the ground in the coal seems far below your feet.

And crawling slowly through the labyrinth of abandoned mine shafts that stretch beneath the once lively town.

You can certainly feel it and smell it, though the air has a faint odor of sulfur, like spent matches or rotten eggs.

And sometimes the ground even feels warm to the touch, and maybe a little more horrifying me, sometimes it even caves in.

So what happened to you?

And how did it get this way?

Long before Centralia became a rare East Coast ghost town, it was a place built on coal.

Located right in the middle of Pennsylvania's coal region.

The area began attracting attention in the early eighteen hundreds for its vast deposits of anthracite, which is a hard, carbon rich cold known for its high energy output and relatively clean and burn.

It wasn't long before a small settlement called Bulls had cropped up, later named Centreville and eventually incorporated as a burrow of Centrallia in eighteen sixty six.

As coal fever took Cold, Centrally blossomed into a full fledged mining up.

The Centralia Colliery opened in eighteen sixty two with mines extending outward in every direction, drawing in workers from across the region.

The town was soon a patchwork of miners, cottages, churches, saloons, and general stores.

Life and work there were hard, as mining often is, but it was also steady and reliable.

Many people built their lives around the coal industry and passed that livelihood down through generations.

And it went like this for decades.

But by the nineteen fifties the industry that supported Centralia began to crack.

The nation was moving on from coal as oil and natural gas were rapidly overtaking it as dominant energy sources.

Mines closed one by one and jobs disappeared.

Families packed up and left, leaving the massive network of tunnels beneath Centralia slowly abandoned and left to rot and filled with water and rubble.

Some of these mines and some of those tunnels still held coal, but to the people who remained, these holdout tunnels were relics instead of lucrative opportunities, thought to be harmless.

In reality, though, that left behind coal was a powder cake beneath the town's foundation.

It's just that no one knew it yet.

By the spring of nineteen sixty two, Centralia had already weathered the long decline of the coal industry.

The town was quieter than it was and its hated, but it was still live.

People still lived there, went to church and raised families there, and like many towns across America that year, they were preparing for Memorial Day festivities.

That May, Centralia's borough council met to discuss how best to clean up the town's new landfill before the holiday.

The dump, which was a former strip mine just outside of town, had become a centralized solution for the community's garbage after a recent crackdown on illegal dumping.

Prior to that, the townspeople were just tossing their trash everywhere in town, and so the pit seemed like a perfect answer to the problem.

This, however, created problems on its own, as the wide pit was filling up fast.

The town then landed on a solution, which was to simply burn the trash.

This was actually a fairly common method for dealing with waste at the time, especially in rural towns like Centralia.

Firefighters were then hired to do the job, and on May twenty seventh, they set the pile on fire.

Once the visible flames had gone down.

They then hosed it down and left, satisfied the fire had been properly extinguished, but it hadn't.

Two days later, flames reappeared and fire crews returned with their hoses.

They then stirred up the garbage with bulldozers and poured on more water.

The surface fired then went out again, and the problem appeared to be solved until a horrible, disgusting smell began to permeate the town.

This smell wafted up from the pit for days, indicating that something deeper down was still burning, and soon a disturbing discovery was made.

A fifteen foot or four and a half meter hole had opened up along the northern wall of the landfill pit.

It was hidden under layers of garbage until then, and soon it was realized that it led straight into the sprawling network of abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia.

That hole was like a doorway that the fire blew right through, igniting the highly combustible coal scene below the town.

At least that's the most accepted story anyway.

What really happened is actually still debated.

Despite the nineteen sixty two garbage burn being a recorded fact.

Some believed that the coal seam fire was started by spontaneous combustion.

There's even been speculation that a separate mind fire from years earlier was never fully extinguished and that this fresh fire gave it new life.

But whatever the truth, one fact was undeniable.

From that point on.

The fire was no longer just in the landfill.

It was now undergrounded in the coal.

But regardless, attempts to dig out the blaze began.

Immediately, the town hard a company to dig out the burning material and seal off the affected areas, and for a time it seemed like the worst might be over.

Cruise worked, the town moved on, and the fire fated from public attention, but it never did go out.

Beneath the surface, it continued to spread through old tunnels, feeding on the very foundation of the town, and incredibly, it wouldn't be until nearly two decades later this centralley would be forced to face the full scope of what had happened.

Because at first, no one had Centrallia imagined the fire would last.

Underground coal fires weren't unheard of, and surely, with enough effort and a little luck, they'd put it out.

And get back to normal.

But this proved to be no ordinary fire.

As the years went on, the town launched a series of increased desperate attempts to put the fire out.

Each came with a new strategy and a new price tag.

The first major effort involved digging massive ditches around the burning area to cut out the fire's path and starve it a fresh coal.

In practice, however, the fire spread faster than the crews could dig.

By the time a trench was completed, the fire had already begun moving beyond it.

So next came a process called flushing, where engineers drilled boreholes down into the burning aras and pumped in a mix of water, sand, slurry, and gravel.

The hope was that this would choke off auxygen feeding the flames, but the fire was hotter than expected, so hot, in fact, that it incinerated the injected material before it could do any good.

Everything burned away, leaving new paths for the fire to creep through and millions of dollars to go up in smoke.

The town also even tried to put up barriers.

These were walls of clay or fly ash, meant to trap the fire in place.

But again they were out maneuvered by the blaze.

More extreme proposals were also floated, including flooding the mines, excavating entire sections of the burning zone, or sealing off every known mine entrance with kung.

These ideas, though were enforcing either deems wildly impractical or prohibitively expensive.

In fact, one proposal called for a full scale excavation costing upwards of six hundred million dollars, which was more money than the town or even the state could dream of pulling together.

And all the while, the fire kept spreading, unbeknownst the majority of residents just living their daily lives.

While believe in the situation had long been under control.

That illusion, however, was about to shatter in the most terrifying way possible.

February fourteenth, nineteen eighty one, was the day everything changed in Centralia.

This is when the underground fire stopped being an abstract threat.

It was a cold Saturday morning when a twelve year old named Todd stepped outside, asked by his mom to figure out why a group of government looking at had been spotted around the neighborhood.

The visitors, it turned out, were Pennsylvania State officials touring Centralia with local leaders to discuss the still simmering mind fire.

As Todd passed by his grandmother's house, his cousin Eric flagged down to show him some repair work he had done to Todd's motorbike.

Todd paused for a moment to see what Eric want to show him before resuming his errand this is when he noticed something strange.

Rising from the ground.

Near an old tree was a wisp of smoke.

The snow also hadn't stuck to that patch of grass, and leaves around it looked disturbed.

So curious, Todd walked over to it, and just as he did, the earth collapsed beneath him.

In a split second, he was up to his knees in hot, soupy mud.

He then struggled and kicked, trying to climb out, but the more he fought, the more the ground gave way.

Before long, he was buried way steep as thick smoke rose around him.

Below his feet, he could also hear a strange wooshing sound, like gusts of wind.

This was the mind fire far below, sucking air through the earth, and every time that wind blew the hole beneath Todd's feet caved in just a little more.

He then sank to his chest as steam stung his eyes and the air reeked of rot.

Panicles took hold and he reached around for anything he could with his mostly pinned arms.

Next to him was a root from that old tree.

He managed to latch onto in desperation, and it was the only thing that was keeping him from disappearing into the void.

Nearby, Eric, the faint screams of his cousin, saw the smoke and came running.

He rushed to the edge of the pit, but Todd was no longer above ground anymore.

All Eric could see was smoke inside the hole in the earth, but he could still hear Todd crying out for help.

So with no time to think, Eric reached into the hole, grabbed a hold of Tod, and pulled with everything he had.

Somehow, Todd emerged alive, covered in hot mud and shaking in fear.

He'd been in that hole for barely a minute, but had he stayed a few moments longer, the carbon monox had pouring out of the opening could have killed him, let alone something worse.

Later analysis confirmed that the gases were lethal and worse still.

The spot where Todd fell was the sight of an old mind shaft, long since filled in.

The fire had reached it and heated the material, util it loosened.

All it took was one wrong step for to cave in.

In the weeks that followed Todd's near death experience, headlines exploded and TV crews arrived.

Politicians were panicked, as was the centrally of public.

The town and its raging underground fire was now a national news story, and for the first time, the question of whether Centralie could survive was no longer hypothetical.

Todd made survived, but from that moment forward, centrally was un borrowed time.

There was no more pretending any longer that the fire was just some inconvenience beared deep within the ground that could be ignored.

It was now a threat that was literally tearing holes in the town.

Centralia didn't collapse overnight, though.

What came next was division, and at the heart of it was a single question no one could agree on, was it still safe to live there.

Experts then came took measurements, analyzed gas leaks, and assessed cave and risk, but the results were murky and often contradictory.

Carbon monoxide levels were high in some homes and normal on others.

It was also learned at this time that there were reports of headaches, respiratory issues, strange smells, and unexplained warmth and basements, but these were a bit inconsistent.

In that ambiguity, two camps emerged.

On one side were the people who were concerned.

They believed the danger was real and growing, and they wanted out.

They demanded relocation, government aid, and a full evacuation.

To them stagingman gambling with their lives, and they weren't willing to do that.

On the other side were the holdouts.

These were the people who felt the fire's danger was exaggerated.

They saw the relocation talk as fearmongering and government overreach, and understandably, many feared losing their homes and property values, and some even suspected it was all deployed to claim the rights to the unminded coal.

In the midst of all of this, chaos broke out.

This range from collapsing friendships and neighbors now speaking to one another, to slash tires and apparently even a home that was fire bombed.

The tight knit town that had once rallied around church events and Fourth of July parades was now ripping itself apart from the inside.

And through it all, the fire kept burning.

Finally, in nineteen eighty four, after mounting public pressure and national tension, Congress stepped in with a lifeline.

It offered forty two million dollars in federal aid to relocate the town's residents, but obviously it was bittersweet.

Those who accepted the biots would leave their homes behind, many of which would be condemned and demolished.

But at the same time, it was a way out, and for most that was enough.

Over the next few years, families packed up and left.

The post office closed, schools shut down, and one by one, homes or bulldozed, leaving only driveways to nowhere and concrete slabs peeking through weeds.

By the early nineteen nineties, Centralia was a shelvet's former self, but not everyone left.

A small, determined group of residents refused to go.

Some had lived their entire lives in Centralia, and others simply didn't trust the state to act in their best interest.

A few were just too stubborn, together their homes and they stayed as the town around them disappeared.

Some time later.

In nineteen ninety two, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania invoked eminent domain, allowing the state to seize all property in Centralia.

The remaining buildings were then condemned, but the holdouts dug in.

Many years of legal battles followed, and eventually those who stayed were granted life estates, which was permissioned to live out their lives in the town, but not passed their property onto anyone else.

It was essentially a legal promise that when they died, Centralia would die with them.

What makes Centralia especially haunting is the fact that the fire still hasn't stopped.

As we all sit here whenever and wherever you're watching or listening from, Centralia continues to burn right now.

So why, after decades of attention, millions of dollars, and countless attempts to put out the fire, has no one been able to put it out?

The short answer is that coal seam fires are practically invincible.

To understand why, you have to picture what's happening underground again.

Centralia hits top vast anthracite coal seems, many of them fractured and exposed for more than a century of mining.

When the fire slipped to those old mind tunnels, it found a nearly endless supply of fuel.

It wasn't just the coal, though, That's only part of the recipe.

The other factor is that abandon mines are riddled with airways, vent shafts, cracks, and old shafts that no one has seen in decades, like the one Todd almost fell through.

It's like a perfect storm of burnability.

Every attempt to stop it has run into the same fundamental problem.

You can't put it a fire, you can't reach.

The early strategies failed because they were working blind.

The fire had already tunneled into places no one expected, and by the time boreholes were drilled or trenches were dug, it had moved on.

Cruis just couldn't keep up, and while more dramatic solutions like flooding them or digging out the entire effected air were proposed, the logistics which is impossible.

Centralia's underground fire stretches an estimated eight miles or almost thirteen kilometers and down to three hundred feet or ninety one meters in total.

This works out to more than thirty seven hundred acres, so by the nineteen eighties.

Extinguishing it would have been a herculean military grid operation, and even then it might not have worked.

The truth is the fire is going to burn until it decides to stop.

Experts believe it'll keep going for another two hundred and fifty years, slowly devouring what remains of the coal seems beneath the region.

The only things that might halt it are natural rock barriers or the water table, and even those aren't guaranteed to do the trick, and so Centralia remains stuck in limbo.

It's too dangerous to rebuild and too far gone to fix.

If you visit it now, what you'll find is a fading imprint where a community once stood.

The streets are still there, kind of, but not much else, Just overgrown lots, rusted street signs, and the occasional fragment of foundation where someone's kitchen or living room used to be.

Us believed to have started as a routine garbage fire became a slow motion disaster, and interestingly, Centralia isn't alone.

Around the world, coal seam fires just like this one continued to burn.

The Brennanderberg in Germany has been smolder since the sixteen hundreds, and Australia's Mount WinGen has been burning for thousands of years.

Centralia simply became one of the most famous because it intersected with modern life and caused it all to vanish.

Today, tourists visit what's left of Centralia, taking photos of the steam riser from the cracks in the earth and trying to imagine what it must have been like to watch a hometown disappear.

For those who lived it, however, it was as real as it gets, and the memories, like the fire itself, still burn today.