The Claim
There’s a real life “silent hill” located in Centralia Pennsylvania
For those of you who aren’t familiar, silent hill is a horror game based in a town with a coal fire constantly raging below ground, which frequently turns the surface into a hell on earth. Centralia in Pennsylvania is the inspiration behind the theme of the game, as the town has been abandoned since 1962 due to a coal fire still burning below the surface.
Some of the concreted areas on the surface are so hot that you can light a match by just touching it to the ground, and the heat combined with all the poisonous gases coming from the earth makes this place uninhabitable.
A reading taking in 2017 showed the temperature 30 feet below the surface to be just over 500 °C, and since no one knows exactly how much coal is still down there and with no sign’s of it stopping any time soon, it could well be burning for close to 100 years or even more.
Mining began in the area in 1856 and was very successful in its early years, being the main reason that so many of the towns buildings were built. At its peak in 1890, Centralia had a population of almost 3000 people, along with seven Church’s, 27 salons, a bank and 14 shops, as well as a few other buildings.
By the time the fire started in 1962 the population had dwindled to less that half its peak population as most of the large mining companies had moved elsewhere, but some illegal mining and smaller pit mining was still going on in the area.
Even though the fire started in 1962, the town didn’t realise there was a major problem until 1979, when the owner of the local gas station dipped a measuring tool into his underground petrol store to measure its contents and discovered the tool came out hot. He then lowered a thermometer into the tank and found the petrol was at 77.8 °C.
Over the next couple of years stories increased around the country about the mysterious underground fire, but nothing came of it until 1981 when a 12 year old fell into a sink hole that opened up in his garden. The hole was only 4 feet wide but went down to a depth of 150 feet, but fortunately his brother was present who managed to pull him up the edge and saved his life. A sample was taken from the steam escaping the hole and found it to contain lethal levels of Carbon Monoxide.
In 1983 the US Congress designated $42 million in re-allocation funds to move the residents out of the town and demolished more than 500 buildings in the area.
As for the cause of the fire there are several stories. One suggests that a group of volunteers set fire to a huge pile of waste materials left over from the previous year and the fire got so hot it ignited an underground deposit which burnt through to the a main coal store and caught fire.
Another suggests that a previous fire in an old mine shaft from decades before was never fully extinguished and finally burned through to the main deposits. The other story is that someone set a fire in one of the old shafts after filling it with rubbish as a means of disposal, but non of these can ever possibly be confirmed.
Today Centralia has a population of less than 10 people spread over the area which is slightly more than 44 square miles. Most of the warning sighs have been removed but the ground is still covered in deep holes and huge cracks in the roads that are expelling poisonous gases. It hasn’t been sealed off from the public and any one can just turn up and walk round it, though you do so at your own risk.
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