The fire down below.

*gasp!!*

Silent Hill!!! O_o

Is that an acid spitter I see in a tree!?

This is the town that Silent Hill is loosely based around, I believe.

It's interesting that you posted this, because I just investigate this via Altavista search just last week. I wonder if the initial urge had come from a common source? Maybe you saw something about it on NEatorama?
I forget where I heard about this. Cool that you posted it!

This is the city of the woody guthrie's song "The Dying Miner ". The song has been written in the 30's though , when Centralia still was a busy mining spot.

I recently watched a show about this as well as the one in Australia that has burned for thousands of years and the huge amounts of mine fires in China. amazing stuff

The town of Valkenvania, from the movie "Nothing But trouble" was loosely based on this town.

This is also the town that Bill Bryson wrote about in his book "A Walk in the Woods." It's fascinating that people refuse to leave even as the town dies around them.

After reading "A Walk in the Woods" in 2000 my husband I and drove through Centralia. It is VERY creepy and the ground is hot to the touch. We saw several homes still standing but didn't stay long as the escaping steam and warning signs were enough to scare us off.

Dean Koontz has a (rather bad) novel where the climax takes place in this town.

One of our colleagues is from around there, and says Residents are still living there and fought the government's buyout attempt

Many people or their children are planning to return in 2016 to open the 50th anniversary 1966 time capsule in veterans' memorial.

This all started from just one trash fire.

According to a recent photo essay in Smithsonian magazine last year, the town is *not* completely evacuated. Many residents chose not to accept the government buyout, and they still live there.

Andy

Used to live in Philadelphia and have visited Centralia. It's mostly dead but there are still residents there. There was even a direct road through the now completely burned-out areas, but that's been blocked off and the road itself fell into disrepair due to not being maintained for a long time. The entire area definitely felt warmer and you could find hot pockets of escaping steam in quite a few locations. One of the spots we investigated was seared white from the heat and you could see the direction the underground fire was going towards. Large boulders slowly crack and fragment into smaller rocks due to the intense heat escaping from below... tree branches and trunks that have died littered the area, and like I said before, EVERYTHING is white. Bleached white. If you happened to find a branch near an escape vent for the steam/heat, you'd notice that the bark was copperised. Steam carried up metals (in this case, copper) from below that deposited onto the branches. Gives you an idea of how hot the underground fire has burned. I even took the time to stand up on a pile of rocks to piss onto one of the escape vents. My urine was evaporating just before it could splatter onto the rocks. My shoes partially melted (even though I was on a "cooler" spot of the pile) because I had stood there long enough before I was finished.

The Daily Show did a bit a few years ago where one of their correspondents interviewed people in the town and it included footage of the split street similar to the pics after the link.

I believe there is also a National Geographic article on this. (the Zip Code USA thing)