The Rebirth of Pennsylvania’s Infamous Burning Town
25th January 2026
I had come here expecting that we would find ruin and neglect, toxicity and destitution. I expected Centralia to be an exemplar of the eerie: A place where once there had been a town, place of thriving life, and instead now was only absence, an emptiness, a void.
What we found instead, strangely, was beauty. Centralia, despite everything I’d been led to expect, was thriving.
Visitors find a similar situation at Chernobyl. Nature has ways of compensating for human ineptitude.
Locals see the story a little differently, though their version borrows from similar themes. Phil, a tour guide at Pioneer Tunnel in neighboring Ashland, pointed out that while the grim toil of the mines claimed many human lives, their closure left the valley with little else to offer. He explained how the families that didn’t leave Centralia were harassed, as government forces tried to drive them off their land. Those that stayed had to go to court to defend their right to live on this abandoned land, all because they wanted to keep the mineral rights to their property. So now, people like Phil assume that the government is just waiting them out. Once they’re gone, putting out the fire will be easy enough. “They’ll take all that red hot coals, but also they’re going to get that rich anthracite coal,” he told us. “And I’m sure they’ll sell that. But are the people or the relatives going to get anything? It’s very doubtful. It’ll probably go to the federal government. Or the coal baron, maybe?”
People have been carefully trained over my lifetime that when the government is here to help, it usually means they are her to help themselves to whatever you’ve got.