I went to Centralia on Saturday. We got there late in the afternoon, so we didn’t have much time to go exploring.
Centralia, in case you’ve never heard of it, is a virtual ghost town due to an underground mine fire that’s been burning for 45 years.
There are huge cracks on the only cement road we could find, and that road was blocked off by a large mound of dirt. The only traffic we saw consisted of a few teenagers on ATVs.
We did come across one of the fifteen residents of the town (Wikipedia says that there are nine, though I think I’d trust a permanent resident over them), but he wasn’t very forthcoming with information.
Due to the fire, the aforementioned cracks in the road constantly spewed smoke into the air. There are also several dirt roads, but we didn’t have time to follow all of them since we were on foot.
As it was getting dark, we walked out on some trails in the woods and found even more smoke venting from the ground. Crazy stuff!
Except for a rather normal-looking cemetary and the house of the one elderly resident we spoke to, however, we found few things of interest.
In 1981, the town boasted a population of 1,000. Now, however, it seems to have been erased from the Earth, at least from what we could find. We didn’t come across even the remains of a single other house.
Has anyone else ever been there? If so, what was the experience like for you, and were you able to find any kind of decent map of the borough?