Get Your Halloween on With a Real Life Ghost Town

Our infatuation with ghost towns and spooky tales is as obsessive as loving bacon. Check out this real life ghost town.

In an attempt to feed our creepy, we take a journey to a small town in Pennsylvania. No, this isn't a vampire story, it's a burning tale of a ghost town.

The mountain town of Centralia has been burning with creepy energy, seemingly, since the beginning of time. Back in the day it thrived as a mining town, home to about two-thousand people. It was a quaint town filled with typical amenities like banks and stores, a school and even a theater.

Today, Centralia is one of the least populated townships in the entire state. All because of the fire down below. The town has been heating up for over fifty years. In 1962 a raging underground fire wiped out the mining cavities throughout the town. Firefighters worked delinquently to put out the blaze, but in the end were beaten. The fire has been brewing underneath this town ever since.

Before arriving in Centralia, it's easy to imagine the town as a scene from depths of Hell; empty streets where tongues of flame spring from the cracked pavement, licking at your heels as a thick grey fog restricts your vision, making every step a treacherous gamble. Roger Avery, writer of the film Silent Hill, has spoken about using the town of Centralia to inspire the eerie visuals of his film, so my preconceived visions of a cinematic nightmare were well placed.

By 1984 most residents of the town left, only a few families stayed. Those who left received government monies to do so. Despite the toxic fumes that choke the town, this close nit town of a few families lived relatively peaceful. That is until the 90's when the Governor condemned all of the buildings. The families fought to stay, but didn't succeed and in 2002 the United States Postal Service eliminated their zip code. Finally in 2009, the residents that had remained through it all were given notice to evacuate the town.

The town is uninhabitable with temperatures rising underneath at over one-thousand degrees, hotter than Mercury with gases more poisonous than Saturn. It is littered with graffiti and crackling roadways. The fire that was started so many years ago by what some say a standard everyday trash burning, may continue to burn for hundreds of years.