I Live In Centralia, PA: It's America's Creepiest Ghost Town

That boy, Todd Domboski, survived and presumably went on to write a bestselling book about his escape from the bowels of Hell. Other human-sized creatures in Centralia have not been as lucky.

"Every once in a while, you would come across a deer sticking out vertically with steam billowing out. They looked like they were crawling out. The poor deer had fallen into a sinkhole and had either starved to death or suffocated to death from the fumes. My friends would claim to see smoke coming out of its mouth, like it had been burnt alive, but it was just the way the smoke came out."

This means the kids who grew up in Centralia before it was completely abandoned had to deal with death on a pretty regular basis. Becky told us about watching the violent death of a neighbor's cat: "We were swinging in the backyard, and this patch of grass suddenly turned brown. Their cat was standing there, and it suddenly became brown. It didn't make any noise, and we thought she had done something to make it all suddenly brown, like flipping a sheet over. But it was just another hole, and the cat went down. We didn't say anything until we jumped off and went over to the fence to see that it was another sinkhole, and we called out to our neighbor, but after some light digging (NEVER go into a sinkhole by yourself), her cat was gone."

Sinkholes even caused an entire stretch of highway to be rerouted after holes and gas buckled parts of it back in 1994. The state did its best to hide the old highway, but because of the dangers lurking beneath, they never got rid of it. And it's still there, waiting for George Miller to make a much more colorful Mad Max sequel.

And Becky elaborated: "There was a lot of coughing. If you know what black lung is [this], it's what the coughing sounded like. It's this cough where you can hear the mucus. Worse than what smokers have. If you spent enough time near the smoke, you got a cough like that. And if you were a miner developing black lung, who smoked and spent time near the smoke, like my dad, then you knew when they were home, because you heard the worst cough in the world. If you went to a nearby store and you heard the cough, odds are they were from Centralia."

This isn't all in the past. Toxic gases still billow from burnt-out places, and that poses a major threat. Vents were built to pipe the steam away from town into areas of eminent domain where no one lives anymore.

Due to all the underground damage, many homes need additional supports (especially if the former houses next door were means of support for them), so they look like they have six or seven chimneys.

Becky points out that the fame of Centralia also means a lot of tourism. She lived there until her 20s, and while she was in grade school, her dying town became a Halloween vacation destination: "Everyone wanted to trick or treat near me. They didn't care that they got less candy. They wanted to be scared. A few years some of that steam would rise, or it would be foggy. With all the abandoned houses, it was better than a haunted house. To them. Me, it was another day."

Even outside of Halloween, tourists would come by just to take in the poisonous "atmosphere" in Centralia. "Whenever people visited from, say, Harrisburg or Lancaster, they would get scared easily. The ground would give out from under them and they'd fall in to their knees, and they'd go 'Oh my God!' I was so used to it that I said, 'Sometimes it does that,' and went on. This wasn't unusual. My mom or dad would say not to go into the steam and to stay away from the 'openings,' and they always asked what that was. When they found out, they asked if they were going to die, and my dad, eloquent as ever, would say, 'Oh, probably not.' Not to be funny, but actually being serious about it."

Jack's father, Guy, isn't exactly on the same page. He's one of the few that stayed behind. And he did it largely to spite those damned scientists and government officials who rolled into town to talk down to him and his neighbors. "They thought they knew more than us, but they were wrong. How come the town hasn't collapsed like they said? It's not as bad as they said, and you see that now."

Jack and Guy's disagreement is nothing new. Back when the evacuation efforts started, Centralia itself was bitterly divided over whether the fire was a threat or not. Becky remembers: "My parents stayed, because they didn't think they could afford to move. But then they got an offer for double the value of their home, and they took it. My neighbor ([the one] who owned the cat), she stayed. She had seen the danger firsthand, and lost something she loved to it, but she wasn't budging. The last time I was there, she was shouting from her porch at some men in suits who obviously wanted her house."

In 2013, after a battle lasting over 20 years, the remaining ten residents were allowed to stay, but once they're gone, their homes go to the public domain. Guy sums it neatly: "It's my home. That's all there is to it."

Becky thinks that for some of those last remaining residents, staying in Centralia may be less about spite and more about living in a place so dangerous it's effectively off the grid: "My old neighbor, until the day she died, would chase off journalists with a broom and hide sprinklers in her lawn to turn them on when people got near. I know before she died, she said she was 'in talks' to buy a cellphone jammer, which seems incredibly illegal, but this woman was also fine with threatening to spray bug spray at tourist's dogs."

We took a picture of Becky's old house:

"See that? You can kinda tell where a driveway was. But that's it. No sign of the huge gate we had, or of the stairs, or anything."

Jack continues: "They took away the name. One day, all the signs were gone. All the signs showing nearby towns had been replaced, with 'Centralia' [left] off. They even later covered up an arrow showing a way to get to another city through Centralia, so people passing through can't get here."

They removed Centralia's name from the city municipal building:

The county records office is slowly removing the town from history, which has made life tough on Jack's dad: "When my father went in to check his property lines, it took almost half a day to find a copy, because they had trashed so much of Centralia."

The county has also cut back on basic services for the seven people who still live there. Says Jack: "My father doesn't get mail. Officially, Centralia has no zip code, so nothing can be sent there. Everybody needs a PO box in another town, or need their family to collect it. All of my father's mail is sent to me. He also stopped using checks. You can't put Centralia down anymore, due to the zip code, and he didn't want to 'burden' me with putting my address down as his. He went full cash and debit."

Becky points out that the lack of a PO box has an even more disastrous consequence: It's made pizza delivery much more difficult. "My parents, after they took away the zip code, couldn't just give directions to people. If they didn't know about Centralia, they needed to be specific. I overheard my parents say to pizza guys on the phone 'Go to Aristes. Then head south on 42. Third little street you see, halfway turn right. We're the only house on the street.'"

Becky adds: "For the last five years or so, [tourists have] been way more destructive than the fire."

Despite intermittent police crackdowns, trespassing has been on the upswing. A lot of that probably has to do with the fact that so many articles on the internet have spread the story of Centralia. So, uh, sorry about that?

Readers, trust us here: Don't visit Centralia. And if you do, don't draw on anything. And super duper don't break pieces off of people's houses. That's just messed up. Residents have enough problems.

Evan V. Symon is a journalist and interviewer for Cracked, who was on location in Centralia and didn't die. Have an awesome job/experience you'd like to see here? Hit us up at tips@cracked.com today!

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