Pennsylvania · Ghost town
Centralia
A borough with five residents, emptied not by economics but by a coal seam that has been burning underneath it since 1962.
Position Columbia County, Pennsylvania · 40.8033, -76.3417
Centralia is the least populated municipality in Pennsylvania. Its population was a thousand in 1980 and five in 2020. The reason is a mine fire that started in 1962 in the coal seams below the borough and has never been put out.
Attempts to extinguish it failed repeatedly, and by the 1980s subsidence and carbon monoxide had made the place unsafe to live in. In 1992 the Commonwealth claimed all real estate in the borough under eminent domain and condemned it. A handful of residents fought to stay and were eventually allowed to remain for their lifetimes.
Most of the buildings are gone. What is left is a street grid with nothing on it, cracked pavement, and vegetation growing over lots where houses stood. The most photographed feature, a graffiti-covered stretch of abandoned highway, was buried in 2020.
This is not a curiosity to be enjoyed. People lost their homes here, some of them are still alive, and a few still live in the borough. The fire is expected to burn for another two centuries.
Facts checked against the Wikipedia article Centralia, Pennsylvania. The words above are ours.