Inside chilling ghost town where underground fire has been burning for over 60 years

If you've ever thought that your hometown was a tough place to live, you might want to check out Centralia in Pennsylvania.

This old mining town wasn't particularly remarkable until 1962, when a major fire broke out. The blaze spread through a landfill site but then took its biggest twist when it spread through to the coal mines underneath the town.

Putting out a landfill fire can be a massive challenge, but putting out a fire that's gone underground and is burning up a practically unfathomable amount of fuel proved impossible.

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So, instead, the fire was eventually simply left to continue smouldering away underground, and Centralia residents were advised to abandon their homes and move somewhere safer.

However, a few chose to instead tough it out and stayed in their hometown.

Over the course of years, the fire burned away under the surface, occasionally causing the ground to collapse in small areas, and toxic fumes to leak out from cracks.

People carried on living there in surprising numbers, until 12-year-old Todd Domboski fell into a sinkhole in 1981 and nearly lost his life.

This seemed to wake people up a bit and many then left, before the state mandated that everyone else clear out, even going so far as to bulldoze homes to stop people from staying and revoking the ZIP code.

Amazingly, though, there are still a small handful of Centralia residents who haven't given up - living in pretty much constant danger of carbon monoxide poisoning or sinkholes opening up.

They had to go to court in 2013 to maintain their right to live there if they wanted, which shows how committed they are.

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Still, things are only getting harder - in 2022 some new roads meant that Centralia was effectively disconnected from the local traffic network (partly to stop tourists from visiting the dangerous site, which had apparently gained a reputation as a spot for graffiti artists).

This means that getting supplies in and out of the town must be becoming a massive struggle for these residents, and you can fairly safely assume that Centralia will eventually end up as a true ghost town.

Unlike some other abandoned towns and villages, though, it'll still have smoke rising up from it for the foreseeable future - that never-ending fire doesn't show any signs of going out.

So, while there are plenty of towns out there down on their luck, few of them can claim to be quite as hellish as Centralia.