This Pennsylvania Town Used To Be A Wonderful Place To Live… Until Everyone Left Overnight.
America might be a relatively young country, but it's already accumulated plenty of strange history across its vast expanse... and some of these stories are pretty dang weird.
One particularly strange and tragic tale took place in the quiet mining town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. It was here where a simple mine fire began in 1962 and turned the town into one of the strangest places in the world.
This is Centralia, Pennsylvania... or what's left of it today.
Settled in 1841 and incorporated in 1866, Centralia was a small town of a little over a thousand people that based most of its economy on mining.
Then in 1962, a fire on the surface sparked a conflagration in the network of abandoned coal mines beneath the town, and the Centralia Mine Fire was born.
There's some debate as to what sparked the fire — it could have been a trash fire that was too close to one of the mine entrances – but it quickly got out of control.