Survival Horror

In my restless dreams, I see that town… Silent Hill. You promised you’d take me there again someday… but you never did. Well, I’m alone there now… in our special place… waiting for you.
— Mary Sunderland, Silent Hill 2

Anyone who goes into our cemeteries to “gawk” or get a thrill is not welcome by any of us former residents. We don’t stomp all over your deceased. Stay away from ours. I, personally believe a “live cam” should be put in at the cemmie and all license plates noted with trespassers charged. Get out of our lives. I despise you.
— Facebook comment, October 30, 2013

Here’s the short version: the town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, has been on fire for 53 years. Centralia is (or was) a small coal-mining town, sixty miles northeast of Harrisburg, the state capital. In 1962, with the town population at an historical low of 1400, a landfill caught fire. As it happens, the landfill had been built over a strip mine pit, and the fire spread underground, igniting the arterial network of coal mines that had been the town’s economic lifeblood. Centralia mined anthracite coal, which burns hotter than any other fossil fuel. Today, that fire is still going; the town is not. There are about five people living in Centralia right now.

Tourists visit Centralia almost every day of the year. They’re drawn to it because the story is weird, strange, and they’re curious to see, basically, what a dead town looks like. Some are only familiar with the short version of the story, and some not even that much. Like a Baltimore couple who, in the account of one ex-Centralian, pulled up to the town, asking, ‘hey, where can we see the fire?’ The Centralian joked that, oh, they put it out just last week, and the couple drove off, like, ‘Oh, that’s a shame.’

There are two roads leading south out of Centralia. One is a destroyed highway, a shuttered stretch of Pennsylvania Route 61, permanently closed to vehicles since the 1990s. The road looks pretty much what all zombie fiction envisions highways will look like: buckled and broken from subsidence, vegetation growing in the cracks, and steam occasionally issuing from fissures in the asphalt. In the decades since its closure, the highway has been painted over with graffiti, offering greetings and warnings, e.g.:

1. This is where she appears in the dark of night
2. Welcome to Hell 666
3. You will all die here
4. Silent Hill, PA
5. Matty has a pencil dick

The Graffiti Highway is absolutely preoccupied with penises, and not just the specific circumstances of Matty’s genitalia. The highway is abundant with penis graffiti. The many families who were forced to leave Centralia are hardly pleased to see the road become a grand canvas for outlandish cocks, as is completely understandable. (“Sad to see it like that because I learned to drive on that road,” recalls one former resident on a Facebook page dedicated to the town. Says another: “It does disturb me in many ways…. Maybe if it were nice things like ‘I love and miss this wonderful town’ and more positive sayings it would not be so bad!”) Penises on the Graffiti Highway form wending trails, and one such trail charts a course for the penises directly into Pac-Man’s mouth.

And it may sound unlikely, but when it comes to Centralia and video games, pornographic Pac-Man graffiti is the least of the town’s problems.

If the idea of a near-ghost town and an underground mine fire sounds familiar, it may be because it’s shown up elsewhere: as the backstory for another little American town called Silent Hill.

Sort of, anyway. The town of Silent Hill has been the eponymous setting for a Japanese horror video game franchise since 1999, but Centralia only entered the picture with a film adaptation in 2006. In the film Silent Hill, a Canadian/French/American production, Silent Hill, West Virginia is a remote coal-mining town, condemned because of an underground fire, which still burns in the present day. The film cops Centralia’s backstory as explanation for Silent Hill’s surface level creepiness: the emptiness, the steam rising from the ground, the unseen threat literally underneath one’s feet. In both film and game, the town of Silent Hill is choked by an oppressive and supernaturally omnipresent fog; air raid sirens blare in announcement of body horror poster children shuddering down the streets; and it is home to a primeval blood cult for whose sins the town is picking up the karmic check.

“You always find what’s alien to be scarier, right?”

“We used [what] had happened to the city of Centralia to feed the mythology of Silent Hill,” director Christophe Gans explained in an interview, and that is probably not what the founder of Centralia hoped would be his legacy. Gans and screenwriter Roger Avary used Centralia as a reference point for what Silent Hill might look like in the real world — although it was filmed in Canada. (“Centralia”, however, was the movie’s working title, so that the production might avoid attention from Silent Hill fans while filming.)

It’s worth pointing out that Centralia has nothing to do with the Japanese video game series Silent Hill. Konami’s Silent Hill also placed the town of Silent Hill in America, but not West Virginia: instead, somewhere vague in the American Northeast, later narrowed down to Maine. There’s nothing about coal mining, or an underground fire, in the games’ mythology. And while the original Silent Hill games nominally take place in America, they’re Japanese, and feel like it: from the unforgiving game design, descended from a tradition of Japanese survival horror, to the stilted English and overuse of ellipses, to the lack of specificity regarding the America it is ostensibly set in. Silent Hill, Maine, might be an American town, but Silent Hill isn’t American.

“When the first three Silent Hill games (the good ones, the ones people mean when they say Silent Hill) were made, Japanese games dominated the home console market pretty exclusively,” says Leigh Alexander — the game critic and editor-in-chief of Offworld — of Silent Hill’s interest in the United States. “Maybe the creators of the game were interested in the dark sides of the living rooms and suburban towns they had infiltrated. Maybe they didn’t want to tell these stories about brutality and superstition using the vocabulary of their own environment. You always find what’s alien to be scarier, right?”

Maybe the reason why the Silent Hill film adopted the history of Centralia was so that its Silent Hill might finally have at least the sense of being an authentic American town. But you’d never know Silent Hill was interested in Centralia from the film itself: Avary’s screenplay dispenses with the mine fire business in two lines of dialogue. (Both of which are, pretty much, “There was a mine fire.”)

It’d be a stretch to say Centralia has much relevance to the overall Silent Hill franchise — in fact, it has no relevance at all to the fourteen (!) Silent Hill video games, or the various comic books, novelizations and franchise ephemera. And yet, people really do show up in Centralia, to this day, entirely because it’s “the real Silent Hill.”

The really remarkable thing about Centralia is not that the fire has been able to burn for so long, it’s that the town, the state, and the federal government spent twenty-two years trying to put it out, and failed.

The fire didn’t start under the town itself, and for a while nobody thought it’d ever go unchecked long enough to reach it. The book Fire Underground by David DeKok is a thorough account of the origins of the fire and the many attempts to end it. It’s a horror story of bureaucratic infighting and inaction that would deliver a Silicon Valley libertarian into anaphylactic shock.

Almost every attempt to suppress the fire followed the same pattern. After months of studying the location and severity of the fire, the government agency responsible would make a list of options and pick the cheapest one. Typically, that would be installing an underground barrier in the path of the fire or flushing the mines with a mixture of rock and water. Those were never thought to be more effective than, for example, total excavation or digging a trench ahead of the fire to prevent its spread, but affordability was the priority. A few private citizens like Quint from Jaws (“You all know me… you know how I earn a living”) occasionally offered to solve the problem, asking only to keep the coal that they find, but were turned away by the bureaucracy just as Quint surely would have been in real life.

Once a solution was chosen, the agency would tender for a contractor and work would commence. And then, the project would simply run out of money, or prove ineffective, or it would be discovered that the fire had already grown past the point where the specific project was designed to contain it. Years later, the agency would seemingly forget they ever did anything in the first place, and respond to Centralians’ anguish with fresh calls to study the fire. Eventually, the fire itself reached the town.

Nothing improved once the problem was elevated to the federal level, where the Centralia fire fell into an ouroboros of buck-passing. The United States Bureau of Mines and the Office of Surface Mining, two agencies within the Department of the Interior, shared responsibility for solving Centralia and feuded intensely almost for decades. Like the Montagues and the Capulets, only loveless, and also very boring.

In some cases, the government actually made things worse: like filling in open pits that had been venting the fire, channelling carbon monoxide towards, and into, residents’ homes. There was not enough government cash to get carbon monoxide detectors for everyone, so families had to share with one another, or go on waiting lists. It didn’t particularly bother the government when residents started passing out. After some Centralians started advocating for relocation, federal agencies blamed them for undermining their efforts.

The two agencies delayed effective intervention long enough for federal involvement to be suspended completely by Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior James Watt. Watt had a dogmatic fervour for terminating federal funding of anything, which extended to banning a free Beach Boys concert at the National Mall. He also, DeKok writes, had a “trademark cowboy hat.”

Some in Centralia began to suspect conspiracy: it was more plausible, they thought, that state and federal governments were colluding to drive residents out so they could seize the town’s valuable anthracite. In truth, the Centralia fire was never impossible or even that hard to put out, just expensive. By 1981, writes DeKok, the fire had grown so much that trying to extinguish it just by pouring water into the mines would take twenty years of non-stop pumping. But at any stage of difficulty, nobody in government, or in Centralia, thought that they should be the ones to spend money on it. The town of Centralia was simply not politically nor economically valuable enough to get a fire put out.

“For years, government lied to us in Centralia. They lied to us.”

“Government lies through its teeth,” former resident Tom Larkin said in the 2007 documentary The Town That Was. “I don’t trust government. And I have good reason not to. Because for years government lied to us in Centralia. They lied to us.” There is evidence to suggest that this is true. To defend its inaction, the Pennsylvania Department of Health denied to the press that there was any public health problem in Centralia. This while withholding from residents basic information on the effects of human exposure to carbon monoxide, and announcing that no carbon monoxide detector in Centralia had ever recorded “dangerous” levels of the gas — that “dangerous” level being a point beyond what their government-issued equipment was able to measure.

The Centralia problem was only ‘solved’ when ignoring it became politically embarrassing. In 1982, twelve-year-old Todd Domboski was swallowed by a sudden rift in the ground, and sucked into a pit of hot mud. He was rescued by his teenage cousin. This occurred while a congressional delegation was visiting Centralia to evaluate how much of a problem the mine fire really was, and, you know: it looked terrible.

As an end to the fire appeared increasingly less likely, a schism developed in Centralia between those who wanted to leave and those who wanted to stay. The latter group seized upon anything to avert the coming diaspora, to the point of denying that the fire or carbon monoxide posed any threat to Centralia residents, or even existed. One opponent of relocation, Helen Womer refused on principle to allow carbon monoxide detectors in her home. After his incident, Domboski says Womer warned him not to talk to reporters. And around that time, an anonymous broadsheet circulated in Centralia denouncing Domboski as a dull boy who spent all day indoors when he wasn’t running his mouth in front of the TV cameras. Larkin, who advocated relocation, said he got death threats. Another advocate had a Molotov cocktail thrown into his motorcycle shop. There are Centralians who lived through this period who do not speak to each other today.

All official efforts to extinguish the Centralia mine fire ceased in 1984. Centralia was surrendered to the path of the fire, and a congressional appropriation of $42 million provided for the relocation costs of Centralia residents. Relocation was voluntary then, and became compulsory in 1992 when Pennsylvania seized and condemned all property in Centralia under eminent domain. A few residents defied the state by refusing to leave their homes, and endured lengthy eviction battles. In 2013, the state gave up, and agreed that those people still intent on living in Centralia, all elderly by that point and technically squatters, might as well legally remain there until their death.

The five or six people still living in Centralia “are the diehards of the diehards,” David DeKok tells me. “They resent tourists of any stripe, and they are too old to know about Silent Hill. But if you told them it brings tourists to Centralia, they would hate it.”

The Silent Hill film broadly follows the plot of the first game and borrows liberally from the imagery and themes of the first four. Rose Da Silva (Radha Mitchell) is worried about her adopted daughter Sharon (Jodelle Ferland) who has a tendency to sleepwalk up to the edges of cliffs and preparing to jump, while repeatedly muttering the words “Silent Hill.” Rose is at a loss, so decides to put Sharon in the car in the middle of the night and drive her to Silent Hill, believing that this is something Sharon will like. This is questionable.

By the time they arrive in Silent Hill, Rose has fled a highway patrol officer (Laurie Holden), crashed the car, lost Sharon in the overbearing fog, and attacked by charred children and a bowlegged gelatin man. Holden’s officer returns to save Rose from the last weirdo; while she is distracted, Rose, handcuffed now, runs away again.

Rose pursues Sharon through schools, hotels and churches, but finds only giant insect swarms and mutilated miners and janitors bound in barbed wire: every parent’s worst nightmare. Also, Silent Hill exists in multiple dimensions, and that only adds to the confusion. It transitions between states, sometimes unclearly, and sometimes, as in the movie, announced by air raid siren. In one dimension, the Fog World, Rose stands alone in falling ash, her daughter lost somewhere in the mist. There are not many people around, but monsters lumber about, without particular malice. They’re lost too. The Fog suggests the vague boundaries of Purgatory: whether Rose leaves the Fog is not her choice to make — the bridge she drove in on is now a yawning chasm — but the whim of a greater power. So Rose waits for the Fog to lift, which would mean that she gets to leave Silent Hill for good — or go, instead, to the Other place.

Signs of the Otherworld: rust, blood, and chases through swinging hooks in a meat locker. This is vile, disturbing: the monsters here are grotesque, carved up and twisted manifestations of primal fears and repressed desires. In the Fog, you might die, in the Otherworld, you will die horribly: skin pulled by giant hands off a warm body. The difference between these dimensions is that of dreading the worst, and the worst coming to pass.

The last dimension in the film, the “Real World,” is glimpsed only briefly, when Rose’s husband (Sean Bean) drives through Silent Hill with another cop ineffectually searching for his wife and daughter. Silent Hill here is just a boring ghost town, with no blood, monsters or dramatic lighting. The scene only even exists because the studio was concerned that there weren’t any men in the movie, and it plays about as perfunctory as its creative inspiration. In a way, Sean Bean’s character has the bleakest fate of anyone in Silent Hill: condemned to the dimension of studio notes.

Later, it emerges that Sharon is the mortal personification of what is good and light about a girl from Silent Hill named Alessa Gillespie. Alessa was a bastard, which was an anathema to the matriarchal, puritan witch-hunting that ran Silent Hill in those days. They attempted to purify Silent Hill by putting Alessa to the torch, but their ritual went awry. The equipment malfunctioned, severely burning Alessa and sparking a fire that spread to the labyrinth of underground mines, where it still burns today, etc.

In the hospital, Alessa’s rage grew until it took dark physical form. The Fog and the Otherworld are her influence, manifestations of Alessa’s pain and hatred, inflicted as punishment upon the cultists of Silent Hill. In the end, Rose helps Alessa take revenge. With her psionic power, Alessa rises from the fire underground and sends long tendrils of barbed wire throughout the church where the cultists are gathered, shredding them to pieces, sexually violating and ultimately vivisecting them all until fresh blood coats the floor.

“I have to say I love Centralia, lived there all my life,” wrote one former resident on the town’s Facebook page. “Had to buy Silent Hill to see it. It was horrible and upset me terribly to know it was inspired by my home town. It was the only movie that I purchased and actually watched and took it outside and smashed. What a sad thing to associate with a place that brought so much joy to so many people.”

Imagine being told that someone made a film inspired by your nice town, and what you sit down to watch is the fucking Silent Hill movie. Imagine seeing Pyramid Head, and what he does on screen. For those who are unfamiliar, Pyramid Head is a man with a pyramid for a head. Everything Pyramid Head does is upsetting, to say nothing of problematic. Pyramid Head has become part of the Centralia story. How is that okay?

Even worse: people showing up in your town, whose deserted state testifies to the occurrence of a powerful and ongoing tragedy, because they’re fans of a pyramid-hatted ghoul and his various acts of sexual violence. “You can go to Centralia on almost any day of the year and see tourists wandering around,” says DeKok. “Of those I speak to, which obviously isn’t everyone, I would say a third to a half are there to see ‘the real Silent Hill.’”

Centralia has been labelled “the real Silent Hill” by offbeat tourism websites so often — based on nothing more substantial than Gans and Avary’s comments in interviews — you might almost forget that Silent Hill really has nothing to do with Centralia. It suggests that Silent Hill has been about Centralia since the first game in 1999 — and evidently, some people do think this — rather than a minor contribution to the Silent Hill canon from a movie that nobody even really likes very much.

Centralians themselves couldn’t be less happy about Silent Hill, since the brief association the film made between Silent Hill and Centralia is now one of the better-known things about the town. Like, what if everyone knew the name of your home town, but only because Frank Booth in Blue Velvet mentioned that he once went to the toilet there.

Inevitably, those who visit Centralia for its relevance to Silent Hill leave disappointed. Every article that posits the town as “the real Silent Hill” — or as “The Actual Town from Hell”, “Hell on Earth”, “A Ghost Town… On Fire”, or as one of the “10 Scariest Places on Earth” — includes a comment section with at least one reality check. “It is NOT a scary place at all.” “I’m afraid if you want scary, find an abandoned insane asylum, because Centralia is not very scary at all.” “It’s very peaceful actually.”

There’s a Facebook page where current and former residents share Centralia reminiscences. The presence in the town of tourists, of any provenance, is a frequent source of anger, and Centralians attribute to the tourist not only disrespect, but active malice. Accusations abound of tourists swiping flowers from graves as souvenirs, or disturbing grave markers and even the cemetery gates themselves. Tourists initially caught the blame when, in 2014, a time capsule from 1966 went missing (“FUCK this SHIT! You said it was safe!”) The capsule reappeared in the hands of ex-residents, who had been concerned about the capsule’s vulnerability to, well, tourists.

It is not clear if a tourist has ever actually been caught thieving, but they remain perennial vandalism suspects. “I bet half the time it is tourists who don’t give a crap about the cemeteries [and who] are on ghost hunts and don’t watch what they are doing,” goes one comment. Another: “My family fought that coal fire, lived those mines. We were baptized there. Our life was Centralia. NONE of these cults are welcome to geek at my family plots. Their footprints… don’t belong. Let them study their own people’s burial grounds.”

Tourists have to cop to some of this. Beyond the very existence of the dick highway, there’s whole Flickr albums of people posing inside the fissures in PA 61, screaming theatrically as if falling into the fires of Hell. On the other hand is the report of a deer corpse laid near a cemetery. That sounds like something a tourist would do, suggested one Facebook poster, which, no, it definitely doesn’t.

Centralians do not profit from tourism, nor care for trying. Not even capitalism can overcome the scorn Centralians have for anyone who shows up looking for ghosts or demons, assuming that they know something about the town. “[I won’t] cooperate with anyone… trying to make a buck off Centralia,” Helen Womer told Joan Quigley, author of the Centralia history The Day the Earth Caved In. Tourism in Centralia is a disrespectful business. And Silent Hill has nothing to do with anything. The “real Silent Hill” is not the real Centralia.

At the end of the Silent Hill film, Rose Da Silva leaves Silent Hill with Sharon — but not really. She thinks she’s come home, but it’s an alternate version of home, one without her husband, and cloaked in the familiar fog of, yes, that town: Silent Hill. She’s trapped there, and so is Centralia: an entire town, stuck in the shadow of Silent Hill, and seriously pissed off about it.

Is there a real Silent Hill? Anywhere?

Not really. It maps to no specific place on Earth. It’s grounded in ideas, but not the truth, of a vague holiday destination somewhere in Maine, or the popular history of a mining town in Pennsylvania. It’s not even depicted especially consistently across its own fiction. Trying to pin down the longitude and latitude of Silent Hill is pointless. It’s not supposed to feel like a real place.

“It’s best not to get too literal about it,” says Leigh Alexander. “Silent Hill could never have been an American game. It was always too delicate. Like most Japanese games of its time — and like nearly all the Eastern horror that I’ve seen — it’s less concerned with the material ‘facts’ of its central mystery than with how the imagery it uses helps create an atmosphere. Japanese horror films are about the unseen, about family ghosts, about symbols and juxtaposition. American fans of Silent Hill 2, for example, are always trying to disassemble it: Is the world of Silent Hill this actual ‘split’ place, a real world, a fog purgatory, and then a hell world? Did the cult ‘create’ it like this, what is the relationship between the first three games plot-wise, if when Alessia burned it caused blah blah… what does Pyramid Head ‘represent’? Is his pyramid head symbolic of the three ‘faces’ of — blah blah blah! You see what I mean? That’s what Americans do to Silent Hill. They want it to be literal.”

A few words on Pyramid Head. Silent Hill fans generally aren’t wild about his appearance in the movie. The character was introduced in the second game, and has personal relevance to that story as the bespoke bête noire for the protagonist, a guy named James Sunderland. Divorced of that context, Pyramid Head is a hollow bad guy, a walk-on-shirtless-with-a-Great-Blade cameo tossed in to please fans of the game (although who is pleased by the appearance of Pyramid Head?)

Speaking of tourists, James Sunderland was one. James and his wife Mary vacationed in Silent Hill, years ago. In Silent Hill 2 he returns, alone, following the instructions in a letter he’s just received from Mary — who has been dead for three years.

In the town, James deals with the same general monster guff as Rose Da Silva, but he is repeatedly persecuted by a humanoid executioner in a bloody white smock and a slanted and rusting metal pyramid where its head should be. Pyramid Head is violent, but James can only run from him. And just as James cannot confront Pyramid Head, he cannot confront something much more important: the repressed truth that Mary is dead because he, James, administered a mercy killing to her to end her suffering from a terminal illness. This is literal. Anything else that happens in Silent Hill 2 is less clearly so.

“I was weak,” James tells Pyramid Head. “That’s why I needed you… needed someone to punish me for my sins.” James’ entire sojourn in Silent Hill is metaphorical, to some degree and all the degrees that matter, for his coming to terms with his actions, and in the unreal town his metaphors assume physical, menacing shape.

In Silent Hill 2, the factual location and history of Silent Hill, the town, are really not important. The town shifts between realities and reshapes itself as necessary to process and reflect James’ individual torment: the moral desire for punishment and the cowardice to not accept it when it arrives. The Silent Hill visited by James Sunderland is not the same town visited by Rose Da Silva or anybody else. It’s his Silent Hill. “The real Silent Hill” could be anywhere, anything: whatever form it has evolves in response to different tragedies. It is tragedy.

And what’s the real Centralia?

One of the reasons the film is such a sore spot is that it’s getting harder and harder to preserve an accurate picture of what Centralia used to be, even without Silent Hill getting in the way. Almost all the buildings, and most of the people, are gone. The story of the fire is well documented, but anything else about the town is at danger of surviving only as long as the people who still remember it.

On that Centralia Facebook page, memories are uploaded with the urgency of concerned citizens fighting to assert the identity of their hometown over its potential legacy as one of the 10 Scariest Places on Earth or as a footnote in the lore of a Japanese video game franchise. Collectively, these memories read as wistful non-sequiturs, forming a chaotic, atemporal picture of the Centralia that used to be.

This is what people talk about when they talk about the real Centralia: guys and muscle cars, old men with mean dogs, boxing matches in the back room of the post office, swimming in the power dam. A bank robbery in 1973. The cast of a minstrel show posing, blackface, underneath a Erin go Bragh banner. A movie theatre in the basement of the Russian Orthodox Church. Strippers at the town fair. Muhammed Ali at the height of his fame visiting to see some friends, and the boys of Centralia too intimidated to talk to him.

A blimp landing in the Little League field. A UFO sighting. A man dressed up as a “Polish Leprechaun.” (“Don’t know where he is now.” “He’s dead.”) The time a bad movie was filmed in the town: Made in U.S.A., starring Adrian Pasdar and Chris Penn. Gang fights with pipes and chains.

St Ignatius Elementary. The Speed Spot. Dee Fashions, the dress factory, where Joe the boss was rumoured to have been having an affair, and murdered by the mob. Staging a wedding between two cats at the “Catlick Church.” The men of the American Legion holding a twenty-one-gun salute on Memorial Day, and the children going around afterwards to pick up the shells.

And this:

In 1987, the Columbia County Housing and Redevelopment Authority sent eviction notices to John and Bertha Mayernick of West Centre Street. The couple, both in their late sixties, did not own the property. After the congressional appropriation for relocation made everything official, the Authority had bought the Mayernicks’ house from its owner, intending to demolish it later.

Under the terms of the letter, a version of which went to about two dozen other Centralia families, the Mayernicks had ninety days to vacate the property. They didn’t want to go, Bertha especially. She was Centralia, through and through. People knew her parents, her grandparents, her family used to run a grocery store. For someone dead set against leaving, the severity of the fire and its gases — unseen, intangible — were easy to ignore. Everyone gets headaches; it doesn’t matter where you live.

So, John and Bertha let the Authority’s ninety days go by without an answer. In that time, they tried to find a new place to live in Centralia, but there was just nothing available. Everyone was selling to the Authority. Even so, Bertha would still not leave Centralia. She was adamant about it.

It wasn’t ordinary stubbornness, especially. It was not a question of it simply being better for them to move from one town to another. It was about the signal that their departure, everybody’s departure, would send: a very literal signal that Centralia was over, that the government was free to end it. That the Mayernicks, or any Centralian, insisted on still living there was the only thing keeping the town from its death. If they went, there would be no more history, no more stories, nothing new would ever live there.

Eventually, John changed his mind, which was probably inevitable. He would have preferred not to leave, but he wasn’t a Centralian, it wasn’t in his blood. And he was accustomed to moving around. He only lived in Centralia at all because he’d moved there to marry Bertha. For a while, he operated a coal shovel in the mines, until he had to stop working on account of a stroke. John had no history to bind him there. But Bertha still said no. The Authority sent new notice, with new terms: this time, if they didn’t leave, the country sheriff would see to it that they did.

And still she refused to go. They argued about it. John was known to be a heavy drinker, everyone in Centralia remembered him drinking, particularly after the stroke, but nobody ever remembered seeing him drunk. That night, they were both upset. He picked up a knife, and she was scared; she held up her hands to protect herself. He stabbed her through her hands, in the face and neck. She stumbled into the living room, where she collapsed, died. He got in his car and drove out of Centralia. The Centralia he left, that people remember now, would not survive the twentieth century. Today in Centralia, the real Centralia, steam rises from scars in a vacant landscape, visitors stoke old resentments, and the state of Pennsylvania awaits the day that all the last remaining residents are dead, and it can finally move in to raze everything that still stands and end the town once and for all. Beneath everything, the fire still burns, and it will still burn: it is the only thing from Centralia more excited about the future of the town than its past.

John Mayernick parked in the badlands just outside of Centralia. Without leaving the car, he poured a can of gasoline over his head. And the fire burned above the soil.

Header image, by Kelly Michals, is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
“Stay Out”, by Peter & Laila, is licensed under CC BY 2.0
“Sign” by Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
“Untitled” by James Armes, is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0