History & local legend
Centralia was a coal-mining borough in Columbia County before an underground fire transformed it into one of Pennsylvania’s best-known abandoned landscapes. The fire began in May 1962. Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection traces its likely origin to a trash burn in an old surface-mine pit, from which flames spread into nearby coal and abandoned mine workings.
As the fire persisted, families left and houses disappeared. Renée Jacobs’s book Slow Burn records the community during that upheaval through photographs and residents’ experiences. In her introduction, journalist Margaret O. Kirk also recounts an older local legend about a priest who condemned the Molly Maguires, a group associated with the region’s nineteenth-century mining conflicts.
In the story, members of the group attacked the priest while he prayed in a cemetery. He returned to his church, rang the bell to gather the parishioners, and pronounced a curse: their town, built over coal, would burn forever. Kirk presents the account as a legend remembered by residents living through the actual mine fire. Its force comes from that connection between an earlier tale of punishment and a disaster that continued beneath the streets long after the town above began to disappear.
