S4 Ep52: A Literal Dumpster Fire: The Centralia, PA Fires

Strange and Unexplained with Daisy Eagan

True Crime, Society & Culture, Science

4.1 • 10K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When the good people of Centralia, PA decided to light an illegal, underground landfill on fire to make it go away, they had no way of knowing that decision would seal the town's fate. How could anyone have predicted that lighting garbage next to a massive coal seam in the earth would cause a fire that couldn't be put out?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What do you think of when you hear the term ghost town?
0:08.8	Is it the remnant of some old town from the Western Gold Rush?
0:13.2	Maybe a saloon in a local post office and a dusty street where cowboys used to face off
0:18.6	and then go have a sasparelli with the local can-can girls in their petticoats.
0:23.6	I have to stop watching 1883 with country superstars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.
0:32.2	Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan.
0:35.4	I'm a writer and an actor who does not belong in the Old West.
0:39.5	I don't even belong in the New West.
0:41.7	I moved east from there to avoid cowboys and hot, arid weather and most of all fires.
0:47.7	But fires, stranger, happen.
0:50.7	And sometimes they happen in the most outrageous places.
0:56.8	And a town, just a regular town,
1:04.6	can become almost overnight, a ghost town. So get your spulunking lights out and join me as we delve into the underground ruins of a corner of America's coal industry. Join me in the
1:10.8	living nightmare that is Centralia, Pennsylvania, home to the smoking ruin that is the town of Centralia,
1:37.7	was once part of northeast Pennsylvania's rolling green wilderness,
1:41.9	an area made up of mountains, rivers, and forests.
1:45.3	It was once a place richly inhabited by wildlife and populated by indigenous Americans.
1:51.5	All that changed in 1749, when for reasons that I assume made sense to them at the time,
1:57.8	the Native Americans living there sold the land to colonial settlers for 500 pounds,
2:03.8	or they were coerced to sell the land. This deal was still 100 years before Andrew Jackson's
2:10.2	Indian Removal Act, not to be confused with the Remove Andrew Jackson Act, was passed, and just a few
2:16.1	years before the start of the French Indian War.
	...

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