I'm Lauren Norton, and this is one strange thing,

the show where we search the nation's news archives for stories that can't quite be explained.

Thank you. Today we visit Columbia County, Pennsylvania, tucked into the northeastern quarter of that pleasantly rectangular state. Columbia County is pretty rural. There's farmland and there's game land, and some towns that

popped up along the Susquehanna River, and in the southern tip of the county, there's mining

country. Our story today concerns a Columbia County mining town, Centralia. Several decades ago,

it was home to about a thousand people. But in 2020, the last time that the Census Bureau was out there, there were five residents.

It's now a ghost town, and there's a very good reason for that.

You see, underneath Centrelia, a fire is raging, and that's not a metaphor.

It's literally on fire down there.

To explain why that's the case, though, we do need to go back in time,

to the heyday of Centralia's coal mining endeavors.

According to Centrelia, p.a.org, a site devoted to the town's history.

The first two mines in Centralia opened in 1856.

In 1890, the town would reach its highest population numbers ever, a little less than 3,000 people.

There were seven churches in town and 27 saloons, which is a fun ratio if we've ever heard of one.

But in the intervening decades, the United States got involved in a world war,

diverting Centralia's young mining men await a military service.

And the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression caused Centralia's main employer,

Lehigh Valley Coal Company, to shutter five of its mines.

Despite that, though, mining operations, they actually hung in there throughout the 20th century

and even into the 21st.

As a matter of fact, there are still miners in Columbia County. They're just not in the mine

...