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hello and welcome to Prism of the past a semi-weekly series about historical events, people, and situations from the fascinating to the forgotten.

I'm the aluminati and today we're going to be talking about a town with an eerie history and still a burning coal mine beneath it, Centralia.

Many people know Centralia as the town that inspired the Silent Hill video games and Pennsylvania's

forbidden dangerous ghost town.

But I wanted to explore why that is the town's history and how it all went wrong.

And I have previously talked about this on my channel probably two or three years ago in a super brief three minute video that summarized the timeline of events that led to this never-ending fire, but today I figured we'd dig a little deeper and expand on look at this strange town and see what we can actually uncover.

So let's get into it. Centralia Valley was part of the vast wilderness of northeastern Pennsylvania,

much of which was sold by Native American tribes

to Pennsylvania colonial agents in 1749 for 500 pounds.

In 1770, Redding Railroad was built in the area linking Redding to Fort Augusta or present-day

Sunbury, a frontier outpost. Most of the trail later became Route 61. It's likely that these builders

saw evidence of the valleys, anthracite coal riches as they

hiked their way over Locust Mountain.

...