Hello all,

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to make one of my urban exploration dreams come true: I spent two days exploring and photographing Centralia, Pennsylvania. This small town is a legend amongst American urban explorers, and rightfully so. The Silent Hill video game series and subsequent movie(s) are based on Centralia's history. That, combined with its near-deserted status (only 10 residents remain as of the 2010 census) and its residents' fight to regain their property rights have piqued incredible amounts of interest in explorers and non-explorers in recent years.

Tucked away in the Appalachian Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania between Scranton and Harrisburg, Centralia was once a thriving coal mining town. In 1962, faulty procedures pertaining to a landfill fire ignited a strip of coal running underneath the town. Eventually, all of Centralia was smoldering from underneath. The strips of anthracite coal that wind its way through 400 acres of the town were burning, and all the residents were now in danger. The government decided it would be better (and, naturally, less expensive) to declare eminent domain on the land, evict all the residents and raze the entire town. Despite the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning, fissures and sinkholes opening in the earth (part of Route 61 has been blocked off and re-routed due to massive fissures in the road, and a boy fell into a fissure that suddenly opened under his feet in 1981) and smoke from the burning coal constantly billowing out of natural vents, some residents are fighting to keep their land and homes. Meanwhile, Centralia has become a ghost town. Only a few houses dot the landscape, mostly on the edges of town, and a large Orthodox church stays perched atop a hill, overlooking the town that once was.

My friend Jonny asked me months ago to help him work on a book that he was very excited about. He called it DisasterLand, and it would be about sites throughout the United States and the world that have seen some sort of disaster - natural or otherwise - which had a serious impact on the way the site operates today. He asked me to be the photographer for the book, and I gladly accepted the offer. Centralia has become our first stop in our journey to put this book together and get people interested in it. I couldn't have asked for a better starting point. Centralia is at once fascinating and terrifying (especially if you've seen Silent Hill), beautiful, confusing and tragic.

I'm posting some pictures of Centralia that I took while on this trip (though not all of them will be in the book) and hope that those who see them feel the same way I did when I was there. Any and all comments are welcome! Please visit Stay Out Stay Alive, the blog for the book project Jonny and I are working on. A Kickstarter page will be coming soon, and there are fantastic rewards for everyone that donates money to the project, no matter how much or how little you give. This was a trip of a lifetime, and I cannot wait for those to come!


Stay Out Stay Alive [link]

-Ashleigh