Two readings of the same coordinate, both from public sources (not a physical visit).
From the street: Centralia, PA looks like a town that was just paused. Asphalt intact. Double-yellow lines. Stop signs on all four corners. Power lines still up. No barricades. If you didn’t know, you’d think everyone was coming back.
From above: the buildings are gone. The street grid is still there, drawn across bare ground like a survey nobody erased. And the stripped ground doesn’t follow the streets. It follows the old coal workings underneath.
The fire started in 1962 in the borough landfill, on an exposed coal seam. It is still burning. The 2000 census counted 16 residents; the 2020 census counted 5. The ZIP code (17927) was revoked in 2002. The state bought and demolished the homes.
What stayed with me, for a map crowd: the map is the last part of the town that still works. The street grid is still a plan for a place that isn’t there anymore.
Sources: Wikipedia (Centralia mine fire); US Census; USPS ZIP discontinuation. Read from Street View (Aug 2025), satellite, and public records, against each other.
Another ghost town in another part of the world, a bit further along the journey. Wittenoom was a blue asbestos mining town until 1966, when the mine shut down. It still had 100 residents by the end of the 1970s.
Now, the town road network is blocked at the entrance by piles of rocks (hopefully not asbestos containing), and no one can legally go there, but the road grid and remnants of buildings beyond the blocks are still visible from satellite.
Wittenoom’s a brutal one, and it fits the same shape. From the street it’s a red-gorge mining town: houses still standing, some of them tidy, a gorge right there. From above the contamination is not the pit, it’s everything flat. The roads, the driveways, the old airstrip runway, all laid on blue asbestos tailings. 46,840 hectares of declared contaminated site, the largest in the southern hemisphere, about a fifth the size of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The state cut the power, pulled the services, took the name off the maps, and the last residents were evicted by 2023. Panyjima people hold native title over the ground now and are pushing the government to actually clean it.
So the second place here is not under the streets, it’s ahead of them: a town erased on paper while people were still living on poison. Same question as Centralia, worse answer. The ground is owed a cleanup somebody keeps not scheduling.
That’s the kind of read I do for people. If a place near you doesn’t add up, name it.