Six Impossible Episodes: U.S. Ghost Towns

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. A couple of octobers ago, I put together an installment of six impossible episodes that was all about ghost stories. And it was specifically listener requests for ghost stories that were pretty well known in a local area but just might not have a lot of name recognition in other places. And as I was going through the listener request to pull all of that together, I also found a lot of requests that were about ghost towns, so I saved those for later, and that is today. For the sake of expectations. When I think of the word ghost town, I usually imagine a place that was a town, the town was abandoned, and the abandoned town and all of its buildings are still standing. That was true of some of the places that we're talking about today, but some of them, as of this moment here in the year twenty twenty five, like, they don't really have a lot of structures, so the town itself is now gone, but it is a town that was completely abandoned in the past.

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Speaker 1: And The first town we're talking about is Body, California, which was requested by listener Corina. Body is a couple hundred miles east southeast of Sacramento or about one hundred miles roughly south of Lake Tahoe. It's very close to the Nevada border. It's in the mountains at an elevation of more than eight thousand feet, and it's probably the best preserved ghost town in California, and today it's known as Body State Historic Park.

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Speaker 2: In eighteen fifty nine, a man named ws Body or Body found gold in the region and stake to claim. Body died in a blizzard the fallowing winter, and afterward the Body Mining District was named in his honor. At first, this district really only attracted a few prospectors. There were other lucrative mines in the Southwest that were already established, some of them were not quite as remote as Body was. But in eighteen seventy seven, a collapse at Bunker Hill Mine in Body revealed a huge vein of gold, and today this is known as one of California's biggest gold strikes. That gold strike brought a lot of new people to Body.

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Speaker 1: This area is the ancestral home of multiple bands of Northern Piute, and when newcomers flooded the area after this gold strike, they forced the Pyute off their land. We talk a lot more about the Northern Paiute during this period in our two parter on Sarah Winnemucca from November of twenty twenty four. Although Winnemucca and her band were from about two hundred miles north of Body, the impact on the Pyute also went beyond the loss of land, with their access to food disrupted as forests were cut down for lumber and firewood, and cattle were introduced to graze on the area's grasslands.

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Speaker 2: Body followed the arc of a typical boom town. It saw a lot of new people and a ton of new buildings, and many of them were very hastily built. It also developed a wild West reputation for danger and lawlessness, and at its peak there were more than sixty saloons and dance halls there for a population of about eighty five hundred people. Like many of the nineteenth centuries gold rush towns, body shops and services were largely provided by Chinese immigrants who had come to the United States for some kind of work, many of them working on the trans Continental Railroad before its completion in eighteen sixty nine, so Body also had its own Chinatown. But just four years after the gold rush started in Body, the gold started to run out. Mining companies and the businesses supporting them started going bankrupt, and people started leaving. While there was still mining going on, everything was at a much smaller scale. A fire struck the town in eighteen ninety two, and then another fire in nineteen thirty two. By the time mining officially ended in nineteen forty two, only about ten percent of the roughly two thousand structures that had been built in the town were still standing, and its population was about a quarter of its peak. People continued to leave until it was basically empty. Twenty years after mining operations ended. Body was designated as a National Historic Site and a State Historic Park in nineteen sixty six. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places. When an open pit gold mine was proposed to be built nearby in the nineteen eighties, people lobbied for the Body Protection Act, which was passed in nineteen ninety four. Today, the buildings in Body are preserved in the state they were in when they were abandoned. This includes products still on the shelves at stores, household goods and furnishings in the homes, and equipment still in some of the shops and mining facilities. A lot of the upholstery is moldering and wallpaper is peeling from the walls. One hotel is precariously leaning and has been propped up with a large beam wedged into its side. Slowly resting car bodies and trailers are dotted around the town. Some of the buildings are essentially in ruins and they'll stay that way. The park's website describes this all as being preserved in a state of quote arrested decay. Unlike a lot of parks, including some other historic parks, there aren't modern buildings or facilities that have been added into the town to accommodate visitors, although there is a parking lot, a picnic and a restroom with flush toilets on the outskirts of the town if you need to use the restroom. While in the town itself there are outhouses. The last three miles that a person needs to travel to get to the site are on a pretty rough dirt road, and while the park is open year round. Getting there in the winter can be treacherous to impossible because of all the snow.

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Speaker 1: Unsurprisingly, people have been taking objects from body as souvenirs since before it officially became a park, but the entire park is essentially one big museum, so people really should not be taking things. Some years ago, a park ranger tried to deter these thefts by starting a rumor that a curse would strike anyone who took anything out of the town. Although staff seem to have stopped telling people that, the park still gets letters from visitors who took things, sometimes packaged with their Pilford items, detailing all of the harm that befell them Because of it's it's a display of these letters in the museum. And while that's kind of a fun story, according to a twenty eighteen piece from KQED, since all these items are stolen, when the park gets them back, they have to report it.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, they have to fill out like theft paperwork for the you know, random rocks and trinkets that people have taken and then believe caused them to be cursed and suffer various misfortunes. Next, we have Old Kahaba, Alabama, which is Old Kahaba Archaeological Park today. This was requested by listener Ryan. This isn't the confluence of the Cahaba and Alabama Rivers. It's about eight miles southwest of Selma, Alabama, and it has been through multiple waves of settlement and change.

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Speaker 1: From about the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, much of what is now the southeastern United States was home to Mississippian peoples. This was not one unified indigenous tribe. The term Mississippian culture is used to describe a whole array of indigenous societies that had some commonalities in their cultures and ways of life during this period. Today's descendants of the Mississippian peoples in what's now Alabama include the Muscogee, Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations, among others. Sometime near the end of the Mississippian period, people settled in the area that later became Old Cahaba.

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Speaker 2: They built a large earthen mound with a semicircular village that was surrounded by a palisade and a moat. Archaeological research at the site suggests that the people living in this village had connections with other Mississippian peoples all over the region, including as far south as the Gulf of Mexico, and that it was probably a center of culture and commerce. There is some speculation that this settlement may have been the town known as Mobila, which was destroyed by Hernando desi Zo in fifteen forty. While that is not completely certain, it does seem like the settlement was no longer inhabited by the end of the seventeenth century.

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Speaker 1: Jumping ahead a little, the United States went to war with the Muscogee Nation and their allies in the early nineteenth century, and the US obtained most of what would become central Alabama under the Treaty of Fort Jackson that ended the war in eighteen fourteen. Three years later, white surveyors arrived in the area and found the mound and the moat. Then, in eighteen nineteen, Alabama's first governor, William Wyatt Bibb, created a plan for the construction of Alabama's first capital at the site. He wanted to build the capitol building directly on top of the mound, but after his death in eighteen twenty, it wound up being built on an adjacent parcel. The rest of The capital city was planned out in a grid that was inspired by the city of Philadelphia.

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Speaker 2: Kahama only served as the capitol of Alabama for a few years. There had been controversy over this choice of location, and its initial approval expired in eighteen twenty five. Its position on the rivers had meant that it had grown and thrived thanks to easy access by steamboat, but the town had also experienced seasonal flooding and disease outbreaks, including malaria outbreaks. The late Governor Bibb had also been one of the biggest advocates of locating the capital in Cahaba, and nobody really took up that fight after he died. On February first of eighteen twenty six, the legislature passed a bill moving the capital from Cahaba to Tuscaloosa, and then eventually the capital moved again to today's location of Montgomery.

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Speaker 1: Caba wasn't abandoned right away, though it continued to serve as the county seat of Dallas County. The region was also still home to fertile agricultural land and rivers for shipping and transportation, and Dallas County became one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, with that wealth being built through the use of enslaved laborers and including the value of the enslaved people themselves.

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Speaker 2: But then during the US Civil War, the Confederate government seized the railroad that had recently been completed to Cahaba, and they pulled up the rails and used them to extend a different railroad line. Railroads were replacing steamboats by this point, so the loss of the railroad was a huge blow. Most of Cahaba's white populations started moving away. After the Civil War, the population of Cahaba was predominantly black, and it became a center for advocacy and organizing work by black activists. Residents of nearby Selma, which had become the county seat after a flood in eighteen sixty five, started calling Cahaba the quote Mecca of the Radical Republican Party. That was a nickname that was intended to be insulting. This community was a lot smaller and a lot more rural than Kahaba had been prior to the Civil War, and it was also very resourceful. The old courthouse became a meeting place for black activists and other leaders in the fight for equal rights. During reconstruction, old mansions were torn down so their building materials could be repurposed or sold for scrap. Bricks were reused to construct new family homes. Vacant lots that were left after buildings burned down or were otherwise destroyed were turned into farms. Eventually, a Confederate veteran named Samuel Kirkpatrick bought out much of the town and converted it into a large farm, but that was abandoned in the nineteen thirties. The Cahaba Historical Commission was established in nineteen forty three, and the site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy three. The Alabama Historical Commission took control of the site two years later. Today, the visitor center at the park is in a restored Greek Revival cottage from the town's earlier days. Visitors can also see an artesian well called the Perine Well, which was used to air condition a mansion and was the deepest artesian well in the world when it was built. There's a two story slave quarters still standing in Saint Luke's Episcopal Church, which was relocated into the park from nearby in the early two thousands. There are also collapsed cellars, ruined buildings, and the foundations of Cahaba Federal Prison. There are still some chimneys and columns standing from the site's former mansions as well, and there are some abandoned trailers that were used by fishers and hunters in the area in the nineteen eighties.

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Speaker 1: There are also cemeteries, and the one called the New Cemetery is described as the park's most haunted location. Visitors report hearing children laughing and playing, and have even looked for park staff near closes time to say that they were worried some kids were going to be locked in when the park gates closed for the night. The park is generally only opened during daylight hours, but they do nighttime Haunted History events in October and those sell out every year. We're going to take a quick sponsor break and then have two more ghost towns. Listener Erica requested an episode on yospa Utah Yusepa is what's in now Tula County. This area has connections to multiple indigenous nations and it's the ancestral homeland of the Ghost Shoots, who are a branch of the Western Shoshone. The ghost Shoots had sometimes violent encounters with Europeans as the Spanish started colonizing areas to the south of what's now Utah. But the first non indigenous people to really try to establish permanent settlements in the area that we're talking about were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. This was after founder Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram were killed in Illinois in eighteen forty four and the Saints began moving west. Conflicts between the Goshoots and the Church and its members were ongoing throughout the period that we're talking about. As the newcomers encroached on go Shoot land, the Saints also displaced the nearby Ute tribe, causing the Ute to try to resettle in Go Shoot territory, and that added another layer to this conflict. Ultimately, the federal government established reservations for the go Chuote in nineteen twelve and nineteen fourteen, which was toward the end of the period we're talking about. While this reservation land was part of the Goshute's ancestral homeland, it was also much smaller than the territory they had been living on and using, and of course being on a reservation meant they were subject to the federal efforts to control their way of life into them into white society, which is something we have discussed in a lot of other episodes. When church leaders first decided to settle in Utah, it was still part of Mexico. After the Mexican American War ended in eighteen forty eight, this region was part of the Mexican Session to the United States Congress established Utah Territory as part of the Compromise of eighteen fifty, and President Millard Fillmore appointed church leader Brigham Young as territorial governor. Of course, there is a whole history of the relationships between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints and the government, including the government of Utah Territory and eventually the State of Utah and the federal government, but the establishment of Yusipa was more about the church's own membership. The church had been sending missionaries to the Pacific Islands, including an eight month mission to Hawaii conducted by founder Joseph Smith in eighteen sixty four. Initially, the Hawaiians who joined the church remained in Hawaii because the Hawaiian monarchy had restrictions on its citizens permanently emigrating. When those restrictions were loosened, Hawaiians started moving to Utah to join the community the Saints had established there. Other Pacific Islanders who had joined the Church moved to Utah as well, but the Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders who made this journey faced racial prejudice and bigotry after arriving, and fears that they would spread leprosy or Hanson's disease in the community. There is no record of this disease in Hawaii prior to around the eighteen thirties, but its population also had no resistance to it, so once it was introduced to Hawaii, it spread very quickly. We talked about this more in our episode on the Koolau Rebellion, which ran as a Saturday Classic on November thirtieth of twenty twenty four. There were also language barriers between the Pacific Islanders and the rest of the church and its leadership, who were predominantly English speaking, so in eighteen eighty nine, the church set up a committee made up of three former missionaries to Hawaii and three Pacific Islanders to find a place to establish a separate community. Yosipa was established in Skull Valley as a joint stock company to get around laws that limited how much property the church could directly own, and it was incorporated as Yosipa Agriculture and Stock Company. Its name came from the Hawaiian pronunciation of the name Joseph, in honor of Joseph Smith. This was a planned settlement with a grid of streets, a central public square, and a meeting house for church worship. While the design and the layout of the community followed the patterns that the Church had established for its communities elsewhere, the names of the streets and other features were taken from the Hawaiian language. This community adapted to the valley's desert climate relatively well in the hotter months, building irrigation systems and drawing inspiration from what life had been like on the windy, er, dryer sides of the Pacific Islands. They also planted lots of fruit and shade trees around their homes, and they found local alternatives to foods that they were used to, like growing algae to use in place of seaweed. The winters, though, were a much bigger issue, with snow and frigid temperatures that people were completely unaccustomed to. The town of Yosipo was small. It had a population of about two hundred and thirty people, including some Anglo shareholders and supervisors for some of the settlement's farms, and this settlement did struggle. It took a long time for the town to start to sustain itself economically, and the Church often had to reinvest money into it to keep it afloat. Some of the men also had to find work in nearby mines after various crop failures. Three residents did develop leprosy in eighteen ninety six, which caused renewed fears of the disease. Then in nineteen seventeen, the Church decided to abandon Yosepa. The idea of gathering is part of church doctrine. People had come from Hawaii and other Pacific islands because they were gathering with the Saints in Utah, but by this point Hawaii had been annexed by the United States, and the Church had decided to build a temple on the island of O Wahoo. Saints would be gathering there as well. The population of Yoseba was encouraged to return to Hawaii to help build that temple, and the church paid their expenses.

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Speaker 2: While Yosepa is often described as a ghost town because of this total abandonment in nineteen seventeen, most of the town itself is not still standing today. It was sold to a ranching company, which demolished most of the buildings to turn it into grazing land. Most of what is still there is the graveyard, which includes monuments and memorials to the town and its residents, and a pavilion that's used by descendants of the people who lived in the town and other church members who visit the area for things like commemorative events. Luziba was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy one. Our next ghost town was requested by Larissa, and it has the charming name of Pitthole City, Pennsylvania, that was an oil boomtown. In eighteen fifty nine, Edwin L. Drake successfully drilled in oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, and this marked the start of the petroleum industry in Pennsylvania, although it didn't really start to grow right away because of the Civil War. Five years later, I. G. Fraser leased a farm on Pitthole Creek roughly eight miles southeast of Drake Well, and he drilled a well of his own, successfully striking oil. In January of eighteen sixty five, word spread of Fraser's oil strike, and as the weather warmed up in the spring, people started building a town around it. And this happened so fast that may Ap Duncan and George C. Prater bought a big farm and they divided it up into plots. People started building on their lots within a day or two of signing a lease. Pitthole's first hotel was called Astor House, and it was built over the course of only a day. By that summer, the town had fifty of them. At the city's peak, its post office was the third busiest in all of Pennsylvania, with only Philadelphia and Pittsburgh moving more mail every day. Pitthole City quickly went from not existing at all to having about fifteen thousand residents. Some of the people who rushed to the area were former Union soldiers looking for work or a place to invest any money they had earned from their service in the war. There were all kinds of opportunities and all kinds of jobs, including thousands of teamsters. Though being people who handled teams of animals hauling thousands of barrels of oil each day. In the summer of eighteen sixty five, Pitthole City produced roughly a third of the petroleum in the United States. But while these wells were extremely productive at first, the oil deposits they were tapping into were fairly small, and soon they started drying up. On top of that, the economy and the logistics of the oil industry started to change. The price of oil plummeted by almost seventy five percent when a pipeline was completed in the fall of eighteen sixty six. It made moving oil out of Pitthole Way easier and more efficient, but it also put all those thousands of teamsters out of work, or at least most of them. The oil industry also started moving toward consolidation, which put smaller drilling and refining operations out of business. We talked about this consolidation process more in our episode on Ida Tarbell versus John D. Rockefeller, which ran over two parts in November of twenty twenty one. This industry was also dangerous, and there were multiple serious oil well explosions and fires. Some of these burned not just the wells and the people who happened to be nearby, but also businesses and homes. These fires spread easily since most of the buildings were made entirely of wood, and because oil storage tanks were intermingled with other buildings. As the city declined and its population dropped, there was little to no effort to clean up after these fires. By the end of eighteen sixty six, there were only about two thousand people left in Pitthole City. Within another five years, there were less than fifty households left. The Pitthole City charter was revoked in February of eighteen seventy seven, and the land that the city had been on was sold. In nineteen sixty three, part of the former city was given to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission opened a visitor center at the site in nineteen seventy five. Today there is a visitor center with a miniature model of the town, and you can still see the foundations of a Methodist church. Beyond that, what was once a bustling town is now just a field, with some of the town's former streets mown into the grass. There are interpretive panels around the fields, describing what used to be there and the history of the town. Archaeological sites can also be added to the National Register of Historic Places, and Pitthhole City was added to that register in nineteen seventy three. We haven't really touched on the indigenous history of this part of Pennsylvania, in part because there's some overlap with history we will be talking about later, and in part because the nation most associated with this area was no longer there by the time Pitthole's City was founded. But this area was home to the Iroquois and speaking Erie people who Lake Erie is named for. The Erie lived on the southern shore of the lake and to the south and southeast of there. In the sixteen hundreds, the Erie were at war with the Hodenashani and many of them were driven out of the region during this war. Survivors of the conflict became part of a lot of other indigenous nations, including some of the nations of the Heddenashani, and we will be coming back to the Hodenashane later on in this episode. For now, though, we will take a quick sponsor break listener Aaron asked for an episode on Jerome, Arizona, roughly one hundred miles north of Phoenix and Arizona's Black Hills. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, this area was home to people of the Johokum culture. Like the Mississippi peoples we mentioned earlier, this is a term that encompasses a number of different indigenous tribes and peoples that had some commonalities, including their development of complex irrigation canals and the cultivation of maize. It appears that the Hohocom peoples left this region sometime between thirteen fifty and fourteen fifty due to widespread drought. People who returned to the area later are likely descendants of Hojocom peoples and include multiple autumn nations.

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Speaker 1: The Spanish weren't really focused on this area when they started colonizing southwestern North America. There were surface levels deposits of ores and pigments that indigenous people had been using for centuries, but Spain's focus was really on gold and silver, not on the copper and other metals found around what's now Jerome. The area became part of Mexico after it gained independence from Spain, and then part of the United States after the Mexican American War in eighteen forty eight.

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Speaker 2: The first Anglo copper mining claims were staked around Jerome. In the eighteen seventies, United Verday Copper Company established a mining camp that was later named after one of its financiers, Eugene Jerome. A blast furnace was hauled into the area, and that furnace successfully produced copper for a few years in the eighteen eighties, but it went through a closure and then a change of ownership before actually becoming a profitable business, and that was toward the end of the decade.

00:28:33
Speaker 1: The town was incorporated in eighteen ninety nine after a series of major fires and a lack of water to fight them. Incorporating as a town meant that they could establish a town council to make decisions about things like building codes and fire districts, and water resources like body and pit hoole. Most of Jerome's buildings were made of wood, and they were built very quickly, and the newly adopted building code was designed to reduce the risk of major fires. After its incorporation, Jerome grew rapidly over the first decades of the twentieth century. Its population reached about fifteen thousand people. Many of these people were immigrants to the United States. It's estimated that.

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Speaker 2: There were people of about thirty different nationalities living in Jerome. Jerome also had a reputation for danger and crime and lawlessness, and it was nicknamed the wickedest town in the West.

00:29:31
Speaker 1: There were also labor disputes. Multiple unions tried to organize the mines, including the AFL's Mine Mill and smelter Workers, the Lega Protectora Latina, and the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobbles. The Industrial Workers of the World were generally more radical than a lot of other labor unions and faced a lot of suspicion and distrust, and in nineteen seventeen, mine supervisors and local businessmen teamed up to drive the Wabble out of Jerome. We talked about this more in our episode on the similar Bisbee Deportation that ran as a Saturday Classic in February of twenty twenty two.

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Speaker 2: Other issues affected Jerome and the landscape around it. Smelting ore produces a lot of pollution, and that pollution killed off most of the vegetation in the surrounding area. That vegetation was what had been anchoring the soil to the hillsides. When the area's mines started running out of ore, mining companies moved to open pit mining and blasting, and that blasting further destabilized the soil. Runoff, erosion, and landslides all became serious problems. By the mid twentieth century, many of the mines had closed down after exhausting all the available ore. Major mining activity ended by nineteen fifty three. Soon the town's population had dropped to only about one hundred people, some of whom formed a historical society to try to preserve the town. Jerome State Historic Park was established in nineteen fifty seven, but even with those preservation efforts, the town continued to decline. Buildings that burned, collapsed, or fell into disrepair were mostly just abandoned, while a lot of the ones that were still standing were demolished to make other use of their materials. There was also a major snowfall in nineteen sixty seven that just flattened some of the buildings that had started to deteriorate, like they were so unsound that they couldn't support the weight of the snow on them. But today Jerome looks a lot different from body or pit hole. It's not just a historic park, but a small town dotted with art galleries, wineries and shops. Shortly after major mining operations ended, artist Roger Holt and his wife Shan moved to Jerome and together they established a group called the Verde Valley Artists, which became the Verde Valley Artists Association. In the nineteen seventies, the Historical Society and the Artist Society worked together to support the town and to bring art an artist to Jerome. The town revived itself as an art colony, and today it has a population of about four hundred and fifty people, about a quarter of whom are artists. It's also a National Historic Landmark and it's on the National Register of Historic Places, and it has some ghosts stories. The Jerome Grand Hotel was originally a hospital, and it's rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of patients who died there. Visitors have also reported the sounds of squeaky gurneys and sightings of a ghost cat, although according to the hotel's website, the current owner of the hotel isn't into hauntings or ghost stories.

00:32:51
Speaker 1: Lawrence Memorial Hall.

00:32:53
Speaker 2: Was built on the site of shacks that were used by sex workers during Jerome's mining camp days, and it is purpose heardtedly haunted by their ghosts and has been given the nickname Spook Hall. People have also reported seeing strange orbs of light around Jerome's old cemetery. These are just examples, and since Jerome has become a tourist destination, there are of course companies who offer ghost tours that you can take if you visit. And our last ghost town has been requested by so many listeners over the years. That is Centralia, Pennsylvania. This is in the eastern part of the Commonwealth, roughly one hundred miles northwest of Philadelphia. This is in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Coal region, which spans six counties and is the only anthracite coal reserve in the United States. This area is the ancestral home of the Algonquin speaking Lenape and the Iroquoisan speaking Susquehannock. The Susquehannock faced violence, war and introduced diseases after the arrival of European colonists in the area in the seventeenth century, and most of the surviving Susquehannock joined one of the Six Nations of the Hudenashawnee, who were eventually forced onto reservations that are mostly but not entirely located in New York. The Lenape faced a lot of those same things, and they were forced to move west, and today the largest population of Lenape in the United States is in Oklahoma.

00:34:23
Speaker 1: These removals were ongoing when Centralia was established. Centralia was originally a settlement called Bullshead. It was incorporated as Centralia Borough in eighteen sixty six, at which point it had a population of about thirteen hundred people. When Centralia was incorporated, cities and towns around the region were growing rapidly thanks to an increasing demand for coal. Although this was true for Centralia as well, it did not have quite the same dramatic boom and bust as the other industrial towns we have talked about today. By the eighteen nineties, its population had grown from about thirteen hundred to about twenty eight hundred. It did reportedly have twenty seven saloons at that point, and one saloon for every hundred residents. Does seem like a lot not to me yet? Uh.

00:35:20
Speaker 2: It wasn't, though, Like going from not really existing to having fifteen thousand residents seemingly overnight.

00:35:27
Speaker 1: Centrillia's decline in the face of a faltering coal industry and other economic pressures also was not quite as dramatic. By nineteen fifty, there were still almost two thousand people living there, and by nineteen sixty that had dropped to about fifteen hundred. Centrillia became a ghost town for a different reason, because of a fire which was first detected in a surface mind pit near the Independent Order of Oddfellow Cemetery.

00:35:56
Speaker 2: There is some debate about the exact cause of the fire and who was responsible, but the thing that comes up the most often was a decision to burn the trash in the city's landfill ahead of Memorial Day in nineteen sixty two. This landfill had been started in an old coal pit, and there was not a fireproof barrier between the bottom of the pit and the flammable coal in the ground underneath it, so the fire spread from the landfill to these underground coal seams, either starting the underground fire or fueling a fire that had already started from some other source.

00:36:37
Speaker 1: Once the fire was detected, people tried to put it out by dousing it with water and by smothering it with clay. There were also efforts to dig trenches and fill old mine shafts and pits with noncombustible materials. None of this successfully extinguished the fire. The obvious challenges of trying to fight a fire underground were made even more challenging by the fact that mining operations had been going on in Centrilia for decades and that included illicit digging that was not documented anywhere. So there were all kinds of unmapped shafts and tunnels and brakes that could continue to provide this fire with oxygen and exposed coal seams that could provide it with fuel. Over the first two decades after the fire started, more than seven million dollars was spent on firefighting and on relocating some of the people whose homes were in the most danger.

00:37:33
Speaker 2: As this fire spread underground, parts of the town were blanketed with carbon monoxide and various other gases and smoke. People could also feel the heat from the fire above the ground, and things that were stored underground, including things like the fuel tanks at gas stations, started heating up as well. Sinkholes formed as the fire hollowed out the coal deposits, homes and other buildings started to shift and tilt, and sink. Parts of two cemeteries are believed to have dropped down into the earth. Surprisingly to me, a lot of people in Centralia just lived with all of this for almost a decade, but some people started developing health problems and the situation became obviously increasingly dangerous. On Valentine's Day of nineteen eighty one, a twelve year old boy fell into a sinkhole and had to be rescued. People quickly realized that the sinkhole was spewing carbon monoxide and that if it had taken them much longer to get the boy out, he would have died. The ongoing fire and its dangers were also getting increasing media attention, so not long after this, authorities decided to just clear out the town. Formal relocation efforts started. In nineteen eighty three, Congress appropriated forty two million dollars for the relocation effort. A year later, that carried on, and then in nineteen ninety two, the remaining buildings still standing in the town were condemned. A year after that, Route sixty one through the town was closed and re routed. In two thousand and two, the United States Postal Service revoked the town's zip code. Meanwhile, a few holdouts refused to leave, and some actually filed suit to be able to keep their homes. A court ultimately allowed them to remain in Centralia for the rest of their lives, and they cannot sell their property or leave it to someone else in their estate. As of twenty twenty, there were five people remaining there. The Centralia mind fire is still burning today, and it is one of more than twenty active mind fires in Pennsylvania. It's believed that if it is not somehow extinguished, it will continue burning underground for centuries. The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Catholic Church still stands in Centralia and it's still in use so far apparently unaffected by the fire, but otherwise the town's buildings are mostly gone. What is left is mostly cemeteries, streets that are slowly cracking apart building foundations, and concrete stairs that lead to nothing. Route sixty one had become covered in so much graffiti that it was nicknamed Graffiti Highway. During the stay at home order phase of the COVID nineteen pandemic, people were still going there, including holding a large bonfire gathering in late March of twenty twenty. A company called Pagnati Enterprises owns a lot of the adjacent land, and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation had turned over the highway right of way to them in twenty eighteen. Pagnatty Enterprises buried the remains of the highway in dirt to discourage visitors. Unsurprisingly, burying the graffiti Highway not a popular decision by people who were fans of the Griffea Highway and sort of Centralia lore. Today. Centralia is also associated with the supernatural horror franchise Silent Hill, although that connection mostly follows the two thousand and six Silent Hill movie rather than the earlier video game franchise that the film is based on. And those are our six ghost towns for today.

00:41:25
Speaker 1: Ghost towns. Do you have one listener? Mail?

00:41:28
Speaker 2: I do. It's absolutely unrelated to this. This is from Wendy. Wendy is one of a number of people who sent similar queries. Wendy wrote to say, Hello Tracy and Holly. Several times I've heard Tracy, I think I still don't have your voices associated to your name.

00:41:44
Speaker 1: Sorry.

00:41:45
Speaker 2: Mention drum Core in passing. My daughter did one season of drum Corp Color Guard and is working on her auditions and fundraising for one more season before she ages out. Your references to drum Corps have us so intrigue. First, have you ever done an episode on drum Core? If not, we'd love to hear one. If drum Core isn't a big enough topic on its own, you could always add in WGI, indoor percussion and winter Guard. Second, to the extent that you're willing to share, where did you march? What instrument did you play? And what are your thoughts about your drum Corp experience. Thankfully, my daughter had an amazing first season last year, saying it was the hardest and most rewarding things she'd ever done. We're hoping she gets an opportunity to perform at Indie again next summer.

00:42:28
Speaker 1: For pet tax.

00:42:29
Speaker 2: Here is our ten year old rescue kitty, Missed, who always manages to find something of ours to sit on the mail, a sweatshirt, the book you're reading, or in this case, a blanket I'm trying to crochet. And equally as adorable my Drum Corp daughter in costume. She is the shortest one in the front. I hope you have a fantastic week, Wendy. Thanks Wendy. Like I said, we got some variation on this question in email and on social media comments, so I thought I would answer it. Yeah, I was in the Color Guard. I was also in my marching bands Color Guard. I marched with Carolina Crown in nineteen ninety two. I started the nineteen ninety three season. I made it through all of the wintertime rehearsal phase and got not very far into like the everyday summer rehearsals ahead of touring because in my first year of Drum Corps I got mono, and recovering fully from mono took me a long time. I seem to do okay with the weekend rehearsals that were just like Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday, but once it was every day in the summer. And also, if I recall correctly, we were being housed in dorms that weren't air conditioned. Like I just my body wasn't capable of it. It was not it was not working. And then also I was a teenager and had teenager drama that also probably was a effect on my decision. To drop out, but I think had I not dropped out when I did, I would have eventually wound up in the hospital, possibly like I was really physically struggling. I have a variety of feelings about my time in drum Corp.

00:44:16
Speaker 1: At Carolina.

00:44:16
Speaker 2: Crown was a much much smaller core at the time, it had only been in existence for a couple or three years. A lot of the people that I marched with were founding members, and it was, much like I said, a much smaller core than it is today. I credit doing a drum corps with having a pretty easy transition from high school to being in college and being responsible for myself and having to look after myself. I think doing drum Corps in a lot of ways helped me with some self confidence and some autonomy that I had not really had the opportunity to develop in other contexts simultaneous, at least when I was there, and this was thirty something years ago, I cannot tell you if it is still like this. There was a real culture of pushing through injuries and not seeking help if you got sick, and in addition to getting mono during drum Corp and taking well over a year to fully recover from it. I also did soft tissue damage to both of my ankles that took a really long time to recover from. And also, in my opinion, the adults who were responsible for uh, you know, instructing us young people did not do a good job of modeling the behavior of leading people without abusing them. I just don't think that grown adult men should be screaming obscenities at children over what's effectively a halftime performance. Like uh, maybe that's me being prissy and old fashioned, but like, I just I don't think there is cause for that and is not the way that we should operate as a society. So it was something that I really got a lot of out of and I still look back on and kind of go, huh. I don't love the fact that a bunch of teenagers were continuing to march on injuries and injuring themselves worse for the sake of a competitive marching experience. And yeah, in a lot of ways it was a fun experience. In other ways, as an adult looking back on it, things about it trouble me. Again. That is my experience from thirty plus years ago. It is not a commentary on what the core is like, now I have no idea, and yeah, we have an adorable picture of an adorable cat lying on a partially completed crochet blanket, and an incredibly fun photo of in costume color Guard members. I'm not going to get into the exact details because I don't want to, you know, involve somebody else's privacy. But that's a very fun picture of this this color Guard. So that was my drum core experience. Thank you for the question, Wendy and other folks who have asked about it. If you'd like to send us a note where hit history podcasts atiheartradio dot com, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.