10 Terrifying True Stories That Would Work Perfectly As Horror Movies

Centralia is a little town in Pennsylvania with a fascinating history. An old coal-mining settlement, the town is almost entirely abandoned these days due to an underground fire that has been burning away for over sixty years.

Investigators and experts have never conclusively agreed on the cause of the fire, but it is believed to have been started during town clean-up efforts when some rubbish from a nearby landfill was set alight. The fire is believed to have come into contact with coal and spread out among the web of tunnels beneath the town.

Attempts to extinguish the blaze were repeatedly unsuccessful and the town was condemned and mostly abandoned, with many buildings being destroyed over time. A few old-timers have chosen to live out their days in Centralia, but it's mostly a ghost town now and has to be one of the creepiest places on the planet.

Any visitors to the area will see little more than broken roads spotted with smoke trails and old lifeless buildings left to rot. Nobody was ever killed in the fire, but the setting of Centralia inspired the movie version of the Silent Hill video game franchise and could be the perfect backdrop for a host of scary tales.