Coal Fires, Old Mills, and the Movies That Started It All

Coal Fires, Old Mills, and the Movies That Started It All

College was 2009, I was in a presentation class, and I remember loving every minute of standing in front of that room. My topic? Centralia, Pennsylvania. The town that inspired Silent Hill.

But Centralia wasn't where it started.

A few years before that classroom, I'd already let the cursed tape from The Ring burn itself into my eyes. The Grudge was the door. The Ring was the descent. Silent Hill was where I figured out I wasn't going back.

That trifecta didn't just light up my love for horror films. It lit up something else — a love for the aesthetic of dark places. Forgotten buildings. Roofs caving in across decades. Brick by brick by brick, the earth pulling everything back down into itself.

By the time I was standing in front of that 2011 classroom talking about a town that wouldn't stop burning, I wasn't really giving a presentation.

I was sharing my passion.

Silent Hill Movie Poster

Here's the pitch:

A coal seam fire has been burning beneath Centralia since May 1962. It runs through a labyrinth of abandoned mines at depths up to 300 feet, across an 8-mile stretch, over roughly 3,700 acres. At its current rate, it could burn for another 250 years.

When the fire started, around 1,100 people lived there. By the 1980s the town was mostly gone — bought out, demolished, condemned. Today? Five residents. A handful of buildings. Smoke still leaking up through cracks in the asphalt like the ground is breathing.

That story lodged itself in me and never left.

A small part of the Centralia mine fire after being exposed during excavation in 1969

So what is it about the abandoned, the dilapidated, the forgotten that pulls us in so hard out here in New England — especially Connecticut and Rhode Island?

Hope Mill

For me, it started with houses.

Then I walked into my first mill.

 

I was terrified. Not because of the size of the thing — that big, blocky box of brick eating up half a city ... but because my friend Sam had told me a story once. Someone had been murdered in a mill. I couldn't shake it climbing up to the door.

Then I stepped inside.

And the fear just… took off. Curiosity. The brick walls. The concrete stairs. The toilets — and for whatever reason, I love photographing those.



Something about a mill makes me pump the brakes. Makes me want to document. Makes me want to reflect with it and write.

More to come.

I'll see you out there.

—Dave

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