This Paranormal Life - #103 Centralia: America’s Most Cursed Ghost Town

Episode Date: March 5, 2019

Today, in the United States of America, you can find a place so dangerous only a handful of people dare live there. A town where people and animals go missing, trees die from the roots up, and the federal government had to step in to evacuate and remove the town from the history books. What is weirder, just a few decades ago, this was a thriving town. What happened? And was it paranormal? Find out on this episode of This Paranormal Life!Support us on Patreon.com/ThisParanormalLife to get access to weekly bonus episodes!Buy Official TPL Merch! - thisparanormallife.com/storeFollow us on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTubeJoin our Secret Society Facebook CommunityIntro music by www.purple-planet.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What happens when you demolish a house that a ghost has been haunting? Can LSD help you telepathically communicate with dolphins? Answers to these questions and more on this episode of This Paranormal Life! Hey! Welcome back to the podcast. It's Tuesday once again. You're listening to This Paranormal Life, where every week we dissect a different paranormal tale, case, or claim and try to get to the bottom of whether

it is true or false using our decades of experience in the paranormal industry that's right uh that's right it is an industry where demons witches and cryptids create paranormal encounters along the paranormal assembly line and then we try to deconstruct them and understand them at a later date i'm joined by rory pars here beside me hello everyone my name is kate greer how you doing today rory i'm doing good and you know not to get too bogged down into the concept of the paranormal world being an industry but you know a lot of people complain that their workplace uh isn't a healthy one right that their boss is difficult to deal with if If I try and touch my boss, I go straight through him, all right? Because he's a goddamn ghost.

Yeah. My HR, maybe I should tell him that I can't touch my boss, except he's freaking Sasquatch. He's bringing me more problems. It's a very unhealthy workplace because half the people there are dead. I can turn to no one.

No. And it has made me turn into a very uh emotionally stunted bitter person actually exactly and at the end of the day i'm coming down on the conclusion of no my paycheck doesn't exist so my paycheck is see-through it is encrypted in the sense that it does not exist as far as science is concerned. My Christmas bonus? Also a ghost. He called it Christmas boonist. I didn't get the pun. I thought it was really rude because my family are starving.

My wife is begging me to get a minimum wage job and I tell her to f*** off. Anyway, enough dilly-dallying at the top of the episode. As always, we're just going to dive right into today's investigation. Today, we're talking about a cursed place, somewhere that is deeply and fundamentally cursed to this day. This isn't some ancient story or myth. We're not going back to Edo, Japan.

We're not going back to ancient Greece, but somewhere that you can experience right now and today. Wow. Our journey takes us to the state of pennsylvania wow that's right this piece of shit state whoa i'm only joking it's not pennsylvania exactly but rather somewhere in pennsylvania okay i guess it kind of is this piece of shit town if you drive north on Route 61 through Columbia County, there is a turnoff at some point. An unmarked turnoff on the main road. A borderline Mario Kart shortcut.

The road signs are unmarked because the name has been desperately and deliberately scratched off. Permanently removed to stop anyone from trying to find this place. The further you travel down this road, you will start to see abandoned cars at the side of the road, like a zombie apocalypse movie. Eventually, abandoned buildings altogether. Go far enough, and you'll reach a complete dead end in the road, and you'll have to continue your journey on foot. The road has been closed to stop people ever reaching this cursed location. Oh my god. I'm gonna just show you.

It just ends. Yeah, it's like they've literally got a digger or something and just dumps like a couple tons of soil on the road. That is so weird. I'm in as you get closer signs along the road start to read risk of injury or death ahead and if you stop to read these warning signs more closely you will also see the word fire in bold letters okay which is kind of unusual right off the bat because normally when there's a fire you don't have time

to make a permanent sign a fire sign yeah you'd hope the fire was out by the time the sign was completed that's right unless it was some insanely efficient sign maker like you first call the fire brigade then you call the sign guy yeah yeah and he he's there before the firefighters like if your friend falls in a lake like off of a pier and into the lake yeah and he's like he's splashing about in the water like and you're like oh my god oh my god you're gonna pick up your phone and you're like and you're like i need a sign i need a sign to say drowning i need a sign he's he's Are you calling the ambulance? Hold on a second. I need a sign. He's going down deep.

All right. And then, you know, someone like shows up and they're like, is everything okay here? And it's like, how could you know? There's no sign to explain the situation. Just f***ing jump in. And then after a couple of minutes, you have to phone him back and be like, I need a sign that says dead. It's too late.

No one can help him. Shut up! I'm making the sign! The worst friend of all time. Eventually, the drowning sign is there, but you know the death sign is already on the way, so you just use the drowning sign to bludgeon your friend to death below the waves. You call up the sign company, it's like, I know you're looking for a drowning sign, but we do have a two-for-one on the drowning and dead sign. That's a steal, I'll take it.

That's right. Signs that say fire on them are not very common, but that's because there is a fire in this cursed, cursed place that has been burning for over 50 years. Our story today brings us back to 1962. In this place, there was once a vibrant mining community. Over a thousand people lived, worked, shopped, and ran businesses, and went to their local church.

Why does every one of our bad stories start with a small mining community never has a small mining community gone on to be a happy peaceful town no it's gone on to be like haunted as shit cursed it's the worst possible things no no story like no uh booming tech companies origin stories started as like you know silicon valley started off life as a small mining community in the outskirts of san francisco then when the mines closed up we learned how to code bada bing bada boom the iphone's invented ted talk over i mean i don't think anyone in silicon valley would ever say by the way steve jobs wasn't known for that steve jobs didn't didn't often talk about where to get

the best pastrami sandwich in san francisco i'd love him doing the talks this is the iphone 7 better than the 6 we upgraded the bish bada Bada bing, bada boom. It's on sale now. We, uh... You obviously barely understand the internal components. What we do is update the gargosh and got the badabosh over

here and, uh, yeah, we soup that bad boy up and, uh, hit the shelves. We got the microchips. We got the micro-salsa. You get what I mean, folks? I'm Steve Jobs. I'll be here all night. Thank you. People are still taking their seats. The whole thing's over. Yeah, I think

if people back in the day had known where the mining industry was going, they would have gotten out a lot sooner. Absolutely. That's right. The people in this small town lived like any other town in 60s America, and they called it

Centralia. Okay, that's kind of cool. Yeah, it's quite a cool little futuristic name, but Centralia's peaceful utopia was shattered on one fateful day when, out of nowhere, a fire started underground and quickly spread to the mines and

centralia quickly lit up like a christmas tree except a christmas tree where only the roots and the bits under the ground are lit up right it's a bad tree now people weren't too worried about this because even though we don't know how this fire started, fires in mines aren't uncommon. Let's face it. How is anyone stopping miners from lighting up? We already know that they do something so dangerous. They probably also smoke like trains.

Oh, yeah. Like snort heroin, juggle knives, just all the dangerous shit. Yeah, you live in a, you work in a hole your whole life. You're going to need to, you know, take the edge off somehow. Spice it up. Crack rocks and smoke crack rocks. Mining 101. Because if you, if you don't realize, but crack cocaine is actually,

it's like an essential mineral found in the earth. So like, I mean, who's to judge those guys? They're mining for like other, like gold and stuff like that. They just, are you just going to ignore the crack that's there? Absolutely not. Of course not. You're bored out of your goddamn mind. Yeah.

You're mining for crystals? What if that's just crystal meth? You're going to find some druggie jewels down there. They're not called that for no reason. Exactly. They knew that this fire would die out soon, just like any mine fire. And things could go back to normal. But as the weeks passed, more weird and disturbing things started happening in the town.

Slowly, trees started dying from the roots upwards, and eventually entire forests worth were dying en masse. You saying that was a strange thing that happened? Because I'm under the impression that below the surface, the earth is melting. I don't think it's a weird thing that trees are dying. And the locals noticed that in winter, when it snowed, no matter how much snow fell or how dry it was, the snow would... Didn't melt? Right. Oh, it melted.

Have you read this story before? This is crazy. It melted instantly. Weird. before this is crazy it melted instantly weird even more alarmingly the ground itself pavements and roads started to crack open and split as if there was an earthquake happening people started getting ill dropping like flies developing what some even called or compared to the black lung it was as if they were being poisoned it didn't take too long to work out what was going on i'm sorry why are you laughing i have a hypothesis really yeah smart guy over here you think you've cracked the case after like three minutes it might have something to do with the

fact that there was a fire in a in a mine that i I think they thought would sort itself out, which is a terrible idea. I don't think you should ever, if you see a fire, assume it will sort itself out. It's under the ground, though. It's just going to go away. But in a cave where gases are? Like, that's not going to help the situation, is it? Gas? I don't know.

I feel like there's canaries down there. The tunnels are pretty small. Like,'s canaries down there the tunnels are pretty similar like the canaries will they'll probably do something like the fire the tunnels are pretty small as well so like i don't that fire is nowhere to go as well so probably just i'm assuming these guys probably already took the path of like locking up the doors but then opening a small hatch and releasing like a thousand canaries down into the mines to try and sort it out and them collectively flapping their wings fanned this fire into an enormous blaze the canaries came out on fire dispersed into the town of entirely thatched roof houses by the way burning the place a cinder. They are laying molten eggs down on the civilians.

Melting faces. Just lava. Lava yolks. The yolks were lava. They're coming down fully cooked. Straight up poached egg. Took out a granny. So normally, fires like the one that started in the mine die out

in hours or maybe days. But in Centralia, it never stopped. Weeks and months started going by where this fire just silently raged underneath the ground itself. Overnight, this town became one of the scariest places to live in the world. Toxic gas clouds and smoke are just rising from the ground, creating a permanent fog. Just going outside could kill you as the smoke poured out of vents and rising from the ground, creating a permanent fog. Just going outside could kill you, as the smoke poured out of vents and drains in the ground. And for some, it even started filling their own basements in their homes. Then people started going missing.

It turned out that the ground itself wasn't just splitting and cracking, but sometimes when you walked, a sinkhole would just appear out of nowhere swallowing you whole good god and if you were lucky enough to hit solid ground like 10 foot down you were trapped in a well of poisonous gas and probably pass out and die immediately god people sometimes stumbled across entire rotting deer carcasses halfway crawled out of these holes in the ground, but suffocated before they could ever fully get out. That's so depressing. Animals were just dying left, right, and center. That's

horrible. I read one story of a resident of Centralia playing with her cat in the garden when they suddenly noticed that the grass beneath the cat turned brown. And they stood there staring at it, wondering what was happening. And then the ground beneath their cat turned brown and they stood there staring at it wondering what was happening and then the ground beneath their cat gave out like a frozen lake but as soon

as they ran over to the hole it was too late the cat was gone forever jesus this took a dark turn and this simply became daily life for the residents one resident recalled her childhood growing up in centralia and how her parents told her to quote stay away from the steam and quote watch out for the openings oh my god which is extremely general advice for not falling into a hole to the center of the earth i think those those life lessons could apply to any child from any location i mean i wish my parents had uh taught me that when i was younger i mean your parents did say stay away from the steam but you didn't count that as like weed vapor yeah they're like it's not steam it's vape mom i mean if they told me to stay away from the steam when I was a child, I wouldn't have got this bad boy.

Oh, shit. Yeah. Got that when I was about six years old. Tried to hug a boiling kettle. I mean, you look like your stomach is Ryan Reynolds and Deadpool's face. It's insane. It was a pretty bad burn at the time. And I would say it is still now.

It still hurts. Yeah, it hurts like a bish kit. A steamy, steamy, steamy bish. This would actually explain your latent fear of all things to do with steam. We went to a cafe the other day, and whenever that coffee machine kicked into gear, you just started swinging wildly. Yeah, I didn't know what to do. I think i drop kicked a child i think so i think into the steam actually so he'll probably have some effects a bit like

yours well a sacrifice had to be made to the steam lords there's no such thing i worship them now if that wasn't clear enough they were cruel to me but through sacrifices they will be kind instead of steaming me they will steam others yeah how could no that's not kind to to you or others how can the steam be kind the steam is always mean that's the rule that my parents should have taught me steam equals mean but if the steam is mean possibly to anyone else preferably a child then the steam will not be mean to me hopefully because i'm using the child as a shield i think for the sake of um like obeying the law i need to ask you this have you been deliberately steaming people let me think if this you shouldn't have to think about that come back and bite me oh it will you

shouldn't have to think about it already listen it already it already will because you've answered on on purpose or by accident on purpose yeah definitely okay by accident no no they've been very deliberate so the worst one then i thought that was the good one i know what i'm doing steaming it's like in my head now it's all i'm just connecting the dots it's like i come home from work rory's steaming his clothes he's steaming his clothes he's steaming his laundry he's using a steam wand and his coffee in the morning i also love thinking that's the response that will get you out of it so if you're like if i was in court and the judge was like uh mr powers were you aware of what you were doing um that's caused offense to so many people absolutely all right

you're guilty what no i know what i was doing i'm not an idiot this shit wasn't an accident dragging me away what judge this was simply premeditated i thought i made that clear the judge is turning to to his colleagues he's like i he asked to represent himself this is insane this isn't a crime of passion this was a planned murder dragging me out by my hands and knees i thought this was america one researcher tried to scientifically evaluate the state of the underground fire and see if this was fightable, if this was stoppable. He said, absolutely not. This fire has enough fuel to burn for at least 1,000 more years. Oh my god.

Now, this is where the authorities stepped in. Because basically the state said, at this point, several children have been swallowed by sinkholes. The mayor himself almost died in a gas incident. This is insane. Everyone has to be evacuated. But people, being red-blooded Americans, were very suspicious of Uncle Sam telling them to evacuate their town. They were like, whoa, whoa, whoa. There may be poisonous gas in my basement.

My children may have been swallowed by a sinkhole. The ground itself may be too hot to even stand on. You kind of have to hop on each foot like a lizard. There is Flames, where the local schools and hospitals used to be. But goddammit, I've been living here for 50 years, and I'm not gonna leave over some goddamn mine fire. Of course.

You know, they just thought, fires like this in living memory have always gone out on their own. Are we just supposed to leave everything behind? But as time went on, life became so unlivable that most did evacuate. But a good number stayed behind and the government got more and more

desperate to get people out suspiciously desperate you might say i didn't they took away the town's zip code so that it didn't exist on the postal system anymore and i mean that's a good you don't want postmen trying to drive into this place so i think it's a smart thing to do i don't think it's suspicious i'm just imagining a very deep hole that has like eight or nine ups trucks in it yeah and he's like i think like all the like eight ups drivers are just yelling out of the hole it's like hey ups guy don't stop oh he fell in as well. That's another one. Oh, jeez. Welcome to the club, buddy. And then obviously then the UPS headquarters, they were like, another truck didn't make its delivery. Better send someone to go check it out.

Driving down the road 100 miles per hour. No. Straying the hole. Also, the UPS headquarters are like 500 meters down the road. It's just truck after truck you best hope the fire doesn't reach that hole because now you've got basically a bunch of match boxes on wheels stuck in this hole ready to go up the scientist is like my god there's enough amazon packages here to burn for a thousand years and not only did they remove the zip code but they removed all mentions of the

name centralia from all municipal buildings and road signs so no one driving in the area would ever know it was there it became a blank spot on the map here's a picture of one of the municipal buildings and you can just see that they've left those words but taken away the name of the time it's kind of odd wow that's really creepy it's kind of it seems to me like a unnecessary step to erase the history of that time yeah today there is only one sign still pointing into centralia this one i'm not shitting you It is just a sign that says fire with an arrow pointing down the road. And it is extremely hand painted and extremely small. Yeah.

Now, I get evacuating everyone, but why wipe Centralia their last memory of the town was men in black suits walking up to every house in the town, trying to persuade them to sell and move out. Ooh, now we're talking. Now we're getting spooky. And the few that didn't believe the government's good intentions to buy everyone out of the town stayed behind to live in hell, basically. And to this day, I think there's about seven people still living there wow fair play in this no-name town the houses that did evacuate were demolished by the state and covered up with soil and plants and even the curbs outside the houses dug up any signs of buildings from before were totally ripped out now the possible explanations for this story are where things get slightly more weird paranormal and conspiratorial so right off the bat let's just

jump right into the most paranormal explanation for what could be happening here lots of tourists have visited centralia since its evacuation it's become kind of a dark tourist hot spot this abandoned place it's only a few hours drive out of major cities wow um so as long as you can go on foot and bring a gas mask and heatproof clothing uh you can see somewhere kind of interesting but tourists that get there only find a disturbing ghost town with unsettling graffiti it's like some left for dead graffiti shit just like all over the time uh the first one is some spray paint on the floor that says this town will eventually take me this town will win uh that's actually pretty cool yeah it's pretty badass yeah those are some good lyrics right there

for a really nice emo song actually scratch that from the pod because i'm gonna need to write that done you know if you're like singing about uh uh leaving your hometown and you're like you know you want to move to the big city but you know that you're never going to be able to make it so it's like this town will take me oh that's good eventually this town will win that's right that's right yeah yeah this town will engulf me in its beautiful flames my cat fell in a hole of poisonous gas kill my mom kill my dad it's beautiful really i mean just there's so many avenues i think that second verse might need slightly more work but yeah i think it'll come together. Maybe not kill, maybe took my mom, took my dad. That's probably pretty good.

I think kill hits pretty close to home. You really un-included the K word. I'm kind of against it. But maybe even more disturbing than the graffiti and toxic gases are that visitors have claimed to hear voices, ghostly voices saying things like, It's the UPS, guys! We're still in the hole! We've been eating the protein bars from the packages!

But there's only six left! For the love of God, let us out! Oh, the ghosts still haunt us today. One of the drivers is allergic to peanuts, but there's only peanut protein bars, Jesus Christ! The memories of those gone still echo through these fields. F***ing help us! There's no water, there's just rotten milk! Carton after carton of rotten milk and it's all boiling

yeah just like i guess their stories never will be told huh yeah these voices were saying things now or why why did you do this oh these claims which you can read online people's personal testimonies about visiting centralia uh plus the existence of several surviving cemeteries in the town this time was really small but it had i think three separate cemeteries it's worrying i've led many to believe that the town is haunted does that explain the fire to begin with potentially not i don't think so other than it just being cursed unless this town is full of so many goddamn sinners and the process of dragging them all to hell created some sort of leak where the endless flames of the underworld emerged and submerged this town in everlasting heat. That's a strong theory, I would say. I mean, there's definitely possibilities there.

You know, is this kind of a burial ground situation that they shouldn't have been mining right this town of uh obviously lots of dead ancestors did this unleash some sort of fury from from the underworld um more people need to i mean like you mine far enough down you're gonna reach hell and i've been saying this for years more people need to mine up yeah because that's heaven baby and that's the end game and that's what they call thinking laterally that's what they call thinking outside the box yeah outside the cave yeah mine outside the cave for once guys think about that that's actually pretty i think there's honestly probably a chunk of like rare minerals up up all the way baby we're talking crack cocaine talking crystal meth right talking not just drugs though oh most of those are down oh i don't know how interested i am then if there's not really you just want the drug you

can buy drugs you know you don't have to like mine for them really yeah there's like drug dealers they're on like corners and stuff that's weird because my dad went like it was one of the like my earliest memories when other kids were like you know throwing you know throwing the the pig skin around playing football with their dads in the backyard yeah uh we were mining we were straight like four drugs dad was just i remember it now i remember like right now he was just like scratching his neck and just like son you junior you're gonna have to help me this is you gotta help your old man out here because i'm getting tired and i need a fix and And there's a lot of good stuff done here. I think there's probably a lot of good stuff up there too,

but today we're going to dig down. Today we're going to hell, Junior. You need to help your old man. He hasn't had a hit in a couple days now, Junior. I'm thinking the big dog in hell actually has a good stash. I mean, he was so gone at this point, you didn't want to tell him he was just in your sandbox with a shovel, just digging away. He was at a borderline paddling pool just shoveling

handfuls of water out of the pool trying to find meth that was the pre-rehab days this kind of leads us on to um a equally paranormal but more concrete potential which is that this town has a literal gateway to hell okay this is a topic we've covered in the past before the huska castle i believe um there are a number of reported gateways to hell on the planet where fires burn for decades on end um and this is yet another one um it would definitely explain the eternal hellfire uh that burns to this day it might also explain why one of the few standing buildings in this town is the local catholic church does it have protection against satan himself oh possibly i mean wouldn't wouldn't the reason it's still standing be

down to the people who came in and you said they destroyed a bunch of the houses? So presumably it's still there because the people came in and didn't destroy it? Not because it was spared by the devil? I don't follow at all. I didn't think it was that hard to follow,

but I don't feel like dying on this hill, so I'm happy to move on. Now let's not move on. What the f*** are you trying to say? So incapable of grasping the slightest criticism. Yet so angrily ready to defend. Badly. For the more distinguished listener out there that maybe isn't buying my ideas about this location being haunted or indeed a gateway to hell maybe

more interested in the more conspiratorial side of things the locals that seem to be pretty suspicious of the government activity i did even see signs that were erected in centralia where people had hung up american flags and hand-painted signs that said we don't want the government in here we just want to continue to live in the place we were born this is our home we're going to stay here right um kind of dumb it's a poisonous place get out yeah but you do understand where they're coming from uh so some have hypothesized that maybe uncle sam you know figured out there was something of value in this time maybe underneath the grind maybe those miners got a little too close to something that we weren't supposed to know about or something valuable

and so they came in started the fire and then used that as a reason to literally buy the houses buy every piece of land off the locals and move them out to a nearby town. Maybe they could be using it for testing to this day. Interesting. Very interesting. So, a bit of a different story today, but I've presented you the kind of spark notes of what is kind of a long story, but what we have here is a really peaceful small town, really nothing to talk about until 1962,

until this not totally uncommon thing happened but became totally extraordinary in just the after effects and the sheer length of time that it's that it's taken um and the fact that it's now just totally abandoned it's a ghost town a genuine ghost town that you can go visit today and is rumored to be haunted uh what do you make of the evidence so far first off i'd love to go to a ghost town at some point one like this or one of those like western ones you know they were like totally abandoned be dope that'd be awesome go see some like haunted cowboys and that sort of stuff whenever i was in uh joshua tree we didn't get to do it i might have talked about in the show before but we were doing one of the very popular trails and there was a sign that was like

if you fire arrow we didn't have our gas mask so it wasn't do it possible fair enough but there was a sign that said uh basically like a two-hour trek from here there's like an abandoned gold mine oh my god yes and it had and i think at the time it had a picture of basically the last person uh to die in joshua tree who had lived and died there um and he he lived so long um after everyone else had kind of left and moved on to other cities and um he just lived in this like western gold mine area like just hundreds of miles away from any civilization the dream and uh but i i just like vowed to myself at that moment i was like i have to go back and bring hiking shoes and go see that goddamn old-timey gold mine at some point old-timey gold miney that sounds amazing and just find some old-timey crack all right back

on the drug thing yeah but anyway what was your thoughts again um it's an interesting case i don't know enough about mining and how gas works because what is the gas is it methane gas that people have to worry about when when they're mining or digging underground i mean methane's flammable uh carbon monoxide's the poisonous one carbon monoxide that's the one that i'm thinking of but yeah as you said methane is the one that actually is ignitable because i know that's a big thing with um oil rigs and oil refineries uh to not obviously have a naked flame around that because, you know, you even touch one of those bad boys and kaboom. Now you have the earth shooting out molten lava, basically in the form of a little volcano. And presumably the same is for an area where flammable gas is emitting from the cracks of the earth.

If you, as we said, are even down there and smoking up a little cigarette and whoosh, you catch this whole tunnel on fire, the whole thing goes up. If this is a constant leak coming out of a section of the earth's core, presumably this thing can burn for hundreds of years. of the earth's core presumably this thing can burn for hundreds of years i should say this one was a this only changes the dynamic slightly but this was i believe a coal mine it wasn't gas from what i'm aware uh the the mine itself you know what i mean got it okay so it's the coal that it was burning so it was like an all-time coal mine um and then these poisonous gases have leaked as well so again i don't know enough about mining maybe those two things go hand in hand but possibly yeah i mean either way those are both two really good reasons to leave a town a giant flaming coal mine and poisonous gas yeah

i mean the poisonous gas alone i think that's the main thing to me yeah if you can't breathe the air if the mayor nearly died yeah when the mayor nearly dies that's when you leave that's the main thing to me yeah if you can't breathe the air if the mayor nearly died yeah when the mayor nearly dies that's when you leave that's when you leave that's the final straw yeah i think so when the captain's on the life raft and you're on the boat saying i just want to die when my father was born i want to drown on this boat you've made the wrong choice you should have been on that life raft it's yeah it's kind of i think we've talked about it before but whenever you see um like the the like rich and famous the leaders of society uh in a spaceship leaving earth you know it's over

yeah yeah when jayden smith is taking a selfie on the next spaceship to mars you need to gtf out of here yeah because we all gonna die the earth is poison and we need to back the f off i've been saying that for years brother that's why jaden smith is in the commune actually yeah we just bagged him like the other day yeah uh so feel free to congratulate him on twitter He may think that we're a record label. We weren't entirely clear on that. Yeah. He may think it's a record label. It's not for commune.

But he's excited nonetheless. Yeah, he thinks he signed a record contract with a record label. But a lot of that, the Invisible Inc. shit would say otherwise. Although I was hoping that the giant sum of money we promised him would uh erase with the invisible link but uh that bit didn't so he's actually been calling me often about that uh so we might need to ramp up the patreon guys because jayden uh is actually pretty expensive yeah i i was um when i submitted the contract i was supposed to obviously put the uh the sum of money that we were going to pay for this quote-unquote record label and then afterwards in invisible link i was supposed to write comma not yeah you know because

it was like we will pay you the sum of uh 4.5 million dollars yeah uh for this contract to be viable it was that much not yeah uh i forgot the not yeah i actually i think put an exclamation point um which really didn't undermine it at all it really just solidified the fact that we owe him a shit ton of cash yeah uh and the knot would have been legally binding but unfortunately this is equally legally legally binding so the whole thing's really gone shits up and tits up so please uh if you could help us this month by checking out the this paranormal life patreon because um jayden needs a new single guys uh and he's paid for it trust me the trouble is he's really nice so i actually feel really bad about it too yeah it's not a great situation to to be in um but he's in the

commune at least good to know great to know um when it comes to deciding whether this case is true or false where are we coming on today i'm always excited when people and cats are dragged into hell it really gets me going in the morning but there's not enough in this story for me personally to suggest that this is anything out of the ordinary i mean it's out of the ordinary in the sense that a town is on fire for 100 years. But, you know, as crazy as it is, this could all be explained by natural causes. So I think this week I'm coming down to not paranormal. Really cool, but not paranormal.

I think that's the definition. Really cool, but not paranormal. As a fun fact, this is what Silent Hill is based on. You may remember the game Silent Hill. Really? Yeah, based on Centralia, Pennsylvania. That's so cool. I didn't know that at all.

If people, I'm sure loads of our listeners have seen the game. It's a very iconic game. It's based in a ghost town. There is a permanent fog. And there are disgusting, hide hideous and terrifying beasts lying around every corner um and yeah that's where they got the inspiration those are the locals that stayed how interesting that's the goddamn mayor uh yeah so i think that just attests to what a amazingly cool story it is um but much like silent hill the video game and film it's not real yeah

unfortunately damn but thank you so much to ruth bradford harris for sending this one into us really enjoyed researching that and really enjoyed um presenting that to you guys um but actually looking at the tweets we're getting right now everyone hated this episode so whoa okay anyway wow uh so thanks for that ruth if you have any of your own thoughts about this particular case you can send them on in to this paranormal life podcast at gmail.com but a great way to get in contact with us is uh socials because it's 2019 baby oh yeah twitter.com forward slash this para life facebook.com forward slash this paranormal life i should probably shout out instagram we never shout out but we do post on instagram occasionally we do um i think it's

instagram.com forward slash this para life uh and i'm not going to check that i'm just going to say it all claims all right i like it as we mentioned before cannot stress this enough jayden smith is in the commune uh he doesn't know it yet he's probably going to do the inaugural concert we're going to have an annual concert currently he's the only musician in the commune uh he doesn't know it yet he's probably going to do the inaugural concert we're going to have an annual concert currently he's the only musician in the commune so it's going to probably be like a five-hour jayden smith set he's he's like 20 years old probably didn't have that much material but it's going to be litty to titty it's going to be great guys you're going to want to be there and if you too want to fraternize with celebrities such as jayden smith such as rory powers such as kick rear yeah

you can head on over to patreon.com forward slash this paranormal life and if you just can't get enough of this show that's the place where from two bucks a month you can get a shout out right here in the show from five bucks a month access to a backlog of bonus episodes where we cover the too hot for TV, too hot for Centralia, too hot for the minds of Centralia content. For 20 bucks a month, you can get the exclusive official Commune t-shirt. That's right.

And as always, we like to take time at the end of every episode to shout out those who have supported us on Patreon. It's time to do that right now. Let's go. Special thank you to Eddie Rodriguez. Dead Ed. That's right. He looks absolutely

dead as a donut. Yeah, just one of the most unhealthy looking people you've ever seen. Wow. He's really employable though in the haunted house scene, the ghost train scene. Of course. He showed up for the interview and the the interviewee was like, Jesus!

Hired! You spooked me when you came in the room, even though you're three minutes late. What's your waist size? Actually, never mind. You look perfect. Get in the f***ing train. Just born that way.

Some people, maybe he's born with it. Maybe it's dead Ed. Who knows? Thanks, dead Ed. Thanks for supporting us. Very kind. Thank you also to Jessica Hayes. Jessica Hayes, the girl from the maze.

Did you hear about this story in the news like two or three years ago? She got lost in a maze for a really long time. And it was kind of weird because it was one of those ones where it's seasonal. So obviously all the leaves die uh at one point but she was in there for like four years right uh and even though it was abundantly clear to get out i think it was like a prison thing she didn't know how to make it outside of the maze so she just kind of was born and raised in the maze at that point she was just foraging for maze food uh you're eating the corn of the walls any bits of popcorn and peanuts that just tourists have left behind you know she's emerging from the

bushes scavenging them and then returning to the depths of the maze borderline school children on trips from france were coming through and saying mademoiselle do you need help to leave the maze and she was like nah i'm good i'm good i live here actually but give me some of your cashews she said what are you in for they're like school trip i suppose she wanted to appear dominant so she punched the oldest french child in the face worked like a charm they ran but they didn't know where they were running hence the maze but glad to see that presumably she isn't operating a computer and patreon.com from the maze.

So hopefully she's on the outside now. Yeah. Thanks. Thank you also to Nathan Ellingsworth. What's an Ellingsworth, I hear you ask? Well, an Elling is a particular quantity of crack cocaine that me and my father used to go down to the docks and try and procure at the weekends.

quantity of crack cocaine that me and my father used to go down to the docks and try and procure at the weekends so an elling's worth would be anything from 500 to 5 000 pounds and it financially ruined us in those years but if you got an elling you were smiling ear to ear i'll tell you that much so you would you would go to someone and ask for an elling's worth of drugs uh mostly just an elling just an elling and they i would say how much and they'd say an ellings worth i assume when you had this conversation you were already on drugs hard to tell it shouldn't be memories it shouldn't be hard to tell if you were on drugs or not uh it was a fish that dealt it so read from that what you will okay probably drugs nathan i'm sorry you had your second name dragged

into this nonsense. Presumably you... Oh no, he sent us Bitcoin. He's actually really big into drugs. Oh wow. Yeah, it's massive. This might be the fish. Thank you also to Abigail Wood. Abigail Force One.

Excuse you? It's a mix between Air Force One. Excuse you? It's a mix between Air Force One and Gale Force Wind. She is powerful. She is a mecha. Part plane, part wind. She is a machine that has somehow harnessed the power of the elements. Imagine a plane that can control the wind. That's Abigail.

Endless flight. Endless possibilities. But also slightly impractical it's actually a lot to read from her name i never would have guessed but that's fascinating yeah you think from the name that she is just a person yes not a top secret military piece of equipment banned by 17 nations well governments pretty quickly figured out that by calling their operations mysterious kind of obtuse things like operation midnight strike um operation sundown they would kind of arise suspicion but by calling their projects abigail wood exactly it just goes under the radar so if they say you know like know, like, hey, no big deal. Abigail Wood has been terminated by death beam.

Nothing to see here, folks. Just a typical everyday piece of legislation that just flies under the radar. Literally. That's one of the things she can do. So thank you, Abigail, you beautiful piece of military technology. Thank you for your support.

Thank you also to Travis Duncan. That's right, Travis is Duncan on the haters. He's dunking them so hard that they're falling through pitfalls in the earth itself and through into gas-filled fiery holes. I love it. He is grabbing the waists of his enemies and suplexing them straight to the underworld. Poisonous gas exploding from every direction.

Duncan, you are a beast. I mean, I know they're haters. That's still murder. I don't know what to tell you, but don't do it to me, Duncan. Yeah, we're right there with you. Thank you also to Casey Johnson. Johnson's on the Casey.

That's right. The one detective at the headquarters they can't let it go can't let anything go any case it doesn't get solved casey's on it i mean johnson's on it on the casey and and it's mostly the cases that they shouldn't be focusing on you know there's a they have like a desk full of like homicides to look into yeah they're mostly trying to find out who had the last donut in the office. Yeah, and Johnson will not let it go. It's like, please, move on. We'll buy you another donut.

It's not about the donut. It's about we've got a liar in our midst. My cases on my desk are piling up. Twelve years ago, this lady's cat's gone missing. Fourteen years ago, a man misplaced his bicycle. I will not rest until these cases are solved. It's like some of those people are dead now. There is no case to solve.

I have another. A guy outside a bar said he would bum a cigarette and he would get a cigarette back to the guy as soon as he bought a new cigarette, but he never gave the cigarette back. It's like, that's not a crime at all. People say that all the time. He's like, my duty is to protect and to solve.

No, it isn't. That's not the motto, Casey Johnson. But thank you, Casey, for taking the time out of your just hectic schedule of solving minor crimes to support us. Yeah. And thank you, lastly, but not leastly, to Jake Elsley. Or Drakey Elsley Prelsley. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much for you

for your contribution to the this paranormal lab patreon I'm so sorry Jake thank you so much for your support I hope you have a nickname for life now Jake Elsley Presley That's right thank you Jake And thank you to everyone else we have shouted out tonight

And everyone else who supported us up to now I think I've mentioned before We're still getting through a little backlog of names But do let us know if we've missed you out In the sort of distant past, and we will do our very best to catch up with that as soon as possible. But otherwise, we will get to you

ASAP. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Hope you enjoyed The Tale of Centralia, the real Silent Hill. Ooh. And otherwise, we will see you next week for a brand new paranormal tale. See you later, folks!