I live about 2 hours from Centralia, PA

If there's anyone here who hasn't heard about it, a coal seam under the town is on fire and so the town has mostly been abandoned. The internet would have you believe it's a real life silent Hill or something, full of abandoned houses with smoke and steam billowing from the ground.

In actuality, it's a lot less dramatic. If a house becomes vacant, it gets torn down because it's not safe to live on top of a fire. And there is some smoke and steam and the ground is noticeably warm in some places, but at this point the fire has mostly moved out from under the town. If a building is still standing, it's because someone is still living there.

And I'm not gonna say it isn't/wasn't worth the visit, it's pretty cool to drive through and see the grid of streets where a town used to be, but it's not exactly the urban exploration wonderland a lot of people imagine it to be. It was really only good for maybe an hour or two of walking around, and probably best enjoyed as a quick detour if you were in the area on your way to somewhere else.

And one of the bigger draws is what became known as the "graffiti highway" a stretch of highway that was bypassed because of the fire. It was blocked off, it has some areas that are all cracked and warped because of the fire, and as it became more popular it was covered in graffiti.

I first visited Centralia as a pretty young kid, before the internet discovered it. My parents made a stop on our way somewhere else. There was little or no graffiti on the highway then. One of the locals saw us and came out to chat with us, and pointed out a couple things for us to check out. I don't remember seeing anyone else around at that time.

Fast forward 10 or 15 years, the internet had discovered it, and a couple of my friends wanted to check it out, so I went with them.

The highway was now covered in graffiti. There were more people around, it wasn't exactly crowded, but it wasn't empty like it had been when I first visited. We saw some people walking around in places they probably shouldn't have been (the ground can be kind of unstable in places, tends to happen when the bedrock underneath has just burned away) and we saw some people doing stuff like driving trucks and dirt bikes onto the abandoned highway. There was also a decent amount of trash just sort of left around.

So I wasn't exactly surprised when a few years later they decided to bulldoze over the highway and generally discouraged people from visiting. It had just become too popular, and people were being dumb and disrespectful.

And that's sort of the way of it for abandoned places. If they stay relatively unknown, a handful of people can get away with visiting them as long as they're not being dumb. Once they get popular though you can't keep the idiots away and they become a problem that needs to be addressed.