Another one that I put on my 1up blog!  I promise I'll run out of these soon.  Anyway, this one speaks for itself.

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I'm a long-time fan of the Silent Hill series.  I own every game, and have gotten multiple endings for each one.  I have fond memories of me and my college roommates taking turns playing through the various stories, delighting in getting as far as we could before beer and being-awake-3am-ness made the tension unbearable.

My wife, Emily, and I moved from from Rhode Island to Colorado (I recommend anyone do likewise) in the summer of 2008. Being a huge nerd, I was very much aware that the 2006 film adaptation of Silent Hill was, in part, inspired by the the ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. On our way to the purple mountains majesty of the Colorado skyline, I asked my ever-so-patient wife if we could go several hours out of our way to make a jaunt through the spooky locale, and she agreed to indulge me.

Do we all know about Centralia? No? C'mon everyone, weak showing. All right, well let me back up for a bit of a history lesson. Centralia, Pennsylvania was a coal mining town that has been active since roughly 1854. In 1962, a mine fire began under dubious circumstances. A mine fire is always serious, but methinks it truly becomes a disaster when it starts in a freaking COAL MINE. The coal is still burning today. It's been nearly 40 years, and the fire is still cooking the bowels of the earth's crust beneath this quiet little town.

No one is sure how the fires started, which, to my mind, is part of the wonderful mystique of the place. Who knows? Did some triangular-headed denizen of hell strike a spark against the coal miles and miles beneath the earth we innocently tread upon? I like to think so!

The burning coal made the town unlivable. People grew sick from the carbon monoxide levels. Occasionally cave-ins swallowed the already charred earth. The town's residents gradually abandoned Centralia.

So! This grisly backdrop inspired Roger Avery, the writer of the 2006 Silent Hill film. He adopted the whole mine fire milieu in order to add some weight to the film's plot.

All this in mind, I desperately wanted to walk the streets of Centralia, and, after much nerdy exposition, Em agreed that this little side-jaunt would be well worth our time.

We had directions. We figured that we knew where we were going. Once we passed a certain point, however, roughly within 30 miles or so of where we were supposed to run into our little ghost town, our turn-by-turn instructions lost all meaning. I'm not just making this up for dramatic effect. We were surrounded on all sides by artificial hillsides. Blasted landscapes whizzed by on either side of the car, formed from man's dynamite-fueled excursions into the crust of the earth. None of the signage that we saw corresponded to what we had written on the page in front of us. We drove through some of the most desolate countryside that I've ever seen for miles and miles, and then, just as we'd decided to give up the chase, we hit an awful pothole and rolled into a stretch of gray, dilapidated buildings. A few teenaged looking individuals skulked about on the sidewalks. Looking around us at the empty, hollow buildings, and the charred, smoking hillsides, we suddenly realized that we had made it into Centralia.

The feelings of desolation and oppressive loneliness were thick in the air. Despite the risks we'd been warned of (i.e. carbon monoxide and cave-ins), Emily and I pulled over and hopped out of the car to take a look at the surrounding landscape. It was too bizarre to not want to wander the hillsides. Evidence of the still-smoldering mine fire was in full force. We stepped out onto a small patch of land that was literally smoking beneath our feet.

We got to the top of the hill and saw a patch of level ground with a wrought iron fence. We trekked up to the gates, and realized, upon seeing the giant Russian Orthodox cross, that we had stumbled upon a cemetery. Now, I'll be honest with you. I know a lot of things. I'm a well-traveled guy. I love learning cultural bits and bobs as much as the next fellow, but I had never ever come across a Russian Orthodox cross before. I had no idea what the symbol in the center of the graveyard was.

To me, this was just yet another fascinating detail that helped me believe that I had somehow stumbled into the horror of the real Silent Hill. It seemed occult and foreign, and I didn't know how to reconcile what I was seeing with the world that I knew. It was culture-shock colored by knowledge of gaming, and I have rarely had the privilege of feeling my reality warp in just precisely that way.

After Emily and I had gotten our fill of gazing at Russian tombstones eerily wreathed in smoke, we turned around to head back towards the car. However, off in the distance, we noticed that the blackened, gnarled, tree-screened hillside was broken by a single brilliant spot of color. A bright shining blue steeple stood out among the foliage. A church. It seemed to be the only building in the whole town still intact.   

After some trial and error navigating the gravel roads, we drove right up to the front of the church. True to our long-distance assumptions, the church appeared to be either perfectly preserved or still in use. Tying this to the Silent Hill mythology in my own mind nearly led to a nerdgasm-induced synaptic meltdown. Emily quickly piled me into the car, and we rode roughly over the broken asphalt past the city limits of the creepy little village. We sped past an empty, dilapidated brick building, identifiable only by the sun-bleached stencil of the words “Police Station”, and got back on the road to Colorado.

I loved our trip to the real-world inspiration for the film world of Silent Hill. Anyone else ever been? Anyone else have pictures?