There will be six sections to the RP, each will have an end, leading to the next section. The big idea is a big mystery that can only be solved once you’ve found all the clues in each location. The locations are: ● Centralia, Pennsylvania ○ Centralia is aborough and a nearghost town inColumbia County, Pennsylvania,United States. Its population has dwindled from over 1,000 residents in 1981 to 10 in 2010, as a result of theCentralia Mine Fire burning beneath the borough since 1962. Centralia is the least-populated municipality in Pennsylvania. Centralia is part of theBloomsburg-Berwick micropolitan area. The borough is completely surrounded byConyngham Township. All properties in the borough were claimed undereminent domain by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1992 (and all buildings therein were condemned). Many of the Native American tribes local to what is now Columbia County, Pennsylvania sold the land that makes up Centralia to colonial agents in the year 1749 for the sum of five hundred pounds (over half a million pounds or $800,000 in today's money). In 1770, during the construction of the Reading Road, which stretched from Reading to Fort Augusta (present day Sunbury), settlers surveyed and explored the land. A large portion of the Reading Road became what is now Route 61, the main highway east into and south out of Centralia. In 1793, Robert Morris, a hero of the Revolutionary War and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, acquired a third of Centralia's valley land. When he declared bankruptcy in 1798, the land was surrendered to the Bank of the United States. A French sea captain named Stephen Girard purchased Morris' lands for $30,000, including 68 tracts east of Morris', because of the anthracite coal in the region. The Centralia coal deposits were largely looked over before the construction of the Mine Run Railroad in 1854. In 1832, Johnathan Faust opened the Bull's Head Tavern in what was called Roaring Creek Township; this gave the town its first name, Bull's Head. In 1842, Centralia's land was bought by the Locust Mountain Coal and Iron Company, and Alexander Rae, a mining engineer, moved his family in and began planning a village, laying out streets and lots for development. Rea named the town Centreville, but in 1865 changed it to Centralia because the U. S. Post Office already had a Centreville in Schuylkill County. The Mine Run Railroad was built in 1854 to transport coal out of the valley. The first two mines in Centralia opened in 1856, the Locust Run Mine and the Coal Ridge Mine. Afterward came the Hazeldell Colliery Mine in 1860, the Centralia Mine in 1862, and the Continental Mine in 1863. The Continental was located on Stephen Girard's estate land. Branching from the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the Lehigh and Mahanoy Railroad came to Centralia in 1865 which expanded Centralia's coal sales to markets in eastern Pennsylvania. Centralia was incorporated as a borough in 1866. Its principal employer was the anthracite coal industry. Alexander Rea, the town's founder, was murdered in his buggy by members of the Molly Maguires on October 17, 1868, during a trip between Centralia and Mount Carmel. Three men were eventually convicted of his death and were hanged in the county seat of Bloomsburg, on March 25, 1878. Several other murders and incidents of arson also took place during the violence, as Centralia was a hotbed of Molly Maguires activity during the 1860s. A legend among locals in Centralia tells that Father Daniel Ignatius McDermott, the first Roman Catholic Priest to call Centralia home, cursed the land in retaliation for being assaulted by three members of the Maguires in 1869. McDermott said that there would be a day when St. Ignatius Roman Catholic Church would be the only structure remaining in Centralia. Many of the Molly Maguires' leaders were hanged in 1877, ending their crimes. Legends say that a number of descendants of the Molly Maguires still lived in Centralia up until the 1980s. According to numbers of Federal census records, the town of Centralia came to its maximum population of 2,761 in the year 1890. At its peak the town had seven churches, five hotels, twenty-seven saloons, two theaters, a bank, a post office, and 14 general and grocery stores. Thirty-seven years later the production of anthracite coal had reached its peak in Pennsylvania. In the following year’s production declined due to many young miners from Centralia enlisting in World War I. The year 1929 saw the crash of the stock market, which led to the Lehigh Valley Coal Company closing five of its Centralia-local mines. Bootleg miners still continued mining in several idle mines, using techniques such as what was called "pillar-robbing," where miners would extract coal from coal pillars left in mines to support their roofs. This caused the collapse of many idle mines, further complicating the prevention of the mine fire in 1962 when an effort was made to seal off the abandoned mines. In the year 1950, Centralia Council acquired the rights to all anthracite coal beneath Centralia through a state law passed in 1949 that enabled the transaction. That year, the federal census counted 1,986 residents in Centralia. Coal mining continued in Centralia until the 1960s, when most of the companies shut down. Bootleg mining continued until 1982 and strip and open-pit mining are still active in the area. There is an underground mine employing about 40 people three miles to the west. Rail service ended in 1966. Centralia operated its own school district, including elementary schools and a high school. There were also two Catholic parochial schools. By 1980, it had just 1,012 residents. Another 500 or 600 lived nearby. Most of the property has now been condemned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The habitable areas were put up for auction, and in 2010 an anonymous buyer purchased nine land deeds, four of them inhabitable. In 1962, a fire started in a mine beneath the town and ultimately led to the town being almost entirely abandoned. There is some disagreement over the specific event which triggered the fire. David DeKok, after studying available local and state government documents and interviewing former borough council members, argues in Unseen Danger and its successor edition, Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, that in May 1962, the Centralia Borough Council hired five members of the volunteer fire company to clean up the town landfill, located in an abandoned strip-mine pit next to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. This had been done prior to Memorial Day in previous years, when the landfill was in a different location. On May 27, 1962, the firefighters, as they had in the past, set the dump on fire and let it burn for some time. Unlike in previous years, however, the fire was not fully extinguished. An unsealed opening in the pit allowed the fire to enter the labyrinth of abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia. Joan Quigley argues in her 2007 book, The Day the Earth Caved In, that the fire had in fact started the previous day, when a trash hauler dumped hot ash or coal discarded from coal burners into the open trash pit. She noted that borough council minutes from June 4, 1962 referred to two fires at the dump, and that five firefighters had submitted bills for "fighting the fire at the landfill area". The borough, by law, was responsible for installing a fire-resistant clay barrier between each layer, but fell behind schedule, leaving the barrier incomplete. This allowed the hot coals to penetrate the vein of coal underneath the pit and start the subsequent subterranean fire. Another theory of note is the Bast Theory. According to legend, the Bast Colliery coal fire of 1932 was never fully extinguished. In 1962, it reached the landfill area. In 1979, locals became aware of the scale of the problem when a gas-station owner and then mayor, John Coddington, inserted a dipstick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he withdrew it, it seemed hot, so he lowered a thermometer down on a string and was shocked to discover that the temperature of the gasoline in the tank was 172 °F (77.8 °C). Statewide attention to the fire began to increase; culminating in 1981 when a 12-year-old resident named Todd Domboski fell into a sinkhole 4 feet (1.2 m) wide by 150 feet (46 m) deep that suddenly opened beneath his feet in a backyard. His cousin, 14-year-old Eric Wolfgang, pulled Todd out of the hole and saved his life. The plume of hot steam billowing from the hole was measured and found to contain a lethal level of carbon monoxide. In 1984, the U.S. Congress allocated more than $42 million for relocation efforts. Most of the residents accepted buyout offers and moved to the nearby communities of Mount Carmel and Ashland. A few families opted to stay despite warnings from Pennsylvania officials. In 1992, Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey invoked eminent domain on all properties in the borough, condemning all the buildings within. A subsequent legal effort by residents failed to have the decision reversed. In 2002, the U.S. Postal Service revoked Centralia's ZIP code, 17927. In 2009, Governor Ed Rendell began the formal eviction of the remaining Centralia residents. The Centralia mine fire extended beneath the town of Byrnesville a few miles to the south and caused it also to be abandoned. ○ The Landmarks of Centralia ■ St. Mary’s Catholic Church ■ Odd Fellow’s Cemetery ■ St. Ignatius Cemetery ■ SS Peter and Paul Cemetery ■ Lehigh Valley Coal Company building ■ Centralia Municipal Building ■ Greystone restaurant ■ The Morris house ■ The Girard house ● Garnet, Montana ○ Garnet is a ghost town in Granite County, Montana, United States. Located on the dirt Wallace Creek Road, it is an abandoned mining town from the 1860s. In the 1800s miners migrated north from played-out placer mines in California and Colorado. Placer mining of gold or other minerals is done by washing the sand, gravel, etc. with running water, but by 1870 most area placer mining was no longer profitable. The Garnet Mountains attracted miners who collected the gold first by panning, then by using rockers and sluice boxes as the free-floating gold diminished. Although miners had located gold-bearing quartz veins, the lack of decent roads and refined extracting and smelting techniques, made further development unfeasible at that time. Silver mines elsewhere started to draw the miners out of the Garnet Mountains, but in 1893, the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act set off a panic throughout the region. Silver mines closed, and within weeks thousands of unemployed miners were on to gold mining in the Garnets. Miners began to trickle back. At the head of First Chance Gulch in 1895, Dr. Armistead Mitchell erected a stamp mill to crush local ore. Around it grew the town, which was originally named Mitchell, but in 1897 became known as Garnet. Soon after Mitchell erected his mill, Sam Ritchey hit a rich vein of ore in his Nancy Hanks mine just west of the town. The "boom" began. By January 1898 nearly 1,000 people resided in Garnet. There were four stores, four hotels, three livery stables, two barber shops, a union hall, a school with 41 students, a butcher shop, a candy shop, a doctor’s office, an assay office, and thirteen saloons comprised the town. Eager miners and entrepreneurs built quickly and without planning. A haphazard community resulted. Most of the buildings stood on existing or future mining claims, and about twenty mines operated. After 1900 many mine owners leased their mines out, the gold having become scarcer and harder to mine. The Nancy Hanks yielded about $300,000 worth of gold, and an estimated $950,000 was extracted from all the mines in Garnet by 1917, but by 1905, many of the mines were abandoned and the town’s population had shrunk to about 150. A fire in the town’s business district in 1912 destroyed may commercial buildings, most remaining residents moved away to defense-related jobs. By the 1940’s, Garnet was a ghost town. Cabins were abandoned, furnishings included, as though residents were merely vacationing. F.A. Davey still ran the store however, and the hotel stood intact. In 1934 when President Roosevelt raised gold prices from $16 to $32 an ounce, Garnet revived. A new wave of miners moved into abandoned cabins and began re-working the mines and dumps. Then, World War II drew the population away again. The use of dynamite for domestic purposes was curtailed, making mining difficult. Garnet again became a ghost town. Once again F. A. Davey and a few others remained. Several new cabins were constructed following the war, and in 1948 an auction was held with items from the Davey store. Much remained however, and souvenir hunters soon stripped the town not only of loose items, but of doors, woodwork, wallpaper, and even the hotel stairway. ○ The Landmarks of Garnet ■ The Garnet Mines ■ Miner’s Union Hall ■ Kelly’s Saloon ■ The Davey House ■ The Mitchell House ● Linda Vista Community Hospital*, Los Angeles, California ○ Linda Vista Community Hospital, originally called the Santa Fe Railroad Hospital and Santa Fe Coast Lines Hospital, is a former hospital at 610-30 South St. Louis Street in Los Angeles, California, United States, in the Boyle Heights neighborhood. The hospital was built for railroad employees and was one of four employee hospitals run by the railroad Santa Fe Employees Hospital Association. The property was purchased for $5,500 and the hospital was constructed at a cost of $147,000. The hospital opened to great fanfare in 1904 and even had its own Jersey cows, chickens, and a garden to provide patients with the freshest milk, butter, eggs, poultry and vegetables. This original Moorish-style hospital building designed by Charles Whittlesey, known as the Santa Fe Coast Lines Hospital, was razed and rebuilt in 1924 in the current Mission Revival Style structure. In 1989 it was renamed the Linda Vista Community Hospital. The Santa Fe Railroad sold the 150-bed hospital to a managed healthcare company in 1980. By the late 1970s, the railroad hospital association facilities were experiencing declining use, as more railroad workers began to use conventional medical-insurance policies. The area surrounding the hospital also became a less-affluent area and hospital funding was affected. According to a California Health Law News report, when Linda Vista tried to reduce operational expenses in response, the hospital was blamed for an increase in facility death rates. During that time, the hospital was regularly treating a fair number of gunshot wounds and stabbings from the local neighborhoods, which affected its mortality statistics. An increase in uninsured and under-insured patients forced the hospital to close its emergency services department in 1989. The quality of care at Linda Vista Community Hospital continued to decline as doctors moved to other hospitals. In 1991, the hospital ceased operations. ● Waverly Hills Sanatorium*, Louisville, Kentucky ○ The Waverly Hills Sanatorium is a closed sanatorium located in southwestern Louisville/Jefferson County, Kentucky. It opened in 1910 as a two-story hospital to accommodate 40 to 50 tuberculosis patients. In the early 1900s, Jefferson County was ravaged by an outbreak of tuberculosis (the "White Plague") which prompted the construction of a new hospital. The hospital closed in 1962, due to the antibiotic drug streptomycin that lowered the need for such a hospital. The land that is today known as Waverly Hill was purchased by Major Thomas H. Hays in 1883 as the Hays' family home. Since the new home was far away from any existing schools, Mr. Hays decided to open a local school for his daughters to attend. He started a one-room schoolhouse on Pages Lane and hired Lizzie Lee Harris as the teacher. Due to Miss Harris' fondness for Walter Scott's Waverley novels, she named the schoolhouse Waverley School. Major Hays liked the peaceful-sounding name, so he named his property Waverley Hill. The Board of Tuberculosis Hospital kept the name when they bought the land and opened the sanatorium. It is not known exactly when the spelling changed to exclude the second "e" and became Waverly Hills. However the spelling fluctuated between both spellings many times over the years. In the early 20th century, Jefferson County was severely stricken with an outbreak of tuberculosis. There were many tuberculosis cases in Louisville at the time because of all the swampland, which was perfect for the tuberculosis bacteria. To try to contain the disease, a two-story wooden sanatorium was opened which consisted of an administrative/main building and two open air pavilions, each housing 20 patients, for the treatment of "early cases". "In the early part of 1911, the city of Louisville began to make preparations to build a new Louisville City Hospital, and the hospital commissioners decided in their plans that there would be no provision made in the new City Hospital for the admission of pulmonary tuberculosis, and the Board of Tuberculosis Hospital was given $25,000 to erect a hospital for the care of advanced cases of pulmonary tuberculosis". On August 31, 1912, all tuberculosis patients from the City Hospital were relocated to temporary quarters in tents on the grounds of Waverly Hills pending the completion of a hospital for advanced cases. In December 1912 a hospital for advanced cases opened for the treatment of another 40 patients. In 1914 a children’s pavilion added another 50 beds making the known “capacity” around 130 patients. The children's pavilion was not only for sick children but also for the children of tuberculosis patients who could not be cared for properly otherwise. This report also mentions that the goal was to add a new building each year to continually grow so there may have even been more beds available than specifically listed. Due to constant need for repairs on the wooden structures, need for a more durable structure, as well as need for more beds so that people would not be turned away due to lack of space, construction of a five-story building that could hold more than 400 patients began in March 1924. The new building opened on October 17, 1926, but after the introduction of streptomycin in 1943, the number of tuberculosis cases gradually lowered, until there was no longer need for such a large hospital. The remaining patients were sent to Hazelwood Sanatorium in Louisville. Waverly Hills closed in June 1961. The building was reopened in 1962 as Woodhaven Geriatric Center, a nursing home. Primarily treating aging patients with various stages of dementia and mobility limits, as well as the severely mentally handicapped. Woodhaven was closed by the state in 1982 allegedly due to patient neglect, as is sometimes common in these environments of understaffed and overcrowded institutions. Rumors later inaccurately termed Woodhaven as an insane asylum lending to many urban legends. ● Bobby Mackey’s*, Wilder, Kentucky ○ Bobby Mackey's Music World is a nightclub and honky tonk that is currently owned by country singer Bobby Mackey and located on 44 Licking Pike in Wilder, Kentucky. Situated about 3 miles (4.8 km) south of Cincinnati, Ohio near the Licking River. According to urban legends and modern folklore, the location allegedly houses a "gateway to hell" and is haunted by spirits including Pearl Bryan, whose corpse was found in a field 2.5 miles from the site in Fort Thomas, Kentucky. It was said that Bryan's murderers were devil worshippers who, according to local talk, cursed the location and vowed to haunt everyone involved in prosecuting the case. Also according to documents, sometime in the 1930s a pregnant dancer named "Johanna" committed suicide with poison backstage on the catwalk at the Latin Quarter club, which then operated inside the building currently housing Bobby Mackey's. Rumor has it that this deed was carried out after her father murdered her lover Robert Randall, a singer at the club, by hanging him in the dressing room, though investigations have failed to find police reports of this event ever having taken place. Furthermore, scholarly research into property records, newspapers, and court files has failed to substantiate most of the fanciful claims made regarding the sanguine history of the location, and no connection between the site of Bobby Mackey's and the Pearl Bryan murder has ever been established. The site was originally used as a slaughterhouse in the early 19th century and later torn down for construction of a roadhouse that took on various names, such as The Brisbane, until he purchased it in 1978. ● Goble, Oregon ○ Goble was first settled by Daniel B. Goble in 1853. He took up a donation land claim and later sold it to George S. Foster, who laid out a town and named it after Goble. Until there was a railroad bridge built across the Columbia River at Vancouver, Washington, Goble was the Oregon terminus for the train ferry to Kalama, Washington. Goble had a post office from 1894 to 1960. The history of the area is complicated because there are at five or six different community names applied to at least three locations in close proximity to each other all dating to about the same era. These names include: Hunters, Reuben, Goble, Mooreville, Red Town, Enterprise aka Enterprise Landing, and arguably Beaver Homes. The history of the area begins with the selection of Kalama, Washington, as the beginning point for the construction of the Pacific Division of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1870. At least by 1879, there was a landing on the Oregon side of the Columbia River across from Kalama known as Enterprise Landing.Reuben, which is a post office name assigned to the location when a post office was sought in 1890 and it was found that the name "Enterprise" was already taken. The physical location is given to be about a mile south of the present day Goble.Reuben was named for the brother of the first postmaster, Reuben R. Foster. Scheduled Rail service of the Northern Pacific Railway from Tacoma to Kalama began on January 5, 1874. It connected to regular riverboat traffic on the Columbia River. However the Northern Pacific Railroad was chartered to construct transcontinental railroad and telegraph lines between Lake Superior and Puget Sound and completing the connection required a Portland to Kalama route. In 1877, Oregon Senator John Mitchell sponsored legislation calling for the Northern Pacific to forfeit 7,000,000 acres (28,000 km2) of land grants unless they completed a line to Kalama "as far as practicable along the Oregon side of the Columbia River". The bill didn't pass congress, but on September 8, 1883, the Last spike was driven at Gold Creek, Montana to close the gap in the Rocky Mountain Division section of the Northern Pacific Railroad. A special train celebrating the opening of the transcontinental line arrived in Tacoma on September 13, 1883, which had traveled over the Portland-Hunters line. The Train Ferry Tacoma would go in service the following year. In the 1890s, Goble was a boomtown, supported by logging, the wood-fired Columbia River steamboats that stopped there for refueling, and as many as six trains that stopped in the community daily on the way to Seattle. Today there are few businesses remaining in Goble, but the Goble Tavern remains open. Goble is generally avoided by those who know of its history due to a large number of events, such a large amount of murders, the hangings of several serial killers, a couple of mining accidents resulting in the deaths of many, and several suicides. ● Landmarks of Goble ○ The Goble Tavern ○ The Goble Crystal Mines ○ The Goble house ○ The Foster House ○ Greystone community church ○ Unnamed local graveyard ○ The Vogelscheuche (or simply V) Property (*These are the places of the activity, but you can roam around the town itself, not just the epicenter. The places that are not marked are towns that are completely filled with activity.) Now, there will be alot of elements of Satanism, btw/fyi. In the RP, a person can rolepley as a human investigating the areas, some kind of ghost, one of the nine angels to be listen in the Character Sheets, or one of the nine demons to be listed in the CS.
