Where Is 'Silent Hill'?

Photo via Inside the Magic

This fictitious New England town is so sleepy it's devoid of people. But Population 0, it's not, for it has inhabitants—just not the merciful, let alone human, kind. 

Mystery shrouds Silent Hill like the mist wafting from Toluca Lake and blocking sunlight over town. Silent Hill was the site of occult rituals before the Europeans settled the land.

Toluca Lake is a very real place though, in sunny Los Angeles, California:

MORE SUN-DRENCHED THAN FOGGY. Lake in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, California. Photo via Fred Holley

Gamers have speculated Silent Hill must be located somewhere in Maine. The 2006 movie adaptation puts Silent Hill expressly in West Virginia, but the filmmakers took inspiration someplace else. Led by screenwriter Roger Avary, they had a little field trip to Centralia, Pennsylvania.

Graffiti on the splitting earth of Centralia. Via ~timid-wolf

Much like Sunnydale, the town of Centralia literally sits on hell. For reasons still unknown, a strip-mine pit caught fire in the early 1960s and the inferno spread to the coal mines beneath town. By 1984, Centralia was pronounced uninhabitable. Toxic gases would shoot from roads and the hollow earth would literally swallow living people at random.

This subterranean conflagration has not abated to this day. Centralia even got Silent Hill's smoky effect right.

via WORLD OF WÜMME

Now Silent Hill may have its cold-blooded monsters and cults, but the air in Centralia is killer by itself. That is, if the brittle earth doesn't eat you first.