The story goes that sometime in the late ’70s, a convoy of touring bands got stranded in Centralia, Pennsylvania... the coal-mine town that’s been burning underground since 1962.

They were en route to a festival that never happened; the organizer disappeared, leaving them with broken promises, broken amps, and a case of whiskey. Locals warned them not to stay the night,  “the ground breathes,” one old miner said... but musicians are stubborn. They set up anyway, right there on the abandoned main street, with the smoke rising through the asphalt.

By midnight, they’d built a makeshift stage out of truck beds and road signs. Someone fired up a generator. Another cracked open bottles. And what followed was less a concert and more a possession.

The fog from the mines rolled over the crowd, thick and chemical. Strings snapped. Drums warped. Yet every band played tighter, louder as if something beneath the surface was keeping tempo.

They said the basslines started to echo from below.
The ground rumbled in rhythm. The air stank of sulfur and electricity.

A few people tried to leave, but couldn’t find their cars. Some swear they saw figures moving under the stage, silhouettes in the smoke, mouthing words in time with the music. The last song of the night was called “Bottles and Bands.” No one had heard it before, and no one’s heard it since.

By sunrise, the generator was dead. The town was empty again.
All that was left were scorched footprints, half-melted bottles, and reel-to-reel tapes that play nothing but laughter when rewound.

Decades later, Mesa Babe supposedly found one of those tapes. Abigail sampled it, those ghostly laughs buried in the background of the hook. But when they played the track live, the lights dimmed exactly three times, and the sound engineer quit mid-set, claiming the monitors were whispering lyrics that weren’t in the mix.

Now, every time “Bottles and Bands” drops in a setlist, the venue’s power flickers. Some say it’s bad wiring. Others say Centralia still wants its encore.

Bottles and Bands

Mesa - a table for offerings
Babe – the innocent we feed to memory