Weird New Jersey

Your Travel Guide to New Jersey's
Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets

For those of you who are wondering just what Weird N.J. is all about, let us try and explain. Weird NJ is a travel guide and magazine to places you won't find on state funded maps or located on any tourist attraction pamphlets.

In Weird N.J. we travel to places that are seen for what they are; weird, odd or unique, all told by New Jerseyans to Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran, publishers of Weird N.J., while traveling the backroads of the Garden State in search of local unwritten history and modern folklore.

When we travel the state of New Jersey, we are looking for tales told only inside the perimeters of a town. These stories and places tell a story that cannot be found in any history books and are not often perceived as "history,"...until we arrive.

The Weird NJ journal also has interviews with people we meet along the road who we feel have a story to tell, and stories sent in by subscribers telling their own Weird experience living in New Jersey. We also feature Weird N.J. News, a collection of newspaper articles compiled over the year, and the usual selection of places you may not want to visit, including underground tunnels, sewer drains, abandoned property and other sites that are brought to our attention at the local diner or "old man bar."

Some of these sites deal with haunted dwellings, graveyards, UFOs and Bigfoot sightings, but that is a small part of what we are trying to accomplish. Our main goal is to record what people think or remember as being weird or odd in their town. It could be anything from a lawn filled with bowling balls, to an abandoned Nike missile base right in your backyard!

Many of the sites we've recorded you can actually go see. Some are told just in legend, but never before recorded for publication. Some sites you cannot visit, but we thought you'd like to know they exist...somewhere in New Jersey.

The Weird N.J. newsletter started in 1989, self-published and sent out to just a few subscribers who somehow got ahold of our mailing address. Since that time we've published nine issues, once a year, and the mailing list keeps growing with each issue. Since all of the early issues are out of print, we are traveling back to some of the earlier sites and updating the history of these "odd" places, and photographed many of these sites. If you know of a place that you think belongs in Weird N.J., sent us a note. We'll be glad to check it out.

One might think of a "weird" site as something mysterious, possibly forbidden and better off left alone for others to trespass on. There have always been "Dead Man's Curves" and places associated with local legends that come and go with generations. Fortunately for New Jersey, almost every town has their own unique brand of weirdness.

The collection of sites you'll find in upcoming issues are a culmination of interviews, letters and traveling miles of highways seeking out what New Jerseyans consider weird and unique about their state. We've met some incredible people along the way, and all of them had a story they wanted to tell.

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