UNION — Union County is known for its parks and recreation, historical significance, restaurants, shopping, transportation gateway, culture and arts. It’s also weird!
And what is exactly weird about Union County? You can find out on Saturday, May 23, at 1 p.m. when Mark Moran of Weird NJ visits Vauxhall Branch Library. He will be leading an interactive presentation where participants will explore the unique, mysterious, and peculiar side of Union County and New Jersey.
Moran plans to zoom in on particular stories that generations will be familiar with. “Some of these stories go back years and years,” he said.
Johnston Drive, which runs through the Watchung Reservation, has 13 bumps that keep reappearing even after the road is repaved. It is said to be the graves of 13 witches or sisters who killed children. “Some of the older people will definitely remember taking night trips with their friends, trying to scare each other,” said Moran.
But there’s also more recent stories. “The Merchants & Drovers Tavern in Rahway has great captures of ghost images,” said Moran.
Moran became interested in weird stuff at a young age. “Something you might see on the cover of Weekly World News back then,” he said.
He’d try to find the truth in things such as Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs and extraterrestrials. Before computers and the internet, Moran and his Weird NJ partner Mark Sceurman would find odd news articles, paste them together and Xerox the pages. Weird NJ originally started out as a newsletter or a pamphlet in 1989.
“In the very early ’90s, people called them fanzines,” said Moran. “Fanzines were all dedicated to a specific band or kind of music – underground stuff. Weird NJ focused on odd things around the state. A fanzine travel guide. It was mostly word of mouth stories; stuff that wasn’t getting documented in legitimate newspapers.”
Moran and Sceurman both had day jobs in graphic design and illustration. They worked on Weird NJ in their free time. They’d take a day off and travel around, get photographs and talk to locals. “These stories were only known in the town,” Moran said. “There was no way to research.”
Weird NJ became popular quickly because people would bootleg the original pamphlets. “They were so easy to replicate,” said Moran. “If we passed out 50 (copies) to friends, they would copy them and give (them) to their friends. It started to get around pretty rapidly. By issue four, we had to go to a small-town legitimate printer. We’d sit around a kitchen table and put a staple into them.”
Eventually, with Barnes & Noble as their publisher, Moran and Sceurman published a Weird USA series covering about 30 states, but according to Moran, New Jersey is definitely the weirdest. He said, “We could do a book on any state, but New Jersey is the only place you can put out 65 issues and two books.”
With so many unusual stories New Jersey has to tell, there are those that people want to hear over and over again. Moran said, “If I’m doing a presentation in Union, I try to stay local. I wouldn’t bring up Clinton Road in West Milford. They want to hear about it. They had this experience, no matter how far away. There are so many legends. So many unusual stories. It’s a long, dark road through the woods. People will say, ‘Why didn’t you say anything about Clinton Road?’ They still have to barricade the road around Halloween time. They don’t want the late-night tourists.”
Weird NJ is published twice a year – spring and fall. With only 82 pages, there’s just so much to fit in, so there’s never a lack of stories, according to Moran, who says they have so much in the files. “We’re not time sensitive,” he said. “A lot of these legends have been around hundreds of years.”
To register for this program, visit www.uplnj.org.
Learn more about Weird NJ at: https://weirdnj.com/.
Photo Courtesy of Weird NJ
