Five questions with 'Weird NJ' co-founders Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran

Show Caption Hide Caption Weird New Jersey Magazine 25 years of covering the weirdest NJ Weird New Jersey magazine's co-founders Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman talk about their beginnings and some of their favorite stories.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about Weird NJ is that a magazine devoted to local legends, abandoned places and obscure oddities has lasted 25 years.

And yet that's exactly what co-founders and editors Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran accomplished earlier this year when they published their 50th issue.

From its humble roots as a fanzine crafted with glue and a typewriter, Weird NJ has carved out a niche and a publishing empire.

From a nondescript office building in Little Falls, their twice-a-year publication has tapped a rich vein of local lore.

Their efforts have expanded to include 45 books such as volumes on weird stories of other states as well as “Weird Civil War” and their latest volume this fall, a collection of ghost stories.

“Twenty-five years. It went by quick,” Moran remarked during a recent visit to the Weird New Jersey offices, where a light-saber life-size Yoda oversees a room decorated with alien skulls, shark jaws and a Hank Williams poster.

“Yeah, it’s been a long weird road,” quipped Sceurman (‘rhymes with mermen.”)

Here are excerpts from five questions we asked Sceurman and Moran about their magazine.

Q: When you started the magazine, did either one of you expect to get this far?

MS: I certainly didn’t. That’s why I asked Mark to join me. I thought we’d just have some fun and that would be it. We’d have our day. Ha Ha! Look at what we did!

And then it just kind of snowballed.

MM: Snowballed is a good way to describe it. We started out with just one issue a year, which was really very modest. It was a newsletter that we collated around Mark’s kitchen table.

MS: Done on a typewriter.

MM: Pasted up with rubber cement and hot wax.

But as it progressed it became more of a real publication, I guess. And what issue were we at — around 12 or so — when they approached us about making a book. And then that snowballed into 45 books. There’s absolutely no way you can predict that sort of thing.

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Q: What does ‘weird’ mean to you guys?

MS: It’s just something so unique and odd. We don’t necessarily have to like, you know, be so strange it can’t be written about. But I think it’s the uniqueness of the state and the uniqueness of the people who live in this state.

MM: Weird is anything that’s so out of the ordinary that when you first hear about it there’s a sense of disbelief or even shock. And you think, “well that really can’t be.”

And that’s what drove us to get out on the road because we heard these stories about Albino Village or Demons’ Alley or the Gates of Hell. And we thought back then, ‘well these places can’t actually exist.’ And so, let’s get in the car and find out.

They all exist. They were all there. Whether the stories were all true or not. Almost all of them had some truth to them.

MS: That’s it. We write about local legends. And I think every story we’ve written about has a little grain of truth to it somewhere.

MM: And some are completely bizarre and 100 percent true.

MS: ...Sometimes people will write us to say, “I went to Annie’s Road and I didn’t see a ghost. So, your magazine really sucks.”

We can’t guarantee people are going to see ghosts.

MM: There are no spectral guarantees in Weird NJ.

Q: 50 issues. 25 years. Are you anywhere near plumbing the depths of weirdness in New Jersey?

MM: We always have a backlog of stories because we’re not that topical, really. So, we can keep stories for years before ever publishing them.

Sometimes they’re not fully baked (laughs). People would argue that none of them are fully baked. But facts come in. People add to them. We don’t rush into any story because it’s not like a daily paper where you need a new headline every day.

So, we have a stockpile of stories and the cream rises to the top every six months.

Q: You’ve got all these books on other states. But is there something uniquely weird about New Jersey?

MM: We like to say we could put out a book on any state, but I don’t think there’s any state that you can do 50 issues of a Weird magazine.

I wouldn’t know because I’ve never lived in another state, but I don’t think anybody has the stories to tell that New Jersey does. Or the sheer volume that New Jersey has to tell.

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Q: So, what’s it like to be at the epicenter of all this weirdness?

MS: Every day Mark and I look at each other and say, “I can’t believe…We seem to be the conduit for every strange thing that happens around here.”

MM: Well you know, it’s a good place to be, because there isn’t any place else where…I mean a lot of these people they wouldn’t have a voice any other way because frankly people would laugh at them.

We never laugh at anybody. We never disrespect anybody. If you want to put two dozen mannequins on your lawn and dress them, we’re not going to laugh at you. We respect that. We respect that because it shows individuality.

These people are expressing something, and we encourage that rather than sort of discourage it, I guess.

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