That’s just Weird

THE weirdest thing about the “Weird N.J.” guys is that they’re not strange at all. Just two fortysomething family men with an inordinate interest in abandoned insane asylums, outsider art, UFO sightings and local legends involving strange beasts, ghosts and serial killers.

Fact is, Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman would just be garden variety Garden State obsessives who dig stories about the Albino Village of Clifton, N.J., or Houdini’s haunted Hollywood home if it weren’t for the fact that they seem to have tapped into a national audience, and have attracted the attention of Barnes & Noble and the History Channel.

Moran, 43, and Sceurman, 47, are earning a living recycling the strange stories that every town seems to have hidden away in the basement of its local historical society. And they are having a great time doing it.

“A lot of towns want to bury and forget the kinds of stories that we want to tell,” says Moran, who with Sceurman publishes a twice-yearly magazine called Weird N.J. that has morphed into a successful series of coffee-table books (“Weird N.J.,” “Weird U.S.”) and will soon become a History Channel series.

“Sometimes, people perceive [these stories] as showing them in a bad light,” Moran continues. “Like here in West Orange, everyone is proud of Thomas Edison [who had a lab here], but no one talks about his electrocuting little furry animals to experiment with the killing power of AC electricity, which he was trying to dissuade people from using. It’s history, and it’s interesting.”

Moran and Sceurman are Jersey natives, former graphic artists who met because of their interest in la vida bizarro. Back in the early 1990s, Sceurman, who says he has “always been interested in local, kind of under-sided history, things that are a little off-kilter,” began publishing a newsletter featuring such tidbits. The newsletter soon attracted a following, and Moran began sending him arcane historical nuggets. The two eventually met, got drunk in a bar and decided to publish a magazine.

Over the years, Weird N.J. has run items about midget attacks under the George Washington Bridge, the history of the notoriously feeble-minded Kallikak family (subjects of a discredited study on idiocy that may have influenced Nazi policy), the legend of the Jersey Devil (a winged creature said to have been terrorizing Garden State residents since the 1700s) and hundreds of other pieces of local lore. Whether any of these stories are true is almost beside the point: “The legend is real,” says Moran, “it is a part of the culture and the community.”

The Two Marks, as they’re often referred to, do try to confirm the veracity of stories they’re sent through research at local historical societies but, ultimately, says Moran, “we leave it up to the readers to decide.” And they have always made a point of distinguishing between weird tales and urban legends, citing what Moran calls the “site specific” nature of their stories.

“An urban legend, you just change the name of the character and the location where it took place, and it’s the same story,” Moran says. “But you take our book, there’s only one incidence of a Bunnyman [in Virginia] -- or the story of the Melonheads [in Ohio, Michigan and Connecticut], that’s not a story that migrates around the country.”

Over the years, Weird N.J. never seemed to run out of stories and, as circulation grew, it evolved from a mailed newsletter to a slick magazine sold in bookstores throughout the state (current circulation is 60,000). The readership soon formed a hard-core following that bought Weird N.J. T-shirts and CDs, and showed up for the annual Weird N.J. Halloween party, dressed as the Sockman of Middletown (an obsessive high school teacher who would offer to buy the socks off your feet), or the Gooseman (a half-goose, half-human creature said to live in an abandoned insane asylum in Verona, N.J.).

On coffee tables, then TV

In 2002, things got really weird. Steve Riggio, a New Jersey resident who is chief executive of Barnes & Noble, happened to see the publication in his hometown store and asked a clerk about it. When told that it outsold Time and other national titles, he took a copy to B&N;’s in-house publishing division and suggested they package a “Weird N.J.” book.

“The magazine attracted me because it was so unique,” Riggio says.

“We had been approached by maybe five or six smaller publishers in the past,” Moran says. “They wanted us to do a small paperback, black and white. We could do that ourselves. We wanted to do a big hardcover, full-color book. And Barnes & Noble didn’t have any problem with that. They’ve got the stores to distribute them, and we knew if it was a Barnes & Noble book, they wouldn’t put it on a back shelf.”

Released early last year for $19.95, the coffee-table book “Weird N.J.” was promoted heavily in B&N; stores in the Mid-Atlantic region and has sold nearly 150,000 copies. That’s an astonishing number for a work with no national distribution (Riggio says only about 1% of all nationally released books sell 100,000 copies).

“I think Barnes & Noble was more surprised than we were,” Sceurman says. “First they were gonna print 15,000. We kept saying, ‘That’s not enough.’ Then they went to 25,000. Then they just had to keep on printing.”

Success begat a deal for more books. “Weird U.S.,” featuring strange stories from around the country, was released nationally in September and is approaching sales of 100,000 copies. Books focusing on the weirdness of Florida, Illinois and Wisconsin are due out in May and, in the next year, the Two Marks will produce “Weird” books on several more states, including California (send your strange tales to them at editor@weirdnj.com).

Calling the books a “publishing phenomenon,” Riggio believes B&N; can sell as many as a million “Weird” volumes in the next three to five years. Numbers like that prompted the History Channel to produce a “Weird U.S.” pilot, which aired on Halloween night and proved so successful that a 13-part series has been ordered for this summer.

“We were concerned whether it would attract History Channel’s core viewership,” says Carl Lindahl, the network’s vice president of historical programming, “but it was appealing to viewers of all ages. I thought it was an interesting way to view history.”

Well, yeah, if you like stories about dancing underwear or the ghost that haunts the Lancaster Performing Arts Center in Antelope Valley. The books are funny, sobering, sometimes creepy, sometimes absurd. Which is why so many people love them.

“It’s just something that has never been talked about or written about before,” Moran says. “People look at this and say, ‘This is right in my backyard; it exists.’ ”