Weird N.J., Celebrating The Odd State of Mind

"Have you ever met any other jug bottle artists?" he asks.

"People came to me and they wanted to know how to start it," Stapleton says. "And I said, it's a lot of hard work, so if you don't wanna work, don't start it."

Sceurman and Moran spend whole days visiting people like the Milk Jug Lady.

If you study old issues of Weird N.J., you find that certain phenomena are described over and over. There are the wavers -- old men, mostly, who sit on lawns or at roadsides and greet passing cars. There's been Wavin' Willie and Wavin' Joe, Dave the Wave, the Birdman of the Pulaski Skyway, an Elvis impersonator named Ed, and some guy that Moran calls Do-It.

"This guy's a trip," Moran says. "He runs down the street jogging, and whenever he sees you, he throws up his arms and yells a big 'Do it!' "

There are the collectors: the guy who collects raisin boxes, and likes to dress like the Sun-Maid girl, and someone else who collects the ink fillers from pens. A feature called Cemetery Safari chronicles the state's most eccentric graves and monuments: a stone armchair, a life-size stone Mercedes-Benz.

Not everything can be witnessed, of course -- chiefly, the paranormal incidents that Weird N.J. chronicles. There is a haunted mental hospital where an abandoned piano supposedly still plays; there is a Jersey Devil that's always bothering people. Sceurman and Moran throw everything into their magazine indiscriminately, giving equal respect to fact and myth.

"If we printed the real story, we wouldn't have a magazine," Sceurman says.

And really, does it matter if the "Possessed Pole of Passaic Park," a street sign that supposedly rocks back and forth, is actually possessed? Isn't it enough that people pose for pictures with it?

Even though the Marks are in their forties, this is a publication in some way created by teenagers, possessed of cars and burdened by boredom. Weird N.J. is a collage of suburban legends. Even those of us who didn't grow up in New Jersey have spent afternoons looking for monsters in our neighbors' back yards. We've all tried -- and failed -- to find the albino village.

Every issue features letters from readers. They write in with stories, like the tale of "The Sock Man of Middletown," who supposedly would pay teenagers $5 per pair of dirty socks, and "The Lump Man of Butler," who had a huge lump between his eyes. They pose questions: "You guys ever check out the crematory in Hightstown?"

Among the hard-core fans is William Angus, 33, a phone company customer service agent from Bergen County who ventures out to find Weird N.J. landmarks between three and 10 times a month. He has seen an abandoned American military jet decaying in the woods, and an abandoned mental hospital near a morgue, where an apparition may or may not have jumped into one of his photographs. Sometimes he takes his 5-year-old son on cemetery trips.

"I am obsessive-compulsive, and I don't say that as a layman; I have been diagnosed," Angus says. "When I have a whole day, I leave at 7 o'clock in the morning and I might not be back until 8, 9, 10 o'clock."

Sceurman and Moran tend to steer clear of their fans. They get a lot of mail from prisoners, for example. When the phone rings one afternoon in the office, nobody picks it up. Mark Moran eyes the caller ID.

"That could be Neil," he says, referring to a guy who sends them creepy letters, written all in capitals with no punctuation.

In some way, such letters are reassuring. They are proof that, despite New Jersey's relatively small size, there are vast tracts of odd beauty still to be explored. Moran and Sceurman don't worry about running out of material.

"As long as there's New Jersey and people living in it, there will be a weird element to it," Moran says.