All the News That Seemed Unfit to Print

"If we get a story about a guy who thinks he's a vampire, we will take him at his word," Clontz told the Philadelphia Inquirer before he died in 2004.

Clontz's philosophy of creative credulity led to wonderful stories that excessive fact-checking would have ruined. For instance, WWN ran more Elvis and Bigfoot sightings than the more finicky newspapers did.

"If a guy calls and says Bigfoot ran away with his wife," Ivone says, "we wrote it as straight as an AP story."

"In the '80s, WWN was 85 percent true," says Derek Clontz. "We simply revved up and played big the wild, odd and strange stories that mainstream media overlooked or were too persnickety to run."

One day, Eddie Clontz spotted a tiny newspaper story about a Florida undertaker who was arrested for selling body parts to research scientists. With a little reporting and a little creativity, it became a WWN classic: "FLORIDA MAN SCREAMS FROM THE GRAVE, MY BRAIN IS MISSING!"

In those days -- they could be termed WWN's semi-factual period -- the tabloid employed a squad of "clippers," who read scores of local newspapers and clipped out the weirder stories.

"They would give me a stack of clips and I'd get on the phone and call people," Berger recalls. "If a guy in Omaha got hit by 30,000 volts of lightning and lived to tell the tale, I'd call the poor sucker and get his version of the story and run it. It was all factual."

But too many facts can ruin a good yarn, so Pope and Clontz encouraged their reporters to embellish a bit. The reporters complied and started spicing up stories with lovely details that came straight from their imaginations. Gradually, true stories became half-true stories, then quarter-true stories, then . . .

"It wasn't like overnight we decided to start running fiction," Berger says. "We just added a few facts to a story and got away with it, and it went on from there."

WWN's writers had stepped out onto that proverbial "slippery slope" you hear so much about, and they gleefully slid down it, riding right to the bottom, giggling all the way. Soon they were producing "FAMED PSYCHIC'S HEAD EXPLODES" and "ELVIS TOMB IS EMPTY" and "HEAVEN PHOTOGRAPHED BY HUBBLE TELESCOPE," which was illustrated by an actual photo from the Hubble, enhanced just a wee bit to show a shining city so lovely it made dying seem like a small price to pay for admission.

As the stories got more creative, circulation soared, reaching nearly a million copies a week by the end of the '80s. Staffers debated how many of the readers actually believed the stories and how many were hipsters reading it for laughs.

"It is my belief that in the '80s and into the '90s, most people believed most of the material most of the time," says Derek Clontz.