Published October 28, 2008 02:19 pm - Six of those tales and eight photos have been included in a recently published book “Weird U.S.: The ODDyssey Continues."
Creepy and kooky: Weird in Alabama
By Kelly Kazek
kelly@athensnews-courier.com
In my more than two decades as a journalist, I’ve come across many unusual tales and seen many strange and sometimes unexplained things.
With a journalist’s natural curiosity, I began collecting stories and photos of oddities in Alabama. Six of those tales and eight photos have been included in a recently published book “Weird U.S.: The ODDyssey Continues, Your Travel Guide to America’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets,” by Mark Moran, Mark Sceurman and Matt Lake.
The hardcover book is available for $19.95 at Barnes and Noble in Bridge Street Town Center in Huntsville and a variety of online booksellers.
For some weird reason, five of the stories the authors chose for inclusion are about Alabama cemeteries, which may seem morbid but the tales also are fascinating (see below).
In addition, the 343-page book includes a few other stories from Alabama, as well as stories from across the country, including those about roadside attractions, unusual collections, ghost tales, villains and heroes and many more.
After the popularity of the “Weird U.S.” series of books, Moran and Sceurman also had a show by the same name on The History Channel.
I recently interviewed Moran about the books and why “weird” is so popular.
KK: How did you get started with the “weird” series?
MM: It all started a long time ago in a land called New Jersey. Mark Sceurman and I began publishing a magazine on the oddities of our home state called Weird N.J. It focused on the kind of very localized legends that were often whispered around a particular town, but seldom heard outside the boundaries of the community were they first originated. In many instances these stories had never before been documented.
So, with camera and note pad in hand, we set off to investigate all these wild tales. Much to our surprise, much of what we had initially presumed to be nothing more that urban legend actually turned out to be real, or at least contained a grain of truth which had originally sparked the lore. After about a dozen years of publishing the magazine we were asked to write a book about our adventures.
The Marks published “Weird NJ: Your Travel Guide to New Jersey's Local Legend and Best Kept Secrets” in 2003, and then the first volume of “Weird U.S.”