Creepy and kooky: Weird in Alabama

October 28, 2008 03:19 pm

— 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.”

MM: That book was such a success that our publishers asked us what we wanted to do next. We told them we wanted to chronicle the unwritten folklore, creepy cemeteries, cursed locations and outlandish roadside oddities that were to be found in every state. And so the Weird U.S. book series was born, each tome focusing on the peculiarities of a particular state.

The series now includes dozens of books specific to particular states, though “Weird Alabama” has not yet been written.

KK: What do you think is compelling about weird things?
MM: By definition, “weird” is a word that describes something so out of the ordinary that it stand outs from that which we’ve come to expect. I think people need that kind of stimulation to snap them out of the mundane realities of daily life. Weird things remind us that life is truly a mysterious, fascinating and unbelievably amazing adventure.
Something weird is not necessarily scary or haunted, sometimes it’s just odd or out of the ordinary––out of place. Sometimes it is just something so absurd and ridiculous that all you can do is laugh about it. Other times though, it is something so disturbing that it makes you uncomfortable and ill at ease. Weird is often an intangible thing, hard to describe, something that gives you a feeling that you can’t quite put your finger on. For us it is the spice of life and something to be savored. It could be anything from a mysterious ancient stone structure in the woods to a person who spends all his days waving to passersby from his front lawn.

KK: What have you learned?
MM: We just never know what crazy adventure we will be on next. One day you’re spending the night in an abandoned insane asylum in Ohio, trying to make contact with a long dead inmate, the next day you’re interviewing a man in the Mojave Desert who has constructed a Technicolor mountain of mud in tribute to God. It's all good, and weird.
It’s been our experience that the more weirdness you discover, the more you realize how much more is out there yet to be found. One can only imagine the countless tales out there across the country yet to be told. Even after years of traveling, we know that we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. In this respect Weird U.S. is a lot like life; it’s the journey itself, not the destination that is really important.

Photos