alternate alternate alternate IN PERSON;Weird. Seriously Weird. NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. Please upgrade your browser. LEARN MORE » (Submit) Sections (Submit) Home (Submit) Search Skip to content Skip to navigation View mobile version The New York Times N.Y. / Region|IN PERSON;Weird. Seriously Weird. (Submit) Search (Submit) Subscribe Now (Submit) Log In (Submit) 0 (Submit) Settings (BUTTON) Close search Site Search Navigation Search NYTimes.com (BUTTON) Clear this text input (Submit) Go 1. Loading... See next articles See previous articles Site Navigation Site Mobile Navigation Advertisement Supported by N.Y. / Region | IN PERSON IN PERSON;Weird. Seriously Weird. By ANDY NEWMANMARCH 31, 1996 Continue reading the main story Share This Page Continue reading the main story Mark Sceurman is looking for Midgetville. "I keep hearing these stories about this place," Mr. Sceurman said recently as he sat at his kitchen table here. "It's supposed to be two or three houses that were built for midgets, in Edgewater or somewhere in Bergen County. Really small houses, and even the stop signs were 8 feet high instead of 12. I think it had something to do with the Ringling Brothers, who lived in Morris County." He furrowed his brow very slightly. "I've hit two spots so far and they've both been called Midgetville, but it's not the Midgetville I'm looking for." Little matter. Midgetville the place may well elude Mr. Sceurman forever, but Midgetville the concept has already been immortalized in Weird New Jersey magazine. For six years, Mr. Sceurman (pronounced SKER-man) has taken the fruits of a lifetime spent scouring the state in search of the unusual, the unexplained and the almost certainly untrue and crammed them all into the 32 black-and-white pages of an annual publication that combines the cheerful credulity of the Weekly World News with the boosterism of a local weekly paper. From the Lawn of a Thousand Milk Bottles in Buena to the Lawn of a Thousand Ornaments in Hackensack, Mr. Sceurman, with help from a small army of like-minded contributors, has seen most of it and written about it all. His is a New Jersey of 100-foot-tall toilets and muffler-wielding roadside giants and miniature castles rising from the swamps, a state where ghosts and U.F.O. sightings are as common as strip malls. The next issue of the magazine, which has a circulation of about 1,000, is due out in May, and Mr. Sceurman, who spends his days as art director for the Aquarian Weekly, a music-scene tabloid, is also working on a deluxe four-color Weird New Jersey map. Continue reading the main story Advertisement Continue reading the main story "I keep thinking I'll run out of things to write about," he said, "and then someone will send me a letter that there's a house in Vineland shaped like a teacup or a cookie jar. It never seems to end. There's a lot of things to see in New Jersey. Well, there's a lot of things in New Jersey. I don't know if you'd want to see them." Advertisement Continue reading the main story T HE first thing a visitor notices about Mr. Sceurman is how unweird he is. An easygoing, chunky 38-year-old with a light brown beard, he lives with his wife, Shirley, in a mostly orderly white house whose cluttered basement harbors no secret darker than a stuffed fish holding a stuffed bird in its mouth. He lives across the street from the house where he grew up, in a town whose claims to weirdness are modest: Bloomfield contains what Mr. Sceurman believes to be the smallest house in the state and is home to the Short Stop, a colorful diner specializing in eggs where Mr. Sceurman once had a rubber band shot into his over-easies. But Mr. Sceurman has had an unquenchable thirst for the bizarre ever since a drunken teen-age encounter with the Dead Nun of Morristown, encased behind glass along the side of the road. Eventually, he began sending out a newsletter to friends listing expeditions he planned. The newsletter also provided an outlet for the odd news clippings from around the state that Mr. Sceurman had been collecting in an enormous box for years ("Drunk Driver Runs Himself Over," and the like), and before he knew it Weird New Jersey was born. Mr. Sceurman is not merely a devotee of the kitschy and lurid, however. He considers himself a serious folklorist and roadside archeologist -- he is president of the Bloomfield Historical Society -- and says his mission is to document precious cultural institutions that are quickly vanishing. "A lot of these roadside attractions are only around for a few years," he said. "They either get plowed over by condominiums or they just get lost. That's what I'm trying to preserve in Weird New Jersey: the things you won't read about in history books." Indeed, many of Mr. Sceurman's favorite haunts have been destroyed in his lifetime. "In Vineland, there was this place called the Palace of Depression," he recalled. "This man named George Trainer built a whole big house out of junk -- car fenders, pitchforks, car parts, anything he could find -- and busloads of people would come down and see it. Now it's torn down." Gone, too, is Mahalchik's 50 Acres, a colossal jumble of military junk decorated with the anti-government slogans of its owner, a cranky perennial Presidential candidate, along Route 206 in Burlington County. Likewise the Leaning Tower of Pizza on Route 22. Even the Dead Nun of Morristown has been retired; the site's keepers had apparently had enough of uninvited late-night tourists. Mr. Sceurman understands that excessive attention can ruin weird spots for everyone, and he is careful to leave directions to certain sensitive sites, especially those on private property, a bit sketchy. "Trespassing is a horrible crime, and you should definitely never do it," he said. "At least, not in the daytime." Advertisement Continue reading the main story But the call of the wild still comes, and then the Scuermans and a few friends pile into his Jeep in search of new frontiers. "Sometime next week I'm going down to see a deserted village in the Watchung Mountains," he said on Wednesday. "A friend of mine who's been doing some research there told me about it. I'm also going to see Tilt Street in Haledon, the steepest street in New Jersey. 'So steep the sidewalks are steps!' " On less tangible phenomena like the Indian Curse Road of Gloucester County or bigfoot sightings in the northwest corner of the state (there have been many), Mr. Sceurman takes his cue from the International Fortean Organization, a group founded by a specialist in the paranormal, Charles Forte, and passes them on to readers without verification. "It's kind of hard to document legends," he said. "I guess if I went to the library and looked it up I could do that, but I don't. If somebody writes it in and I like it and it sounds funny or weird, then I'll put it in." Mr. Sceurman is an agnostic on the subject of U.F.O.'s but said he had heard too many credible ghost stories -- and seen one too many inexplicably jiggling doorknobs -- to doubt the presence of a world beyond. "I don't think that this life is all there is," he said. "I believe there are ghosts, some kind of lost spirit of something that's not settled. There's definitely something there." Issue No. 7 will include an interview with Bob Warth of Little Silver-based Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained, a man whose world view even Mr. Sceurman describes as "pretty far out." "This guy claims that there are actually two kinds of bigfoots," Mr. Sceurman explained, "the ones that are related to U.F.O.'s and the ones in northwest New Jersey. His theory is that these U.F.O.-related bigfoots are like biological robots." Advertisement Continue reading the main story He is also planning a feature on a lost tribe of Woodbridge that produced a series of wood sculptures recently exhibited at the Newark Museum. "People think these folks were Hessian traders from the Revolutionary War who withdrew to the woods," he said. "They had a churchlike structure where people would go to get healed. Now it's the parking lot of Fortunoff's at the Woodbridge Mall." Although he relies heavily on tips from fellow curiosity-seekers ("the guys who wrote the book 'Roadside America' are going to put me in touch with a guy in West Milford who's built a backwards time-travel car"), Mr. Sceurman has found some of his favorite places simply by walking into a diner in a strange town and asking, "Is there anything weird around here?" "If I won the lottery," he said, "I'd open up a diner and cater to the 4:30 A.M.-to-noon crowd, garbage men and people like that. That's where you get the best stories." Weird New Jersey can be reached at P.O. Box 1346, Bloomfield, N.J., 07003, or by e-mail at markatwnj Continue reading the main story We’re interested in your feedback on this page. Tell us what you think. What's Next Loading... Go to Home Page » Site Index The New York Times Site Index Navigation News World U.S. Politics N.Y. Business Tech Science Health Sports Education Obituaries Today's Paper Corrections Opinion Today's Opinion Op-Ed Columnists Editorials Contributing Writers Op-Ed Contributors Opinionator Letters Sunday Review Taking Note Room for Debate Public Editor Video: Opinion Arts Today's Arts Art Design Books Dance Movies Music N.Y.C. Events Guide Television Theater Video: Arts Living Automobiles Crossword Food Education Fashion Style Health Jobs Magazine N.Y.C. Events Guide Real Estate T Magazine Travel Weddings Celebrations Listings More Classifieds Tools Services Times Topics Public Editor N.Y.C. 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