Inside Weird NJ: The Legends, the Lore, and the Men Who Made It a Movement
Published on June 8, 2025
Hey, I’m Sal - but most people know me as Social Gal. I chase chaos, beauty, and big energy across New Jersey, turning late-night comedy sets, underground art shows, and hometown legends into stories that *hit*. If it’s weird, raw, or lowkey iconic, I’m already three steps ahead with a notebook and a hot take. I almost died after being diagnosed with heart cancer and documented it all on online in hopes I could leave something behind if I die. Surprisingly, I survived but my love for documentation never died. I came out louder, bolder, and more in love with life than ever. I believe the best stories aren’t polished - they’re real, messy, and full of soul. That’s what I bring to NJ Radar. Catch me wherever the vibes are real, the people are unfiltered, and the stories *actually matter*.
Never Meet Your Heroes…Unless They’re Mark and Mark
People always say never meet your heroes, but those people are fucking wrong, okay!?
The whole reason I got into journalism - like literally the reason - was because of Mark and Mark from Weird NJ. Their magazine raised me. Haunted me. Lit the fuse in my brain that said, “Tell the story, even if it’s weird. Especially if it’s weird.”
So when I got to attend a live talk with them at a local library - and not only meet them but interview them? Yeah, it was the best day of my life.
Signed copy, full circle moment, the whole thing.
It started as a joke, really. Just some sheets of paper I stapled together.
30 years later and Weird NJ isn’t just a magazine. It’s a damn folk archive. A love letter to the strange, the forgotten, the unexplained. A Jersey mythos that refuses to be sanitized.
This piece is a deep-dive into the minds who made weirdness something sacred. A look at what haunts them, what they’ve protected, and why preserving local folklore matters more than ever.
In a world of algorithm-fed, over-slicked stories, Weird NJ reminds us that the truth is sometimes less important than the tale, and that someone needs to keep writing the weird shit down.
No one was writing about our surrounding weird culture. Someone had to do it.
Stepping Into the Weird
Before Weird NJ was a cultural staple, you could hold it in your hands. Literally. Just a few sheets of paper. Stapled. Xeroxed. Barebones as hell.
No marketing scheme. No content calendar. Just two guys, Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran, who loved New Jersey and wanted to write about the parts nobody else dared to touch.
The urban legends, haunted iron bridges, the cursed trees, the roads that seemed to whisper when your headlights hit the shoulder wrong.
They were bored of the polite brochures and sanitized state pride. They knew deep down that the real stories weren’t being told. So they told them.
First in newsletters. Then in zines. Then in full-color issues that sold out before they hit the shelves.
Three decades later, Weird NJ is a sacred library of Jersey’s strangest corners fueled by local tips, reader submissions, and the kind of on-foot reporting that involves swamps, ticks, and a lot of off grid adventures.
Like the story of the white shirts in the Pine Barrens. At first, it sounded like a prank. Twenty starched white dress shirts, nailed high into the pine trees. Who does that? Why?
We see them just nailed on the trees about 16 feet up. It gave you that weird feeling, like ‘there’s something not right about this place.’ Was there some kind of ritual going on? Are we in danger? Is someone watching us?
They don’t always get answers, but that wasn’t the point. The not-knowing was the point.
That’s what separates Weird NJ from every ghost-hunting TikTok or BuzzFeed “haunted places” listicle. These aren’t viral stunts. They’re fieldwork. Mythology built from boots on the ground and letters in the mail.
They go out. They look. They listen…and they don’t always share what they find.
Sometimes, behind the boarded-up windows and overgrown paths, there’s still someone living there. Maybe hiding from something. Maybe protecting something.
Mark and Mark don’t exploit that.
People that live in these houses far from society have their reasons for being there. We don’t feel the need to expose whatever they’re doing no matter how strange the tale.
That respect, that boundary, is part of what’s made them legends. They know the difference between folklore and violation. Between documenting the weird…and weaponizing it.
Sometimes beneath the spookiest tale, whether it’s a haunted mill, a bloody well, or a crying hitchhiker, there’s always something achingly human at the core.
A loss. A warning. A memory. A need to be remembered.
Yeah, sometimes you’re chasing the Jersey Devil. But sometimes, you’re just trying to understand why someone nailed shirts to a tree in the middle of nowhere.
And that’s where the story begins.
The Gospel of Garden State Weird
Are you really from New Jersey if you didn’t have a Weird NJ phase in high school?
Sure, there were kids in my grade who didn’t know what it was. But the ones who did? We STUDIED that shit.
We revolved weekend plans around the locations in our NJ bible. I'd print out pages from the website, highlight landmarks like I was prepping for the SATs, and gather the crew. I remember planning an entire Weird NJ road trip for my friend’s birthday and scaring ourselves shitless when I reversed into a mailbox outside a haunted bridge.
We tried the whole “reverse around Devil’s Tower three times” trick. We hunted for the Devil’s Tree in the middle of nowhere. I even knew someone who got chased out of a private neighborhood people called...a non-PC term that I will not write out here.
We weren’t ghost hunting. We were belonging.
Weird NJ gave suburban punks, emo kids, and restless weirdos a portal into something deeper than textbook history. It handed us a flashlight and dared us to look under the surface.
Folklore is not urban legends, but sometimes they intertwine,” Mark told me. “We write about both, but the urban legends are the ones the kids love to hear about.
They’re not wrong. No one gets hyped about municipal charters or zoning laws. But tell a kid about Mother Leeds’ cursed 13th child, aka the Jersey Devil, and you’ve got a classroom full of imaginations catching fire.
Obviously it would be the Jersey Devil. The imagery and countless tales about this creature lead to a great imagination and speculation if it’s real or not.
That’s the magic of it.
Weird NJ isn’t trying to sort fact from fiction, it’s about making the space to wonder.
Every kid in Jersey has a Weird NJ story - or wanted one. That’s how a zine turned into a movement. It gave us folklore we could touch.
We get a lot of 4th grade teachers who ask us to speak about New Jersey folklore… It’s something the curriculum leaves out.
But Weird NJ put it back in.
It said: this matters. The strange stuff. The stuff you whisper about in diners. The stories that get passed down not because they’re true but because they’re true enough.
Weirdness isn’t scary. It’s how we make sense of the places we live in. In a world that feels increasingly prepackaged and sanitized, Weird NJ still feels raw, real, and ours.
Garden State Mythology & Beautiful Bullshit
Jersey is a fever dream wrapped in a toll receipt.
You’ve got sprawling suburbs and abandoned diners. Mountains and malls. Swamps full of rumors and shore towns that still look like 1976. It’s a place where you can hit three different climates and five kinds of cryptids in one day if the Parkway isn’t backed up.
For being a small state, New Jersey does have a great wealth of weirdness.
Mark and Mark aren’t out here pitching some cosmic ley-line conspiracy, but if you were going to believe that portals exist, New Jersey would be the place.
It’s a very diversified group of people. Most of them don’t even know they’re doing weird things…like filling their lawn up with bowling balls or painting their whole property purple.
There’s something about the Jersey sprawl - how it packs everything in so tight - that turns eccentricity into atmosphere.
It’s in the sleepy hamlets that feel untouched by time. In the manmade lakes with no real backstory. In the way the trees seem to lean closer when you drive a little too far down a road with no name.
And it makes you wonder…what else is out there?
That’s where folklore comes in - not to answer the question, but to keep you asking it.
With every bit of folklore there is a grain of truth. It becomes embellished the more you tell the tale.
And baby, Jersey LOVES to embellish.
Take Clinton Road: ten miles of tree-lined paranoia, where people claim to see phantom headlights and ghost kids who throw coins back at you. Did it happen? No idea. But someone believed it hard enough that now it lives rent-free in the state’s collective brain.
Or the Devil’s Tree - just a sad-looking oak in a field, supposedly cursed and crawling with tragedy. People touch it. People dare each other to piss on it. People make it a thing because that’s what we do. We tell the story so many times it becomes part of the soil.
It’s just a tree, but the legend has grown and taken on many variations over the years.
And that’s the beauty of it.
Weird NJ doesn’t try to debunk or verify. That’s not the point. They’re not ghostbusters, they’re archivists. Sacred keepers of “you had to be there” energy.
We’re not interested in getting down to whether something is real or not. We just want to make sure it’s a great story.
Stories are what last. They hold the culture together even when the buildings crumble.
And when the world feels too monotonous, too stripped of mystery? Weirdness gives us an escape hatch for our minds.
It is a scary and sometimes horrific world we live in. We all need an escape plan…Weirdness is not scary. It’s fun.
That’s what makes Weird NJ holy in its own way.
It’s not trying to convert you. It’s saying believe what you want but keep the tale alive. When we lose the myths, we lose the soul of the place.
Human Skulls & Haunted Inboxes: The Real Weird Shit
You think it’s all ghost stories until you see the brick from the Jersey Devil’s house. Or the human skull. Or the haunted ritual mask that just…showed up one day.
Mark and Mark hold folklore - boxed in their makeshift museum, whispered through their inbox, wrapped in letters stained with grief, madness, or god-knows-what.
We have a box called ‘Letters from the insane.’
It sounds like a punchline. It’s not.
Once you start publishing stories about the strange, the forgotten, the unspeakable…the unspeakable starts to speak back.
Voodoo dolls. Bones. Curses in envelope form.
They’ve seen it all and they’ve learned this simple truth:
I think the people we encounter are sometimes scarier than the story itself!
So Weird NJ built an editorial ethic most horror writers wouldn’t dare: respect the subject. Honor the tale. Don’t exploit the myth or make it more salacious than it is, because the truth, even in fragments, is already weird enough.
They’ve never needed to fake a legend.
No, that has never crossed our mind. Some of these stories you just can’t make up.
The stories find them. In parking lots. In voicemails. In notes scribbled in Sharpie on the back of diner menus. The world is weirder than fiction, and Jersey never stops delivering.
It’s not just fans now - it’s folklore teachers, cryptid hunters, cemetery caretakers, and ten-year-olds who just heard about the Jersey Devil and need to know more.
Now there are books, a radio segment, and inboxes full of fresh weirdness that never stops rolling in.
There will always be stories to tell because weirdness never ends. It grows and takes on new forms.
That’s why Weird NJ still matters: it evolves.
Print zines, blog posts, Instagram rabbit holes - folklore isn’t frozen. It shape-shifts.
And as long as there are abandoned diners, whispering trees, and people who swear they saw something at the end of Clinton Road…
Weird NJ will be there, notebook in hand, asking: “Tell us everything.”
The Point Is To Be Remembered
You don’t build a legacy like Weird NJ by chasing clicks or ghost-chasing with EMF meters.
You do it by listening to the kid who saw hoofprints in the snow, to the grandmother who swears her backyard has a portal, or to the guy who paints his house purple because it’s how he grieves.
Mark and Mark never set out to make a magazine. They just wanted to preserve the strange stuff that no one else was writing down. And somehow, in the process, they built a bible for the beautifully bizarre.
So yeah, go ahead and scoff at the idea of haunted trees or cursed roads. But you’ll remember them, won’t you?
That’s what Mark and Mark gave us: a reason to look a little harder at that boarded-up house.
To ask questions. To listen better.
To believe, just for a second, that there’s more out there.
OH! and one last thing…according to the legends themselves, if Weird NJ was a person?
It would have a head like Tillie with antennas and razor-sharp teeth, a body like bigfoot and wings and cloven hoofs like the Jersey Devil. It would eat only pork roll, hot dogs and pizza. It would shape-shift and be able to disappear right in front of you. It wouldn’t listen to music, but if you ever encounter it, this song would surround it. I wouldn’t fuck with it,
The song in question? Enjoy!
Where to Find Them (If You Dare)
Want more stories about shirt-covered trees, cursed bricks, and haunted roads that lead absolutely somewhere? Yeah, you do.
Here’s how to step through:
That’s where you’ll get the first taste of all things cursed, creepy, and Jersey-as-hell. Expect ghost signs, urban legends, and roadside strangeness in your feed.
For deep dives, archives, and bizarre dispatches straight from the Garden State crypt.
One click. All the links. Enter the Weird NJ vortex.
Own a piece of the legend. Whether it’s your first or your 30th, no Jersey shelf is complete without an issue (or ten).