Assuming the man would only court her/it if she/it didn’t have babies, she threw her babies off of Crybaby Bridge right there on Devil’s Elbow Road in Broken Whistle, Oklahoma. She/it was seeking the love of a non-Melon Head man from a higher station in life. The lead Melon Head also happened to be a woman, and had a couple babies. The fearless leader of the Melon Heads incited an uprising and burned the stone building down with the deranged scientist trapped inside the attic with his collection of Peruvian voodoo dolls. Down the road there used to be an asylum where a disenfranchised Rumanian chemist was turning orphans into Melon Heads in either the early 1800s or 1973. It was a hazy evening so we decided to turn off on Devils Foot Road. “So me and some buds were driving along route 34 in North Carolina. Potato Head doll where you just plug in pre-scripted elements to make a freakish thing. It makes me think there’s some sort of return-postage, story-spinning template mailed to everyone who lives more than 40 miles from a video rental store. Crybaby bridges and “Melon-heads” are seemingly in every county. In format, the authors non-critically expose the innumerable overlaps of stories, sightings, and BS across the nation. This is the underbelly of Americana…and I love this crap!Īs a compilation of weirdness, this book includes the surreal-real (Rodia’s Towers, Lizzy Borden) and the surreal-gotta-be-fake (96.9% of the rest of the content). Reveling in a collage of myths and neurosis, this tome is chock-full of supposed oddities that have somehow escaped the lens of a camera (in a society where seemingly every post-1987 infant pratfall or freaking dog chasing a squirrel is filmed and aired on my damn TV each Sunday!). Some of what’s out there is disturbing, some of it's hilarious, but all of it is unforgettably…weird.īefore reading this, I assumed – per a South Park episode – that Al Gore was the only person who believed in the notorious Man-Bear-Pig chimera.

So come along and visit such unique spots as Midgetville, explore long-empty insane asylums, and go through forgotten tunnels-but keep in mind that the maniacal Bunnyman just might be hiding out in one of them.

Instead, it’s chock full of the local legends, crazy characters, cursed roads, abandoned sites, and bizarre roadside attractions.

The result is a travel guide of sorts, but to the kind of places voyagers will never find on their everyday maps. But why should they stop at New Jersey when there’s so much that’s strange, odd, and utterly nutty all across the U.S.? So they’ve expanded their universe, taken their act on the road, and found stories of weirdness in every state in the nation.

What’s weird around here? That’s a question Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman have enjoyed asking for years-and their offbeat sense of curiosity led them to create the best-selling phenomenon, Weird N.J.

Weird U.S. by Mark Moran