Weird U.S.: Your Travel Guide to Americas Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets by Mark Moran

Weird U.S.: Your Travel Guide to Americas Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets Reviews

• 
  Daniel

  "Weird U.S." is an excellent read. I've owned it for years, and I still discover something new every time I open it. The whole book is rather light-hearted, even when discussing very heavy subject matter such as murders and disappearances, so it's not going to change the way anyone thinks about the universe or anything. However, for anyone interested in the paranormal, mysteries, or just plain weirdness, this is the book for you. "Weird U.S." is cleverly written and full of images depicting the sites, people, and events it mentions. Each section describes a different aspect of America's weirdness; from the first (and only) Emperor of the U.S. to a ghost who loves beer, the book is full of delightful and bizarre topics. I highly recommend it for anyone who likes weirdness or humor!
• 
  Elyse

  Once again the Kings of Weird have pulled together an entertaining and chilling collection of stories. Sort of a "Best of" collection. Although no other state can beat New Jersey for Weirdness.
• 
  Michael

  Before 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. Now I know otherwise. 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!). This is the underbelly of Americana…and I love this crap!
  
  As 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). In format, the authors non-critically expose the innumerable overlaps of stories, sightings, and BS across the nation. Crybaby bridges and “Melon-heads” are seemingly in every county. 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. It’s the equivalent of a Mr. Potato Head doll where you just plug in pre-scripted elements to make a freakish thing. I wanna play:
  
  “So me and some buds were driving along route 34 in North Carolina. It was a hazy evening so we decided to turn off on Devils Foot Road. 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. 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. The lead Melon Head also happened to be a woman, and had a couple babies. She/it was seeking the love of a non-Melon Head man from a higher station in life. 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. Nonetheless, the man still screened her phone calls so the scorned lady/thing can now be seen, dressed like a bunny, wandering in a perfect 120 mile radius within South Jersey. She hits one Wawa store in each Township at alarmingly regular intervals. Nowadays, if you listen close enough you can hear the tossed Melon children singing along to frightening Neil Diamond songs as gaseous red balls dance around near the removed Union Pacific tracks down by the river bed. These multi-colored balls seem to emanate from a tree whose roots resemble a skull and/or the cloven hooves of the Devil himself! According to early colonists in Northern California, the Native Americans of the region used to call it the “cracker tree,” and as you’re straining to look for it (as well as the blood-red water), your car will suddenly defy gravity and roll up hill (did I mention the wooden bridge slopes?). If you put baby powder on the hood, little melon-brat handprints will appear on the bumper! The melon kid apparitions are pulling your car up towards the hilltop where Creole-Hessian Jackson Whites have built an albino midget village – complete with a 2-liter soda bottle Stonehenge – dedicated to the New Testament! Freaked out, we started the engine and drove off, picking up some non-Melon Head hitch-hiking chick in a hoop skirt on the way. Charming at first, she became noticeably frigid as the conversation turned towards March Madness. Then she suddenly disappeared from the back seat as we passed the pet cemetery. Definitely the creepiest place in central Florida – don’t drink the water.” M. Grogan
  
  My favorite quote from one of the authors was:
  
  “…is it possible that there really is a strange subhuman beast lurking in the backwoods of Arkansas?”
  
  Having lived there for a while, I’ll withhold commentary.
  
• 
  Josh

  Reading some of the fantastical and bizarre stories in this book, you might ask “Whoa, really?”
  
  Well, no. Not really.
  
  This coffee table book is an extension of the website
  www.weridus.com that documents local myths and urban legends throughout the states, including first, second or third-hand accounts submitted to them on the site. The authors fully admit that the work is apocryphal, and that no story, regardless of how suspect, would be discounted as long as it’s a good story. If you remind yourself that these stories are intended to be nothing more than that (and you do need to remind yourself, due to the authors' lack of an objective voice, and since many of the submissions swear up and down to be 100% true), they can be a fun read.
  
  So how could that be a problem in urban legends, which are already inherently misinformational? By the inclusion of fakelore: stories that claim to be real oral history lore, but are in fact fabricated and perpetuated – usually by an individual over the internet. Perhaps the best example being Maryland’s Crybaby Bridge which is devoted a good deal of attention by the book.
  
  The inclusion of “any-old-story-goes” aside, a great many of these tales are just not the “good stories” they claim to be. There’s only so much obviously made-up hokum that begins with “there used to be a nearby insane asylum” or “there’s this local Satanist cult” one can read before it all melts together into one labored campfire tale.
  
  There are some good examples of classic American folklore like The Jersey Devil and La Llorona, questionably weird stories like The Beast of Bay Road and The Mothman, quirky real-life places like Gravity Hill or Coral Castle, but even these articles are let-down by intentionally vague writing that leaves the stories feeling incomplete.
  
  I like a good spooky story as much as the next guy, but in an age where blogs pass editorial off as news and wikis create “common knowledge” out of misinformation, Weird US seems just to be another symptom of the information age’s increasingly blurred line between fact and fantasy.
  
• 
  GoldenjoyBazyll

  NOW... if you really want to go down roads less traveled.... here are some sugggestions for you.
  
  I bought the game and on Thanksgiving I played it with my friends. We didn't have the book and didn't know alot about WEIRD US so we started looking up the places on the web. OMG... what a riot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I ended up purchasing the book and as I read through it I realized... I have visited many of the places. Ok- so what does that say about me??? Maybe I enjoy the weird... the odd and offbeat a little more than I had realized???? HUMMMMM well.... I embrace my love for the extra ordinary (look at my friends - only kidding sort of guys!!!!!! :)
  
  I was surprised that I knew some odd-spots not listed.... Ringing Rocks Park in Bucks County PA (Look it up it is sooooo cool and I went this past Sept.) A visit with the San Francisco BUSHMAN on Fisherman's Wharf (Check this character out on UTUBE- gutta love him???
  
  Worldwide I have- on instinct- sought these types of experiences out.... if there is a crop circle I'll visit, whirlygig park- I am there, Tarot Card sculpture houses.... well how can I not be interested... I cannot miss it next time I am in Eroupe. If there are long tail monkeys living wild in a mountain in the jungle of Thailand I will find the monk who knows them and I did.
  
  I applaud mark and Mark for thier brilliant thought of creating books to lead the masses not to miss out in experiencing WEIRD US... people, places and legends.
  
  So... next stop on my weird experiences...... the land of India (who knows who and what I will discover! ;)
• 
  Laura

  You would think by now that I'd know better than to read ghost stories too late at night or too close to bedtime. Think again!
  
  I brought Weird US on my trip to Washington, DC. Some of the stories I'd heard before. Some of the stories had some really awful drawings with them. Most of the stories are anecdotal along with a few historical facts.
  
  It's kind of fun to read the different takes on the same legend. I like reading the background of the various legends. I didn't always understand how the stories were divided in the book; some, I think, were placed in the wrong section.
  
  But I was always entertained.
• 
  Bryan Whitehead

  This book pursues a recent, unwelcome trend: take the content of a website, dump it onto paper, stuff it between covers and see if people will buy it. The result here is even more mixed than other efforts in similar vein. The overall goal of documenting some of the stranger spots in the American landscape is a worthwhile cause. But using entries from so many different (sometimes even anonymous) contributors produces results that are – predictably – mixed. Some of the writing is good stuff, particularly the passages by the book’s main authors and some other folk who appear to be regular contributors. Other spots are silly, poorly-written or both. At its best this is great stuff, but you have to sift through a lot of nonsense to get to it (especially in the section on ghosts).
• 
  Ace McGee

  I originally picked up this book from the library and thought I'd just pick through and read an article here and there. First I read the articles about events and mysteries taking place in my home state. That led to noticing interesting places and pictures from across America. I turned out reading the whole thing cover to cover! This book is a lot of fun and I found a couple of places I will visit, (no scary ones though). A Good study in urban legends and how similar tales pop up hundreds of miles apart. Warning: a few chapters are a bit "unsettling" and do not, as I did, read before drifting off to sleep for the night!
• 
  Abigail Katz

  I finished reading this book about 2 weeks ago. This is a very good book full of supposibly supernatural places in the US. Each location has a clearly explained myth or story behind it, and each tale is unique and interesting. I could not put this book down! Now I even want to visit some of these places!
  
  If you are into ghost hunting or just like myths and the supernatural, then this book is for you. The places cover a range of subjects, such as ghosts, aliens, science, mysteries, and just plain weird. Actual visitors of these odd places wrote about their experiences, which I think is really awesome.
• 
  This is V!

  An incredible guide to all the strange things that go down in the American land . This book contains so many weird stories that have been told and it makes you think about going to all these places to find out for yourself what’s going on . I have actually been to so many of the locations listed in the book but never seen these things because I did not know about it , but now I do and will gladly go back to check them out !
• 
  Zachary Shelton

  I went into this book wanting to know about some weird and interesting things in US and I came out of it pretty disappointed. A lot of the book didn’t interest me all that much with topics I didn’t care about like gateways to hell and cemeteries and horror folklore
• 
  Nicholas Maulucci

  What?! Waste of time.
• 
  Chy

  One of, if not the best book in the Weird series!
• 
  Christine

  I couldn't even get through this book. It was like reading one National Inquirer story after another. The only redeeming thing was a factual article about the abandoned Danvers State Hospital.
• 
  Alicia Scott

  Looooooove this series so much.
• 
  Tia

  Not really a travel guide so much as a collection of weird American stories and places.
• 
  Colleen

  Crazy world we live in!
  Visit my store at Cleowulf Studio LLC @
  www.cleowulf.com/shop
• 
  Steve Johnson

  A nice survey of strange places, ghost stories, tall tales, urban legends, local flavor, roadside attractions, and other all-American weirdness. A lot of the material will be familiar to Fortean-leaning readers, but there's enough obscure stuff to make it worth a read. Some people might complain about the fact that the authors almost gleefully refuse to engage in any real fact-checking or verifying. A lot of the stories were submitted by website readers, which means that in some cases there are multiple conflicting accounts about the same subject, and a few tales that have been debunked or explained are presented as if the debunking or explanation never happened or is in dispute. However, it should be noted that the authors state right up front that they're more interested in collecting the stories themselves than worrying about whether or not the stories are true. I can't decide whether that's admirable or lazy, but still found the book enjoyable.
• 
  Lauren

  One of the most addicting books I've ever read - and I almost never read it at all!
  
  My dad is good at finding gifts online that you wouldn't think of yourself, but as soon as he gives it to you it's like "this is awesome!". In this case 'Weird US' was a Christmas gift for my mother, who said something along the lines of 'oh, that's interesting' and put it aside. A few days later, having read every book I'd gotten, I started reading 'Weird US' and was hooked, adopting it into my own personal library. Some of the stories, while obviously just urban legends and campfire stories, were good enough - and accompanied by delightfully creepy Photoshopped pictures - to send shivers down my spine. Others were funny, strange, or 'wtf?'. After finding out this was only one in a series of great books, I started snapping up copies of other 'Weird' books and I love them to this day.
  
  Read with a bit of skepticism, but enjoy!
• 
  Jennifer

  This book of U.S. folklore, ostensibly a travel guide to weird sites (though many of the ones listed are essentially off-limits unless the traveler is into trespassing), is a mixed bag. Some of it is fascinating, some of it dull and repetitive. As I guidebook, I don't think it's particularly useful; you'd have to supplement it with maps and a guidebook that actually told you things. As a collection of folklore, it has some shivery moments--especially with some of the eyewitness accounts gleaned from the authors' website--but there's also an element of sameness to many of them. (It's like teenagers all over the country get kind of buzzed and hang out at creepy locales in the middle of the night with their friends and . . . BOOM! Vague bad feelings and creepy shadows abound!) I've read stuff that was funnier, stuff that was scarier, and for all that it claims to be a 'U.S.' guidebook, there are wide swathes of the country that don't get much attention.
• 
  TJ

  A collection of the some the strangest, most unexplained, haunted, and fabled places in the United States. Authors Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman have personally visited many of the places that they write about in "Weird US", but also included are stories from "locals" who have inside knowledge or experience with these strange sites and places. Much of the book is centered in the states of New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Indiana, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, so people from those states will really enjoy the book and will possible relate more to it. For others who just like to read about some of the more unique places in our country, "Weird US" is for you. Plenty of pictures support the stories along with a solid index for referencing later.
• 
  Eden

  Weird U.S. was.....Well, weird!
  
  If you're looking for weird, strange or haunted places to visit this is the book you want to read. Now not all the places in the book they recommend you visiting because some are private property, but others are open to the public.
  There is so many stories in here; from a Bunny Man to Phantom Clowns to Rehmeyer's Hollow and the Curse of The Witch, there is tons of interesting and crazy stories to read about in this book. I would recommend it to anyone that's into weird or paranormal things. There is quite a few stories about haunted places as well so this book will interest those who are into ghost stories.
• 
  Amanda

  I liked this book. I received it as a Christmas present a few years back and love picking it up to read every now and again. It is filled with interested and odd facts about everything the USA has to offer. It's a great book to pick up and put down for easy subtle reading. This book also has great pictures of the actual story in it too, so children can get into the book as well. I'm looking forward to buying Weird Hauntings by the same authors. They put a lot of research and traveling into these books. This book make a great present for readers and non-readers alike.