Weird New York ─ Your Travel Guide to New York's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets

"It was a typical day in New Square Fish Market and Luis Nivelo...was in the process of gutting carp. Just before he put his knife to one fish's belly, though, he was fabbergasted when the carp began speaking to him---in Hebrew!"

"Letchworth in Rockland Country is an old rundown asylum... My friends once roamed these buildings... They said they heard desks dragging across the floors above them. Certain rooms were freezing cold in the middle of the summer, almost as if something was there with you."

"If a policeman should pull you over one dark night, check the back of his head. If he has no skull there, you have just met another of Mount Misery's ghosts."

"Kudos to Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman for their intrepid willingness to venture down the forbidden roads and explore the musty tunnels of America's shadowlands.... This is the book by which future exploreres will chart their road trips in pursuit of the meaning of this nation."---New York Press

"No need to leave the country to find the exotic and the extreme.... Weird U.S. is delicious armchair reading. Who can resist an ax-wielding man in a bunny suit, a home shaped like a giant shoe, cannibal albino villages, midget colonies, passages to hell or close relations of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster?"---San Francisco Chronicle

"Scrabbled together from all manner of sources, this highly graphic volume pretends to be a tour guide to strange sites in America. It is that, but really, it is a crazy journey inside the human head.... A hunger for knowledge often begins with books.... Teachers, try ordering a set of Weird U.S. for the classroom. The kids will love you for it. The principal may fire you."---SeacoastNH.com

"There's veracity in the tone of these stories-one gets the sense that the story-teller truly believes what they experienced was real."---Fairfield County Weekly

"Weird U.S. is a marvelous work of entertainment and the basis for a truly unique vacation. It deserves a prominent place in all public libraries."---Library Journal

It's called the Empire State for a reason, for as all New Yorkers Know, our state is the one by which all others are measured. The Pilgrims probably landed here first, and recorded history got the geography wrong, because really, everything started here. We have the Yankees and the Mets---plus the Giants and the Jets, even if they are, for some weird reason, in New Jersey. And we have trout, lots of cows, the Catskills, the Baseball Hall of Fame, a really big waterfall, and we're the birthplace of Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore, for Pete's sake.

But there's something else, something we've got so much more of. We've got a great big quantity of ... weirdness. Yes, our level of bizarreness is so high that we enticed an out-of-stater to become a New Yorker and chronicle it all. With notepad in hand and apples in pocket for nourishment, author Chris Gethard scouted the state's highways and byways in search of the odd and the offbeat. He tracked down impossible-to-believe tales, only to discover odd grains of truth that give the stories just enough credibility to make one feel... slightly uneasy.

So turn the pages and visit Long Island's Big Duck, travel down Moan and Groan Road in, of all places, a town called Hope, and sample the Jell-O Museum in Le Roy. Drive by the abandoned insane asylums that blanket the state---big surprise. By all means avoid the screaming gunshots of House Road, but do coast up Spook Rock Road, Say hi to Jumper and Grumpy at America's largest pet cemetery, and knock on Eunice Welsh's Crypt (she might knock back).

Yes, It's clear why we all sing "I Love New York" with such fervor. Weird New York is filled with all the good stuff your history teacher never taught you. So get on the road with Chris for a great adventure. We guarantee It'll make you love New York that much more.

Chris served as the associate editor of Weird N.J. magazine for more than four years. While there, he helped write and edit Weird N.J. (the book) and co-authored its follow-up, Weird U.S. Chris is also an actor and comedian, has contributed writing to shows on Comedy Central, and has acted on a number of TV programs, including Late Night with Conan O'Brien. He is a performer and teacher at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Manhattan.
Chris grew up in west Orange, New Jersey, a few short blocks from the laboratory where Thomas Edison once put on public electrocutions of a variety of animals. Now he lives in Astoria, Queens, just a stone's throw from the Hell Gate section of the East River, where more than one thousand people perished in the General Slocum stemboat fire of 1904.
Mark graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York City, where he studied fine art, illustration, and photography. It was a boring and misspent suburban New Jersey childhood that first led him to his lifelong fascination with seeking out and exploring lost history and forgotten landmarks of his surroundings. These days he lives with his wife, Barbara, and their two daughters in a boring suburban New Jersey neighborhood (when he is not out tracking down satanic albino cannibals).
With his love for the state of New Jersey and his affection for the strange, Mark blended the two into a magazine called Weird N.J. It was an adventurous concept that explored every unbelievable tale he would hear while traveling around the state. The response to the publications was overwhelming. Thus, the joumey to uncover little-known weird stories about the other forty-nine states began. Mark has been in the publishing industry most of his life as a graphic designer and writer. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, Shirley, and their daughter. He likes rock `n' roll and vacations "down the shore," and was voted "most likely to spontaneously combust" in his high school yearbook. So far it hasn't happened.