It All Began

2010-08-22T22:19:00.000-07:00

July 2000......

Malcontent

WiffleBall

The go no where job that Malcontent and WiffleBall had been working was coming to an end. The company decided that paying union workers in NJ was too expensive, so they pulled up stakes and moved up to NY. As it is with any job and groups of people bonds form between people and they want to keep in contact with each other. It started as a bar meeting between friends. Every so often the group would meet at the local watering hole and have a few to keep in touch. This, as you can guess, quickly got to be boring for some. Wiffleball started talking to Malcontent saying there had to be something else to do. When Mal asked him, "Have you ever heard of the magazine Weird NJ?", Wiffle didn't know what to think. Malcontent showed him some copies that he had in his truck and plans were quickly made for the following Saturday.

I'll never forget the first trip, we had so many locations we wanted to find. We were like kids in a candy store. I picked Wiffle up and off we went. The plan was to locate the area of the Hookerman Ghost Light in the daytime so we knew where it was then move on to some other locations. We would spend the day taking photos of the other areas then come back to the Hookerman at night to see if we could catch some of the lights. Problem is Weird NJ doesn't give very good directions! We knew the name of the road the Hookerman was on, but that road runs through a couple of towns up in North Jersey. Was it Flanders, Chester, or Bud Lake? Well, we went to Bud Lake and were wrong. After looking for a few hours and experiencing what would become a tradition, counting u-turns, we decided to head off to the next stop. That stop was none other than the Devil's Tree down Mountain Rd in Martinsville. We found it and after the disappointment from not finding the Hookerman we could hardly contain ourselves. Parking on side of the road we dashed out of the truck up to the tree, camera in hand. Wiffle was doing the "run around the tree three times" as some legends said to while Mal took photos when a big black SUV skidded to a stop. Was this the truck that is supposed to chase you? The window went down and a skinny older lady started shouting "Quit hurting my tree!" and "If you have an axe I'm calling the cops!". I replied to her that the only tool I had was a camera, and then boldly approached her truck. I found out that the tree was very very old, and that the land where it sat had once been owned by her family. I took out the copy of WNJ that had the story in it and showed it to her. She wasn't happy and grumbled something about more idiots would be on the way. Lucky for her we were probably the biggest idiots of that day! We told her we were just documenting the tree and would never harm it. The part of the story that said try to cut it down and evil will befall you, well, that was just being destructive. It would have ended there as she drove off, but we were hungry after that and decided to stop at the local Friendly's to get some lunch and ice cream. As we sat and ate guess who walked in to eat her lunch? Cold older broad stares the whole lunch as she never took her eyes off us!

Later that day we found the Denville NJ where UFOs come out to play, then we headed up to Layton Rd where the Bigfoot like creature known as Big Red Eyes was seen just recently. By that time it was getting dark and we started back home. Along the way we made another attempt to find the Hookerman, but failed again the second time. Wanting to find it we made plans for yet the next Saturday after we would do some more research on the net as well as in the magazines.

The following Saturday we made the trip and after checking and double checking drove almost straight up to the Hookerman. We made a note of where it was (remember this was before GPS was popular and affordable) and headed off to some other locations including Shades Of Death Rd., returning at night just in time for the sun to be going down. We first parked across the street where the tracks remain and stood there watching and waiting. We watched and waited, and waited and watched and, you get the point! After sitting there for what seemed like days WiffleBall looked at me and said "Lets go this is a bunch of" ..... His words broke off slowly as he stared straight ahead. He was the first to see a light floating around in the area where the tracks had been removed. I had just caught it before it flipped around and winked out. We jumped in my truck and tore off to the other side where we saw something that we couldn't explain. These lights would in all directions, some would head straight for you and blink out, almost like there were some kind of intelligence behind them.

This was the bug that bit us. We came up with the name Weird Travels from Weird NJ. They are "Your Travel Guide to NJ's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets". So Weird Travels it was. I scanned the photos that were taken and built a website. (This was a full three years before the Travel Channel show Weird Travels, do they owe me some cash? LOL) Through the years we found some other Travelers. There was excitement and disappointments along the way. Oh, and some run ins with the Police! We always had fun and that's all that mattered. It's been awhile since our last trip together but I have kept active with finding some local Weirdness and taking videos. You can see them here on my YouTube page : http://www.youtube.com/user/Malcontent1 I even got my nephews involved and they have a YouTube page here: http://www.youtube.com/user/WeirdTravelsJr . Later I created a page for Weird Travels here: http://www.youtube.com/user/weirdtravels but haven't used it much.

So many stories I could tell, like how we were taken to the abandoned mental asylum in Lakeland NJ, took pictures and posted them on our website. I was contacted about from this other Traveler that had a website wanting to know where it was. I reluctantly gave him directions and he sent the pictures into Weird NJ taking full credit and never mentioning us! That really got under Wiffles skin. I was mad also, but I had been to his site and downloaded all the directions he had posted!