Weird NJ Presentations
Weird NJ Presentations
Are you looking for speakers to address an audience at a gathering? Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman, publishers of Weird NJ, present engaging, informative and entertaining multi-media talks at events both public and private. They offer a wide range of presentations based on the subject matter that your group of attendees would be most interested in. All presentations are custom made based on the particular desires of each gathering. Subject matter can be a broad overview of Weird NJ topics or more narrowly focused on a specific subject, such as the paranormal or cryptozoology. Discussions can cover the state as a whole, or concentrate on a particular area or county. It’s all up to you! Contact us at WeirdNJ1@gmail.com for a full list of subjects that Mark & Mark are uniquely qualified authorities in the state to discuss.
Just Who are these Two Marks Anyway?
Our weird journey began a long time ago in a far-off land called New Jersey. Once a year Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran would compile a homespun newsletter to hand out to their friends called Weird NJ. The pamphlet was a collection of odd news clippings, bizarre facts, little-know historical anecdotes and anomalous encounters from our home state. The newsletter also focused on the kind of very localized legends that were often whispered around a particular town, but seldom heard outside the boundaries of the community where they first originated.
The two Marks had started the publication with the simple theory that every town in the state had at least one good tale to tell. Weird NJ soon become a full-fledged magazine and they made the decision to actually do all of their own investigating and see if they couldn’t track down just where all of these seemingly unbelievable stories were coming from. Was there, they wondered, any factual basis for these fantastic local legends that people were telling them? Armed with not much more than a camera and note pad they set off on a mystical journey of discovery. Much to their surprise and amazement, much of what they had initially presumed to be nothing more that urban legend actually turned out to be real, or at least contained a grain of truth which had original sparked the lore.
Mark Moran is a lifelong resident of New Jersey. After graduating from Parson’s School of Design 1983 he set out on a journey of weird discovery, wandering the back roads, back alleys and back woods of the U.S., listening to the tall tales locals would tell and photographing the unusual sites he found along the way. This odd quest would lead to him to his unforeseen and unexpected roles as magazine publisher, author and TV show host.
These days Mark lives a seemingly normal life in a quiet Jersey suburb with his wife and two daughters. Though his mild-mannered neighbors would never suspect it, each morning as he jumps into his Jeep to go to work, Mark begins a brand new adventure into the unknown, seldom explored and all but forgotten side of American culture.
Mark Sceurman: 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 journey to uncover little-known weird stories about the other 49 states began.
Mark has been in the publishing industry most of his life as a graphic designer, writer, and man behind the scenes on the New Jersey music front. During the last 7 years he’s been traveling across the United States—sometimes with a camera crew for the Weird U.S. television series—and sometimes just jumping in the car and hitting the road, with only cryptic notes and crude directions as the guide. He is of New Jersey, from the county of Essex where he lives with his wife Shirley and their daughter. He likes rock ‘n’ roll, vacations “down the shore,” and was voted “most likely to spontaneously combust” in his high school yearbook.
For more information on Weird NJ please visit our About Weird NJ page.
