For decades, the Montclair Police Department kept a file on a local poet. It held years of unusual letters, several signed “send this to the immune officer,” mailed in by a man named Alfred Starr Hamilton. Nobody in the department seemed sure what to do with it. Nobody threw it away either.
That is the kind of story Mark Sceurman has built a career chasing. Sceurman started Weird New Jersey in 1989, a magazine that has spent 32 years documenting the strange, unexplained and quietly bizarre corners of the state, Montclair included. He joined the Montclair Pod recently to talk through some of what he has found close to home, and the answer turns out to be more than screaming reservoirs and half-abandoned asylums, though there is plenty of that too.
Who Is Weird New Jersey’s Mark Sceurman?
Sceurman grew up in Bloomfield, still lives on the street where he was born and remains vice president of the Bloomfield Historical Society, which gives him access to archives most residents never see, not unlike what the Montclair History Center here in Montclair. Weird New Jersey started as something fun among friends.
“It was just a joke, really, ha ha, weird New Jersey,” Sceurman said. “Let’s go on day trips, let’s go to the dumps, let’s go here and there. And for some reason it caught the attention of everybody, because nobody was really documenting any of these places before. Nobody was documenting it as history, as I like to call it, local history. You’re not gonna really talk about the dumps or legendary places like Albino Village or Heartbeat Roads. Nobody was talking about that stuff. That’s why it really started. It was just some place to go with my friends. We’d make a flyer out of it and just have a lot of fun.”
A few years in, a reader named Mark Moran wrote in, and the two Marks became partners. What began as a photocopied newsletter grew into a magazine sold on newsstands twice a year, then a book series called Weird US covering other states, then a History Channel show. Thirty-two years later, Sceurman and Moran are still doing it the same way: driving around New Jersey, knocking on doors, chasing down stories nobody else is chasing. That instinct is exactly what led them to Montclair.
The Montclair Poet the Police Couldn’t Figure Out
Hamilton spent almost his entire life around Watchung Plaza, writing poems that found their way into respected small presses and literary journals starting in the 1960s. He is remembered today as a real, if obscure, literary figure, not just a local curiosity. Sceurman says his poetry is still assigned in college courses in New York. What made him a Weird New Jersey subject, though, was what he was mailing across town.
“He was pretty odd, out-of-place character,” Sceurman said. “He lived in Montclair around Watchung Center. Some of his poems are fairly famous, they get into certain poetry books and everything. But he was a little bit crazy.”
Hamilton addressed his letters to what he called “the officer” and used them to formally object to department decisions, sometimes including original poetry along with his complaints. When Sceurman’s colleague, Lisa Borinsky, visited the police department decades later to research the story, she found they had kept every one of them: an entire file, spanning 30 to 40 years.
“He’s quite a character, a Montclair local hero, as they say,” Sceurman said. “A lot of people don’t know about him.”
Hamilton died in a nursing home in Montclair in 2005 and was buried in a veterans cemetery with full military honors, according to archival records held at the University of Chicago Library, where his papers are kept. He had served one year in the military during World War Two. Weird New Jersey, and Borinsky in particular, is the reason most of Montclair ever heard his story at all. Not every Weird New Jersey story out of town has a name attached to it. Some don’t even have a face.
What’s Making That Sound at Mills Reservation?
Long before anyone had a name for it, people walking through Mills Reservation, on the border of Cedar Grove and Upper Montclair, started hearing something they couldn’t explain.
“Mills Reservation is on the border of Cedar Grove and Upper Montclair,” Sceurman said. “People would hear these blood-curdling screams. It’s not like a fox scream, but it was like a howl, and people could never really figure out where it was coming from… People would hear these screams, and they just nicknamed it the Essex Phantom because nobody really could find out where these sounds were coming from. Nobody’s ever seen it, heard it.”
Sceurman says the sound was first reported in the early 1970s, according to his own reporting. Despite the nickname, he doesn’t think the Essex Phantom is a cryptid, the term for a creature whose existence has never been confirmed. “It’s probably an animal,” he said.
That kind of restraint runs through most of what Weird New Jersey publishes, even when the subject invites less of it. The magazine has also covered the Big Red Eye, a Bigfoot-like animal reported breaking into a Sussex County barn in 1973, and the Mantis Man, a six-foot creature people claim to have seen along the Musconetcong River. Then there’s the state’s most famous case, the Jersey Devil, which Sceurman traces to a 1735 legend involving a woman known as Mother Leeds and a documented 1909 rampage that ran from the Pine Barrens to Camden. Mike described it plainly: “A lot of people, especially transplants, hear New Jersey Devil and just think the hockey team.” Not every abandoned corner of Essex County needs a monster to feel haunted. Some places earned that reputation on their own.
Inside the Ruins of Overbrook and the Essex Sanatorium
Before it became green space, the hilltop between Verona and Cedar Grove held two institutions: Overbrook Hospital, built to relieve overcrowding at Newark’s hospitals, and above it, the Essex Sanatorium, which treated tuberculosis patients. Sceurman’s team got inside both, at the end.
“The history of the place is unbelievable,” Sceurman said. Both institutions were once self-sufficient, growing their own food on-site, a setup Sceurman calls “pretty utopian thinking back then.” That changed as the population grew. Close to 10,000 patients died there over the decades, Sceurman said, some from exposure during winters without adequate heat. As psychiatric medicine improved and fewer patients needed to be institutionalized, the complex was left to decay, drawing in urban explorers and vandals in the years before demolition.
“We were at the hilltop, at the Essex Sanatorium, right before it got knocked down, it was just a labyrinth of buildings and decay,” Sceurman said. “And when Overbrook was knocked down, we got invited into the tunnels underneath that connect all the buildings. Talk about scary.”
Mike remembers hiking the woods behind Overbrook with his dog years ago and finding gurneys half-buried in the dirt, discarded along with other hospital debris. Both buildings are gone now, replaced by the kind of park and condo development that has quietly absorbed most of the sites Weird New Jersey has spent three decades documenting. Sceurman doesn’t sound bitter about that. He sounds like someone racing to get the story down before it disappears entirely, which is really what the whole project has been about since 1989.
Weird New Jersey Tried Going Digital. It Didn’t Work.
Weird New Jersey has had 32 years to go digital, the same 32 years that turned nearly every other local publication into a website first and a print product second, if at all. Sceurman tried it anyway. It didn’t work.
“The other problem we had with Weird NJ was we tried to do digital, but nobody wanted to buy it,” Sceurman said. “They seem to want to have the thing in their hands. All this online, whatever, it’s clutter. It kind of disorients you from the real deal.”
The website today exists mostly to tease what’s inside the magazine, not replace it. “We tease everybody,” Sceurman said. “If you want the full story, buy the magazine.”
That stubbornness is arguably why Weird New Jersey has outlasted plenty of alt-weeklies and newsletters from the same era that didn’t survive the shift online. A story about a Montclair poet’s police file, or a reservoir nobody can explain, works better as something a reader holds onto and hands to a neighbor than as one more tab left open and forgotten.
Weird New Jersey comes out twice a year and is sold on newsstands statewide and through weirdnj.com. A special issue, “The Jersey Devil and Other Bizarre Beasts,” recently hit shelves, with the next regular issue due out in October. If Montclair’s own strange history is news to you, that is kind of the point. Go find a copy and see what else is sitting in that file cabinet.
Image credit: Weird New Jersey
