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.”
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…