In my life I’ve had the opportunity to travel a pretty good distance from home. I’ve seen other countries, I’ve been all over the United States, and I’ve explored my own back yard. One thing I’ve discovered for certain is that we live on a very weird planet. To truly capture the odd folktales, ghostly legends, UFO sightings, and understand the cryptids lurking in a given area, you need to be local for a good deal of time. I was born in Massachusetts. I’ve lived in a few other states, but I came back. I know the locals and the locales. If I don’t know the history or the witnesses, I know who to ask.

I spent most of last year exploring a bizarre place called Massachusetts. In my research I learned that life here in the Bay State was perfectly normal… right up until about 10,000 years ago. And then things started to get weird. Massachusetts has more than its share of ghosts; I knew that years ago. We’re old New England, we embrace our history, and we’re more apt to talk about our ghosts than some other parts of the country. But we also have our monsters: Pukwudgies, Bigfoot, the Dover Demon, Big Hairy, and the Thunderbird just to name a few. We have Salem — arguably the world capital of all things witchy. We have Cape Cod, full of sea tales, giant serpents, and Wampanoag creation legends. Every corner of the state has something unusual to share. Sometimes you just need to scratch the surface a bit.

This was the most fun I’ve had writing a book. I crawled through caves, I trekked through swamps looking for cryptids, and I pored through history books discovering the oddities our forefathers believed in.

In the past, I had the chance to contribute to other books in this series including Weird U.S. and Weird Hauntings, but this was my first opportunity to mostly take the reins on my own “weird” book. With the help of some invaluable contributors like Daniel Boudillion, Chris Balzano, and of course, Mark and Mark, Weird Massachusetts came together like a dream. I hope you’ll pick up a copy and enjoy the very weird Bay State!

-Jeff

The phrase “insult to injury” is a writing cliché. But there are circumstances, times, and events where nothing but a cliché will do. It’s in these circumstances that we must forgive the writer for the use of tired phrases.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to go to Volcano, California, to speak at the Ghost Rush Conference. During some down time at the event, I took a walk around town — a town with a population of 101. So when I say I took a walk around town I’m being quite literal. There’s a wonderful wooden structure in the village that begs further investigation once you get a glimpse of the building. It’s old, has a tin roof, plank siding, and no windows. I learned from one of the locals (and the plaque on the front), that this was Volcano’s first jail. It was built in 1871.

Two men guilty of crimes were sentenced to construct the jail with two-by-twelve timbers on the outer and inner walls with boiler plate sandwiched in between. Once the construction was complete, the two carpenter criminals were told to get inside and get comfortable, because they still had time to serve. Yeah… insult to injury.