Rife with noxious odors, gaping sprawl, and oil refineries that burn to kingdom come, New Jersey is best known for its offensive squalor. But for Jersey natives, being a product of America's armpit carries with it a certain sense of pride. So in the face of a nation's ridicule, a movement glorifying what the other forty-nine states consider revolting, nauseating, and downright weird has taken shape in the Garden State. And Weirdnj.com, the Web companion to a yearly 'zine that chronicles New Jersey's freakish folklore, has become a voice of this cause, the best example yet of Jersey's fascination with its own fathomless incongruity.

Exploring the surreal underside of the Garden State's fetid veneer, weirdnj.com reads like a B-Movie script. Tales of monkey-men, cursed roadways, and entombed nuns echo the incredulous details of bad science fiction, defying rational standards of belief and good sense. But with eyewitness accounts of a township with undersized houses called Midgetville, and a village once inhabited entirely by "pigment impaired individuals" called Albinoville, New Jersey's true weirdness doesn't seem imagined, more like a statewide epidemic.

Published by Jersey natives Mark Scourman and Mark Moran, WeirdNJ.com never sneers at the area’s eccentricity, but gives it a profoundly human face. Among the sundry tales of demonic birds and elaborations on the Jersey Devil Myth, maybe the most renowned of all New Jersey legends, are provocative portraits of a people whose only means of self-expression is the language of the bizarre: there's the story of the Palace of Depression, a Great Depression-era estate built of junk and thrown-away car parts; an interview with Charles Lindbergh Jr., an administrator at a juvenile halfway house claiming to be the-kidnapped-and-assumed-dead Lindbergh baby; and the Zorzis, a middle-aged couple who, for whatever reason, decided one day to decorate their front lawn with bowling balls. Hundreds of bowling balls.

The site has branched off into a Weird U.S. site, but a nation of weirdness can’t hold a torch to the inexplicable goings-on in New Jersey. Part travel guide, part folk archive, weirdnj.com takes state pride to a baffling new level. In a region where local history brazenly blurs the line between fact and fiction, weirdness has become the tie that binds the populace. Weirdnj.com wants the world to know just how proud New Jersey is of its strangeness.

Donny Mahoney is a New Jersey native and he's damn proud of it.