Jim Brandon

It''s never good to start a book with a glaring factual error - this one managed to evade even the most rudimentary proofreading on page 1 when it placed the capital of Alabama in the northwest corner of the state and the Mississippi border in the center. Most of the entries are on the order of "In 1876 a newspaper here reported fish fell from the sky!". Being something of an aficionado of this sort of thing, I was surprised to find only four entries for my home state, none of which I'd heard of, and none very interesting - not even the dead crocodile in the Wabash in 1946. I made it as far as Kentucky before I just couldn't take it anymore. According to the inside cover I must've picked this book up used some years ago for a quarter. I overpaid.… (meer)

Published long before Weird New Jersey or Roadside America, Weird America lists locations in all fifty states that have experienced unusual or unexplained events, from rains of frogs and mysterious string to burial mounds and monster sightings, supernatural and scientific oddities mixing with folklore and urban legend. Some of the sites listed are merely where events once occurred and offer no current landmarks to witness, but you'll find less muffler men or tourist traps in this book, and more things like geomancy locales and dowsing hotspots.… (meer)