Wacky Hoosiers and Their Strange Attractions -- If You Can Find Them

Weird Indiana - Mark Marimen, James A. Willis and Troy Taylor

When we moved back to Indiana after nearly forty years, reacquainting ourselves with our surroundings ranked pretty high on our to-do list. In fact, it was right below recycling about a ton of moving boxes.  We’re not the kind of people who are content with typical tourist sites –like museums, amusement parks or state parks: we tend to be more attracted to the kind of places that show up in the “Weird U.S.” series. So once we’d finished our move to Indianapolis, we picked up a copy of Weird Indiana; written by our fellow Hoosier  Mark Marimen and a neighbor to the east, James Willis (Ohio), and one from the west, Troy Taylor (Illinois). 

Weird Indiana is available either as a trade paperback or an eBook. On its 250-plus pages you’ll find details of more than a hundred Indiana legends (“The House of Blue Lights” in northern Indianapolis), roadside oddities (giant “muffler men” in Indy and Yorktown), and – naturally – haunts, like the Stepp Cemetery near Bloomington. The “haunt” section is to be expected, since all three authors have written their own books about the haunted places of the Midwest and beyond.

Each entry includes an illustration or two as well as a brief write-up based on local lore and the occasional newspaper article. Many of them include a transcribed letter from a local resident, the tip that originally brought the attraction to the authors’ attention. Most entries contain only the most rudimentary of information about the site’s location, typically nothing beyond the name of a nearby town.  The entries are grouped by type, from “haunts” to “local lore” to “local heroes and villains,” which includes people like John Dillinger – a through-and-through Hoosier. To help you find points of interest, the authors included a table of contents and an index of the attractions and subjects.

The most glaring omission, in this user’s opinion, is the lack of any kind of map showing even the most general location of the attractions. On the cover of the paperback version you’ll find a stylized map in black on black, but the image seems to be a small-scale map of Ohio roadways, not of Indiana (except perhaps the lefthand edge). For those who aren’t pretty familiar with the Hoosier state, the locations will remain pretty much a mystery without constant trips to google maps or an atlas.

Most entries are fun from a purely entertainment or historical perspective. Even though I’m a native Hoosier, I’d forgotten – or never known – that my neighbors in Indiana have so profound a streak of whimsy.  Unfortunately, the book would be almost impossible to use for a travel guide without a map (or even a functioning website… hint, hint). Even if you decided to take a day trip to witness some of the oddities, you’d be hard-pressed to find them. Heck, you could pass within a few hundred feet of one and never even know about it: one of the roadside features – a giant pink elephant depicted on the cover, above – lives within ten miles of our new house, and we didn’t know it until we spotted its entry while skimming the book!

When push comes to shove, Weird Indiana makes for interesting armchair (or bathroom) reading, but it won’t prove very useful for familiarizing yourself with wackiness that seems to infest the state that calls itself The Crossroads of America.

copyright © 2016 scmrak