Byline: Ron Rosenbaum

So where do you find Truly Weird America these days? Does the "Ghost World" exist any more?

The Old, Weird America: That was the title of Greil Marcus' admirably eccentric and illuminating book on the obscure sources of the Basement Tapes; it was the world of backroads, crossroads voodoo the Steve Buscemi character searches for in Ghost World. But let's face it, there's not much Old, Weird America, not much Ghost World left in the backroads and back alleys of Wal-Mart America. Believe me, I've looked.

But you can still find True American Weirdness if you look hard enough. Or, rather, listen hard enough. You can still find True American Weirdness on the last remnant of midnight-to-dawn radio. The kind of weirdness that the great American novelist Stanley Elkin celebrated so memorably and brilliantly in The Dick Gibson Show, the classic account of the etheric voices that emerge from the ghostly static of the night. (I've said this before and I'll say it again: The 90-page "Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau" section of The Dick Gibson Show may be the greatest sustained comic/metaphysical tour de force in American literature of the past century.)

But until recently, I'd thought that midnight-to-dawn radio weirdness had vanished from the ether with the disappearance of the legendary Long John Nebel show (which inspired the "Dr. Behr-Bleibtreau" episode.)

I was wrong. I wasn't paying attention to the growth of Coast to Coast AM, the midnight-(well, 1 a.m.)-to-dawn marathon weirdathon. It's nationally syndicated and live, and you can tune into it here in New York on WABC, 770 on your AM dial, Mondays through Thursdays and also on weekends. It's like a link to an Invisible Republic of the strange, occult Bizzaro World America.

The Old, Weird America of Edgar Cayce ("the sleeping prophet") and other "Ascended Masters," of U.F.O. contactees, U.F.O. abductees, alternative-cancer-cure types, Atlantis historians, six varieties of Illuminati conspiracy theorists (including those who believe the evil Globalists are really alien lizards in disguise)-you name it. And 10 varieties of End of the World apocalypticists, including a new one for me: the solar-flare "Killshot" that is rapidly heading for Earth, coming to fuck you up.

This is the late-night American Unconscious in its purest form, unburdening itself of its dream life, its nightmare underside, disclosing the seething fantasies within. All hosted by an astonishingly mild-mannered radio personality, George Noory, who almost heroically gives them all equally respectful attention. (Art Bell, the founder of the show, hosts on Sunday nights now. I once appeared on the Art Bell show in a probably futile attempt to separate myth from reality about Skull and Bones.)

Alas, New Yorkers can't hear Coast to Coast AM on Friday, which is when the show offers its regular feature "Trucker Hotline," when listeners-specifically restricted to truckers, cops and newspaper carriers-call in to Coast to Coast with their truly scary ghostly encounters out there alone on the road at night. (You know, the "hitchhiker" who turned out to have been murdered weeks...