Ten years ago today I was sitting at my desk with a notebook. On the page in front of me, I had written a short list of possible names for a new website I wanted to build which would help validate the amount of time I spent digging up weird news stories and researching historical oddities. At the time, I imagined it as a sort of encyclopedia of famous enigmas ranging from the Roswell UFO crash to the Loch Ness Monster. And I wanted to craft a unique brand around it that felt like opening a dusty tome full of ancient secrets and mysteries.
Instead, I picked Cult of Weird from the list because it could be represented by the acronym COW, with a logo depicting livestock being abducted by a flying saucer.
Fortunately, I had already come to hate that idea by the time I registered the domain. But the name stuck.
The original incarnation of Cult of Weird, 2010
I didn’t think this website would really ever be anything more than a small blog of random oddities I’d stumbled across while researching other things. After all, I had two young children, along with a freelance design business and other websites to run.
I had no idea Cult of Weird would grow to over 1 million visitors a year, with content shared all over the world, featured in books and TV shows, and even used in classrooms in multiple countries.
That’s mind-blowing.
Cult of Weird is a labor of love that often takes the backseat to IRL enigmas like work and family, but it’s been an amazing experience.
Thank you all for coming along on this journey with me!
