All The Tropes entry for Weirdness Magnet

[froodle]

There is a series of young adult books about a place called Eerie, Indiana. It involved these two kids named Marshall Teller and Simon Holmes who were in a small town in Indiana where lots of weird and crazy stuff happened (like running into kids from the future, or a TV cable salesman ripping holes in reality). It turns out the town literally was a weirdness magnet, for two reasons. One, a meteorite filled with a material called "eerieum" had landed, and it soaked into the local landscape. This material causes weirdness. Two, the Roswell aliens are being stored there, attracting even more weirdness. Guess you could call them space oddities.

Paralleled by the TV series Eerie, Indiana, as noted below.

Preceded, actually: after FOX rebroadcast the former NBC episodes for Saturday morning, the series became much more popular; the books were then written to take advantage of the resulting new demand for young adult Weird Fiction.