Author, researcher, storyteller, and “supernatural historian” Mason Winfield is the premier paranormalist in upstate New York.
Mason studied English and Classics at Denison University, earned a master’s degree in British literature at Boston College, and studied poetry and fiction at SUNY Buffalo with professor emeritus and MacArthur grant recipient Irving Feldman. In his thirteen years at The Gow School (South Wales, NY) he chaired the English department, won a 50K cross-country ski marathon, and was ranked among the Buffalo, NY, area’s top ten tennis players.
As a journalist, Mason writes on a range of subjects. including the War of 1812 and Celtic and Native American folklore. He is the author or editor of eighteen books, including the upstate sensation Shadows of the Western Door (1997) and Iroquois Supernatural (2011), a much-praised study of the traditions of the Six Longhouse Nations. Mason’s award-winning short story “The Hunters” (2000) gained honorable mention in the year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. He’s written a pair of occult adventures, The Prince of the Air (2021) and its sequel The Elven Smith (2024). In between them, A Ghosthunter’s Journal (2022) details the adventures of a pair of Buffalo-based paranormal detectives. A research-survey of supernatural folklore, sacred architecture, occult influences, and the Niagara’s great builders, Buffalo’s Haunted Architecture, will be published in late summer 2024.
Mason is a popular lecturer who’s addressed audiences at the New England Antiquities Research Association, Lily Dale Assembly, the Roycroft Campus Corporation, and Larkin Square Author Series in Buffalo, NY. His talks have been sponsored by Poets & Writers, “The Big Read,” New York Council for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, and First Night Saratoga. As a storyteller, Mason has appeared at a variety of prestigious festivals, including City of Night (Buffalo), Rochester (NY) Fringe Festival, and Piccolo Spoletto (Charleston, SC).
Mason has been a guest on countless podcasts and TV and radio programs. He designed and hosted The Phantom Tour (2003), a two-hour TV program/DVD on upstate New York’s haunted history. He’s appeared on a number of major network programs and stars in a 2006 episode of the Travel Channel program Legend Hunters. More recently he appears in two Travel Channel programs, Mysteries at the Museum (2018) and Hometown Horrors (2019).
Mason is the founder of Haunted History Ghost Walks, Inc., a company that designs tours and events with supernatural themes. Cultural, historic, and architectural preservation are vital issues to Mason, and his company has supported those causes through fund-raising events with organizations such as Lewiston Council on the Arts, the Allentown Association, The Landmark Society of Western New York, Saratoga Arts Council, Ontario County Historical Society, Wayne County History Museum, and Friends of Knox Farm State Park.
Mason is the co-founder (with Michael Bastine) of the research association The Spirit Way Project, devoted to the preservation of upstate New York’s supernatural and paranormal legacy. In association with Spirit Way Project, Mason is the host of a podcast series of interviews and discussions with experts in niche fields of the paranormal.
The Whistlers: A Paranormal Intrigue
Three Ohio pothunters turn up a bizarre artifact – a life-sized human lower jaw fashioned out of quartz crystal – near a Hopewell burial mound in 2007. Shortly after it surfaces on the underground antiquities market, its vendors are found dead, evidently after interrogation.’
An alarming new drug suspected of a South American origin turns up in 2008 in Buffalo, NY. The most benign of its reported effects is the activation of ESP.
Anatomically perfect Crystal Skulls are found at ancient sites in the Yucatan jungles and the Peruvian mountain forest in 2009 and 2010. Both archaeological teams vanish.
International investigations converge around school teacher/paranormal scholar Ward Courier when his works of fiction and folklore turn out to be prophetic of these events and more.
Through his conferences with law enforcement agencies – and his maddening affair with a dangerous woman – Courier is swept into an adventure that unfolds across the Americas and involves Native American spirituality, apocalyptic prophecy, the legendary Crystal Skulls, an ancient, potentially extraterrestrial conspiracy, and the monstrous cult of blind assassins known as “the Whistlers.”
The Rose Witch: Supernatural Tales Among Western New York’s Ethnicities
Celebrated for its ethnic riches, Western New York may have another heritage – the astonishing survival of ancient supernatural tradition from across the globe. The Rose Witch is Mason Winfield’s groundbreaking survey of lore and legends from Western New York’s diverse cultures.
“On the Niagara,” Winfield writes, “the Banshee, the Little People, the after-life messages, and ‘the Evil Eye’ are not exactly as they appear in the classic stories.” Neither are the curses, the spells, the shapeshifters, the omens, or the other figments of local belief. The fact that they survive at all ought to take our breath away.