Author: Mason Winfield

The founder of New York’s original “supernatural tourism” company Haunted History Ghost Walks, Inc., Mason Winfield studied English and Classics at Denison University and earned a master’s degree at Boston College. In his 13 years as a teacher/department chair at The Gow School (South Wales, N.Y.), he won a 50K cross-country ski marathon and was ranked among the Buffalo area’s top ten tennis players. A specialist in upstate supernatural folklore and an award-winning fiction writer, Mason has written or edited 11 books, including the regional sensation Shadows of the Western Door (1997) and Iroquois Supernatural (Inner Traditions International/Bear & Company, 2011). A lecturer whose talks have been sponsored by Poets & Writers, New York Council for the Humanities, “The Big Read,” and the National Endowment for the Arts, Mason is also a spoken word artist who has appeared at City of Night, Buffalo; Rochester Fringe Festival; and Piccolo Spoletto Festival (Charleston, S.C.).

Ghengis Khan and his Mongols were good at siege warfare during their heyday in the 12th and 13th centuries. When a Mongol army drew up outside a walled city, it set up a white tent for all to see. This signified that no one would be harmed if the city surrendered and bowed to Mongol will. They only had a day to think about it, though. On the next morning, a red tent was displayed. That meant that if the city surrendered before nightfall, only the warriors would be killed. On the third day, the tent erected was black, and…

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Two of the most desperate, sensational battles I’ve heard of in history took place at Fort Erie during the late summer and early fall of 1814. The Siege of Fort Erie and the September sortie that followed it were so prodigious that they seem to belong more to works of fiction than history. Despite the fairly recent three-year round of commemorations, these events and the 1812 war as a whole are largely forgotten except by historians, which seems a tragedy, especially in Western New York. This was the Niagara’s war. While largely a bash-and-dash affair involving creeks, lakeshores, and coasts,…

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St. Patrick’s Day is here, and thoughts run to all things Irish. Other aspects of Celtic tradition have crossed the Atlantic as well and thrived remarkably on the Niagara Frontier. This seems the occasion to summarize the local supernatural connection.  First of all, who were/are the Celts? “Most Northwest Europeans” is the simple answer. Most of pre-Roman Europe was populated by cultures who displayed signs of a shared Celtic identity. Though today seven nations tend to consider themselves Celtic, including the Welsh and French, the stereotypical Celts for most of us are the Irish and the Scottish. In the U.S.…

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Author: Mason Winfield – researcher Mason Winfield is the author of eleven, soon twelve, books. He is the founder of Haunted History Ghost Walks, Inc., Western New York’s original supernatural touring company.] Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that. Hamlet, Act V, addressing the skull of the jester Yorick. O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we tell the dancer from the dance? W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children” You’ve all heard about the creepy clowns. The flap…

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Be these juggling fiends no more believed, That palter with us in a double sense, That keep the word of promise to our ear, And break it to our hope. —- Shakespeare, MacBeth “Wide right!” – Van Miller We drift to the end of yet another Buffalo Bills season with no football life beyond it, and the idea comes to more than one of us that the Bills could be suffering from a collective hex. Should any of us take the subject seriously? To me the question is like many in American politics. If a lot of people think a…

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The season of Halloween is on us, and in the human environment, the imagery of our massive entertainment apparatus has already turned to the garish and the monstrous. Before we get to discussing Western New York’s legendary monsters, we should understand the roots of the occasion. Our Halloween is a highly commercialized children’s holiday/party night. Its original significance was far other. It was the prime religious festival of the Celtic societies, the most holy and important day in the Celtic year. The Celts were northern Europe’s first historic people. Most Americans of European descent have some Celt in them. The…

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Mason Winfield’s Twilight on the Western Door: The Spiritual, Supernatural and Paranormal Witch Lights | Part 2 © 2015 Mason Winfield About, about in reel and rout The death-fires danced at night. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge We’ve all seen the occasional light at night we couldn’t explain. Not many of us thought to make anything out of it, at least if it was close to the earth. It was almost surely an illusion, we think. Light-sources are all around us today, almost anywhere we are. It could be an aircraft low on the horizon or the headlight of a car on a hilly winding…

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Mason Winfield’s Twilight on the Western Door: The Spiritual, Supernatural and Paranormal Witch Lights | Part 1 © 2015 Mason Winfield The lights have been with us since the beginning of time, and they will be with us until the end of time. DuWayne Leslie Bowen Some of the 20th century’s most prominent paranormal scholars started their careers in search of the answer to the UFO phenomenon whose early peak was in the 1960s. Two original thinkers, British authors Paul Devereux and the late John Michell, were among them. The UFO mess was so mind-boggling to them that they despaired of ever solving…

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When I die and come back, I wanna be able to f— with people. The query below was tossed into speculation on the Facebook page of John Harris, the Buffalo jeweler, artist, musician, filmmaker, and bon vivant. The epigraph above is a direct quote from a total stranger, uttered immediately upon finding out the subject of my specialization. JOHN HARRIS’ QUERY:  So for the past few days, I’ve seen people posting about so many different big and important topics. But frankly, I’m sick of thinking about them at the moment. So let’s start a discussion on a more conceptual basis. Somehow…

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At Twilight on the Western Door we appreciate questions about potentially psychic and paranormal experiences. Below is a slightly edited e-mail exchange between this column and a resident of Glenwood, N.Y. Q: On Friday, January 2, 2015, at around 10 am my friend and I decided to run at Sprague Brook Park. We usually run the hiking trails in the woods, and the runs last around 1 1/2 hours. Anyways, why I’m emailing you is that during my run when I was completely alone (my friend is a faster runner), I heard sleigh bells or chimes. It happened briefly. They…

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