Mason Winfield

Author:
Author, teacher, storyteller, and supernatural historian Mason Winfield 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. He has written or edited fourteen books, including the regional sensation “Shadows of the Western Door” (1997) and “Iroquois Supernatural,” co-authored with Michael Bastine, on the traditions of the Six Longhouse Nations (Inner Traditions International/Bear & Company, 2011). Several of his surveys of upstate folklore and paranormal tradition may be found at the website of Western New York Wares: www.buffalobooks.com. He may be reached at www.masonwinfield.com.

An anatomically perfect human jaw fashioned of diamond-hard quartz crystal is uncovered at an Ohio burial mound and sold on the underground antiquities market. Shortly after, three pothunters are found dead.

A mysterious new drug suspected of South American origin surfaces in Buffalo, NY. Its unprecedented psycho-tropic effects include the momentary activation of ESP. 

Blind, speechless, emaciated street people start appearing in many parts of the world. An urban legend-cycle forms around them, and the name of a murderous old cult, “the Whistlers” attaches to them.

An archaeological team at a Mayan site reports finding a bizarre artifact and vanishes. 

An upstate schoolteacher’s book of New York legends and folklore foreshadows these developments and more. 

   These are the threads – plus his affair with a maddening woman – that draw narrator Ward Courier into the international adventure of occultism, terror, Native American tradition and onrushing prophecy that is Mason Winfield’s anticipated new novel THE WHISTLERS. By the time the picture of THE WHISTLERS becomes clear, we are ready to believe in a sinister conspiracy that could predate Atlantis and even hail from another world.

The Whistlers

SHORT STORY of WARD COURIER: The Second Scholar's Tale: "High Hat and The SkinWalker," Continued


By eleven Hubbard realized that the last handful of lights he could remember seeing had been half an hour earlier. By midnight, he felt sure that he had seen the last of them, and he felt finally alone. He tossed a few more branches onto the fire. It rose up and cast amber light about the clearing before his lean-to. He heard a rustling in the trees that could not be wind and was aware that the natural animals had fallen still.


Something was shaking the bag of bloody parts Hubbard had left in the tree. Whatever it was had to be reaching up from the ground, which shocked him. He had placed it on such a high branch to turn back even the exceptional bear. He stayed where he was, straining his eyes into the dimness at the edge of the glow.


Chapter 152: High Hat and the Skinwalker, Part 152