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

EPISODE in the WHITE MOUNTAINS near the DURAND LINE, the AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN BORDER


Faint red light shows from the mouth of a cave in a mountainous region on an overcast night.


Two bearded men in turbans come out, AK-47s on slings. One of them is singing sourly. They step into the bushes just below the cave-mouth and reach for the waistbands of their loose pants. Black-clothed arms strike from behind them like snakes, covering their mouths and jerking them down out of sight.


A balding, bearded man with a huge belly and a small turban at the crown of his head comes to the mouth of the cave and calls something into the darkness. He yells a couple of times and steps uneasily down from the cave-mouth. A dark arm comes around him from behind. The blade of a combat knife rises and falls.


Chapter 184: No Meaning Otherwise, Part 184