Mason Winfield
Ghost Walker
Also read: "The Real Ghostbusters"By Jay Pawlowski
When you need to know about the paranormal in Western New York, there’s no question as to whom you should call—Mason Winfield is your man. He’s written and lectured about practically every haunting, spook, ghost, and psychic phenomenon from Niagara Falls to the Finger Lakes. With four books, a TV special and DVD, and countless talks and walking tours under his belt, Winfield has become the go-to guy on ghosts in Western New York.
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Mason Winfield.
Photo by Jim Bush. |
But don’t ask him those big, burning questions you have about the universe.
“People come to me with questions about life and afterlife as if I hold eternal truths. I’m a quester like everyone else,” Winfield says humbly. “I don’t know the answers—just a little more about the questions than the non-specialist.”
This sentiment marks the strange thing about Winfield’s career. While his work incorporates intangibles like the supernatural, occultism, parapsychology, local history, and folklore, his approach is grounded in the principles of real-world inquiry. “I’m trying to apply hard thinking to a soft subject,” he says. “The basis of my work is logic and philosophy. What do you know? What can you deduce?”
After spending thirteen years as an English teacher and department chair at the Gow School in South Wales (not to mention being ranked as one of the area’s top-ten tennis players and winning a 50k cross-country ski marathon), Winfield left teaching in 1993 to pursue a freelance writing career. Combining his interest in the supernatural with the communication skills he developed as a student and teacher of literature—and noticing a lack of good writing and research on local hauntings—he quickly found his niche. He began his research and writing, then added talks and the wildly popular walking tours of local haunted areas.
While he is a believer in ghosts himself (although, he says, in a way “completely different from the pop-Hollywood way of looking at them”), Winfield isn’t some wild-eyed crackpot trying to push his views on the public.
“It isn’t my goal to make believers out of people,” he says. “I want to entertain them. Our tours succeed in that. I want people to think, to consider possibilities that they may never have considered before, and to look at all issues objectively.”
Regarding skeptics, Winfield says, “We have nice conversations. I always learn something from the interchange.”
Winfield’s accomplishments demonstrate an unwavering commitment to his home region and the community. All his books were published locally, and he repeatedly lists education about local history as a major goal of his endeavors.
“I want people to know their local heritage,” he says. “I want to promote real learning about regional history, architecture, Native American issues, and serious speculation about otherworldly matters.”
The Ghost Walks
Winfield’s company, Haunted History Ghost Walks, was incorporated in 2004, but he and his associates have been walking Western New Yorkers through the paranormal history of this area for a decade.
“The ghost walks, well, they started out as a lark,” Winfield recalls, “sort of a way to give back to East Aurora by commemorating it and bringing people to the village.”
After uncovering a wealth of ghost stories and mystical folklore in the Roycroft community and the surrounding village, Winfield saw an opportunity. New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina, had successful walking tours of their haunted areas—so why not East Aurora?
He was right—the original ghost walks gained instant popularity. Clearly he had found a formula that worked, and the next step was to expand and grow his walking tours. Now with a staff of what he adoringly calls “talented and spiritual” people that grew from two to seven to ten, Haunted History Ghost Walks leads tours in six areas: East Aurora, Allentown, the Theater District, Lewiston, North Tonawanda, and, as a new addition this year, Niagara Falls. Tours run year-round, rain or shine, and they last ninety minutes.
Winfield notes that while the walks may not make staunch believers out of everyone, they are fun and they do leave lasting impressions.
“I think, for sure, people come away with a new respect for parapsychology,” he says. “The matter is more than just a conflict between believers (on faith) and doubters (on logic).”
Plus, you never know what can happen when a group visits a haunted place. “About once a year something dramatic and potentially psychic happens on a walk,” Winfield notes. During a 1999 tour of the Theater District, for example, “An apparently psychic cat—yes, there are animal ghosts—appeared to thirty people in a tour group just outside the Sphere supper club. The image walked through the group as if it owned it ... and dematerialized. I was immersed in the presentation and never saw it. The entire group was holding its breath—I thought it was my rendition of the ghost stories of the Sphere. Two of my assistants, both Ph.D.’s, pointed out the real reason later.”
The Halloween season is, of course, prime time for ghost walking, and Winfield’s calendar is full of opportunities to take a walk on the supernatural side. For the full schedule, visit www.masonwinfield.com.
Books by Mason Winfield
Shadows of the Western Door (1997), a survey of haunted sites
and mysteries of the area.
A Ghosthunter’s Journal (1999), a collection of thirteen fictional tales.
Spirits of the Great Hill (2001), a sequel to Shadows.
Haunted Places of Western New York (2003), a supernatural guided tour.
Jay Pawlowski is a writer living in Buffalo.
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