It's hard to draw the line between what's spooky and what's sacred. Most of us tend to use words like spiritual, holy, religious and sacred to describe the supernaturalism our culture likes. Terms like magic, superstition, occultism and even witchcraft are ones we apply to somebody else's. This website is dedicated to paranormal study in upstate New York. It doesn't try to make those classifications.
As the years go by I find myself less interested in individual ghosts, sightings, and haunted-sites and more in the general big picture: the patterns that might be made by them. This website is becoming more comprised of my reflections and finished literary pieces than it is a blog or itemization of hot new reports.
Every study has to have a focus. Ours is in general Iroquois country, a region bounded on the north by Interstate 90, on the south by the Pennsylvania line, and sandwiched east and west by the Hudson and Lake Erie. Cities in this tract include Buffalo, Rochester, Jamestown, Elmira, Auburn, Syracuse, Utica, Rome, Binghamton, Saratoga Springs, and Albany. But for a diagonal cutout of the lower Hudson Valley and the topmost chunk of the Adirondacks, this was the general territory of the Confederacy of Six Nations, the Longhouse People.
Like my books, this site is a regional survey into the "fuzzy fringe" (we'll use the term "paranormal" for almost all of it) in this region: UFOs, mystery monsters, hauntings, earth energies, ancient anomalies, offbeat religious groups, magical societies, "Fortean phenomena" (named for Charles Fort, collector of worldwide mysteries), Native American supernaturalism, and even old-fashioned ghostlore.
By now I've written or edited eight books, including Shadows of the Western Door (1997), Haunted Rochester (2008), Supernatural Saratoga (2009), and Ghosts of 1812 (2009). You can order most of them on line at BuffaloBooks.Com. As of summer 2010 I'm hard at work on Talking Animals & Medicine People, a book on the supernaturalism of the Iroquois co-authored by Michael Bastine. It will be published in 2011 by Inner Traditions International/Bear & Company.
I welcome you to this website and encourage you to contact me through it if you have any questions or observations to make.