The Halloween season is obviously coming, and as we draw into it, most years I hook onto a theme that gets us - me, at least - into the zone of this very powerful time of year. This season and its holiday are intuitive and spiritual, but they're also celebratory and spooky, and a lot of the energy for the former themes comes from the latter.

In honor of our native upstate New York landscape and of our Iroquois friends needing as much support as they can get, this might be the year that we revisit Native American supernatural legend and custom. Since many of us are going to don our own masks and guises pretty soon, the tale below - © 2010, Mason Winfield and Michael Bastine - is from our chapter on False Faces, those marvelous, mysterious medicine masks thought to have so much power. 

 Surely something accounts for the strange but spare supernatural folklore from today's Delaware Park in Buffalo, particularly a pastoral space used as a golf course and containing a big stone with a plaque. It is a memorial to 300 soldiers buried there during a single disastrous winter during the War of 1812. This is a short section from my recent book Ghosts of 1812 (2009).

It seemed all too fortuitous, co-author Michael Bastine giving a talk in Lincoln, VT, on the due date of our book together. The Peace Village Elders Conference happens to be right around the mountain from the publishers' home base in Rochester, VT. I decided to do the last research and editing that week on the road and drop in on Bear & Company/Inner Traditions International in person. On the first Monday of August I dropped off the disk of "Talking Animals and Medicine People." Lots of editing, cutting, art, and marketing lies ahead, but at least they know for sure they have a book coming. They have something in their hands that their editors could turn into something worth reading. This is a section from the False Faces chapter. 

Author and healer Ted Williams (1930-2005) was raised on the Tuscarora Reservation. He was a close friend of Michael Bastine, and I was lucky enough to know him myself. Here are two miraculous tales that involve him from the upcoming book, TALKING ANIMALS & MEDICINE PEOPLE. By Mason Winfield and Michael Bastine, © 2010.

TALKING ANIMALS and MEDICINE PEOPLE, my book-in-progress with co-author Michael Bastine, features a final chapter on ghosts and psychic experiences related to the New York Iroquois. Three of Michael's dreams seem to fit into that category so well. They are below.

May 5, 2010, 2:47am

March 15, 2010, 8:32am

February 11, 2010, 3:57pm

January 23, 2010, 11:03pm

December 22, 2009, 7:33am