Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:34:25 -0500 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=0 I got a date on July 24 down in Olean. It's not with any living person, though. It's with a place, and in honor of an old friend. I wouldn't miss it for anything. If any of you are off that night around 7 you might join me and a couple of others there at the Olean Public Library. For Duce Bowen - the culture-keeper of the Allegany Seneca. Below is the press release: The Olean Public Library will be holding a commemoration honoring the life and writing of Duwayne “Duce” Bowen, the Seneca author and storyteller. The program will take place on Thursday, July 24, at 7:00 P. M. and will include selected readings from his two books of Contemporary Seneca Indian Tales of the Supernatural (Bowman Books), and comments by family and friends. The event, which is free and open to the public, will also invite comments from anybody who knew him, or from those who are familiar with his works. Among those of special interest in this evening of personal reflection, in addition to Mr. Bowen’s family, will be Grandma Edna Gordon, a Seneca elder and poet, whose last book, Voice of the Hawk Elder, was the winner in the Native American studies category of the 2007 National Best Books Award; Mason Winfield, “The Supernatural Historian,” and author of six published books on the Paranormal and Supernatural; and Virginia Richardson, a freelance writer, who was adopted into the Heron Clan. Her husband, Charles, was a close friend of Mr. Bowen’s and adopted as his brother in the Beaver Clan. Markus Bowen, one of Mr. Bowen’s grandsons, will also share the platform. He will read one of his Grandfather’s stories. Born in Salamanca, Duwayne Bowen (1946-2006) was a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians. He attended a one room school on Robinson Run, the Allegany Indian School, the Salamanca Schools, the Vale Technical School, Blairsville, PA, and took courses at Jamestown Community College. A descendant of John O’Bail, the Cornplanter, he was formerly the chairperson of the Cornplanter Descendants’ Association, an organization dedicated to preserving the only Indian Land in Pennsylvania, and to storing historical data. The Cornplanter was a Principal Chief of the Seneca People. The Bowen family, victims of the Kinzua crisis, lost their land and their home to the waters of the Kinzua. (This was the forced removal of the Seneca People during the 1960’s due to the construction of the Kinzua Dam on the Allegany River). The breaking of the Pickering Treaty had a profound effect on those Senecas who were forced from their homes. According to Mr. Bowen’s widow, Jan, “Kinzua destroyed a way of life. Within a year and a half, we lost practically all of our old people. They died of a broken heart.” She feels much of her husband’s storytelling was deeply motivated by a desire to preserve the memory of this way of life. This program is made possible through funding from the New York State Council on the Arts. For further information, call Robert Taylor, at the Olean Public Library, (716) 372-0200, or Pamela Bowen, at the Seneca Nation Library, (716) 945-3157. Mason Winfield Sun, 20 Jul 2008 18:25:30 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=1 In the spring of 2008 Mason Winfield was contacted through his website by the owner of a manufacturing company (ARCOT) in Wheatfield, NY, at the edge of the Bell Aircraft complex. While the 1950s site didn’t ring any immediate bells, something about it “felt interesting” to Mason. As an example of a “young” potential haunt, it looked like a perfect case for the newly-formed Spirit Way Project’s second site-study. SWP organizational members who visited the site on Wednesday evening, June 18, were: Researcher/Asian Energies expert Sensei Gerald Halligan Author/Christian Mysteries expert John Koerner Researcher/author Rob Lockhart Author/researcher Mason Winfield SWP Coordinator/Secretary Lurana Reed They were joined by S.P.I.R.I.T. Team Paranormal Investigators Liz Houlihan, Meghann Daley and Chris Gannon. THE AREA: This part of Niagara County has been settled by Europeans for two centuries and visited and contested by Native American societies for thousands of years. The location of the 20th century complex is an odd one, not close to the river or any geological landmarks. We could think of no major historic events, at least before the Bell operation took over the site. THE SITE: The Bell Aircraft Corporation started up in Wheatfield, NY, in 1935. Not only did it manufacture many of the US fighting aircraft in World War II, but it contined its work during the subsequent Cold War. Many of the technological advances of the 1950s took place here. Some of the research and experimentation for the Manhattan Project may have gone on here, as well as work on rocket engines, including the one for the X-1 airplane in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. Other things are only rumored. The whole area was doubtless top-secret in the 1950s and 60s. Fences and security gates still ring the complex. Bell was taken over by another company in 1960 and declined shortly after. The main part of the Bell complex is along the south side of the vast tract, closest to Niagara Falls Boulevard. Its mess of labs, factories and testing areas is voluminous and storied. While not high buildings, they are long, wide, sprawling and rundown. Industrial and creepy, the site resembles a post-apocalyptic landscape – what most of our cities would look like ten miles from ground zero after a nuke attack. More than once we were impressed by its cinematic possibilities. It would also be a good practice-field for your revolutionary skills if they include rock-tossing and window-breaking. OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE AREA: 1) The old Niagara Falls Boulevard is a busy enough road today. Most people traveling between Buffalo and Niagara Falls cross Grand Island using the bridges. This road, Route 62 – a mile or two from the Niagara River as it nears the city of Niagara Falls – would have been the main land route between Niagara Falls and Williamsville in the 19th century. 2) The site is vast, laterally. It’s as big as an airport. The gates entering into it off of Walmore Road have to be numbered so people don’t drive around endlessly looking for what they want. 3) There are many elements of both intrigue and danger here. Deserted factories, military testing-grounds, flooded underground chambers, missile silos... One such well from hell is just feet to the east of the garage doors of our site - the ARCOT Custom Countertops building. We peered down into some sort of man-made hole into which metal stairs descended into water. One of the ARCOT employees told us he sent a 30-foot plumline into it and didn’t hit bottom. 4) This is a hazardous site. Notwithstanding the sheerly structural dangers, there is almost certainly toxic waste somewhere at the Bell complex, and it is all close enough to the legendary Love Canal to feel the influence. It wouldn’t surprise us if there was radioactivity. Plus, the work done at Bell was inherently dangerous. People were killed working here. People were killed flying planes with parts made here. How many deaths did the P-39 wreak in Europe? 5) There’s just a lot of “bad vibes” around here. The whole region has been heavily militarized. Had World War Three broken out in the 1950s and 60s, there would have been attacks launched at and from nearby Air Force bases. The site has been rumored of involvement in the Manhattan Project – basically the development of the nuclear bomb. (This is not confirmed, but see what Rob Lockhart has to say about it.) 6) One thing that may not be directly significant to a psychic site is relevant to a paranormal one: the whole region along the Niagara is a UFO zone. The reports were at a high point in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. THE BUILDING: The individual building we studied – the (as of July 2008) former ARCOT - is not at all prepossessing and has no hints of intrigue. Set aside by at least a quarter mile from the main complex, it’s a rectangular one-story factory devoted to its single purpose: manufacturing granite counter tops such as some of you have in your kitchens. From the inside, almost every part of the building is visible from every other part. It has just a bit of enclosed space, a several-room area to the southeast called “the office.” The ARCOT building is a stand-alone concrete structure a ways off from the sprawling Bell buildings. It is as unimposing as any haunted site one could imagine. HAUNTED HISTORY: Mason Winfield has been recording psychic folklore and reports for fifteen years. Authors Rob Lockhart and John Koerner have been at it for at least the five years of their professional association with Mason. We can all say categorically that buildings tend to be haunted in patterns, and that these patterns are very seldom the ones you experience through entertainment. It is rare that a haunted building breaks very far out of the general profile. This is not the place to discuss the matter further. For its second time out, SWP has really lucked onto another OOPS – Out Of Pattern Site. That, of course, is what SWP is looking for. PSYCHIC PHENOMENA: The impression that the building is haunted is quite strong among the current employees. The owner who contacted Mason reported that his workers were so freaked that they didn’t want to do overnight shifts. We found, though, that the psychic phenomena reported by the workers was shockingly localized. It was all on the east side of the building. This is about a fifth of the total floorspace of the operation. To cite the phenomena reported: 1) Visual/mental: There are apparitions reported here. Few of them are coherent, even in psychic terms. Most of them are blurry moving images. The few who crystallize into anything by consensus are almost comical in this location: “the Little Girl Ghost.” What would any natural little girl have ever been doing here, at this location? The whole picture is irrational. And the image of the LGG has been reported in an odd spot, too: the top of the one second-story space, the storage-area just above what they call “the office” on the east side of the building. 2) Physical: The physical effects reported here are not distinguished (among haunted sites). You get the usual SPOTUK you expect at haunted sites. This is Mason’s term for Spooky Phenomena Of The Usual Kind. You know the drill: moving objects, electrical phenomena, and unexplained sounds. The sound effects are probably the most dramatic. One reedy shrieking was so dramatic that it came through to a man working on a loud machine – with headphones and music piping through them. The fact that he heard any other sound at all through those two impediments means either that the shriek was the sudden deafening cry of Godzilla outside – spotting an outraged Mechagodzilla across the Niagara – or that the sound was not external. It was projected into the mind of the experiencer. This does not mean that it was not legitimate. While we would hesitate to say that any psychic experience was “all in the mind” of any individual experiencer, we do notice that some psychic sounds – usually ones connected to psychic apparitions (ghosts) - do have an unusual sound quality. Under questioning, the witnesser does often acknowledge that the matter was not one of normal sound. The few tests there are out there of psychic sounds which are external seem to concur that – like the recorded calls of Bigfoot – they have an unusual sound profile. They are not natural noises. Let’s follow with Part Two, the comments of individual members of SWP and its friends S.P.I.R.I.T. Paranormal Investigators. Mason Winfield Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:17:34 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=2 In honor of the recent Roycroft Renaissance weekend in East Aurora we should discuss one of the most mysterious artifacts on the historic campus. An architectural feature for which my late friend Austin Fox ("Church Tales of the Niagara Frontier") had no explanation is surely worth a closer look. In a high gable on the north side of the Roycroft Chapel is a red, bas-relief, bearded face. It’s right there at Main Street and South Grove, in open view on the southwest corner, but few visitors or residents ever notice. It was apparently put there at the building’s construction in 1899 by Roycroft sculptor and blacksmith Jerome Connor, known to work in terra cotta. It looks a bit like the Wizard of Oz’ cowardly lion, and indeed, Oz illustrator W. W. Denslow was a prime Roycrofter. I know of nothing else like it at Roycroft. Some say this face is the North wind (not commonly thought of as red). In most drawings, the winds appear open-mouthed and with familiar gusty breath. This one looks far more like old images of the lion, a prime symbol in Renaissance alchemy and astrology. It surely seems to be the focus of the gaze of Michelangelo’s statue across Main Street on the Middle School lawn. The bearded, paternal face certainly resembles traditional depictions of sky gods and reminds me of the Mormon “sunstone” of their Nauvoo temple. Twin pairs of rays from the cheeks and beard suggest pyramidal angles with the ground. (I think again of the pyramid-roofed Ruskin Room, Hubbard’s study at the northeast corner of the Roycroft Inn.) The pyramid evokes - like the lion - the esoteric symbol of primal Fire, the kingly element. The face on the Chapel reminds me of William Blake’s painting “The Ancient of Days.” This shows the mighty bearded Creator reclining on the clouds and reaching his hand down from the firmament. Beams from his spanned thumb and forefinger (like those from the cheeks of the Roycroft face) make the old Masonic symbol of the compass. This painting, like much of Blake’s work, seems to show the influence of Gnostic ideas. Blake’s figure is looking down into the world, and the Chapel-face looks more out across it, but the attitudes of the two are similar. There are reasons to look to occultism as an explanation for anything curious at Roycroft. Community founder Hubbard was all too fond of putting suggestive imagery into the art, architecture, and literature of Roycroft (most of which, presumably, he controlled). Hubbard was rather widely thought to have been a member, possibly even a founder, of AMORC, H. Spencer Lewis' outfit of Rosicrucians. (The name means "Ancient and Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross.") A lot of medieval and alchemical symbolism surfaces in Rosicrucian work, and this is just one feature at Roycroft that could have Rosicrucian roots. Rosicrucianism, of course, was not an isolated movement. It had roots and connections to a big web of Euro/Mediterranean mysticism we'd call "the Hermetic-Cabalist tradition." Its closest link might be to Freemasonry, and by Elbert Hubbard's time it had open arms with Theosophy. We're finding a lot of correspondence to Euro sacred tradition in other world cultures, too. If one looked at the Roycroft Campus as a sacred mini-city like some of those in Egypt or Mesoamerica, this striking face on the northernmost feature could be considered a ceremonial doorway. The Red Face is the northern gate. I have a few ideas about the other points, which I'll develop when I have more to say. So far no one has explained the face on the Chapel, but I like to think (on the basis of no evidence whatsoever) that it may be linked specifically to a Renaissance German monarch, Frederick of the Rhine, the Elector Palatine, the so-called “Winter King,” and sometimes styled “The Rosicrucian King.” Frederick established a short-lived court in which all forms of philosophy thrived, and to which alchemists and magicians flocked. He became a hero to the secret societies ever after. Frederick’s coat of arms held a man-like red lion, and in the political cartoons of the day he was portrayed by that image. I have yet to hear any other explanations at all for "The Red Face on the Chapel," so let’s keep that one for awhile. Mason Winfield Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:11:12 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=3 Foreword: In the spring of 2008 Mason Winfield was contacted through his website by a woman who worked in what is called the Tonawanda Indian Community Center. The building is in Akron, NY, at the southern edge of the Tonawanda Reservation. Our witness and others who frequent the building were convinced not only that the site was haunted, but that the observed psychic phenomena was escalating into a troubling crescendo in the winter and spring of 2008. They feared that something worse might be ahead, and they called Mason in to try to figure out what the message was, and possibly even to dispel the matter. Several founding members of Spirit Way Project – with affiliated paranormal investigators S.P.I.R.I.T. – showed up on May 21 to take a look around. Our general summary is in Article 1. To follow are further observations from our individual members, with our conclusion. Sensei GERALD HALLIGAN: Nothing I encountered here rang a bell from the Asian perspectives of energy-flow in which I have been trained. My subjects may simply not be relevant here. I busied myself making maps of the building and recording the spots of reports. Parts of this building have three levels, parts only one. I made drawings of the building at each level based on the fire-escape plan and plotted the spots at which psychic incidents tend to be reported. I found only two points of congruence: a spot on the gym floor; and one on the level above it, sort of a hallway by a library, with display cases holding many maps and drawings. What this means, I don’t know; but it is safe to say that if there is an earthly/geological component to the pattern of reports, this would represent the power-spot. We had no reports from directly under the same spot - in the basement - but this doesn’t surprise us. The basement is a virtual crawlspace under this position. People don’t hang out there much. This spot was not the same as the electrical power-spot Ray Watson had found with his EMF detector, the area of crossing water-pipes and electrical fuse-boxes. That was up to sixty feet away, to the west, from this spot under the gym floor. We also can't connect it to that one Halloween party in 2006, the event at which the missing little girl followed the apparition into the basement. Despite the fact that it was at the same level of the building, there is not enough clarity in the reports we have gotten. Author/researcher JOHN KOERNER: I noticed a theme of feelings of negative energy at this building. One of our contacts feels that it is seeking to divide the people on this Reservation. Maybe that was the building’s original purpose. The fact that this is a WPA building may be significant, even ironic. It is a “white” building just off of Reservation territory but meant to unify Native American people. For the people who live and work near it it may hold an understandable tension. The location is also important. The building is isolated, accidentally or not, from its surroundings. It sits in the middle of a “Power Triangle”: the folkloric railroad tracks, Tonawanda Creek, and a branch of that creek. On the map this formation is striking. In the reports, I also noticed a lot of focus on children. If it is an entity or a targeted force, could it be targeting a certain person, perhaps even a certain child? S.P.I.R.I.T. Team Paranormal Investigators MEGHANN DALEY and LIZ HOULIHAN: While we did not capture any tangible evidence at the time of our visit, we did experience very intense feelings in certain areas of the building. The gym is our primary area of interest. This is where we experienced the strongest psychic and emotional phenomena, including heaviness in the chest, watery eyes and an energy that compelled us to step back out of the room. Even standing on the balcony overlooking the gym stirred strong feelings which could be described as an intense sense of power over those who may have once been below. It was as if one had to be important to stand upon that height. We do believe that paranormal activity is quite possibly occurring. The causes of what we sensed and what others have reported are not easily ascertained. We are hesitant to apply labels like “ghost,” “curse” or simply Mother Nature’s own energies converging upon one spot. Whatever it is, something is certainly harbored there. We will be returning for further investigation. Author/researcher ROB LOCKHART: People who had personal experience with the suspected psychic activity spoke just as often about the negative emotional effects of the building. Everyone we interviewed made it apparent that the building seemed to amplify personal hostile energy, like a stereo system for bad feelings. What would have been minor disagreements in other environments seemed to blossom into full arguments inside the community center. A quote from one of our hosts stands out: "As soon as you walk through the door, people are at each other’s throats. (This building) brings out the bad in people." We gather that this was part of the reason we were called in. It was also apparent that there was something we weren’t being told. Mason Winfield started pushing a couple of times, and people shied away from answering some of his questions. The matter supports Mason and Michael Bastine in their opinion that this could in some fashion be an "in house" issue. Dowser/Geomancer RAY WATSON: It looks like the EMF "hot spots" on the gym floor I mentioned to everyone when we were inside the building were not due to natural power-points, but instead to man-made electricity, a batch of fuses and wires just below the gym. Still, energy is energy, and artificial electricity can be involved in psychic effects. They might want to get this spot neutralized if they are still troubled by effects in the general area of this spot. After everyone left I walked around the outside of the Community Building. I found no noxious ley lines or geopathic rays. This is all the more evidence to me that whatever they are encountering is no normal haunting. It’s either not precisely a haunting at all, or it has different causes. Author/Researcher MASON WINFIELD: I thought from the start that this was not a simple haunting. The types of apparitions gave it away. As common as they are in movies, these AFAs – Altered-Form Apparitions – are almost never reported at “ordinary” haunted sites in our region. These AFAs would seem to be a sign of something different. We’ve found them almost exclusively associated with Native American power-sites and crisis-times. Political turmoil on the Reservation often shows itself in psychic outbreaks. AFAs were quite common all over the Allegany Reservation during the middle 1960s, for instance, when the Allegany Seneca were losing parts of their territory to the Kinzua Dam. They were common on the Tuscarora Reservation in the 1970s when the Tuscarora under the leadership of “Mad Bear” Anderson were in one of their legendary beefs with New York State over power and property-rights. It could be that the Medicine People are at it again – on both sides. Why this should be expressing itself at the building to which we were summoned – and why no one there would talk about it – is a problem in sorting the matter out. From other sources in the Iroquois community I hear that there could be two causes of collective unrest at this time on this Reservation. One is the recent parole of a young Native American man who, in an apparent shotgun accident, killed a young girl in the late 1990s. Not everyone is happy with his return to the Reservation. His nationality – he is not a Seneca – could have something to do with it. Another factor could be some discontent with the current crop of chiefs, and possibly a related curse-slinging contest among the local Medicine People. But I didn’t think I got the whole picture until I talked with Michael Bastine. His conclusions are pretty much ours, and it’s fitting that he gets the last direct word. Algonquin mystic MICHAEL BASTINE: I don’t think the issue of that one kid coming back to the Rez would be enough to set off fireworks by itself. The beef with the chiefs might be something. But there’s always some kinda stuff going on on those Reservations, and it doesn’t always heat up like that in a single building. This is most likely a case of a big backup of psychic energy that shows up in these kinds of reports. In the old days they used to clean that stuff up every couple years, lot of the time during the festivals – the Midwinter festival and the Strawberry one in the summer. It wouldn’t ever get to a head like this in the old days. Maybe they haven’t been doing that for that building. I understand why. The really good healers, there aren’t too many of them left around here any more. I can think of one real good healer on that Reservation. He may not lead the regular ceremonies, but he ought to be able to handle a clearing at this site. He’s one of the chiefs. I don’t know him real well. Maybe they better get him on it, if they get along with him. If they can’t get him in there, I’d have to get thinking about who they can call in. If it was ten, twenty years ago I’d have sent ‘em to Ted or Mad Bear. (Mike refers to his late Tuscarora friends, medicine man/statesman Wallace “Mad Bear” Anderson and False Face healer/author Ted Williams.) They’d have got it handled real quick. SWP RECOMMENDATION: Based on eyewitness reports of various "normal" ghosts over the years, the building probably is haunted, and harmlessly. Legions of other buildings are haunted just like it, with no complications other than the occasional sighting and no signs at all that the “entities” – be that what they are – are trying to say something. In our best judgment, something else is going on. The connection to old Iroquois tradition makes the matter trickier. But one possibility seems far more probable than those of either “message ghosts,” an occult malaise or a targeted curse. It seems likely that a pileup of psychic energy has happened at the TICC. It’s like a basement that gets cluttered because generations of people who use the house leave bits and pieces of their stuff here. In this case the detritus – the lost and found – is in the currency of the psychic. It's not the sign of a psychic war, it's the sign of a building that needs tending to in other areas. This is fairly common in any big, public Reservation building – the proverbial Longhouse at which people gather and which symbolizes the culture of the Iroquois. This unrest is going to show itself in a number of ways, including apparitions that are strange even for apparitions. In the old days regular ceremonies were held every couple of years to clear out that psychic garbage. All world societies had customs of the sort. It may simply have been too long since the healing has been done properly at that building. We think the building needs a traditional healer (or several) to come in and do a cleansing ceremony, possibly tied into traditional ceremonies. They better hustle up if they want to get to Strawberry-time in 2008. This probably needs to get done every couple of years. We know a fine traditional healer on the Tonawanda Reservation who should be the ideal person to do this service. If he is disinterested, we can recommend healers from other Western New York Reservations. This appears to us, though, to be a Six Nations (Iroquois) matter calling exclusively for Six Nations solutions. Mason Winfield Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:17:51 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=4 In the spring of 2008 Mason Winfield was contacted through his website by a woman who works in what is called the Tonawanda Indian Community Center. The building is in Akron, NY, off the southeastern corner of the Tonawanda Reservation. Our witness and others who frequent the building were convinced not only that the site was haunted, but that the psychic phenomena was escalating. By the winter of 2008 it had come to a troubling crescendo. Our contacts feared that something worse might be ahead, and they called Mason in to try to figure out the matter and possibly even dispel it. Mason has never felt that he possessed occult powers. He has some heavy friends who, if anyone does, just might. It looked like a perfect case for the newly-formed Spirit Way Project’s first site-study. SWP organizational members who visited the TICC on Wednesday evening, May 21, were: Researcher/Asian Energies expert Sensei Gerald Halligan Author/Christian Mysteries expert John Koerner Researcher/author Rob Lockhart Dowser/healer Ray Watson Author/researcher Mason Winfield Paranormal Investigators: S.P.I.R.I.T. Team Members Meghann Daley and Liz Houlihan THE AREA: This part of Western New York is at the junction of several counties (Genesee, Niagara, Orleans and Erie). It has been visited and contested by Europeans since the 1500s. (A trail marker near our site commemorates George Washington’s passage along a local trail during one of the French & Indian Wars.) The region was heavily settled by people of European ancestry only since the very late 1700s/early 1800s. The Western New York reservations were all established and settled by the very early 1800s, and it is safe to say that this Reservation has been in Seneca hands since. Other Iroquois folk live here, too. We know of some Cayuga and Mohawk who live on this Rez. THE SITE: The address is just off the Reservation, and this itself has been the cause of some tension. It may have been set off the Reservation so that the chiefs might have no direct authority over it. It’s hard to be sure whose idea this was or what its point was. As it is, though, the building is in an odd no-man’s state, a Seneca Nation building but not perhaps under the direct authority of the nation’s chiefs. THE BUILDING: The building is an early 20th century gym/assembly hall made of wood and natural stone. It’s very much like the lodge of a typical upstate public park. On Bloomingdale Road just northeast of the village of Akron, it was constructed on what we are told was open farm fields in 1937 as part of the WPA projects. [These “Works Progress/Projects Administrations” (1935-1943) were government sponsored employment projects that did a lot of public building throughout the US, including the construction of Western New York parks like Emery and Chestnut Ridge.] Though it’s a classier building than that of your typical fast food/drugstore chain, no suggestion of classic architecture is apparent. It’s a squarish building just tall enough to be a basketball court. It has a rough basement, a bit of storage and a few meeting rooms and offices on the first and second floors. Today the building is what it calls itself, a community center. It hosts a small library, offices, rec space, and a basketball court that does multiple duty as a dance floor, assembly-space, and indoor campground during emergencies like storms and power-outages. Since so many Reservation folk lack indoor plumbing, people are using the outdoor faucet at all times of day or night. THE BUILDING OVERVIEW: In the big picture, it shouldn’t seem incongruous to encounter a ghostly gym, at least by the Reservation. This is more than just a gym, anyway. The Tonawanda Indian Community Center should be regarded as a cultural power-building, significant to the Reservation psyche in a way that would surprise most members of the greater US. The Native American mind, at least the preindustrial one, fails to make the rigid delineations found in the Western/European way of thinking. To the Native American mind, one use or function does not exclude all others. The Native American mind tends to accept that that which is strongly spiritual can also be equally political, social, military, recreational… It’s not at all uncommon for revered trails to have been used for migration-routes, warpaths, hunting-tracks, and vision-quests. Also, as the community center, the Tonawanda Indian Community Center is the proverbial Longhouse of the Reservation community. The Longhouse is the namesake building of the Iroquois people. The image is a very powerful one relevant to national pride and identity. As with other rural upstate communities, the folk of the Tonawanda Reservation live in houses or trailers; but this is the Reservation’s public building. If you hold to the “spiritualist” theory of ghosts – that ghosts are the spirits of the human dead which have motives for coming back – you should have no problems with the concept of this ghostly gym. OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE SITE: 1) The location of this building is interesting. It’s in an isolated position geologically, framed in a neat triangle of the Tonawanda Creek, one of its branches, and an apparently “dead” – unused and cut-off - railroad tracks. In some folkloric systems, streams are thought to be both conduits and “cutter-offers” of otherworldly energies, depending on the direction from which you approach them; train tracks are often conduits. There are thus associations to psychic folklore from several perspectives. 2) Shanks Road is walking distance north of the TICC, and Sandhill Road less than a mile east of it. There are many reports from both roads of varied Iroquois bogies: shapeshifters, Little People, Witch Lights, and ordinary ghosts. 3) These tracks – part of the New York Central that, we are told, once hosted trains to and from Batavia – seem to run today only between Akron and Oakfield. There’s an old pattern of those tracks being involved in psychic flaps. 1888 was a great year for it circulating around Batavia. One may be a purely European-style train accident/“ghost-conductor” cycle that originated in Batavia, flowered in North Tonawanda, and had its accident somewhere in between, in March 1888. (We’re still trying to track something called “Black Ash Swamp.” Sorry, it may be basic to locals in the know, as these facts so often are; but no town or county historian we’ve talked to has been able to find it for us. However, there are swamps near our site, and other spots named in the train-accident motif, like “Indian Falls.”) The cursed train should have passed right over these tracks. There were “witch-light” reports concerning the same tracks in Batavia-and-area in the winter of 1887-1888 and on the Reservation in the 1990s. 4) The Seneca in this area often bury their dead behind their houses, without elaborate monuments. In just a generation or two no one may know where the graves are. It would be hard to rule anything out about a piece of ground around here. OUR VISIT: We toured every part of the building. The fieldstone basement walls looked older to all of us than the work typical of the 1930s, and we wondered if there hadn’t been some earlier construction on the site whose foundations had been used for this. (Mason’s own c.1880 basement is just like it.) If that were the case, we’d be interested in the history of that building and its inhabitants. On the other hand, the WPA seemed to be fond of antique and natural stonework, as we see in its constructions at local public parks. We have to leave this date as we are told: 1937. If it seems really relevant at some future point we can do some more digging. HAUNTED HISTORY: Reservation folk have considered the building haunted almost from its inception. The oldest person we interviewed recalled that the impression was developed since her childhood. With some allegedly haunted places, the apparent/folkloric motive for the haunting may be what took place at them. With others, it may be because of what’s in them, or what comes into them. Museums so often get haunted reputations, and reports of experiences surge when new and highly-charged exhibitions come in. This should be no surprise if you have any faith in something that could be called psychic energy. Think of the displays of weapons, mummies, grave-goods, idols, crystals and jewelry that come into some museums! Think of the intense energy focused on some of these objects by anonymous, obscure artists in some temple or rain forest. Two old carvings on loan from a Rochester museum may have had a hand in the reports at this building. One was of an Iroquois bogie called in books, “The Legs.” (This carving was called by these folk, “The Hairy Legs.”) The other was of the Great Flying Head, one of a group of monstrous beings who may have been involved in the origin-myth of one clan of the False Face healers’ cult. Children were particularly creeped out by the carving of the Legs, and not until both carvings were returned to the museum did one spell of the haunted energy subside. People we interviewed were foggy on the exact dates, either of the manufacture of the carvings, their arrival here, and their departure. (We could pursue the matter if it seemed vital, but so far it does not.) The building also has many old books, maps, paintings and artifacts vital to the identity of the folk who live on this Res. While most of them are no older than a century, in the belief-system of “power-objects,” it would be hard to say that none of them could have been a source of the act-up energy. It would be just as hard to pinpoint which of them it definitely was. STUDY of PSYCHIC PHENOMENA: Whenever there’s a conflict involving Reservation folk – either a serious feud between individuals, a fight with New York State, or a power struggle over the national direction - psychic reports flower. It is either a sign of psychic turmoil within the nation or the way the Medicine People send up warning signs. At any site, Mason’s philosophy usually breaks the reported psi down into two categories: Visual/mental and Physical. 1) Visual/mental: We heard a few accounts of what we might consider “internal psi,” that is, completely within the minds of individual witnesses. We hear it’s a virtual rite of passage, for instance, for Reservation children to dislike or otherwise react to parts of the gym. Some little kids won’t even enter it because they think they see old people watching like an audience. One 14-year old at our interview was pointed out to us as one who, before the age of five, had claimed to see many apparitions in the gym. She stopped reporting them by about the time she entered school. When we asked her about those experiences, she could not remember seeing anything at all. It was something others testified that she said she saw. (Many children who talked of apparitions at a young age cannot remember having seen what everyone remembers them saying that they saw. This is not remarkable. How many of us remember anything clearly from before the age of five? In the case of young children reporting ghosts, it’s either a facet of seeing - or the tendency to feed us remarkably consistent whoppers - that they grow out of.) The most dramatic psychic phenomena of this type (mental/visual) reported at this site is external and visual – apparitions - many involving multiple witnesses. The ones we were told about fall into two categories: a) Fairly traditional “haunted public building” images – like phantom audiences, lost children, “women in white,” and filmy forms that could be anything drifting or darting by. (We hear these reported at many a theater, church, library and museum.) b) “Altered Form Images.” In this case, all the AFAs we heard of were human-form, but they were creepy. Faceless children and adults have been reported, mostly recently. This could have been what triggered the outreach to us. The apparitions in these cases could be the best sign of what might be going on. In the belief-system we encounter with this type of psychic folklore/report, these latter types of apparitions (AFAs) could be interpreted as chronic projections of power-sites – like Ga’hai Hill, a cursed region on the Allegany Rez. They could also be the timely effects of an apparent curse targeted at individuals, such with a site on the Cattaraugus Rez of which we heard something in 2007. 2) Physical: The tactile, audible, and other sensual effects reported at this Community Center are far more “normal” and typical of other big chronically haunted buildings. To list them: Psychic Sounds: Bouncing basketballs as if from an invisible game; footsteps; crying children; whistling; moving furniture; and even a knocking sound like somebody is hoping to come into the observer’s room. Reported Material Events: a) Doors open and close, sometimes within the sight of observers, sometimes strongly. b) During the Halloween night party of 2006, a girl felt a distinct, substantial push from an invisible presence. It was dramatic enough to be memorable to this day. She encountered it under the arch of a door leading into the basketball court. (When asked to characterize the push, she reported that she felt that it was kind of a “Hey, I’m here!” push… Not a “Get out!” “Look out!” or, “Die, Little Girl, Die!!!!!!!!!!!!”) c) A whiffle ball (the baseball-variety) went missing for at least three weeks. Since at that time they had a perfect dozen of them and kept strict count during classes and events, they knew when they were one short. Weeks later, as a woman was at work cleaning the gym, a door opened as if by the hand of the Invisible Man and the missing whiffle ball rolled in. It was as if some hidden force had taken it for a time and then decided to return it. (In famous cases of both poltergeist outbreaks and religious miracles, this strange relocation of material objects would be called an “apport.” While mind-boggling, they are quite common in these two rare events.) d) During the Halloween night party of 2007, a girl was temporarily lost within the building, setting off a frenzied search. After at least an hour, she reappeared rather naturally in the gym floor. When asked where she had been, she replied that she had followed some strange young girl into the basement of the same building. The little girl turned, revealed that she had no face, then disappeared. At that point the Seneca girl returned directly to the gym. Nothing, though, accounted for the missing time, or the fact that that basement had been searched several times while the girl was missing. On her part, she had had no idea that she had been gone long enough for people to worry about her. As with instances of fairy-captivity, we’re getting the folkloric profile of missing-time events and alternate-dimension visits. e) It’s widely thought that animals often express some collective occult message. In what may be a simple curiosity, some bees had built their hive on the building we had been called in to study. When, after some time, it was cleared away, it was noticed that the hive had been formed around what our Seneca contacts called “a charm.” (“A medicine bag?” Mason asked. None of them had ever seen it. Those who had heard it described remembered it as made of rags, yarn, and little trinkets. None know what became of it.) When the object was discovered they had sent a power-person, one of the male elders, to remove it. No one speculated on its intended purpose, and it would be useless of us to do so. It was another occult connection in the file. 6) One of our contacts heard a bout of heavy knocking on the walls and doors of the shower room when she and two girls were the only people nearby. There was no explanation. 7) Children hear things the adults can’t. Conversely, sometimes adults hear an invisible child call out. (Example: A waifish cry, “Mommy,” is heard in an empty bathroom.) INTANGIBLES: There is seldom a period that can be called pacific among the Iroquois. Some beef or other is always going on on the Reservations. This means only to say that the Iroquois are human. The same condition is true of US society as a whole. The difference may come in that, with Reservation disputes, the Medicine People are often involved, on both sides. Psychic reports are often the first signs, the smoke that signals the fire. It is hard to be sure nothing heavy is looming on this Reservation, and that this type of psychic outbreak might not be a predictor, a sign, or a flower of it. We are sure that there is something we are not being told. One would have to be an insider to be sure what. On the other hand, a less ominous possibility may be the most likely. To follow, the insights of Spirit Way Project founders and associates, and our general conclusions. Mason Winfield Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:44:26 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=5 We'd like to announce the formation of a new Western New York-centered society, hopefully one that can become "the trumpet of a prophecy," in Shelley's words: leaders into a new day of inspiration for a region, helping to raise awareness of spirituality wherever we can reach. SPIRIT WAY PROJECT – formed in the spring of 2008 - is a Buffalo, NY, based group of illuminated friends who have decided to work together to assess, teach and preserve the psychic-spiritual heritage of the Niagara Frontier and all Western New York. Our subject is “the sacred, the psychic, the spiritual, the paranormal.” Our focus is Seneca country, the New York territory of the Phelps-Gorham/Holland Purchase. We are inspired by the international 1970s-80s society called "The Dragon Project," that multidisciplinary outfit that studied "sacred space" and the ancient monuments of the world. The Dragon Project was an earth-mysteries research group devoted to a hard and multi-leveled study of earth-centered supernaturalism as shown in the ancient religious monuments. SWP's focus is regionally narrower and topically broader. Our main point is the general (research and understanding), not the specific (investigation). But, yes, in certain cases we can act as “ghosthunters.” Yes, we study sites and incidents of suspected hauntings and psychic activity about upstate New York and the Niagara Frontier. We visit “haunted houses” and develop special cases. We keep research files about a great many others. But that is only a part of our work. The picture is a lot bigger than that: regional, global, and spiritual. Displays of psychic phenomena are not always what they appear. We take them to be manifestations, flowers in a bed, that may help us someday to understand a garden – and at least teach others why the whole landscape is valuable. Our region’s psychic legacy is its human legacy. We are specialists in many areas. We know the psychic and paranormal from perspectives including history, architecture, folklore, geology, astrology, geomancy and religion. We understand the logic and terminology of parapsychology, and apply those insights to all we survey. We incorporate perspectives from world traditions of folklore, religion and spirituality: African-American, Asian, Celtic, Christian, Native American, Spiritualist, Wiccan. We look for patterns and overlap. We are authors, healers, researchers, ministers, dowsers, astrologers, mediums, readers. We are “out of the box” thinkers. As an association, we are psychic-spiritual generalists. We are cultural preservationists. We are all teachers. We call our partnership after one of the traditional nicknames of the Burned-over District, the small area of upstate New York whose 19th and 20th century legacy of occult and religious energy is one of the more remarkable social developments in American history. Surely it says something about the nature and the people of a region; figuring out what - and telling others – is the key to who we, Spirit Way Project, are. Right now SWP is just a group of friends who have monthly meetings, go on site-visits, and confer about relevant matters. Whether we become an association that takes members, sends newsletters, leads ceremonies, hosts conferences, and even publishes... even our readers can't see that far ahead. It will be an evolution, and we look forward to the ride. You should look forward to our web page, which should be coming soon. SPIRIT WAY PROJECT 2008: DEANS of “THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE” with SPECIALTIES: MICHAEL BASTINE: Native American spirituality/prophecy ELLEN BOURN: Spiritualist Medium and Psychic, Teacher, Healer, Registered Nurse CASSANDRA BUTLER-BAUERLE: Insights from astrology and Spiritualist tradition KELLIE GALUCKI: Coordinator of SWP operations, 1812 history, general research Sensei GERALD HALLIGAN: Asian disciplines, martial arts, general research JOHN KOERNER: Insights from parapsychology and Christian tradition, general research Father JAMES LAGONA: Christian and Spiritualist tradition ROB LOCKHART: Parapsychology, folklore, history, general research LURANA REED: Secretary/treasurer of SWP operations, general research RAY WATSON: Dowser, “Earth Mysteries” specialist MYSHA WEBBER-EAKIN: Spiritualist, African American, and Wiccan insights MASON WINFIELD: Perspectives from parapsychology, “sacred space,” Celtic and Native American spirituality, and general paranormal studies. Mason Winfield Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:41:49 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=6 The papers were on fire with it: “Supernatural Murder!” Her twelve-year-old son had found Clothilde Marchand, wife of a famous artist, dead in their Buffalo home one March afternoon in 1930. Within twenty-four hours two Cayuga women from the Cattaraugus Reservation (near Gowanda) had admitted to the killing at the behest of a Cayuga mystic known as “Sassafras Charley.” He was unavailable for questioning, however; he had died weeks before. Sassafras Charley Bowen had been a familiar figure to many Buffalonians. He sold trinkets, charms, herbs, his own nifty whittling, and, of course, sassafras. To his mostly Seneca neighbors he was a Cayuga, and somewhat offbeat. Sassafras Charley was into the firewater, too, which most people felt accounted for his bad moments - including the practice of sorcery. The rite he performed in front of a cabin of Christian Senecas (one of several deeds that got him into hot water) would probably never have been discovered but for the aftereffects - some red powder he had sprinkled in the snow outside. Several young Seneca threw Sassafras Charley off the reservation and stood guard over the cabin a few nights thereafter. Charley’s death had been hard on his sixty-six-year-old widow Nancy, a Cayuga herbalist and healer. It was she whose hammer-blows had killed the artist’s wife. Her twentysomething co-conspirator Lila Jimerson - half-Seneca, half-Cayuga - was accounted a seer, even the inheritor of some of Charley’s magic after he passed into the dateless night. The Bowens’ close friend Lila had been a model for Henri Marchand, the illustrator at the Buffalo Museum of Natural Sciences. She rode with him around Buffalo as his wife was killed. In the weeks before the murder, Jimerson and Bowen had received letters (never traced to any mortal hand) naming Mrs. Marchand as a “White witch” whose long-range maleficence was behind many reservation deaths. An escalating series of messages from the beyond were arriving through Lila (in a number of occult methods), attesting even that it was Mrs. Marchand who had killed Sassafras Charley. For weeks the two women had been aiming traditional Six Nations magic at Clothilde Marchand. Its failure must have convinced them of her sorcerous power. The final stroke - a ouija board message from Sassafras Charley - might have pushed others over the edge. The Jimerson-Bowen trial may not have sensitized the public to Iroquois issues, but it woke them up to the supernaturalism on the reservation. Though there were many Christian Seneca, Handsome Lake’s Longhouse religion was strong, encouraging the old Six Nations traditions (in which wizardry was an active agent). One “expert” testified that an Iroquois would kill his best friend if convinced this was the source of a hex. The sober scholar Arthur C. Parker agreed that the Six Nations took magic for real. Henri Marchand was a man of suave Gallic manners and great prestige. The papers presumed he was devoted to his family and his work of painting on the Cattaraugus Reservation, where Marchand had many acquaintances. He’d driven his models - among them Lila Jimerson - to various sites. Many Whites concluded that his wife’s murder was moved by infatuation: thinking to marry her husband, Lila Jimerson had Mrs. Marchand killed. It was more complicated than that. As time and trial went on, Marchand was thoroughly tarnished. A Buffalo paper printed some letters he had written to Lila Jimerson; artist and model had long been more than friends, and Marchand had lied to the police about it. He’d had affairs with more Iroquois women than he could count and more women of all types than he could reliably estimate. He lived the image of the Continental artist, and his Continental wife (if so she expected to remain) was expected to understand. When chided on the stand about his infidelities, Marchand claimed that he needed clear impressions of the Iroquois women’s breasts for his displays. (A nubile and hopefully accurate little image still in one of Marchand’s dioramas is said to represent Lila.) Iroquois women did not show themselves to men with whom they were not intimate, thus Marchand’s seductions of them served art. [The reaction to this line in the real Buffalo courtroom can only rival that of the Pink Panther’s filmed one - abrupt laughter - as “Inspector Closeau” (Peter Sellers), when asked how his family could live luxuriously on his policeman’s salary, deadpanned that his wife (a jewel-thief unbeknownst) was frugal with the laundry money.] Occult speculation lent a lurid cast to the newspaper accounts, but it was not the focus of legal matters. Shouts of racism and conspiracy from the women’s defenders would be familiar in the late 1990’s. Caught between state and federal authorities (who sent a formidable team to defend the women), the case became a lightning rod for issues of cross-cultural communication, Native American sovereignty, and the role of religion in it all. Even jury selection was hard, because many prospective jurors refused to consider the death penalty for a woman. It was, after all, a charge of premeditated murder. It’s hard to form a conviction about the case and the virtual acquittal of the two women. No one doubted that they’d committed the murder, but they were let off with no more punishment than the ordeal of the trials. Maybe the jury regarded the women as so uneducated and superstitious that they knew not what they did; maybe it felt the real culprit was not on trial. The all-male jury seems to have loathed Marchand’s amorous escapades and sensed it no one else’s fault that something finally blew up. They may even have suspected that Marchand had a hand in provoking the murder. (There were those mysterious letters.) The artist did not flatter his image, having taken another wife - eighteen years old - by the time of the verdicts in 1931. Then again, the jury may have come to believe that the spirit of a Cayuga shaman had driven two women to the murder of one. We grieve for Clothilde, wife, mother, and undoubted victim. The injustices dealt her, alone, are not unclear. Mason Winfield Mon, 19 May 2008 06:51:34 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=7 Reports of encounters with “Little People” turn up in the US even today. To say that I do or don’t consider them literal “fairies” – the “real thing” that inspired the ones from folklore - would be irrelevant. I’ve never seen any of the potentially supernatural little people, for one thing. But when the paranormal overlaps with the folkloric, I get interested. There is something very neat going on with at least the pattern of reports. The children who see these little people often report interactions, even sustaining relationships like those with imaginary friends. (Many examples of the well-known imaginary friend would actually be classified as little-people encounters by different interviewers.) The adult experiencers I meet often think they’ve seen “ordinary” ghosts. Then you start questioning them. They even surprise themselves with things in their recollection that they never noticed before. (“Hey… Yeah, he was really small.”) And then they start to get it. You’d think the size would be the first thing they’d notice, but it seems like the shock of seeing something they sense is supernatural outweighs everything else. That’s a logical way for most experiencers to think, because of the apparitional qualities of these Little People. It’s clear that they aren’t completely material, and they appear and disappear mysteriously. They don’t behave like ghosts in most other ways, though, and because of their consistent parallels to figures of folklore, it feels like there may be a lot more to them. Little People tales are quite a bit rarer in the US than ghost stories, but I still have a thick file of them from my home region of Western New York, seemingly a hotspot for them. Part I of this series was another upstate NY story about a human child who interacted with Little People apparitions. Let’s finish up with some of the speculation the details of that event brought to me. 1) Were these Celtic-style Little People? The narrator of the tale we told in Part I is of pure Irish ancestry. Her father was born in Ireland, and many of her aunts had still the brogue. There is a long tradition about the Little People in her family. The Celtic cultures of Europe have a very developed cycle of legends and tradition about the fairies and fairy-style beings, most of whom answer to the name of “The Little People.” While literal faith is obviously dwindling, many living people of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Manx, Breton, and American-Celtic ancestry still have a bit of belief in them. Could the seven year old of our tale have been saved from the frozen pond by a troop of the Irish-style fair folk, possibly paying back some family debt? Some of the old Irish and Scottish families were rumored to have such special friends who surfaced every generation or two, often when there was a crisis. But that was in the home country. Rushford Lake is a long way from Tipperary; but the idea of almost instantaneous cross-Atlantic travel isn’t any weirder than the one of supernatural Little People. The reactions of the girl’s Irish-born father at the time of the incident might be telling. He accepted the story about the Little People a lot quicker than most of us would. 2) But do we look to the place, rather than the people, for an explanation? This tale surfaced in Western New York, the historic territory of the Seneca. As did other nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, our Seneca friends had a sacred and private system concerning these Little People. It appears to be an original tradition with them, well older than the time of European influence. Many living Reservation folk believe in these Little People today. It seems almost as likely that these could have been local – Native American – wee folk. It’s not only Native Americans who see them in their Western New York places. Our White contemporaries report Little People, too, often at traditional sites. Sometimes they come as diminutive children, but even when they appear as tiny adults they are often remembered as children because of their size and, when in groups, their playfulness. The teller of the tale in our last update doesn’t mention much about the clothing or complexion of the Little People she saw. She notices only that they were not wearing winter clothes. While it may be frustrating, this is not really unusual. Many ghost-sighters seem to have a picture frozen in their minds, recalling minute details of dress, expression, light and shade. With certain other types of sightings, including Little People, many of my witnesses display a curious lack of recall about details. Most people who see Little People report them as members of their own society, often (when they remember) in the dress of a few decades before. Seneca witnesses see little Native Americans. White witnesses see little 19th and early 20th century farmers. What does this suggest about the Little People, when people always see them as members of their own society? That they could be something else entirely than what they appear? That they cast webs of illusion into the minds of witnesses? That the witnesses do a lot of projecting? Your call. 3) Our witness recalls some curious features of the hill on which she had her adventure with the Little People. Apart from its legend as a sled-hill, it seems an unusual piece of landscape. Years later our narrator came to it in the summer and remembers at least one side of it as terraced, like a ziggurat or a Mesoamerican pyramid. There was at least two feet between each of the grassy “steps.” Its broad, flat peak suggests the top of one of the American pyramids at which ceremonies, even sacrifice, were often held. (In this case the Little People saw that there would be no sacrifice.) Of course, there’s a big difference between the recollection of a seven-year-old and a certainty we can use to build a theory. And there might be easy explanations for the odd landscaping. But other earthy curiosities have been reported about Western New York, suggesting, perhaps, that someone was working on the local landscape before the Iroquois arrived. If this stepped-mountain is what it seems, it could suggest a ceremonial site, and something unusual in the prehistory of this part of upstate New York. The Cahokian cultures of the Mississippi Valley fashioned stepped earthen pyramids. It’s hard to believe that a truly ancient feature of landscape-architecture made of simple earth would survive even a century without upkeep. But if just a part of it did, it suggests that the hill might have had ritual significance. And these sites are associated with psychic folklore, including “Little People” stories. The supplanting culture always attributes psychic folklore to the sacred sites and monuments of the displaced. 3) Even the timing of the event on the hill is suggestive – December 21, 1976. Our witness is sure of the date. Evidently someone in the family made a note of it. That’s usually the date of the Winter Solstice. This shortest day of the year is a pivot-point for many preindustrial cultures. It’s one of the eight power-points of the year that include the solstices, the equinoxes, and the cross-quarter days. These cross-quarters - points in between the solar peaks and standstills – were of more importance to the Celtic societies. Still, the solstice would have been powerful to any society. “To Juan at the Winter Solstice” is one of Robert Graves’ most important mythological poems, and its major theme is the old Mediterranean solar Adonis-cult and its ritual sacrifice. 4) The sound effects our witness attributed to the manifesting Little People are also curious. One would expect laughter and conversation that would escalate as the children neared; but “rushing horses”? Some of the Irish and Scottish Little People were thought to travel and manifest in ghostly equestrian troops, sometimes with chariots and carriages. Having them arrive as cavalry we never see is just one more thing to be considered. It reminds me of the Tuscarora Reservation tale from a man who had seen “Witch Lights” streak across a field shortly after the sound of running horses. While “witch lights” are not Little People, in folklore anything supernatural tends to get associated at least occasionally with anything else supernatural. (Power-places get witches, Little People, ghosts, mystery-lights and other crazy stuff.) Our witness’ “rushing horses” association reminds us unavoidably of the famous Yeats poem, “The Hosting of the Sidhe" (Shee): “The Host is riding from Knocknarea…” But there are strange consistencies at the root to all Fairy-folk, both in lore and report. Whatever they may be, wherever these little people appear, they are associated with both the cycles of nature and the spirits of the human dead. They also have a universal interest in human children. This tale we were given from the recollections of a seven-year-old touches a lot of bases. It's a good one for the May Eve. Mason Winfield Thu, 01 May 2008 20:07:36 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=8 “The boys and girls got me out…” she kept saying, the little girl saved from chilly death a few days before Christmas, 1976. This is one of the best “Little People” tales I’ve ever gotten around Western New York. Rushford Lake is a man-made affair. The 1927 dam on Caneadea Creek created a summer boating and resort community off Route 438 in Allegany County, NY. It also flooded two tiny villages, East Rushford and Kelloggville. They drain it again every winter, too, aiming for an ideal depth. Once in a while they go too far, and if you’re there at just the right time, they say, what’s left of the buildings comes into view. It has to look pretty eerie, and clearly someone agrees. “Ghost Lake” was filmed here in 2004. This is also hilly country. It feels strange, as you drive through it, to look for a lake. When she was seven, a friend of Haunted History Ghost Walks was visiting a cottage at Rushford Lake. For some reason she’s sure of the date: December 21, 1976. The season that would bring us the Blizzard of ‘77 was an old-time Western New Yorker. Thick snow was everywhere. The family visited often in the summer; the cottage-owner was a childhood friend of the father. But this was Christmas vacation. The point of the out-of-season trip was to get a look at the odd lake emptied. Four children were inseparable summer companions – our storyteller, her brother, the son of the cottage owner, and his cousin. They dedicated this bright afternoon to sledding on a hill they'd only heard about, somewhere up beyond the highest cottage. As they set out, the only girl tore off ahead of them, calling back a promise to beat them all to the top. She covered a lot of country. She crossed a creek on a thin wooden makeshift bridge. She cut through a stretch of woods, a cornfield, and a clearing before she came to the destined hill. She stood at the bottom for a quick, admiring rest. Then up she ran. She remembers getting to the top and simply staring. This hill was like a plateau, its summit high enough to be scary. She could see the valley below. She could see to all the four quarters around. The sun, the clouds, the other hills… It was intoxicating. All she had to do for a whole new look at the world was run to another side of the hilltop! The slopes fell below. Which would they be sledding first? When the boys arrived, she wanted to show them the best. From one side to the other she ran… She got a jolt. The snow fell through. She dropped straight down and felt icy water coursing over her ankles and sloshing between her toes. She must have stepped into a hidden puddle. She hurried to get over it. Then she heard something she’d never heard before, a loud cracking sound muffled by snow. She dropped and foundered, knee-deep. She kept going. Next she was in up to her waist. The best course seemed to be to go forward. She’d learned how to swim the summer before and wasn’t afraid to test her new skill. She went under. She came up, but snow came in on her as she tried to swim. It was as much a barrier as the ice at her chest. The ground under her was rising, though. Soon her upper body rested against a bank, but she stalled trying to climb out. Rubber boots slid on underwater rocks. The snow on the bank choked and chilled her as she tried to grip it. And that full-body snowsuit, logged with stinging water, doubled her weight. Ice-daggers pierced her legs. She called out, but, ringed with snowbanks, her cries seemed to go nowhere. The boys could have been ten feet away and never seen or heard her. Were they still coming? She struggled until she was exhausted. Her trunk under water, her head on her arm, she collapsed and sobbed. After awhile her legs didn’t hurt. But she couldn’t lift her head! Her cheek had frozen to her sleeve. Where were the boys? They’d played other jokes before. She was so tired she could sleep forever. Then something happened that to this day she can't explain. Light, random human voices like children on a playground were fading in and, strangely, a sound like “rushing horses,” all of it increasing in volume as if coming toward her. None of this made sense at the top of a snowy hill. She turned her head as much as she could and rolled her eyes. She saw small children running toward her, moving over and across the hilltop in huge, half-flying strides. A boy jumped over her in a bound as big as he was small, landed in the water behind her, and started trying to push her up. He smiled as if her danger was play. Another “child” took her by the hood, and other boys and girls tugged at her arms. Not even wearing winter clothes, they were as cheery as the first bold boy. They seemed at the start no stronger than they looked, but suddenly the mortal girl went airborne, soaring over the top of the bank and landing several feet from the water's edge, as safely and softly as if the others had leaped or flown along with her. She was suddenly, completely alone again in the sunlight, astonished enough to forget the cold. Sometime later her companions arrived. They loaded her soaked and shivering on a sled and took her back to the cottage. After a long process of thawing out, their host commenced an interview session that went over the simple facts again and again. At the end he shook his head. There were three ponds on the broad top of that hill. They’d been drained a bit so the spring thaw wouldn't pour them into the field below… but they were death-traps. Climbing out should have been impossible for a snowsuited seven-year old. "The boys and girls got me out," was all this one kept saying. When the girl was sent to bed, her Irish-born father took over. He asked the boys carefully about these other “children.” “There was no one else up there,” his son said. “She was already out of the water.” The father nodded to himself as if he knew something. Check back for Part II: “Implications” Mason Winfield Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:52:47 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=9 I wrote my first article in this series about the film “10,000 BC” and its presumed subjects before it premiered. I see that I’d guessed a few things right. Let’s see how prophetic I’ll have been with the upcoming “Indiana Jones” flick, lashing-and-crashing in sometime soon and clearly based on the Crystal Skulls. This article is being written in early April 2008. My last update surveyed the general background to the world’s crystal skulls. Now we come to the one you all know, “The Skull of Doom…” You know the one I mean. Otherwise called “the Mitchell-Hedges Skull,” it’s the glassy-clear crystal skull, almost perfectly lifelike, whose image you’ve seen countless times in books and on TV. It was the trademark image in the credits of Arthur C. Clarke’s old TV program “Mysterious World.” Doubtless it’s a major player in the new Indiana Jones film. We call this “the Mitchell-Hedges Skull” because it first surfaced to history in the possession of British adventurer F. A. (Frederick Albert) “Mike” Mitchell-Hedges (1882-1959). He claimed to have found it in 1927 during an expedition on the Mayan island of Lubantuun, off the waters of Belize. We have the Skull, all right, but other questions remain. The circumstances under which Mitchell-Hedges’ expedition turned up their Skull were dodgy, to say the least. Mitchell-Hedges was no archaeologist, and the world’s finest crystal skull was an unlikely object to have been left behind when its owners packed up and moved out. It was said to have been found by Mitchell-Hedges’ adopted daughter Anna (nicknamed “Sammy”). She was drawn to it in a flash of insight as if it spoke to her. The team didn’t spend much time on that island, either, so Mitchell-Hedges was either psychically guided to that spot, mighty lucky, or… brought the Skull with him and faked the find. Bavarian glass-blowers of the day were doing some amazing things that looked just as miraculous as that Skull. Mitchell-Hedges could surely have met some of them or seen their work. Furthermore, the Skull didn’t surface officially till some time later. A funny discovery all the way round. However Mitchell-Hedges came by it, the Skull is a storied object. To summarize the folklore in bullet-form, the Skull may be: - A healing object (It can cure what ails you.) - A prophetic object (It enhances ESP and prophecy, possibly with just a touch.) - A big crystal computer, capable of imparting the knowledge of the ages. (Our own computers work on quartz chips, don’t they?) - A weapon (It can curse or kill, possibly with a sudden beam of light or energy, at the behest of a power-person or possibly its own “will.” It could become a magical laser.) - Incredibly ancient (As in “Atlantean.”) - Extraterrestrial (As in “Pleieadian.”) - The “ruler” of the other major skulls. (In one version of the mythology there are 13 of these skulls, possibly all in Mesoamerica, possibly distributed among all major Native American culture-groups and language-families.) This latter point deserves a bit of comment. It’s possible that the Skulls were exclusively Mesoamerican objects. Sure Skull-possessors would seem to be the Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacanos, and through them – or the Toltec – the newcoming Aztec. (Why Cortez and 500 Spanish peasants could knock off an empire of millions could be because the Skull had decided to go dead for the Aztec.) There should have been at least several Skulls in “Meso,” as they slang it, a part of the world in which both crystal-traditions and skull-cults were well established. But there could have been a pan-American distribution. In that motif, several power-Skulls should have been in South America, all interdependent “magical”-objects. I imagine there would be a couple Skulls among the Andean societies, and surely one in the Amazon, whose cultures were far more developed than anyone had suspected till recently. The rest of the skulls would have been in North America. The Iroquois or their ancestors doubtless had one, as did the Hopewell, the Anasazi, possibly the Algonkians… I hear there was a crystal tradition among the Iroquois. Surely the Confederacy had one of the Skulls. Or they would have taken it from someone else had they wanted. But one thing stands out: When all the Skulls are brought together, it’s supposed to be a major moment for humanity. Whatever that might mean… Maybe the “Indy” film will tell us. What were these thirteen original Skulls like? Were they primitive one-piece jobs like all the known ones except “the Skull of Doom”? Were they anatomically correct masterworks, jaw and all, of different colors and functions? (Quartz crystal comes in several shades.) Is the Skull of Doom, therefore, the Great Skull? How many “real” Crystal Skulls do we have, anyway? Do we have only the knock-offs? Do we even have the top dog? Could it be that the world has only one authentic Skull? How would we know for sure? There are a handful of big skulls in museums and private collections that people sense may be special; but they’re hard to verify. None of them were found on true archaeological digs. They didn’t even start turning up until the early 1900s. Could it be that none of them are historic artifacts any older than a century? Is it likely that none of these are anything other than rude copies of the originals? Testing seems to reveal that a few of the big ones in museums may be at least a few centuries old. But there’s enough controversy to go around about a single one of them, “The Skull of Doom,” to say nothing of its finder, Mitchell-Hedges. With him the real questioning begins. Mitchell-Hedges was a character. You could write a book about him. Actually someone, did: Mitchell-Hedges himself. His James-Bond-ish titled autobiography, “Danger, My Ally” came out in 1964. I hope he turns up as a character in the new “Indy” flick. (I nominate Johnny Depp, Robin Williams or Jim Carrey for the part.) There was a web of intrigue dating back to the World War I era surrounding Mexico. It involved Ambrose Bierce, "the Zone of Silence," U.S. General Pershing, Pancho Villa, and Karl Hausofer, Hitler’s evil tutor. I hope this, too, comes up in the film. However Mitchell-Hedges came by it, the Skull exists. There are pros and cons to its validity. The cons begin with the appearance of the Skull itself. It is unlike all the other known crystal skulls suspected to be historic. This is the only one of the known ones with a detachable jaw, and the only one remotely lifelike. (Most crystal skulls are crude, cartoonish, and one-piece. Their etched-on teeth bloom like rows of corn on a cob.) The Skull of Doom is natural enough to have been given a forensic cranio-facial reconstruction. We can even infer its gender and ethnicity: Polynesian, I hear, and female. This alone is very special. YOU try making that out of glass. The fact that the Skull of Doom was found in Maya territory is strange, too. The Maya did a lot of work in jade, but they weren’t known to do much with crystal. Either the Skull was not a Maya artifact, or… someone before them or after them made it. (The “before” possibility is most problematic.) Not only is the Skull of Doom unlike other skulls, but it is completely unlike any other work of Mesoamerican art. That alone could be a giveaway. True-to-life art is very rare among preindustrial societies. Only in a few parts and periods of Europe and the Mediterranean did art resemble life. Usually when you see a piece of realistic art or drawing, it HAS to be recent. Or else… someone in or before the Mayan culture had a breakthrough, and the Maya ended up with the Skull of Doom. Few exposed to 2008 New Age mythology would put it past them. The Skull itself is its most persuasive defender. Simply put, it shouldn’t exist. Engineers from Hewlett-Packard studied the Skull in the 1970s and decided that only three places in the world could have been the source of the crystal - Brazil, Madagascar, or Russia. Funny beds for an ancient object found in the Gulf of Mexico. At least Brazil was in the hemisphere, but it’s believed that there were not even trade networks between South America and Mesoamerica when the Euros landed. The Inca didn’t know the Aztec existed. Why should they? Neither empire was maritime, and land travel between the zones was almost unthinkable. The Hewlett-Packard team also couldn’t figure out how the Skull of Doom was made. They found no signs of the scratching you’d expect with such an object, and figured it had to be made with soft techniques like polishing with rags, sand and oil. Right. 300 straight years of it – that’s 24-7 man-hours - one worker at a time. (You can’t fit an assembly-line around a skull!) Even with modern tools - like diamonds – its crafting would take a year. Hewlett-Packard’s team, though, had no idea if it was an authentic artifact. After that “Sammy” Mitchell-Hedges quit testing it – as if the Skull was getting tired of the probing and told her so itself. Maybe the Pleieadians did make it. The Skull of Doom is a cult object today, still as far as I know in the possession of the family of Anna Mitchell-Hedges (1907-2007), RIP, in Kitchener, ON. (If it was in the U.S. the Death Tax would own it by now.) “Sammy” and the Skull came to Lily Dale in the early 1990s for a talk – it was Anna, I recall, doing the talking - and attendees got to parade by and touch it. I was one of them. I got a flash of insight for fiction, as yet unrealized, and circulated only as proposals (on which more to follow). My tennis elbow, though, is better. (Now if we could just get working on the right knee… Maybe another touch of the Skull…) So where might the “Indy” people go with this? I imagine the 2008 film is another adventure-chase like the “Ark” and “Grail” films. I presume the military and informational potential of the Skull would be the draw of the action. I know enough to suspect that it’s set in the Cold War, so the drama could be over the simple possession of the object. (The KGB was known to be researching all avenues of edge over the CIA.) After that… Let’s just see what they do with it. I get the feeling they’ll go back to the “Indy” roots – the first film. May as well. Let that be the end. Whatever they do, they have a lot to work with. Folklore of the outright psychic variety goes with the Skulls. The attendants of a British museum holding one big Skull say that it moves now and then of its own accord. Allegedly, a Skull arrived in the mail at the American Smithsonian, and a curator of the museum started to unbox it. “Don’t look it in the eye,” warned one of his colleagues as the wraps fell away. He did anyway, and took his own life shortly after. If you have any unsettling feelings after seeing the Indy flick, please talk to someone you trust. Or call (716) 655-6663 – Haunted History Ghost Walks, Inc. We are your friend. We do turn the phone off after 10 PM. Call crisis services otherwise before you make any rash decisions. Mason Winfield Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:27:49 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=10 My last update discussed the film “10,000 BC” and its presumed subjects before it premiered. I see that I had guessed a few things right. Advanced cultures involved in the flick were presumptively drawn from the Atlantis-cycle. There was a lot of what I call “Hollywoodizing” (stock plots and political preaching). They also left out the short-faced bear, my favorite Pleistocene predator. I guess they were on the wrong continent for the short-faced, a North American beastie. To their credit, they must have known it. Let’s see how prophetic I’ll have been with the backdrop to the upcoming – and hopefully last-with-Harrison Ford - “Indiana Jones” flick, swashbuckling in on April 7 and clearly based on the Crystal Skulls. This article is being written in mid-March 2008. Ah, the Indy-cycle! The films were delightful. And there was no one like Harrison - in 1980. Adventure-fantasy may be a lighthearted genre, but it could be argued that the hero of the “Indy” and “Star Wars” cycles was one of the great leading men of the 20th century. But he has to stop doing these. I’m a little worried about the fourth Indy. The three Indiana Jones films have had a predilection for occult totems, ancient mysteries, and Peace Corps-style locations. They did the Ark of the Covenant, some sacred Indian stones, and the Holy Grail. Other than the four totems of the Celtic gods – sword, stone, cauldron, and spear – or something related but Arthurian like the sword Excalibur, I couldn’t think of a logical next step for them… Unless it was something Native American that had been waiting a long time for its popular treatment. They had to be scouting for ideas. The Skulls were there… I circulated a proposal ten years ago and have no idea where it went. (Does this mean I get to sue somebody? More on that later.) If the names of a certain pair of agent-producers are involved anywhere in the Indy flick we may have to talk, but until then… Let me confess that I am shocked that no one picked up on the “Skull” theme before. It’s such a natural, and they’ve done so many other things to death. Why did they wait so long? By the 1930s there was some collective oral mythology about the Skulls, a hierarchy of interdependent power-objects. (It could have been some inspiration to Tolkien’s Ring-cycle.) I don’t know of any source that put it all together, but by 2005 there were websites devoted to the Skulls. Some of them today are quite informative. I say we start with the basics of the Skulls and then go on to the levels of the modern mythology – A, B, and C. For the basics: There are thousands of crystal skulls in the world, most of them in Meso – Middle and Central – America. Most of them are small – tennis-ball-sized - and commercially made within the last sixty years. They’re toys and trinkets brought out for sale at “Day of the Dead” November 1 celebrations all over Latin America. (You can see them by the rack at festivals.) There are a handful of unique ones. The skull was a symbol to most world-cultures. You find skull-cults on all the continents at a certain level of development, usually well before the urban stage. In fact, “the Cult of the Severed Head” seems to be something all societies had at some point, usually when they needed to express warrior-virtues. This, too, is natural. Body-parts of dreaded enemies are expressions of cultural and personal prowess. The heads and then skulls of victims or enemies were celebrated and even displayed. It’s remarkable, though, how big the skull became as an image to Central America. It is possibly the dominant symbol of Mesoamerican art. In cross-cultural terms, the skull is right up there with the familiar icons - crosses, spirals, roses, hearts, lotuses, stars-of-David, yin-yangs, and the rest - of Eurasian societies. So omnipresent is this image that, almost like one of our letters, it is used to form many of the characters in Maya writing, the only “true” writing system ever developed in Native America. It’s no exaggeration to say that the skull-symbol was an obsession for this part of the world when the Christians took over starting with Cortez in 1519. Cortez’ snatch of Mexico has been seen as a rude power-grab, a thirst for gold. That it surely was. It was at least partly a spiritual culture-clash that could be likened to a Crusade. Mesoamerica’s skull-cult was eventually fixed on a Christian holiday. Europe’s “All-Souls’ Day” (October 31/November 1) was nothing to Mary, Moses, God, or Jesus. Developed well before the Conquest of Mexico, it was one of the substitutes the Church foisted on Europe in place of the pagan Halloween, the dominant festival to Celtic societies. It made Christianity all that much more palatable to the Dark Age Welsh, Scots and Irish. A few centuries later it was music to the ears of the post-Conquest Mexicans. Their original festival could have been thousands of years old, but its date was about the start of August – another Celtic cross-quarter day (and the time of their festival Lunasa). This alone is the subject of a study – someone else’s. Mexican imagery came down to the skull. The trick is that almost every Mesoamerican working of the image looks cartoonish. Think of Disney; Corben; Moebius. For observation purposes, there was no shortage of real skulls – ahem – in known Meso societies. Maya. Teotihuacano. Toltec. And the Aztec, ah, yes. Racks of them. Still, the painted, sculpted, etched and bas-relief skulls came out brutally stylized. Some of the old ones were made of glassy crystal. A few dozen of these crystal skulls are near-life-size and in museums. These were found in circumstances that lead us to believe they were significant totems to Mesoamerican societies before the Christians got there. They are made of different varieties of glassy quartz crystal, and they come in colors. Rose-quartz and gold-quartz come to mind. They were found or bought well before the mid-1900s craze of fake-manufacture. They are starting to get to be quite famous in New Age circles. Some have quite colorful nicknames: The Rose Skull, The Rainbow Skull, The Jaguar Skull(s), “ET,” “Max…” It’s hard to tell for sure how many of the big ones we have in museums are truly ancient. Then we come to the one you all know, “The Skull of Doom…” and the related cycle. Stay Tuned for Part 3 Mason Winfield Thu, 20 Mar 2008 08:16:52 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=11 So we see there’s a new epic film called “10,000 BC”… From the trailers I gather that it involves the human prehistory, Ice Age predators, and unknown ancient civilizations. Its debut is March 7, next Friday, actually, the night of Michael Bastine’s lecture in East Aurora. I’m really looking forward to both events, though I guarantee I will be at Mike’s talk, also named after a year (2012), and take in the film another night. I’m a sap for sword-and-sorcery, or, in this case, spear-and-shamanism… “10,000 BC” would appear to draw from something like the “Lost Civilization” theme and possibly even the Atlantis-myth. From the title one would say it's set in one of the periods in which the mainstream doubts there even was such a thing as civilization. It looks like it incorporates a reasonable display of the animals and the climate of the day, which is a new shift. I’ve had an interest in both these themes – “Lost Worlds” and Ice Age life - since childhood and consider that combination a long-overdue source of imaginative fiction. The “Lost Civilizations” theme has of course been tapped many a time in literature and film. At its simplest, it can involve a community of some group known to history – Egyptians, Romans, Aztec – that survives in a remote pocket well longer than expected. It might also create its own fictional ancient civilization unknown to the outer world. It might even be rooted in the grand scheme of an ancient super-civilization that once existed, founded all the rest, vanished, and left pockets of colonists, still waiting... The Atlantis myth at the heart of it all would seem to have started with Plato. Plato believed in this continental power off the Pillars of Hercules, and claimed that they were trying to conquer the world. The ancestors of his own Athenians kept their independence, in his account, by fighting off an Atlantean expedition.) Too many writers since to mention – Augustus Le Plongeon, Rider Haggard, James Churchward, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and others - have had a field day with the general idea of lost worlds, some of them deriving from Atlantis, often with a mystical element. Some of these authors were alleged researchers and others avowed fantasists. The common theme to much Atlantean/Lost World fiction is that our own 60 centuries-old cycle of civilization that we think started in the Mediterranean and Near East is not the only one, and that there have been several great rises and falls in the past. The one advanced civilization most recent to us was on its own continent in the Atlantic. The time period is deep in the human past, usually 8,000 to even 100,000 years ago, well before the end of the Ice Ages. (One problem with the far range of that scenario is that anatomically modern humans may not have been around much longer than 100,000 years. It's a tough ask of a first-generation Homo sapiens to build Atlantis. You'd think we might start with fire or the Clovis point.) The seed-culture of the rest of the world, Atlantis may have been as advanced as our own society, though probably in different ways – crystals, healing, earth-energies, psi. It may have had a predecessor, a successor, or a rival, often called Lemuria or Mu, maybe on its own huge island in the Pacific. Either natural catastrophes or conflict doomed them both, and their signs survive only in the art and tradition of the oldest “high” cultures of the world – Egypt, the Andes, Mesoamerica, Tibet. Without having to answer to a home base, the spinoff colonies that survived the destruction could have become corrupt empires based on exploiting the lower-tech locals. Because this whole scenario took place so long ago and Atlantis’ destruction was so complete, the story goes, it’s harder to prove than to refute. It’s thus easy for mainstream archaeology to stay unconvinced. But there’s been one major problem with most of the entertainment in this genre: an utter lack of understanding of the geological and natural world of the deep human past. The creators of the film or novel either set the action onto a contemporary landscape or gave it dinosaurs – both laughable. Anyone on earth 10,000 years ago or earlier would have faced a vastly different landscape and animal world than we see now: the Pleistocene. The world has had a lot of Ice Ages. “Pleistocene” is one of those broad terms that covers the most recent Ice Age cycle, which started about 110,000 years ago and ended about 10,000 back, almost immediately after which was the big die-off of the Megafauna, of which more later. (We’re still in the one since, called “the Holocene,” the era of civilization.) Even in the late 19th century the experts had some understanding of Ice Age animal-life. Fiction writers of the day have to be faulted for not looking into it. The full splendor of Pleistocene zoology has just emerged in recent decades, but only people who really hunted for it - archaeologists and zoologists and people who talked to them – were ever exposed to it. Today, though, we have the wonderful productions of the educational cable TV stations – ANP, DSC, HIST, TLC. At their best, they make education into entertainment. (At their worst – as with some of the “ghost programs” – they mask entertainment as education.) The end of the last Ice Age – around 10,000 years ago - was a major shock for a bizarre group of creatures called “the Megafauna” – something “10,000 BC” seems to have incorporated. Ice Age animal-life was vivid, different, and dangerous beyond our belief. Most of the mammal species we have now were bigger. And they were far from identical to their modern relatives. I don’t know which continent the film 10K BC is set on, but any one of them would have a passle of predators to pick from. Not only did the duress of the Ice Ages increase the size of today’s mammal groups up to 200%, but we had different flesh-and-fowl filling niches in the predatory cycle. We had: - Wolverines the size of bears. (They say if today’s wolverine was the size of a bear it would be the strongest animal on today’s planet.) - Eagles the size of people. (When an eagle today gets a broken wing it dies of starvation. Nothing – puma, rattler, wolf, bear – messes with it even then. Just too nasty. Imagine one of these things six feet tall.) - Land-running birds like ostriches but far bigger, including an Australian “demon duck of doom.” (Its head looked like a cross between a horse-skull and an axe blade. - Lions up to double the size of today’s African, called Panthera Leo. (There are paintings of European cave lions done by the Cro-Magnon. They appeared to be striped and have faint manes.) - An echelon of saber-tooth “cats” who may have been not quite cats. (Not only is there serious dispute about how they used those gigantic canines, but these animals may be some sort of tweener between the species.) - Hog-like and hyena-like beasties the size of today’s horses. - A half-ton critter called “AndrewSarchus” (1000 lb.) that may have been an aquatic mammal-gator. Something for the crocs of the day to worry about. - In other continents – Australia and South America – marsupial predators like killer kangaroos, wacked wombats, loopy lions, and shocking saber-tooths – filling the niches of mammal predators. But my all-time favorite is the American Short-faced – or “Bulldog” - Bear, Arctodus simus, weighing up to 1900 pounds. That’s a Honda Accord with teeth. The short-faced was a North American critter that could chase its dinner at 40 miles an hour. It was a really unusual looking bear. Its broad flat skull gave it a bone-crushing bite. It could have clubbed or slashed with its long huge limbs. It may have been exclusively carnivorous. While some of today’s polar bears reach 1300 pounds and grizzlies 1500, a lot of this weight is blubber. The short-faced was leaner and bigger. And bears are cannibalistic. The short-faced undoubtedly preyed on its cousins, like the grizzly. If 10K BC leaves out the short-faced, I hope it has a good reason – like not being set in North America. Projected as the top predator of its age and continent, the Giant Short-faced Bear is also accompanied by controversy. Like another big, not necessarily agile predator of a different age – T-Rex – the Giant Short-faced could have been a scavenger. Its imposing height when it stood – eleven feet – and its size may have helped it intimidate packs of lesser predators - wolves, hyenas, lions, saber-toothed cats, even other bears - and drive them off the kill. Like a clever con man, it could bluff its way to dinner, rather than having to stalk, chase, tackle, and kill for it. It may also have been better-equipped to drive off pack-predators than to catch the prey they stalked, chased, tackled, and killed. One swing of that five-foot long meat-hook of a paw would have settled for the toughest saber-tooth on the planet. The rest of the pack wouldn’t stick for a sequel. But back to the prospective movie, which does appear to involve both ancient civilizations and the likely landscape and fauna they would have encountered. All I remember that ever set the imaginative possibilities of the fauna into the fiction was a five-book batch (1963-77) from Jane Gaskell. Her imaginative “Atlan” series involved Atlantis, ancient South American civilizations, and prehistoric critters. (People had domesticated some of the giant land-birds into two-legged motorcycles.) You might check it out. To cut to the chase, I hope 10K BC is not too “Hollywood-ized,” meaning comical fights, implausible action, political preaching and stock plots. I hope they don’t kill the impact of their film with a hackneyed script. If they don’t do a great job with it, it will be a long time before anyone else gets to tackle the same theme. This period of prehistory is utterly fabulous, and right now the average American who doesn’t devour educational cable TV is unexposed to it. Trust me. I really am getting to a greater point about intellectual property, copyright protocol and the imaginative writing business. Somewhere in this article-series. Part 2 is coming. Mason Winfield Sat, 08 Mar 2008 03:17:32 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=12 [It was a haunted family house that got me onto this subject. It was the recommendation of one of my colleagues in Haunted History Ghost Walks that got me writing it. I suppose every family has one like my dear, late Aunt Cora.] My mother hailed from Spartanburg, SC. The ample old house in which her parents lived was on Glendalyn Drive, right across the street from a little red-soil park. I used to visit them now and then as a kid. Our visits were usually family occasions, and I got to know the older members of my mom’s family pretty well, including the lady I knew as Aunt Cora. She was a medium-sized woman with a Southern voice so rich and welcoming that anything she said seemed to be asking you to take a seat. She had fair skin, red hair and green eyes. I was always very comfortable around her. Late in her life she moved in with my grandmother. In that park across the street I played and got to be friends with the neighborhood kids. One day a puppy came into the park with a pack of boys. It was a happy, black short-haired thing, but some girls got the feeling it wasn’t being cared for well enough and they took it away from the boys. I can still see the two eight-year olds cradling it like a baby, huddling over it with their slender arms and torsos, refusing to give it up. It took a lot of guts. I can remember the boy who brought it with him shouting down the street after they were out of earshot. “Yall bring back lat dog!” By sundown it was back in the park and ended up with me at my grandparents’ house. We eventually found it a good home right next door, but for the moment… No one knew what my Southern grandfather, already retired, would have to say in the morning. Someone asked Aunt Cora’s take on the matter. Aunt Cora got up ceremoniously. “I…” she announced, “shall be indisposed.” Everybody laughed. I would learn later that this almost certainly meant that she’d go to her room, tuck into some Faulkner and Jack Daniels, and not be heard from till the morning. Middle and upper class Southerners tend to be so mannerly that Northerners find it hard to read them. You can’t tell who likes - and who really doesn’t like - who. As a boy I was never aware of any tension between Cora and the other women in the family. Maybe it didn’t surface till after my grandfather died and Cora moved in with her sister. I was in high school at the time. All I remember knowing about Aunt Cora in passing was that she’d done a lot in her life. Born around 1900 and the youngest in her family, she’d been well educated and become a journalist at a time when “women didn’t do that.” She’d worked for important papers in southern cities, including Atlanta and Dallas. She’d been married, divorced, and retired before I remember meeting her. She had two sons, both of them doing pretty well in life, neither one of them in the picture. It must have said something that, in her later years, Aunt Cora was back in Spartanburg with her widowed older sister. By my college years I knew some blowup had happened. From the distance of a two-day drive and the social fog of the age I was at, I could never piece it together. Eventually I heard that my mother’s sister living not far off had broken up her mother’s house, sent her mother to a home, and pitched Aunt Cora to the streets. With little ceremony. I ached when I heard this. I knew Aunt Cora could be “a character,” as they say. So could my mother’s sister. It was also too late to do anything about it. I loved everybody who could be blamed. They were also dead. I processed this as just more female family infighting. Why ask why? But why weren’t Cora’s sons more involved? I know what it’s like to want to run from some things. From some things you can’t run. This could have been a sign of something, too. It was Aunt Cora who, during her stay with my grandmother, destroyed or threw out all the family mementoes. It’s the reason there aren’t any pictures of my mother or her late sister as children or girls, or any other pics from that side of the family. It’s the reason a couple of aged relatives on one of those old porches had a furious debate about my mother’s exact age. Southern people often wrote the important details – like birth-dates of their children - into the family Bible, another casualty of Hurricane Cora. If she went as post-80 batty as my grandmother, there was your explanation for Cora; but I was told this was more of an indicator than a quirk. Once in her later years when my mom was lucid, I asked her about the whole deal with Aunt Cora. Why the tension? “She was mean,” said my mother sadly. “She was always nice to me,” I said. “Well… She liked boys,” my mother said back as if she, too, found it funny. I figured that was where the matter would end. After my mom and her only sister passed away I developed a bit more curiosity about that side of the family. I made some inquiries and a new picture of Aunt Cora came out, one that was mighty tricky. If she was truly mean, it was in the way that only the very intelligent can be. Sting your targets, keep your supporters, divide and confuse everybody else. The real picture of Cora may have come out in her early teens. To those who remembered it the story was just a curiosity. To me it was far more interesting. The early 1900s was a time when memories and echoes of the birth of Spiritualism and spirit-communication were vivid. People all over the US still remembered the episode of the mysterious knockings in the home of the Fox family of upstate New York. They appeared spontaneously, followed the girls around, seemed to come when called, and led to the birth of a religion. Interest in this style of psychic communication took another big spike during the World War I years; and the South was a cradle, anyway, of Christian fundamentalism and African-American spirituality. This backdrop was either the inspiration for the story about Cora you are about to hear or the reason others took what she may have done so seriously. When Cora was a girl, possibly twelve or fourteen, a cycle of apparently psychic incidents broke out in her family’s home. Someone who’d only heard others’ descriptions described it to me as a strange and unique scratching sound, seeming to come – like the rappings of the Fox Sisters – from the core of the family home. Before long it was a sensation. I knew those little Southern towns with their mix of immensely distinguished Whites, devoutly religious Blacks, and all of each ethnicity in between. I could only envision the climate of belief in Cora's village, far from a city and high into the Carolina hills. Was it the Devil? The Spirits? The Second Coming? It grew quickly into a scandal that drew curiosity seekers and sleuths from all over. Folk from church, university, and law enforcement spent weeks trying to get to the bottom of it. It drove my great-grandparents’ family, their friends, their neighbors, and any number of others absolutely crazy. The sheer scale of the production was said to be impressive. If it had gotten any bigger, you would probably know of it now. There’s no telling how far it could have gone. But... A sharp Southern doctor may have settled the question. Like so many others he’d spent time interviewing everyone in the matter and doing his own sort of study. He finally decided that my Aunt Cora had been pulling it all off. Somehow... And it was said that he could prove how she’d done it. Not only did she have the cleverness to manufacture these sounds that fooled everyone and caused so much misery and commotion, but she was an actress who could have won an Oscar. Not with the blink of an eyelid or a change of expression did she give herself away. Even after she was caught, she never changed, she never confessed, and she never seemed to even care what she had put so many others through. This doctor came away impressed, both by her gifts and… something else. His reaction could only have been like that of MacBeth, suddenly feeling no other emotion but marvel for the wife he thought he knew. (“Bring forth men children only…”) The spring after my mother died I was in her old neighborhood. The house she’d lived in had been 666 Glendalyn, but one set of later owners had petitioned to beat the number of the Beast, and 668 it may be today. The neighborhood kids all thought it was haunted by something scary. Every once in a while when they snuck out into the park late at night, a pair of glowing red eyes could be seen peering out over the park from the window under the top front gable of the former 666. I got the impression that the story had been passed on a long time. I don’t think I could find anyone to ask if that had been Cora’s room, or if she had spent time there with her books and bottle. Do I need to? Mason Winfield Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:43:03 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=13 One of the nation’s sublime burying-places is Rochester’s Mount Hope Cemetery on the Genesee. One of the most tormented is at the point where an old trail meets the same river, linking sites and psychic incidents for over two centuries. Welcome to “The Torture Tree.” I Western New York in the Revolution was a hotbed of British, Loyalist, and Native American opposition. Multicultural bands of paramilitaries – we call them terrorists today – like Butler’s Rangers nested at Fort Niagara, allied themselves with Native American war-bands and forged out on the colonies. They specialized in civilians. Massacres at sites like Wyoming, PA, and Cherry Valley, NY, can be laid on them and the Empire’s Native allies, including the Western New York Seneca - whom General George Washington resolved to take out of the war. At harvest-time in 1779 General John Sullivan and 4000 buddies - a fifth of the US war strength - marched on Seneca country. After turning the tables of one big bushwhack near Elmira, Sullivan romped along Canandaigua Lake, up the Genesee, and into the Seneca heartland. He thirsted to come to grips with Seneca and Tory armies. All he could catch were villages and orchards. Sullivan tore up as many of these as he could and may have done more damage. Countless Seneca starved and froze in the bitter winter of 1779-80. Sullivan’s foray hit its westernmost point at the village of Little Beard’s Town. Where Route 20A crosses the Genesee, some of his scouts met up with destiny. As Sullivan’s Continental Army neared its target, his map said one thing, his guides said another, and it mattered quite a bit which side of the river “the Genesee Castle” was on. Sullivan sent Lieutenant Thomas Boyd to scout it out. Young Boyd was ordered to take a handful of men and avoid fighting. He ended up getting two dozen into several reckless scraps. It should have been no surprise. This Boyd was a firebrand, eager for advancement and none too careful how he got it. At the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 his riflemen turned back a British move that may have saved the day and the Revolution. A year later Boyd was a hero solo. On picket-duty, he surprised a couple guys scouting the US army wagons and brought them in at bayonet-point. They were famous Tory desperadoes who were cheerfully hung for crimes against civilians. For sure Boyd was getting a reputation. He might also have been cursed. As his regiment pulled out of New York he backed off a young woman he’d wronged with a drawn sword. “I hope you’re cut to pieces by Indians (sic)!” she cried. Hmm…. Against the advice of his Oneida guide, Boyd and his men chased a couple Seneca decoys into a formidable ambush in Groveland on September 14. A handful slugged, slashed and galloped their way out. Boyd and the rest stood their ground, and were disabled in gunfire from at least 300 Seneca, who swarmed in with knife, club, and tomahawk. Their mates hacked to dogmeat, Boyd and Sergeant Michael Parker were taken to Little Beard’s Town for questioning from three Loyalist heavy hitters: the famous “White Indian” John Butler; the Mohawk Joseph Brant; and Seneca chief Little Beard, doubtless eager to ask why “The Long Blue Snake” (as Sullivan’s army looked to the Seneca from their overlooks) had come to burn his ancestral village. There was only a while to work on these two; the most was made of it. General Sullivan himself could hear the ambush and sent cavalry to investigate. By then most of the Seneca were gone, and the handfuls who reared up and fought were quickly killed. Among the first on the scene was Moses Van Campen, legendary scout, fighter and adventurer. One of the frontier heroes of the Genesee Valley, Van Campen had seen his share of the terrible. To his last day he admitted that he could not quite forget the sight of the bodies of Boyd and Parker. Possibly to save others the memory, the pair were buried quickly where they were found. Their only memorial a clump of wild plums, they lay for decades by Little Beard’s Creek where the main trail crossed. Their fellows rested where they fell at Groveland Hill. Souvenir-hunters knew both spots. Bones, buttons, and weapons too-routinely came up. What stories went with them? A lot was left. II If you think the deaths of the Boyd-Parker mission were tormented, you should track the course of their remains. Life in the Genesee Valley came a long way quickly after the Torture Tree. Momentum was gathering to honor all Revolutionary War soldiers lost on Valley soil. “Revolutionary Hill,” a prominent mound in Mount Hope Cemetery, was designated the spot for reburials. By 1841 the city of Rochester talked the folk of Livingston County into parting with their martyrs. On August 20, 1841, the remains of the victims of “the Boyd-Parker ambush” were taken up with ceremony. Descendants of looters showed up to return bits of their grievous spoil. Everything was reinterred days later with fanfare on Revolutionary Hill. Within days, local Democrats accused their political rivals of a coverup. Despite the fact that 5000 people had seen the ceremonies, the charge that the local Whigs had reburied only animal bones caused a controversy that lasted generations. The quick cast hungry eyes on the dead as young lion Rochester grew. Revolutionary Hill was prime burying-space, and the original wooden monuments were deteriorating. Around the time of the Civil War, Revolutionary Hill was graded to become “Rochester Hill” and the William A. Reynolds family plot in section R, one of the moodiest in the already-atmospheric space. Remains were relocated to “the Common Ground” - a Potter’s Field, a home for the poor and neglected. That alone might rile spirits. Decades later “The Young Lion of the West” was undergoing another transformation. Cultural and historic awareness was building again, and these men were no longer out of style but… history. Mount Hope Cemetery donated land, and the Irondequoit Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution started a search for the graves. It took five years to find them all. The day after Halloween 1903 the remains of Boyd, Parker, and all other Revolutionary soldiers were moved to the ground they occupy now, a newer, flatter portion of the same cemetery. May Patriot Hill be their last rest, and the sleeping sweet. III Dishonored graves foster many a tale, and ghostly rumor draws to hard deaths. It’s no wonder that all points in the tale of the Torture Tree get their rumors. Mount Hope’s stones and shrines are totems for the living as much as the dead. Its curious, hilly, wet ground has a natural ambience, which, matched with its trails and stonework, gives too many meditative places to count. So beautiful that people walk it like a park, it’s so powerful that “witches” – probably Wiccans – have held ceremonies here. The Boyd-Parker team’s Mount Hope rests have their rumors. It’s hard to say they pertain only to the displaced veterans. Before the Torture Tree candidates were brought here the early Rochesterians were hearing reports from a swampy area near what’s now Mount Hope and Elmwood Aves: mystery lights, sounds, impressions, feelings, occasional indistinct apparitions. Mount Hope may also have a “Lady in Black,” a vanishing hitchhiker who, unless a grieving widow, should have no connection to the wartime phantoms. A faint but unworldly howling has been reported as an occasional sound effect in the general area of the first Revolutionary burials. Maybe you should ask the residents of the nearest U of R dorm, a few dozen feet from where they rest today. The profile narrows when we turn to the Boyd-Parker Memorial near Cuylerville on the south side of Route 20A. Much like the site of the longtime torture-post in nearby Caledonia, the little riverside region got reports of psychic events, strongest, it seems, a few decades after. Shadowy figures were said to return for traumatic replays. Hunters steered clear of the area after sunset. Locals reported psychic echoes of the original events re-sounding through the groves and valleys. Today some locals claim not to know a thing about these reports. It would figure. Many once-haunted sites lose their mojo over time, at least as gauged by the folklore. But in 1999 a mighty tree spontaneously cracked and fell near the ambush-site without explanation. The day was dead-still. Other tragedies that could have left a psychic mark took place here. Iroquois villages were uprooted as the Whites moved into this part of the Genesee. Both contemporary Native Americans and White psychics report the reverberations: whipcracks, rolling carriages, horses’ hooves, the boots of troops, men’s shouts, the weeping of women and children. As we see, the bodies of the men of the Boyd-Parker expedition were treated at first like refuse, then like heroes. All the dead deserve respect; but it’s hard to see that Boyd accomplished anything much but disobey orders and get his fool self and a bunch of others killed. In another light, though, on that fateful day, Boyd’s rashness could have sprung a Seneca ambush that might have menaced Sullivan’s whole army. And his troop gave their lives in a cause beyond them, however ill-figured their sending-off. Let them stay heroes. Mason Winfield <a@a.com> Fri, 15 Feb 2008 22:04:12 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=14 One of the very intelligent students from the Park School in Buffalo sent me these questions as part of a project. I’ve done a bit of work with that progressive establishment over the years and have decided to run the interaction on this website. Thank you, Maribel. Q: What makes you an expert on ghosts? A: I didn't know I was one. So little concrete is provable about ghosts that even our experts look like beginners. However, I am exposed to some of the objective research and philosophy of the subject. I’m exposed to the process of questioning. You have to realize that being a "ghost expert" is not like being a doctor. Anyone can call him/herself a ghost expert since there are no credentials for the title. Most other fields... different ball game. When you call yourself a doctor, for instance, you need a degree and a license. From some established school that is degreed and licensed. Q: How long have you been studying ghosts? A: I've been interested since high school, an author since 1997. Take your pick as to the ceremonial beginning. And it would be more proper to say that I study haunted places, not the ghosts themselves. If I had picked that first allegedly haunted place and sat around waiting for a ghost to show I would probably still be there. Good sightings are very rare anywhere. Q: What made you interested in ghosts in the first place? A: I'm interested in human spirituality and consciousness. Studying the sorts of places that people have thought to be spiritual and consciousness-altering brings you fairly quickly into matters of visions, miracles, and apparitions. The rest follows. The public loves ghosts, though, and we can’t give them any good message from our specialties or help the world in any way if we can’t get people to hear us. Hence, ghosts. My specialty. Q: Did anyone influence you to become an expert on ghosts? A: Hundreds of people have influenced me to go the way I’ve gone, but, off the top… Authors John Michell, Colin Wilson, Paul Devereux, and my first influence, Nandor Fodor. Researchers William Roll and John Beloff. Poets Yeats, Shelley, and Shakespeare. Friends who are effectively all three, like geomancer Sig Lonegren, the late Franciscan exorcist Father Alphonsus Trabold, the late Seneca storyteller Duwayne "Duce" Bowen. Q: What exactly are ghosts? A: Spontaneous apparitions. The word means "things people see." A lot of people use the word “ghost” very unspecifically. They get it mixed in with a lot of other terms, most commonly “spirits.” They also use “ghosts” to mean whatever it is that creates psychic phenomena. What causes ghosts...? That's the real question I think you may be asking. That I can’t answer because I don’t have evidence. I don’t think anyone should say what’s behind them without direct evidence. But bear in mind that I am using the word “ghost” to mean “apparition.” What else can you know about them? Everything I say about ghosts reflects this. Q: Where do ghosts appear? A: Seemingly anywhere. However, they have higher tendencies to be reported in certain places: trauma-sites like battlefields and institutions; sacred sites like churches, fountains, and religious monuments; old and heavily-populated sites like schools and hospitals; oral-culture sittes like theaters and fire halls. Q: Have you ever lived or been to a place where it is haunted? A: I've been hundreds of places reputed to be haunted, some of them quite famous. I don't recall ever seeing a ghost at one of them. I've also lived in places that weren't famous and experienced psychic phenomena. Q: What is the most haunted place in the world? A: As far as I'm concerned, the most haunted place in the world is any place you happen to be at the moment of a psychic experience. But as for buildings... It's often thought to be the Tower of London. Not sure how you'd prove that. It's said to be the most haunted building in England, which is said to be the world's most haunted country. That about do it? Q: Are ghosts really attracted to metal or is that just something made up? A: I can’t tell you that a connection to metal is made-up, but… Who the heck told you that? I would really like to know. And then I would love to hear the evidence. Maybe it would make sense to me once I heard the full story; but at first thought it sounds like nonsense. Off the top, I can’t think of any metal-connection at all to some of the most famous outdoor haunted sites. A prehistoric Native American battlefield? Metal? And almost all indoor sites have metal of some sort in them. In that theory, why wouldn't they all be haunted? Really, I don't get this one. It’s nice, though, to think of people looking for patterns – the Big Picture – instead of just “proving” ghosts exist in a certain spot via orbs and EVPs and moving on, or even driving us all crazy by telling us what the ghosts are saying to us. But we have to be finding the right constants, not superficial ones. Q: Is there any history involved with ghosts? A: Not sure I get the point of this question. There are indeed many ghosts reported in history. Some famous people have been involved in very convincing episodes. The ones that stick in my mind - Goethe, Shelley, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Yeats - tend to be artsy and humanities-type people. But it’s not just poets who can be mystical. Some very driven and inspired figures of political and military history – Patton and Napoleon come to mind – had famous visionary experiences that were psychic and could even be apparitional – ghostly. Patton’s was at the site of the former Carthage and Napoleon’s was within the Great Pyramid, possibly inside the King’s Chamber. Even the despised Hitler had some sort of visionary experience, though I doubt it was a full one. If he’d seen what he was about to make happen I doubt even a madman would go forth with it. Q: Are there different kinds of ghosts? A: I think there are. You will get many systems from different people. Some give you six categories, some seven, some only three... I was on a radio program last fall and some ghosthunter called in kinda mad at me for disagreeing with his three categories. But the trick with most of the contemporary categories is that they are based on the default presumption that ghosts are spirits of the human dead, and they process everything that comes in based on that. Obviously, no good scientific thinker bases his/her study on anything that isn't proved. They don’t start with an assumption and process evidence accordingly. They shouldn't anyway. (I guess they only do that in the social sciences.) Based on the most reliable reports of eyewitnesses, these are my two categories of apparitions: 1) The (lightheartedly) GVG, “Garden-Variety Ghost.” This is an image that behaves like it's a film of some earlier moment of time at the same spot. It doesn't seem to be self-aware or even back with any purpose at all. It's like a mirage, or a video clip from a movie, one that spontaneously replays itself in the same place now and then - for unknown reasons. Most of the other people’s categories for ghosts fall into this one of my own. Religious apparitions usually fall into this category, too, though sometimes they address people and look self-aware. (To me, religious mysteries/miracles are the most utterly baffling psychic subject.) 2) The Crisis-Apparition. This is much rarer, and more focused and apparently intelligent. It is also not site-specific. It will find the person it’s looking for anywhere they are in the world and address them and speak to them, often logically. It seldom appears more than once. It’s often the image of a friend or loved one who has come back with a warning or message. Often the person the image resembles isn’t even dead yet, though he or she soon may be. The experiences with this Crisis-Apparition kind of ghost also give the best evidence of the after-death survival of human consciousness and identity. I could develop this discussion quite a bit, which I do in my lectures. But there are drastic differences in behavior and nature between the “ghosts” in these two categories. This is a very big and amorphous field, you realize, and it’s hard to know what to make of anything. There will always be things that seem to fall out of category. But I think I’ll stick with my two until further notice. Mason Winfield Mon, 04 Feb 2008 20:48:12 -0500 http://www.masonwinfield.com/journal.php?item=15 They’ve been dying to hang this one on a Yank for a long time, and it looks like they’ve finally done it. New light has shined on the Ripper case, and it shadows a Rochester gravestone. We thank a neat bit of work done by two English policemen: "Jack the Ripper: First American Serial Killer." ©Mason Winfield, SHADOWS of the WESTERN DOOR (1997). In three Autumn months of 1888, an unknown fiend killed and mutilated five women beneath the Whitechapel section gaslights of Victoria’s London. The public was outraged; herculean efforts were made to find the killer. British wit gave “Jack the Ripper” his memorable name, but it has always been stymied giving us his real one. The utter absence of any firm leads fed the wildest speculation. Conspiracies - even black magic - were thought at work, and “Ripperology” soon became a hobby. At least a hundred and thirty suspects (almost all of them disqualified out