Mason Winfield was raised in the suburbs near Buffalo, NY, the only child of a middle-class family. He was an active, energetic kid. Except for an inquisitive streak, an early predilection for reading and drawing, and that “only child”-thing, he showed few signs of a future author, storyteller, and paranormalist. He did like monsters, though. Books, movies, comics. Except that it could have used a few more monsters, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad would have been his idea of a perfect movie at age seven. Mason’s first brush with psychic phenomena – psi – came during junior high school. A little cult of neighborhood kids played – we do mean “played” – with the ouija board. A gifted amateur psychic taught them about Spiritualism. Mason witnessed several convincing incidents of psi, though he had then, as now, no firm theory about its causes and mechanisms.