Imagine this: It’s winter, you, your brother and sister, and some friends are staying in an awesome lodge in the mountains, something you do every year. Everything is great, until a few of your friends decide to play a nasty prank on you. Instead of being the butt of their joke, you take off, only your sister pursuing you – that is until something else appears. It’s large, monstrous, and spewing fire. You both run until you’re cornered on a cliff, but you both slip and fall. Your sister dies instantly, but you’re still alive. Your body is broken, you can’t move, but you’re still alive. The creature that was chasing you has disappeared, and no one can hear your screams.
One year later, your brother and friends return to the cabin. You’re not the same person. You’re hungry, and you can’t control your insatiable appetite. You’ve become the same as the creature that chased you over the cliff. You are a wendigo.
Sound familiar? That’s because it’s the premise behind the popular Playstation game, “Until Dawn.”
The Wendigo appears in other areas of pop culture, Supernatural – S1E2, The X-Files – S1E19, Ravenous, Dungeons & Dragons, Final Fantasy, and much more. But the Wendigo isn’t just a creature from someone’s imagination. We can actually trace its origin back to the legends of the Native American Algonquian people, including the Ojibwe, the Saulteaux, the Cree, the Naskapi, and the Innu.
Wendigo is plural for Wendigoag, which, roughly translated, means “the evil spirit that devours mankind.” They are believed to roam around the forests along the Atlantic Coast and the Great Lakes Region, where the Algonquian people once lived.
Legends say that Wendigoag were once humans, but were formed when that person consumed human flesh. It did not matter if it were a choice, or a means for survival, the person would be overcome by evil spirits and transformed into a Wendigo.
Another version of the story says that the very first Wendigoag was a warrior who made a deal with the Devil to save his tribe. In doing so, he gave up his soul and was transformed into a Wendigoag. When peace was finally attained, there was no more need for the Wendigoag, and he was banished from the tribe, forced to live as an outcast.
Regardless of which origin story you believe, the fact is, the Wendigo is a terrifying creature. They have an insatiable hunger for human flesh, never feeling satisfied. This is reflected in their appearance, as they are extremely thin, and tall, often measuring at approximately 14.8 feet in height. Their skin is yellowish in color and taut across their bones, like leather stretched on a rack. They have long yellowed fangs and long tongues protruding from a stag skull head. Their eyes, glowing specs in the dark.
Basil Johnston, an Ojibwe teacher and scholar from Ontario, described a Wendigo as:
“… gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody … Unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.”
Natives long attributed disappearances of local forest dwellers to the Wendigo, believing they were eaten. The creature has been spotted by more than just Native Americans. In fact, early settlers reported seeing a Wendigo near a town called Roseau in northern Minnesota. They claimed that every time this creature was spotted, a death followed soon after.
The question is, is the Wendigo real? Or is it the result of mental illness and susceptible believers? Wendigo Psychosis is one of the more dramatic mental illnesses, characterized by an intense craving for human flesh. In accounts reported by Jesuit missionaries, it was reported that humans became possessed by the Wendigo spirit, after being in a situation of needing food and having no other choice aside from cannibalism.
The following was taken from their reports in The Jesuit Relations.
“What caused us greater concern was the intelligence that met us upon entering the Lake, namely, that the men deputed by our Conductor for the purpose of summoning the Nations to the North Sea, and assigning them a rendezvous, where they were to await our coming, had met their death the previous Winter in a very strange manner. Those poor men (according to the report given us) were seized with an ailment unknown to us, but not very unusual among the people we were seeking. They are afflicted with neither lunacy, hypochondria, nor frenzy; but have a combination of all these species of disease, which affects their imaginations and causes them a more than canine hunger. This makes them so ravenous for human flesh that they pounce upon women, children, and even upon men, like veritable werewolves, and devour them voraciously, without being able to appease or glut their appetite —ever seeking fresh prey, and the more greedily the more they eat. This ailment attacked our deputies; and, as death is the sole remedy among those simple people for checking such acts of murder, they were slain in order to stay the course of their madness.”
One famous case of Wendigo Psychosis is that of a Plains Cree trapper from Alberta, named Swift Runner. During the winter of 1878, a year of starvation and misery for the Cree people, Swift Runner and his family were starving. His eldest son died, with food and emergency supplies just twenty-five miles away. However, instead of making a move to get supplies, Swift killed and ate his wife and 5 other children. His case was not cannibalism as a last resort, but a man with Wendigo Psychosis. In the end, Swift Runner confessed to authorities and was executed at Fort Saskatchewan.
The legitimacy of Wendigo Psychosis has been a highly debated controversy since the 1980’s, leaving some researchers arguing that Wendigo Psychosis was a fabrication; the result of naive anthropologists taking stories related to them as truth, without having observed the behavior itself. Others argued their credible eyewitness accounts as evidence that Wendigo Psychosis was a factual historical phenomenon.
