Wendigo | Cannibalistic Monsters

In this post of Mystery Café, let’s get to know some things about the lore of Wendigo, also spelled as Windigo or Windego. Wendigo is a Cree-Indian word which basically means “an evil spirit that devours”. A German explorer explained the term ‘wendigo’ as ‘cannibal’.

In the lore, they are said to be originated along the coast of northern forests of the Atlantic Coast and Great Lakes Region of both the United States and Canada and there are different stories found about their legend in the Native American tribes.

Legend rumor has it that Wendigo has an unsatisfying hunger for the human flesh - no matter how much they eat, they are always hungry and this hunger is reflected straight into their appearance, which is assumed to be thin and really skinny. A description of the appearance of this very creature was described by Basil Johnston, an Ojibwe teacher, and scholar from Ontario. He described it as menacing, dangerous:

                                                  “The Wendigo was 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.”

This legend is actually associated with cannibalism, murder, insatiable greed, and the cultural taboos against such behaviors. They are said to know how to last through long extremely cold winters and that is somewhat of how the legend says they were originated.

There are locally two very much known stories related to their origin:

#1. What do you all think will happen if you get stuck somewhere far away from the crowd area and cut off from the food supply? From all the things you are thinking if one of them is starving then that’s what the most common story is related to. They were supposed to have been humans once. Humans who were somehow set into such conditions that they could not get access to any food supply and were left with no other choice than to starve. But we all have that desire to live, we humans can get pretty stubborn, don’t we? So these humans when could no longer take their hunger & resorted to cannibalism. They started to eat human flesh and it was believed that when a person consumes the flesh of another human being, he or she is believed to be overcome by evil spirits and transformed into a Wendigo, even if it was just for survival.

#2. Another version of the story is more like ‘the deal with the devil’. It was believed that the very first Wendigo was actually a tribal warrior who wanted to save his tribe from war and its consequences, so he made a deal with the Devil - in which he offered his soul in exchange for peace and thus making him into a cannibalistic creature of the night. As the legend goes when peace sued through the land there was no need for such a fearsome creature so tribe banished him and he was forced to live as an outcast.

In lore, the Wendigo is said to possess a cannibalistic hunter/trapper, often in a nightmare. Then it begins to burst through the hunter's flesh within a few days. It soon manifests as a decomposing, rotten humanoid with the decomposing head of a deer, a foul stench of death, and a bloody set of maws.

In modern times a very controversial medical term, Wendigo psychosis, was derived from this very legendary creature. It is described by psychiatrists as a culture-bound syndrome with symptoms such as an intense craving for human flesh and a fear of becoming a cannibal. In some Indigenous communities, environmental destruction and insatiable greed are also seen as a manifestation of this disorder.

So this legendary creature could in more simple modern terms be called as a cannibal or can we?

-XOXO   

Ace

P.S.  - In lore, they can be killed by silver.