Its dark and cold, you it's just you and your father living in that small cabin, now all you can trying to do is just stay warm by the small fire, it's been hours since your father went into the forest to look for something to eat, it's been days since your last full-sized meal and your stomach is growling.
Then you hear something outside your cabin, it must be your father coming back hopefully with something good to eat, so you decide to go greet him, as you open the door you get a whoof of a stench like rotten meat by the time your mind clicked with what was happening a giant emaciated creature was devouring your arm you try to scream but you have lost so much blood you can't get even a whimper out .. then nothing.
The Wendigo is an emaciated creature with ashen flesh, large standing up to 15 feet tall (4.5m) with glowing eyes and sharp fangs and fangs, with horns or antlers and worst of all, it smells like rotten flesh. Originated in the First Nation mythos from the East Coast of Canada and the Great Lakes region of the United States.
The first known written record of the wendigo is by Paul Le Jeune a French Jesuit missionary in 1636 described a woman of a woman who warned about a wendigo who had eaten some tribal members nearby and that "would eat a great many more of them if he were not called elsewhere."
The wendigo is the embodiment of gluttony, greed and excess: never satisfied always looking for new victims and more victims.
The wendigo did not lose their ability to speak in fact in some stories they threated or taunt their victims.
One folk story from Chippewas of the Rama First Nation is as follows.
- " One time long ago a big Windigo stole an Indian boy, but the boy was too thin, so the Windigo didn't eat him up right away, but he travelled with the Indian boy waiting for him till he'd get fat. The Windigo had a knife and he'd cut the boy on the hand to see if he was fat enough to eat, but the boy didn't get fat. They travelled too much. One day they came to an Indian village and the Windigo sent the boy to the Indian village to get some things for him to eat. He just gave the boy so much time to go there and back. The boy told the Indians that the Windigo was near them and showed them his hand where the Windigo cut him to see if he was fat enough to eat. They heard the Windigo calling the boy. He said to the boy "Hurry up. Don't tell lies to those Indians." All of these Indians went to where the Windigo was and cut off his legs. They went back again to see if he was dead. He wasn't dead. He was eating the juice (marrow) from the inside of the bones of his legs that were cut off. The Indians asked the Windigo if there was any fat on them. He said, "You bet there is, I have eaten lots of Indians, no wonder they are fat." The Indians then killed him and cut him to pieces. This was the end of this Giant Windigo.
It is said in some traditions what human can turn into wendigos or created when a human resorted to cannibalism to survive or by been in contact with them too long.
The Assiniboine, Cree, Ojibwe had a satirical ceremonial dance that was sometimes performed during famines to reinforce the seriousness of the wendigo.
A peculiar report is wendigo psychosis or humans that believed they were possessed by a wendigo and had no other choice but to resort to murder and cannibalism.
One report from 1661 The Jesuit Relations (a paper that chronicled the Jesuits in new France from 1632-1673) reported.
-"What caused us greater concern was the news 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 report of wendigo psychosis is of Jack fiddler an Oji-Cree medicine man and his brother Joseph, in 1907 they brothers were arrested by the Canadian authorities for the murder of Joseph's daughter in law. According to them to stop her from becoming a wendigo Jack Fiddler escaped and later was found hanged he committed suicide and Joseph died in prison in 1909 of tuberculosis.
Another more well known is about Swift Runner a Plains Cree trapper from Alberta.
In the winter of 1878 Swift Runner and his family were starving, his eldest son died. They were about 25 miles away from the closest emergency food supplies at a Hudson's Bay Company, Swift still chose to butcher and ate his wife and five remaining children. The authorities concluded that he did not sole resulted to cannibalism due to starvation since he was so close to food. Thus, he was sentence to death and was executed in Fort Saskatchewan in the winter of 1879, a year later to his family demise.
One thing is true... not many cases of wendigo possessions happened in the 20th century however one must think it might be cause of technology.
And that also make me think. how hungry they must be after that they haven't feasted in a long time.
Now my dear reader if you happen to stay in a cabin in the wintertime on the East coast of Canada, I highly suggest don't wonder far and I hope you don't smell rotten flesh because if you do run ... but you might not get far, after all they are starving.
Good night.