Hey, spooky babes and welcome back! It’s been a little while since I’ve talked about cryptids, and I just mentioned them on Instagram the other day, so I thought now would be a great time to bring up another creepy cryptid for us all to think about when we try to fall asleep at night: The Wendigo.
Despite the fact that the Wendigo seems to be rising in popularity as of late (more on that in a moment), this creepy creature has been around for ages—literally. The Wendigo springs from ancient folklore attributed to Native American tribes like the Cree, the Salteaux, the Algonquian Okibwe, and the Innu. You may notice a lot of these tribes are concentrated to colder areas, like Canada or the northern U.S., where tales of Wendigo are most popular. The Wendigo is often associated with cold, famine, and starvation, and most tales report spotting it in snowy climates or frigid forests.
But what exactly is a Wendigo? The Wendigo is sometimes also called a Windigo. I’ve always written it with the “e”, but this seems to be entirely colloquial as some say Windigo, and even others call it the The Wendigo is most often described as looking like a skeletal hybrid of a humanoid and a deer, elk, or moose type creature. It is often described as standing on two feet and having sort of a human-ish body, but with the skull or head of a deer or other cervid creature. It often described as having antlers like a cervid, as well.
Even creepier, the Wendigo usually has some corpse-y qualities, looking like it possibly crawled out of a grave just recently. Its skin is gray and ashy and clinging to its bones, sometimes in shredded tatters and sometimes bloody, its eyes sunken into their sockets, its teeth broken or jagged and fang-like, and bared by lips that seem to be rotting away. At the end of its too-long arms it sports horrific claws, and most also describe it as having creepy glowing or red eyes. Those lucky enough to encounter a Wendigo usually report that it reeks of death, that sickening smell unique only to decaying flesh and organs.
So is the Wendigo just another random creature that we haven’t discovered yet running around in the woods? Not exactly. While it is a cryptid whose existence hasn’t been definitively proven, unlike say, the chupacabra, the Wendigo wasn’t necessarily born that way. Legends say that Wendigos started out as humans, and that a Wendigo is created when a human desperately resorts to cannibalism. Other legends say that a human transforms into a Wendigo when they are consumed by the darkness of greed and gluttony. Either way, the legends were useful folktales in imploring people to…well, to act right, basically, and to resist temptations. Folklore also says that people can become Wendigos by spending too much time around existing Wendigos, and some tales say you can transform by getting bitten by a Wendigo. After that, they are cursed to wander forever in search of human flesh to feed their appetite. One of the more well-known stories about Wendigos involves a man named Jack Fiddler, a shaman who killed fourteen humans because he claimed he knew that they were about to transform into Wendigos and he was killing them before they could do so, to protect them from themselves and to save others from being consumed by them after the hideous transformation.
Where have you seen the Wendigo? Chances are that even if you haven’t run across this cryptid in the chilling Northern landscape, you might still have spotted it in pop culture. Wendigo popularity seems to be on the rise, and they’ve been cropping up in several places, including YouTube videos, popular books, movies, and even video games.
First, there’s a barrage of YouTube videos featuring people’s own stories about what they think are real life encounters with the Wendigo in the wild, like these stories narrated by Darkness Prevails, one of my favorite spooky story readers on YouTube.
Until Dawn, a 2015 survival RPG for PS4, also features a really creepy rendition of the Wendigo as an integral part of the plot, and this game seems to be having a resurgence in popularity recently (possibly due to the lockdown and all of us being isolated indoors with little else to do).
You may have also recently seen one of my favorite YouTubers, Mykie AKA Glam&Gore, turn herself into the Wendigo featured in Until Dawn using SFX makeup—while playing Until Dawn.
And no matter what your views on this creepy creature are, you have to admit this image of a Wendigo sitting on the couch casually playing video games during quarantine is an absolute mood.
If you’re a movie buff, you may have also recently spotted the Wendigo in the Netflix movie The Ritual.
And in more mainstream movies, you might have seen it in the popular horror remake Pet Sematary. They discuss the Wendigo briefly as a source for the strange occurrences and noises in the cemetery, and you can hear it and possibly glimpse it in the background. However, if you’re more of a reader, the Wendigo features much more heavily in the book version of Pet Sematary. I’ve heard the Wendigo is also in the Stephen King book The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, which I haven’t read yet, but it is something I’m interested in checking out.
As you can see, these deer-headed monsters are getting more and more exposure in popular media nowadays. Have you seen any of this Wendigo content?
That wraps up today’s Spooky Saturday lesson this particular cryptid. What do you guys think of the Wendigo? Is it creepy? Just a weird myth made up to scare people into making good decisions? Or are these things possibly roaming around out there, looking to eat your flesh?
Leave me some comments with your thoughts! As always, I’d love to talk. <3
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