By Trigo Jose Marroquin
Photo from Scott Cooper’s “Antlers”
Though skinwalkers are a popular myth in native culture, especially in Arizona, there is another creature of legend that would make your skin crawl: the windago. Hollywood’s depiction of windagos shows them as moose or deer, or a monster on two legs carrying antlers on their head with a deer skull and/or deer shape. But in the original native myths, they are said to be a spirit and/or a walking skeleton.
You might also recognize them from movies like “Wendigo”, a game on Roblox called “99 Nights in the Forest” and a horror game called “The Cabin.”There are three versions of the windago. The first one is from the movies. We love them, we know them and they aren’t that far from the truth. The modern-day windago is said to have control over the cold, with the ability to mimic human voices, leading people to the forest to kill and eat them. It is the most well-known.
The most common depiction of a windago would be a deer-like body to be reshaped to look like a human’s, with their face rotten away only
There is another type that’s somewhat similar to the perceived one, but this one is a spirit. This one is called the “Spirit of the Wild.” From the original native language, the name roughly translates to “the evil that devours mankind.” There are several stories of this evil spirit, but all have this in common — possession.
Every story starts in a forest or near a forest. An example of this can be shown in “The Wendigo” by Algernon Blackwood. What happens is that the possessed one yells a poem that says, “Oh, my feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!…” ran in far, beseeching accents of indescribable appeal, this voice of anguish down the sky.”
As they say this, they run and slowly change shape and hide in the trees, with their feet burning to stubs and ash left with every step. If found, it looks like it’s wearing the skin like a bodysuit, with the face looking like it’s a mask that’s too big for the head under. After a few days, the spirit leaves the body near where it was found, and the person is healed but with burn scars, with no memory of anything that happened before. It’s like in “Steven Universe,” where the gems get reset in the movie. Days would pass, and they would be found dead.
There’s also an experience called “Windago psychosis”, which is what happens when someone starves and eats a human. From there, that person will start to believe that they have been possessed by a windago.