Trigo Jose Marroquin
The popularized version of the Wendigo vs an illustration of the original Wendigo. Courtesy of David J. Jo.
With the topic of skinwalkers we’ve talked about, I’ve mentioned Windago. With Hollywood’s depiction of Windagos, you probably see them as moose or deer and/or a monster on two legs with antlers on their head with a deer skull and/or deer shape. But in the myths, they are said to be a spirit or perhaps a walking skeleton.
There are three of the Windago. The first one is from the movies. We all know about it. We love them, we know them, and they aren’t that far from the truth. The modern-day “Wendigo” 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 probably the most well-known.
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. The native name roughly translates to “The Evil That Devours Mankind.” There are several stories of the evil spirit, but all have this in common — they all have possession.
Every story starts in or near a forest. The next thing that happens is that the possessed one yells a poem that says, “Oh, my feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!… I ran in far, beseeching accents of indescribable appeal, this voice of anguish down the sky.”
As they say this, they will 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 nor what happened. It’s like in the show “Steven Universe,” where the gems get reset in the movie. Days would pass, and they would be found dead.
When you eat human flesh, you have a chance of getting an illness that makes you crave only human flesh. It makes you feel hungry, and that hunger will only be filled when you eat more and more human flesh. Wendigo psychosis happens when you starve and eat a human. From there, you start to believe that you have been possessed by a Windago.