According to A Dictionary of Ghost Lore by Peter Haining:
The wendigo is a Canadian entity, half phantom, half beast, who lives in the forests and preys on human beings, particularly children. The belief in this horror dates back to the earliest Indian legends and it is said that the wendigo will eat the flesh of its victims. According to R.S. Lambert in “Exploring the Supernatural” (1955), ‘Wendigos (who might be women as well as men) were believed to have entered into a pact with evil spirits, lurking in the forest, who helped them kill their victims.’ The legend of this creature has been immortalized in Algernon Blackwood’s short story “The Wendigo” (1907). In W.T. Cox’s “Fearsome Creatures of the Lumber Woods” (1951) a number of other Canadian “wood horrors” are listed, including the hodag, the whimpus, the hoop-snake, the celofay, and the filamaloo.
Noah Broadwater (lseifer@usa.net) adds:
The posting on ‘Wendigos’ or ‘Wendegos’ (there are two spellings) is quite interesting and accurate from a folk point of view. Anthropologically, however, a different definition exists. ‘Wendigos’ are people who have a psychological problem. This occurs to people who starve out in the sub-arctic region. This hunger often causes a psychological imbalance. The person becomes cannibalistic and tries to eat other humans or anything that will provide food, including rotting animals. This often begins at night during sleep where the afflicted will turn in their sleep and attempt to eat whomever is next to them. The Inupiak (sp?) Native Americans are the most affected by this due to their migratory lifestyle and harsh environment. Currently Canadian hospitals are treating people affected by this phenomena.
More from a reader:
From: “Drachen” (drachen@home.com)
To: obiwan@ghosts.org
Subject: WENDIGO CRAP
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1999 16:19:37 -0600
I have been doing tonnes of research on the ‘wendigo’ for an animation screenplay I’m doing, and you REALLY have your facts mixed up..
First, it is a spirit or race of small people or race of giants, there is either ONE or there are many different ones… they can be human, or they can be a shapeshifter, they can be walking across a river and their head touching the clouds, then they can change form and be inside the lodge with regular people…
they exist primarily in the wintertime, and these storys are told to children to warn them of getting lost. and they mainly occur in the treelines of canada… there is a similar spirit I came accross from the northern regions of the states, however with that you merely get lost and never find your way back home if you ever cross his tracks…
and there are approximately 45+ different ways of spelling it, as it is a cree word, and there are five different dialects of cree, which, basically when letters are pronounced, the we (or i) followed by an asperated H sound followed by the N/D/T sound it is neither one of those but rather a sound right in between, so you can see whoever wrote about these things may not have been phonetically based in their writings. also the G/K is in between for the last part, which in some is pronounced similar to cow or rather gow…. and in some like go…
It is also known as atchen, mahtsie (phonetically spelled) and several other words… There are MANY stories, there are only a few things consistant about it… the wendigo suffers an insatiable appetite, they have jagged or sharp teeth, their hearts are made of ice, and their lips look as if animals have nibbled them off or the wendigo themselves have chewed them off… sometimes the tongue too,
they sometimes smell, and ussually their obsession becomes everything to them letting their hygene suffer terribly, scraggly hair, shreds for clothes etc…
There are many different stories that say who or how you become a wendigo, some say that only bad people become one, some say that a powerful medicine man can make one, some say that you become one in dreams, and some say that only indians can be one, some say that only men, and some say anyone can become one…
The culture that the wendigo is a part of, believe deeply in dreams, if by chance you dream of eating a person, then you may drive yourself to do so, as one rule is to dream it is to become one…
Also there are tonnes of storys concernign the wendigo, and I have read a ton of them… so far only one or two White’mans versions have been semi accurate, otherwise its romantisized and stupid, with NO basis in what it actually means or represents….
Another thing… the wendigo is NOT a good spirit but rather a very evil spirit… if you come accross the tracks and cross them, of the wendigo there are only three options, 1. you become one yourself, 2. you become the victim of one and are consumed, 3. you die of fright and freeze to death…
Any person becoming a wendigo will always ask to be killed when in their right mind… there is a story of a man who was a good man, and strong and handsome… he had a wife, and children, one day his wife made comment to her brother who lived in a village, as she and her family lived outside the village a ways… she made a comment that she was starting to fear for her children and her husband has not been the same for a few day, waking up from bad dreams… the brother tried to reassure her and said he would check up on her later that week.
a week passes and he sees his brother in law in the village and asks how hes been doing and how his sister was… the brother in law said that he is fine and his bad dreams are gone now… and then he leaves. The brother is no longer concerned, but the rcmp were in the village that week and decided to check up on all the people. So they headed out to where the Husband lived with his wife, and they found him there with a dead child carcass drying…
He turned to the officers and calmly said, I’m glad you are here, you can kill me now…
The rest of the family had already been eaten. What shocked them the most was that there was PLENTY of moose, deer and fish, as well as a huge variety of berries both drying out beside the human flesh.
The man was arrested and the villagers were shocked and angry that they were taking so long to kill this man as it was tradition. An elder who knew the man since he was a small child offered to be the one to kill him so that his soul would not return to harm others. (a belief held among the cree and dene population) However he had to wait for trial, and wait and wait…. for about six months plus he waited. He was found guilty, and when he was sentenced to be hung, his last words were, “this could have been less painful had you followed my wishes to kill me in the first place.”
There you go…
This is just one story of the wihtikow… (my personal favorite spelling of it)
There is a book called ‘the wendigo’ if you really want to get some good information about it, it delves into the stories, of all kinds analyses each one, both culturally and scientifically, there is something called the wendigo psychosis, that they beleive happens, such as what happened to the donner party…
e mail me if you have any particular questions… thanks… and PLEASE make changes in your FAQs for this… feel free to omit a bit of this if it is too winded for you. There is still SSSOOOOO much more about this…
Carrie