November 3, 2023 • 31 mins
In 1878, a man named Kakisikutchin took his wife, six children, mother-in-law, and brother, out into the forest, to hunt food for the winter.
But only Kakisikutchin returned. His family had all died he said, and now he was being tormented by the wendigo.
This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by Richard MacLean Smith.
Go to twitter @unexplainedpod, facebook.com/unexplainedpodcast or unexplainedpodcast.com for more info. Thank you for listening.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
A howling wind whipped through the pine trees, blowing icy
crystals from snow heavy branches. In a small clearing, A
thin curl of smoke rose from the roof of a
dome shaped dwelling made from tree branches covered with rush
matting and a dusting of fresh snow. Inside, a family
(00:32):
lay as close as possible to the meager fire and
its hot stones, Too tired and famished to move. There
were occasional whimpers from the small children as the mother
weakly stroked their hair. Three other adults were listlessly sleeping,
her mother and brother in law, and her husband. Scraps
(00:55):
from their last meal, fragments of the skin and bone
of a beaver, the snowshoe hare stripped of every last
morsel of flesh, and several days old, lay scattered near
the hearth. The husband, empty whiskey bottles at his feet,
had fallen into a fitful sleep. Somewhere deep in his mind.
(01:18):
The sound of the gusty wind howling around the wigwamp
morphed first into a semi human howl, and then into
an insistent, rasping whisper that sounded like bone scraping on bone.
Then he found himself, staring out into a snowstorm and
(01:39):
through a white mist, the shape of an impossibly tall figure,
gaunt and skeletal, emerged in the distance. He could see
it hiding in the trees, deathly ashen gray, with desiccated
skin pulled tightly over its bones. It had only sock
(01:59):
it for eyes, and in place of lips there was
only tattered, bloody flesh, stinking of decay and decomposition. The
creature raised one emaciated clawlike hand, beckoning Kakisi Kutcheon closer,
but the man stayed still, too terrified to move. He
(02:25):
could see then that the creature was chewing on what
looked like raw pink flesh, the blood dripping from its mouth.
Khakisi Kutcheon woke suddenly from the nightmare, drenched in cold sweat.
Shaking it off, he rose weakly to his feet and
(02:46):
snaggered outside to relieve himself. The gathering dusk was descending
like a blanket over the trees, the start of another interminable,
frozen Canadian winter night. Through a groggy haze, the man
remembered his dream. He gazed out into the growing blizzard,
(03:08):
trying to discern shapes in the trees beyond. Then, as
if hypnotized, he began shuffling slowly back to the relative
warmth of the Wigwam, Gripped by an insatiable urge in sight.
He stared at the forms of his wife, mother in law, brother,
(03:30):
and his six children. They seemed to shift and change
before him in the flickering half light of the dying fire,
into the shapes of beavers, hares, and rabbits. His eyes
glazed over with a strange intensity. Saliva dripped from the
corners of his mouth, and a terrible hunger twisted in
(03:54):
his gut. Consumed by the unstoppable desire to eat flesh,
he took up the hunting rifle resting against the wall
and raised it to his shoulder. Then he took aim
and opened fire. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard
(04:15):
mc lean smith. The Wendigo is held deep in the
collective memory and traditional folklore of the Ojibwe, Cree, Chippewa,
and Algonquin tribes. These Annishinabe peoples ancestral homelands stretch across
(04:38):
much of the northern u s and Canada for centuries.
Every year, at the end of fall, when the lakes
began to freeze over and the snow started to fall,
and a Shinabe people would spread out from communal summer
camps deep into the woods, with each family group going
to traditional winter camp sites. There, they hunted deer and moose,
(05:02):
snowshoe hair, and beaver, as well as fishing through the
ice and using stores of wild rice, berries and maple
sugar to survive the winter months. They were often haunted
by the Wendigo, an evil spirit said to roam the dark,
intensely cold forests, preying on starving humans. As they sat
(05:26):
in their traditional wooden framed wigwams draped in tree bark,
the cracks stuffed with grass, they would tell tales around
the fire of how the Wendigo would sometimes be seen
by one or more members of a group who'd fallen
on hard times, used up their store of berries and
(05:46):
failed to catch enough game. This spirit creature would strike
whenever it found people starving and at their most desperate,
often preceded by a foul stench or sudden extra icy chill.
The creature would appear as a giant, gray skinned, emaciated humanoid.
(06:09):
Sometimes it is said that the windigo would mimic human voices,
which appeared to be carried on the wind, luring an
unsuspecting victim deep into the trees, where it would attack
and then feast on them. Whenever a wendigo ate someone,
it was said to grow in proportion to the size
(06:29):
of the meal, and so never able to satiate its hunger.
The wendigo was also and still is, an embodiment of gluttony, greed,
and excess. Although the wendigo is frequently depicted as having
horns or antlers, these features never appeared in the original
(06:50):
indigenous stories. They are modern inventions of horror novels and
Hollywood movie plots. On other occasions, the Anishinabis said that
one or more starving people became possessed by the wendigo,
with historical accounts of such possessions going at least as
far back as sixteen sixty one. In the seventeenth century,
(07:20):
Jesuit ministries reported being greatly concerned when they learned that
some people they were supposed to rendezvous with had died
in a very strange manner the previous winter. These people,
they said, seemed to have suffered from some type of
frenzy which made them so ravenous for human flesh that
(07:40):
they pounced upon women, children, and men like veritable werewolves,
devouring them voraciously without being able to appease or stem
their appetite. But Jesuits reported that having been thus afflicted,
the individuals were then killed by fellow members of their
tribe to halt the madness. Fear of anyone suspected of
(08:06):
having been so possessed was rife, and members of a
community would sometimes band together and kill a person suspected
of wendigo possession. In spring seventeen seventy five, Hudson's Bay
Company officer Samuel Hearn was busy building what's known today
as Cumberland House, the Hudson's Bay Company's first inland for
(08:31):
trading post. When a lean, hardy looking Native American of
the Wapoos tribe arrived at the settlement, he was soon
accosted by a group of fellow Native Americans, who gathered
around him, demanding to know where he'd come from. He
said only that he'd come a considerable way by himself,
(08:52):
without a gun or ammunition. The others quickly became suspicious
and wondered if he'd perhaps met an killed someone along
his way later, once the young Wapoos had found lodgings,
he was seen secretly snashing a bag of provisions up
a nearby pine tree. Some women stealthily crept out to
(09:15):
the tree and pulled down the bag. Inside they found
meat that they were certain was human flesh. Fearing they
might have a real life Wendigo on their hands, the
men loaded up their guns and readied their bows and arrows,
while the women took up hatchets, all intent on killing
(09:37):
the hapless stranger. Luckily, some elders quickly debunked the claims
and declared that the young man was guilty of nothing
more than traveling two hundred miles alone. On this occasion,
a life was saved, but not everyone was so lucky
or so innocent. One spring day in eighteen seventy nine,
(10:11):
a tall, apparently healthy cree man wandered alone into the
Catholic mission town of Saint albert on the Sturgeon River,
just northwest of the city of Edmonton in Alberta. Far
from staggering to the steps of the mission, he walked
jauntily and appeared to be a specimen of good health.
(10:32):
His name was Khaki C. Kutchin or swift Runner, as
it translates to English. Over six feet tall and a
father of six children, he'd been a popular man in
the Cree community for many years, making his living as
a trapper, then working as a guide for the Northwest
Mounted Police. But over time swift Runner developed a taste
(10:57):
for whiskey and became an alcoholic. He was said to
be an angry drunk with the tendency to violence, and
his habit would eventually get him fired by the police
force and kicked out of his tribe. In the winter
of eighteen seventy eight, swift Runner took his wife, six children,
(11:18):
mother in law, and brother out into the forest, ostensibly
to hunt food to last them the winter months, but
only swift Runner returned from the stay. When asked by
the priests in Saint Albert what had happened to his family,
swift Runner claimed they had all starved to death. It
(11:39):
had been an especially brutal and bitter winter that year,
But the priests had trouble believing the story. They knew
quite a few other Cree who'd had a pretty successful
winter hunting season that year, and if the family had
experienced trouble catching food, why hadn't they traveled to the
Hudson's Baker Company post, located a mere twenty five miles
(12:03):
from their camp, where they would have been given emergency rations.
But more strange is the fact that, despite his family
having apparently starved to death at about two hundred pounds
in weight, swift Runner seemed not in the least bit
malnourished himself. Over the next few days, the priests kept
(12:26):
swift Runner under observation. In the daytime, he acted perfectly normal,
but at night time the town would be plagued by
the sound of swift Runner's screams, the result of terrible
nightmares that often had him waking up in terror and
gasping for breath. When quizzed by the priests about it,
(12:48):
he replied simply that he was being tormented by an
evil spirit called a Wendigo, which wouldn't elaborate any further. Then.
One day, it was to governed that some of the
children from the town had gone missing. Swift Runner was
found soon after attempting to lead them out into the woods.
(13:10):
Swift Runner was promptly arrested, and, with the priests now
convinced that he was hiding something, they ordered him to
lead them to his family's winter camp. Swift Runner was
reluctant to do it at first. Some say that he
(13:32):
tried to mislead the police, only cooperating with them after
they got him drunk. Others that he first led them
to the wrong place, but eventually the man did lead
them to where they wanted to go, and soon they
arrived at a small clearing in the forest, where before
them was a modest dome shaped dwelling made from tree branches,
(13:57):
covered with rush matting and topped with the light dusting
of snow. Lifting the flap to go inside, the police
were confronted with a scene like hell on Earth. The
place was littered with scraps of human flesh, hair, and bones.
Some of the larger ones had been snapped and the
(14:19):
marrow sucked out of them. It said that they even
found a pot full of human fat. With nowhere left
to hide, swift Runner made his terrible confession. The truth
was they had struggled to find food, but when his
eldest son had died of starvation, swift Runner's response was
(14:42):
to murder his remaining family members one by one. Some
of them he shot, others he bludgeoned with an axe.
He confessed to strangling one of his daughters with a cord,
while he fed his eldest son's flesh to another son,
before killing and eating that boy too. At his trial,
(15:06):
swift Runner claimed that a Wendigo spirit had somehow possessed him,
forcing him to carry out the atrocities, but the jury
didn't believe him. After twenty minutes of deliberation, they found
him guilty of the multiple murders and he was sentenced
to death. Swift Runner's execution took place on December twentieth,
(15:28):
eighteen seventy nine. He was the first man to be
legally hanged in Alberta. According to some reports, before the
death sentence was carried out, swift Runner converted to Catholicism
and admitted his guilt. Moments before the trap door dropped.
He was said to have expressed extreme remorse, telling his
(15:51):
confessor father LeDuc, I am the least of men and
do not merit even being called a man. Quite a
few spectators arrived to watch swift runners execution. One proclaimed
that he was thoroughly impressed with the show and that
it was the prettiest hanging he'd ever seen. The Ani
(16:20):
Shinabe peoples, especially the Ojibwe and Cree. Like most people,
were extremely repelled by the idea of cannibalism, and far
from living the impoverished, mean, hand to mouth existence that
some white settlers thought they saw. The Anishinabi's lives were
typically filled with joy, love, and fulfillment. It was only
(16:42):
during times a great hardship that the Wendigo spirit was
said to surface. Victims of wendigo possession were said to
show physical changes, their bodies, reputedly swelling and growing, their
lips and mouths, also becoming in large lodged. Some spoke
of being unable to warm their bodies as an icy
(17:05):
cold gripped their chest. Of the many supposed wendigo possessions
between the mid eighteen hundreds and the nineteen twenties, there
were other reports of unofficial wendigo executions, and a Jibwe
creed chief and shaman called in English Jack Fiddler, known
for his powers defeating wendigoes, was said to have in
(17:29):
some cases euthanized people said to be possessed. However, in
nineteen o seven, the law caught up with Jack Fiddler
and his brother Joseph when they were arrested by Canadian
authorities for murder. Jack committed suicide, while Joseph was tried
and sentenced to life in prison. It was psychologist and
(17:53):
missionary J. E. Sanden who first made a formal definition
of what he termed a sickness while he worked among
the cree of Western James Bay on the southern end
of Hudson Bay in the early nineteen hundreds. But far
from resembling the gruesome case of swift Runner, what Sanden
observed corresponded closely with some Northern Ajibwe accounts of wendigo possession.
(18:18):
The main symptoms shown by one female victim was that
she didn't wish to see anyone outside her immediate family,
because she said strangers looked like wild animals to her,
an appearance that gave her the urge to kill them
in self defense. After receiving assurances from Sandon, the women
(18:41):
did soon apparently recover. Another psychologist, lou Moreno, who conducted
field studies among the Anish and Arbi, reported two similar
cases involving married women who had become reclusive, expressing fear
of all but their closest relatives. In nineteen thirty three,
(19:03):
priest and anthropologist John M. Cooper published the first so
called scientific report in which the word psychosis was applied
to the wendigo phenomenon, based on observations among Cree and
other Algonquin speaking peoples. He wrote cannibalism was resorted to
only in cases where actual starvation threatened and people were
(19:27):
driven to desperation by prolonged famine, after which they often
suffered from mental breakdown. He went on to say that
the Cree would sometimes eat the bodies of those who
had perished, but only rarely kill the living and eat
their flesh, which, according to him, left as its aftermath
(19:49):
an unnatural craving for human flesh, or a psychosis that
took the form of such a craving. In nineteen thirty four,
Irving Halliwell, a cultural anthropologist known for his work on
(20:12):
the Ojibwe, claimed to confirm the existence of the wendigo
psychosis among the Baron's River Salto, a northern Ojibwe group,
despite its lack of firsthand knowledge. He categorized early physical
symptoms of the disease as a distaste for ordinary foods, nausea,
and vomiting. Of the disorder's later stages, he wrote, the
(20:37):
individual may exhibit a positive desire for human flesh or
even take steps to satisfy this desire, and the persons
affected were either killed or they recovered. Babies and even
dogs became suspected of being afflicted with wendigo psychosis. Also
(20:58):
in the nineteen thirty the anthropologist Ruth Lands described how
the infant son of a shaman named Great Mallard Duck
began eating his fingers, then bit off the nipples off
his dead mother's breasts during a period of starvation in
which seven out of sixteen family members died of hunger.
(21:21):
Lands wrote the baby's eyes were blazing and his teeth rattling,
his wendigo symptoms indicating fever, privation and neurotic fury. Having
decided he was turning into a wendigo, the baby boy
was killed by his grandmother. Interestingly, very different conclusions were
(21:45):
reached about a group of white Mormon pioneers also caught
in starvation circumstances drawn by the promise of fertile farmlands
in central California. In spring eighteen four six, the families
of George Donna, Jacob Donner, and James Reed left Illinois
(22:07):
to migrate west. They made good progress as far as
Fort Laramie in what is now Wyoming, but where most
wagon trains turned north taking the Oregon Trail. In late
summer eighteen forty six, the Reeds and Donners chose an
apparent short cut to California, another path known as the
(22:29):
Hastings cut Off. It was a disastrous decision. The so
called Donna Party, consisting of eighty seven people, including fifteen
women and forty three children, with twenty three ox drawn wagons,
believed it would shave more than three hundred miles off
the journey. It was in fact one hundred and twenty
(22:52):
five miles longer than the established trail, traversing some of
the most inhospitable country in the West, including the Great
Salt Lake Desert. Migrants taking the main trail had already
arrived in California in late September, while the Donner Party,
having lost dozens of cattle and been forced to abandon
(23:15):
several wagons along the way, found themselves in a race
against time to clear the high passes of the Sierra
Nevada Mountains before it started snowing. Running very low on food,
(23:35):
the Donner Party and their exhausted animals approached what is
now called Donna Pass on October thirty first, and found
it blocked by snow. Building crude cabins by a lake,
they sat through eight straight days of heavy snowfall. Many
of the oxen wandered off and were lost. On December fifteenth,
(24:00):
an employee of the Reed family died of malnutrition. Determined
not to meet the same fate, the next day, ten
men and five at the women set out to cross
the mountains on improvised snow shoes through deep snow with
inadequate food. Eight of the men died, and in an
(24:21):
act of terrible desperation, the two surviving men and five
women cannibalized some of the bodies. Sustained by this, the
seven survivors finally reached the Sacramento Valley in January of
eighteen forty seven. They organized a relief party who struggled
(24:42):
back through the deep snow, reaching the camp at what
is now called Donna Lake in mid February. Alfter the
remaining party had died one by one. Those left alive
had also resorted to canlizing the corpses of the dead. Incredibly,
(25:05):
survivors of the harrowing journey seemed undeterred by it all.
Fourteen year old Donna Party member Virginia Reid wrote soon
after to a cousin in Illinois who was due to
make the journey herself the following year. After detailing some
of the events, she finished simply with, Oh, Mary, I
(25:27):
have not wrote you half the trouble we have had,
but I have wrote you enough to let you know
what trouble is. But don't let this letter dishearten anybody.
Never take no cutoffs, and hurry along as fast as
you can. Later that year, gold was discovered in California,
(25:48):
turning the trickle of westbound migrants into a flood. It
was never suggested that having tasted human flesh, members of
the Donner Party became permanent slaves to in satiable cannibalistic psychosis,
and the group were never suspected of now being prone
to stalking the California gold fields searching for unsuspecting prospectors
(26:12):
to dine on. By the nineteen eighties, there was a
hot debate among Western ethnographers, psychologists, and anthropologists as to
whether wendigo psychosis even existed at all. By the time,
so called wendigo possessions reached their peak, many Anishanabi had
(26:34):
been involved in the fur trade for more than two centuries,
begun as a means of supplementing income in exchange for
providing European traders with luxury goods. Fur trapping often led
Native Americans into debt with the trading posts. So many
newly arrived people indiscriminately hunting so many game animals, especially
(26:58):
moose and beaver, also depleted vital winter food sources for
indigenous tribes, contributing to widespread famine. Perhaps, in some ways,
the wendigo was merely a manifestation of a Native American
collective fear of what might become of them in their
newly depleted world. In the nineteen sixties, reports appeared of
(27:29):
an indigenous woman with a number of strange behavioral problems,
most especially food hoarding. In the beginning, the woman took
to carrying around a cooked hot dog in her purse,
but soon switched to raw hamburger meat. For two years,
she bought two to five pounds of hamburger a day,
(27:50):
later increasing her purchases to around sixty pounds per day,
carrying the meat with her in her car. She had
trouble parting with it even when it became rotten, just
as a jeepway hunters had roamed the dark woods for
centuries in search of prey, so night after night, the
(28:11):
woman would drive the darkened streets of the city searching
for open stores where she could buy hamburger meat. She
did not eat the raw hamburger, although on one occasion,
while looking at a supermarket's meat display, she reported feeling
the sudden impulse to bury her face in it and
devour it all. Two psychiatrists treating the woman concluded that
(28:36):
she was a symbolic cannibal, and for a while she
was confined to a psychiatric hospital. There, she switched from
hoarding hamburger, which she could no longer get her hands on,
to hoarding bread, and eventually she gave up hoarding food
altogether and was released. It's not known how many people
(28:59):
over the last three centuries or more, propelled by a
mixture of desperation, starvation, cultural and environmental oppression, have been
convinced that they've seen the Wendigo or succumbed to so
called Wendigo psychosis, or how many Indigenous people were forced
to resort to cannibalism during times of extreme privation, or
(29:22):
were killed for wendigo possession, and while no one has
ever produced physical evidence that the wendigo really exists. From
time to time, eerie howls are heard drifting through North
America's boreal forests. In twenty nineteen, reports of one such
(29:43):
mysterious howl being heard and recorded in the Canadian wilderness
emerged online. Genomechus was out hunting grouse with his wife
and grandson in northwestern Ontario, more than thirty miles from
the nearest town, when they heard a series of eerie
screams ringing out from somewhere deep in the forest. An
(30:07):
experienced an avid hunter from a young age, Mikus said,
I've heard many different wild animal calls, but nothing like this.
Initially distant, the howls appeared to be approaching the family.
We could hear it moving. It sounded kind of heavy,
Mikus told a local news station. His frightened wife grabbed
(30:31):
their grandson, and the family retreated as fast as they
could back to their truck. They never saw the creature
making the sounds, the recordings of which were passed on
to a number of government biologists, and none of them
could identify it. This episode was written by Diane Hope
(30:55):
and produced by Richard mclan smith. Unexplained as an Abe
Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other
elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced
by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook
with the stories never before featured on the show, is
(31:16):
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(31:38):
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Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast
A howling wind whipped through the pine trees, blowing icy
crystals from snow heavy branches. In a small clearing, A
thin curl of smoke rose from the roof of a
dome shaped dwelling made from tree branches covered with rush
matting and a dusting of fresh snow. Inside, a family
(00:32):
lay as close as possible to the meager fire and
its hot stones, Too tired and famished to move. There
were occasional whimpers from the small children as the mother
weakly stroked their hair. Three other adults were listlessly sleeping,
her mother and brother in law, and her husband. Scraps
(00:55):
from their last meal, fragments of the skin and bone
of a beaver, the snowshoe hare stripped of every last
morsel of flesh, and several days old, lay scattered near
the hearth. The husband, empty whiskey bottles at his feet,
had fallen into a fitful sleep. Somewhere deep in his mind.
(01:18):
The sound of the gusty wind howling around the wigwamp
morphed first into a semi human howl, and then into
an insistent, rasping whisper that sounded like bone scraping on bone.
Then he found himself, staring out into a snowstorm and
(01:39):
through a white mist, the shape of an impossibly tall figure,
gaunt and skeletal, emerged in the distance. He could see
it hiding in the trees, deathly ashen gray, with desiccated
skin pulled tightly over its bones. It had only sock
(01:59):
it for eyes, and in place of lips there was
only tattered, bloody flesh, stinking of decay and decomposition. The
creature raised one emaciated clawlike hand, beckoning Kakisi Kutcheon closer,
but the man stayed still, too terrified to move. He
(02:25):
could see then that the creature was chewing on what
looked like raw pink flesh, the blood dripping from its mouth.
Khakisi Kutcheon woke suddenly from the nightmare, drenched in cold sweat.
Shaking it off, he rose weakly to his feet and
(02:46):
snaggered outside to relieve himself. The gathering dusk was descending
like a blanket over the trees, the start of another interminable,
frozen Canadian winter night. Through a groggy haze, the man
remembered his dream. He gazed out into the growing blizzard,
(03:08):
trying to discern shapes in the trees beyond. Then, as
if hypnotized, he began shuffling slowly back to the relative
warmth of the Wigwam, Gripped by an insatiable urge in sight.
He stared at the forms of his wife, mother in law, brother,
(03:30):
and his six children. They seemed to shift and change
before him in the flickering half light of the dying fire,
into the shapes of beavers, hares, and rabbits. His eyes
glazed over with a strange intensity. Saliva dripped from the
corners of his mouth, and a terrible hunger twisted in
(03:54):
his gut. Consumed by the unstoppable desire to eat flesh,
he took up the hunting rifle resting against the wall
and raised it to his shoulder. Then he took aim
and opened fire. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard
(04:15):
mc lean smith. The Wendigo is held deep in the
collective memory and traditional folklore of the Ojibwe, Cree, Chippewa,
and Algonquin tribes. These Annishinabe peoples ancestral homelands stretch across
(04:38):
much of the northern u s and Canada for centuries.
Every year, at the end of fall, when the lakes
began to freeze over and the snow started to fall,
and a Shinabe people would spread out from communal summer
camps deep into the woods, with each family group going
to traditional winter camp sites. There, they hunted deer and moose,
(05:02):
snowshoe hair, and beaver, as well as fishing through the
ice and using stores of wild rice, berries and maple
sugar to survive the winter months. They were often haunted
by the Wendigo, an evil spirit said to roam the dark,
intensely cold forests, preying on starving humans. As they sat
(05:26):
in their traditional wooden framed wigwams draped in tree bark,
the cracks stuffed with grass, they would tell tales around
the fire of how the Wendigo would sometimes be seen
by one or more members of a group who'd fallen
on hard times, used up their store of berries and
(05:46):
failed to catch enough game. This spirit creature would strike
whenever it found people starving and at their most desperate,
often preceded by a foul stench or sudden extra icy chill.
The creature would appear as a giant, gray skinned, emaciated humanoid.
(06:09):
Sometimes it is said that the windigo would mimic human voices,
which appeared to be carried on the wind, luring an
unsuspecting victim deep into the trees, where it would attack
and then feast on them. Whenever a wendigo ate someone,
it was said to grow in proportion to the size
(06:29):
of the meal, and so never able to satiate its hunger.
The wendigo was also and still is, an embodiment of gluttony, greed,
and excess. Although the wendigo is frequently depicted as having
horns or antlers, these features never appeared in the original
(06:50):
indigenous stories. They are modern inventions of horror novels and
Hollywood movie plots. On other occasions, the Anishinabis said that
one or more starving people became possessed by the wendigo,
with historical accounts of such possessions going at least as
far back as sixteen sixty one. In the seventeenth century,
(07:20):
Jesuit ministries reported being greatly concerned when they learned that
some people they were supposed to rendezvous with had died
in a very strange manner the previous winter. These people,
they said, seemed to have suffered from some type of
frenzy which made them so ravenous for human flesh that
(07:40):
they pounced upon women, children, and men like veritable werewolves,
devouring them voraciously without being able to appease or stem
their appetite. But Jesuits reported that having been thus afflicted,
the individuals were then killed by fellow members of their
tribe to halt the madness. Fear of anyone suspected of
(08:06):
having been so possessed was rife, and members of a
community would sometimes band together and kill a person suspected
of wendigo possession. In spring seventeen seventy five, Hudson's Bay
Company officer Samuel Hearn was busy building what's known today
as Cumberland House, the Hudson's Bay Company's first inland for
(08:31):
trading post. When a lean, hardy looking Native American of
the Wapoos tribe arrived at the settlement, he was soon
accosted by a group of fellow Native Americans, who gathered
around him, demanding to know where he'd come from. He
said only that he'd come a considerable way by himself,
(08:52):
without a gun or ammunition. The others quickly became suspicious
and wondered if he'd perhaps met an killed someone along
his way later, once the young Wapoos had found lodgings,
he was seen secretly snashing a bag of provisions up
a nearby pine tree. Some women stealthily crept out to
(09:15):
the tree and pulled down the bag. Inside they found
meat that they were certain was human flesh. Fearing they
might have a real life Wendigo on their hands, the
men loaded up their guns and readied their bows and arrows,
while the women took up hatchets, all intent on killing
(09:37):
the hapless stranger. Luckily, some elders quickly debunked the claims
and declared that the young man was guilty of nothing
more than traveling two hundred miles alone. On this occasion,
a life was saved, but not everyone was so lucky
or so innocent. One spring day in eighteen seventy nine,
(10:11):
a tall, apparently healthy cree man wandered alone into the
Catholic mission town of Saint albert on the Sturgeon River,
just northwest of the city of Edmonton in Alberta. Far
from staggering to the steps of the mission, he walked
jauntily and appeared to be a specimen of good health.
(10:32):
His name was Khaki C. Kutchin or swift Runner, as
it translates to English. Over six feet tall and a
father of six children, he'd been a popular man in
the Cree community for many years, making his living as
a trapper, then working as a guide for the Northwest
Mounted Police. But over time swift Runner developed a taste
(10:57):
for whiskey and became an alcoholic. He was said to
be an angry drunk with the tendency to violence, and
his habit would eventually get him fired by the police
force and kicked out of his tribe. In the winter
of eighteen seventy eight, swift Runner took his wife, six children,
(11:18):
mother in law, and brother out into the forest, ostensibly
to hunt food to last them the winter months, but
only swift Runner returned from the stay. When asked by
the priests in Saint Albert what had happened to his family,
swift Runner claimed they had all starved to death. It
(11:39):
had been an especially brutal and bitter winter that year,
But the priests had trouble believing the story. They knew
quite a few other Cree who'd had a pretty successful
winter hunting season that year, and if the family had
experienced trouble catching food, why hadn't they traveled to the
Hudson's Baker Company post, located a mere twenty five miles
(12:03):
from their camp, where they would have been given emergency rations.
But more strange is the fact that, despite his family
having apparently starved to death at about two hundred pounds
in weight, swift Runner seemed not in the least bit
malnourished himself. Over the next few days, the priests kept
(12:26):
swift Runner under observation. In the daytime, he acted perfectly normal,
but at night time the town would be plagued by
the sound of swift Runner's screams, the result of terrible
nightmares that often had him waking up in terror and
gasping for breath. When quizzed by the priests about it,
(12:48):
he replied simply that he was being tormented by an
evil spirit called a Wendigo, which wouldn't elaborate any further. Then.
One day, it was to governed that some of the
children from the town had gone missing. Swift Runner was
found soon after attempting to lead them out into the woods.
(13:10):
Swift Runner was promptly arrested, and, with the priests now
convinced that he was hiding something, they ordered him to
lead them to his family's winter camp. Swift Runner was
reluctant to do it at first. Some say that he
(13:32):
tried to mislead the police, only cooperating with them after
they got him drunk. Others that he first led them
to the wrong place, but eventually the man did lead
them to where they wanted to go, and soon they
arrived at a small clearing in the forest, where before
them was a modest dome shaped dwelling made from tree branches,
(13:57):
covered with rush matting and topped with the light dusting
of snow. Lifting the flap to go inside, the police
were confronted with a scene like hell on Earth. The
place was littered with scraps of human flesh, hair, and bones.
Some of the larger ones had been snapped and the
(14:19):
marrow sucked out of them. It said that they even
found a pot full of human fat. With nowhere left
to hide, swift Runner made his terrible confession. The truth
was they had struggled to find food, but when his
eldest son had died of starvation, swift Runner's response was
(14:42):
to murder his remaining family members one by one. Some
of them he shot, others he bludgeoned with an axe.
He confessed to strangling one of his daughters with a cord,
while he fed his eldest son's flesh to another son,
before killing and eating that boy too. At his trial,
(15:06):
swift Runner claimed that a Wendigo spirit had somehow possessed him,
forcing him to carry out the atrocities, but the jury
didn't believe him. After twenty minutes of deliberation, they found
him guilty of the multiple murders and he was sentenced
to death. Swift Runner's execution took place on December twentieth,
(15:28):
eighteen seventy nine. He was the first man to be
legally hanged in Alberta. According to some reports, before the
death sentence was carried out, swift Runner converted to Catholicism
and admitted his guilt. Moments before the trap door dropped.
He was said to have expressed extreme remorse, telling his
(15:51):
confessor father LeDuc, I am the least of men and
do not merit even being called a man. Quite a
few spectators arrived to watch swift runners execution. One proclaimed
that he was thoroughly impressed with the show and that
it was the prettiest hanging he'd ever seen. The Ani
(16:20):
Shinabe peoples, especially the Ojibwe and Cree. Like most people,
were extremely repelled by the idea of cannibalism, and far
from living the impoverished, mean, hand to mouth existence that
some white settlers thought they saw. The Anishinabi's lives were
typically filled with joy, love, and fulfillment. It was only
(16:42):
during times a great hardship that the Wendigo spirit was
said to surface. Victims of wendigo possession were said to
show physical changes, their bodies, reputedly swelling and growing, their
lips and mouths, also becoming in large lodged. Some spoke
of being unable to warm their bodies as an icy
(17:05):
cold gripped their chest. Of the many supposed wendigo possessions
between the mid eighteen hundreds and the nineteen twenties, there
were other reports of unofficial wendigo executions, and a Jibwe
creed chief and shaman called in English Jack Fiddler, known
for his powers defeating wendigoes, was said to have in
(17:29):
some cases euthanized people said to be possessed. However, in
nineteen o seven, the law caught up with Jack Fiddler
and his brother Joseph when they were arrested by Canadian
authorities for murder. Jack committed suicide, while Joseph was tried
and sentenced to life in prison. It was psychologist and
(17:53):
missionary J. E. Sanden who first made a formal definition
of what he termed a sickness while he worked among
the cree of Western James Bay on the southern end
of Hudson Bay in the early nineteen hundreds. But far
from resembling the gruesome case of swift Runner, what Sanden
observed corresponded closely with some Northern Ajibwe accounts of wendigo possession.
(18:18):
The main symptoms shown by one female victim was that
she didn't wish to see anyone outside her immediate family,
because she said strangers looked like wild animals to her,
an appearance that gave her the urge to kill them
in self defense. After receiving assurances from Sandon, the women
(18:41):
did soon apparently recover. Another psychologist, lou Moreno, who conducted
field studies among the Anish and Arbi, reported two similar
cases involving married women who had become reclusive, expressing fear
of all but their closest relatives. In nineteen thirty three,
(19:03):
priest and anthropologist John M. Cooper published the first so
called scientific report in which the word psychosis was applied
to the wendigo phenomenon, based on observations among Cree and
other Algonquin speaking peoples. He wrote cannibalism was resorted to
only in cases where actual starvation threatened and people were
(19:27):
driven to desperation by prolonged famine, after which they often
suffered from mental breakdown. He went on to say that
the Cree would sometimes eat the bodies of those who
had perished, but only rarely kill the living and eat
their flesh, which, according to him, left as its aftermath
(19:49):
an unnatural craving for human flesh, or a psychosis that
took the form of such a craving. In nineteen thirty four,
Irving Halliwell, a cultural anthropologist known for his work on
(20:12):
the Ojibwe, claimed to confirm the existence of the wendigo
psychosis among the Baron's River Salto, a northern Ojibwe group,
despite its lack of firsthand knowledge. He categorized early physical
symptoms of the disease as a distaste for ordinary foods, nausea,
and vomiting. Of the disorder's later stages, he wrote, the
(20:37):
individual may exhibit a positive desire for human flesh or
even take steps to satisfy this desire, and the persons
affected were either killed or they recovered. Babies and even
dogs became suspected of being afflicted with wendigo psychosis. Also
(20:58):
in the nineteen thirty the anthropologist Ruth Lands described how
the infant son of a shaman named Great Mallard Duck
began eating his fingers, then bit off the nipples off
his dead mother's breasts during a period of starvation in
which seven out of sixteen family members died of hunger.
(21:21):
Lands wrote the baby's eyes were blazing and his teeth rattling,
his wendigo symptoms indicating fever, privation and neurotic fury. Having
decided he was turning into a wendigo, the baby boy
was killed by his grandmother. Interestingly, very different conclusions were
(21:45):
reached about a group of white Mormon pioneers also caught
in starvation circumstances drawn by the promise of fertile farmlands
in central California. In spring eighteen four six, the families
of George Donna, Jacob Donner, and James Reed left Illinois
(22:07):
to migrate west. They made good progress as far as
Fort Laramie in what is now Wyoming, but where most
wagon trains turned north taking the Oregon Trail. In late
summer eighteen forty six, the Reeds and Donners chose an
apparent short cut to California, another path known as the
(22:29):
Hastings cut Off. It was a disastrous decision. The so
called Donna Party, consisting of eighty seven people, including fifteen
women and forty three children, with twenty three ox drawn wagons,
believed it would shave more than three hundred miles off
the journey. It was in fact one hundred and twenty
(22:52):
five miles longer than the established trail, traversing some of
the most inhospitable country in the West, including the Great
Salt Lake Desert. Migrants taking the main trail had already
arrived in California in late September, while the Donner Party,
having lost dozens of cattle and been forced to abandon
(23:15):
several wagons along the way, found themselves in a race
against time to clear the high passes of the Sierra
Nevada Mountains before it started snowing. Running very low on food,
(23:35):
the Donner Party and their exhausted animals approached what is
now called Donna Pass on October thirty first, and found
it blocked by snow. Building crude cabins by a lake,
they sat through eight straight days of heavy snowfall. Many
of the oxen wandered off and were lost. On December fifteenth,
(24:00):
an employee of the Reed family died of malnutrition. Determined
not to meet the same fate, the next day, ten
men and five at the women set out to cross
the mountains on improvised snow shoes through deep snow with
inadequate food. Eight of the men died, and in an
(24:21):
act of terrible desperation, the two surviving men and five
women cannibalized some of the bodies. Sustained by this, the
seven survivors finally reached the Sacramento Valley in January of
eighteen forty seven. They organized a relief party who struggled
(24:42):
back through the deep snow, reaching the camp at what
is now called Donna Lake in mid February. Alfter the
remaining party had died one by one. Those left alive
had also resorted to canlizing the corpses of the dead. Incredibly,
(25:05):
survivors of the harrowing journey seemed undeterred by it all.
Fourteen year old Donna Party member Virginia Reid wrote soon
after to a cousin in Illinois who was due to
make the journey herself the following year. After detailing some
of the events, she finished simply with, Oh, Mary, I
(25:27):
have not wrote you half the trouble we have had,
but I have wrote you enough to let you know
what trouble is. But don't let this letter dishearten anybody.
Never take no cutoffs, and hurry along as fast as
you can. Later that year, gold was discovered in California,
(25:48):
turning the trickle of westbound migrants into a flood. It
was never suggested that having tasted human flesh, members of
the Donner Party became permanent slaves to in satiable cannibalistic psychosis,
and the group were never suspected of now being prone
to stalking the California gold fields searching for unsuspecting prospectors
(26:12):
to dine on. By the nineteen eighties, there was a
hot debate among Western ethnographers, psychologists, and anthropologists as to
whether wendigo psychosis even existed at all. By the time,
so called wendigo possessions reached their peak, many Anishanabi had
(26:34):
been involved in the fur trade for more than two centuries,
begun as a means of supplementing income in exchange for
providing European traders with luxury goods. Fur trapping often led
Native Americans into debt with the trading posts. So many
newly arrived people indiscriminately hunting so many game animals, especially
(26:58):
moose and beaver, also depleted vital winter food sources for
indigenous tribes, contributing to widespread famine. Perhaps, in some ways,
the wendigo was merely a manifestation of a Native American
collective fear of what might become of them in their
newly depleted world. In the nineteen sixties, reports appeared of
(27:29):
an indigenous woman with a number of strange behavioral problems,
most especially food hoarding. In the beginning, the woman took
to carrying around a cooked hot dog in her purse,
but soon switched to raw hamburger meat. For two years,
she bought two to five pounds of hamburger a day,
(27:50):
later increasing her purchases to around sixty pounds per day,
carrying the meat with her in her car. She had
trouble parting with it even when it became rotten, just
as a jeepway hunters had roamed the dark woods for
centuries in search of prey, so night after night, the
(28:11):
woman would drive the darkened streets of the city searching
for open stores where she could buy hamburger meat. She
did not eat the raw hamburger, although on one occasion,
while looking at a supermarket's meat display, she reported feeling
the sudden impulse to bury her face in it and
devour it all. Two psychiatrists treating the woman concluded that
(28:36):
she was a symbolic cannibal, and for a while she
was confined to a psychiatric hospital. There, she switched from
hoarding hamburger, which she could no longer get her hands on,
to hoarding bread, and eventually she gave up hoarding food
altogether and was released. It's not known how many people
(28:59):
over the last three centuries or more, propelled by a
mixture of desperation, starvation, cultural and environmental oppression, have been
convinced that they've seen the Wendigo or succumbed to so
called Wendigo psychosis, or how many Indigenous people were forced
to resort to cannibalism during times of extreme privation, or
(29:22):
were killed for wendigo possession, and while no one has
ever produced physical evidence that the wendigo really exists. From
time to time, eerie howls are heard drifting through North
America's boreal forests. In twenty nineteen, reports of one such
(29:43):
mysterious howl being heard and recorded in the Canadian wilderness
emerged online. Genomechus was out hunting grouse with his wife
and grandson in northwestern Ontario, more than thirty miles from
the nearest town, when they heard a series of eerie
screams ringing out from somewhere deep in the forest. An
(30:07):
experienced an avid hunter from a young age, Mikus said,
I've heard many different wild animal calls, but nothing like this.
Initially distant, the howls appeared to be approaching the family.
We could hear it moving. It sounded kind of heavy,
Mikus told a local news station. His frightened wife grabbed
(30:31):
their grandson, and the family retreated as fast as they
could back to their truck. They never saw the creature
making the sounds, the recordings of which were passed on
to a number of government biologists, and none of them
could identify it. This episode was written by Diane Hope
(30:55):
and produced by Richard mclan smith. Unexplained as an Abe
Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain Smith. All other
elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced
by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook
with the stories never before featured on the show, is
(31:16):
now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon,
Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to
and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and
feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or
ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps
you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share.
(31:38):
You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com
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