Behind The Skinwalkers of TikTok

Hashtag #Skinwalker is huge on TikTok but why? Michelle explores the Indigenous legend of the southwest and its viral explosion. Then Edwin takes us to Tennessee for another local legend of a mysterious creature.

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Hosted by Michelle Newman and Edwin Covarrubias. Episode edited & sound designed by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound

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Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Fear filled this guy's body. Nocoyote could do that, and whoever was
in that room was about to havea very bad night. Get ready for
a campfire story. I'm Edwin,I'm Michelle, and we'll share spooky stories
with playful banter that'll keep you upat night. So throw some wood on

(00:24):
the fire and put a wider ona stick. We're telling you a campfire
story tonight, Edwin, have youever heard of a skin walker? I
have? What would you say itis? I had a concept of skinwalkers
until this one guy, he's likea Native American YouTuber. Uh huh.

(00:45):
He started talking about skinwalkers and hewas like, for him, it's like
a sacred thing or something. Butalso like there's a legend and there's lore
attached to it, so it's stilleerie, but it's different. We don't
necessarily need to know all the facetsof it in order for it to be
like scary and also to respect it. I wrote, it's a legend.
I don't think white people are supposedto know a skinwalker. I one hundred

(01:10):
percent believe that, But I'm gladeverybody's educating themselves on a culture. Probably
the easiest translation, a skin walkeris a Navajo witch that wears the skins
of animals and could turn into anyanimal they want, which doesn't sound scary
on the surface. Yeah, Iknow, it sounds kind of cool.
But first we're going to start witha story I heard from a friend of

(01:32):
a friend of a friend's cousin whotold me to never talk about this around
a campfire. This friend of afriend of a friend of a cousin,
he was visiting a friend on theres one day after graduation. You know,
they've gone to high school together.They were hanging out on a porch
talking about what they were going todo now that school is over, and

(01:53):
just you know, like wasting theday as we all have done. Then
they noticed a coyote just wandering afew yards away from them. In this
neighborhood. There weren't any like fencesdividing the yard, so he could see
it walk from yard to yard.He nudged his friend and knodded over to

(02:13):
it, and they just got reallyquiet and just watched. Then it stood
up on two feet. It waspressed up against a house in the shadows,
and just shuffled along on two feetlike a human. He was so
shocked. He just whispered, Ididn't think coyotes could do that, and
his friend whispered back, that's nota coyote, that's a skin walker.

(02:38):
Once it was next to the garbagecan, it hopped up on it and
then leaped up on the window ledgethe window was open and fear filled this
guy's body. No coyote could dothat, and whoever was in that room
was about to have a very badnight. Then they heard his friend's neighbor

(03:00):
screaming from that room. Then hisscreams were drowned out by a scream that
was somewhat of a mix between ananimal and a human. They ran inside,
They locked all the doors, inthe windows, and hid as the
screams echoed through the night. Imean, clearly that's true, because it's

(03:23):
a friend of a friend of acousin of a friend. That is creepy.
Though, Like I wouldn't enjoy seeingthat, I absolutely would. Yeah,
I'd be like, ah, whatthe fuck? Boom gone, I'm
come out of there. Yeah,if I saw any animal do the hide
legs walking thing just be a littletoo surreal, I think now that I

(03:44):
think about it. Whenever I seea bird walking like really fast, I
get kind of weirded out. Soimagine seeing a thing like a coyote.
Just all of it's disturbing. Youknow, skin walker is a huge tag
on TikTok and social media right now. It's huge. You can find millions,
if not billions, of videos.But I was curious about, like

(04:05):
where it all started, how thishappened, because you know, like skinwalkers
went from being not a smaller legendbut like a localized legend in the Southwest
to being like a global phenomenon.So it all started back in twenty twenty
when this TikTok user named John Sotoand he goes by at that one number

(04:29):
one cowboy on TikTok, and hisupbringing was Navajo and Apache, and he's
been talking and posting other videos abouta possible skin walker on his property.
But in this video he captures something. He's on a horse and the video
starts and he's like, you seethe horse's ears, and they're riding down
a dirt road and the sun's startingto set, and as he scans a

(04:54):
cloud of vultures in the trees liningthe road, you hear someone frantically call
out hey, and the horse stopsand the voice cries out again, hey,
and the horse bolts in the oppositedirection. What like, you can
watch this video now. The horse'sreaction makes it very credible. So that's
creepy, but that's what did it. It just said hey, and like,

(05:15):
yeah, it's just that hey,hey, and then the horse took
off, which I think if itwas a human, why would the horse
take off? Right? The videohas seven point five million lights on TikTok
and counting and basically generated skin walkeras a hashtag because it didn't really have

(05:38):
any videos until then. People wouldcomment and be like, oh, it's
the cries of a goat or amountain lion. But in Soto's case,
those kinds of animals don't live nearhis property, and he hasn't found any
signs of harmless human pranksters either.So after his horses got mysteriously injured and

(05:59):
his chickens killed but not eaten,Soto, who is Navajo and Apache,
brought in his local medicine ban tobless the home, and since then,
the disturbing sounds have not crossed theprotective barrier, but he's been warned that
the skin walker still wants something fromhim, perhaps his newborn baby. And

(06:19):
then there's a quote from him.I can just tell by the sound of
whatever's calling me out that it's notright, like it wants to do wrong
to me. Wow. Okay,yeah, that's creepy, super creepy.
And so I found this quote fromNaomi Summer. It was from an article

(06:41):
from Days magazine. But she's anindigenous social media hashtag navajo TikTok I guess
this is her thing. But sheexplains what a skinwalker is and she says
that, which is a close translationbut not an exact translation. Ah.
So it's like as close as youcould get to it in English, which
I found pretty interesting. Skinwalker isa quote unquote which that committed unspeakable acts

(07:06):
to obtain power to change their shapeinto an animal in order to do harm.
They mimic the sounds that might drawsomeone's attention, like the voice of
a loved one or a stranger thatmight be in trouble, in order to
lure their defenseless victims to their death. It's often personal, akin to having
a hex put on you, andthey exist primarily on Native American reservations.

(07:30):
The skinwalker is deeply terrifying for indigenouspupils, and their threat is taken very
seriously, but the legend isn't alwaystreated with respect in this wave of videos
that have come out, because suddenlypeople from all across the country who live
far from the desert and certainly notNative American confidently began sharing their knowledge and

(07:54):
experiences with skinwalkers. Many, ifnot most, of these videos were ambiguously
scary, spooky sounds at night,shadowy figures in the trees, items that
seem to be talisman left as warnings. Months ago, these videos would have
easily been attributed to ghosts, stalkers, or a generic witch, but now

(08:16):
the culprit is solidly determined to bea skin walker as the likes and views
of their videos grow by the millions. I'm not from a reservation and I
just told the skinwalker story, butyou know, these things happen, and
I get people calling in it totell me a ghost story all the time,
with skinwalker stories where they hear somethingmimicking a voice. Ah, I

(08:39):
just I can imagine that. Like, I think I'm more sensitive to sound
than seeing something. No, thankyou, I think there's something to it.
I don't know if all the skinwalkervideos on TikTok are correct, but
there definitely seems like there's something andthen we're never gonna actually get the full
story because culturally we probably shouldn't.So this woman was walking around and she's

(09:07):
kind of investigating this area known asPressman's Home in Tennessee. Now, the
place itself was a creepy town,just all on its own. It was
a place known for it was justhousing printing workers, like people that in
the printing press and like all thatstuff, and they had a labor union
there. The union changed its headquartersin the late sixties and the town was

(09:30):
just abandoned. But basically, thiswoman's driving around this place doing what teenagers
do in Tennessee because it's Tennessee,and I don't know what there is to
do over there. You know,Sarah's in Nashville, right, Hi,
Sarah, what do you used todo over there? Yeah? Tell us,
So, like in this area,like you know, when teens is

(09:52):
going, they drive around and theywant to go to a counted places or
just like a place like it's Butanyway, this woman she goes, she's
driving around when suddenly some runs rightin front of the car. The thing
stops, looks at her in theeyes, and then it starts running.
It stayed there for a bit,right, like, just kind of stops
looks over So just in that instant, you kind of know what it looks

(10:15):
like, right, So she describedit as a dog kind of, but
it ran with his fist like agorilla. It had a pink tail,
just like a rat. She hadno idea what it had been, right,
so she started asking around the town, and she was told that the
same creature had been seen at StoneMountain, right next to where she was
at Presman's home. Now, whatshe saw wasn't a skinwalker, but people

(10:39):
say that it sounds a lot likea wamput beast. So it said to
look like a panther with glowing yelloweyes, and it roams around Tennessee.
Now, people also reported seeing itin North and South Carolina and West Virginia.
They say that it might come fromCherokee culture, though I'm not from

(11:01):
that culture. I'm not aware ofit, so anything that I say it
just comes from the internet, that'sit. A version of this story says
that there was a woman who thoughtthat her husband was cheating on her and
put animal hide on and followed himto a meeting. At the meeting,
the men were talking about hunting stories, and then a medicine man saw that

(11:22):
this thing that was nearby was notan animal, but a woman in animal
skin, so it was like shame, and then put a spell on her
and the skin fused with this womanand she became a beast. So now
she was doomed to roam the forest. This other story, another version from

(11:43):
a Cherokee legend, this woman whodoes her husband to a beast. The
husband was a warrior and he dies, so she puts on the skin of
a mountain lion to go after him, after the beast, and after roaming
the woods for a while, shefinally spotted it and the beast actually got
scared. I started to run andit actually escaped. But the legend says

(12:05):
that to this day she's still runningaround trying to catch that beast. And
that's what we see the wamp IsBeast. The third story for the womp
Is Beast is pretty creepy, andit talks about a witch who lived in
the hills of West Virginia who wouldgo around killing animals just for the heck
of it. Like you know,you see a cow aha cow, like
instead of tipping it, it wouldkill it. I don't know if she

(12:26):
chased them to get their blood,ate them, bully around the farmers,
the people around there. Anyway,one night they heard noises out in the
hills, the people from the town, and they suspected the witch was out
there, so they're like, let'sgo right, so they gather around.
They ran toward her and they seeher like she's there and she's like about
to kill another animal. And thiswoman, this creepy woman, realizing that

(12:50):
she was caught, started to turninto a cat like with through witch powers.
The people got near her, shewas like halfway through when they caught
her, and she stayed in thathalf cat half woman state and then ran
away. And that's how she's beenforever. If we move on to today
though, according to exemptlore dot com, how where this information is coming from.

(13:15):
By the way, the wamp isBeast is rumored to live in sewers,
so that's why it stinks. That'sanother thing about it. By the
way, they say that it reallysmells, like really really bad, and
that when you you know, ifit has it like a weird possum tail,
that's not a stretch for some reason. I just imagine anything with a
tail like that really smells. Yeah. I don't know why they say that

(13:37):
if you hear one of those thingscry, someone will die within three days.
Oh that took a turn. Yeah, and the sewer does it call
up through the toilet? Oh?See, that's creepy. Have you heard
that snake thing? Like a snakecoming up through the toilet? Yeah?
Didn't that happen once? It soundslike it happened in Florida. If it
happened, it for sure happened inFlorida. Back to Tennessee. Back to

(14:00):
Tennessee. When I think of Tennessee, I think of the wild Man story,
you know, the wild Man ofTennessee. Ever heard of that,
the Tennessee wild Man? No wayback back to like the eighteen hundreds.
In McNary County, they say thata freak show owner caught a beast and
charged for people to go see ituntil it just escaped. The creature was
said to have dark gray hair,was about seven feet tall, red glowing

(14:24):
eyes, super aggressive, so don'tget close. Plus it's supposed to stink
really, really badly, kind oflike the skunk ape Supposedly, this Tennessee
wildman likes dogs and women and triesto take them away, but for some
reason he always fails at it,just can't manage to take him away.
So that's why the victims always speakup, Hey, put me down.

(14:45):
Hey, I'm not going with you, okay. I can just imagine it
walking all disappointed, just walks awayback into the woods, punched over.
Even the dog said no. Butthere was a sighting about this thing from
Rob Phillips and his cousin who werehiking to be Cliffs a few decades ago.

(15:09):
By the way, this is inElizabeth, ten Tennessee, when they
noticed that it had suddenly become reallyreally quiet in the woods. Now.
I don't go into the woods alot, especially not anywhere that's not like,
you know, a small park isharea, but I can imagine if
it gets really quiet, that's notgood because that probably means, like all

(15:30):
the other animals ran away, there'ssomething there. But in that silence,
suddenly there was a twig that broke, and then they heard a scream that
wasn't human and not something that hadever heard before, so they got scared
and ran in different directions. Ialways imagine this happening when we get scared
and it's like, ah, theyjust run. Rob found a spot behind

(15:50):
a tree and he looked up andhe saw about five yards away a wild
man holding onto a tree. Itwas about nine feet tall, beady eyes,
claws, and it smelled really badly. But this was one hundred and
fifty years later, like after thesightings of this other beast. So was

(16:11):
it the same one? What arewe looking at? Is this like the
grandchild? I don't know what elselurks out in the woods. Don't forget
the desert too. Fan corner,Fan fan corner. Okay, So in
one of the previous episodes, Iasked, what should we talk about next?

(16:34):
Wicked Wendigo says, how about therake? Or maybe hide behind?
What? What's a hide behind?I think we looked that up, the
hide behind? Michelle, do youremember the episode the Man with Two Faces?
Yeah? It was an oldie buta goodie. Yeah. We had
a comment on that a year ago, and I can't believe we had to
like Reddit read it. It's fromHeathwell, he says, Michelle. Thank

(16:59):
you for your unique and sometimes darkhumor. Edwin Love the Office quotes you're
a scholar and a gentleman. It'sthe only show I watch, and uh,
I've ever seen it so so really, it's the only thing he can
do is office quotes. Anyway,write in with a comment. We love
to hear from you. Stuff happensthen in the woods, Finn, I'm

(17:21):
scared now. I think we shouldcall it put out that fire. Campfire
Story is hosted by Michelle Newman andEdwin Karubias. This podcast was edited and
sound designed by Sarah Worhez Wendel,a VW sound Make sure you follow us
wherever you get your pod