Talking Weird #164 Hunting the Wendigo with Jason Hewlett

Jason Hewlett is a paranormal investigator, researcher. author and filmmaker from British Columbia, Canada. He is the co-founder of the Canadian Paranormal Society, the co-creator, writer and director of the award-winning web series We Want to Believe, and the author of four books, the most recent being The Legend of Ogopogo: Canada's Loch Ness Monster from Small Town Monsters Publishing.

He also appears in the Small Town Monsters documentaries Cursed Waters: Creature of Lake Okanagan and On the Trail of Bigfoot: The Origin. His latest book, Heart of Ice: Tracking the Wendigo, came out Oct. 6 from Small Town Monsters Publishing. It accompanies the documentary Tracking the Wendigo, which debuts Oct. 26. He also has a Bigfoot documentary coming out in December 2025.

Visit Small Town Monsters here: https://www.smalltownmonsters.com/

Jason returns to Talking Weird for our special month of spooky shows in the lead-up to Halloween! He chats about his brand new book HEART OF ICE: TRACKING THE WENDIGO, and his accompanying feature documentary from Small Town Monsters. And also shares some creepy tales and experiences that accompanied his research into the terrifying entity,

This is a spooky and fascinating episode with a great guest, that you do not want to miss!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
The paranormal, Zufos, monsters, Mysteries that you're listening to Talking
Weird and now from a Kevin deep in the northwards,
your host, Doctor Dean Bertram.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
Greetings, or my fellow widows and widows, welcome to Talking
Weird on the Unsold Radio Network. I'm your host, Dean Bertram,
and as always I'm absolutely delighted that you've decided to
spend I hope the next hour or so of your
life with me. Whether it's watching and listening to the
show live where it goes out every week at Thursday
Night's on nine pm on Exit, on Facebook and of

(01:03):
course on YouTube, or maybe you're watching the show archived
in one of those slights after that date, or perhaps
perhaps you're listening to the audio only version of the
show which goes out on all podcast platforms the following day.
However you're watching or listening to the program, thank you
for joining me. I really appreciate you being here. I'm
loving the fall. The cold weather has finally hit here.

(01:25):
I have to actually cover the last of my pumpkins
at night now so they don't wither on the vine.
I suppose most of the other crop is in even
though I had a small crop this year. Things are
turning cold here and it's a perfect night for the
type of I don't know, crypto creature, myth entity, whatever
you want to call it, that we'll be talking about tonight.

(01:47):
And joining me to talk about it is somebody who's
just done an amazing book and an amazing film about
the topic. He's a paranormal investigator, researcher, author and filmmaker
from British Columbia, Canada. He's the co founder of the
Canadian Paranormal Society, the co creator, writer and director of
the award winning web series We Want to Believe, which
was great. I missed that show, and the author of

(02:08):
four books, the most recent being The Legend of Okapogo,
Canada's Locknest Monster. In fact, that's the second most recent book.
I probably first wrote this copy before his new book
was released, which we'll get to in a minute, But
that was from Small Town Monsters Publishing, as is his
new one. And he also appears in the Small Town
Monsters documentaries that you might have seen, Cursed Warters, Creature
of Lake Okanagan and on the trailer Bigfoot The Origin,

(02:31):
both of which are great. His latest book it actually
just dropped earlier this week. It's also from a small
town Monsters Publishing. His title is Heart of Ice, Tracking
the Wendigo, and it accompanies the upcoming documentary Tracking the Wendigo,
which will debut on October twenty six. He's also has
a Bigfoot documentary which is coming out later this year

(02:52):
in December. So I am delighted to welcome back to
Talking Weird my good friend Jason Ewleits.

Speaker 3 (02:59):
Hello, sir man. Great to have you back. Been too long,
it has been. It's great to be back. Life seems
like it's treating you well. So this is good.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, no, my life. Could you seem super busy too?
You've just got book after book, documentary after documentary. Goodness,
good will, graduations.

Speaker 3 (03:16):
Thank you, thank you very much. I might I might
be an overachiever. I'm starting to wonder this time. But
the opportunities are there and I as well take them
while they're around.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
So that's just it's just great. Obviously we're going to
be chatting about your when to go book and when
to go film, and this is your I think this
is your feature debut as a director, because certainly you've
directed web series and other things, But I don't think
you've done a feature before. This is the first one.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
This is the first one. Yeah, my first feature length
documentary as writer, director, and then you know, organizer, director
of photography, all that stuff. Kind of you mentioned We
Want to Believe. It's kind of like all the stuff
I did on We Want to Believe, but just on
a It ended up being on a much bigger scale,
really using a lot of the same people that were
involved in that show, which was great.

Speaker 2 (04:03):
So we got to see Peter Ren again, which was fantastic.

Speaker 3 (04:06):
Yeah. Yeah, Pete Rents in it and he's featured in
the book as well. And then my editor Jason Morris,
who worked on We Want to Believe. He's edited the
documentary which was great. And then Sean Kippleberg who appeared
in some We Want to Believes and did the music.
He shows up in it, and he also does all
the score plus the end credit song, which people need
to crank the volume for when they get to the

(04:27):
end of the movie because it's a great track.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
It is great. It was also wonderful to see two
of my favorite people in the paranormal space, and that's
Chad Lewis and Morgan Knutson. They just I mean I
adore both of those guys so much so to see
them both in the one documentary and both featured so heavily,
I was very happy. It was like, oh great, and
it was Morgan, then it's Chad, and I'm like fantastic.

Speaker 3 (04:49):
Yeah, that was That was a real score. And it
kind of came about. I mean, you can't do the
WHN to Go without talking to Chad Lewis because of
his book WHND to Go Low and all the work
he's done in the field. And then when I realized
that I was going to be writing a book about
it and that Small Town Monsters was interested in it,
I started reaching out to people I knew, and Morgan
Canutson is one of them. And she's in Alberta, which

(05:10):
is the next province over to me, and of course
that's where a lot of the Wendog stories began. So
I remember messaging her just on a whim, like you know,
her and I knew and known each other and talked,
but like, hey, Morgan, you know much about the WHND
to Go? And it spurred like this really long conversation
that we had and I realized right away that I
need to go up to Alberta and hang out with
Morgan and start researching all of these stories and such.

(05:31):
That's how she got involved.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
So and she writes the intro for your book. It
just it just dropped on like Monday or Tuesday this
week to write Hoart Advice.

Speaker 3 (05:39):
Yeah, Monday morning it had come out, So it's just
been out for like three four days now. Yeah, she
wrote the intro. She was a big part of just
the whole project. I don't think it would have worked
if Morgan hadn't come on board and heard and I
hadn't been able to go up and do the work
we did in northern Alberta. And originally I was just
supposed to write the book, so I just thought that
would be it and we'd sort of see what happened

(06:00):
in terms of, you know, the rest of the film
would play out, and then you know, over the course
of the next year, in a bit circumstances ended up
that I was ended up offered the job of directing
the documentary. So that's how it all kind of worked.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
Well, you must have been so like already like into
the research that it must have been I wouldn't say easy,
but at least you were prepped when you took over
the reins of directing the film, like it must have been. Well,
I kind of know about whinny Go, so.

Speaker 3 (06:28):
Yeah, it was. I mean I think i'd written I
don't know if i'd written much of the book. I'd
written a good portion of it, and I had, yeah,
researched a ton of it. And when I traveled up
to Edmonton and then we journeyed around, I think I
had three or four days up there with Morgan and
another gentleman named Michael Brown, who co hosted Supernatural Circumstances podcast.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
With Yeah, and I'm Mike too. I was guessed on
this show a few times when he was the co host.
I think I've been a guest once since he isn't
the co host anymore, but yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:57):
Yeah, he came up from Vancouver, flew up and joined us.
We worked together on it, and at that point, like
there was going to be a documentary and I no
one knew how it was going to look or who
was going to work on it. So I took my
video camera with me, and I'd like to do that anyways,
because at Edmonton's a different terrain than where I live
so I'd like to shoot it, and so I get
an idea for the places where I'm going so it's

(07:19):
easier to describe in the book. And then I just figured, well,
i'd record, I'd shoot the interviews that I was also
recording like it would be for a documentary, just in
case they ever wanted to use that material in the
finished film. So when the offer came up, I was
really glad that I shot all that. I would have
been screwed or I had to go up and do
it all over again. So it just everything happens for

(07:40):
a reason, I think, and it just worked out the
way that it was. But I know when I talked
with Seth another from Small Town Monsters, they said, it
just made sense for someone in Canada to tell this
very Canadian story. Even though when to go sightings do
go down into the States.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
Yeah we haven't here in Wisconsin we.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
Get win yes, yeah, whereas, but the bulk of the
stories and a lot of the sightings everything really started
up in northern Canada. So it just sort of worked
out the way that it should have. So I'm thankful
that I had foresight to bring a camera and shoot
all that.

Speaker 2 (08:11):
Maybe that's a good place to jump off where it started,
is we start to talk about the wind to go itself,
I mean historically, I guess the guess the swift Runner
story is a great one to tell, but maybe maybe
there's an entry point before then you'd like to hear
wherever you like to jump off to start explaining the
origins of the wind to go to listeners and viewers.

Speaker 3 (08:33):
Well, that's the interesting part, Dean. No one really knows
where when it began. It's a story that was told.
It's primarily amongst the Algonquin and Cree people, and so
the stories began within their tribes, passed on verbally largely,
so the exact starting point no one knows. But it's
been around for like much like Ogo Pogo or any
of those, like thousands, tens of thousands of years. But

(08:56):
swift Runner is the story where it broke into sort
of the public consciousness because his crimes basically carried over
into Canadian criminal law. So he was like a tracker trapper,
worked with the Hudson's Bay Company, acted as a guide
sometimes even for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and he

(09:20):
basically showed up in Saint Albert one day, Uh, Saint Albert, Alberta,
which is just north of Edmonton, saying that he his
family was dead and basically what happened that they were
able to determine while he was there that he started
claiming that a creature called a wendigo was trying to
break into his room and attack him, possess him, take

(09:43):
him over. Eventually, the priests at the at the at
the church there where he was staying, we're able to
get the police involved. The police kind of convinced him
to take him to where he was staying in the
Twattna Valley, and it turned out that swift Runner had
basically murdered and eaten his entire family, committed this horrendous crime.

(10:04):
So they eventually took him to Fort Saskatchewan where he
was held and while even staying in his cell in
Fort Saskatchewan, the guards there had a hard time wanting
to be around him because at night he would be
screaming and shouting in his very little prison, saying the
spirit of the Wendigo is trying to come in to
his cell and take him over. So he claimed basically
the wendigo did possess him and did drive him to
eat his family and he was the first person legally

(10:26):
hung in Alberta at Fort, Saskatchewan, which that's just a gruesome,
gruesome story, but it was documented in the newspapers and
it is documented in Canadian criminal law, and that's kind
of when the Wendigo sort of entered Western European culture.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
It's a terrible story and it's a terrifying story. And
I think you make the points in the documentary and
in the book that that's part of the uniqueness. I
guess of the Wendigo legend or looking at the wend
to Go was some paranormal entity or some kind of
cryptid is that there's all these different layers, all these

(11:06):
different ways you can look at it. You can look
at it as something that possesses somebody, or you can
look at it as some kind of cultural psychosis. Or
then there were stories about people actually seeing when to
Go type creatures the way we imagine them in pop
culture today, with horns and everything else, creeping around the woods.
So that must have been difficult too, Like when you

(11:28):
were writing the book and when you were filming it,
like how were you going to it? Was this something
that hit you early on, like how am I going
to approach this thing.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
Yeah, it was one of those I wasn't sure what
it was like when I first went in. I thought
it was more just like a cryptid, But well, doing
the research and interviewing with people, it became very clear
that there was a lot of different layers to this,
and that's something that Chad Lewis and both Morgan Canuts
and really really touched on that. In the early days,
it was literally just like a state of being. You know,

(11:55):
you went when to go. If you were sort of
someone who was taking more and you needed and behaving
really badly and just being a really terrible human being,
you could be possessed by the spirit of the Wendigo
and driven into these horrible crimes. But then as the
stories kind of went on, it started transforming into sort
of this creature. And the first time that the Wendigo

(12:17):
has ever referred to as an actual flesh and blood
creature is an elginon Blackwood's book The Wendig, which is
kind of like a novella about it. But before that,
it was always more of a state of being, so
it was looked at more like the DSM kind of
calls it Wendego. Psychosis, which is like a mental condition
primarily among the Algonquin and Cree people, where this story
is told of people thinking that they're being taken over

(12:38):
by something and then committing these cannibalistic crimes. But that
doesn't work in every Wend to Go case or everyone
to Go story, and people are reporting seeing something, so
it's almost like this multi tiered supernatural mental health issue
kind of creature depending on kind of where you pick
up the story, but in modern times it's very much

(13:00):
referred to as this sort of flesh and blood thing,
and if you even speak of it in some cultures,
you can then draw the wend to Go to you
and it will attack you. And if you come across
it in the woods, you don't have much chance of
defending yourself. It'll just run you down and eat you.
And people report seeing these very emaciated beings that even
have the parts of themselves chewed off because they're so

(13:20):
hungry that they just keep eating themselves, you know, until
they basically sort of burn out in the woods. And
even when it first started being depicted as a creature,
the horns weren't there. They were in some of the stories,
but not all of them is primarily thought up to
look more like a rake, so it's a tall, skinny,
very white, pale being, and over time the Atler depiction
just kind of became a part of the lore.

Speaker 2 (13:43):
Yeah, it's interesting how that's mentioned in the documentary as well,
how it kind of it enters later. I think Chad
Lewis might make that point initially that prior to the
nineteen forties or something, there were no Antler reports or something,
and then somehow it gradually gradually crept. We have a question.
We have a couple of questions. We might hit them
before we move on. Once from Horace Smith, who's a

(14:04):
good friend of the show, he's been against. He's also
the professor emeritus of Astronomy and Physics at Michigan State University.
He asks, does Jason know whether the Ajibwa is that
how I call pronounce the Ajibua bear Walker? Featured in
the movie is Escabarna Into Moonlight, which is such a

(14:25):
hilarious movie about deer season is regarded as something similar
to the Wender Goes. So is the bear walker regarded
as something to similar to the Wende?

Speaker 3 (14:34):
Do you know or I'm not like, I'm not familiar
with the film, but I'm not as familiar with the
whole bear Walker idea. But I know there's various different
depictions of Wendigo or offshoots of it that that sort
of show up all through different indigenous cultures and tribes
much as much else, Like you know, Sasquatch is told
in sort of every different tribe, they have the different
versions of it. Sometimes the wender goes even as the
widow go or the wedder go, like it's got different names.

(14:54):
People also assume to think the skin Walker is an
offshoot of it, although it's not really, but there's I
guess the transfer formative part of it. So fortune I
can't ask answer that question with any confidence other than
there seems to be a lot of variations on what
the Wendigo is depending on who you talk about it,
So I could see the bear Walker kind of being
another one of those versions.

Speaker 2 (15:15):
I think. I remember when I was at the Jersey
Devil Film Festival last year where it was one of
the very early screenings of the Shape of Mystery in
my short documentary, and they had a wonderful street festival
as well, and somebody there was dressed as the Jersey
Devil but the costume looked very much also like a
Wendigo was Aunt Lorie and you know, yeah as well,
so that all these things kind of merge sometimes, I

(15:37):
think in the popular consciousness.

Speaker 3 (15:40):
I think they do, and because there's so many like
the first time, I think it really became big and
modern popular cultures. From the episode of Supernatural back in
two thousand and five they featured the wender and in
that episode they didn't feature with the Antlers. It was
featured without. But in that story that one of the
characters in it who was eventually attacked and killed by
the Wendigo, someone called from the woods that sounded like

(16:00):
a relative of theirs and drew them out of the tent,
and the when the Go got them, and that's kind
of become part of the one to Go Laura as well,
which is also usually a social with trickster Laura, you
know what I mean, Like you're right, there's all these
different things that are kind of meshing as this story
goes on, as as often happens, right, it's like the
you know, the phone call with the can and you know,
you passed the story down on the line and things
like that.

Speaker 2 (16:21):
There's that that's in Kushtakar Laura as well the man
order type creature from Alaskan Native American traditions. I supposedly
that will whisper to you and try to sound like
a friend or somebody you know, to draw you into
the woods. And that's become part of and that's covered
in the documentary as well, and I think in the book,

(16:41):
or maybe actually it might be Morgan in the forward
mentions that once she heard which sounded like a friend's
dog in pain or something in the woods, and it
wasn't in the woods. That was she suspected it was
something trying to lure into the woods. And that fits
into this kind of, you know, mythology of things tricksters
appearing as something we know or sounding like something we

(17:02):
know to get us away from the tribe or the
group before it devours us.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
Devourers or takes us over to some other plane of existence,
depending on which story you're hearing and where, and the
wender goes case it would eat you. You wouldn't be
taken anywhere.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
You were done, and then that segues into things like
David Polite is missing four one one ideas people in
the woods.

Speaker 3 (17:21):
Something Oh yeah, there's something in the world.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
Often boom, yeah, there's something in the woods.

Speaker 1 (17:26):
No matter what.

Speaker 2 (17:28):
We have another question here in this This is a
good one, I guess for you to answer because it
encourages people to buy your book. It's some ghost reads
and how is this book different from other Wendigo books.
I'll also put the cover of the book, which is
available on Amazon at the moment. I think you can
also go to small ten months of dot com to Finally, yes.

Speaker 3 (17:46):
Yeah, it's different in the sense we cover off like
the Wendigo lore, kind of the big stories like the
swift Runner story, the Jack Fiddler story, the Marie Cootrat story,
napp and then we talk about in it. The difference
is that, like you know, we Go two, I went
up to Edmonton, Elbert, which Chad Lewis did in his
book too, but I tie in sort of this. It's

(18:06):
more of an on the boots on the ground adventure
story at the same time, and there was an experience
that Morgan and the pro Werner family had at a
place called Ma Mayo Beach that we kind of really
take a deep dive into that encounter that they had
before they believe was a WND to Go and how
that expanded. And then while researching the book, I was
told of a potential when to Go sighting near where

(18:28):
I live, and we got to investigate that as well,
which in the movie that investigation has fleshed out even
more because I was able to then add that to it.
But when the book was kind of completed, we touched
on it. Pete ren and I went up and did
her own investigation. So it's one part history lesson on
the Wenda Go and talking about the Lord, and another
part boots on the ground adventure looking into some modern
cases and discussing some other modern cases near Vancouver, plus

(18:50):
touching on the pop culture influence the Wendo Go has
had as well.

Speaker 2 (18:54):
Speaking of pop culture, we've got a comment from grand
as a twelve. Remember the movie Revenus, which had got
piece in it.

Speaker 3 (19:00):
If yeah, that was a great movie.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
When the guy Yelsy's looking me long, what's about the
wind Go? That is a fantastic movie. It also has
who's a guy from train Spotting who plays like big Yeah?

Speaker 3 (19:09):
Oh Robert Carlisle.

Speaker 2 (19:10):
Yeah, he's so great that movie. If nobody say, we
won't give any spoilers, but if nobody's seen Ravenous. It's
a spectacular thrill. I just bumped into it on Australian cable,
like I don't know how long ago it must be
almost twenty years ago, having no idea what it was about,
and seeing this movie, going this is just an incredible film.

Speaker 3 (19:27):
So it is. And when they go wives, it sort
of about the early bit where it takes people over.
They don't turn into monsters, they just become cannibals and
right they're held to eat each other.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
It's a fantastic movie. I know. I really love that movie.
I like how your book too, and the film to
a degree does look at those popular origins. I was
fascinated because the first time I heard about the Windigo
was the exact same first time you heard about the Windigo.

Speaker 3 (19:50):
Oh though the Incredible Hulk comic from Yeah, I know,
and I thought it was a comic book character. Like
I was just sort of blown away. It's like, oh, yeah,
this is really cool. It's a great comic character. I
would draw it myself because I just thought it was
such a neat looking like white Bigfoot with a tail,
you know. And it was appeared I think in a
few Halt comics and even a Wolverine comic. I think
they fought it because it's there up in Canada. Yeah,

(20:12):
that's time. I'm like, that's the wolver Yeah, that's the
Wolverine introduction. It was a two part a in Hulk.
My brother had one of the issues.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
The first two part had the final The final caption
was the introduction of Wolverine, like his old yellow and
black suit, but a little different, a little weird or
I think he almost had whiskers or something. And then
the second issue I think, I know maybe it was
one eighty one, one eighty two there. I might be wrong,
but I'm showing some of my comic nerdery. This is
the cover of the second one had Wolverine on the

(20:42):
cover for the first time and he was kind of
fighting maybe when to go and Hulk I can't even
remember now, but yeah, they were iconic Marvel Marvel issues.

Speaker 3 (20:52):
They were, yeah, they were. They were huge and so
you can still see find them online, like you can
find the covers and everything like that. And it was
just was I was so taken with that creature, but
the fact that it was like a real story, I
think is what really blew me away. Once I figured
that out that it wasn't just a comic book, right, Like,
I thought that was pretty cool.

Speaker 2 (21:10):
We have a superrected chat. People are fascinated with the
Wind to Go to Here's a question for you from
Patty Troy. Is it believed that a Wind to Go
can attack or possess only Indigenous people? Or can it
attack and possess anyone? Jason?

Speaker 3 (21:24):
Well, most of the accounts that I've actually all of
the accounts that I've looked into, is only Indigenous people.
It could attack anyone, and it could eat anyone, but
it's primarily more in terms of possession. It's within the
Indigenous people. I mean, the Hollywood movies will show you otherwise,
but that's just filmmaking. I've never heard came across a
case where it was like, you know, a Caucasian or
European person becoming a wend to Go itself, And except

(21:46):
in the movie Antlers, that was sort of a.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
I don't know if I saw another Wind to Go.
I read about it in your book and I'm like,
I don't know if I've seen it. Was I saw
another Wind to Go movie? I think maybe just Cold
Wind to Go, which also came.

Speaker 3 (21:57):
To two thousand and one, very questioned, I hate it. Yeah, yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
Like that too. Another question from Horace, and it's a
good question also, and that is how closely is the
wind Togo associated with areas having long and cold winter nights?
Are there southern US Windigo tales?

Speaker 3 (22:15):
It's primarily up it's in the cold weather where you are, Dean.
I know there's people that have had sightings outside of
cooler weather. I've never heard of any down in like
the southern US states where it's always warm. There's some
in like eastern Canada as well, but it's primarily it
only really comes around in the cold of the winter.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
And I think that probably and correct me if I'm wrong.
It's because initially it's associated with the ideas of starvation,
of being trapped somewhere in a cabin, of having cabin fever,
of not being able to eat, so that cannibal spirit
of the Wendigo overtakes you and you, you know, you
eat your family or your friends or other members of
the village or whatever.

Speaker 3 (22:55):
Right, Yeah, that's exactly it. Yeah, And you know, or
you're taking too much from other members of the village,
like you're hoarding their food and they're causing them to starve.
So the wndergill comes and takes you over, as you know,
cautionary to balance the scales kind of thing.

Speaker 4 (23:08):
Yeah, yeah, no, I think I I actually now I
live in the Northern Hemisphere, and I live in particularly
cold climbs in the Northern Hemisphere.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
All of these old legends that I never really got
when I was in Australia really because Sydney just is,
you know, it's always kind of nice. I guess it
gets a little colder and a little well sometimes i'mcomfortably hot,
but you never think, well, if I didn't have you know,
the crops in, or you know, if I felt, you know,
if I fell off my roof, I'm going to be dead.

(23:39):
Like there was a guy in the town near me,
he was cleaning a roof, fell off it. Nobody found him.
The snow buried him. I don't think they found him
for like maybe till the spring or something. And that's
my recent times. Let known, if you went back to
those days where you couldn't just get in your you know,
heated truck and drive for the store for supplies, like
if you didn't have the food in and that's what Halloween.
I think I've always loved the holiday, and this is

(24:00):
an episode obviously now Halloween month, but I think the
Wendigo is a great thing to talk about because Halloween
was so potent in the Northern hemisphere because it kind
of represented that transition from you know, the summer into
the fall and then you hadn't went with your harvest
was a success and if you had it all the
food and you were going to live. And if you

(24:21):
if you didn't have it in there were going to
be problems that the knights get here. The Knights get
aggressively darker at this time of the year, like before
you know, it's like what on earth? You know, it's
already getting dark, and so you really feel the terror
of winter creeping in. And I suspect to also, in
response to Horace's question, that that might have had a

(24:41):
lot to do with whatever the reality of the Wind
to Go is, it might have a lot to do
with the popularization and the potency of this kind of
story in these parts.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
Absolutely, And you nailed it to Dan, like going to
the I went to the Twattna Valley where swift Runner
murdered and ate his family, and even in modern times,
and like May, it's pretty barren, and there's the odd
home in there, and you're a long way from like
the late you know, Saint Albert or Edmonton or anything
like that. So then you dump four or five feet

(25:12):
of snow on top of that, I have the temperature
drop to like minus thirty five to minus fifty degrees celsius.
It's cold and it's barren, and yeah, you're alone out there,
So it's that really would permeate these kind of stories
for sure.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
We have another quick question, but I think we've kind
of answered, and that is, Jason, what about whind to
Go cases that are overseas foreign into the North America region?
Are there any Wind to Go stories outside of here?

Speaker 3 (25:39):
Not moally like the Wind to Go. It's very much
like a Canadian, you know, North American thing. I know
there's other like there's the Wild Hunt sort of in Europe,
which is very winter based and very animal based sort
of thing, but it's nothing quite like quite like the
Wind to Go. It's very much sort of more isolated
to sort of Canada and the northern United States.

Speaker 2 (26:01):
What I was fascinated with in your book, and I
think it's mentioned in the film as well, and it
is actually now I do record it is mentioned in
the film is Stories. So the swift Runner one is
so famous for somebody getting in trouble for being a
wendy go or claiming to be a windy go eating
his family, but there's there's other tales of First Nation

(26:23):
people in the nineteenth century getting into trouble for killing wendigoes.

Speaker 3 (26:28):
Yeah, Jenn, that was Jack Fiddler and his brother and
the Fiddlers. They were like wendigo hunters, So if someone
was believed to be going when to go within their tribe,
they would come to Jack Fiddler and his brother and
they would go out and determine whether or not they
are Wendigo, and if they were, they would kill them.
They would they would dismember them. They would like poor

(26:48):
hot Tallow and melt the heart because when you become
a wendergiller, their heart turns to ice and go through
this whole process. And they were doing in their mind
the community of service, and the people in the community
felt that they were doing them a service as well.
But as soon as like you know, Canadian police found
out about it, the royal amount of police they were,

(27:08):
there's an investigation and they were both arrested. But Jack Fiddler,
I think I believe he died before he even went
to trial. And that's another case where it became part
of you know, Canadian criminal law. And that's partly what,
like to me, makes this so fascinating. It's like a
lot of monster like you know og Pogo or Lochnesser Sasquats.
There's like all these stories, but there's never anything about

(27:28):
like murder and people actually going to trial and being
hung as a result of this kind of monster story.
So it's like one of those few stories it becomes
like a true crime story at the exact same time.

Speaker 2 (27:41):
I think that is what's so fascinating. And also, to
be honest, and I think you pointed out too, it's
particularly terrifying, Like it's so much more disturbing than almost
any other tale within the cryptid paranormal space today. Like
it's just it's it chills up your spine when you
read about some of these cases. Now there's another case

(28:04):
which you might want to tell us about, you might
want to do a slow lead into it. I don't know,
because it's fascinating, and that is the Fort Kent massacre story.

Speaker 3 (28:12):
Yeah, the Fort Kent massacre was one. How did it
talk about the Fort Kent massacre story. I've heard about
it well doing my research and I kind of reached
out to some journalists in the area of Fort Kent
and sort of how this story goes. This is also
going back to the early nineteen hundreds, maybe the late
eighteen hundreds. My memory is sort of not serving me

(28:33):
right now, but where people started to see something in
the fields that was like sort of attacking their livestock,
and a farmer went out one night with his shotgun
to deal with it, and he said that he saw
something in the woods with glowing red eyes. Shortly after that,
a young doctor arrived who was a World War One veteran,
so this is putting it sort of into perspective, and
he a virus hit the community. Think it was I

(28:57):
can't remember. It was like tuberculosis or like a smallpox
or something like that. So he was trying to care
for all these people who were getting sick, and his
wife eventually went sick and he became more to run
down and depressed and just wild, and he the story
goes that he was taken over by a wendogo who
then turned and ate his wife and then started going
throughout the community and basically slaughtering everybody and eating them.

(29:20):
And as the story goes, either a male person showed
up eventually, as the police finally showed up and found
that like everyone was dead in this community and the
doctor had become this raving monster, this wend to go
that they had to dispatch. And this was so gruesome
that the town was eventually moved like sort of across
what's now the highway to another across the highway to

(29:41):
another part of the country of the county. But and
this story actually became known enough that a TV show
called Creepy Canada talked about it, so everybody started to
believe it was true. But the truth of the matter
is it was actually a story created for a movie
called The Fort Kent Wendigo. There was a complete work
of fiction. The person who wrote the movie. The movie
didn't get made, but he wrote the script. I even said, no,

(30:03):
this was like a made up story for it's going
to be like a horror movie about the wender Girl.
But it was because the TV show got ahold of it,
it became believed that it was a true story, and
so many people believed it, including myself at first when
I first started researching it, and it was Morgan Canudtcent
who actually sort of had all the deats on what
that what really went on.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
Again, Morgan's great, but it's one of the dangers in
this space because stories that are fictional can enter the
actual narrative of the supposed history of things. I mean,
there's a lot of confusion. I think when you're dealing
with things which are as difficult to comprehend as whether

(30:44):
it's the Wender Girl or whether it's UFOs or whether
it's paranormal stories, you get all these fictional or hoaxed
or other versions that come in and muddy the understanding,
or perhaps perhaps they're part of the Patterners John Keel
or Jim Mosley or Gray Barker or those guys would
have said, out of the pattern. So I love that story.
By the way that the Kent massacres story was.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
Actually it's great. It's a great story.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
He's taken on board as being true. Listen, I think
you've done an incredible overview of some of the history
and some of the I suppose points, which are great
entry points. People should read your book and watch the
documentaries because there's so much more about the history in
there that we obviously can't cover anymore. Will be here
for you know, the length of the documentary. But let's
move into some of your experiences while you actually were

(31:29):
out there on the trail tracking down these stories. Because
I know there's a few creepy bits in the documentary
where you yourself, you know, feel uncomfortable or where things
seem to be strange. Maybe you could talk about some
of those experiences.

Speaker 3 (31:43):
Yeah, I guess the first one when we went out
to Mameo Beach with Morgan and the Pero Werner family.
What was really interesting about that has this encounter sort
of happened in like summer and they've basically gone out
to this place called a Mail Beach, which is an
hour south of Edmonton. They're going looking for dog Man
of all things, and while they were out there, they

(32:04):
had kind of stopped and pulled over on the side
of the road and suddenly they said, it was like
this portal or beam of light opened up and they
saw this creature within it that sort of resembled a
wendigo that had kind of come out and sort of
moving outside of the portal before it just suddenly kind
of disappeared. They got in the truck because they're ready
getting ready to leave. They turned the lights on the truck,
turned around, and this portal was gone. So we went
back out there to kind of take a look. And

(32:25):
what was really interesting is there was a side road
there that they hadn't gone down because it was middle
of the night and pitch blacks. We decided to drive
down that road that would eventually take us. It was
one of many roads to the beach. But what we found,
like maybe twenty to thirty meters behind that stand, there
was a stand of trees, and then behind that there
was like a cemetery that Alicia Pero Werner, who's part

(32:46):
of the Cree people, said was like an an Indian
one of their ancient burial grounds. And within this burial
ground there were sort of plots that looked like they
had been recently dug up and new bodies put in.
But she said, spiritually, the fact that there was this
burial ground behind where they saw this portal of light
and what they believe was like a Wendigo coming out
was very significant because of the connection that way, not
that burial grounds or anything evil or anything like that,

(33:09):
but there's just there's an energy there to it. And
what was sort of interesting is that the tail end
of us kind of investigating the cemetery, I shut off
the camera and everything, and we were getting ready to leave,
a black truck blew in from out of nowhere, just
as the sun was setting, no lights on, went right
by us, went into the middle of the sort of seminary,
turned around and just parked and with the front end
name towards us and nobody got out, but whoever was

(33:30):
in it was just sitting there staring at us until
we kind of basically packed up our stuff and leave.
And then I wish I'd kept my camera running because
would have been a nice addition to the documentary. But
it's talked about in the book and it was quite
that alone was quite unnerving and just sort of speaks,
I think, to how people believe, you know, feel about
all this stuff in Alberta. And then when we were

(33:53):
filming sequence for the for the documentary that isn't in
the book, my colleague Olivier Aslyn and I just went
up to where we had heard about this local sighting
and conducted an investigation, set up a bunch of our equipment,
like you know, trigger objects, and we had like you
know night vision on and like a laser grid set
up in the woods, and we did start to we

(34:17):
heard things moving in the woods, heavy things, could be anything.
It could have been a bear, it could have been
deer or whatever, but we couldn't see it. But the
one thing that was really unnerving is we had a
trigger object set up in a tree aiming down this
sort of gully into this valley that would be set
off by a change in temperature primarily heat. There was

(34:37):
no win, nothing's moving. It was like I was standing
on one the other side of the tree with the
the you know, scanner sensors aiming away from me, and
it literally went off like something had walked up basically
within a few feet of me, right behind me in
front of this object and set it off. And it's
this UFO trigger object that the light spin and everything
like that, and that I would have to be one

(34:59):
of the most terrifying I think I've ever had conducting
an investigation, because there's no way that thing could go.
If you go up and you could wave your hand
in front of it within a few feet, it's not
going off. It's very specific what sets off this device.
And there was nobody there, no one else around us
that we had been working around it for a couple
hours that night. We didn't set it off, and this
was just set off on its own.

Speaker 1 (35:19):
It was.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
It was quite creepy.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah, no, it's a it's a creepy moment in the film,
that's for absolutely sure. I don't know if you can
help me with this one, because I'm not sure what
Paddy Troy's are talking about. I might be out of libit.
But Patty says, I thought that the nine one one
call from North Carolina could have been a Wendigo. Is
that too far south? Have you heard that?

Speaker 3 (35:40):
I haven't. That would be quite far south. And like
we were started talking a bit about earlier, Dean, is
that a lot of people are because the wind that
goes sort of entered public lexicon, people could be mistaking
something else for it, like I was when I went
to the Curse Waters was screened near me in the
town called Vernon. It was like the Canadian, first Canadian
screening it. And well there I've talked to some people

(36:02):
in the audience afterwards and everything, and someone came up
to me and said that there was a windygo that
had possessed a barn nearby, and when they gooes don't
possess barnes. It just doesn't work that way. But you know,
they hear the word when they go, they associate it
with something possession, and they just start kind of We've
talked about this before, like how people can just sort
of start taking ideas and mixing it together and creating
something different or misinterpreting something else. I think you could

(36:25):
see a lot of that going on with the When
to Go, especially now that it's kind of popping up everywhere.

Speaker 2 (36:31):
Now I think that's the case, as you suggested, then
with a whole lot of different phenomena, is it. If
that's the case, then is the wind to Go really
different perhaps from all of these other strange things that
we look at. Are they all somehow you know, amorphous

(36:51):
and do they appear and change to what our expectations are?
Maybe the winder goes a great case study because there's
a very clear historical root of it being you know,
this this Native American or First Nation idea, and then
they're being legal cases around the strength of people's beliefs

(37:11):
and their behavior and then Algernon Blackwood's thing kind of
transforms it, and then there's other popular culture and we
can kind of trace these weird changes. But I wonder
if and now we go up to as you're saying,
people see them, you know, in the suburbs of you know,
Canadian cities and things, but I wonder if that isn't
the same as people seeing Bigfoot in the suburbs of

(37:32):
North American cities and the outskirts of cities. Like to me,
it's it's absolutely that to me, is just as crazy
as seeing a Wendigo. And then maybe maybe it's the
same with UFOs or Blessed Virgin Mary Siding so Poulter guy.
So maybe all of these things or ghosts or whatever,
maybe they're all somehow interacting with us and our expectations,

(37:53):
and maybe the wender Goes just a great casebook example
of that because we can we can track it, you know,
and it's transformation so much clearer than we can a
lot of these other things.

Speaker 3 (38:03):
Well, I just think of like John Keel and his
ultraterrestrial theory. Like, and I know you're a big fan
of Keel. That's one of the first conversations we've ever
end up having right, And I think to me that
just kind of it's a prime example of what Keil
was talking about. It's something that as time has gone on,
it's sort of changed to suit our time period, our
belief systems, what's going on in our culture and society

(38:25):
at the time. And I think now more than ever,
the window it was a great cautionary tale for behavior
and human behavior. So it almost wouldn't surprise me that
people are seeing it more so I think, yeah, you're right,
it's a great case study for keel sort of ideas.
But ultraterrestrials and what the paranormal really is and its
role here on the planet and how it interacts with us.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
One of the things I found interesting. I mean, I
found so many things interesting, but you might have you
mentioned Morgan's story of when she was in the truck
with free three friends and they went back to the truck.
But it's Morgan's somebody who's not when she has a
Dogma encounter, She's like, oh, these puppies, they're friendly. We
can talk about Snoopy, or to see her, to see

(39:08):
her in a wendygo. Whatever this thing was, it's energy
or her senses or whatever was like, no, we got
to get back in the truck and put the walls
of the truck between us and it. And then, as
you mentioned before that the graveyard situation where there was
genuine uncomfortable when people feeling ill and and spooky. I mean,

(39:28):
perhaps there's the I don't know, I don't want to
say manifestation of negative energy because I sound like some
weird new ages, but perhaps there, perhaps there does seem
to be something particularly negative about wendigo experiences as opposed
to some of these other things we're talking about. Like
I don't know, I don't I'm asking you half facetiously,
but I imagine there aren't any nice wendigo stories out there.

Speaker 3 (39:49):
No, there's none. It's one of those kinds where there's none.
Like people have positive sasquatch experiences, they are positive, like
lockness monster experiences, they have positive UFO experiences, even positive
ghost experiences. Nothing positive ever happens with the wind to Go.
And even when Allie and I were out in those
woods where we were doing that investigation that's featured in
the documentary, like once that trigger object went off, like

(40:11):
we both felt highly unease. A great deal of unease
about it, like we were very uncomfortable and all all
senses firing and hairs standing up on the back of
the neck and and everything like that, and even being
in that cemetery when parts of it where they said
this one part of their feeling off. I went back
there and I immediately started feeling like, you know, I said, Dassius,
that's the only way I could explain it. But I
didn't feel great, you know, So it was Yeah, it's

(40:33):
really interesting. It's and it's just it is this evil thing,
like through the whind to go. There's nothing good about it.
There's nothing you know, pleasant. It's not like evening a score.
It's not you know what I mean, it's not setting
justice right. It's just it eats and it consumes and
it just doesn't stop. No.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
Like again, as I've said a number of times, it's
one of the more terrifying things in this space I
think to read about letting known experience. We have a
question here from Mojo Tao, and it is did any
Native Americans open up and tell you some inside stories
of what's current with battling Wendigo or I guess you know,

(41:14):
did they did they talk to you at all about
you know, approaches to the wind to Go or you know,
what's going on with the Windigo today or anything like that.

Speaker 3 (41:23):
Yeah, a little bit like the Alicia Pearrow Werner. She's,
like I said, she's from the Elk Cree tribe and
so she kind of shared what she could. But a
lot of Indigenous people don't like talking about it. You know.
Chad Lewis had some good insight too, and he was
doing like talks about different creatures, and he was in
one of the Native Native American bands, and they didn't
want him talking about it at all. They just believe

(41:44):
nothing good can come from even talking about the wend
to Go, And in terms of like trying to battle
it or stop it, like we were basically considered idiots
for going out there and trying to investigate it. And
even once we get out there, everything we'd read and
known about the wend to Go, it's there's nothing you
can really do except run if you are somehow lucky enough.
And this is sort of what the fiddlers would do
before the person could be fully changed or possessed. You

(42:07):
would basically dismember the body, cut it out, cut the
body open, pour the hot tallow or hot liquid onto
the heart so you could melt it. And then you
would just basically burn the remains and scatter the ashes,
preferably on consecrated grounder and various different places far apart
from each other. But that's really all you can do.
But once it's sort of I guess, in its animal
cryptid form, there's not much you can do about it.

(42:29):
You just stay away and stay out of its path.

Speaker 2 (42:34):
No, that certainly seems to be I think. I think
the takeaway from reading the book and watching the documentary
as well. Here's a question from somebody who's new to
the channel, David Lopez. Thank you for joining us. David,
you hear this channel. Do you go into the woods
armed while searching for the wind to go at least
for the psychological comfort?

Speaker 3 (42:54):
Yes, we went in. We had we brought a rifle
with us. I mean, not just because when ideas, but
there are other animals in the woods that you know
could legit, like bears and wolves and cougars and coyotes
that you don't want to run a foul up without
a wap, And anytime in the woods you should bring
something with you, I think. But it did provide a
little I think even make a joke about it, like,
you know, if we were able to kill it and

(43:17):
get the heart, what are we going to do and
we just I'll smash it with the rifle butt. I
hope that that works. Yeah, it's a little bit for
like a peace of mind maybe, but that's about it. No.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
But as far as going on the wood or even
where I live, my back forty which attaches to other
woods and farms and various other things. When I go
out into the woods and we've got trails at my
door and I walk, you know, just for the pleasure
of walking in the woods, I'm always armed because we've
got we been a bobcat now back yard, Like during
the day. Recently there's weird a Samantha, my girlfriend who's

(43:50):
listening now, would tell you we had crazy growling in
our woods the other night, like really loud, deep growling.
There's all kinds of weird noise. We've got everything in
this air area, from cougar traveling through to bobcat, to
coyote to wolf to bear it. When you go even
further north, of course, it gets even crazy. So I
think to go into the woods wandering around filming a
Wind to Go documentary and not be able to defend

(44:12):
yourself even forget the whind to Go from all of
these other things. Not to mention crazy people in the
middle of nowhere, by the.

Speaker 3 (44:18):
Way, well big time, big time, right, It's just good
practice if you have a firearm license and you have
a firearm ticket with you in the woods, just as
common sense.

Speaker 2 (44:26):
Thankfully, I live in a country where I don't need
a license. I have the Second Amendment, which is my license.

Speaker 3 (44:30):
Yeah, yeah, we don't have that here. I do have a.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
Concealed carry permit, though, so I can carry where I
go elsewhere as well, which is nice we have. This
is a cool question because I kind of hinted at
before with Missing four one one. This is from Paranormal Ranges.
Do you think any current missing person cases are When
to Go related?

Speaker 3 (44:51):
You know, it could be like it was like you're right,
you mentioned David Palisades and his cases. You know, it
could be sasquatch related, you know, really if you really
want to get into it, or it could literally just
be a missing person or some other animal attack. But
I mean, if the Wendago is real and it's out there,
I'm sure you could attribute it's missing person cases, especially

(45:12):
up here in Canada and Northern Canada, and called parts
of the climate related to that. It wouldn't surprise me.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
Yeah, I mean, I think I wonder, just in general,
how many of these strange experiences are paranormal related, whether
it's wendigo or whether it's something else, or whether all
of these things are somehow manifestations from a central source
of all the different phenomena, but arms of the one phenomenon.
A great comment here from Bob Antone, who is actually
on Talking Weed next week. He's a regular guest, a

(45:43):
good friend of mine. He's in the documentary that I'm making,
the Man who Inventifying Sources. He also did some of
the incredible music for it. He's very knowable, he said.
According to my wife's tribe, the wendigo is a cannibal
spirit that possesses a human and makes them go crazy.
And that's Dnay First Nations Northwest Territories.

Speaker 3 (46:05):
Interesting. I wonder if I could talk to your wife, Bob,
because I'm working on something about the the Haney Valley
as a general just interest story, so and the tribe
of from them the Haney Valley.

Speaker 2 (46:19):
I'm sure, Bob and his wonderful wife Laura would be
happy to talk to you. You can, I can put
you in touch.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
Where Yeah, that'd be awesome.

Speaker 2 (46:25):
So yeah, no, that's yeah, that's interesting. Thank you Bob
for that, for that comment. That's awesome. This is another
cool question from from ghost Roads. And then then I
had some other questions about your finale to the book
and some of the things you thought. But ghost Roads
asks what questions about the Wendigo were left unanswered for

(46:48):
you by the end of your journey when you were
writing the book.

Speaker 3 (46:51):
I think like it was one of those rare cases
where I couldn't determine if it was something I fully
believed in or not, do you know what I mean?
Like it was I didn't see one, you know, I mean,
no one tried to eat me. And I like to
really sort of take things at face value. But I
definitely was compelled by people's belief in this whatever it is,

(47:14):
spirit cryptid thing out there, and that surprised me too.
Is even how in our modern times there could be
people living somewhere who could still so strongly believe in
it that they were scared to even talk about it.
But so that but I was left with like, what
was it? What is it? And I think that's partly
what's so compelling is there's no easy answer to what
but the vendor Go really is other than it's a

(47:36):
very something that people very strongly believe in.

Speaker 2 (47:41):
And all your investigations, because I know you've done all
kinds and then we'll come back to that last point
because I want to talk to you more about that,
But in all of your investigations, because I know you've
looked at like you know, you've looked Bigfoot, and you've
done lots of paranormal standard investigations, and you've done Hogo
of course, or every from Lake Monster's to Bigfoot to

(48:03):
ghost to everything in between. Is this you've gone back
and looked at those things a number of times? Is
this something you'd go back to again. It's just something
you might want to recall you to look at it again.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
Oh for sure. Yeah, there's so many more stories. And
Morgan and I've talked about so many other experiences that
she's heard of and that you know, I keep hearing
about that you could do another book, another film, you
could you could keep looking into coming back to it.
I think it's something I don't think it's something that's
going to go away anytime soon. Like I think now
more than ever, it's becoming more and more popular, and
even just like tonight and I was on a live
stream yesterday, the amount of interest in the subject matter

(48:39):
is huge. So I think that bodes well for the
book and the documentary in terms of perhaps even coming
revisiting it as well. Yeah, I think there's so much
more to look at and dig in, especially in modern times.
We've those part of projects. There's more a lot about
the history, a little bit about the modern. I think
there's a lot more modern stuff that could be touched
on and looked into.

Speaker 2 (48:58):
Other than perhaps more story which we talked about. Is
is there another modern case or there's some other modern
cases you want to you want to talk about it
all because I'm not aware of the modern cases, to
be honest, in the historical ones.

Speaker 3 (49:09):
Yeah, Like there's just other stuff that that people have
told me that I don't I haven't looked too much into,
but I would like to. But just people having experiences
with what something that started off like an animal sound
that was very mechanical and then sort of transformed into
this person's voice basically saying like, you know, come here,
I need help, like come here, but not no one's
the person not seeing anybody, and whatever was creating the

(49:32):
voice not coming forward, but just something like come help me,
you know what I mean, and just not sounding quite right.
Stories like that that I just are creepy as hell.
That fit into the wend to go lore.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
This this super creepy. When when you do that, you
should look at the Kushta car as well, which is
another you know up North awescan creature which does behaves
in that capacity, just like those new Wendigo stories talk
about a question from Jennifer Andrews. Thank you, Jennifer. Do
you feel like the wendigo is a spiritual thing or
a geographical thing or something else.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
I think it's both spiritual geographical largely definitely fits into
that category.

Speaker 2 (50:10):
That kind of leads into something I was going to
ask you at the end of your because, like you said,
you're going to return to it, and I think that's great.
I think there probably are more stories. I'm fascinated to
hear modern stories and the way the legend might change
and modern interpretations and people seeing weird things with antlers
and you know, in the woods. Is there something you

(50:32):
ultimately took away of what you suspect this thing might Like,
there's no way any of us know what this thing is, right,
But if you lean in an interpretation like is this
if you had to say, well, this is just my
ballpark guess of what the wendigo might be.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
Yeah, I leaned into the concept of it being a tulpa,
which is of course is an Eastern and Buddhist belief
about that if enough people believe strongly and something, you
can actually kind of will it into existence. It's like
when the slender Man became so popular online and so
may people were talking about it, and you know, young
kids would believe in it being this real thing, and

(51:10):
the next thing you know, people think they're seeing slender
Man out in the woods for real, like you know,
not like a hoax or anything like that or for
some joke. It's like, no, they believe they were seeing it.
So could people then, if you know the Algonquin and creep,
people are believing that there's this thing out there that
could possess people, and these people who are committing these
crimes are believing it's a creature that made them do it.
Over time, if enough people are believing that and it's

(51:32):
be coming into the mainstream culture through like you know,
news stories and criminal reports, et cetera. Could then we
not create it? And I know that's like one of
those like swinging for the fence kind of answers, But
that was kind of the one thing that to me
felt like a remote possibility for explaining what the wendigoll
could really be.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
I think that explanation is as good as any and
probably better than a lot. Again, none of us can
really work out any of this stuff, and then that's
perhaps a great craction of it. This might be the
final question for the not And it is again from
grand Zia twelve and it's Jason. Any cases of near
wendigo cases where the victim may start to have Wendigo

(52:17):
type like habits or cravings.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
Ll and then not actually full follow through on.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
That, Yeah, I'm guessing there there was The only one.

Speaker 3 (52:26):
I kind of heard of was it was talked about
in the book but not in the actual film. It
was something that happened at Charles Campsel Hospital in Edmonton
where a person was admitted to the hospital. It was
a hospital that would take in a lot of Indigenous people,
but where someone was believed that they were possessed by
the whnd Togo and an exorcism was performed and no

(52:49):
one knows what the end result of that really was,
but it was one of the first times there's really
an you know, interference in preventing the change from happening.
And I think I like, in my head, I remember
hearing something about they were able to pour like back
in the more frontier times this was going on. They
were able to pour enough like hot drink hot tallow
down someone's throw that they could melt it and it

(53:09):
did stop it. But they it was like that's like
one of those just anecdotal stories you hear, we don't
know too much more about it, and trying to find
out more facts and details. There wasn't enough to really
make much mention of it. But I can recall hearing
something to that regard as well.

Speaker 2 (53:22):
Yeah, I think that's that Tallo part is even mentioned
in the book maybe.

Speaker 3 (53:27):
The Dogs for sure. Morgan might have mentioned it in
the film as well, like you can do that and
that's a way to kind of prevent it. So maybe
it was something related to the Fiddler stories. They were
they didn't have to kill someone that they were able
to stop the transformation from happening, because obviously couln't kill
everybody like aholl that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
So and that's fantastic because if it's a mental illness,
then Tello isn't going to work. But it's some kind
of cultural psychoses. It might be like pointing the bone
in my part of the world, where supposedly, like you know,
the equivalent of the shaman and the Aboriginal community were
able to like X you and of course you were
part of that culture and you believed that you drop

(54:04):
over dead. Now, if you were a European settler, you
just laugh and nothing would happen to you. But if
you believed it, boom. So maybe if somebody believes the
Wendigo's coming and if the well known cultural cure is Tello,
then maybe they makes a difference.

Speaker 3 (54:21):
It does, right, And that's why there's wendego psychosis listed
in the DSM. Like it doesn't fit in every case,
but there's enough of them that the people they felt
it needed to be actually addressed as a mental health issue,
a cultural mental health issue.

Speaker 2 (54:35):
That's interesting culturally too, because perhaps while people were asking
about Wendigo reports in other parts of the world, and
clearly there aren't wehnd to go because that is, you know,
a language for it's a word from a First Nation tribe,
I'm imagined. And there's also windigo I've heard and as
you say to go.

Speaker 3 (54:53):
And like three different way wehndgo, you know what I mean?
Like it's but.

Speaker 2 (54:58):
I wonder if similar story for example, in you know,
which we which aren't just stories, they're actual. There's historical
examples in you know, the medieval to later medieval period
in Europe, ideas of people thinking that they've been they've
done a deal with the devil, or they become you know,

(55:18):
possessed by a wolf spirit and they've become, you know,
a were wolf. I wonder if those weren't just a
different culturally bound version of the wendigo because it was
you know, it didn't have we didn't have the people
there didn't have the wendigo legend when they slipped into
some kind of psychoses and wanted to start eating people.
But they did have they did have the were wolf

(55:39):
story which they could slip into when they went you know,
serial killer level and started eating people.

Speaker 3 (55:44):
M hm. It makes sense. It makes sense, right, Like
I think, you know, there's these different they're similar enough
stories all over the world, but just the the like,
You're right, the end result is not the same creature.
So it would make sense then that if different cultures
would adapt these to these incidents, to whatever made the
most sense within their society.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
You know, I think.

Speaker 3 (56:07):
That's great.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
That's flat Rockland, who's Alsothing a guest on the show
and is a great He is a great friend of
the show, he says. Man, the more I learned about
the Wind to Go, the less I feel I know
about it. I feel the same the same way.

Speaker 3 (56:18):
It's it's super it's super strange, it's super confusing, it's
super weird.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
But at the same time, in some ways it fits
other patterns. I think if we can step back from
any of these things, whether it's wendigoes or werewolves or
UFO encounters or you know, bigfoot encounters, and we can
start to look at them from the position of perhaps
there is and maybe that's another great reason the Wender
goes a fantastic case example, because we look at them
through a cultural lens, then we can look at aha,

(56:48):
this is where the difference is here because there's difference
in you know, North American native belief than there was
to the you know, you know late medieval period where
people thought about were wolves, but some the behaviors are
very similar. Maybe we can see a psychological pattern. Maybe
when we look at a more phenomenological pattern, when people
are seeing strange things appear, maybe we can go, well,

(57:10):
it's interesting today people see things with antlers, and they
didn't used to see things with antlers. So somehow, whatever
it is, whether it's totally exterior from us or whether
it's engaging with us, somehow it's culturally bound, whether it's
a psychosis, or whether it's a genuine, a genuine external entity,

(57:30):
or whether it's somewhere somehow in between, which I think
some of these things fall.

Speaker 3 (57:35):
I think a lot of them are somewhere in between, right,
And I think we can you know, influence these the
outcomes of the our encounters with these you know it's yeah,
which was more of a parapsychological kind of approach to.

Speaker 2 (57:47):
It now that that, as you know, is always my
type of approach. Congratulations mate on knocking out a book
and a future documentary, because that's an incredible feat I know,
with somebody who still is trying to get a book
out and is still working on a feature documentary that
I've been working on for almost three years now, as

(58:08):
anybody who listens to this show knows and suffers from.
But how do people get a hold of the book,
which is available now, and how will they get a
hold of the film which is coming out later this month.

Speaker 3 (58:18):
The book is available from small Town Monsters publisher, well
from small Town Monsters dot com or via Amazon, and
then the film will debut on the small Town Monsters
YouTube channel on October twenty six. Not sure the exact
I think that like eleven am my time, so it
would be like two o'clock Eastern time kind of thing
somewhere in there. But if you subscribe to their channel,
you'll get a notification about when it comes out, and

(58:38):
then who knows from there on spool elsewhere as well.

Speaker 2 (58:42):
Well, Yeah, I hope it's available as widely as possible,
so as many people can see it as possible. Before
I let you go, you also teased in your bio
that I receive that you have an upcoming Bigfoot documentary.
Can you give us any hints or insight? Spoiler? Listen
to what that might be.

Speaker 3 (59:01):
All I can really say is because I'm in Canada.
It deals with Sasquatch in Canada and an encounter that
we came across and investigated. And we also take the
story to Harrison Hot Springs, where like some of the legends.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
Of Ruy Ribby Creeks ney there right.

Speaker 3 (59:15):
Ruby Creek's there, there's you know, that's where John Green
was mayor and he kind of started rolling a lot
of modern investigat you know, Bigfoot in Sasquatch from research.
You know, Thomas Steinberg is still there. So it involves
all sorts of things like that. And we do go
back into the woods Olivia and I and do some
more investigating, this time with Sasquatch.

Speaker 2 (59:35):
There's the goal fantastic. In fact, I think I saw
on your Facebook the other day maybe a teaser for
like maybe you just showed some of the screen. I went,
I think that's Thomas Steinberg on the screen. So I'm guess, yeah,
it was a little bit of a teaser that I
put up. Is we did talk to Thomas, and Thomas
is awesome. I have one or two of his books
over there. Well, I think I shouldn't lie. I think
I have one Thomas book on my chaff over there.

(59:56):
He's great. He is, He's awesome. He's an awesome guy.
Well man, thank you so much for joining me tonight.
I encourage everybody to check out your upcoming book or
not upcomings out now actually Hard of Eyes tracking the
Wendigo and the soon to be released tracking the Wendigo documentary,
which I've been very fortunate enough to have an advanced
screener of it. Thank you so much for joining me tonight.

(01:00:18):
Jason was a blast as always.

Speaker 3 (01:00:20):
Thank you so much for having me ay and it's
always an honor and always enjoyable. Man.

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
I can't wait to talk to you again, and until
next week when Bob Antone is my guest and I'll
get to talk to everybody else out there. The same
weird time, same weird network, the untold Radio Network. Please
keep it weird.