October 2, 2014 • 35 mins
What are we to make of this evil spirit of Algonquin folklore, said to transform unfortunate travelers into cannibalistic monsters? Have true accounts of "wendigo psychosis" actually occurred in the Canadian wilds? Join Robert and Julie as they explore the mythic, anthropological and scientific dimensions of the legend.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome the Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Tuglas, and
it's the Halloween season once more. So we are re
releasing one of our favorite creepy episodes from last year,
on the Wind to Go, or as I wanted to
(00:25):
call it, eight My birth Day. Yes, yes, that was
your original pitch for the title episode. We did not,
but yeah, it's creepy subject matter and it's I mean,
at heart, it's a monster, a monster's idea, and it's
a monster that seems to be picking up more and
more in popular culture. Windigo uh symbolism played heavily into
(00:47):
expect for the first season of TV's Hannibal, and in
Sleepy Hollow season two, we will be seeing a wind
to Goo and and teen Wolf. They're already already of course,
you're already a window got So this is the thing
about people finding about out about your cool monsters. They
end up showing up, I know. And then one hand
(01:07):
you're like, oh, yes, it's finding its rightful place and
pop culture, and then you're like, oh yeah, and maybe
this is what Algernon Blackwood really wanted, though. We'll see maybe.
January six eight. I went to see the sick man
today and he's a pitiful looking devil. They had him
with about six blankets and he still was nearly freezing.
(01:29):
I can do nothing for him. January twelve. I went
to see him today and he looks worse than ever.
I gave him a dose of Castor Royal, but he
he says his heart is freezing. He keeps insisting he'll
become a cannibal. He wants the Algonquins to kill him
before he gets worse. January. Friend Sis came here and
asked me if I would read some prayers for the
sick man. He doesn't look like a human being. He
seems to be terribly swollen in the body and face.
(01:52):
The sight of him is enough to frighten any person.
The poor Algonquin slept very little here for the last
nineteen days since he arrived. They have been watching him
all time. I don't know how this will end. January one,
Friendsois came from me last night and I went with him.
I told him we ought to take some rope with
us and tie him up if we could. The sound
of him was terrible. It was like the calling of
a wild animal. We tied him with the ropes and
(02:14):
I left to find some more, but it couldn't find any.
And when I got back, the cords around his arms
were already breaking. The algonquins asked what we should do.
They said that when he got up, he would kill
all of us. I told them to do what they
had to do is I had no more ropes which
to bind it. That was the account of Francis work
Beaten Uh the Ordney HBC clerk at the Trout Lake
(02:36):
Outpost the winter of eighteen ninety six during the alleged
Windigo possession of napapen Auger. Edited slightly for for clarity's sake,
but otherwise exactly what's in the history books. And we
wanted to bring that bit to your attention because what
we're talking about is a creature or a possession that
(02:56):
has to deal with cannibalism. Yeah, and even though the
creature itself is obviously a creature of myth. We've talked
before about the power of myth, the power of paranormal
scripts within a culture, as well as the real life
incidences that have allegedly occurred because of or alongside the
Wind to Go belief. Because if the oral account of
(03:18):
this particular Wind to Go possession story, as collected by
the University of Alberta's Nathan D. Carlson, holds true, then
the Algonquin tribes people gave Napapen boiling bear grease an
attempt to cure him after this, uh this account that
I read, and then when that didn't work, they executed
him with an axe, cutting off his head and bearing
it separate from his body. Now, there are various problems,
(03:40):
of course, with any account of cannibalism, just just cannibalism alone,
much less when you start involving supernatural uh in material
as well. Yeah, and that's the thing about Window that
is so interesting is it really highlights this issue of cannibalism.
And we've talked about this before. It's very hard to
really pin down cannibalism what has actually happened, um with
(04:02):
humans for sure, Actually in nature it's very easy to explain,
right because they are not ashamed of it. They're not ashamed,
and they have a purpose, a real clear purpose to
their cannibalism. And you have, um, the sexual cannibalism in
orb spiders, right, that helps in terms of sexual reproduction, fitness.
And then in tiger sharks you have siblified, right, you
(04:24):
have a tiger that eats excuse me, a tiger shark
that eats a sibling because it's an easy source of energy. Yeah,
it's it's just pure economics. It's a harsh world. Sometimes
you have to reabsorb energy back into the the winning prospects,
and that's just how it goes. But of course in
human culture, the economics may still hold true, but we
(04:45):
have all of these layers of moral concerns of society
and culture. They just complicate the equation. Well, I mean
when you say the economics, you're talking about survival cannibalism.
In other words, you're just at the end of your
rope and you may be with one who could provide
you with a bit of energy, or perhaps there is
even a body who that has recently passed that someone uses.
(05:07):
And we have many accounts of this survival cannibalism in history.
Their counts that are proven, and then there are accounts
that are sort of forever being argued about, such as
the Dolmar Party, where some saying well, maybe they didn't
resort to survival cannibalism. Whethers say yes, some say well
the bones, there's no bone evidence that they did, and
others say, well, well they wouldn't know on the bones,
(05:29):
they would have eaten the soft flesh, and of course
that wouldn't the evidence of that wouldn't survive. And then
you know how many people are going to come back
from a chaotic trip to the mountains and be like, woa,
I only survived because I ate my friend Caleb. Right,
It's just probably something that you're going to admit at
cocktail parties. Right, Um, so, yeah, you've got the survival cannibalism.
And then, just to complicate things a little bit further,
(05:51):
we have these accounts of cultural rituals which may or
may not be symbolic cannibalism, right, They may actually have
occurred or occurred in different ways that we don't think
is cannibalistic. Yeah. Well, I mean you always have the
the outsider viewing some sort of cannab supposedly cannibalistic ceremony
or hearing about it. You're having Westerners observed or hear
(06:13):
about a ritual that that from the people that they
view as primitive, and so you know, it's hard to
tack down the actual truth of the matter. Yeah. Actually,
if you want to look at a good example of
this and someone who actually further this idea of cannibalism,
you can look to Columbus, who encountered the Arawak people
in Hispaniola during the fifteenth century, and they warned him
(06:33):
of another tribe, the carab that eight people, which it
appears this other tribe never existed. So this has been
really hard for anthropologists to go through and to try
to figure out. But as far as I can tell,
this other tribe just wasn't a reality. So it may
have just been for them this story about another tribe
just kind of a boogeyman, a boogeyman right telling the
(06:54):
night there's another tribe out there and they're so bad
they eat people. You don't want to be like that,
and you don't want them to come for you, right,
Or maybe they just wanted, you know, Columbus to hang
around and they were like, we need to get him
to stay here with us and not go exploring. So
in addition, Columbus may have mistaken the ritual of keeping
a loved one's bones around the house. So that's what
(07:16):
the Arrow Act people did, and he may have mistaken
that for evidence of cannibalism, and of course the whole
thing is ridiculous too when you realize that Columbus comes
bearing his his Catholic faith, and of course Catholicism, like
a lot of Christianity, is rich in this symbol symbolic
consumption of Christ's blood and flesh, which even though you're
(07:38):
not actually consuming blood and flesh, uh, it is, it
is symbolic cannibalism at at heart, right, which we see
in so many other cultures. The problem, of course, is
that Columbus was the authority on all matters foreign at
that point, so people are like, so where'd you go,
what'd you see? What you experience? And then whatever he
said became sort of the gospel. Yeah, and that's one
(07:59):
of the ms you have throughout history too. I mean,
going back to plenty of the Elder and all these
guys where you just have certain voices and there aren't
a lot of there's not a lot of discussion about
the matter, but you know, this guy said that there
are cannibals living in Africa, and that remains sort of
the voice of truth for a matter of centuries. So
that's why The Wind to Go is such an interesting
thing to look at, because it really gets at the
(08:21):
heart of the taboo of cannibalism, but also the psychology
of the ways in which we behave when we have
these folk tales as stand ins for for what becomes
a reality. Yeah. So I want you to imagine a dark,
gaunt giant that haunts the woods, clad only in matted hair,
and it's peering outitude from the wild depths, with blood
(08:43):
red eyes as wild as sinister and sinister as those
of an owl, with claws that are curl and muscles
that are coiled with the strength of a bear, and
its teeth are eager, and its foul tongue is longing
for the taste of human flesh that sounds cuddly. Yeah. Yeah, Now,
this is some thing that is The creature is known
to different North American tribal groups um. And when we're
(09:05):
talking about the geography here, we're talking about French Canadian
territory um and the Algonquins are they figure in this
quite a bit as well as a couple of the
other tribes. Yeah, the Algonquins as one of the most
populous and widespread North American native language groups, and uh
at different times it composed like a whole bunch of
(09:26):
different tribes. You know, there did a lot of different
tribes that would spoke the Algonquin tongue, and there were
a lot of shared beliefs among them, and they they
thrived in the harsh world of northern North America, a
land of vast, unforgiving wilderness, brutal winners, particularly during the
Little Ice Age era in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries,
(09:46):
which correlates exactly with a lot of this exploration by
French Canadians who met up with these different tribes. And
we'll talk about this more, but they began to um
actually adopt some of these folk tales of the win
to go. And I also wanted to mention that it
goes by wakaw Witigo with tikio and weendigo long ago
(10:08):
Windigo Witigo and we ti go Tigo. It sounds like
a corporation secretly is based on cannibalism. It's right, we tigo,
you can we tigo to um. And the cool thing
about this is that the Windigo really sort of describes
two different things at play here. One is the beast
(10:29):
that you described who lives in that forest waiting to
feast on a human. The other is a cannibalistic spirit
that can possess a human. Yeah, and that spirit kind
of walks the barrier between the world and the world
of the spirits. And of course that's a very important
area in the tales and the belief systems in the
world view of the the first people of North America. Yeah,
(10:51):
and if you look at the Algonquins, they they really
focus on these spirits as as a sort of cautionary
all to people during these very harsh winters not to
turn to cannibalism, because they're saying that if you eat
the flesh of another, well, your soul is now susceptible
to the wind to go. Yeah. There there were a
number of causes, a number of things that could turn
(11:13):
you into a window go. Most of them are are
based in diet and food and and hunger. Um. So
you might be cursed by a sorcerer, always a possibility.
You know, it'll happen if you are yourself. If you
yourself are a sorcerer, you might seek the transformation in yourself,
always an option, all right. You might trigger the change.
If you fast too long or feast too heavily, so
(11:34):
a little too much food, a little too little food,
you're gonna potentially open yourself up to the window Goes caress.
But most importantly are all of all, as you mentioned,
if you if you are forced to consume human flesh,
or if you're tricked into doing so, even in a dream,
then the window go can reach out to you, touch
your soul and bring on this steady and horrible change,
(11:55):
And then you might feel ice in your heart longing
for flesh. Yeah, because that's uh, that's that's the big
thing right there. Um. There are a number of symptoms.
According to the Algonquin Reports catalog by Nathan D. Carlson,
the symptoms include stupor, catatonia, depression, paranoia, and orexia or
the inability to hold down food, nausea, vomiting, emaciation, glazed eyes,
(12:17):
bodily or facial swelling, violent shouting, hallucinations of family members
as food animals, particularly as beavers, and finally, this unstoppable
urge to consume human flesh. Yeah. There was one account
that was reading in a separate book where like a
mother was was potentially turning into a window. Go and
she was telling her she's matter or children. She's saying,
you all look like beavers to me. Now wow, But
(12:40):
but it's that. But the big thing that like the
major symptoms and the ultimate symptoms are the unstoppable urge
to consume human flesh and this chill in your in
your torso, meaning in your heart, as your heart becomes
this lump of ice, that's right, as the transformation occurs.
Let's take a quick break and when we get back,
we'll talk about psychosis. All right, we're back. We're just
(13:11):
talking about the symptoms in the folk tales of the
of the Wind to Go and uh, and how your
heart may seem to become this lump of of of
ice and you have this irresistible urge to consume human flesh. Now,
there were a few cures curative measures, that were also
related in the folk tales. But I think it is
interesting for you talking about the curative measures, is that
(13:32):
people took this folklore and then they began to exhibit
these symptoms. And this is what that psychosis is, These
cases of people actually coming down with not actually turning
into these sort of werewolf like creatures, but actually connating
some dastardly acts. Yeah, because, on one hand, as as
(13:53):
Nathan D. Carlson points out in his excellent article reviewing
Wittico and Ethno History of donable Monsters in the Athabaska
District of Northern Alberta nineteen kien Um, this was not
just a you know, folk tale. If it was told,
this was something in which there was a lot of belief.
There was a lot of fear, he says, quote in
(14:13):
the collective belief systems of pre twenty one century Algonquins.
Contrary to the opinions of some modern academics, as discussed below,
the Wittigo condition was not a legendary fabrication. For example,
in early eighteen ninety six, Richard Young, the Anglican Bishop
of the Athabaska District, wrote the following in a letter
journal to the Evangelical Fathers in the Church Missionary Society. Quote,
(14:34):
the Indians have a great terror of the so called
windigoose or cannibals. They believe that after eating human flesh,
their heart becomes a lump of ice, and no one
alive is safer them. Assert as all of this sounds
to us, it is a real terror to the untutored Indian.
So there's a little obviously there's a bit of xenophobia
and uh and and racism and in that uh, that
(14:54):
particular portrayal, but but still it underlines that this was
this was serious. That and if you're in a situation
where you have been forced to resort to survival cannibalism,
and then it's known or even if it's known only
to you, you you return with shame. Perhaps they other
members of your your group know that this occurred, and
(15:16):
before you know what, you're ostracized and maybe you feel
and there are a number of these symptoms, like if
there's a whole list of possible symptoms, and if you
begin if you experience one of them or feel like
you experience one of them, uh, combined with the guilt
that you feel, then how long before you begin manifesting
this this paranoid idea you were transforming. Yeah, let's set
(15:37):
this seam for this too. Or we're talking about these
sort of starvation winters that would occur in in this
part of the world, um, particularly as you said, during
that period from the seventy century to the nineteenth century,
and you know, you have people who would sort of
collectively get together as families during that time and band
together and try to survive. But there is still a
huge amount of isolation. So you might be with five
(15:59):
six oven of your family members, um, you know, out
in the middle of nowhere, with this wind whistling or
this wind howling. And when you look at these algonquin
Um depictions, the wind is a huge force here. So
I don't have you ever been like on the mountain before,
and and um, there's just huge amounts of wind coming
(16:22):
in at your structure. If you're in a tent or
in a cabin, yeah, yeah, it's just if you're you're
out in the open, it's just whipping by. It's all
you can hear in your ears. And if you're in
a structure or even you know, in the shelter of
a tree or or or some stone, and it's just
whistling by, and it's and it varies, it's it's this
changing tone almost the song. Yeah, and yeah. I remember
when I was in Costa Rica, Monteverde and I was
(16:44):
I spent a couple of nights in a cabin on
the top of the mountain there and the first night
I was like, oh, this is beautiful, It's gorgeous. The
second night I was like, it's this is awful. I
cannot get any sleep. The wind is howling. The third
night I started to feel like I was going crazy.
So imagine bumps of this going on. I want to say,
if you resort to cannibalism in Monteverdi, that's on. You.
(17:05):
Don't try and pin that on a wind to go. Well,
that's the thing, right, So I go out with a friend.
We're gonna go try to trap something. You know, maybe
he breaks his leg. You know, things aren't looking good.
Form so awesome, and I have a little bit of
his meat and then as we as you said, come
back to camp or to your cabin and you're feeling
the shame for it. Um Now, I didn't want to
(17:26):
point out that Kevin Vulcan a professor of psychology. He's
often called on as a behavioral expert on TV shows
and they're like, he categorizes it as an extreme form
of cabin fever. So again, you've got harsh environmental factors there.
You're with a couple of people and things can go awry.
You're with a bunch of people that you love but
are also maybe driving you a little crazy. Yeah, and uh,
(17:47):
and because that's one of the common tropes of the
wind to go story is you have like a mom
or a dad or even both that go nuts and
start eating the kids. And then you know, you eat
one kid, and you eat the steck again, and then
and then it just gets out of hand. Yeah, Vulgan says,
it becomes a compulsion. So there you are in your cabin,
the wind howling for months on end, and you began
to really think that you are the wind and go right,
(18:09):
it's it's taken hold of you. You're feeling icing in
your heart and uh, your your child is starting to
look like a drumstick, yeah or beaver. Yeah. All right,
we're gonna continue talking talking about that particular strain, but
just to go back presented cures that that we're explored
for for the wind to go situation. Carlson relates several
(18:32):
from different sources, but they include drinking high wines by
the fire, which sounds rather pleasant. I would say that
should be your first stop on any attempt to treat
a suspected wind to go situation. Next, the hit the
consumption of heated or even boiling animal flats, fats. So
you have some some moose meat, bear meat, what have you.
(18:54):
You heat to heat the fat up, get it nice
and boiling, and then you drink it. Now, both of
these methods uh drinking by the fire and drinking hot
animal fat. The idea is that it would help UH
burn away the ice that is formed in the heart.
That's the key to the window go There was another
tail that I believe Carlson related in which there was
a group of window goes and they were they were
(19:15):
just a complete terror and you know, eat everyone in sight.
And they were particularly hard to deal with because on
one hand, window goes were said to be bulletproof, you know,
or bullets didn't affect them, and the only way to
to really kill them was to deal with that icy heart.
But these window goes had taken their icy hearts out
and store them elsewhere, so they were they weren't not
susceptible to that. Yeah. So um so those are some options. Also,
(19:39):
you could of course get a spirit medium to use
a shaking tent ritual, which is a special tint in
which spirits could be summoned. But if these didn't work,
the only thing to do was to tie the window
go down and hack it to pieces with an axe
bearing the pieces so as to keep it from becoming
whole again and killing everyone inside. Now, someone by the
name of Jack Fiddler and okay cream Member actually took
(20:01):
that to heart and kind of became the van helsing
for his community of window Goes. He claimed to have
slayed fourteen people who were possessed, and he was in
prison when he murdered a woman who he says was
on the verge of turning into a windingo. So just
so you know, there were people out there that we're
trying to actually, you know, stop it before it started
(20:23):
what they really thought was going to be a possession.
And of course we have so many different examples of
people who actually did this to their families, who actually
ate their family. So you can see why someone like
Jack Fiddler might really take this to heart as his cause,
his his reason for being. Yeah, and now, of course
one of the of course, the problems we mentioned with
(20:45):
the cannibalism and cannibism stories, so the window Goes stories
were we're told in around the campfire and by a
bi bi algonquin drives people who really love stories and
told stories and the nature of stories they are told
as is that you you take on stories as your
own that are other people's. You you prop up a
story by saying you were there when you weren't. All
(21:07):
of these things happened. The fish gets a little larger
with each telling, etcetera. And then you have the French
Canadian voyagers, the travelers who are who are who are
meeting these people trading stories with them, and of course
they're early into telling stories as well. Uh So we
can't take every story to heart, but some of them
are are are actually really well found at that for instance, uh,
(21:28):
the swift Runner kids, Now, this was a cree trapper
who serially murdered and consumed the bodies of his wife
and five children. And this was near Athabaska Landing Trading
Post in the North the Central in north central Alberta
in the winner of eighteen seventy eight. And all the
murders except the last one, we're more of a clear
case of starvation cannibalism. But then the last one, well,
(21:51):
i'll just read you what he had to say when
when he was interviewed, he said, at that that moment,
the window go suddenly took possession of my soul, and
in order to live longer, far from people, and to
put out of the way the only witness to my crime,
I seized my gun and killed the last of my children,
and aid him as that I had done the others.
Some weeks later I was taken by the police, sentenced
to death, and in three days I am to be hanged.
(22:13):
And indeed, this is where it gets a little a
little extra historical importance added to this is that, according
to Carlson, uh swift Runner was the first person hanged
by the Mounties, the Mounted Police, which which gives this
Uh swift Runner winding. Okay, so a unique position in
the history of Canadian jurisprudence. So the thing about this
(22:33):
is that we don't know that it's actually a psychosis right.
In fact, academics have seen it or they've talked about
as a cultural balanced psychosis, but they've also called it
um perhaps a culturally localized manifestation of paranoid schizophrenia because
we see some mental illness UM in this area, and
then a correlate of scapegoating. And then also in Nathan D.
(22:56):
Carlson's paper Reviving Whittico, he says that it could have
been a culturally mediated performance. So in some ways, again
it was taking to heart this uh, this story and
performing it in a way. Uh. Perhaps that person didn't
actually want the taste of flesh, but they were caught
up in the moments in these long winters and the
(23:19):
sort of disease that would settle in with this, and
maybe they began to display the history on its Yeah.
And then also their their situations where you can well
imagine one using the wind to go idea and wind
to go stigma for personal game, like, for instance, here
at work, so we all have new desks. Um, louder Milk,
Alsa louder Milk has a particularly nice desk. It's like
(23:42):
right next to the window. It's pretty good. So I
can imagine that if ladder Milk were to be accused
of being a wind to go, um, you know, someone
might say, well, hey, I kind of want louder milks
to desk, So I'm gonna jump in on that bandwagon
and try to to push that that idea among my
my fellow co workers. And then you originally reached the
(24:02):
point where there's nothing left to do but chopper into
pieces and then lo and behold, I'm setting in her
new desk. Okay, so you're the one who started the
rumor about not going into the bathroom alone when ladder
Milk was using yes and about what she's really been
bringing in her launch pail. Okay. The second thing someone
I want to mention is that some of us might
apply a little magical thinking to that space and think
that they wouldn't want to inhabit it for fear of
(24:25):
being possessed by the window go as well. Yeah, exactly,
it's uh, it's been picked up over the years. We're
gonna talk a little bit about how it was picked
up by the French Canadians, but of course even in
modern culture, how you see it to show up in
in different forms of media. For instance, Stephen King's novel
pet Cemetery as a Window Go in It that I
remember is working pretty well. Um, the movie Ravenous uh
(24:47):
is it also features the wind to Go myth pretty strongly,
kind of kind of taking it and combining with the
Western vampire uh folk folklore to create kind of I
think an interesting Animal's been a while since I've seen it,
but as a really awesome soundtrack by Damon Auburn of
Blur and Guerrillas, and minimalis composer Michael Nyman. And uh,
let's say there was Larry Fresden's film Wind to Go,
(25:09):
which was like an indie horror film. It was pretty interesting,
and the TV show Hannibal has sort of dream hallucination
sequences in which a Wind to Go character appears. That
that I thought it was pretty effective and one of
the pieces of media that may have started at all
in terms of math consumption. Uh, sorry about that pun
is Algernon Blackwood's seven short story The Wind to Go,
(25:31):
you know, And I like Ultronon Blackwood. I have enjoyed
his writing in the past, but I started to reread
his window Go story and I have to say I
didn't like it. I didn't feel like it was really
very wind to Go e you know, it was just
he kind of took the name Win to Go and
some a certain amount of the feeling for it. But
then I don't know, I thought I thought it felt
kind of felt like it fell flat a bit. Well though,
(25:53):
you you could say that at that point Blackwood didn't
have this sort of vast stores of information about the
Wind to Go to pull from. You can go to
the Wikipedia or listen to our podcast. No, No, you
probably had a French Canadian friend who was like, let
me tell you about this crazy thing that happened to
a friend of a friend of a friend of mines. Right,
And when someone tells you a story, like, especially when
it's from a different culture, what can you do but
(26:16):
combine the scraps that you were given that may or
may not make sense from from your own cultural standpoint.
You combine it with the ideas that you already have
in your own culture, and you end up with sort
of a new animal, a new myth emerges from this
synthesis of ideas. Yeah, so let's let's sort of do
some time traveling here to say, the Lake Superior region
(26:37):
in Canada eighteen fifties. You probably would hear a French
Canadian really complaining about this really harsh winter and saying
that they were so hungry and there were so little
resources that they actually boiled their moccasins and ate them.
I mean, this is our true accounts, and um, and
then and but then also of the story that is
so popular that you end up telling it even if
(26:59):
you didn't necessarily experience, right, And then, of course, one
thing leads to another and you start talking about canibalism, right,
so you say, oh, man, if I ate my my
Moncasin's food from just two seconds away from from you, buddy, right,
and the conversation gets really awkward. Yes, this was This
was all excellently discussed in Werewolves and Windy Goes Narratives
of cannibal monsters in French Canadian uh Voyager oral tradition
(27:22):
by Caroline Protruction of York University where she she really
goes into what happens when the French Canadian voyagers encounter
the algonquins and start swapping tales. Yeah, because you have
to again sort of imagine this this time period. There
are missionaries, fur traders, colonists, the voyagers all going through
(27:45):
and meeting different tribes and then hearing about these atrocities. Now,
if you are someone who is French Canadian, you might
be familiar with some other folklore from Europe, like say,
we're wolfs, So it wouldn't be too crazy easy because
you may have a belief system that supports that. Because
the werewolf myth, of course is that on certain nights
(28:06):
because of the moon, you know, maybe some curses are
in play as well. But a man transforms into a
wolf or a wolf like being, and then goes out
and eats things, including human flesh. And then the next
morning he's like, whoa, what do I What had happened?
What did I do? What horrible things happened to me?
What kind of monster did I become? Right? And then
you've got the whole like, man, I was boiling my
my moccasins, and you have all these other accounts. In fact,
(28:29):
I wanted to bring up Jamestown sixteen o nine, Um
that that colony had such a harsh winter, that we
know that they engaged not in just eating saint dogs,
cats and horses. But recently this year the bones of
a fourteen year old girl were excavated, and Um, Douglas Owsley,
he's the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones, says, given,
(28:53):
given these bones in a trash pit, all cut up
and chopped up, it's clear that this body was dismembered
for consumption. So in the same way, if you have
these this folklore from Europe and you know about werewolf,
you know that people can be transformed into them, and
you also have these folk tales standing in for moral code,
then as a European who is in this territory, this
(29:15):
Algonquian territory. You probably would say, wow, we gotta watch
out here. Yeah, because I mean, the werewolf myth ultimately
revolves around the idea, you know, what happens if I
give in to my be steal nature, or what if
my my be steal nature overcomes me? What have I
given to the economic sensibility of cannibalism, for instance, despite
(29:35):
all of my human moral standing. And so there's a
there's there's a lot of of comparisons to be made
between the werewolf myth and the wind to Go myth.
And you can definitely see where the werewolf myth would
help you understand the wind to Go myth, even though
the window Go myth is totally about human human flesh
being consumed, totally about cannibalism, whereas cannibalism is just sort
of one aspect of the werewolf myth. Yes, protructing me
(29:59):
actually us and and as you say, her find paper
that what we can learn from this is that the
cannibal monster stories that for youshers told each other reveal
many aspects of their lives and cosmology, such as starvation,
mental illness, and metamorphos because in a way they were
undergoing a transformation themselves. Yeah, they started out as Westerners
in a strange world. They travel out into this just
(30:21):
I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine. Some books
have have really done a great job of of portraying
this excursion into the wilds and from this territory. I
think of like Northwest Passage. I also think of Black Robe,
excellent book. Um, you go into this just rich, wild
world where there are no Westerners there. There these these
foreign people's that you can only partially understand, that have
(30:43):
a totally different worldview than you do. And and then
you start and you're in dealing with with limited resources,
you're suddenly you find yourself starving or you're ill, and
then what are you to make up of all that?
And then over time you have the Westerners of assimilating
more and more with the native cultures to the point
where they're they're taking they're taking Algonquin brides, they're they're
(31:04):
they're they're becoming their own communities. Right with this shared
mythos that has been weaved together from both the Algonquin
traditions and the European traditions that they imported and yet
xenophobia exists. And that's where it becomes really interesting because
the window Goo is really a stand in for this otherness.
(31:25):
As you said, these are people in a new land
with new experiences, and everything is the other, including the
Alcohnquin at some point in other tribes. So, uh, you know,
with the windingo carries this idea that you're you're engaging
in this other world, the supernatural world. You know, I
can't in thinking about the window Go, I keep coming
back to some material that we came across in our
(31:47):
episode on the Problem of Hell, where we talked about
the the old gods that that society has had, the
hunter gatherer gods, the hornet gods that were more chaotic,
that were that that dealt uh thematically with the scarcity
of food and the the uncertainty of tomorrow's meal and
the meal after that and the in and in doing
(32:08):
so you can see where that you can see why
the windowgo is really the ultimate evil spirit of the Algonquins,
because it represents the uncertainty of food and it represents
the likelihood at even at times of starvation and in falling,
what it would take to fall below the barrier, the
threshold for um civilization, you know, because I feel like
(32:31):
a lot of our stories deal with that. Like we
watched the show like Breaking Bad, and we see like
these you see a character that's falling throughout the entire show,
and at what point does he fall below the threshold?
And you see these other characters that you know, addicts
and whatnot, and you you look at them and you think,
there's a character who's fallen below the threshold. Woe as
would be me if I were to to to fall
that low as well? And uh in in a society
(32:53):
like that, like that is the base mark cannibalism. You've
fallen below the moral standing that defines the protects the
culture well right, And it's a reminder of that time
period when that the line between you know, death and survival,
which is just like that you cross over it so quickly.
So it would be tempting to engage in cannibalism if
(33:15):
you had to, because it may be the difference between
life and death. Indeed, prodruct Any points out that a
lot of these stories he shared stories of the wind
to Go that the French Canadians shared with the Algonquins,
that there were There were two lessons essentially in all
of them, particularly for the the French Canadian listener. First
of all, the idea that the native people's are your friend,
(33:37):
or at least to be relied upon in the wild,
because a lot of these stories they end with either
you're starving and uh and some algonquins come along and
they feed you and then you're you're safe, or the
windigo situation happens and they're the ones who come with
the knowledge of how to defeat the wind to go,
or they actually chop it up for you. But then
the second lesson, and this lesson, and she says is
a is a little more subdued. The lesson is that
(34:00):
starvation cannibalism is an option. It's a kind of a
whisper in the ear saying and so this is horrible,
but if you've got to do it, you can do it.
And if it's going to get whispered into your ear,
you might as well blame it on the wind, right Yeah. Um.
You know The thing about this is that anthropologists, when
they began to study this in earnest, found that it
pretty much dried up all of these these expressions of
(34:23):
windigo possession just evaporated. So again it brings into question
whether or not it was really a psychosis or if
maybe this part of the world was opening up and um,
there were other influences going on. So there you have
(34:43):
it again. This is one of our favorite creepy episodes
from the past few years, so we figured you would
like to explore it again and we we got a
chance to to listen to it again as well. Yeah,
and if you guys have any ideas about this that
the power of folklore, Um, whether or not you maybe
have even I've seen a window go in your midst
or become one, let us know. You can email us
(35:05):
at below the Mind at how stafforks dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome the Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Tuglas, and
it's the Halloween season once more. So we are re
releasing one of our favorite creepy episodes from last year,
on the Wind to Go, or as I wanted to
(00:25):
call it, eight My birth Day. Yes, yes, that was
your original pitch for the title episode. We did not,
but yeah, it's creepy subject matter and it's I mean,
at heart, it's a monster, a monster's idea, and it's
a monster that seems to be picking up more and
more in popular culture. Windigo uh symbolism played heavily into
(00:47):
expect for the first season of TV's Hannibal, and in
Sleepy Hollow season two, we will be seeing a wind
to Goo and and teen Wolf. They're already already of course,
you're already a window got So this is the thing
about people finding about out about your cool monsters. They
end up showing up, I know. And then one hand
(01:07):
you're like, oh, yes, it's finding its rightful place and
pop culture, and then you're like, oh yeah, and maybe
this is what Algernon Blackwood really wanted, though. We'll see maybe.
January six eight. I went to see the sick man
today and he's a pitiful looking devil. They had him
with about six blankets and he still was nearly freezing.
(01:29):
I can do nothing for him. January twelve. I went
to see him today and he looks worse than ever.
I gave him a dose of Castor Royal, but he
he says his heart is freezing. He keeps insisting he'll
become a cannibal. He wants the Algonquins to kill him
before he gets worse. January. Friend Sis came here and
asked me if I would read some prayers for the
sick man. He doesn't look like a human being. He
seems to be terribly swollen in the body and face.
(01:52):
The sight of him is enough to frighten any person.
The poor Algonquin slept very little here for the last
nineteen days since he arrived. They have been watching him
all time. I don't know how this will end. January one,
Friendsois came from me last night and I went with him.
I told him we ought to take some rope with
us and tie him up if we could. The sound
of him was terrible. It was like the calling of
a wild animal. We tied him with the ropes and
(02:14):
I left to find some more, but it couldn't find any.
And when I got back, the cords around his arms
were already breaking. The algonquins asked what we should do.
They said that when he got up, he would kill
all of us. I told them to do what they
had to do is I had no more ropes which
to bind it. That was the account of Francis work
Beaten Uh the Ordney HBC clerk at the Trout Lake
(02:36):
Outpost the winter of eighteen ninety six during the alleged
Windigo possession of napapen Auger. Edited slightly for for clarity's sake,
but otherwise exactly what's in the history books. And we
wanted to bring that bit to your attention because what
we're talking about is a creature or a possession that
(02:56):
has to deal with cannibalism. Yeah, and even though the
creature itself is obviously a creature of myth. We've talked
before about the power of myth, the power of paranormal
scripts within a culture, as well as the real life
incidences that have allegedly occurred because of or alongside the
Wind to Go belief. Because if the oral account of
(03:18):
this particular Wind to Go possession story, as collected by
the University of Alberta's Nathan D. Carlson, holds true, then
the Algonquin tribes people gave Napapen boiling bear grease an
attempt to cure him after this, uh this account that
I read, and then when that didn't work, they executed
him with an axe, cutting off his head and bearing
it separate from his body. Now, there are various problems,
(03:40):
of course, with any account of cannibalism, just just cannibalism alone,
much less when you start involving supernatural uh in material
as well. Yeah, and that's the thing about Window that
is so interesting is it really highlights this issue of cannibalism.
And we've talked about this before. It's very hard to
really pin down cannibalism what has actually happened, um with
(04:02):
humans for sure, Actually in nature it's very easy to explain,
right because they are not ashamed of it. They're not ashamed,
and they have a purpose, a real clear purpose to
their cannibalism. And you have, um, the sexual cannibalism in
orb spiders, right, that helps in terms of sexual reproduction, fitness.
And then in tiger sharks you have siblified, right, you
(04:24):
have a tiger that eats excuse me, a tiger shark
that eats a sibling because it's an easy source of energy. Yeah,
it's it's just pure economics. It's a harsh world. Sometimes
you have to reabsorb energy back into the the winning prospects,
and that's just how it goes. But of course in
human culture, the economics may still hold true, but we
(04:45):
have all of these layers of moral concerns of society
and culture. They just complicate the equation. Well, I mean
when you say the economics, you're talking about survival cannibalism.
In other words, you're just at the end of your
rope and you may be with one who could provide
you with a bit of energy, or perhaps there is
even a body who that has recently passed that someone uses.
(05:07):
And we have many accounts of this survival cannibalism in history.
Their counts that are proven, and then there are accounts
that are sort of forever being argued about, such as
the Dolmar Party, where some saying well, maybe they didn't
resort to survival cannibalism. Whethers say yes, some say well
the bones, there's no bone evidence that they did, and
others say, well, well they wouldn't know on the bones,
(05:29):
they would have eaten the soft flesh, and of course
that wouldn't the evidence of that wouldn't survive. And then
you know how many people are going to come back
from a chaotic trip to the mountains and be like, woa,
I only survived because I ate my friend Caleb. Right,
It's just probably something that you're going to admit at
cocktail parties. Right, Um, so, yeah, you've got the survival cannibalism.
And then, just to complicate things a little bit further,
(05:51):
we have these accounts of cultural rituals which may or
may not be symbolic cannibalism, right, They may actually have
occurred or occurred in different ways that we don't think
is cannibalistic. Yeah. Well, I mean you always have the
the outsider viewing some sort of cannab supposedly cannibalistic ceremony
or hearing about it. You're having Westerners observed or hear
(06:13):
about a ritual that that from the people that they
view as primitive, and so you know, it's hard to
tack down the actual truth of the matter. Yeah. Actually,
if you want to look at a good example of
this and someone who actually further this idea of cannibalism,
you can look to Columbus, who encountered the Arawak people
in Hispaniola during the fifteenth century, and they warned him
(06:33):
of another tribe, the carab that eight people, which it
appears this other tribe never existed. So this has been
really hard for anthropologists to go through and to try
to figure out. But as far as I can tell,
this other tribe just wasn't a reality. So it may
have just been for them this story about another tribe
just kind of a boogeyman, a boogeyman right telling the
(06:54):
night there's another tribe out there and they're so bad
they eat people. You don't want to be like that,
and you don't want them to come for you, right,
Or maybe they just wanted, you know, Columbus to hang
around and they were like, we need to get him
to stay here with us and not go exploring. So
in addition, Columbus may have mistaken the ritual of keeping
a loved one's bones around the house. So that's what
(07:16):
the Arrow Act people did, and he may have mistaken
that for evidence of cannibalism, and of course the whole
thing is ridiculous too when you realize that Columbus comes
bearing his his Catholic faith, and of course Catholicism, like
a lot of Christianity, is rich in this symbol symbolic
consumption of Christ's blood and flesh, which even though you're
(07:38):
not actually consuming blood and flesh, uh, it is, it
is symbolic cannibalism at at heart, right, which we see
in so many other cultures. The problem, of course, is
that Columbus was the authority on all matters foreign at
that point, so people are like, so where'd you go,
what'd you see? What you experience? And then whatever he
said became sort of the gospel. Yeah, and that's one
(07:59):
of the ms you have throughout history too. I mean,
going back to plenty of the Elder and all these
guys where you just have certain voices and there aren't
a lot of there's not a lot of discussion about
the matter, but you know, this guy said that there
are cannibals living in Africa, and that remains sort of
the voice of truth for a matter of centuries. So
that's why The Wind to Go is such an interesting
thing to look at, because it really gets at the
(08:21):
heart of the taboo of cannibalism, but also the psychology
of the ways in which we behave when we have
these folk tales as stand ins for for what becomes
a reality. Yeah. So I want you to imagine a dark,
gaunt giant that haunts the woods, clad only in matted hair,
and it's peering outitude from the wild depths, with blood
(08:43):
red eyes as wild as sinister and sinister as those
of an owl, with claws that are curl and muscles
that are coiled with the strength of a bear, and
its teeth are eager, and its foul tongue is longing
for the taste of human flesh that sounds cuddly. Yeah. Yeah, Now,
this is some thing that is The creature is known
to different North American tribal groups um. And when we're
(09:05):
talking about the geography here, we're talking about French Canadian
territory um and the Algonquins are they figure in this
quite a bit as well as a couple of the
other tribes. Yeah, the Algonquins as one of the most
populous and widespread North American native language groups, and uh
at different times it composed like a whole bunch of
(09:26):
different tribes. You know, there did a lot of different
tribes that would spoke the Algonquin tongue, and there were
a lot of shared beliefs among them, and they they
thrived in the harsh world of northern North America, a
land of vast, unforgiving wilderness, brutal winners, particularly during the
Little Ice Age era in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries,
(09:46):
which correlates exactly with a lot of this exploration by
French Canadians who met up with these different tribes. And
we'll talk about this more, but they began to um
actually adopt some of these folk tales of the win
to go. And I also wanted to mention that it
goes by wakaw Witigo with tikio and weendigo long ago
(10:08):
Windigo Witigo and we ti go Tigo. It sounds like
a corporation secretly is based on cannibalism. It's right, we tigo,
you can we tigo to um. And the cool thing
about this is that the Windigo really sort of describes
two different things at play here. One is the beast
(10:29):
that you described who lives in that forest waiting to
feast on a human. The other is a cannibalistic spirit
that can possess a human. Yeah, and that spirit kind
of walks the barrier between the world and the world
of the spirits. And of course that's a very important
area in the tales and the belief systems in the
world view of the the first people of North America. Yeah,
(10:51):
and if you look at the Algonquins, they they really
focus on these spirits as as a sort of cautionary
all to people during these very harsh winters not to
turn to cannibalism, because they're saying that if you eat
the flesh of another, well, your soul is now susceptible
to the wind to go. Yeah. There there were a
number of causes, a number of things that could turn
(11:13):
you into a window go. Most of them are are
based in diet and food and and hunger. Um. So
you might be cursed by a sorcerer, always a possibility.
You know, it'll happen if you are yourself. If you
yourself are a sorcerer, you might seek the transformation in yourself,
always an option, all right. You might trigger the change.
If you fast too long or feast too heavily, so
(11:34):
a little too much food, a little too little food,
you're gonna potentially open yourself up to the window Goes caress.
But most importantly are all of all, as you mentioned,
if you if you are forced to consume human flesh,
or if you're tricked into doing so, even in a dream,
then the window go can reach out to you, touch
your soul and bring on this steady and horrible change,
(11:55):
And then you might feel ice in your heart longing
for flesh. Yeah, because that's uh, that's that's the big
thing right there. Um. There are a number of symptoms.
According to the Algonquin Reports catalog by Nathan D. Carlson,
the symptoms include stupor, catatonia, depression, paranoia, and orexia or
the inability to hold down food, nausea, vomiting, emaciation, glazed eyes,
(12:17):
bodily or facial swelling, violent shouting, hallucinations of family members
as food animals, particularly as beavers, and finally, this unstoppable
urge to consume human flesh. Yeah. There was one account
that was reading in a separate book where like a
mother was was potentially turning into a window. Go and
she was telling her she's matter or children. She's saying,
you all look like beavers to me. Now wow, But
(12:40):
but it's that. But the big thing that like the
major symptoms and the ultimate symptoms are the unstoppable urge
to consume human flesh and this chill in your in
your torso, meaning in your heart, as your heart becomes
this lump of ice, that's right, as the transformation occurs.
Let's take a quick break and when we get back,
we'll talk about psychosis. All right, we're back. We're just
(13:11):
talking about the symptoms in the folk tales of the
of the Wind to Go and uh, and how your
heart may seem to become this lump of of of
ice and you have this irresistible urge to consume human flesh. Now,
there were a few cures curative measures, that were also
related in the folk tales. But I think it is
interesting for you talking about the curative measures, is that
(13:32):
people took this folklore and then they began to exhibit
these symptoms. And this is what that psychosis is, These
cases of people actually coming down with not actually turning
into these sort of werewolf like creatures, but actually connating
some dastardly acts. Yeah, because, on one hand, as as
(13:53):
Nathan D. Carlson points out in his excellent article reviewing
Wittico and Ethno History of donable Monsters in the Athabaska
District of Northern Alberta nineteen kien Um, this was not
just a you know, folk tale. If it was told,
this was something in which there was a lot of belief.
There was a lot of fear, he says, quote in
(14:13):
the collective belief systems of pre twenty one century Algonquins.
Contrary to the opinions of some modern academics, as discussed below,
the Wittigo condition was not a legendary fabrication. For example,
in early eighteen ninety six, Richard Young, the Anglican Bishop
of the Athabaska District, wrote the following in a letter
journal to the Evangelical Fathers in the Church Missionary Society. Quote,
(14:34):
the Indians have a great terror of the so called
windigoose or cannibals. They believe that after eating human flesh,
their heart becomes a lump of ice, and no one
alive is safer them. Assert as all of this sounds
to us, it is a real terror to the untutored Indian.
So there's a little obviously there's a bit of xenophobia
and uh and and racism and in that uh, that
(14:54):
particular portrayal, but but still it underlines that this was
this was serious. That and if you're in a situation
where you have been forced to resort to survival cannibalism,
and then it's known or even if it's known only
to you, you you return with shame. Perhaps they other
members of your your group know that this occurred, and
(15:16):
before you know what, you're ostracized and maybe you feel
and there are a number of these symptoms, like if
there's a whole list of possible symptoms, and if you
begin if you experience one of them or feel like
you experience one of them, uh, combined with the guilt
that you feel, then how long before you begin manifesting
this this paranoid idea you were transforming. Yeah, let's set
(15:37):
this seam for this too. Or we're talking about these
sort of starvation winters that would occur in in this
part of the world, um, particularly as you said, during
that period from the seventy century to the nineteenth century,
and you know, you have people who would sort of
collectively get together as families during that time and band
together and try to survive. But there is still a
huge amount of isolation. So you might be with five
(15:59):
six oven of your family members, um, you know, out
in the middle of nowhere, with this wind whistling or
this wind howling. And when you look at these algonquin
Um depictions, the wind is a huge force here. So
I don't have you ever been like on the mountain before,
and and um, there's just huge amounts of wind coming
(16:22):
in at your structure. If you're in a tent or
in a cabin, yeah, yeah, it's just if you're you're
out in the open, it's just whipping by. It's all
you can hear in your ears. And if you're in
a structure or even you know, in the shelter of
a tree or or or some stone, and it's just
whistling by, and it's and it varies, it's it's this
changing tone almost the song. Yeah, and yeah. I remember
when I was in Costa Rica, Monteverde and I was
(16:44):
I spent a couple of nights in a cabin on
the top of the mountain there and the first night
I was like, oh, this is beautiful, It's gorgeous. The
second night I was like, it's this is awful. I
cannot get any sleep. The wind is howling. The third
night I started to feel like I was going crazy.
So imagine bumps of this going on. I want to say,
if you resort to cannibalism in Monteverdi, that's on. You.
(17:05):
Don't try and pin that on a wind to go. Well,
that's the thing, right, So I go out with a friend.
We're gonna go try to trap something. You know, maybe
he breaks his leg. You know, things aren't looking good.
Form so awesome, and I have a little bit of
his meat and then as we as you said, come
back to camp or to your cabin and you're feeling
the shame for it. Um Now, I didn't want to
(17:26):
point out that Kevin Vulcan a professor of psychology. He's
often called on as a behavioral expert on TV shows
and they're like, he categorizes it as an extreme form
of cabin fever. So again, you've got harsh environmental factors there.
You're with a couple of people and things can go awry.
You're with a bunch of people that you love but
are also maybe driving you a little crazy. Yeah, and uh,
(17:47):
and because that's one of the common tropes of the
wind to go story is you have like a mom
or a dad or even both that go nuts and
start eating the kids. And then you know, you eat
one kid, and you eat the steck again, and then
and then it just gets out of hand. Yeah, Vulgan says,
it becomes a compulsion. So there you are in your cabin,
the wind howling for months on end, and you began
to really think that you are the wind and go right,
(18:09):
it's it's taken hold of you. You're feeling icing in
your heart and uh, your your child is starting to
look like a drumstick, yeah or beaver. Yeah. All right,
we're gonna continue talking talking about that particular strain, but
just to go back presented cures that that we're explored
for for the wind to go situation. Carlson relates several
(18:32):
from different sources, but they include drinking high wines by
the fire, which sounds rather pleasant. I would say that
should be your first stop on any attempt to treat
a suspected wind to go situation. Next, the hit the
consumption of heated or even boiling animal flats, fats. So
you have some some moose meat, bear meat, what have you.
(18:54):
You heat to heat the fat up, get it nice
and boiling, and then you drink it. Now, both of
these methods uh drinking by the fire and drinking hot
animal fat. The idea is that it would help UH
burn away the ice that is formed in the heart.
That's the key to the window go There was another
tail that I believe Carlson related in which there was
a group of window goes and they were they were
(19:15):
just a complete terror and you know, eat everyone in sight.
And they were particularly hard to deal with because on
one hand, window goes were said to be bulletproof, you know,
or bullets didn't affect them, and the only way to
to really kill them was to deal with that icy heart.
But these window goes had taken their icy hearts out
and store them elsewhere, so they were they weren't not
susceptible to that. Yeah. So um so those are some options. Also,
(19:39):
you could of course get a spirit medium to use
a shaking tent ritual, which is a special tint in
which spirits could be summoned. But if these didn't work,
the only thing to do was to tie the window
go down and hack it to pieces with an axe
bearing the pieces so as to keep it from becoming
whole again and killing everyone inside. Now, someone by the
name of Jack Fiddler and okay cream Member actually took
(20:01):
that to heart and kind of became the van helsing
for his community of window Goes. He claimed to have
slayed fourteen people who were possessed, and he was in
prison when he murdered a woman who he says was
on the verge of turning into a windingo. So just
so you know, there were people out there that we're
trying to actually, you know, stop it before it started
(20:23):
what they really thought was going to be a possession.
And of course we have so many different examples of
people who actually did this to their families, who actually
ate their family. So you can see why someone like
Jack Fiddler might really take this to heart as his cause,
his his reason for being. Yeah, and now, of course
one of the of course, the problems we mentioned with
(20:45):
the cannibalism and cannibism stories, so the window Goes stories
were we're told in around the campfire and by a
bi bi algonquin drives people who really love stories and
told stories and the nature of stories they are told
as is that you you take on stories as your
own that are other people's. You you prop up a
story by saying you were there when you weren't. All
(21:07):
of these things happened. The fish gets a little larger
with each telling, etcetera. And then you have the French
Canadian voyagers, the travelers who are who are who are
meeting these people trading stories with them, and of course
they're early into telling stories as well. Uh So we
can't take every story to heart, but some of them
are are are actually really well found at that for instance, uh,
(21:28):
the swift Runner kids, Now, this was a cree trapper
who serially murdered and consumed the bodies of his wife
and five children. And this was near Athabaska Landing Trading
Post in the North the Central in north central Alberta
in the winner of eighteen seventy eight. And all the
murders except the last one, we're more of a clear
case of starvation cannibalism. But then the last one, well,
(21:51):
i'll just read you what he had to say when
when he was interviewed, he said, at that that moment,
the window go suddenly took possession of my soul, and
in order to live longer, far from people, and to
put out of the way the only witness to my crime,
I seized my gun and killed the last of my children,
and aid him as that I had done the others.
Some weeks later I was taken by the police, sentenced
to death, and in three days I am to be hanged.
(22:13):
And indeed, this is where it gets a little a
little extra historical importance added to this is that, according
to Carlson, uh swift Runner was the first person hanged
by the Mounties, the Mounted Police, which which gives this
Uh swift Runner winding. Okay, so a unique position in
the history of Canadian jurisprudence. So the thing about this
(22:33):
is that we don't know that it's actually a psychosis right.
In fact, academics have seen it or they've talked about
as a cultural balanced psychosis, but they've also called it
um perhaps a culturally localized manifestation of paranoid schizophrenia because
we see some mental illness UM in this area, and
then a correlate of scapegoating. And then also in Nathan D.
(22:56):
Carlson's paper Reviving Whittico, he says that it could have
been a culturally mediated performance. So in some ways, again
it was taking to heart this uh, this story and
performing it in a way. Uh. Perhaps that person didn't
actually want the taste of flesh, but they were caught
up in the moments in these long winters and the
(23:19):
sort of disease that would settle in with this, and
maybe they began to display the history on its Yeah.
And then also their their situations where you can well
imagine one using the wind to go idea and wind
to go stigma for personal game, like, for instance, here
at work, so we all have new desks. Um, louder Milk,
Alsa louder Milk has a particularly nice desk. It's like
(23:42):
right next to the window. It's pretty good. So I
can imagine that if ladder Milk were to be accused
of being a wind to go, um, you know, someone
might say, well, hey, I kind of want louder milks
to desk, So I'm gonna jump in on that bandwagon
and try to to push that that idea among my
my fellow co workers. And then you originally reached the
(24:02):
point where there's nothing left to do but chopper into
pieces and then lo and behold, I'm setting in her
new desk. Okay, so you're the one who started the
rumor about not going into the bathroom alone when ladder
Milk was using yes and about what she's really been
bringing in her launch pail. Okay. The second thing someone
I want to mention is that some of us might
apply a little magical thinking to that space and think
that they wouldn't want to inhabit it for fear of
(24:25):
being possessed by the window go as well. Yeah, exactly,
it's uh, it's been picked up over the years. We're
gonna talk a little bit about how it was picked
up by the French Canadians, but of course even in
modern culture, how you see it to show up in
in different forms of media. For instance, Stephen King's novel
pet Cemetery as a Window Go in It that I
remember is working pretty well. Um, the movie Ravenous uh
(24:47):
is it also features the wind to Go myth pretty strongly,
kind of kind of taking it and combining with the
Western vampire uh folk folklore to create kind of I
think an interesting Animal's been a while since I've seen it,
but as a really awesome soundtrack by Damon Auburn of
Blur and Guerrillas, and minimalis composer Michael Nyman. And uh,
let's say there was Larry Fresden's film Wind to Go,
(25:09):
which was like an indie horror film. It was pretty interesting,
and the TV show Hannibal has sort of dream hallucination
sequences in which a Wind to Go character appears. That
that I thought it was pretty effective and one of
the pieces of media that may have started at all
in terms of math consumption. Uh, sorry about that pun
is Algernon Blackwood's seven short story The Wind to Go,
(25:31):
you know, And I like Ultronon Blackwood. I have enjoyed
his writing in the past, but I started to reread
his window Go story and I have to say I
didn't like it. I didn't feel like it was really
very wind to Go e you know, it was just
he kind of took the name Win to Go and
some a certain amount of the feeling for it. But
then I don't know, I thought I thought it felt
kind of felt like it fell flat a bit. Well though,
(25:53):
you you could say that at that point Blackwood didn't
have this sort of vast stores of information about the
Wind to Go to pull from. You can go to
the Wikipedia or listen to our podcast. No, No, you
probably had a French Canadian friend who was like, let
me tell you about this crazy thing that happened to
a friend of a friend of a friend of mines. Right,
And when someone tells you a story, like, especially when
it's from a different culture, what can you do but
(26:16):
combine the scraps that you were given that may or
may not make sense from from your own cultural standpoint.
You combine it with the ideas that you already have
in your own culture, and you end up with sort
of a new animal, a new myth emerges from this
synthesis of ideas. Yeah, so let's let's sort of do
some time traveling here to say, the Lake Superior region
(26:37):
in Canada eighteen fifties. You probably would hear a French
Canadian really complaining about this really harsh winter and saying
that they were so hungry and there were so little
resources that they actually boiled their moccasins and ate them.
I mean, this is our true accounts, and um, and
then and but then also of the story that is
so popular that you end up telling it even if
(26:59):
you didn't necessarily experience, right, And then, of course, one
thing leads to another and you start talking about canibalism, right,
so you say, oh, man, if I ate my my
Moncasin's food from just two seconds away from from you, buddy, right,
and the conversation gets really awkward. Yes, this was This
was all excellently discussed in Werewolves and Windy Goes Narratives
of cannibal monsters in French Canadian uh Voyager oral tradition
(27:22):
by Caroline Protruction of York University where she she really
goes into what happens when the French Canadian voyagers encounter
the algonquins and start swapping tales. Yeah, because you have
to again sort of imagine this this time period. There
are missionaries, fur traders, colonists, the voyagers all going through
(27:45):
and meeting different tribes and then hearing about these atrocities. Now,
if you are someone who is French Canadian, you might
be familiar with some other folklore from Europe, like say,
we're wolfs, So it wouldn't be too crazy easy because
you may have a belief system that supports that. Because
the werewolf myth, of course is that on certain nights
(28:06):
because of the moon, you know, maybe some curses are
in play as well. But a man transforms into a
wolf or a wolf like being, and then goes out
and eats things, including human flesh. And then the next
morning he's like, whoa, what do I What had happened?
What did I do? What horrible things happened to me?
What kind of monster did I become? Right? And then
you've got the whole like, man, I was boiling my
my moccasins, and you have all these other accounts. In fact,
(28:29):
I wanted to bring up Jamestown sixteen o nine, Um
that that colony had such a harsh winter, that we
know that they engaged not in just eating saint dogs,
cats and horses. But recently this year the bones of
a fourteen year old girl were excavated, and Um, Douglas Owsley,
he's the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones, says, given,
(28:53):
given these bones in a trash pit, all cut up
and chopped up, it's clear that this body was dismembered
for consumption. So in the same way, if you have
these this folklore from Europe and you know about werewolf,
you know that people can be transformed into them, and
you also have these folk tales standing in for moral code,
then as a European who is in this territory, this
(29:15):
Algonquian territory. You probably would say, wow, we gotta watch
out here. Yeah, because I mean, the werewolf myth ultimately
revolves around the idea, you know, what happens if I
give in to my be steal nature, or what if
my my be steal nature overcomes me? What have I
given to the economic sensibility of cannibalism, for instance, despite
(29:35):
all of my human moral standing. And so there's a
there's there's a lot of of comparisons to be made
between the werewolf myth and the wind to Go myth.
And you can definitely see where the werewolf myth would
help you understand the wind to Go myth, even though
the window Go myth is totally about human human flesh
being consumed, totally about cannibalism, whereas cannibalism is just sort
of one aspect of the werewolf myth. Yes, protructing me
(29:59):
actually us and and as you say, her find paper
that what we can learn from this is that the
cannibal monster stories that for youshers told each other reveal
many aspects of their lives and cosmology, such as starvation,
mental illness, and metamorphos because in a way they were
undergoing a transformation themselves. Yeah, they started out as Westerners
in a strange world. They travel out into this just
(30:21):
I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine. Some books
have have really done a great job of of portraying
this excursion into the wilds and from this territory. I
think of like Northwest Passage. I also think of Black Robe,
excellent book. Um, you go into this just rich, wild
world where there are no Westerners there. There these these
foreign people's that you can only partially understand, that have
(30:43):
a totally different worldview than you do. And and then
you start and you're in dealing with with limited resources,
you're suddenly you find yourself starving or you're ill, and
then what are you to make up of all that?
And then over time you have the Westerners of assimilating
more and more with the native cultures to the point
where they're they're taking they're taking Algonquin brides, they're they're
(31:04):
they're they're becoming their own communities. Right with this shared
mythos that has been weaved together from both the Algonquin
traditions and the European traditions that they imported and yet
xenophobia exists. And that's where it becomes really interesting because
the window Goo is really a stand in for this otherness.
(31:25):
As you said, these are people in a new land
with new experiences, and everything is the other, including the
Alcohnquin at some point in other tribes. So, uh, you know,
with the windingo carries this idea that you're you're engaging
in this other world, the supernatural world. You know, I
can't in thinking about the window Go, I keep coming
back to some material that we came across in our
(31:47):
episode on the Problem of Hell, where we talked about
the the old gods that that society has had, the
hunter gatherer gods, the hornet gods that were more chaotic,
that were that that dealt uh thematically with the scarcity
of food and the the uncertainty of tomorrow's meal and
the meal after that and the in and in doing
(32:08):
so you can see where that you can see why
the windowgo is really the ultimate evil spirit of the Algonquins,
because it represents the uncertainty of food and it represents
the likelihood at even at times of starvation and in falling,
what it would take to fall below the barrier, the
threshold for um civilization, you know, because I feel like
(32:31):
a lot of our stories deal with that. Like we
watched the show like Breaking Bad, and we see like
these you see a character that's falling throughout the entire show,
and at what point does he fall below the threshold?
And you see these other characters that you know, addicts
and whatnot, and you you look at them and you think,
there's a character who's fallen below the threshold. Woe as
would be me if I were to to to fall
that low as well? And uh in in a society
(32:53):
like that, like that is the base mark cannibalism. You've
fallen below the moral standing that defines the protects the
culture well right, And it's a reminder of that time
period when that the line between you know, death and survival,
which is just like that you cross over it so quickly.
So it would be tempting to engage in cannibalism if
(33:15):
you had to, because it may be the difference between
life and death. Indeed, prodruct Any points out that a
lot of these stories he shared stories of the wind
to Go that the French Canadians shared with the Algonquins,
that there were There were two lessons essentially in all
of them, particularly for the the French Canadian listener. First
of all, the idea that the native people's are your friend,
(33:37):
or at least to be relied upon in the wild,
because a lot of these stories they end with either
you're starving and uh and some algonquins come along and
they feed you and then you're you're safe, or the
windigo situation happens and they're the ones who come with
the knowledge of how to defeat the wind to go,
or they actually chop it up for you. But then
the second lesson, and this lesson, and she says is
a is a little more subdued. The lesson is that
(34:00):
starvation cannibalism is an option. It's a kind of a
whisper in the ear saying and so this is horrible,
but if you've got to do it, you can do it.
And if it's going to get whispered into your ear,
you might as well blame it on the wind, right Yeah. Um.
You know The thing about this is that anthropologists, when
they began to study this in earnest, found that it
pretty much dried up all of these these expressions of
(34:23):
windigo possession just evaporated. So again it brings into question
whether or not it was really a psychosis or if
maybe this part of the world was opening up and um,
there were other influences going on. So there you have
(34:43):
it again. This is one of our favorite creepy episodes
from the past few years, so we figured you would
like to explore it again and we we got a
chance to to listen to it again as well. Yeah,
and if you guys have any ideas about this that
the power of folklore, Um, whether or not you maybe
have even I've seen a window go in your midst
or become one, let us know. You can email us
(35:05):
at below the Mind at how stafforks dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
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