Are Wendigos physical creatures, an entity or not real at all?

I was recently searching about the legend of the Dogman after the episode 2.10 of Paranormal Witness. On the episode, four people had maintained contactwith an Werewolf called George, who was an Elder who lived in Ohio in the middle of the forest for over 90 years.

Then i started to search about the possibilities on how old George was able to become a Werewolf. One of them was the Wendigo. A legendary creature from the Native America LORE:

The wendigo (also known as windigo, weendigo, windago, waindigo, windiga, witiko, wihtikow, and numerous other variants) is a creature appearing in the legends of the Algonquian people.

It is thought of variously as a malevolent cannibalistic spirit that could possess humans or a monster that humans could physically transform into. Those who indulged in cannibalism were at particular risand the legend appears to have reinforced this practice as a taboo.

Wendigo psychosis is the name conventionally given to a disputed culture-bound disorder featuring an intense craving for human flesh and the fear that the sufferer would turn into a cannibal. This was alleged to have occurred among Algonquian native cultures.

Recently the wendigo has also featured in modern horror fiction.
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All cultures in which the Wendigo myth appeared shared the belief that human beings could turn into Wendigos if they ever resorted to cannibalism or, alternatively, become possessed by the demonic spirit of a Wendigo,

So, if I'm correct, a human possessed by an Wendigo would take a form of something close to a Werewolf.... I hope. Than i searched more about this possibility and i found about cases where people murder family members/innocent people in early's 1900. These people said they were possessed by a Wendigo, people believed and they were executed.

Now i'm kinda confused. Are Wendigo a ghost-like creature, folklore or a real creature that can be associated with the legend of the Michigan Dogman?

reply to post by Frocharocha


A negative entity would be the closest match.

They are quite large, extremely strong and pure evil.

A low level angel will probably choose a physical form like this...



Humans shapeshifting into a animal will never have claws the size of the Wendigo.

reply to post by Frocharocha


ive been finding this quite interesting ,thanks

Originally posted by darknewt
reply to post by Frocharocha

 

ive been finding this quite interesting ,thanks

Enjoy ;D

My gut feeling is the Wendigo and Bigfoot may be remnants of ancient peoples from long before modern man came into the picture.

I own a book titled Exploring Atlantis by Dr. Frank Alper, where he claims to be a medium channeling ancient Atlantians. In a passage he describes "Mutants" that were made for labor by the Atantians. The book also describes in great detail other civilizations that have lived or are still living on earth, either underground or in different frequencies to us.

Any of these may be what modern man has only glimpsed it's eyes on. It's not fact, just a gut feeling.

Originally posted by Rapha
reply to post by Frocharocha

 

A negative entity would be the closest match.

They are quite large, extremely strong and pure evil.

A low level angel will probably choose a physical form like this...

Humans shapeshifting into a animal will never have claws the size of the Wendigo.

Well, that's pretty scare. I really hope i don't find one of these.

I am quite certain that the Wendigos are physical animals. They are one in the same with the Native American sasquatch, which virtually every single tribe has a unique name for. Some tribes attribute more spiritual and mystical powers to these animals, while some maintain they are purely flesh and blood animals. I think the entire reason some of the mythical aspects of sasquatch have crept up is because of the nature and behavior of the sasquatch. They have a tendency to move when you are not looking at them, and this and other similar behaviors sometimes makes a witness think the animal has simply disappeared. Of course this is not what occurred, but it seems like it at the time to some witnesses.

Also, I believe the vast majority of dog man sightings, werewolf sightings, or local monster sightings can also be attributed to the sasquatch, or Wendigo. Wendigo is just a tribal name for sasquatch by the way, used by certain tribes.

reply to post by Frocharocha

Ingikendamaawang aw Wiindigo (We know the Wiindigo)

Aanish naa! My name is E. I was reading and being an Anishinaabe person I will give you input of these Wiindigo as they are called. It is said that the Wiindigo is a monster that dwells underneath the frozen ice from the waters. This is why we do not fish on the big lake. There are other people such as the Misaabe (-g) who are the guardians of our people, these beings are known as big foot ( Or the great people). They wait for the Wiindigo by the streams and shorelines to appear when ice make the first crack trying to ward them back or even kill these beasts sending them to the icy waters from where they once escaped. The water beings known as Nibinaabe (-g) or mermaids then bring them to the abyss known as Abi (home). The belief is known that in the winter people go out in groups so that the Wiindigo be afriad when man are in numbers because with them there will be Misaabeg. The winter is the time for Wiindigowag, but do not mistake the "BIG FOOT" or Misaabe as evil, they are beings that help the Anishinaabeg. When the ice breaks the Wiindigo goes back into the waters until the next freezing. If you are in the woods and hear clunking or hitting of stick those are the Misaabeg beating on logs they are telling you that you are protected, this is the belief they that they are always watching us at distance. As for the Wiindigo they are beings that eat the flesh of men and none the less desire the souls (ojichaag -oog) of children.

I believe Onandawaabandaan is referring to Lake Winnipeg as the big lake.
I come from further east, North of Lake Huron. To the Ojibwe, the Windigo is a cannibal spirit who inhabits the body of a man and causes him to believe his family/friends have transformed into beaver and so become food.
The afflicted person must be killed and his heart burned in fire to destroy the evil spirit within.

The legend possibly stems from ancient times,before contact with white people, when the tribes would break off into smaller family groups and scatter to their various wintering grounds due to the shortage of food in winter. If the winter was especially long or harsh, the family could face starvation and occasionally may resort to cannibalism.
This fear of starvation could also lead to hoarding of food and not sharing with other family members or people who are wandering because they are starving and wandering to find scarce food. This could lead to madness and murder to get this scarce food.

The legend could also be a cautionary tale used to illustrate the native value of Sharing which was a very important value to the people as nobody had a sense of ownership of anything. Everything the people had were gifts from the creator and belonged to everybody. This value was essential to the survival of the tribe as a whole.

A very, very cool movie about the wendigo legend is the movie Ravenous, it remains probably one of my all time favorite movies.

I grew up in a rural area in northeastern Ohio and my friends and I spent our teenage years documenting the strange properties of an area fairly deep in the forest near my house. I had a good friend in elementary school who lived kind of far away by following roads. If you picture the streets as a four square mile square, we were nearly at the same lower right corner, but by road you must travel the full square. So we cut a path through the woods with scraps of cloth so we could navigate the quarter mile or so through the woods. We used this for the better part of a decade until we had cars. Eventually we made different side paths deeper into the forest and we dubbed one "the evil place."

It just had an absolutely terrible vibe to it, and we made two attempts to camp there and left both times in the middle of the night, no matter how we tried to stick it through. We filmed it the second time and noticed many bizarre things upon replaying the tape, though we noticed few of the unusual things at the time. We heard a long, clearly audible sigh/exhale close to the camera, which actually one of my friends heard at the time, he said, "wait...." but the rest of us didn't hear him and he kept it to himself. The film vindicated him though. Also we heard noises continuously over the crest of a nearby hill, that was what prompted us to leave the camp. Upon reviewing the footage, when we had moved the camera along the hill, explaining the various noises we heard, a small pinpoint of light could be seen to appear next to a large tree at the top of the hill. It remained there for the duration of our filming. If it were an eye, the animal would had to have been clinging to the tree or been at least five feet or so tall. Also, throughout our filming in the interior of "the evil place" a purple vein-like distortion flickers throughout the entire filming. This appeared soon after we entered the forest and faded away as we left. We were only fourteen or so at the time, so we inevitably lost the tape, but I remember the events vividly. I had shown it to my girlfriend at the time, all my friends, my brother, my parents... because I had talked about this place for ages, practically since I was seven, and everyone just thought I was a superstitious nut-ball. As I got older, around 16, I resolved never to return, because each time the sense of impending doom became more traumatizing.

For the few remaining years I lived at home, I used to sneak out of my house late at night to smoke without my parents catching me, and I could usually hardly make it through a smoke before I'd have to retreat back into the house, the darkness along the edge of the woods was too unsettling. It always, always, felt like something was nearby watching me. I always maintained privately that what I had bothered in the forest took it upon itself to make its presence known to me whenever I was near the forest.

Another time, in an unrelated but rather close forest, my friends and I were sitting out around a fire when we heard the sound of what can only be explained as a large pig dying horribly. Note this is not a farm-like rural area, it is a vastly spread out suburb more like, and this was in the early hours of the a.m. Just horrific almost human screaming for an impossibly long seeming time but was really probably only twenty or thirty seconds then total silence. I know our local wildlife, too, I'm an eagle scout and have spent time camping in multiple countries, across dozens of states, from temperatures ranging from -30C to 35C and these experiences left me shaken about camping in the forest for years. I probably still would not camp in the area to this day. Looking on google earth it appears development is coming to the area, I feel sorry for whatever Poltergeist like experience the home owners are going to have living there. I believe paranormal areas exist based on my experiences there. Maybe deforestation will kill the forest spirit, or something, who knows.

Anyway, my point being, hearing the wendigo legend, I always wondered if I had found an area that was haunted by a wendigo spirit, if not some stealthy wendigo beast. The original legend seems to speak of it more as a spirit or ghost, but it could be a beast, or maybe even a state of mind. The scientific explanation has been that the wendigo was a cautionary tale to reinforce the taboo of cannibalism, such that people who believed in the wendigo would probably choose to starve to death over eating people to survive. Could it be a mental condition similar to addiction that occurs when practicing cannibalism? Could it trigger a mental disorder due entirely to the complex and severe mental stress of the situation itself similar to dissociation in times of trauma?

I've always found it illuminating to view things from a Jungian perspective, and see if there isn't some mental or psychic condition that bears resemblance to the legend. For example, lunacy is an ancient condition people believed was caused by the moon. We know now that "lunacy" to a certain degree does exist, the people were just misguided in their belief as to the cause of the condition. Nonetheless, regardless of the absurdity of the lunatic legend, lunacy is legitimate. So we can wonder, regardless of the far-fetched nature of the wendigo legend, is "wendigoism" legitimate?

It is said that a wendigo desires human flesh more and more, but is it not an easy leap to say that a person who has already eaten humans in some prior situation will have far fewer qualms about doing it again in another situation? Is that the wendigo spirit possessing him or does it just say something about humanity's tendency to see taboo as something akin to virginity, that once it is broken and the crime is transgressed, what the point in going back, in "pretending" to be what you were "before" the transgression? Once someone is known in his community as a cannibal, once he's already done it, when famine comes again, what is the person likely to do? How will society react to having their preconceptions reinforced? Is it possible on some level, everybody is right?

Anyway, sorry for ranting, but I have always been greatly enamored with this subject. I think I may have encountered a malevolent forest spirit, as it seemed to dwell where no home was ever built, far from society. Whether or not it was a wendigo, is hard to say, but I lived in an area where the legend was known. I think I may have had run ins with such a thing, and whether it is coincidence or not, my life only got darker for having interacted with this area/thing, and only improved when I moved very far away.

reply to post by JiggyPotamus


I dont think so........

Most native American accounts have nothing to do with "bigfoot" or sasquatch really engaging in cannibalism or even really harming the native Americans......

He WOULD if he needed to, but he was more a guardian of the land, not a malevolent creature bent on devouring any human that he could get his hands on......

Again bigfoot was a protector, not a crazed blood thirsty beast, the wendigo was quite different

reply to post by ManBehindTheMask
This is how Big Feet was told to our people. They are protectors of our people and in my recent post a big lake I was speaking of the Lake Superior.

i may be a bit biased growing up from a heyoka family....
bigfoot is a wonderful spirit, from what my family has told me of their encounters... it usually appears as a messenger to help keep people safe. it is like a hero hidden in mystery, there are those that think its just some wild creature but it is truly a great spirit.
i on the other hand.... am a bit more complex i dont really want to get into details but there are different kinds of wendigo out there. im dakota/ojibwe so i kind of hear both sides of the legends. they are the eternal paradox. from the beings i have fought... so far have been wendigos, heyokas and uktena. the thing to know is that they are the same yet different. they are all legends of humans who "shift" to beasts. usually those who are "contrary" -a term i will use for all of them- are considered spirits, they cant really fit in with others as no one truly understands them, they are human... yet more. they have so much power yet they are not animals, they dont have "animal instinct".

the cannibals you refer to are most likely -bears or wolf contrarians-, the uktena are reptilian snake like beings. the buffalo contrarians are more earthly and pretty rare... the eagle/bird like heyoka are long nosed beings who are or can be thunderbirds... all eventually change when needed. there are many others i would love to get in depth about but i am afraid that might be a little more... revealing than i hoped to be. be mindful i encountered such beings myself. anyways... to answer your question on whether they are physical beings or spiritual creatures, the truth is that they are both. it is weird to say how i know but they exist in both realities.

i probably shouldnt say more... but i hope i am atleast a little helpful xD....

Just bumping this thread so it won´t die,
"Wendigo" is not something to be taken lightly,
mankind can learn more about themselves through it
than they would ever wish to know.

reply to post by Frocharocha


Not that the show Supernatural has everything right, but their episode on the Wendigo was great. The legends say they were once men, but were possessed by the spirit of cannibalism. After eating human flesh (which they believed could give you unnatural physical powers because you absorbed that person) the possessed men became less human and more monster, emaciated from their constant hunger, and with unnatural strength and speed.

As for how people become werewolves? Try the Skinwalkers on for size. There are people to this day, especially on Indian reservations, who won't talk about Skinwalkers. They're sorcerers who have used black magic and the skin of an animal to transform into them. Many of the people who won't mention them refuse to do so because they've seen them transform and don't want it let out that they're a witness.