This week’s monster is the Wendigo/Windigo, a spirit born from the spiritual traditions of the North American Algonquian-speaking tribes.

Quickly, before I dive any deeper into this week’s monster, I want to share some Wicked Tree Press News.

Check out the unboxing video of the upcoming second book, The Killing Stone! All the books arrived this week, safe and sound!

I wanted to express my gratitude to Lily at Alpaca Printing for making sure every detail was perfect and assuring the books arrived on time and in excellent shape. A big shout out the Metal Ninja Studios for their support in lettering and book design and production. Matt Krotzer's lettering is fantastic.

Thanks for being here and supporting my company. These are perilous times in the indie publishing world, and I definitely need and appreciate you!

There are still a few more days to order so you get the book with my early supporters. After next week, I’ll close those pre-orders and you won’t be able to get the book until its official release date of September 16th, 2025.

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You knew I was coming for you, little one,
when the kettle jumped into the fire.
Towels flapped on the hooks,
and the dog crept off, groaning,
to the deepest part of the woods.

- excerpt from Louise Eldrich’s poem “Windigo”

This malevolent spirit grew out of the Algonquian-speaking tribes’ spiritual traditions. These terrifying beasts live in colder climates across the northern United States and Canada, places where the winters are particularly brutal and deadly. Snow and ice are no issues for these nimble creatures. Stories describe the wendigo as a giant creature that grows as it consumes flesh, sometimes up to 15 feet tall. It is supernaturally fast and strong. Its eyes are sunken and glow. Its fangs and claws, yellowed and jagged. Sometimes it has hair, sometimes it doesn’t. At times, it is connected to deer and may have antlers or pointed ears. They are often emaciated and malnourished, and no matter how much they eat, they are always starving.

This dark entity is associated with surviving long and brutal winters and what horrors those winters have driven humans to commit. The creature is a warning against succumbing to cannibalism but it is just as much a warning against insatiable greed and destroying more natural resources than you need to survive. It is a lesson to how over-hunting a region can lead to famine and dark times. It is a harbinger of the consequences of overconsumption. The wendigo appears when a habitat can no longer sustain humans anymore. It is in that type of devastation where people succumb to the wendigo and transform themselves.

The Anishinaabe and many of the indigenous North American people believe that spirits exist in natural objects. In the Algonquin language, these forces are called manitou which means spirit or supernatural. The great spirit is the Gitchi Manitou/Kitche Manitou. These forces are indifferent to the needs of human and are neither good nor evil. A wendigo is a type of manitou associated with hunger and greed. The wendigo’s story reinforces the need for community and the dangers of isolation.

Indigenous artists and writers have also used the wendigo to address the issues of violence, colonization and environmental destruction. In the 21st century, activist Winona LaDuke coined the term wendigo economics to criticize corporations’ “cannibalistic” effect on Earth. You don’t need a degree in economics to see that late-stage capitalism is very much wendigo economics as the common person and necessary natural resources are relentlessly consumed to keep the soulless humanity-destroying machine running.

There are also some real-life cases where a wendigo is blamed for a truly horrific crime. A trapper named Swift Runner claimed a wendigo possessed him and forced him to kill and eat his family. The courts did not buy that story, and he was convicted and hanged for those crimes. However, the long, dark winter clearly drove Swift insane and turned him into a some type of real monster rather than a metaphorical one. Whether a physical manifestation of a wendigo actually exists, it does seem possible a spiritual one does in cases such as Swift’s.

There is also an intriguing story about a chief and shaman, Jack Fiddler, who killed a woman because he believed she was a wendigo. He may have killed up to 14 people he believed were wendigos, people possessed by a dark entity, possibly cannibals. or more likely, just very ill people. Before he was tried for his alleged crimes, he escaped and committed suicide. As I researched Jack Fiddler, I was happy to find that

The true terror of the wendigo exists when it reveals what a man or woman is capable of when either starvation or greed enter the picture. There is nothing morally wrong with starvation but it can present moral choices since survival is on the line. Those choices can involve good and evil. This is where a wendigo may appear, and you must choose to die or to kill another to survive. Greed is also type of starvation but a clearly immoral type. A greedy person is never full, always searching for more to fill the insatiable void inside of them. Part of the wendigo’s lesson is the importance of community when it comes to different types of starvation. If a person has a strong connection to their community, they may resist these carnal instincts because they will have that support, that sense of belonging and duty to the whole. However, when in isolation, whether physical or mental, humans are much more likely to give into their darker impulses.

When a wendigo is involved, and a human has succumbed to those dark impulses, that human will begin to transform. Once they have crossed over and become full wendigo, death is usually their only salvation from this horrible existence. They will feed on the flesh of others until they are stopped.

In one story, a young warrior made a deal with a dark entity to become stronger or simply succumbed to cannibalism and was transformed into a wendigo. He was banished to the woods by his community. In another, a hunter enters the woods and notices that the forest is transformed and not producing its usual bounties. It has been over hunted and now the people face famine. The survival of his people is threatened, and he encounters the wendigo. He begins to transform. His wife sacrifice herself to save his soul but the wendigo’s curse still eventually takes his life.

The wendigo exists to teach humans a valuable lesson. Its terrible condition can be passed to them to make that lesson clear. There is such a thing as taking too much from this world or from another person. If you eat someone else’s flesh to stay alive, that life will become sinister and consume you from within. If you take too much from the natural world, it will also turn on you. A cost is always paid when someone crosses those lines, whether external or internal.

Wendigos have very strong senses. They have heightened hearing, smell, and sight. In the video game, Until Dawn, they are presented as blind but that is not the case in most folktales told about them. They are practically indestructible but fire can kill them, hopefully releasing the human soul from its torment. There are a few versions of the story that demonstrate that a human’s soul can be released from this terrible condition and return to the living, but in most versions, death is the only way to escape being a wendigo once infected. It seems the more popular take is that some acts like eating your family or plundering your community’s natural resources can only be purified in the spiritual realm.

So, if you spot a wendigo, please quickly evaluate your life choices and hope that you haven’t already gone too far.

If you want to consume some pop culture that explores this entity, there is plenty. Currently, the movie Until Dawn is playing in theaters. It’s full of wendigo-like monsters just like the amazing video game it is based on. If you have a PlayStation and have not played Until Dawn, I highly suggest checking it out. It’s a completely fun and gruesome horror game, and you get to choose your fate at every turn which makes the game super engaging. The film Antlers by Guillermo Del Toro features wendigos and scarred me permanently. The true horror of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary involves a wendigo’s curse. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones is a masterful bit of horror that brings the wendigo to life in a truly terrifying way while exploring the American Indian experience. Finally, an older novella, The Wendigo, by Algernon Blackwood also explores a hunting trip gone wrong. And of course, I have a special place in my heart for the Supernatural episode featuring the wendigo.

There are many others I am sure, but I think the ones I’ve listed are the best ways to get started. Please let me know if you think I missed a great wendigo themed book, comics, show or game.

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