Don’t Get Hungry or Lost — the Windigo Will Get You!
Tuesday November 27, 2007 8:44 AMEvery culture has its ghouls, bogeymen and monsters, but one of the most ferocious and stinky of them all is the windigo of Algonquian lore. The windigo is a human being-turned-supernatural-cannibal that roams the forests, swamps and plains of North America, in constant search of human flesh for its insatiable hunger.
The windigo has numerous physical descriptions and variations of the spelling of its name. It stands over six feet tall, has long, stringy hair, and smells like a rotting corpse. It runs faster than a human, is stronger than a grizzly bear, breathes fire and howls like the wind. It has a heart of ice.
The windigo seems to serve several social functions. One is to keep children from wandering into the woods. Another is to explain forbidden behavior, such as cannibalism by starving humans — which in earlier times occurred among the Algonquian peoples, who endured harsh winters. Another function is punishment for wrong-doing.
A person becomes a windigo by eating human flesh, by being bitten by a windigo or by being cursed by a shaman. Once turned into a windigo, the victim has no hope of salvation, but will always crave human flesh. The only solution is death.
Oral accounts of the windigo were old by the time white settlers penetrated into the woods of North America. One of the first written accounts dates to the early 1600s, recorded by a Jesuit missionary in Quebec, telling of cannibalism among families suffering from winter famine. White settlers in Minnesota regarded the windigo in the same way that Celtic people regarded the banshee: its appearance was an omen of death of a family member.
