Skinwalkers, Wendigos, and Haunted Indian Burial Grounds - And other creepy shit that goes bump in the night

[Mad Asshatter]

Credits to @ZXO who suggested I should try starting this thread.

Post about any movies, published short stories or books, fanfics, theories and for those Kiwis that are nembers of recognized Native American or Aboriginal tribes, whatever tribal lore says on monsters and spooks. I think a thread on monsters that aren't the standard werewolf, vampires, space aliens or zombies would be interesting.

Now to start, I know fuck all about Skinwalkers or Wendigos, what I know about Skinwalkers I learned from here, that they were evil shamans that have committed incest, murder and necrophilia (eww, Eww, and EWW) to 'become' these monsters, and can shape-shift to do some kind of nefarious deeds for some reason, but that is all I know.



What I can surmise so about Wendigos far is that they are tall, cannibalistic creatures that come out during the winter, that often look extremely emaciated, pale, and corpse-like, sometimes are covered in ice, and lack toes and lips. They might even have antlers or even more grisly, a head that looks like a deer skull. I think Wendies can take on appearances too, but I think that is just to lure people away to eat them.

For books and movies on these creatures, I don't know any on Skinwalkers, but two I know about feature Wendigos. One was Pet Semetary, the Stephen King novel and movie that features a haunted Indian burial grounds and a Wendigo.
In the book, the 'Wendigo' is described as a floating, biforcated horned head that has a long rotting yellow tongue. I don't know if this is 'accurate' to real lore or not, or artistic license. In the first older movie, the creature is only hinted at, but in the reboot made last year a picture of it is shown, but it is the 'classic' depiction and not the one from the novel. There is also a brief glimpse of the creature in the reboot, but it is very shadowy and very indistinct.

The other movie is one that is coming out in April. It is titled Antlers, and it is based off a short story called The Quiet Boy. It looks like it will be a bit grim and grisly, and looks like it might be something I'd really like to see, I was really disappointed with Pet Semetary, so I'm hoping this is better.

 

[???]

The Ritual is a good one about some blokes that go on a hike in Sweden and are enriched by the local wildlife. Film from 2017, book from 2011 by Adam Nevill. I only saw the movie.

 

[Judge Holden]

Guys we already have a subforum dedicated to Wendigo...

 

[Dom Cruise]

Check out the 2003 movie Wendigo, it's really good.

 

[Autumnal Equinox]

Read Pet Sematary. Probably the bleakest thing King ever wrote, and a Wendigo is strongly implied to be a part in what goes on in the novel.

 

[Immortal Technique]

LOOK HERE, LOOK LISTEN
Paranormal Witness had a spooky episode where Skin Walkers attacked a father and son in a car......I wanna know what episode that was--give me the episode #. I wanna watch it again.

 

[Mariposa Colorado]

LOOK HERE, LOOK LISTEN
Paranormal Witness had a spooky episode where Skin Walkers attacked a father and son in a car......I wanna know what episode that was--give me the episode #. I wanna watch it again.

was it "the wolf pack", or "Sacred Ground" ? that's all I could find sorry. Use google

 

[Immortal Technique]

was it "the wolf pack", or "Sacred Ground" ? that's all I could find sorry. Use google

Nah, on both. Those stories, they're in their house. This is a skin walker story where it's a father and son in car (it wasn't a main story in the show and the skin walker was chasing them in thier car). If Google worked I wouldn't be asking here. All that search does if give me is the "Skin Walker Ranch" episode.

 

[Bunny Tracks]

Animal Planet's Lost Tapes series had episodes on both Skinwalkers, and Wendigos.

 

[MechanicusAdmin]

Not really about Wendigos and skinwalkers per se, but I suggest reading up on the Missing 411 cases by David Paulides. A few of the 'experts' and witnesses hint at the possibility of Wendigos or Bigfoot being the culprit on top of a whole smorgasboard of other theories, but once you read some of these case profiles you definitely start seeing a pattern of...something.
There's been a couple of documentaries on Missing 411 but they really only scratch the surface of the information in the books. Even if you jewtube some of Paulides talks you get a better overview of what's been going on.

 

[PrussiansMarchingOn1819]

Monsters And Mysteries In America did a little thing about the Wendigo near the ending they were hinting that the Wendigo possessed Vincent Li to attack and eat a man on a bus in Canada.

 

[YuhNeechee]

The story I was told was the Wendigo as spirit that possesses people who perform cannibalism and they get all gnarly and attack people.
Media wise,I always suggest Ravenous. It was the first film I saw use the myth and it's a great black comedy. There's also an episode of Fear Itself called Skin and Bones that stars Doug Jones as a wendigo possessed man.

On other native spooks, I've started looking into Raven Mockers. Appears to be pretty exclusively Cherokee unlike wendigo that multiple tribes mention.

 

[W00K #17]

Apparently to become a skinwalker you have to kill, then fuck, and eat one of your siblings.

I didnt know the injuns were that metal.

 

[Mr. Skeltal]

Apparently to become a skinwalker you have to kill, then fuck, and eat one of your siblings.

I didnt know the injuns were that metal.

Injuns were metal as fuck, the Plains Indians (Sioux, Crow, etc.), among others, had that habit of scalping white settlers alive.

 

[lamictal]

The Ritual is a good one about some blokes that go on a hike in Sweden and are enriched by the local wildlife. Film from 2017, book from 2011 by Adam Nevill. I only saw the movie.

I second this. I really enjoyed The Ritual (film) and genuinely got chills at the monster reveal. Shit was dope.

Spoiler: What the monster looks like (Kinda Spoiler)

 

[Pickle Inspector]

A bit of a spoiler but

Spoiler

Until Dawn

for the PS4 is a fun game which contain wendigos.

 

[Freedom Fries]

Two pretty good spooky stories from amateur writers about the first one. I do a fair bit of camping and hiking and they scare and intrigue me more than any other ghost story.

https://thoughtcatalog.com/brianna-...his-is-what-happens-when-you-break-the-rules/
https://archive.md/qw5v7

I remember reading some pretty decent fan-fic type scary stories about Windigo too, but a google search didn't pull them right up.
Both have a pretty creative and active cult following.

 

[Intelligent Calcium]

As far as real life accounts go, there is a story retold by Teddy Roosevelt about what some consider a wendigo encounter (others claim it as a bigfoot encounter), from his book "The Wilderness Hunter".

The Wendigo

Spoiler

The Wendigo
by
Theodore Roosevelt

​

FRONTIERSMEN are not, as a rule, apt to be very superstitious. They lead lives too hard and practical, and have too little imagination in things spiritual and supernatural. I have heard but few ghost stories while living on the frontier, and these few were of a perfectly commonplace and conventional type.


But I once listened to a goblin story which rather impressed me. It was told by a grizzled, weather-beaten old mountain hunter, named Bauman, who was born and had passed all his life on the frontier. He must have believed what he said, for he could hardly repress a shudder at certain points of the tale; but he was of German ancestry, and in childhood had doubtless been saturated with all kinds of ghost and goblin lore, so that many fearsome superstitions were latent in his mind; besides, he knew well the stories told by the Indian medicine men in their winter camps, of the snow-walkers, and the spectres, and the formless evil beings that haunt the forest depths, and dog and waylay the lonely wanderer who after nightfall passes through the regions where they lurk....


When the event occurred, Bauman was still a young man, and was trapping with a partner among the mountains dividing the forks of Salmon from the head of Wisdom River. Not having had much luck he and his partner determined to go up into a particularly wild and lonely pass through which ran a small stream said to contain many Beaver. The pass had an evil reputation, because the year before a solitary hunter who had wandered into it was there slain, seemingly by a wild beast, the half-eaten remains being afterwards found by some mining prospectors who had passed his camp only the night before.


The memory of this event, however, weighed very lightly with the two trappers, who were as adventurous and hardy as others of their kind. They took their two lean mountain Ponies to the foot of the pass, where they left them in an open Beaver meadow, the rocky timberclad ground being from thence onwards impracticable for Horses. They then struck out on foot through the vast, gloomy forest, and in about four hours, reached a little open glade where they concluded to camp, as signs of game were plenty.


There was still an hour or two of daylight left; and after building brush lean-to and throwing down and opening their packs, they started up stream. The country was very dense and hard to travel through, as there was much down timber, although here and there the sombre woodland was broken by small glades of mountain grass.


At dusk, they again reached camp. The glade in which it was pitched was not many yards wide, the tall, close-set pines and firs rising round it like a wall. On one side, was a little stream, beyond which rose the steep mountain-slopes, covered with the unbroken growth of the evergreen forest.


They were surprised to find that during their short absence, something, apparently a Bear, had visited camp, and had rummaged about among their things, scattering the contents of their packs, and in sheer wantonness destroying their lean-to. The footprints of the beast were quite plain but at first they paid no particular heed to them, busying themselves with rebuilding the lean-to, laying out their beds and stores, and lighting the fire.


While Bauman was making ready supper, it being already dark, his companion began to examine the tracks more closely, and soon took a brand from the fire to follow them up, where the intruder had walked along a game trail after leaving the camp. When the brand flickered out, he returned and took another, repeating his inspection of the footprints very closely. Coming back to the fire, he stood by it a minute or two, peering out into the darkness, and suddenly remarked: "Bauman, that Bear has been walking on two legs." Bauman laughed at this, but his partner insisted that he was right; and upon again examining the tracks with a torch, they certainly did seem to be made by but two paws, or feet. However, it was too dark to make sure. After discussing whether the footprints could possibly be those of a human being, and coming to the conclusion that they could not be, the two men rolled up in their blankets, and went to sleep under the lean-to.


At midnight, Bauman was awakened by some noise, and sat up in his blankets. As he did so, his nostrils were struck by a strong, wild-beast odor, and he caught the loom of a great body in the darkness at the mouth of the lean-to. Grasping his rifle, he fired at the vague, threatening shadow, but must have missed; for immediately afterwards he heard the smashing of the underwood as the thing, whatever it was, rushed off into the impenetrable blackness of the forest and the night.


After this the two men slept but little, sitting up by the rekindled fire, but they heard nothing more. In the morning, they started out to look at the few traps they had set the previous evening, and to put out new ones. By an unspoken agreement, they kept together all day, and returned to camp towards evening.


On nearing it they saw, hardly to their astonishment, that the lean-to had been again torn down. The visitor of the preceding day had returned; and in wanton malice had tossed about their camp kit and bedding, and destroyed the shanty. The ground was marked up by its tracks; and on leaving the camp, it had gone along the soft earth by the brook, where the footprints were as plain as if on snow, and, after a careful scrutiny of the trail, it certainly did seem as if, whatever the thing was, it had walked off on but two legs.


The men, thoroughly uneasy, gathered a great heap of dead logs, and kept up a roaring fire throughout the night, one or the other sitting on guard most of the time. About midnight, the thing came down through the forest opposite, across the brook, and stayed there on the hillside for nearly an hour. They could hear the branches crackle as it moved about, and several times it uttered a harsh, grating, long-drawn moan, a peculiarly sinister sound. Yet it did not venture near the fire.


In the morning, the two trappers, after discussing the strange events of the last thirty-six hours, decided that they would shoulder their packs and leave the valley that afternoon. They were the more ready to do this because, in spite of seeing a good deal of game sign, they had caught very little fur. However, it was necessary first to go along the line of their traps and gather them, and this they started out to do.


All the morning, they kept together, picking up trap after trap, each one empty. On first leaving camp, they had the disagreeable sensation of being followed. In the dense spruce thickets, they occasionally heard a branch snap after they had passed; and now and then, there were slight rustling noises among the small pines to one side of them.


At noon, they were back within a couple of miles of camp. In the high bright sunlight, their fears seemed absurd to the two armed men, accustomed as they were, through long years of lonely wandering in the wilderness, to face every kind of danger from man, brute, or element. There were still three Beaver traps to collect from a little pond in a wide ravine nearby. Bauman volunteered to gather these, and bring them in, while his companion went ahead to camp and made ready the packs.


On reaching the pond, Bauman found three Beaver in the traps, one of which had been pulled loose and carried into a Beaver house. He took several hours in securing and preparing the Beaver, and when he started homewards he marked with some uneasiness how low the sun was getting. As he hurried towards camp, under the tall trees, the silence and desolation of the forest weighed on him. His feet made no sound on the pine needles, and the slanting sun rays, striking through among the straight trunks, made a gray twilight in which objects at a distance glimmer indistinctly. There was nothing to break the ghostly stillness which, when there is no breeze, always broods over these sombre primeval forests.


At last, he came to the edge of the little glade where the camp lay, and shouted as he approached it, but got no answer. The camp fire had gone out, though the thin blue smoke was still curling upwards. Near it lay the packs wrapped and arranged. At first, Bauman could see nobody; nor did he receive an answer to his call. Stepping forward he again shouted; and as he did so, his eye fell on the body of his friend, stretched beside the trunk of a great fallen spruce. Rushing towards it, the horrified trapper found that the body was still warm, but that the neck was broken, while there were four great fang marks in the throat.


The footprints of the unknown beast-creature, printed deep in the soil, told the whole story.


The unfortunate man, having finished his packing, had sat down on the spruce log with his face to the fire, and his back to the dense woods, to wait for his companion. While thus waiting, his monstrous assailant, which must have been lurking nearby in the woods, waiting for a chance to catch one of the adventurers unprepared, came silently up from behind, walking with long, noiseless steps, and seemingly still on two legs. Evidently unheard, it reached the man, and broke his neck by wrenching his head back with its forepaws, while it buried its teeth in his throat. It had not eaten the body, but apparently had romped and gambolled round it in uncouth, ferocious glee, occasionally rolling over and over it; and had then fled back into the soundless depths of the woods.


Bauman, utterly unnerved, and believing that the creature with which he had to deal was something either half-human or half-devil, some great goblin-beast, abandoned everything but his rifle, and struck off at speed down the pass, not halting until he reached the Beaver meadows where the hobbled Ponies were still grazing. Mounting, he rode onwards through the night, until far beyond the reach of pursuit.

There's a decent reading on Youtube if you prefer that.

In Canada, there is an area nicknamed Headless Creek, because the decapitated corpses of hunters and prospectors kept turning up there.

The Nahanni Valley has been steeped in folklore and mystery since it was first inhabited around 9 to 10 thousand years ago. Many tribes were afraid to settle within the region as they believed it to be an evil, haunted place inhabited by various spirits, specters, and devils. Those who did come here, such as the native Dene people, told of mysterious creatures lurking in the vast forests, and were plagued by the enigmatic, aggressive, and violent Naha tribe of the mountains. This tribe was said to consist of fierce warriors who wore masks and armor adorned with frightening imagery and were known to brutally decapitate their victims. Warriors of the Naha tribe were said to be larger than normal men and to wield strange and powerful weapons that no one had ever seen before. The fearsome Naha tribe itself has become one of the area’s many mysteries, as the whole tribe is said to have suddenly and inexplicably disappeared from the face of the earth, and it has never been ascertained just what happened to them. They have seemingly just vanished without a trace.
[...]
The two packed up their gear, headed out into the wilderness, and never returned. After a year had passed, it was presumed that the brothers must have succumbed to the elements or any of the countless perils the area had to offer, such as sinkholes, jagged gorges, and wild animals. Some rumors suggested that the two had succeeded in finding one of the mythical veins of gold thought to dot the valley and had made off with their fortune without telling anyone. Then, as suddenly as they had vanished, the two men were found dead along the river. Their bodies had been decapitated and the heads were nowhere to be found.

A spooky story to be sure, but it would not be an isolated case, nor the last victims the valley would claim. In 1917, a Swiss prospector by the name of Martin Jorgenson made his way to Nahanni to try his hand at finding gold. At first, Jorgenson seemed to have settled well in the valley. He built a cabin, ran a small mining operation, and was generally well-known by settlers in the area. When Jorgenson’s cabin mysteriously burned down to the ground, the prospector’s skeleton was found among the ashes without its head, and a search of the charred remains of the cabin found no trace of the skull. In 1945, a miner from Ontario was found dead in his sleeping bag without his head. Around the same time, a trapper named John O’Brien was found frozen to death in the nearby wilderness with his hands clutching a pack of matches in a death grip right next to a campfire pit that showed evidence of having had a fire going. Those who had stumbled across the corpse described having the feeling that the unfortunate trapper had been flash frozen within seconds.

These mysterious deaths are not the only oddities the valley holds. In addition to the mysterious beheadings, a good many others simply went missing without a trace. It is thought that around 44 people had vanished under mysterious circumstances in the valley by 1969.

The Mysterious Valley of the Headless Corpses | Mysterious Universe

Canada is a land full of vast natural beauty and thriving, unspoiled wilderness. Much of the wild landscape here is a world full of natural wonders that have managed to remain pristine and nearly

mysteriousuniverse.org

I assume this is a case of Indians telling whitey to fuck off in no uncertain terms, inspired by local legend. A serial killer would be the closest thing to a real wendigo you could get, but he would have had to be active for a hell of a long time for this to make sense.

 

[YuhNeechee]

Anansi's Goatman Story

Saved from 4chan's/x/ on Friday Sep 28th 2012 at 1:31 AM Eastern Time. Edited slightly from the original thread to improve grammar and flow. Here's my story:

creepypasta.fandom.com

This isn't specifically tagged as being wither but it lines up with a lot of wendigo lore and is one of the better pastas I've read relating to it.

 

[Robert James]

Animal Planet's Lost Tapes series had episodes on both Skinwalkers, and Wendigos.

The first season of lost tapes was pretty good, they didn't have the budget to show off the monsters so a lot of the horror was based off of what you couldn't see and sold the "we found this tape thing". It kind of lost itself when they got a budget and they started showing off the monsters more and it switched from scary to hilarious. The jersey devil one was hilarious, it features a pregnant women beating the shit out of the devil with a plank of wood.

As for spooky stories, anything on skin walker ranch is good, Coast to Coast Am has a few good stories related to skinwalkers/bigfoots/ and other odities. One of the ongoing stories was mels hole, it's pretty good until the last part where it goes off the deep end.