When Hollywood comes looking for a nasty monster from First Nations folklore, there’s one supernatural creature that seems to dominate the landscape. The legend of the Wendigo has inspired cinematic villains from Pet Sematary to Supernatural , Ravenous to Bone Tomahawk. From the legends of the Algonquin-speaking Great Lakes tribes in the Upper Midwest and Canada, the Wendigo is the evil spirit that transforms starving humans into a voracious cannibalistic monster after they finally succumb to their basest instincts and taste human flesh.

These tribes lived in an area with harsh cold winters where food becomes scarce. Right around February when you haven’t had anything decent to eat for months and your body is starving for any kind of protein outside of your shoe leather, well, your neighbor might start looking pretty good. The human instinct to survive at all costs is hard to resist. The Wendigo is our warning to resist that urge, that this evil irreparably taints the soul once you feast upon another human.

Cannibalism is the ultimate human taboo. The whole reason that humans thrived on this planet is because we work together. We don’t have the natural advantages that other creatures do like fur on a bear to survive the winter cold or teeth like a wolf to dig into our prey. Our socialization is what enabled us to conquer the planet in all of its areas and climates. Winter is the cruelest climate of all because not only is terribly cold, there’s no food. Eating your fellow man is the ultimate betrayal of what makes us human, our tribal capacity to take on the world together.

Chad Lewis and Kevin Lee Nelson have been working on this compendium of Wendigo lore and mythology for almost two decades. And in this episode, Chad tells us of the journey he took in writing the book. Some of the things we also talk about in this conversation:

• Why you’re never even supposed to say the name of the Wendigo
• The most famous case of the Wendigo in the modern era, Swift Runner, who ate his family in 1878 Alberta
• The far edges of the world that Chad Lewis and his co- author went to walk on the same ground as the people they talk about in the book
• The radio station in Eau Claire, Wisconsin we used to perform at all the time and Chad had a show had an owner that thought he was a skin walker!

The Wendigo are more than just the winter spirits of desperate hunger, it is a monster that feeds on greed. The human capacity for gluttony and the desire that you will never have enough. The Wendigo, like George Romero’s zombies, is never satisfied, its craving is never satiated. It’s a eerily thin, gaunt beast who grows larger with every human it devours, but it’s still not enough. Once you break the taboo and taste the flesh, you descend into madness and you will never satisfy “The Hunger of The Damned”.

Welcome to See You on the Other Mike, where the world of

the mysterious collides with the world of entertainment.

A discussion of art, music, movies, spirituality,

the weird and self discovery. And

now, your hosts, musicians and entertainers

who have their own weakness for the weird, Mike and

Wendy from the band, Sunspot. Episode

294, Wendigo Lore, Monsters, Myths and

Madness, and Allison and I are here today

with one of our favorite paranormal authors, Chad

Lewis. Chad, how are you doing today? Greetings from the back roads of

Wisconsin. That's right. Hey,

Chad. It's so glad I'm so glad to hear from you. Yes. I'm so

glad we can get together in these weird times and talk about even

weirder things. That's exactly right. Yeah. If that's possible to get any

weirder than where we are right now. Chad, it's it's always, you haven't been in

the podcast. I was gonna say in in a couple of years. Last time, I

think we talked about, like, weird news headlines or, you know,

like, the strangest, you know, the the strangest kinda,

headlines you you picked out of newspapers. But I think the first

time that I heard of you

was when you had a a show on, like, Wolf

108 in Eau Claire. Yes. It was this

community radio, so it only reached people in the

Chippewa Valley of Wisconsin. You know, maybe a 100000

people living there and maybe 10 listening to the show, but it was

this small little independent station. And the best part about it

was the owner of this station believed he was a

werewolf, and that's why he called his station Wolf,

FM, because he believed he truly was a werewolf.

Yes. So when he transformed during the full moon, I mean, what was

his story? Did he ever invite you out to see

his transformation? No. He never did. He was very secretive

about it. And some of the stories that he had told over the

years was that he had met some weird stranger in a

bar. Like all good stories, that happened at a

bar. But he gave him some cocktail of

some sort and told him this would transform him into a

werewolf and that if he drank it, he could never

return. So he took a few days to contemplate the

decision and then drank it. And sure enough, this weird

stranger was right. He had turned into a werewolf. And this guy was

pretty serious about it to the fact that he lived in a pack in

his house where he was the alpha, of course, but he

had a couple other guys living there and a few women as well.

And all the doors were removed on their bedrooms for

no privacy because that's the way a pack apparently lives in a

house. You know, I didn't I didn't even know that part of the

story. We used to go so, Wendy and Ben and I and Sunspot, we

used to play in Eau Claire fairly frequently. We played homecoming there,

and we would do live appearances on The Wolf. And, you

know, that was a cool radio studio. We played benefits for the radio

station, the Haddison rotation. Really, it it was a fun thing,

and I just always knew the guy as Wolf. And then one night, like, I

think it was after one of the benefit shows or whatever, we were out having

a beer. And, like, Wolf's one of, like, Wolf's buddy's name was

Highlander. Yes. I know Highlander. And every but everybody had a

nickname, Allison. This is at a time where everybody has a nickname. And,

and we're out one night. He's like, you know, Wolf really thinks he's a

wolf. He thinks he can change. And I'm like, what?

I'm I I just thought it was drunk talk. I'm like, what are you talking

about? He's like, no. No. He believes it.

He met a guy in a bar. And just like he told me the story

just like Chad did. And I'm like, what? That's

awesome. That's the first time I ever heard of a of a furry. Also, was

that same night that was that same night somebody's like, yeah. He's like a furry,

you know, but with wolves. And I'm like, what's what what's a

furry? And it introduced me to this whole wild world.

So, Chad, that's this is my first memory of you is is because I know

you had your show on the wolf. I just wanna say that I I really

enjoyed your show on the wolf, Chad.

I used to actually listen, quite

regularly at work back in, like, I don't know,

2,002. You know, all the episodes,

were up on the website, And then so I would just listen to all

the shows even though I didn't live in Eau Claire.

Tiny show in Eau Claire that we did, Terry Fisk and I,

is just kind of a lark. It was late at night. Half the

callers were bar closing at 2 AM and calling us.

And the funny thing about the Wolf program is that,

Wolf told us the only topic we could never

discuss was ironically about werewolves.

Oh, it's just too close to home. I must. Maybe we didn't wanna give

up his secret. So when he actually lost the station and

it came it became a public station, the first

guest we had on was obviously Linda Godfrey talking about werewolves.

Right? He just couldn't wait. The ban on lycanthropy was over.

Yes. The dark days were lifted.

So moving to your latest book, and that is,

the Wendy Monsters, Myths, and

Madness. I feel like the Wendigo is the kind of

creature that I hear about in, like, movies

or they even mention the Wendigo. We we watched the pet, you know, the Pet

Cemetery remake a couple weeks ago, like, in our Patreon group. We ever

rewatch Pet Sematary. And they they bring out the Wendigo, and they talk about it

a little bit. But they never go back and then mention anything or go into

the real legends or anything. And so I realized that

even though I've heard about the Wendigo, movies like, Bone Tomahawk

bring it up, as in, you know, that they were, you know, cannibalistic

natives, that eventually birthed the legend of

the Wendigo. And, you know, and you hear sometimes, like, oh, the

Skinwalker Ranch. There's Wendigo roaming around there at

that secret place in Utah. You know, it

makes me think, like, I don't know anything about this creature,

really. And so Yeah. And and maybe, you know, Chad,

you can help, separate, the the the

myth from from the tradition. You know, there's there's

a hefty Algonquin tradition, and and it

really has nothing to do with, like, the skinwalkers of the Southwest. It

is very Midwestern, but I'll let you talk about it.

Well, the Wendigo is perhaps the most puzzling,

bizarre, and terrifying legend I've ever tackled in

my 20 plus years of researching folklore.

And it's perhaps the oldest folklore legend

of a monster in North America, and ironically, one of the

least known today. And it really began with

the 1st, nation people of, Alberta

and Canada. And you're talking of the Cree and Ojibwe

and various other tribes that believed in this

giant monster spirit legend type

thing. And that's the puzzling part because the Wendy,

known by many different names and dozens and dozens of

spellings of that name, really came in 3 different

forms, which makes it even more puzzling. It could come as a

spirit. A shaman could direct one to,

curse your area, drive away games so you would starve,

bring you bad health. But it could also possess you

and slowly turn you into a Wendy. But then it could

also appear as a giant cannibalistic flesh and

blood monster. So it was really similar to

a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, that they're the same

creature. They're just in different states. So that's what makes the

Windigo so puzzling is Wendy you're talking about it, you can talk about

it in spirit form, flesh and blood, or

even a possession form. So does the wendigo become

almost like an an all purpose monster,

for for the people? Because, you know, I I think about, like the gin.

And, the gin, there's so many varieties, and

there's, Mike, you know, and you can blame them for anything. You know, they

can have a one gin is messing around with your house. The other

gin is stuck in a lamp kind of thing. You know? To the

Wendigo, is it always a monster? Are

they always something scary? Are they, like, an all purpose

monster for the native peoples, or, is it

something more specific? It was certainly a

catchall that if game was running short during the

season, it was because a wendigo scared it off or

a shaman sent a wendigo to scare it off. If someone became

depressed or they became ill, they were obviously

turning wendigo and possessed by the wendigo. If a

stranger showed up at night to your encampment, you

didn't know them. They were a wendigo. So it really was a

catchall. And these these stories were going with the

tribes there, but also, we can't forget that a lot of

the early pioneers, the missionaries, the fur traders,

they brought a lot of their legends with them of werewolves and

vampires. And it really melded into the

Wendy lore. So they added stuff to it and it

became this legend that brewed for 100 of years where it

was the most terrifying thing you ever wanted to

encounter or not want to encounter, even so much

that many cultures were afraid to even say its

name. Because if you said its name, it would put you on its

radar and then it could find you. It was like

luring out calling a dog to come after you. That's what it was

like blowing a dog whistle that this thing could then find

you. Oh, that's like the bye bye man. Yeah. Yeah.

And and that's that's kind of unusual because,

in all the stories I've heard, the the Wendy is really a

winter creature, and in,

the traditions, the woodland traditions of the Midwest,

it was okay to talk about a lot of creatures,

and supernatural beings during winter Wendy the snow

had fallen, because,

all of those things were asleep, and

so you could tell some of the stories that you couldn't tell when there was

no snow on the ground and and the ground was not frozen

over. So when the ground was frozen, when there was snow, you could tell

certain stories, and you wouldn't you wouldn't incur

the wrath of certain supernatural beings, but but the

wendigo seemed to be, you know, specifically

talked about during winter in that extreme time of

scarcity. At least that's what I've found,

in my research. What have you found in your research, Chad?

One of the classic telltale symptoms of a wendigo is that

food scarcity, that starvation, that not

having enough to eat and that will cause somebody to

turn wendigo to all of a sudden be possessed by the

wendigo where they may become depressed. They'll become silent. They

don't want to hunt. They won't want to interact. And then they'll

start to view their loved ones as tasty food

Mike beavers and moose. And then they'll have this

insatiable hunger for human flesh. And that's

all thought to be brought on by famine and cold

weather. But I think so much of the Wendy

lore has been lost forever because people

weren't writing it down or recording it 100 of years

ago. So there's a lot of different beliefs on when you and when

you cannot talk about the Wendigo. Some say you talk about it in the

summer because it's not there. Others say in the winter because it's

already out and you won't do yourself harm. Other

beliefs are that you can only talk about it after the 1st snowfall

of the season. So there's a lot of competing theories

and most people just hedge their bets by not speaking its name

ever. You know, what do you mean? Like, they just don't talk about it for

an hour on a podcast?

Well, I think we're safe. It's summer's coming. Right. I

hope I hope summer comes right now. It just snowed yesterday, but summer is coming.

I feel it. What's interesting though, one extra thing though that I I

think is interesting, we're looking for, like, a a cultural connection here. And I

know, our Patreon, Chuck Martin, he had asked he's like,

well, make sure you ask about if the stories of the wenigo go

beyond North America. Like, if there's any you know, if there's other cultures

that may have similar types of creatures. And when you

said a stranger shows up at the camp in the middle of the night, the

first thing that that made me think about was the stories

of the Popobawa from Zanzibar. Because when they

had their Popobawa scare in the mid 19 nineties and they were thinking that,

you know, the the people in the villages were thinking that the Popobawa, who's an

evil kind of spirit, was out. And we've talked to doctor Martin Walsh about this,

who was there at the time and had to investigate. He said that a lot

of the you know, if you would have a stranger come to your village late

at night, you would lock him up. Or

they they actually shot at somebody, because they thought it

it was the Popoboa coming in a human form showing up in the middle of

the night. And so that was the first, I think, cross cultural connection that

I could think of, that fear of the stranger being

someone in the form you know, being an evil monster in

the form of a man, showing up in the middle of the night.

Because, of course, if you're you know, what why is that person

wandering around? What do they want? What could what could possibly need in the

middle of the night that couldn't wait till morning to come and scare the pants

off you? So you can see immediately there's gonna be a fear

reaction and a a natural suspicion for

somebody showing up when everybody else should be sleeping. Well, the best

advice I could have given to someone in the 16, 17,

1800 is never travel at night because you're

right. Any suspicion was if they didn't know you,

most likely they were so terrified that they would shoot first

and ask questions later by the fact that, these beliefs

were that anybody traveling at night had to have some type of

sinister motive. But these beliefs really were a North

American belief from far Western Canada

all the way over to Labrador, from the Rockies, in

the US, the Great Lakes region, as we all know,

is plentiful in Wendigo stories. I

recently did a program up near Grand Marais, Minnesota,

way up by the Canadian border. Hey. And after the program, a

woman came up to me in her eighties and said that as a

young girl, she grew up in the area near Canada. Her father

used to tell her and all the other neighbor children playing in the

village that if they ever heard a kettle being banged

in the woods, they needed to run home as fast as they could

because that meant the Wendy was coming and banging its

kettle. Because it wants to eat you. Yes.

It wants to put you in the kettle. And here she

was 70 plus years later. She said she had never heard the

kettle, but that story stuck with her in Minnesota

for all those years because it was so terrifying. Now was she

a was she a a First Nations person, or was she just, you

know, was it just, you know, somebody who's I mean, growing up obviously in

the early 20th century near the Canadian border in northern you know,

far northern Minnesota is gonna she's gonna be living the,

why can't I think of her in the little house on the prairie dream. Yeah.

She was a pioneer. Her parents were pioneers in the

area. She was not, native or First Nation

blood in her. But that's the thing is these stories,

they may start out in a geographic location. They may start

out with one type or one culture. But like

everything, they spread. They morph. They progress. And

the Wendigo stories from the 16, 1700 are

much different than the ones we have today, as you would

assume, because legends, like everything, they just change. So

the original Wendy stories, or maybe even the original

Wendigo creatures, are much different than the ones we have

today. Well, let's get into that. I I just

wanna add, you know, one more note that,

for 13 years I taught at a a Native American

school and a large,

contingent of the population there was Ojibwe and so

even the urban Ojibwe

had knowledge of the Wendigo

and there are, children's book native

children's book authors that, have

dedicated books and sections of their books,

to lengthy discussion of the Wendy,

like, a very popular

writer Joseph Bruchac has a series

called Skeleton Man, and there's a couple of

books in that series and it's about, it's

about a young girl who is who is entrapped

by, by a a Wendy,

essentially, and how that's accomplished and how she

escapes. So that's that's very interesting, and then,

also, Louise Louise, Aldrich,

has a book called the the I believe I believe that's

the author's name has a book called The Birchbark House and they,

that's a coming of age series, about a little

girl growing up Ojibwe, in the

1700, I believe, in the Midwest and of course they

discussed the when to go in there. So it's an important part of the Ojibwe

culture and so much so that, at the school I

remember one assembly where the kids came

in to talk with to hear a talk by

elders who was telling them an elder was telling them about

the wendigo and actually drew a connection

between Jeffrey Dahmer and the Wendy. And

he asserted that Jeffrey Dahmer was a Wendigo and so

that was just That's scary but awesome. That was just interesting news, at a school

assembly and and, that comes out. So, it it just gives you an idea of

the cult different cultural interpretations of events that, certain groups of people have.

So, but, you know, Wendy is just really terrifying. You know, there

were stories, that I've heard

about about, creature that they were

actually people just like you and me who were just driven

insane by the scarcity during winter and,

you know, not only ate their families but started eating

themselves, Mike, ate their own lips off. This is how insatiable their

hunger became. So I mean it's such a terrifying creature.

I want to see how the stories have changed throughout the years,

Chad. Well, yes, the original stories were

that the Wendy when it was in its human flesh

type, flesh and bone, something you could

possibly kill if you knew the right procedures, you

know, they range from anywhere from 8 to 30 feet or as big as

they wanted to get. They're very thin, very gaunt.

Many times their lips and mouth are missing because they've chewed

off their own flesh. Oh, God. Their

hunger, bite marks all over their body.

And that was the flesh and blood type creature of

the Wendigo. Oftentimes, people thought it was a shape

shifter. It was immune to the elements. Cold could

not hurt it. Warmth did not hurt it unless it was

fire. You know, it could swim underwater, didn't need to

breathe. It would move in a straight line because why

wouldn't you if nothing's in your way that you can't move through?

But these stories progress where even today, there are many

cultures who believe that you should not build a

snowman or a snow woman in your yard because

there's a tendency of it coming to life as a

Wendy, much like the old belief of if you build a scarecrow,

you have to take it down or burn it before Halloween.

Otherwise, it will come to life. Wait. I never heard that. I

I I was building snow snowmen with my daughter this winter.

I'm not gonna do that again. Well, it was the same with it's the cold.

It's the same with the belief that, for years, it was

told to kids, do not eat ice because

then you might be susceptible to turn to a Wendy

because the ice got into your body and it may take over your

heart. One of the telltale hallmarks of a Wendigo is

it's a heart that is encased in ice

and that's how you defeat it by melting the heart or

cutting it out are just 2 of the ways you can defeat it. But it's

all, again, as Allison alluded to earlier, that

cold, that starvation, the ice, the hunger,

all of that equates into the Wendigo. You know, I think that's,

interesting there too, the idea of the the heart

encased in ice. That makes me think about Dante's Inferno,

because when you get to the center like, the last level of hell or

whatever, you know, like Judas is there encased in ice.

You know, we think that hell is supposed to be full of fire. You know,

hell is supposed to be, hot and burning,

but then the most, you know, it's it's like when people say,

you know, you get the wintertime. And how many times have your Wendy said, like,

when you're freezing in the car waiting for it to heat up, how many times

you heard somebody say, like, oh my god. I would rather be hot in the

summer than cold in the winter. Oh, it's so bad. I'm just freezing right now,

and I like like, trying to make a deal. Like, you know, I'd so

much rather be hot than cold. And this idea that the most evil

creation, the Wendigo, the most evil thing around,

its heart is, is frozen.

And I just you know, when you think about how people think

about evil, in different cultures,

there's, you know, one thing that's scarier than Mike, And that's I

mean, even Wendy you when you go to the Game of Thrones, the White Walkers.

You know, what's the the dragons that are the good guys? Who are the bad

guys? It's the ice. It's the cold. It's the death coming for you

because winter is the season of it. And what's interesting about the the

Wendy as well is that when people were

killed for being suspected to be a windigo

or turning windigo or going windigo as they often

called it. Many times, witnesses reported

that they would find ice along the backbone of

the person or that their heart really had ice

surrounding it or other parts of their body had

formed ice. Some saying you could even hear it

crunching as the person moved. But then when they died, they

would believe they found literally ice in

there. And whether we think these people were misidentifying

some medical disorder or they were hallucinating, they,

by all accounts, actually did find ice in these

bodies. So that's the puzzling part of what do we make of

that where these seemingly good

witnesses found ice in people. Wow. That

I mean, that is so you you're saying that there are

some accounts of perhaps even physical evidence

of of these icing overs.

Could you tell us, like, a particular story, that that

you know of from that time period? Yes. 1,

gentleman who was killed for being a Wendy, he

was turning Wendigo. And one of the, I

think, the most, perhaps the

most touted story about the Wendigo in terms

of sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists,

anthropologists who look at this from an academic level,

they see Wendigo psychosis or the belief someone's turning

Wendigo as nothing more than a scapegoat for

those looking to get rid of their sick, their ill,

their weak or another mouth to feed. And it was gave

them a free pass to kill these

people and then alleviate their own blame by

saying they were going windigo. We were doing it to save the village

because they would have killed everybody. But there are so many

accounts of people trying to cure this

person going way out of their way for weeks Wendy

this person's telling the whole village, I'm going

to kill and eat you. That they tie these people up and try

to heal them. And on one account, a gentleman

was unable to be healed. So what they did is they ended

up getting together and after many days of trying

to revive this person, they ended up,

stabbing him and smashing him with an ax. But that wasn't

enough. They ended up chopping off his head.

That wasn't enough. So they drove stakes through the body.

And when that wasn't enough, they tied the body down to make sure it couldn't

come back to life because they truly thought it would. And that's

when they noticed that there was ice in the body,

through one of the stab wounds that they had, done on

this gentleman. So what they did was poured hot liquid,

what was known as tallow. It was a beef fat back then and it was

one of the ways you could cure or kill a Wendy. But they poured

this tallow along with, hot tea in the

hole that the ax made to defrost the

ice. And when they looked in there, they saw that the

heart was encased with the ice and that's when they poured the

liquid in and eventually, they burned the body just to

be absolutely sure. Doctor. So I mean,

number 1, that's the idea that you, you know, you find this

this, person with ice in their veins or whatever. Like, you always make the

joke like, yeah. She's got ice in her veins. Well, this guy did, and he

wants to eat you.

When I'm thinking about stories about the wendigo, it's this idea

of of scarcity. It's going back to this this thought that in the

winter Wendy there's no food and there's no place to get any food,

that you'll eventually turn to eating your

friends and, like you said, Allison, eating yourself.

And so, Chad, when you were doing your research for the Wendigo lore book,

what would you say was the earliest story you were able to find

before, you know, maybe it had been,

adapted by European settlers? What was

the what was the earliest one you were able to find, from the

native legends? Well, written accounts came in

the 1800 Wendy the white

pioneers, the fur traders, the missionaries, all the

immigrants coming over from Europe, they were the

ones who wrote these stories down. Until then, it was an oral

tradition and we have stories in the mid 1800 of

people saying that nobody knows the origin of the Wendy because

it's been around so long. Nobody knows when it actually

began. And that's very difficult.

Imagine having 100 of years of this legend where

only it was passed down orally, never

connected to paper. And it wasn't until those

missionaries started writing about the stories that we got a

glimpse. And that's where all the various names and the

various spellings come in because people wrote down what they

heard and it depended on the spelling ability of

whoever was documenting this story. So when I mentioned

earlier that so much of the Wendy lore,

my colleague and co author Kevin Nelson and I, we really

believed a lot of it has been lost to history. That we're just

getting these little pieces and snippets. And

Kevin likes to say that it's almost like supernatural

Indiana Jones work that you're, like an archaeologist

that you're trying to take pieces and snippets of this legend

and see how they would have fit into the greater legend because

so many of it's lost. When we were doing research on the Wendigo,

we dig up these stories about it Mike that.

It would often sweat blood and that you could see the blood in

its footprints as it ran because it was sweating. But we

only found 1 or 2 stories of that. Nowhere else was that

ever mentioned. It's the same thing with how to kill it. There's

some stories out there that you could sacrifice

dogs to ward off the Wendy, but there were only 2

instances we found of that in all the legends that had

never been heard of before. So I think it's a lot of

detective work when trying to put these together. And again, I'm

just really saddened by how much there must have been at the

time that simply has gone to history. So, you

know, one of the things that I'm thinking about here, when we talk about the

early stories of the wendigo and, like, you know, it it develops as a

symbol for the worst of humanity

when there is a shortage of food? You know? What

the like the movie Ravenous, or, you

know, you think about those, those soccer players in the in the

Andes when they had to, you know, eat the dead

bodies from the from the airplane, in order to be able to

survive. And so or, I mean, those

obviously the horrible stories of, during,

when Stalin was not letting the food into the Ukraine,

and then there's horror stories of parents eating their children and

stuff. And so you think of the Wendy

maybe as a symbol or,

you know, some kind of, it's a trope because

it it's the worst of humanity. When when the chips are

down, when you can't find food, when you have to survive,

you go to your most basis basic instinct, and then

you end up eating people you love or eating a human, the

the worst crime you can do, you know, killing another person

and eating them. And so the Wendy becomes the symbol of

that. But then you're like, okay. So that's a symbol. That's it's like

telling kids you gotta behave or Santa Claus isn't gonna bring you a the

toy at Christmas. But then you get

stories where people actually think they encountered a wendigo. So,

you know, in your book and in your research, what do you think was a

story that when you were looking for, looking through it and

and reading the accounts, you were like, okay. Well,

maybe this is more than a story. Maybe Mike this is more

than a symbol. This might be something that

actually has some kind of supernatural bent. Well, I think a

lot of researchers look at the Windigold

legend and believe it was only done out of

hunger. That that's the only reason people went cannibal

and ate one another is out of no other choice. And for a

lot of times, that was true, but there were other times it wasn't. And

perhaps, if any of your listeners even know a tiny

bit about the Wendigo, they probably know the story

of a gentleman named Swift Runner. It's perhaps the

most infamous alleged Wendigo cases

ever. And Swift Runner was a Cree Indian living up

in Alberta, Canada north of Edmonton. And this

was in the winter of 18 78 into 18/79.

And as Allison and you both probably know,

during the summer, the First Nation people would have big

gatherings where they would all live among one another

because food was plentiful and they was more of a

community. But when winter settled in, you would

often go with your family, your core family and spread

out to spread out the game and have a better chance to

survive only feeding 10 people instead of 85,

90. So Swift Runner went off with his family which

consisted of his wife, their 6 children, his mother,

and his brother. And in the beginning, game was plentiful.

He shot a few moose, a few deer. And as the winter

went on, less and less game, they became more and more

hungry and he ended up killing his

Mike and the children and eating them. And

many scholars look at this case of Swift Runner and

say that he did it because obviously to survive. There

was no other way. But when spring came along

and all the game came back according to Swift Runner, one of his

boys, the last remaining, was still alive. And

he actually did kill and consume him when other

food was available. And he believed he was

possessed by the Wendigo. He called it the devil or the

evil spirit of that time. And Swift Runner ended up

killing 5 of it and eating 5 of his children along with

his wife. And his brother and mother

probably starved or froze along with his oldest

son. But that's the story most people know because Swift Runner came

back to St. Albert in Alberta

in the spring of that year claiming this terrible

starvation. His entire family died, But

researchers and the law at the time saw that he was

the strapping man. He was over £200, 6

foot 3. He didn't look like he was starving for the winter.

He looked better than he ever had. So they went back to his

winter encampment, and that's when they found all the bones scattered around.

And they gathered up what they could and took him to Fort

Saskatchewan where he was tried and convicted of, being

a cannibal and a monstrous murderer. Wow.

God, I'd never heard the story of Swift Runner before, so, that guy is disturb

officially disturbed me. Yeah. It is disturbing, and

my question is from what you said there, Chad,

about, in the springtime, he still

had one of them left, one of his sons, and he still

killed and ate him. And so that makes

me think that that he was gradually working

through his family. So, I mean, it wasn't

it wasn't Mike a quick death. It sounds

like, it sounds like it might have been more Mike,

you know it's coming. You know? He's he's working through his

family, and he's keeping you captive there. There's nowhere you

can go anyway. And so you're kept

captive by your demented father,

and perhaps, as in someone to ghost stories,

he's eating you gradually. Maybe an arm here,

then a leg, then the other arm. I mean,

what evidence do you have, or, you know, what what

is in the official documents about the actual progression

of the murders? Yes. And that's the fascinating part

because Swift Runner, on his trial or at his

trial, he confessed and gave a detailed account of

what happened. And you're right that it wasn't where he just killed all of his

family on the same day. It was a gradual thing where

he would kill one and hide and eat it and then he

killed another. But that last son of his

not only had to travel with his father as they were killing 1 by

1 the children and his mother, but he also consumed

the meat of his siblings. And for me, the most

terrifying part is not Swift Runner himself, but the

idea that his young son had

to know that he would be next as less and less of his

family were alive. And just that knowing, but yet you're

in the middle of nowhere. You're still malnourished from

a terrible winter. You're tired. You don't know where

you're going. You're 9 years old. What are you going to do?

Run away from your father in the middle of the woods, in the middle of

the night? So for me, the most terrifying and the most

troubling when I was there in the woods where Swift Runner

committed these gruesome acts, was trying to put myself in

the shoes of that young boy and that, here's the most trusted

person in the world. Your own parent is this sinister

monster coming after you and the dread he must have felt

felt going to sleep every night or just walking around. It's

just hard to believe. You know,

first of all, Swift Trevor is one sick bastard, number 1.

Number 2, when you're when you're talking about

the horror that that child had to experience, like, he's being

groomed to become the next Wendigo. And I

kinda wanted to talk about that for a second because you were talking about how

the shaman could maybe, the shaman could,

like, conjure a Wendigo. And so

there was a couple of different like you said that the, the caterpillar

eventually becomes a butterfly. So what's

the process, going from a human,

like, let's say, you know, you're consuming your brother's flesh,

your mother's flesh to eventually

becoming this tormented I mean,

I guess, no longer cannibalistic because it's a monster. So you just go from a

human committing cannibalism to a monster. What are some of the steps for that caterpillar

to eventually become an evil butterfly? Yes. What what's fascinating is it usually didn't happen

overnight. And what it was is it was a a

a battle of, I call it a battle of sanity and

soul. And the fact that the Wendy would

start out by taking people and there were certain

signs. One is that all of a sudden you just weren't acting

like yourself, that you'd get sick or you may not

want to interact with the rest of the

tribe or the encampment.

And you would be depressed. Oftentimes, you'd

call out in groaning or pain or making odd

noises. Sometimes, you'd have hallucinations. But mostly,

it would be abrupt personality changes. Maybe you were

depressed, apathy and the Mike. You would isolate yourself.

You might go into the woods by yourself. And that was a sure sign

that the wendigo was taking you over.

And that's when you would often be killed at that moment

because it was believed that if the process went any

farther, further, that you would become a wendigo. And

according to legend, that is, if it's not stopped, you fully

become a wendigo and you resort to cannibalism.

Well, I guess it won't even be cannibalism at that time because you'd no longer

be human. But once you consume human flesh, it was

said there was no turning back. There was no cure but death. Only

death could alleviate your suffering. So it

often began with what we would think of as mental illness

or possibly even physical illness. And let's

not forget these same communities that were battling

Wendy and people turning Wendigo were the same

ones battling measles, smallpox,

influenza and all kinds of infectious diseases that

would put forth some of these same

symptoms that turning Wendy. Depression,

being weak, not wanting to move, crawling out in pains,

shouting. All those are

signs of a physical illness. So the

lines between when you turned Wendy and when you didn't, when you

needed to be killed and when you didn't, were very thin

lines. And so, you know, I when I think about a lot

of Native American lore, you know, when you think about the water

panther, it's a water panther versus the thunderbird.

You know, there are, there are opposites.

There is someone working against humanity and there's somebody there's a, you know,

a spirit or a creature on humanity's side. Does the wendigo have

an enemy, a natural enemy? Does the wendigo have a

opposite? Is there an angel to its demon?

There's not a specific creature that you could call on. You could call

on your spirit animals if you were or your spirit

guides. If you were a shaman, you could go

into a shaking tent and perform a ritual where

you would call forth the Wendigo or whoever was

creating the Wendigo and you would battle them in the spirit

realm and you could kill the Wendigo that way

as well. The wendigo could be killed in many different

manners. 1, obviously, was a powerful shaman

who was powerful enough to do it. And that would be people like,

Jack Fiddler, who was thought to be the last greatest wendigo

killer in history. But you could also kill it in normal means.

And what I mean by that is anyone going wendigo

could have been killed by basic means. You could kill an

individual. They were often strangled because that was the

easiest. Sometimes they were shot. Obviously. Yeah. Strangled

is the easiest. Yeah. Well, I mean, being the easiest in the fact that you

don't need a weapon. You don't need to I mean, it's a personal

thing, but oftentimes Doctor. And not a lot of clean up. Yeah, exactly.

But they would then burn the body because if you didn't, the ice

of the Wendy would come back. If any part of the body was

not burned completely to ash that and then the

ashes scattered, that that person could

come back as a Wendy. But what was fascinating is that when

somebody was suspected of turning Wendigo and they had to be killed,

oftentimes that process fell

to the family of the person, of the victim,

because that would eliminate a lot of retaliatory

killings that if somebody was a friend of mine and I was

killed, they might go after the person that killed me. But if it was a

family member that had done it, it would cut down on the chance

someone would retaliate. So many times people would have to

kill their own family members and put them out of their misery.

And oftentimes the most puzzling part of the Wendy

aspect was that many people who feared they were turning

Wendigo, they begged to be killed. They

asked to be killed so that they did not want to turn wendigo.

They really feared that they were going to turn and consume

all their family. So they begged to be killed and

oftentimes people went through with that request.

Oh, man. Well, that that would be obviously difficult unless, Allison,

you you needed me to kill you. I probably could do it. You'd be okay

with that. I probably let just let me know. It's been a

long time coming. Just let me know. So, you know, Chad,

in your research for the book, like you said, you you walked the same woods

as Switch Runner. And so just wondering, like, how did you do

research on the book? Who did you talk to? Like, where did you start,

And where did you end up having to go

to get all the research you needed to be able to come up with a

tome on Wendigo lore? Well, this book is something that was

planned and unplanned for well over a decade.

And I first started researching the Wendy

Wendy was in graduate school studying psychology and

learning about Wendigo psychosis. And it wasn't long after

that, that back in the early 2000, I went up way up to

northern Minnesota to a town called Ross by War

Road and Roseau up by the Canadian border

because there was a journal of a man, a white pioneer in the

1800s named Jake Nelson, who wrote about

the Wendy visiting a place called Indian Village, as

it was called. And he reported every time that this creature would

come there, it was a harbinger of death that the

people believed if you saw it, much like hearing or seeing the Irish

Banshee, it meant you or someone you knew was going to die. And

sure enough, people died after the Wendy showed up in the

village. And that was in the early 2000s when I first

was on-site at these places. And then shortly after, I made

my first expedition into Canada. And for the next

20 plus years, I've been traveling Canada and the U.

S. Looking at these Wendy stories. A few

years back, with my colleagues Noah Vos and Kevin Nelson,

we actually did a winter camping expedition on,

Lake Windigo in Minnesota. It's this lake,

in a lake. So it's a lake and an island amongst another

lake which is an oddity in itself. Right. And they believe that

the lake is the wendigo. Getting back to the water panther, the

water spirits, many believe the wendigo comes from the

water and they believe that the wendigo used the lake as its

kettle, that it would drown people and bring them to

their watery grave and spend eternity with the Wendigo.

So we camped on that expedition there and a lot

of these places I had to see firsthand. It's one thing

being from Wisconsin. When you talk about a heavily forested

area, people in Wisconsin immediately know what that's like.

Yes. When I was in Alberta, in Canada, far

Western Canada and location

where Swift Runner was, it was a different type of forest.

A much thicker, unruly, and older

forest than what I was even used to. And I call it the first growth.

Right? The first growth forest which means it's never been logged? Yeah.

These these stories of these these forests that you think you know, but

when you're walking around is unlike anything you've ever experienced. And I'm

a firm believer in visiting places of

the folklore to really get a sense not only

of the atmosphere and the the layout of the

land, but talking to the people. Because these legends, they

exist among the people that spread them and the

people that live with them and their histories intertwined with

the locations in which they originate.

So going to these places, talking to people, modern day

people about stories that are 400 years old and getting their

take on it, I think that's very important. I know a lot of

people do research through the Internet and they never visit

these places. And that's fine if that's the way they like to do it.

But for me, I have to be there to really

experience the folklore. Well, I'm a I'm a 100% with you there, Chad,

because, like, obviously, right now, we can't go anywhere.

Yeah. But, but that's I mean, the thing is

part of why I think we all are interested in this

and, why we're all looking for

the the weird in the world. We wanna go there. We

wanna see what those you know, we we wanna experience what those people experienced.

Then if we can't experience it I mean, obviously, we don't have a Wendigo experience

even though that this Wendigo experience might happen in my house

pretty soon. It, we want

to feel what those people felt or and if we can't do that, we wanna

get to the place where they felt it. So at least we can come close

to kind of understanding it better and having an understanding of

these strange, paranormal, and supernatural experiences.

And the best way to get that is to stand where they stood.

And, I I think that, I think you're preaching to the converted when

it comes to the best way to investigate is to go to the damn place

yourself. Yeah. Get your boots on the ground. Yeah. It gives you

a great idea when you're standing somewhere. Like, Allison, when you hit all the

Chicago Mothman alleged sighting sites, I

mean, talk about that of just being able to say, wait a minute. They

couldn't have seen it. There's a building here. Yeah. Yeah. You

gotta you gotta be where, it all

went down, or supposedly all went down to

really see what what

is is apparent there. And, you know,

it's something that can help you understand, you

know, where the witness is coming from, but it can also, you

know, help out any inconsistencies when you're

really there and not just being an armchair explorer. But it's a it's a

it's also though, like journalism or any

kind of thing is that if you wanna relate the story in the best

way you can, the best way to relate the story is to

go to the place and give a little bit of your own

interpretation of what the place is Mike.

And then you say, okay. And here's what the claim was. You

know, because you're not just, you're not just relating

a story. You're going somewhere and you're trying to,

interpret it through a way that educates

people, that, makes people feel like they were there themselves.

And it's hard for an experiencer to write like that because an

experiencer isn't a professional author. Like, we've all here you know, all of us here

have been paid to write about something. And Right. Someone that has a

paranormal experience could be just like, oh my god. I saw a UFO. It

was crazy. Crazy. And, like, that's awesome. Yeah. But you like, it

needs to come to the filter of someone who, you know,

it needs to come to that filter so we can portray it in in the

best possible way. And so, I think that, Chad, it's

awesome that you have to go to these places, and it's funny that you're talking

about Western Alberta as this place, the first growth forest. Yeah. Old

growth forest, yeah, is an incredible

experience that maybe a lot of us haven't partaken

in yet. And and when we were talking to a couple weeks ago, we talked

to Ken Walker, and he's from Western Alberta. And he's

a taxidermist that has Bigfoot experiences, and he was the one

who who created a Bigfoot. You know, he created, like,

this fake Bigfoot for, these taxidermy

conventions or whatever, and he goes through this entire process of doing it. But

the way he talks about Western Alberta Wendy he's like,

yeah. They haven't logged it. We don't know what's out there. This

area, you know, you going to that place and feeling it

and having that feeling of this is an alien place to

Mike. Does is does that help feel

like maybe this is a place where old it's it's almost a Neil Gaiman,

American Gods thing. Like, I'm here in a place where old

spirits could be living. Well, I think what was beneficial when I

was walking the woods, with Kevin Nelson is that we were

saying, We could imagine the Wendigo living here today.

Imagine 300 years ago. I mean, we have all the

modern conveniences of a vehicle and protection

and food and lodging and warmth, but

we were still a little thrown off. And imagine people living

300 years ago and that's the beauty of it. Wendy

walk to a place and you can immediately say, Yeah, I see why

people do not like this place. But then imagine what it was

like a 100, 200 years ago. It must have just been an

incredibly weird time to live. Well, Chad, I

gotta thank you for your time today. It's it's always nice to hear your

stories. It's always nice to,

to to read your books, and I'm a big fan of your books. And I

wanna encourage everybody out there to check out, Wendy Go

Lore on Amazon. There's gonna be links in the show notes. Othersidepodcast.com/294.

Chad, where is the website where people can find you when they wanna go find

because the thing is, also, in addition to your writing, you're appearing at

libraries in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa all the

time. And once we're obviously we can all go back outside,

where is the best place they can see you live? Well, I think

easiest place to find me is chadlewisresearch.com.

And once things get back to normal, if you

find the weirdest legend you can think of, most likely that's where

you'll find me. You know, one last question, Chad,

about the book. How would you like, you said you've been working on this, and

you've gone to these places over the past decades, and, I've never heard about the

did you say called Wendy psychosis? Is that an actual thing? Yes. That's not an

actual thing in the DSM 5 or whatever, is it? No.

Well, Wendigo psychosis and those of your listeners,

the DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of

Mental Disorders. Basically, the bible of mental

illness, that health professionals use. And it's

not specifically listed in any of the DSMs

over the years but it is put under a category

of a culture bound syndrome. Because it's believed that

Wendigo psychosis and in the book, I think you'll see that I

lean very heavily against this, that they believed it was

only in a certain area where this

belief was. One little culture where it was bound to

that culture and nowhere else. But in the book, you'll see that it

was all over Canada. It was on the eastern edge of the

United States. It was the Great Lakes area. But yes, it

is considered a culture bound syndrome, but it does not

have its own place in the

DSM. And most characterize it as, you know, this

flesh eating monster manifesting in symptoms of

cannibalism and they believe it's a mental illness. We

did an entire chapter on Wendigo psychosis

with its origin back in the 19 thirties all the way up to today.

Awesome. Well, I I'm old enough to have gone to psych classes where I have

a DSM 4, like, somewhere in the house here. So it's like

I'm like, I'm gonna go find that right away. The other thing,

Chet, is, you know, every time you put something out, and I know

this is a creative person and Allison knows this, every time you put something

out, you're changed a little bit at the Wendy, especially if

it's a project that takes a year and any kind a book is gonna take

months or a year to put together unless you're just cranking them out for, like,

Amazon Kindle or whatever. But you you Mike,

physical books for people to read, and they take a long time to

put together. Would you you know,

thinking of the creative process, is there anything that has changed in

your perspective or ideas or beliefs

from when you started the first word of this book to

when you printed it? Just wondering if this book has changed any

of your personal beliefs at all in how you approach investigation or

how you believe about the world. I really fell in starting

this out. Both Kevin and I, we stuttered quite a bit with it

of stopping it, thinking it was too big, too complex, too

puzzling, and then we would start up again on it. And then we would

pause and say, Do we really need another book by 2

Caucasian men talking about a First Nation legend? Right.

And, and then we really came to the conclusion that

over the 400 years, it's been intertwined with so many

other cultures, that it's become part of the

Great Lakes legend as well where we all grew up.

But I think what what terrified me about this research and what

changed me about it was the fact that I thought I had

been to a lot of places where gruesome things had been done by

people, individuals, whether it was visiting Ed Gein's

farm or a little place down in Cambridge,

Illinois where a woman murdered her 7 children. You

know, serial killers, gangsters, suicides,

untimely deaths. I thought I'd been to all of it but

nothing prepared me for visiting Swift Runners Forest.

And it was to the point where Kevin and I stayed in right in that

area for many nights. And it was,

for many, many weeks when we got back here in Wisconsin, I would

wake up in the middle of the night, you know, nightmares about Swift

Runner. And that's something that never happened to me before.

And I think it just illustrates that to

Mike, the scariest monsters and the most

gruesome things that have been done are humans for

me. And I think that's what I took away from this book that

this unspeakable terror that they felt. I tasted

a tiny tiny bit of it and it was enough for me to say

I didn't need to go through what they went through 400 years ago.

Allison, any last questions for Chad? Well, I'm just

gonna suggest that everybody get the book. I can't wait to to,

you know, take a look at all the stories in there, because, you know, like

you said, you've been working on it for so many years,

and it is a a subject that, you

know, is very dark, but, you know, it probably

looking at it illuminates these dark corners

of of humanity and, you know, helps us to

learn a little bit more about ourselves, perhaps. So

I would encourage everybody to get the book. Oh I think this is

my 25th book on the supernatural

and without a doubt for me I think it's the one that's going

to define my contribution if any to this

field. Wow. Yeah. I think this is going to

be if anyone ever remembers me in 50

years, it'll probably be for the Wendy book and

not anything else. I think it's it's that

much of a project we put into this over the last 15

years that I think this probably will define my

research in the field if anything does. Holy cow.

Fantastic. Well, you guys can find, links to buy the book at

othersidepodcast.com/294. You can check out and get the full

story. And also, you can you know, obviously,

Hollywood and TV, they love to bring up these

legends. And Chad's gone. He's done the research to find

the real legends for you. And so it's a good chance to

get a little check on, what we get from the dream factory.

It's really interesting to look at the First Nations and

also the way that, these legends have

seeped into culture, the American culture over the

past 300 years. So, Chad, we really appreciate your time today, and

I just wanna wish you the best of luck. Thanks, and keep an eye out.

Thank you, Chad. The Wendigo is more than just the winter spirit

of desperate hunger. It's a monster that feeds on greed, the

human capacity for gluttony, and the desire that you will never have enough.

The Wendigo, like George Romero's zombies, is never

satisfied. Its craving is never satiated. It's an

eerily thin gaunt beast who grows larger with every human it

devours, but it's still not enough. Once you break the

taboo and taste the flesh, you descend into madness and you will

never satisfy that hunger. So that's our inspiration for this week's

sunspot song, The Hunger of the Damned.

I can hear its cold

In the stream of the cold,

I can feel it crawl, an infection

in my soul. A

little voice deep inside,

You'd rather eat than die.

Find a way to justify as the

hunger takes

time.

Once you taste it fresh, don't say its

name.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. You can find us

online at othersidepodcast.com. Until next

Mike. See you on the other side. Yes. Thank

you for listening. And thank you to our Patreon community members

for making it possible for us to produce the show and continue making cool

things, new songs, new episodes, videos, and all of

the other content that we love to create for you. Now I'm excited

to welcome some new members into our community, and those people

are Jeremiah, and

Matt. Hey. Welcome aboard and we're looking

forward to having you in the discussion both in our private Facebook group and our

monthly hangouts. And finally, I want to acknowledge a couple of

special patrons that are pledging us at a level where they get this executive

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Doctor Ned, you've been with us all along and thank you so

much for all of your incredible support. We love you. And now

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Thank you so much for your support, JJ. We really appreciate

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And you can see all the different levels available for pledging. Thanks again

for listening, and have a great week.

It's the ice. It's the cold. It's the death coming for you because winter

is the season of it.