Who is wendigo

According to other legends, the windigo has pointed or animal-like ears with antlers or horns sprouting on its head. Sharp and pointy teeth, extremely bad breath and body odour are also often traits of a windigo.

The windigo is usually, but not always, endowed with powers, such as superhuman strength and stamina that allow it to stalk, overpower and devour its victims. Windigos are usually credited with exceptional eyesight, hearing and sense of smell. They are said to move with the speed of the wind and have the ability to walk across deep snow or even over open water without sinking.

According to some legends, windigos can be killed with a conventional weapon, such as a club or firearm. Other legends claim that the windigo has to be somehow subdued, its icy heart cut out and then melted in a roaring fire. Still other legends claim that only a knowledgeable First Nations spiritual leader, a shaman , can dispatch a windigo with a specific spell and ceremony. The windigo legend existed in Algonquian oral history for many centuries, long before Europeans arrived in North America.

However, the first European-written account of a windigo was by Paul Le Jeune , a Jesuit missionary who lived among the Algonquin people in the earlyth century in what is now Quebec. In a report to his superiors in Paris in , Le Jeune wrote:. This devilish woman…added that [the windigo] had eaten some Attikamegoukin — these are the tribes that live north of the River that is called Three Rivers — and that he would eat a great many more of them if he were not called elsewhere.

But that Atchen sort of a werewolf would come in his place to devour them… even up to the French Fort; that he would slaughter the French themselves. Missionaries in what became Canada continued to report legends of the windigo until well into the 20th century. Indigenous peoples often accused these people of being windigos; HBC traders sometimes described them as mad.

In some cases, community members or relatives of the accused killed the suspected windigo as a precaution. Myths and Folklore Wiki Explore. Top Content. Forum Blog posts. Explore Wikis Community Central. This creature may appear as a monster with some characteristics of a human, or as a spirit who has possessed a human being and made them become monstrous. It is historically associated with cannibalism, murder, insatiable greed, and the cultural taboos against such behaviors.

This creature has long been known among the Algonquian Ojibwe , Eastern Cree, Saulteaux, Westmain Swampy Cree, Naskapi, and Innu peoples who have described them as giants, many times larger than human beings.

Although descriptions can vary somewhat, common to all these cultures is the view that the wendigo is a malevolent, cannibalistic, supernatural being that is strongly associated with winter, the north, coldness, famine, and starvation. Its body is skeletal and deformed, with missing lips and toes. Its breath was a strange hiss, its footprints full of blood, and it ate any man, woman or child who ventured into its territory. And those were the lucky ones. Sometimes, the Wendigo chose to possess a person instead, and then the luckless individual became a Wendigo himself, hunting down those he had once loved and feasting upon their flesh.

According to the legends, a Wendigo is created whenever a human resorts to cannibalism to survive. In the past, this occurred more often when Indians and settlers found themselves stranded in the bitter snows and ice of the north woods. Sometimes stranded for days, any survivors might have felt compelled to cannibalize the dead in order to survive.

Other versions of the legend cite that humans who displayed extreme greed, gluttony, and excess might also be possessed by a Wendigo, thus the myth served as a method of encouraging cooperation and moderation.

Native American versions of the creature spoke of a gigantic spirit, over fifteen feet tall, that had once been human but had been transformed into a creature by the use of magic. Though all of the descriptions of the creature vary slightly, the Wendigo is generally said to have glowing eyes, long yellowed fangs, terrible claws, and overly long tongues. Sometimes they are described as having sallow, yellowish skin and other times, depicted to be covered with matted hair.

In Dead Space 3 , the Feeders are necromorphs that resulted from humans eating infected corpses out of desperation. They are fairly weak individually, but like the Pack from the previous game , who may or may not be the child version always attack in groups. Wendigo is the official name of the line of monsters that starts with Gargantuan Beast and ends with Yeti in Diablo II. Although not encountered in the game, one of the codex entries in Dragon Age: Origins mentions that people possessed by hunger demons become cannibals.

An enemy introduced in the second episode of DUSK is named after the creature. On top of the looks they have the appearance of human skeletons with the skulls and antlers of deer and the implied taste for human flesh the level that introduces them has no living enemies before their first appearance, just a lot of pre-placed corpses , they've also gained invisibility that lasts until the player lands a hit on them. Fallout series: Fallout 76 features wendigo in the more dangerous areas of the map.

One of the storylines of the main quest reveals that the wendigos of the Fallout universe are the cannibal variety. And then there's the Wendigo Colossus, a three-headed variant whose piercing shrieks can terrify the player characters, causing them to involuntarily run in a random direction. Earle Williams.

Note The reason he has such a mundane name is because he Was Once a Man ; he was trapped in a mine with no food and when one of the other miners died, they cannibalized him. Slowly, Earle started to go insane, trying to eat all of his colleagues, living or dead The monster is a spore carrier , which mutated and grew to enormous size after being exposed to a chemical weapon.

This is what happened to Joshua Graham after dying from the Vault 22 infection. There's a boss called Wendigo in Final Fantasy X. Gems of War , the Boss of the Wild Court mission is the Wendigo, appearing as a hulking, fur-covered humanoid with a deer Skull for a Head and hunt-related magics.

It is classified as a member of the Fair Folk and in the background story he took over the Court after the PC and heroine Atlanta took care of Orion, the previous Master of the Hunt.

Ghost Master features a Secret Character note If right conditions are met, you may encounter him later in the game captured by Ghostbreakers Windwalker, a Wendigo-class ghost. He is a hunchback ghost of ice and wind with British Teeth. Right from the start, he can howl in the night, driving people crazy, summon winds, and even cause a Siberian cold on the whole map.

Train him further, and he'll be able to freeze everyone and make people outright mad with anger. Humorously, a wendigo named Wendy appears in Grand Chase , but looks like this until Art Evolution set in Grim Dawn Wendigoes appear as the result of the Ravager influencing those who resort to cannibalism; since the apocalypse has struck, and naturally many people have to resort to it, wendigos are running rampant in several regions.

You get a sneak peak of two of them on Asterkarn Road in Act 4, but they don't show up in force until Act 5. In the Ashes of Malmouth expansion, you even find a whole Affably Evil town of Wendigo cultists that worship the Ravager, and purport at least they're not quite as savage as the actual Wendigos.

It also lets you find an incomplete aspect of the Ravager called the Reaper of the Lost if you really piss them off. It's modifier skill, Blood Pact , adds a combat buff to this aura. It's noted that these totems are usually taboo among most wildmen tribes, since contact with the wendigo's spirit form usually turns the shaman into its vessel. Hexen has an enemy type called "wendigo", found in frosty areas; they look like humanoid beings made of ice and they shoot spiky lumps of ice at you.

Horror adventure Kona makes mention of the myth, as you track through rural Quebec in a blizzard, trying to solve a murder and string of disappearances. It turns out to be far more than a mention, with the wendigo being invoked as an instrument of revenge by a local native after a hunting incident gone wrong. When the intended target of revenge died, the wendigo was left to rampage and kill everyone in town by encasing them in ice, until it was shot through the heart with a crossbow bolt.

The game climaxes with you accidentally releasing the beast by pulling out the bolt, and being chased by the wendigo before making a narrow escape.

He resembles a massive, grotesque humanoid with a skull-like head, exposed ribs and heart and a long tail. It's also missing an arm, apparently because the Arc Villain you're after mutilated him, but can summon a phantom copy to use. As a nod to mythology, the party member who notices his presence in the pre-bossfight cutscene is Kongol, who vaguely resembles a native american, and you can instantly kill him by using the Satchel on his exposed heart after he perform a certain move.

Kaichi "Susukichi" Suzuki from NEO: The World Ends with You gives this vibe as part of his boss battle, with his massive top-heavy build, deer Animal Motif , and eyes emanating dark auras that make his head look like a skull.

Ironically, he's weak to Ice. In Outward , people who commit cannibalism transform into wendigos, powerful undead that exude cold. They're commonly found around bandits, who abuse and neglect their captives to the point that cannibalism approaches inevitability. The bandits themselves are also prone to turning. Here, they're portrayed as muscular semi-human monstrosities crawling on all fours, and are commonly found in the forests and mountains of the area.

Though not given specific focus in the missions, Lore entries note that Wendigoes are the result of possession by a malignant spirit usually kept away by magic rituals, are effectively unaging , and doomed to grow hungrier the more they eat ; worse still, with most of their usual prey having been herded away from the forests by the ongoing Zombie Apocalypse , the local Wendigoes have resorted to eating literally anything else - including trees and rocks.

Wendigo appear as demons in several Shin Megami Tensei games. Specimen 8 in Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion appears to be modeled after one, having a deer-like head with antlers and being in a prominently wooded area.

Until Dawn : Wendigoes, depicted as emaciated, corpse-like humanoids with abnormally long limbs, serve as the main supernatural threat. The mountain has been infested with them since , when a group of miners resorted to cannibalism to survive after being trapped for weeks by a cave-in. The survivors were taken to a nearby sanatorium where, once they finished their transformation, they massacred the staff and the other patients.

Years later, Hannah also turned into one when she ate her sister Beth to survive after they both fell off a cliff and were presumed dead. They're no larger than a normal human, but they're substantially stronger and more acrobatic, while their tough skin means that bullets only slow them down, so they have to be killed with fire.

The characters initially think they're fighting zombies, which leads to misplaced Zombie Infectee drama upon finding out that one of them bit Emily. In World of Warcraft there is a rather common type of enemy sporting the name "Wendigo", although they more resemble yetis than actual wendigos. And, in a strange if amusing coincidence, wendigos in the game as well as the sasquatch and yeti that share its wireframe are among the only creatures in the game that actually have functioning, individually-rendered toes instead of sock-shaped feet with the toes painted on.

Wendigos in the Warcraft series date from earlier than that - there were already some in Warcraft III , being the arctic equivalents of the Sasquatch. A large one is what kills Mason during the tutorial level of West Of Dead. He can pay it back in kind during "The Hunt", gaining the ability to fast travel between sigils he's found on the current level he's on as a reward. In X2: Wolverine's Revenge , The Wendigo appears in the mountain levels and is the second boss fight. Marvel's Wendigo shows up as a boss character in the old X-Men arcade game, and again in the boss rush that was the final level.

He's fast, hits hard, and is constantly shouting "Wen-Di-Go! Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven : Woody, an anthropology post-graduate, believes he has encountered one shortly before the outbreak while living in a Native American community.

It bears a striking similarity to those infected with the Zeta virus. The Big Guy Sevink from Geist Panik is a Wendigo who has 'achieved critical flesh', and you would have to kill him as many times as the number of people he's eaten. He's described at one point as being " It returns in the Spin-Off Bad Machinery.

Eloria from White Dark Life is a demon classified as a wendigo. She usually appears as an armored woman with ram like horns but her One-Winged Angel form swaps them for the appropriate deer antlers.

Web Original. Unclassified Encounter has Wendigos appearing all the way in the Ardennes, Belgium, no thanks to a Native American soldier stationed there turning himself into one out of desperation. Unfortunately for the unnamed soldier, the curse cannot be reversed, anyone bitten and killed by the Wendigo is turned into one themselves, and Wendigos cannot distinguish between friendly or enemy.

Bedtime Stories YouTube Channel has an episode that covers the legend surrounding the Wendigo, as well as recent eyewitness accounts and alleged video evidence of its existence. Wendigos turn up in several Creepypastas.

The Mordeo in the Crypt TV universe is this in all but name: being a monster that pulls a Demonic Possession on those who cannibalize in its woods and turns their head into a rotting deer skull painfully. In Guardian Angel , it's implied that the titular "Angel" who saved Tanya from the car crash is actually a Wendigo.

The ending of the story outright states that Tanya has become one too. Hazbin Hotel : Alastor gives off this vibe with his deer Animal Motif , his slender build , and his cannibalistic tendencies. The horror tale "I am the Wendigo" is told from the perspective of a once-human wendigo on the hunt. Wendigos are basically interchangeable with ghouls in The Kingdoms of Evil. Wendigos are basically mass-manufactured cannibal sociopath Super Soldiers used by Skrea as spies.