Signing up enhances your TCE experience with the ability to save items to your personal reading list, and access the interactive map. According to most Algonquian oral traditions, a windigo is a cannibalistic monster that preys on the weak and socially disconnected. In most versions of the legend, a human becomes a windigo after his or her spirit is corrupted by greed or weakened by extreme conditions, such as hunger and cold.

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The wendigo is described as a monster with some characteristics of a human or as a spirit who has possessed a human being and made them become monstrous. Its influence is said to invoke acts of murder, insatiable greed, cannibalism and the cultural taboos against such behaviors. The creature lends its name to the controversial modern medical term Wendigo psychosis , described by psychiatrists as a culture-bound syndrome with symptoms such as an intense craving for human flesh and fear of becoming a cannibal. The word appears in many Native American languages, and has many alternative transliterations.
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The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tautly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody. Its body was unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, giving off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption. In the north woods of Minnesota , the forests of the Great Lake Region, and the central regions of Canada is said to live a malevolent being called a wendigo also spelled windigo. 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.
Gordon Frazer. Source: Wikimedia Commons. But do you know where—or more importantly, from whom— this story originated? The windigo originates from spiritual beliefs held by Indigenous peoples who inhabited large parts of both the northeastern seaboard and continental interior, especially the region around the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River.