Wendigo...

your original pitch for the title episode. We did not, but yeah, it's creepy subject matter and it's I mean, at heart, it's a monster, a monster's idea, and it's a monster that seems to be picking up more and more in popular culture. Windigo uh symbolism played heavily into expect for the first season of TV's Hannibal, and in Sleepy Hollow season two, we will be seeing a wind to Goo and and teen Wolf. They're already already of course, you're already a window got So this is the thing

about people finding about out about your cool monsters. They end up showing up, I know. And then one hand you're like, oh, yes, it's finding its rightful place and pop culture, and then you're like, oh yeah, and maybe this is what Algernon Blackwood really wanted, though. We'll see maybe. January six eight. I went to see the sick man today and he's a pitiful looking devil. They had him with about six blankets and he still was nearly freezing.

I can do nothing for him. January twelve. I went to see him today and he looks worse than ever. I gave him a dose of Castor Royal, but he he says his heart is freezing. He keeps insisting he'll become a cannibal. He wants the Algonquins to kill him before he gets worse. January. Friend Sis came here and asked me if I would read some prayers for the sick man. He doesn't look like a human being. He seems to be terribly swollen in the body and face.

The sight of him is enough to frighten any person. The poor Algonquin slept very little here for the last nineteen days since he arrived. They have been watching him all time. I don't know how this will end. January one, Friendsois came from me last night and I went with him. I told him we ought to take some rope with us and tie him up if we could. The sound of him was terrible. It was like the calling of

a wild animal. We tied him with the ropes and I left to find some more, but it couldn't find any. And when I got back, the cords around his arms were already breaking. The algonquins asked what we should do. They said that when he got up, he would kill all of us. I told them to do what they had to do is I had no more ropes which to bind it. That was the account of Francis work Beaten Uh the Ordney HBC clerk at the Trout Lake Outpost the winter of eighteen ninety six during the alleged

Windigo possession of napapen Auger. Edited slightly for for clarity's sake, but otherwise exactly what's in the history books. And we wanted to bring that bit to your attention because what we're talking about is a creature or a possession that has to deal with cannibalism. Yeah, and even though the

creature itself is obviously a creature of myth. We've talked before about the power of myth, the power of paranormal scripts within a culture, as well as the real life incidences that have allegedly occurred because of or alongside the

Wind to Go belief. Because if the oral account of this particular Wind to Go possession story, as collected by the University of Alberta's Nathan D. Carlson, holds true, then the Algonquin tribes people gave Napapen boiling bear grease an attempt to cure him after this, uh this account that I read, and then when that didn't work, they executed him with an axe, cutting off his head and bearing

it separate from his body. Now, there are various problems, of course, with any account of cannibalism, just just cannibalism alone, much less when you start involving supernatural uh in material as well. Yeah, and that's the thing about Window that is so interesting is it really highlights this issue of cannibalism. And we've talked about this before. It's very hard to really pin down cannibalism what has actually happened, um with humans for sure, Actually in nature it's very easy to explain,

right because they are not ashamed of it. They're not ashamed, and they have a purpose, a real clear purpose to their cannibalism. And you have, um, the sexual cannibalism in orb spiders, right, that helps in terms of sexual reproduction, fitness. And then in tiger sharks you have siblified, right, you have a tiger that eats excuse me, a tiger shark that eats a sibling because it's an easy source of energy. Yeah,

it's it's just pure economics. It's a harsh world. Sometimes you have to reabsorb energy back into the the winning prospects, and that's just how it goes. But of course in human culture, the economics may still hold true, but we have all of these layers of moral concerns of society and culture. They just complicate the equation. Well, I mean when you say the economics, you're talking about survival cannibalism.

In other words, you're just at the end of your rope and you may be with one who could provide you with a bit of energy, or perhaps there is even a body who that has recently passed that someone uses. And we have many accounts of this survival cannibalism in history. Their counts that are proven, and then there are accounts that are sort of forever being argued about, such as the Dolmar Party, where some saying well, maybe they didn't

resort to survival cannibalism. Whethers say yes, some say well the bones, there's no bone evidence that they did, and others say, well, well they wouldn't know on the bones, they would have eaten the soft flesh, and of course that wouldn't the evidence of that wouldn't survive. And then you know how many people are going to come back from a chaotic trip to the mountains and be like, woa,

I only survived because I ate my friend Caleb. Right, It's just probably something that you're going to admit at cocktail parties. Right, Um, so, yeah, you've got the survival cannibalism. And then, just to complicate things a little bit further, we have these accounts of cultural rituals which may or may not be symbolic cannibalism, right, They may actually have occurred or occurred in different ways that we don't think

is cannibalistic. Yeah. Well, I mean you always have the the outsider viewing some sort of cannab supposedly cannibalistic ceremony or hearing about it. You're having Westerners observed or hear about a ritual that that from the people that they view as primitive, and so you know, it's hard to

tack down the actual truth of the matter. Yeah. Actually, if you want to look at a good example of this and someone who actually further this idea of cannibalism, you can look to Columbus, who encountered the Arawak people in Hispaniola during the fifteenth century, and they warned him of another tribe, the carab that eight people, which it appears this other tribe never existed. So this has been really hard for anthropologists to go through and to try to figure out. But as far as I can tell,

this other tribe just wasn't a reality. So it may have just been for them this story about another tribe just kind of a boogeyman, a boogeyman right telling the night there's another tribe out there and they're so bad they eat people. You don't want to be like that, and you don't want them to come for you, right, Or maybe they just wanted, you know, Columbus to hang around and they were like, we need to get him

to stay here with us and not go exploring. So in addition, Columbus may have mistaken the ritual of keeping

a loved one's bones around the house. So that's what the Arrow Act people did, and he may have mistaken that for evidence of cannibalism, and of course the whole thing is ridiculous too when you realize that Columbus comes bearing his his Catholic faith, and of course Catholicism, like a lot of Christianity, is rich in this symbol symbolic consumption of Christ's blood and flesh, which even though you're not actually consuming blood and flesh, uh, it is, it

is symbolic cannibalism at at heart, right, which we see in so many other cultures. The problem, of course, is that Columbus was the authority on all matters foreign at that point, so people are like, so where'd you go, what'd you see? What you experience? And then whatever he said became sort of the gospel. Yeah, and that's one

of the ms you have throughout history too. I mean, going back to plenty of the Elder and all these guys where you just have certain voices and there aren't a lot of there's not a lot of discussion about the matter, but you know, this guy said that there are cannibals living in Africa, and that remains sort of

the voice of truth for a matter of centuries. So that's why The Wind to Go is such an interesting thing to look at, because it really gets at the heart of the taboo of cannibalism, but also the psychology of the ways in which we behave when we have these folk tales as stand ins for for what becomes

a reality. Yeah. So I want you to imagine a dark, gaunt giant that haunts the woods, clad only in matted hair, and it's peering outitude from the wild depths, with blood red eyes as wild as sinister and sinister as those of an owl, with claws that are curl and muscles that are coiled with the strength of a bear, and its teeth are eager, and its foul tongue is longing for the taste of human flesh that sounds cuddly. Yeah. Yeah, Now, this is some thing that is The creature is known

to different North American tribal groups um. And when we're talking about the geography here, we're talking about French Canadian territory um and the Algonquins are they figure in this quite a bit as well as a couple of the other tribes. Yeah, the Algonquins as one of the most populous and widespread North American native language groups, and uh at different times it composed like a whole bunch of

different tribes. You know, there did a lot of different tribes that would spoke the Algonquin tongue, and there were a lot of shared beliefs among them, and they they thrived in the harsh world of northern North America, a land of vast, unforgiving wilderness, brutal winners, particularly during the Little Ice Age era in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, which correlates exactly with a lot of this exploration by

French Canadians who met up with these different tribes. And we'll talk about this more, but they began to um actually adopt some of these folk tales of the win to go. And I also wanted to mention that it goes by wakaw Witigo with tikio and weendigo long ago Windigo Witigo and we ti go Tigo. It sounds like a corporation secretly is based on cannibalism. It's right, we tigo, you can we tigo to um. And the cool thing about this is that the Windigo really sort of describes

two different things at play here. One is the beast that you described who lives in that forest waiting to feast on a human. The other is a cannibalistic spirit that can possess a human. Yeah, and that spirit kind of walks the barrier between the world and the world of the spirits. And of course that's a very important area in the tales and the belief systems in the

world view of the the first people of North America. Yeah, and if you look at the Algonquins, they they really focus on these spirits as as a sort of cautionary all to people during these very harsh winters not to turn to cannibalism, because they're saying that if you eat the flesh of another, well, your soul is now susceptible to the wind to go. Yeah. There there were a number of causes, a number of things that could turn you into a window go. Most of them are are

based in diet and food and and hunger. Um. So you might be cursed by a sorcerer, always a possibility. You know, it'll happen if you are yourself. If you yourself are a sorcerer, you might seek the transformation in yourself, always an option, all right. You might trigger the change. If you fast too long or feast too heavily, so a little too much food, a little too little food, you're gonna potentially open yourself up to the window Goes caress.

But most importantly are all of all, as you mentioned, if you if you are forced to consume human flesh, or if you're tricked into doing so, even in a dream, then the window go can reach out to you, touch your soul and bring on this steady and horrible change, And then you might feel ice in your heart longing for flesh. Yeah, because that's uh, that's that's the big thing right there. Um. There are a number of symptoms.

According to the Algonquin Reports catalog by Nathan D. Carlson, the symptoms include stupor, catatonia, depression, paranoia, and orexia or the inability to hold down food, nausea, vomiting, emaciation, glazed eyes, bodily or facial swelling, violent shouting, hallucinations of family members as food animals, particularly as beavers, and finally, this unstoppable urge to consume human flesh. Yeah. There was one account that was reading in a separate book where like a

mother was was potentially turning into a window. Go and she was telling her she's matter or children. She's saying, you all look like beavers to me. Now wow, But but it's that. But the big thing that like the major symptoms and the ultimate symptoms are the unstoppable urge to consume human flesh and this chill in your in your torso, meaning in your heart, as your heart becomes this lump of ice, that's right, as the transformation occurs. Let's take a quick break and when we get back,

we'll talk about psychosis. All right, we're back. We're just talking about the symptoms in the folk tales of the of the Wind to Go and uh, and how your heart may seem to become this lump of of of ice and you have this irresistible urge to consume human flesh. Now, there were a few cures curative measures, that were also related in the folk tales. But I think it is interesting for you talking about the curative measures, is that people took this folklore and then they began to exhibit

these symptoms. And this is what that psychosis is, These cases of people actually coming down with not actually turning into these sort of werewolf like creatures, but actually connating some dastardly acts. Yeah, because, on one hand, as as Nathan D. Carlson points out in his excellent article reviewing Wittico and Ethno History of donable Monsters in the Athabaska District of Northern Alberta nineteen kien Um, this was not

just a you know, folk tale. If it was told, this was something in which there was a lot of belief. There was a lot of fear, he says, quote in the collective belief systems of pre twenty one century Algonquins. Contrary to the opinions of some modern academics, as discussed below, the Wittigo condition was not a legendary fabrication. For example, in early eighteen ninety six, Richard Young, the Anglican Bishop of the Athabaska District, wrote the following in a letter

journal to the Evangelical Fathers in the Church Missionary Society. Quote, the Indians have a great terror of the so called windigoose or cannibals. They believe that after eating human flesh, their heart becomes a lump of ice, and no one alive is safer them. Assert as all of this sounds to us, it is a real terror to the untutored Indian.

So there's a little obviously there's a bit of xenophobia and uh and and racism and in that uh, that particular portrayal, but but still it underlines that this was this was serious. That and if you're in a situation where you have been forced to resort to survival cannibalism, and then it's known or even if it's known only

to you, you you return with shame. Perhaps they other members of your your group know that this occurred, and before you know what, you're ostracized and maybe you feel and there are a number of these symptoms, like if there's a whole list of possible symptoms, and if you begin if you experience one of them or feel like you experience one of them, uh, combined with the guilt that you feel, then how long before you begin manifesting this this paranoid idea you were transforming. Yeah, let's set

this seam for this too. Or we're talking about these sort of starvation winters that would occur in in this part of the world, um, particularly as you said, during that period from the seventy century to the nineteenth century, and you know, you have people who would sort of collectively get together as families during that time and band together and try to survive. But there is still a

huge amount of isolation. So you might be with five six oven of your family members, um, you know, out in the middle of nowhere, with this wind whistling or this wind howling. And when you look at these algonquin Um depictions, the wind is a huge force here. So I don't have you ever been like on the mountain before, and and um, there's just huge amounts of wind coming in at your structure. If you're in a tent or in a cabin, yeah, yeah, it's just if you're you're

out in the open, it's just whipping by. It's all you can hear in your ears. And if you're in a structure or even you know, in the shelter of a tree or or or some stone, and it's just whistling by, and it's and it varies, it's it's this changing tone almost the song. Yeah, and yeah. I remember when I was in Costa Rica, Monteverde and I was I spent a couple of nights in a cabin on the top of the mountain there and the first night I was like, oh, this is beautiful, It's gorgeous. The

second night I was like, it's this is awful. I cannot get any sleep. The wind is howling. The third night I started to feel like I was going crazy. So imagine bumps of this going on. I want to say, if you resort to cannibalism in Monteverdi, that's on. You. Don't try and pin that on a wind to go. Well, that's the thing, right, So I go out with a friend. We're gonna go try to trap something. You know, maybe he breaks his leg. You know, things aren't looking good.

Form so awesome, and I have a little bit of his meat and then as we as you said, come back to camp or to your cabin and you're feeling the shame for it. Um Now, I didn't want to point out that Kevin Vulcan a professor of psychology. He's often called on as a behavioral expert on TV shows and they're like, he categorizes it as an extreme form of cabin fever. So again, you've got harsh environmental factors there. You're with a couple of people and things can go awry.

You're with a bunch of people that you love but are also maybe driving you a little crazy. Yeah, and uh, and because that's one of the common tropes of the wind to go story is you have like a mom or a dad or even both that go nuts and start eating the kids. And then you know, you eat one kid, and you eat the steck again, and then and then it just gets out of hand. Yeah, Vulgan says,

it becomes a compulsion. So there you are in your cabin, the wind howling for months on end, and you began to really think that you are the wind and go right, it's it's taken hold of you. You're feeling icing in your heart and uh, your your child is starting to look like a drumstick, yeah or beaver. Yeah. All right, we're gonna continue talking talking about that particular strain, but just to go back presented cures that that we're explored

for for the wind to go situation. Carlson relates several from different sources, but they include drinking high wines by the fire, which sounds rather pleasant. I would say that should be your first stop on any attempt to treat a suspected wind to go situation. Next, the hit the consumption of heated or even boiling animal flats, fats. So you have some some moose meat, bear meat, what have you. You heat to heat the fat up, get it nice

and boiling, and then you drink it. Now, both of these methods uh drinking by the fire and drinking hot animal fat. The idea is that it would help UH burn away the ice that is formed in the heart. That's the key to the window go There was another tail that I believe Carlson related in which there was a group of window goes and they were they were just a complete terror and you know, eat everyone in sight.

And they were particularly hard to deal with because on one hand, window goes were said to be bulletproof, you know, or bullets didn't affect them, and the only way to to really kill them was to deal with that icy heart. But these window goes had taken their icy hearts out and store them elsewhere, so they were they weren't not susceptible to that. Yeah. So um so those are some options. Also, you could of course get a spirit medium to use a shaking tent ritual, which is a special tint in

which spirits could be summoned. But if these didn't work, the only thing to do was to tie the window go down and hack it to pieces with an axe bearing the pieces so as to keep it from becoming whole again and killing everyone inside. Now, someone by the name of Jack Fiddler and okay cream Member actually took that to heart and kind of became the van helsing

for his community of window Goes. He claimed to have slayed fourteen people who were possessed, and he was in prison when he murdered a woman who he says was on the verge of turning into a windingo. So just so you know, there were people out there that we're trying to actually, you know, stop it before it started what they really thought was going to be a possession. And of course we have so many different examples of people who actually did this to their families, who actually

ate their family. So you can see why someone like Jack Fiddler might really take this to heart as his cause, his his reason for being. Yeah, and now, of course one of the of course, the problems we mentioned with the cannibalism and cannibism stories, so the window Goes stories were we're told in around the campfire and by a bi bi algonquin drives people who really love stories and told stories and the nature of stories they are told as is that you you take on stories as your

own that are other people's. You you prop up a story by saying you were there when you weren't. All of these things happened. The fish gets a little larger with each telling, etcetera. And then you have the French Canadian voyagers, the travelers who are who are who are meeting these people trading stories with them, and of course

they're early into telling stories as well. Uh So we can't take every story to heart, but some of them are are are actually really well found at that for instance, uh, the swift Runner kids, Now, this was a cree trapper who serially murdered and consumed the bodies of his wife and five children. And this was near Athabaska Landing Trading Post in the North the Central in north central Alberta in the winner of eighteen seventy eight. And all the murders except the last one, we're more of a clear

case of starvation cannibalism. But then the last one, well, i'll just read you what he had to say when when he was interviewed, he said, at that that moment, the window go suddenly took possession of my soul, and in order to live longer, far from people, and to put out of the way the only witness to my crime, I seized my gun and killed the last of my children, and aid him as that I had done the others.

Some weeks later I was taken by the police, sentenced to death, and in three days I am to be hanged. And indeed, this is where it gets a little a little extra historical importance added to this is that, according to Carlson, uh swift Runner was the first person hanged by the Mounties, the Mounted Police, which which gives this Uh swift Runner winding. Okay, so a unique position in

the history of Canadian jurisprudence. So the thing about this is that we don't know that it's actually a psychosis right. In fact, academics have seen it or they've talked about as a cultural balanced psychosis, but they've also called it um perhaps a culturally localized manifestation of paranoid schizophrenia because we see some mental illness UM in this area, and then a correlate of scapegoating. And then also in Nathan D. Carlson's paper Reviving Whittico, he says that it could have

been a culturally mediated performance. So in some ways, again it was taking to heart this uh, this story and performing it in a way. Uh. Perhaps that person didn't actually want the taste of flesh, but they were caught up in the moments in these long winters and the sort of disease that would settle in with this, and maybe they began to display the history on its Yeah.

And then also their their situations where you can well imagine one using the wind to go idea and wind to go stigma for personal game, like, for instance, here at work, so we all have new desks. Um, louder Milk, Alsa louder Milk has a particularly nice desk. It's like

right next to the window. It's pretty good. So I can imagine that if ladder Milk were to be accused of being a wind to go, um, you know, someone might say, well, hey, I kind of want louder milks to desk, So I'm gonna jump in on that bandwagon and try to to push that that idea among my my fellow co workers. And then you originally reached the point where there's nothing left to do but chopper into pieces and then lo and behold, I'm setting in her

new desk. Okay, so you're the one who started the rumor about not going into the bathroom alone when ladder Milk was using yes and about what she's really been bringing in her launch pail. Okay. The second thing someone I want to mention is that some of us might apply a little magical thinking to that space and think that they wouldn't want to inhabit it for fear of being possessed by the window go as well. Yeah, exactly,

it's uh, it's been picked up over the years. We're gonna talk a little bit about how it was picked up by the French Canadians, but of course even in modern culture, how you see it to show up in in different forms of media. For instance, Stephen King's novel pet Cemetery as a Window Go in It that I

remember is working pretty well. Um, the movie Ravenous uh is it also features the wind to Go myth pretty strongly, kind of kind of taking it and combining with the Western vampire uh folk folklore to create kind of I think an interesting Animal's been a while since I've seen it, but as a really awesome soundtrack by Damon Auburn of Blur and Guerrillas, and minimalis composer Michael Nyman. And uh, let's say there was Larry Fresden's film Wind to Go,

which was like an indie horror film. It was pretty interesting, and the TV show Hannibal has sort of dream hallucination sequences in which a Wind to Go character appears. That that I thought it was pretty effective and one of the pieces of media that may have started at all in terms of math consumption. Uh, sorry about that pun is Algernon Blackwood's seven short story The Wind to Go,

you know, And I like Ultronon Blackwood. I have enjoyed his writing in the past, but I started to reread his window Go story and I have to say I didn't like it. I didn't feel like it was really very wind to Go e you know, it was just he kind of took the name Win to Go and some a certain amount of the feeling for it. But then I don't know, I thought I thought it felt

kind of felt like it fell flat a bit. Well though, you you could say that at that point Blackwood didn't have this sort of vast stores of information about the Wind to Go to pull from. You can go to the Wikipedia or listen to our podcast. No, No, you probably had a French Canadian friend who was like, let me tell you about this crazy thing that happened to

a friend of a friend of a friend of mines. Right, And when someone tells you a story, like, especially when it's from a different culture, what can you do but combine the scraps that you were given that may or may not make sense from from your own cultural standpoint. You combine it with the ideas that you already have in your own culture, and you end up with sort of a new animal, a new myth emerges from this

synthesis of ideas. Yeah, so let's let's sort of do some time traveling here to say, the Lake Superior region in Canada eighteen fifties. You probably would hear a French Canadian really complaining about this really harsh winter and saying that they were so hungry and there were so little resources that they actually boiled their moccasins and ate them.

I mean, this is our true accounts, and um, and then and but then also of the story that is so popular that you end up telling it even if you didn't necessarily experience, right, And then, of course, one thing leads to another and you start talking about canibalism, right, so you say, oh, man, if I ate my my Moncasin's food from just two seconds away from from you, buddy, right,

and the conversation gets really awkward. Yes, this was This was all excellently discussed in Werewolves and Windy Goes Narratives of cannibal monsters in French Canadian uh Voyager oral tradition by Caroline Protruction of York University where she she really goes into what happens when the French Canadian voyagers encounter the algonquins and start swapping tales. Yeah, because you have

to again sort of imagine this this time period. There are missionaries, fur traders, colonists, the voyagers all going through and meeting different tribes and then hearing about these atrocities. Now, if you are someone who is French Canadian, you might be familiar with some other folklore from Europe, like say, we're wolfs, So it wouldn't be too crazy easy because

you may have a belief system that supports that. Because the werewolf myth, of course is that on certain nights because of the moon, you know, maybe some curses are in play as well. But a man transforms into a wolf or a wolf like being, and then goes out and eats things, including human flesh. And then the next morning he's like, whoa, what do I What had happened? What did I do? What horrible things happened to me?

What kind of monster did I become? Right? And then you've got the whole like, man, I was boiling my my moccasins, and you have all these other accounts. In fact, I wanted to bring up Jamestown sixteen o nine, Um that that colony had such a harsh winter, that we know that they engaged not in just eating saint dogs,

cats and horses. But recently this year the bones of a fourteen year old girl were excavated, and Um, Douglas Owsley, he's the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones, says, given, given these bones in a trash pit, all cut up and chopped up, it's clear that this body was dismembered

for consumption. So in the same way, if you have these this folklore from Europe and you know about werewolf, you know that people can be transformed into them, and you also have these folk tales standing in for moral code, then as a European who is in this territory, this Algonquian territory. You probably would say, wow, we gotta watch out here. Yeah, because I mean, the werewolf myth ultimately revolves around the idea, you know, what happens if I give in to my be steal nature, or what if

my my be steal nature overcomes me? What have I given to the economic sensibility of cannibalism, for instance, despite all of my human moral standing. And so there's a there's there's a lot of of comparisons to be made between the werewolf myth and the wind to Go myth.

And you can definitely see where the werewolf myth would help you understand the wind to Go myth, even though the window Go myth is totally about human human flesh being consumed, totally about cannibalism, whereas cannibalism is just sort

of one aspect of the werewolf myth. Yes, protructing me actually us and and as you say, her find paper that what we can learn from this is that the cannibal monster stories that for youshers told each other reveal many aspects of their lives and cosmology, such as starvation, mental illness, and metamorphos because in a way they were undergoing a transformation themselves. Yeah, they started out as Westerners in a strange world. They travel out into this just

I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine. Some books have have really done a great job of of portraying this excursion into the wilds and from this territory. I think of like Northwest Passage. I also think of Black Robe, excellent book. Um, you go into this just rich, wild world where there are no Westerners there. There these these foreign people's that you can only partially understand, that have

a totally different worldview than you do. And and then you start and you're in dealing with with limited resources, you're suddenly you find yourself starving or you're ill, and then what are you to make up of all that? And then over time you have the Westerners of assimilating more and more with the native cultures to the point where they're they're taking they're taking Algonquin brides, they're they're

they're they're becoming their own communities. Right with this shared mythos that has been weaved together from both the Algonquin traditions and the European traditions that they imported and yet xenophobia exists. And that's where it becomes really interesting because the window Goo is really a stand in for this otherness. As you said, these are people in a new land with new experiences, and everything is the other, including the

Alcohnquin at some point in other tribes. So, uh, you know, with the windingo carries this idea that you're you're engaging

in this other world, the supernatural world. You know, I can't in thinking about the window Go, I keep coming back to some material that we came across in our episode on the Problem of Hell, where we talked about the the old gods that that society has had, the hunter gatherer gods, the hornet gods that were more chaotic, that were that that dealt uh thematically with the scarcity of food and the the uncertainty of tomorrow's meal and the meal after that and the in and in doing

so you can see where that you can see why the windowgo is really the ultimate evil spirit of the Algonquins, because it represents the uncertainty of food and it represents the likelihood at even at times of starvation and in falling, what it would take to fall below the barrier, the threshold for um civilization, you know, because I feel like

a lot of our stories deal with that. Like we watched the show like Breaking Bad, and we see like these you see a character that's falling throughout the entire show, and at what point does he fall below the threshold? And you see these other characters that you know, addicts and whatnot, and you you look at them and you think, there's a character who's fallen below the threshold. Woe as would be me if I were to to to fall that low as well? And uh in in a society

like that, like that is the base mark cannibalism. You've fallen below the moral standing that defines the protects the culture well right, And it's a reminder of that time period when that the line between you know, death and survival, which is just like that you cross over it so quickly. So it would be tempting to engage in cannibalism if you had to, because it may be the difference between

life and death. Indeed, prodruct Any points out that a lot of these stories he shared stories of the wind to Go that the French Canadians shared with the Algonquins, that there were There were two lessons essentially in all

of them, particularly for the the French Canadian listener. First of all, the idea that the native people's are your friend, or at least to be relied upon in the wild, because a lot of these stories they end with either you're starving and uh and some algonquins come along and they feed you and then you're you're safe, or the windigo situation happens and they're the ones who come with the knowledge of how to defeat the wind to go,

or they actually chop it up for you. But then the second lesson, and this lesson, and she says is a is a little more subdued. The lesson is that starvation cannibalism is an option. It's a kind of a whisper in the ear saying and so this is horrible, but if you've got to do it, you can do it. And if it's going to get whispered into your ear,

you might as well blame it on the wind, right Yeah. Um. You know The thing about this is that anthropologists, when they began to study this in earnest, found that it pretty much dried up all of these these expressions of windigo possession just evaporated. So again it brings into question whether or not it was really a psychosis or if maybe this part of the world was opening up and um, there were other influences going on. So there you have

it again. This is one of our favorite creepy episodes from the past few years, so we figured you would like to explore it again and we we got a chance to to listen to it again as well. Yeah, and if you guys have any ideas about this that the power of folklore, Um, whether or not you maybe have even I've seen a window go in your midst or become one, let us know. You can email us at below the Mind at how stafforks dot com for

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