Wendigo stories break down into two categories. In one, the wendigo is created when a proud warrior trades his soul for the power to destroy a threat to his tribe. Once the threat is gone, he is driven into the wilderness and vanishes. In the other, the wendigo slowly loses its humanity through some combination of dark magic and cannibalism. In either case, the end result is one fearsome monster.
Cryptozoologists have seized on the wendigo legends as evidence for everything from Sasquatch to the survival of D. B. Cooper, and although they’re wrong—don’t get us started on cryptozoologists—there is some variation in the appearance of individual wendigo. They don’t look like Bigfoot. More like a yeti, maybe, that’s eaten nothing but snow since 1850. They’re typically larger than a human, but not too much, and skeletally thin. Often, especially in the north country, they are missing some of the body parts that are most vulnerable to frostbite: toes and parts of the ears and nose. Sometimes they’re covered in matted white fur, and other descriptions characterize them as practically hairless. What all of the descriptions have in common is inhumanly long teeth, claws instead of fingernails, and glowing eyes.
Often they hunt by simply running down their prey, but sometimes there’s a different approach, one that for our money says that the wendigo enjoys what it does. A lone traveler in the forest starts to hear things, say. He looks around and never quite sees anything, except every once in a while he catches a glimpse of something moving fast out of the corner of his eye. After a while all of these glimpses add up, and maybe the wendigo gives him a growl to get things going a little faster. The traveler snaps at last and begins to run, and then the wendigo pounces.
They don’t have to do it that way. Wendigo are stronger and faster than any human alive and can kill you before you know they’re in the same time zone. They do it that way because they like to.
And if you survive an encounter with a wendigo, don’t think you’re out of the woods yet (ha). There’s plenty of lore claiming that the wendigo can possess the spirits of hunters, jumping bodies, perhaps, when its own has started to break down.
So how do you kill them? Part of the final transformation from human to wendigo is the heart changing into pure ice. Shatter that icy heart with a blade of iron or silver, and you kill the wendigo.
Maybe. The only way to be sure is to cut its body apart. Us Winchesters, we’re of the opinion that it never hurts to burn them, too.
After his first run-in with a wendigo, Dad had this to say:
Cannibalism plus magic equals a dark, dark road. I’ve never seen anything so hungry. Every motion and sound and breath of the WENDIGO is about hunger. It’s stealthy when stalking its prey, blindingly fast when pouncing, savage and ravenous when eating.
I wish I didn’t know about that last part, but you see things in this job.
Algernon Blackwood didn’t know the half of it.
Algernon Blackwood wrote a famous horror story called “The Wendigo.” We got a kick out of it but have to agree with Dad, too—once you’ve really seen a wendigo, some of the zip is gone from the story.
We’ve taken out a wendigo, and it wasn’t easy. Hunters who don’t bat an eyelash at your average spirit speak of the wendigo with the kind of respect due a dangerous adversary. And speaking of hunters, one of the legends from the job was Jack Fiddler, a Cree Indian who claimed at least fourteen wendigo kills—the last in 1907, when he was eighty-seven years old. That one got him thrown in prison, which we can tell you is still one of the perpetual hazards of the family business.
Another winter spirit is the yuki-onna. It’s from Japan. Typically appearing as a beautiful woman, the yuki-onna is possibly the spirit of someone who has died of exposure—although we’re not quite sure why they’re always female. Don’t men ever freeze to death in Japan? Her modus operandi: she appears to people who have gotten lost in a snowstorm and either kills them outright or leads them on, promising shelter, until they die. A variation on the lore says that she appears to a parent searching for a lost child, and in this manifestation she holds a child in her arms. When the grateful parent takes the child from her, he or she is frozen in place and dies. Occasionally her predations take on a sexual flavor, and she leads men to what seems to be a shelter and then, well, you know. Kills them. But not right away.
A slightly more merciful incarnation of the yuki-onna tells of a young boy lost in a storm. The spirit finds the boy and lets him go because of his youth, on the condition that he never tell anyone that he has seen her. He agrees, but years later, he tells his wife the story—whereupon his wife turns out to be the yuki-onna. Again she spares him because he is a good father to the children they have reared together, but because he has broken his promise, she disappears, melting away as if she were made of ice.