The Wendigo - Paperback

by Algernon Blackwood (Author)

The Wendigo

Algernon Blackwood

Classic Weird Tales

Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE (14 March 1869 - 10 December 1951) was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. He was also a journalist and a broadcasting narrator. S. T. Joshi has stated that "his work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer's except Dunsany's" and that his short story collection Incredible Adventures (1914) "may be the premier weird collection of this or any other century."

In Algonquian folklore, the wendigo or windigo is a cannibal monster or evil spirit native to the northern forests of the Atlantic Coast and Great Lakes Region of both the United States and Canada. The wendigo 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 behaviours. The legend lends its name to the disputed modern medical term Wendigo psychosis, which is considered by psychiatrists to be a form of culture-bound syndrome with symptoms such as an intense craving for human flesh and a fear of becoming a cannibal. In some Indigenous communities, environmental destruction and insatiable greed are also seen as a manifestation of Windigo Psychosis.

In historical accounts of Wendigo psychosis, it has been reported that humans became possessed by the windigo spirit, leading them to crave human flesh and other obscene things. The most common response when a person showed signs of Wendigo psychosis was a curing attempt by traditional native healers. In the cases where these attempts failed, reports indicate that the possessed person began either to threaten those around them or to act violently or anti-socially; generally they were then executed. Cases of this type of Wendigo psychosis, though evidently real, were relatively rare, and it was even rarer for them to culminate in execution. Theories about how to deal with contemporary cases vary.