Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome the Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Tuglas, and
Speaker 1: it's the Halloween season once more. So we are re
Speaker 1: releasing one of our favorite creepy episodes from last year,
Speaker 1: on the Wind to Go, or as I wanted to
Speaker 1: call it, eight My birth Day. Yes, yes, that was
Speaker 1: your original pitch for the title episode. We did not,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's creepy subject matter and it's I mean,
Speaker 1: at heart, it's a monster, a monster's idea, and it's
Speaker 1: a monster that seems to be picking up more and
Speaker 1: more in popular culture. Windigo uh symbolism played heavily into
Speaker 1: expect for the first season of TV's Hannibal, and in
Speaker 1: Sleepy Hollow season two, we will be seeing a wind
Speaker 1: to Goo and and teen Wolf. They're already already of course,
Speaker 1: you're already a window got So this is the thing
Speaker 1: about people finding about out about your cool monsters. They
Speaker 1: end up showing up, I know. And then one hand
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, yes, it's finding its rightful place and
Speaker 1: pop culture, and then you're like, oh yeah, and maybe
Speaker 1: this is what Algernon Blackwood really wanted, though. We'll see maybe.
Speaker 1: January six eight. I went to see the sick man
Speaker 1: today and he's a pitiful looking devil. They had him
Speaker 1: with about six blankets and he still was nearly freezing.
Speaker 1: I can do nothing for him. January twelve. I went
Speaker 1: to see him today and he looks worse than ever.
Speaker 1: I gave him a dose of Castor Royal, but he
Speaker 1: he says his heart is freezing. He keeps insisting he'll
Speaker 1: become a cannibal. He wants the Algonquins to kill him
Speaker 1: before he gets worse. January. Friend Sis came here and
Speaker 1: asked me if I would read some prayers for the
Speaker 1: sick man. He doesn't look like a human being. He
Speaker 1: seems to be terribly swollen in the body and face.
Speaker 1: The sight of him is enough to frighten any person.
Speaker 1: The poor Algonquin slept very little here for the last
Speaker 1: nineteen days since he arrived. They have been watching him
Speaker 1: all time. I don't know how this will end. January one,
Speaker 1: Friendsois came from me last night and I went with him.
Speaker 1: I told him we ought to take some rope with
Speaker 1: us and tie him up if we could. The sound
Speaker 1: of him was terrible. It was like the calling of
Speaker 1: a wild animal. We tied him with the ropes and
Speaker 1: I left to find some more, but it couldn't find any.
Speaker 1: And when I got back, the cords around his arms
Speaker 1: were already breaking. The algonquins asked what we should do.
Speaker 1: They said that when he got up, he would kill
Speaker 1: all of us. I told them to do what they
Speaker 1: had to do is I had no more ropes which
Speaker 1: to bind it. That was the account of Francis work
Speaker 1: Beaten Uh the Ordney HBC clerk at the Trout Lake
Speaker 1: Outpost the winter of eighteen ninety six during the alleged
Speaker 1: Windigo possession of napapen Auger. Edited slightly for for clarity's sake,
Speaker 1: but otherwise exactly what's in the history books. And we
Speaker 1: wanted to bring that bit to your attention because what
Speaker 1: we're talking about is a creature or a possession that
Speaker 1: has to deal with cannibalism. Yeah, and even though the
Speaker 1: creature itself is obviously a creature of myth. We've talked
Speaker 1: before about the power of myth, the power of paranormal
Speaker 1: scripts within a culture, as well as the real life
Speaker 1: incidences that have allegedly occurred because of or alongside the
Speaker 1: Wind to Go belief. Because if the oral account of
Speaker 1: this particular Wind to Go possession story, as collected by
Speaker 1: the University of Alberta's Nathan D. Carlson, holds true, then
Speaker 1: the Algonquin tribes people gave Napapen boiling bear grease an
Speaker 1: attempt to cure him after this, uh this account that
Speaker 1: I read, and then when that didn't work, they executed
Speaker 1: him with an axe, cutting off his head and bearing
Speaker 1: it separate from his body. Now, there are various problems,
Speaker 1: of course, with any account of cannibalism, just just cannibalism alone,
Speaker 1: much less when you start involving supernatural uh in material
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, and that's the thing about Window that
Speaker 1: is so interesting is it really highlights this issue of cannibalism.
Speaker 1: And we've talked about this before. It's very hard to
Speaker 1: really pin down cannibalism what has actually happened, um with
Speaker 1: humans for sure, Actually in nature it's very easy to explain,
Speaker 1: right because they are not ashamed of it. They're not ashamed,
Speaker 1: and they have a purpose, a real clear purpose to
Speaker 1: their cannibalism. And you have, um, the sexual cannibalism in
Speaker 1: orb spiders, right, that helps in terms of sexual reproduction, fitness.
Speaker 1: And then in tiger sharks you have siblified, right, you
Speaker 1: have a tiger that eats excuse me, a tiger shark
Speaker 1: that eats a sibling because it's an easy source of energy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's just pure economics. It's a harsh world. Sometimes
Speaker 1: you have to reabsorb energy back into the the winning prospects,
Speaker 1: and that's just how it goes. But of course in
Speaker 1: human culture, the economics may still hold true, but we
Speaker 1: have all of these layers of moral concerns of society
Speaker 1: and culture. They just complicate the equation. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: when you say the economics, you're talking about survival cannibalism.
Speaker 1: In other words, you're just at the end of your
Speaker 1: rope and you may be with one who could provide
Speaker 1: you with a bit of energy, or perhaps there is
Speaker 1: even a body who that has recently passed that someone uses.
Speaker 1: And we have many accounts of this survival cannibalism in history.
Speaker 1: Their counts that are proven, and then there are accounts
Speaker 1: that are sort of forever being argued about, such as
Speaker 1: the Dolmar Party, where some saying well, maybe they didn't
Speaker 1: resort to survival cannibalism. Whethers say yes, some say well
Speaker 1: the bones, there's no bone evidence that they did, and
Speaker 1: others say, well, well they wouldn't know on the bones,
Speaker 1: they would have eaten the soft flesh, and of course
Speaker 1: that wouldn't the evidence of that wouldn't survive. And then
Speaker 1: you know how many people are going to come back
Speaker 1: from a chaotic trip to the mountains and be like, woa,
Speaker 1: I only survived because I ate my friend Caleb. Right,
Speaker 1: It's just probably something that you're going to admit at
Speaker 1: cocktail parties. Right, Um, so, yeah, you've got the survival cannibalism.
Speaker 1: And then, just to complicate things a little bit further,
Speaker 1: we have these accounts of cultural rituals which may or
Speaker 1: may not be symbolic cannibalism, right, They may actually have
Speaker 1: occurred or occurred in different ways that we don't think
Speaker 1: is cannibalistic. Yeah. Well, I mean you always have the
Speaker 1: the outsider viewing some sort of cannab supposedly cannibalistic ceremony
Speaker 1: or hearing about it. You're having Westerners observed or hear
Speaker 1: about a ritual that that from the people that they
Speaker 1: view as primitive, and so you know, it's hard to
Speaker 1: tack down the actual truth of the matter. Yeah. Actually,
Speaker 1: if you want to look at a good example of
Speaker 1: this and someone who actually further this idea of cannibalism,
Speaker 1: you can look to Columbus, who encountered the Arawak people
Speaker 1: in Hispaniola during the fifteenth century, and they warned him
Speaker 1: of another tribe, the carab that eight people, which it
Speaker 1: appears this other tribe never existed. So this has been
Speaker 1: really hard for anthropologists to go through and to try
Speaker 1: to figure out. But as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: this other tribe just wasn't a reality. So it may
Speaker 1: have just been for them this story about another tribe
Speaker 1: just kind of a boogeyman, a boogeyman right telling the
Speaker 1: night there's another tribe out there and they're so bad
Speaker 1: they eat people. You don't want to be like that,
Speaker 1: and you don't want them to come for you, right,
Speaker 1: Or maybe they just wanted, you know, Columbus to hang
Speaker 1: around and they were like, we need to get him
Speaker 1: to stay here with us and not go exploring. So
Speaker 1: in addition, Columbus may have mistaken the ritual of keeping
Speaker 1: a loved one's bones around the house. So that's what
Speaker 1: the Arrow Act people did, and he may have mistaken
Speaker 1: that for evidence of cannibalism, and of course the whole
Speaker 1: thing is ridiculous too when you realize that Columbus comes
Speaker 1: bearing his his Catholic faith, and of course Catholicism, like
Speaker 1: a lot of Christianity, is rich in this symbol symbolic
Speaker 1: consumption of Christ's blood and flesh, which even though you're
Speaker 1: not actually consuming blood and flesh, uh, it is, it
Speaker 1: is symbolic cannibalism at at heart, right, which we see
Speaker 1: in so many other cultures. The problem, of course, is
Speaker 1: that Columbus was the authority on all matters foreign at
Speaker 1: that point, so people are like, so where'd you go,
Speaker 1: what'd you see? What you experience? And then whatever he
Speaker 1: said became sort of the gospel. Yeah, and that's one
Speaker 1: of the ms you have throughout history too. I mean,
Speaker 1: going back to plenty of the Elder and all these
Speaker 1: guys where you just have certain voices and there aren't
Speaker 1: a lot of there's not a lot of discussion about
Speaker 1: the matter, but you know, this guy said that there
Speaker 1: are cannibals living in Africa, and that remains sort of
Speaker 1: the voice of truth for a matter of centuries. So
Speaker 1: that's why The Wind to Go is such an interesting
Speaker 1: thing to look at, because it really gets at the
Speaker 1: heart of the taboo of cannibalism, but also the psychology
Speaker 1: of the ways in which we behave when we have
Speaker 1: these folk tales as stand ins for for what becomes
Speaker 1: a reality. Yeah. So I want you to imagine a dark,
Speaker 1: gaunt giant that haunts the woods, clad only in matted hair,
Speaker 1: and it's peering outitude from the wild depths, with blood
Speaker 1: red eyes as wild as sinister and sinister as those
Speaker 1: of an owl, with claws that are curl and muscles
Speaker 1: that are coiled with the strength of a bear, and
Speaker 1: its teeth are eager, and its foul tongue is longing
Speaker 1: for the taste of human flesh that sounds cuddly. Yeah. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: this is some thing that is The creature is known
Speaker 1: to different North American tribal groups um. And when we're
Speaker 1: talking about the geography here, we're talking about French Canadian
Speaker 1: territory um and the Algonquins are they figure in this
Speaker 1: quite a bit as well as a couple of the
Speaker 1: other tribes. Yeah, the Algonquins as one of the most
Speaker 1: populous and widespread North American native language groups, and uh
Speaker 1: at different times it composed like a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: different tribes. You know, there did a lot of different
Speaker 1: tribes that would spoke the Algonquin tongue, and there were
Speaker 1: a lot of shared beliefs among them, and they they
Speaker 1: thrived in the harsh world of northern North America, a
Speaker 1: land of vast, unforgiving wilderness, brutal winners, particularly during the
Speaker 1: Little Ice Age era in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries,
Speaker 1: which correlates exactly with a lot of this exploration by
Speaker 1: French Canadians who met up with these different tribes. And
Speaker 1: we'll talk about this more, but they began to um
Speaker 1: actually adopt some of these folk tales of the win
Speaker 1: to go. And I also wanted to mention that it
Speaker 1: goes by wakaw Witigo with tikio and weendigo long ago
Speaker 1: Windigo Witigo and we ti go Tigo. It sounds like
Speaker 1: a corporation secretly is based on cannibalism. It's right, we tigo,
Speaker 1: you can we tigo to um. And the cool thing
Speaker 1: about this is that the Windigo really sort of describes
Speaker 1: two different things at play here. One is the beast
Speaker 1: that you described who lives in that forest waiting to
Speaker 1: feast on a human. The other is a cannibalistic spirit
Speaker 1: that can possess a human. Yeah, and that spirit kind
Speaker 1: of walks the barrier between the world and the world
Speaker 1: of the spirits. And of course that's a very important
Speaker 1: area in the tales and the belief systems in the
Speaker 1: world view of the the first people of North America. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if you look at the Algonquins, they they really
Speaker 1: focus on these spirits as as a sort of cautionary
Speaker 1: all to people during these very harsh winters not to
Speaker 1: turn to cannibalism, because they're saying that if you eat
Speaker 1: the flesh of another, well, your soul is now susceptible
Speaker 1: to the wind to go. Yeah. There there were a
Speaker 1: number of causes, a number of things that could turn
Speaker 1: you into a window go. Most of them are are
Speaker 1: based in diet and food and and hunger. Um. So
Speaker 1: you might be cursed by a sorcerer, always a possibility.
Speaker 1: You know, it'll happen if you are yourself. If you
Speaker 1: yourself are a sorcerer, you might seek the transformation in yourself,
Speaker 1: always an option, all right. You might trigger the change.
Speaker 1: If you fast too long or feast too heavily, so
Speaker 1: a little too much food, a little too little food,
Speaker 1: you're gonna potentially open yourself up to the window Goes caress.
Speaker 1: But most importantly are all of all, as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: if you if you are forced to consume human flesh,
Speaker 1: or if you're tricked into doing so, even in a dream,
Speaker 1: then the window go can reach out to you, touch
Speaker 1: your soul and bring on this steady and horrible change,
Speaker 1: And then you might feel ice in your heart longing
Speaker 1: for flesh. Yeah, because that's uh, that's that's the big
Speaker 1: thing right there. Um. There are a number of symptoms.
Speaker 1: According to the Algonquin Reports catalog by Nathan D. Carlson,
Speaker 1: the symptoms include stupor, catatonia, depression, paranoia, and orexia or
Speaker 1: the inability to hold down food, nausea, vomiting, emaciation, glazed eyes,
Speaker 1: bodily or facial swelling, violent shouting, hallucinations of family members
Speaker 1: as food animals, particularly as beavers, and finally, this unstoppable
Speaker 1: urge to consume human flesh. Yeah. There was one account
Speaker 1: that was reading in a separate book where like a
Speaker 1: mother was was potentially turning into a window. Go and
Speaker 1: she was telling her she's matter or children. She's saying,
Speaker 1: you all look like beavers to me. Now wow, But
Speaker 1: but it's that. But the big thing that like the
Speaker 1: major symptoms and the ultimate symptoms are the unstoppable urge
Speaker 1: to consume human flesh and this chill in your in
Speaker 1: your torso, meaning in your heart, as your heart becomes
Speaker 1: this lump of ice, that's right, as the transformation occurs.
Speaker 1: Let's take a quick break and when we get back,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about psychosis. All right, we're back. We're just
Speaker 1: talking about the symptoms in the folk tales of the
Speaker 1: of the Wind to Go and uh, and how your
Speaker 1: heart may seem to become this lump of of of
Speaker 1: ice and you have this irresistible urge to consume human flesh. Now,
Speaker 1: there were a few cures curative measures, that were also
Speaker 1: related in the folk tales. But I think it is
Speaker 1: interesting for you talking about the curative measures, is that
Speaker 1: people took this folklore and then they began to exhibit
Speaker 1: these symptoms. And this is what that psychosis is, These
Speaker 1: cases of people actually coming down with not actually turning
Speaker 1: into these sort of werewolf like creatures, but actually connating
Speaker 1: some dastardly acts. Yeah, because, on one hand, as as
Speaker 1: Nathan D. Carlson points out in his excellent article reviewing
Speaker 1: Wittico and Ethno History of donable Monsters in the Athabaska
Speaker 1: District of Northern Alberta nineteen kien Um, this was not
Speaker 1: just a you know, folk tale. If it was told,
Speaker 1: this was something in which there was a lot of belief.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of fear, he says, quote in
Speaker 1: the collective belief systems of pre twenty one century Algonquins.
Speaker 1: Contrary to the opinions of some modern academics, as discussed below,
Speaker 1: the Wittigo condition was not a legendary fabrication. For example,
Speaker 1: in early eighteen ninety six, Richard Young, the Anglican Bishop
Speaker 1: of the Athabaska District, wrote the following in a letter
Speaker 1: journal to the Evangelical Fathers in the Church Missionary Society. Quote,
Speaker 1: the Indians have a great terror of the so called
Speaker 1: windigoose or cannibals. They believe that after eating human flesh,
Speaker 1: their heart becomes a lump of ice, and no one
Speaker 1: alive is safer them. Assert as all of this sounds
Speaker 1: to us, it is a real terror to the untutored Indian.
Speaker 1: So there's a little obviously there's a bit of xenophobia
Speaker 1: and uh and and racism and in that uh, that
Speaker 1: particular portrayal, but but still it underlines that this was
Speaker 1: this was serious. That and if you're in a situation
Speaker 1: where you have been forced to resort to survival cannibalism,
Speaker 1: and then it's known or even if it's known only
Speaker 1: to you, you you return with shame. Perhaps they other
Speaker 1: members of your your group know that this occurred, and
Speaker 1: before you know what, you're ostracized and maybe you feel
Speaker 1: and there are a number of these symptoms, like if
Speaker 1: there's a whole list of possible symptoms, and if you
Speaker 1: begin if you experience one of them or feel like
Speaker 1: you experience one of them, uh, combined with the guilt
Speaker 1: that you feel, then how long before you begin manifesting
Speaker 1: this this paranoid idea you were transforming. Yeah, let's set
Speaker 1: this seam for this too. Or we're talking about these
Speaker 1: sort of starvation winters that would occur in in this
Speaker 1: part of the world, um, particularly as you said, during
Speaker 1: that period from the seventy century to the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: and you know, you have people who would sort of
Speaker 1: collectively get together as families during that time and band
Speaker 1: together and try to survive. But there is still a
Speaker 1: huge amount of isolation. So you might be with five
Speaker 1: six oven of your family members, um, you know, out
Speaker 1: in the middle of nowhere, with this wind whistling or
Speaker 1: this wind howling. And when you look at these algonquin
Speaker 1: Um depictions, the wind is a huge force here. So
Speaker 1: I don't have you ever been like on the mountain before,
Speaker 1: and and um, there's just huge amounts of wind coming
Speaker 1: in at your structure. If you're in a tent or
Speaker 1: in a cabin, yeah, yeah, it's just if you're you're
Speaker 1: out in the open, it's just whipping by. It's all
Speaker 1: you can hear in your ears. And if you're in
Speaker 1: a structure or even you know, in the shelter of
Speaker 1: a tree or or or some stone, and it's just
Speaker 1: whistling by, and it's and it varies, it's it's this
Speaker 1: changing tone almost the song. Yeah, and yeah. I remember
Speaker 1: when I was in Costa Rica, Monteverde and I was
Speaker 1: I spent a couple of nights in a cabin on
Speaker 1: the top of the mountain there and the first night
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, this is beautiful, It's gorgeous. The
Speaker 1: second night I was like, it's this is awful. I
Speaker 1: cannot get any sleep. The wind is howling. The third
Speaker 1: night I started to feel like I was going crazy.
Speaker 1: So imagine bumps of this going on. I want to say,
Speaker 1: if you resort to cannibalism in Monteverdi, that's on. You.
Speaker 1: Don't try and pin that on a wind to go. Well,
Speaker 1: that's the thing, right, So I go out with a friend.
Speaker 1: We're gonna go try to trap something. You know, maybe
Speaker 1: he breaks his leg. You know, things aren't looking good.
Speaker 1: Form so awesome, and I have a little bit of
Speaker 1: his meat and then as we as you said, come
Speaker 1: back to camp or to your cabin and you're feeling
Speaker 1: the shame for it. Um Now, I didn't want to
Speaker 1: point out that Kevin Vulcan a professor of psychology. He's
Speaker 1: often called on as a behavioral expert on TV shows
Speaker 1: and they're like, he categorizes it as an extreme form
Speaker 1: of cabin fever. So again, you've got harsh environmental factors there.
Speaker 1: You're with a couple of people and things can go awry.
Speaker 1: You're with a bunch of people that you love but
Speaker 1: are also maybe driving you a little crazy. Yeah, and uh,
Speaker 1: and because that's one of the common tropes of the
Speaker 1: wind to go story is you have like a mom
Speaker 1: or a dad or even both that go nuts and
Speaker 1: start eating the kids. And then you know, you eat
Speaker 1: one kid, and you eat the steck again, and then
Speaker 1: and then it just gets out of hand. Yeah, Vulgan says,
Speaker 1: it becomes a compulsion. So there you are in your cabin,
Speaker 1: the wind howling for months on end, and you began
Speaker 1: to really think that you are the wind and go right,
Speaker 1: it's it's taken hold of you. You're feeling icing in
Speaker 1: your heart and uh, your your child is starting to
Speaker 1: look like a drumstick, yeah or beaver. Yeah. All right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna continue talking talking about that particular strain, but
Speaker 1: just to go back presented cures that that we're explored
Speaker 1: for for the wind to go situation. Carlson relates several
Speaker 1: from different sources, but they include drinking high wines by
Speaker 1: the fire, which sounds rather pleasant. I would say that
Speaker 1: should be your first stop on any attempt to treat
Speaker 1: a suspected wind to go situation. Next, the hit the
Speaker 1: consumption of heated or even boiling animal flats, fats. So
Speaker 1: you have some some moose meat, bear meat, what have you.
Speaker 1: You heat to heat the fat up, get it nice
Speaker 1: and boiling, and then you drink it. Now, both of
Speaker 1: these methods uh drinking by the fire and drinking hot
Speaker 1: animal fat. The idea is that it would help UH
Speaker 1: burn away the ice that is formed in the heart.
Speaker 1: That's the key to the window go There was another
Speaker 1: tail that I believe Carlson related in which there was
Speaker 1: a group of window goes and they were they were
Speaker 1: just a complete terror and you know, eat everyone in sight.
Speaker 1: And they were particularly hard to deal with because on
Speaker 1: one hand, window goes were said to be bulletproof, you know,
Speaker 1: or bullets didn't affect them, and the only way to
Speaker 1: to really kill them was to deal with that icy heart.
Speaker 1: But these window goes had taken their icy hearts out
Speaker 1: and store them elsewhere, so they were they weren't not
Speaker 1: susceptible to that. Yeah. So um so those are some options. Also,
Speaker 1: you could of course get a spirit medium to use
Speaker 1: a shaking tent ritual, which is a special tint in
Speaker 1: which spirits could be summoned. But if these didn't work,
Speaker 1: the only thing to do was to tie the window
Speaker 1: go down and hack it to pieces with an axe
Speaker 1: bearing the pieces so as to keep it from becoming
Speaker 1: whole again and killing everyone inside. Now, someone by the
Speaker 1: name of Jack Fiddler and okay cream Member actually took
Speaker 1: that to heart and kind of became the van helsing
Speaker 1: for his community of window Goes. He claimed to have
Speaker 1: slayed fourteen people who were possessed, and he was in
Speaker 1: prison when he murdered a woman who he says was
Speaker 1: on the verge of turning into a windingo. So just
Speaker 1: so you know, there were people out there that we're
Speaker 1: trying to actually, you know, stop it before it started
Speaker 1: what they really thought was going to be a possession.
Speaker 1: And of course we have so many different examples of
Speaker 1: people who actually did this to their families, who actually
Speaker 1: ate their family. So you can see why someone like
Speaker 1: Jack Fiddler might really take this to heart as his cause,
Speaker 1: his his reason for being. Yeah, and now, of course
Speaker 1: one of the of course, the problems we mentioned with
Speaker 1: the cannibalism and cannibism stories, so the window Goes stories
Speaker 1: were we're told in around the campfire and by a
Speaker 1: bi bi algonquin drives people who really love stories and
Speaker 1: told stories and the nature of stories they are told
Speaker 1: as is that you you take on stories as your
Speaker 1: own that are other people's. You you prop up a
Speaker 1: story by saying you were there when you weren't. All
Speaker 1: of these things happened. The fish gets a little larger
Speaker 1: with each telling, etcetera. And then you have the French
Speaker 1: Canadian voyagers, the travelers who are who are who are
Speaker 1: meeting these people trading stories with them, and of course
Speaker 1: they're early into telling stories as well. Uh So we
Speaker 1: can't take every story to heart, but some of them
Speaker 1: are are are actually really well found at that for instance, uh,
Speaker 1: the swift Runner kids, Now, this was a cree trapper
Speaker 1: who serially murdered and consumed the bodies of his wife
Speaker 1: and five children. And this was near Athabaska Landing Trading
Speaker 1: Post in the North the Central in north central Alberta
Speaker 1: in the winner of eighteen seventy eight. And all the
Speaker 1: murders except the last one, we're more of a clear
Speaker 1: case of starvation cannibalism. But then the last one, well,
Speaker 1: i'll just read you what he had to say when
Speaker 1: when he was interviewed, he said, at that that moment,
Speaker 1: the window go suddenly took possession of my soul, and
Speaker 1: in order to live longer, far from people, and to
Speaker 1: put out of the way the only witness to my crime,
Speaker 1: I seized my gun and killed the last of my children,
Speaker 1: and aid him as that I had done the others.
Speaker 1: Some weeks later I was taken by the police, sentenced
Speaker 1: to death, and in three days I am to be hanged.
Speaker 1: And indeed, this is where it gets a little a
Speaker 1: little extra historical importance added to this is that, according
Speaker 1: to Carlson, uh swift Runner was the first person hanged
Speaker 1: by the Mounties, the Mounted Police, which which gives this
Speaker 1: Uh swift Runner winding. Okay, so a unique position in
Speaker 1: the history of Canadian jurisprudence. So the thing about this
Speaker 1: is that we don't know that it's actually a psychosis right.
Speaker 1: In fact, academics have seen it or they've talked about
Speaker 1: as a cultural balanced psychosis, but they've also called it
Speaker 1: um perhaps a culturally localized manifestation of paranoid schizophrenia because
Speaker 1: we see some mental illness UM in this area, and
Speaker 1: then a correlate of scapegoating. And then also in Nathan D.
Speaker 1: Carlson's paper Reviving Whittico, he says that it could have
Speaker 1: been a culturally mediated performance. So in some ways, again
Speaker 1: it was taking to heart this uh, this story and
Speaker 1: performing it in a way. Uh. Perhaps that person didn't
Speaker 1: actually want the taste of flesh, but they were caught
Speaker 1: up in the moments in these long winters and the
Speaker 1: sort of disease that would settle in with this, and
Speaker 1: maybe they began to display the history on its Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then also their their situations where you can well
Speaker 1: imagine one using the wind to go idea and wind
Speaker 1: to go stigma for personal game, like, for instance, here
Speaker 1: at work, so we all have new desks. Um, louder Milk,
Speaker 1: Alsa louder Milk has a particularly nice desk. It's like
Speaker 1: right next to the window. It's pretty good. So I
Speaker 1: can imagine that if ladder Milk were to be accused
Speaker 1: of being a wind to go, um, you know, someone
Speaker 1: might say, well, hey, I kind of want louder milks
Speaker 1: to desk, So I'm gonna jump in on that bandwagon
Speaker 1: and try to to push that that idea among my
Speaker 1: my fellow co workers. And then you originally reached the
Speaker 1: point where there's nothing left to do but chopper into
Speaker 1: pieces and then lo and behold, I'm setting in her
Speaker 1: new desk. Okay, so you're the one who started the
Speaker 1: rumor about not going into the bathroom alone when ladder
Speaker 1: Milk was using yes and about what she's really been
Speaker 1: bringing in her launch pail. Okay. The second thing someone
Speaker 1: I want to mention is that some of us might
Speaker 1: apply a little magical thinking to that space and think
Speaker 1: that they wouldn't want to inhabit it for fear of
Speaker 1: being possessed by the window go as well. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's been picked up over the years. We're
Speaker 1: gonna talk a little bit about how it was picked
Speaker 1: up by the French Canadians, but of course even in
Speaker 1: modern culture, how you see it to show up in
Speaker 1: in different forms of media. For instance, Stephen King's novel
Speaker 1: pet Cemetery as a Window Go in It that I
Speaker 1: remember is working pretty well. Um, the movie Ravenous uh
Speaker 1: is it also features the wind to Go myth pretty strongly,
Speaker 1: kind of kind of taking it and combining with the
Speaker 1: Western vampire uh folk folklore to create kind of I
Speaker 1: think an interesting Animal's been a while since I've seen it,
Speaker 1: but as a really awesome soundtrack by Damon Auburn of
Speaker 1: Blur and Guerrillas, and minimalis composer Michael Nyman. And uh,
Speaker 1: let's say there was Larry Fresden's film Wind to Go,
Speaker 1: which was like an indie horror film. It was pretty interesting,
Speaker 1: and the TV show Hannibal has sort of dream hallucination
Speaker 1: sequences in which a Wind to Go character appears. That
Speaker 1: that I thought it was pretty effective and one of
Speaker 1: the pieces of media that may have started at all
Speaker 1: in terms of math consumption. Uh, sorry about that pun
Speaker 1: is Algernon Blackwood's seven short story The Wind to Go,
Speaker 1: you know, And I like Ultronon Blackwood. I have enjoyed
Speaker 1: his writing in the past, but I started to reread
Speaker 1: his window Go story and I have to say I
Speaker 1: didn't like it. I didn't feel like it was really
Speaker 1: very wind to Go e you know, it was just
Speaker 1: he kind of took the name Win to Go and
Speaker 1: some a certain amount of the feeling for it. But
Speaker 1: then I don't know, I thought I thought it felt
Speaker 1: kind of felt like it fell flat a bit. Well though,
Speaker 1: you you could say that at that point Blackwood didn't
Speaker 1: have this sort of vast stores of information about the
Speaker 1: Wind to Go to pull from. You can go to
Speaker 1: the Wikipedia or listen to our podcast. No, No, you
Speaker 1: probably had a French Canadian friend who was like, let
Speaker 1: me tell you about this crazy thing that happened to
Speaker 1: a friend of a friend of a friend of mines. Right,
Speaker 1: And when someone tells you a story, like, especially when
Speaker 1: it's from a different culture, what can you do but
Speaker 1: combine the scraps that you were given that may or
Speaker 1: may not make sense from from your own cultural standpoint.
Speaker 1: You combine it with the ideas that you already have
Speaker 1: in your own culture, and you end up with sort
Speaker 1: of a new animal, a new myth emerges from this
Speaker 1: synthesis of ideas. Yeah, so let's let's sort of do
Speaker 1: some time traveling here to say, the Lake Superior region
Speaker 1: in Canada eighteen fifties. You probably would hear a French
Speaker 1: Canadian really complaining about this really harsh winter and saying
Speaker 1: that they were so hungry and there were so little
Speaker 1: resources that they actually boiled their moccasins and ate them.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is our true accounts, and um, and
Speaker 1: then and but then also of the story that is
Speaker 1: so popular that you end up telling it even if
Speaker 1: you didn't necessarily experience, right, And then, of course, one
Speaker 1: thing leads to another and you start talking about canibalism, right,
Speaker 1: so you say, oh, man, if I ate my my
Speaker 1: Moncasin's food from just two seconds away from from you, buddy, right,
Speaker 1: and the conversation gets really awkward. Yes, this was This
Speaker 1: was all excellently discussed in Werewolves and Windy Goes Narratives
Speaker 1: of cannibal monsters in French Canadian uh Voyager oral tradition
Speaker 1: by Caroline Protruction of York University where she she really
Speaker 1: goes into what happens when the French Canadian voyagers encounter
Speaker 1: the algonquins and start swapping tales. Yeah, because you have
Speaker 1: to again sort of imagine this this time period. There
Speaker 1: are missionaries, fur traders, colonists, the voyagers all going through
Speaker 1: and meeting different tribes and then hearing about these atrocities. Now,
Speaker 1: if you are someone who is French Canadian, you might
Speaker 1: be familiar with some other folklore from Europe, like say,
Speaker 1: we're wolfs, So it wouldn't be too crazy easy because
Speaker 1: you may have a belief system that supports that. Because
Speaker 1: the werewolf myth, of course is that on certain nights
Speaker 1: because of the moon, you know, maybe some curses are
Speaker 1: in play as well. But a man transforms into a
Speaker 1: wolf or a wolf like being, and then goes out
Speaker 1: and eats things, including human flesh. And then the next
Speaker 1: morning he's like, whoa, what do I What had happened?
Speaker 1: What did I do? What horrible things happened to me?
Speaker 1: What kind of monster did I become? Right? And then
Speaker 1: you've got the whole like, man, I was boiling my
Speaker 1: my moccasins, and you have all these other accounts. In fact,
Speaker 1: I wanted to bring up Jamestown sixteen o nine, Um
Speaker 1: that that colony had such a harsh winter, that we
Speaker 1: know that they engaged not in just eating saint dogs,
Speaker 1: cats and horses. But recently this year the bones of
Speaker 1: a fourteen year old girl were excavated, and Um, Douglas Owsley,
Speaker 1: he's the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones, says, given,
Speaker 1: given these bones in a trash pit, all cut up
Speaker 1: and chopped up, it's clear that this body was dismembered
Speaker 1: for consumption. So in the same way, if you have
Speaker 1: these this folklore from Europe and you know about werewolf,
Speaker 1: you know that people can be transformed into them, and
Speaker 1: you also have these folk tales standing in for moral code,
Speaker 1: then as a European who is in this territory, this
Speaker 1: Algonquian territory. You probably would say, wow, we gotta watch
Speaker 1: out here. Yeah, because I mean, the werewolf myth ultimately
Speaker 1: revolves around the idea, you know, what happens if I
Speaker 1: give in to my be steal nature, or what if
Speaker 1: my my be steal nature overcomes me? What have I
Speaker 1: given to the economic sensibility of cannibalism, for instance, despite
Speaker 1: all of my human moral standing. And so there's a
Speaker 1: there's there's a lot of of comparisons to be made
Speaker 1: between the werewolf myth and the wind to Go myth.
Speaker 1: And you can definitely see where the werewolf myth would
Speaker 1: help you understand the wind to Go myth, even though
Speaker 1: the window Go myth is totally about human human flesh
Speaker 1: being consumed, totally about cannibalism, whereas cannibalism is just sort
Speaker 1: of one aspect of the werewolf myth. Yes, protructing me
Speaker 1: actually us and and as you say, her find paper
Speaker 1: that what we can learn from this is that the
Speaker 1: cannibal monster stories that for youshers told each other reveal
Speaker 1: many aspects of their lives and cosmology, such as starvation,
Speaker 1: mental illness, and metamorphos because in a way they were
Speaker 1: undergoing a transformation themselves. Yeah, they started out as Westerners
Speaker 1: in a strange world. They travel out into this just
Speaker 1: I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine. Some books
Speaker 1: have have really done a great job of of portraying
Speaker 1: this excursion into the wilds and from this territory. I
Speaker 1: think of like Northwest Passage. I also think of Black Robe,
Speaker 1: excellent book. Um, you go into this just rich, wild
Speaker 1: world where there are no Westerners there. There these these
Speaker 1: foreign people's that you can only partially understand, that have
Speaker 1: a totally different worldview than you do. And and then
Speaker 1: you start and you're in dealing with with limited resources,
Speaker 1: you're suddenly you find yourself starving or you're ill, and
Speaker 1: then what are you to make up of all that?
Speaker 1: And then over time you have the Westerners of assimilating
Speaker 1: more and more with the native cultures to the point
Speaker 1: where they're they're taking they're taking Algonquin brides, they're they're
Speaker 1: they're they're becoming their own communities. Right with this shared
Speaker 1: mythos that has been weaved together from both the Algonquin
Speaker 1: traditions and the European traditions that they imported and yet
Speaker 1: xenophobia exists. And that's where it becomes really interesting because
Speaker 1: the window Goo is really a stand in for this otherness.
Speaker 1: As you said, these are people in a new land
Speaker 1: with new experiences, and everything is the other, including the
Speaker 1: Alcohnquin at some point in other tribes. So, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: with the windingo carries this idea that you're you're engaging
Speaker 1: in this other world, the supernatural world. You know, I
Speaker 1: can't in thinking about the window Go, I keep coming
Speaker 1: back to some material that we came across in our
Speaker 1: episode on the Problem of Hell, where we talked about
Speaker 1: the the old gods that that society has had, the
Speaker 1: hunter gatherer gods, the hornet gods that were more chaotic,
Speaker 1: that were that that dealt uh thematically with the scarcity
Speaker 1: of food and the the uncertainty of tomorrow's meal and
Speaker 1: the meal after that and the in and in doing
Speaker 1: so you can see where that you can see why
Speaker 1: the windowgo is really the ultimate evil spirit of the Algonquins,
Speaker 1: because it represents the uncertainty of food and it represents
Speaker 1: the likelihood at even at times of starvation and in falling,
Speaker 1: what it would take to fall below the barrier, the
Speaker 1: threshold for um civilization, you know, because I feel like
Speaker 1: a lot of our stories deal with that. Like we
Speaker 1: watched the show like Breaking Bad, and we see like
Speaker 1: these you see a character that's falling throughout the entire show,
Speaker 1: and at what point does he fall below the threshold?
Speaker 1: And you see these other characters that you know, addicts
Speaker 1: and whatnot, and you you look at them and you think,
Speaker 1: there's a character who's fallen below the threshold. Woe as
Speaker 1: would be me if I were to to to fall
Speaker 1: that low as well? And uh in in a society
Speaker 1: like that, like that is the base mark cannibalism. You've
Speaker 1: fallen below the moral standing that defines the protects the
Speaker 1: culture well right, And it's a reminder of that time
Speaker 1: period when that the line between you know, death and survival,
Speaker 1: which is just like that you cross over it so quickly.
Speaker 1: So it would be tempting to engage in cannibalism if
Speaker 1: you had to, because it may be the difference between
Speaker 1: life and death. Indeed, prodruct Any points out that a
Speaker 1: lot of these stories he shared stories of the wind
Speaker 1: to Go that the French Canadians shared with the Algonquins,
Speaker 1: that there were There were two lessons essentially in all
Speaker 1: of them, particularly for the the French Canadian listener. First
Speaker 1: of all, the idea that the native people's are your friend,
Speaker 1: or at least to be relied upon in the wild,
Speaker 1: because a lot of these stories they end with either
Speaker 1: you're starving and uh and some algonquins come along and
Speaker 1: they feed you and then you're you're safe, or the
Speaker 1: windigo situation happens and they're the ones who come with
Speaker 1: the knowledge of how to defeat the wind to go,
Speaker 1: or they actually chop it up for you. But then
Speaker 1: the second lesson, and this lesson, and she says is
Speaker 1: a is a little more subdued. The lesson is that
Speaker 1: starvation cannibalism is an option. It's a kind of a
Speaker 1: whisper in the ear saying and so this is horrible,
Speaker 1: but if you've got to do it, you can do it.
Speaker 1: And if it's going to get whispered into your ear,
Speaker 1: you might as well blame it on the wind, right Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: You know The thing about this is that anthropologists, when
Speaker 1: they began to study this in earnest, found that it
Speaker 1: pretty much dried up all of these these expressions of
Speaker 1: windigo possession just evaporated. So again it brings into question
Speaker 1: whether or not it was really a psychosis or if
Speaker 1: maybe this part of the world was opening up and um,
Speaker 1: there were other influences going on. So there you have
Speaker 1: it again. This is one of our favorite creepy episodes
Speaker 1: from the past few years, so we figured you would
Speaker 1: like to explore it again and we we got a
Speaker 1: chance to to listen to it again as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if you guys have any ideas about this that
Speaker 1: the power of folklore, Um, whether or not you maybe
Speaker 1: have even I've seen a window go in your midst
Speaker 1: or become one, let us know. You can email us
Speaker 1: at below the Mind at how stafforks dot com for
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com