Man theorizes that 'wendigo' may be to blame for local Bigfoot reports

Is a 'Wendigo' to blame for local Bigfoot reports?

I received an unexpected call last Thursday from Re Monteith, an investigator with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) in Florida, who wanted to know if I’d received any Bigfoot reports lately. I told her that I hadn’t heard any new local reports lately, but that I was keeping my ears open.

To my surprise, she said that the BFRO was recently contacted by someone from our area, who reported Bigfoot activity in an area where there’d been previous reports. She said that the BFRO planned to look into it and she would contact me later if anything comes out of it.

When I got off the phone with her, I was reminded of a Bigfoot-related conversation that I’d had with a local man about a month ago. This man enjoys reading and studying about Native American folklore, and he posed an interesting theory about the local Bigfoot reports. He said that people might not be seeing a Bigfoot or Sasquatch at all. Instead, they’re seeing what the Indians called a “Wendigo.”

Being unfamiliar with the wendigo, I did a little research and what I found was pretty interesting. Indians believed that a wendigo was a supernatural man-eating creature or evil ghost that lived in the forest. Translations of the word “wendigo” say it means “spirit of lonely places” or the “evil spirt that devours mankind.”

Some sources described them as giants while others describe them as skeletal and emaciated. Some descriptions say that they have sunken yellow eyes or large eyes like an owl. Others say that they have large horns, razor-sharp claws and smell really bad.

A number of legends indicate that when a person goes missing in the forest, the wendigo is to blame. Some say that they can mimic human voices and some are unnaturally fast. Some Indians even believed that the wendigo could control the weather, was able to endure the harshest climates and was even known to hibernate, sometimes for years and years at a time.

Some Native American tribes even had special ceremonies they performed to keep the wendigo away. These ceremonies included special dances that were supposed to prevent members of the tribe from falling victim to the wendigo. Other sources say that only the most powerful Medicine Men had the ability to protect their tribes from the wendigo.

Many sources that I read said that wendigos favor cold weather and that most of the wendigo stories come from Indians tribes that lived in parts of Canada and the Great Lakes. This is the sort of thing that I like to hear because that’s a long way from Conecuh County, where the weather is usually a lot warmer than it is in Canada.

In the end, I’d be interested in hearing from anyone in the reading audience who has seen anything out of the ordinary in the woods of Conecuh County. I think it’s important to document these incidents because it helps make the big picture a lot clearer.