State Cryptids: The Wendigo
In the north woods of the Great Lake region, a monster with an ice heart filled with greed and cannibalistic desire roams. The Wendigo lurks. It is “the evil spirit that devours mankind.” Welcome to Minnesota.
Tales of the Wendigo can be traced back as early as the 1600s. It comes from Algonquian and Ojibwa folklore and is associated with cannibalism, murder, and greed.
Some say it’s a monster with human characteristics, and others say it’s an evil spirit that possesses a human and turns it monstrous dooming it to wander the earth always searching for the next human flesh meal.
The descriptions vary but it is usually depicted as 10–15 feet tall with yellow eyes, a lipless mouth with yellow fangs, and a deformed skeletal body. The Algonquian people say it is also made of ice with an ice heart.
The sightings of the Wendigo come with horrific stories of cannibalistic murder. In 1661 a Jesuit Relations document stated
“What caused us greater concern was the intelligence that met us upon entering the Lake, namely, that the men deputed by our Conductor to summon the Nations to the North Sea, and assigning them a rendezvous, where they were to await our coming, had met their death the previous Winter in a very strange manner. Those poor men…
