So apparently my hometown had a real honest-to-God cannibalism case before - which was also caused by/blamed on a wendigo*.
WHY DO WE NOT GET TAUGHT ABOUT THIS AT FORT EDMONTON PARK?!
Like, why have I never heard one of the storytellers during Fort Ed’s Halloween celebrations tell this?! We have our very own local wendigo, ffs!
Wanna hear what happened? It went something like this:
Way back when Edmonton was still known as Fort Edmonton, this local man named Swift Runner went to one of the local churches and told the priests there that the past winter had been especially hard at his camp; they had severe starvation and he was the only survivor amongst his entire family.
Thing is, Swift Runner didn’t look like a man who’d recently dealt with starvation. He weighed about 90 kilos, was well-muscled, and seemed to be in fantastic health.
Something about his story just didn’t add up.
So the priests contacted the RCMP, who went with Swift Runner to his camp to investigate.
When they arrived, they found a shallow grave which held the bones of a child. That in itself wasn’t surprising - it’s hard to dig much of anything during an Albertan winter, after all.
What was unusual, however, were all the other bones which littered the camp, including a skull. To make things even stranger, some bones were hollow and broken, like someone had sucked out the marrow.
That was when Swift Runner broke down and told them what had happened.
A wendigo’s voice had come to him, he said, and told him he should kill and eat his wife. Swift runner tried to resist the voice, but eventually gave in, later killing his son, mother-in-law, and brother and eating them too.
He was taken to St. Albert to await trial, and once convicted, taken to Fort Saskatchewan to be hanged.
* For anyone who’s unfamiliar with the term, wendigos are, according to various North American indigenous cultures, monsters that were once people but now have an insatiable appetite for human flesh.
The specifics of how they look/sound/manifest/etc can vary slightly from culture to culture, but what remains constant is that a wendigo is created when a person commits cannibalism.
And once you’ve crossed that line, there’s no going back - you’re a wendigo for life.
Another common aspect of wendigo lore is that when a wendigo is killed you must burn the corpse, otherwise a wendigo can jump from one body to another.