REMASTERED – Episode 18: Hunger Pains

This is the story of the one.

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One of the most chilling historical events of the last 200 years, one that has fascinated me for most of my life, is the 1846 pioneer journey of the families and employees of James Reed and George Donner.

I can't think of a last name that evokes as much emotion, as much fear, and as much instant visual imagery as the Donner name.

In the years since that fateful winter, the name has become synonymous with mountain passes, frozen bodies huddled around dead campfires, and of course, cannibalism.

The Donner story has a way of stopping us in our tracks.

We are morbidly fascinated with their tragic journey.

But even more so, we're amazed at how far they went to stay alive.

Their story forces us to look straight into the face of a fear that most people bury deep beneath the surface.

People.

Eating other people.

We can look for justification, we can research the reasons behind their situation and write sterile and safe papers about the horrific plight they found themselves in.

But at the end of the day, we are simply and powerfully horrified.

From the story of Hansel and Gretel to the modern television show Hannibal, We have always maintained a repulsive fascination with those who cross the line.

We can't stand to think about it, and yet we can't look away either.

Maybe it has to do with the morbid symbolism of one body within another body.

Perhaps it's the realization that, like cattle or wild game, humans can sometimes become food for something or someone else.

Or perhaps, deep down, we're fascinated with cannibalism because we believe that maybe, just maybe,

it turns us into monsters.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this

is lore.

Humans have been confronted with cannibalism for a very long time.

Archaeologists have discovered signs of the act that date back tens of thousands of years.

In some instances, the reasons have clearly been ritualistic, while others have been driven by food shortages.

There's a lot we still don't know but what we do understand has highlighted the fact that long ago it was far more common than it is today.

In the realm of ancient history Greek and Roman historians recorded instances related to war and conquering.

The Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, for example, resulted in scattered reports of cannibalism.

Decades later, when the Romans attacked Numantia, historians in Alexandria recorded similar stories.

One interesting observation is that over the centuries, the accusation of cannibalism has been a political and colonial tool.

The ancient Greeks assumed that all non-Hellenistic peoples were barbarians and cannibals and used it to justify their hostility toward them.

For many empires, even up through the British Empire of the 17th and 18th centuries, it was a way to demonize a people group and to give themselves permission to come in and take over, to bring civilization, so to speak.

Which led to deep prejudice against these people groups.

One example from 1820 stands out.

That was the year a whaling ship called the Essex was rammed and sunk by one of the whales it was pursuing.

If that sounds familiar at all, that's because the story went on to inspire the novel Moby Dick.

After the accident, the captain and crew of 21 boarded three of their whale boats.

They had two choices for a route to safety.

sail 3,000 miles against the wind to Chile or half the distance with the wind to the Marquesas Islands.

But the Marquesans were rumored to be cannibals, so the crew took the longer route.

As a result, they spent months at sea and eventually resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Reality can be cruel and ironic, apparently.

But something darker sits at the center of many cannibalism stories.

At the core of almost all Native American cultures across Canada and the northern portion of what is now the United States, there are stories of the supernatural effects that eating other humans can have on a person.

Each tribe seems to refer to the stories with different terms, but they are all eerily similar.

Wabanaki legend speaks of the man-eating snow giant Gewakwa.

The Cree tell tales of the Witako, also a giant and also a man-eater.

The Mi'kmaq tribes of northern Maine up through Nova Scotia tell stories of the Chinoo, creatures that were once human but had been transformed through some horrible crime that was usually cannibalism.

The most common name for these creatures among Native Americans, however, is one we already know from popular culture.

They are the wendigo, a creature that was once human but had been transformed by their hunger for human flesh into a monster that can't ever be satisfied.

One Native American description of the creature claims a wendigo is taller than a grown man, with a gaunt body and dead skin that seems to be pulled too tightly over its bones.

Tales speak of the tangle of antlers upon its head and the deep eye sockets that seemed to be dead inside.

And it smelled of death and decay.

In Cree mythology though, the wendigo was simply a human who had become possessed by an evil spirit.

It would take over and then turn its hunger and hatred toward the people around it.

To the Cree, the Wendigo was most often just another person, a neighbor, a friend, a sister, or a son.

There was no hope for those who were transformed into man-eating creatures.

There was only one solution available.

These creatures must be hunted and killed.

It's fantasy.

It's a cultural meta-narrative about something else, something deeper.

At least that's what the anthropologists tell us.

But some have taken those legends at face value.

Swift Runner was a Native American man from the Cree tribe that lived in the western portion of Canada.

He was born in the early 1800s and worked as a hunter and trapper in the country north of Fort Edmonton, as well as a guide for the Northwest Mounted Police.

He was a big man, standing over six feet tall, and according to the reports, he was well liked and respected among his people.

He and his wife had six children.

It was said that he was a loving father who cared deeply for his family, which is why the winter of 1878 will be remembered as a tragedy.

According to the reports, Swift Runner stumbled into a Catholic mission in St.

Albert sometime in the spring of 1879.

He was distraught and unfocused.

He told the priests there that the winter had been harsh and that his entire family had starved to death.

He was, in fact, the only one to make it out alive.

But something didn't sit right with the priests.

For one thing, Swift Runner didn't look like a man who had endured starvation throughout the winter months.

He was a solid 200 pounds and seemed healthy and strong.

And another hint that not all was well were his nightmares, which often ended with him screaming.

In the end, the priests reached out to the mounted police.

A group of investigators was dispatched to look into the matter and they took Swift Runner back to his winter camp.

To his credit, Swift Runner was helpful.

He immediately showed the men a small grave near his campsite and explained that it was the grave of one one of his boys.

They even went as far as to open the grave and everything lined up with his story.

They were full of the bones of a child and it was safe to assume the child was Swiftrunners.

But then the police found other clues that began to paint a darker picture.

Around the camp in scattered locations, they began to uncover more bones and a skull.

Not just a few either.

There were bones everywhere.

Some of the larger bones were hollow and snapped in half, clearly the result of someone sucking the marrow out of them.

They also found bits of flesh and hair.

The evidence began to pile up, and they looked to Swiftrunner for an explanation.

That's when he told them the truth.

According to him, a Wendigo spirit came to their camp during the winter.

It spoke to him and told him to eat his family.

At first, he resisted, ignoring the voice, but slowly, over time, the wendigo took control.

And then it took action.

Swiftrunner's Runner's wife was the first to die, then one of the younger boys.

One by one, his family was killed and eaten.

Then the creature moved on to his mother-in-law, then his own brother.

To Swift Runner, it was just cold fact.

A monster had eaten his family.

And the police agreed.

The only thing they disagreed on was who the monster was.

The mutilated human remains were collected and transported to Fort Saskatchewan, along with Swift Runner himself.

His trial began on August 8th, 1879, and it was about as cut and dried as could be.

Both the judge and jury refused to accept the story of the Wendigo.

They saw the man as a murderer and sentenced him to be hanged.

Over 60 people gathered at the fort on December 20th to watch that hanging.

One witness to the execution, a man who had reportedly seen several hangings in his life, was said to have slapped his thigh and declared, Boys, that was the prettiest hanging I ever seen.

The Severn River in Ontario winds through the homeland of the Sandy Lake First Nation.

This area of Canada is so isolated that it wasn't until the early decades of the 20th century that the Western world really made an effort to reach out and connect with the people who lived there.

It's way up in the far western corner of Ontario, in the kind of territory where lakes have islands that have their own lakes.

By the late 1800s, the Hudson Bay Company had closed down enough of its trading posts that the closest one to Sandy Lake was over 140 miles away.

That was a 50-hour walk across rough terrain.

I'm not really sure that isolated is a strong enough word.

This place was practically alien.

Jack Fiddler was born in the 1830s, or maybe it was the 1840s, most people aren't sure.

sure, but we know that he was a Cree man who worked as a trader in that area.

He made the trek between the villages and the trading posts for a living, and in the process he met a lot of people.

He was the son of the Sandy Lake people's shaman, and over his lifetime he had five wives and many, many children.

When Jack's father died in 1891, he took over as the leader of the Sandy Lake people.

That sounds fancy, but in reality there were only around 120 living in his community.

He had influence on the wider geographical area too, but his real power came from his role as tribal shaman.

A shaman's powers were a vital part of his leadership.

When Jack became the spiritual leader of his people, he became the keeper of their ancient traditions and their guardian against the approaching darkness that was Western civilization.

There are even legends that tell of Jack Fiddler.

curing illnesses.

But most importantly, Jack became their first and only defense against the Wendigo, often called upon to hunt down and kill them.

I know this sounds like the stuff of comic books or Hollywood movies, but Jack Fiddler lives up to the hype.

In fact, over his lifetime, he claimed to have defeated 14 of the monsters.

But Jack didn't go looking for tall, monstrous creatures with antlers and bony bodies.

No, he understood the wendigo to be more subtle.

Some wendigos, Jack said, had been sent to attack his people by other shamans.

Others had been members of his own tribe who seemed to have been overtaken with an unstoppable urge to eat human flesh.

When it was his own people, Jack said that he and his brother Joseph were the ones called upon to do the hard thing and kill the individuals.

And not just kill them.

No, that wasn't enough to stop the possession.

You see, it was believed that the Wendigo spirit could actually hop from one body to the next, so those who died as a result of their possession were often burned to stop the infection from spreading.

For the Sandy Lake people and many of the other other Native American tribes that cover much of the northern half of North America, the Wendigo stories were more than hearsay.

It was an idea that was rooted in ancient tradition.

Ceremonies were built around the legend.

People were warned and educated constantly about the dangers this creature posed to the community.

And then suddenly, all of that tradition and history ran headlong into the modern world.

And the results were disastrous.

Sometime in 1905, Joseph Fiddler's daughter-in-law was brought to Jack's village.

She was very sick, according to multiple first-hand accounts.

She was in deep pain that often drove her to cry out and moan and constantly make noises.

Some of the women tending to her would even have to hold her down to keep her under control.

Jack and his brother Joseph were brought in.

They were old men by then, both in their 80s and very frail.

but they knew what was causing her illness, and they knew how to stop it.

They had done this many times before, before, and so they did what they did best.

They took a thin rope and looped it over her head, and then slowly, they tightened it.

It wasn't done in cold blood.

It was a calculated decision that these men came to only after deep discussion.

But it was driven by fear.

If the Wendigo spirit inside her had been allowed to take control, There was no telling how destructive it might have become.

To them, this was preventative.

It was mercy.

A form of euthanasia that protected the entire community.

The Fiddlers were mere instruments in the hands of a culture driven by superstition.

Witnesses testified to their quiet, dignified nature.

But that didn't help.

The men were brought before a six-man jury later that year.

The Toronto newspapers printed sensational headlines about the trial, crying out against devil worship and murder.

And in response, people around the country cried out for a conviction.

And they were guilty, without question.

These men had killed a member of their family.

It might not have been a crime of passion, but they were still murderers.

So when the final verdict came down, it was far from a surprise.

Guilty.

The Cree people of Sandy Lake lost their leader.

They lost two of the most respected elders of their tiny community.

And most frightening to them, They lost their last remaining Wendigo hunters.

Real or not, these men had been a wall that kept the darkness and fear at bay.

And now that wall was gone.

Superstition has often served to answer our questions and calm our fears.

From the changelings of Ireland to the vampires of New England, the stories we tell have helped us explain the mysteries we don't understand.

That's not all superstition does, I know, but it makes up a lot of the examples we find.

We fear the unknown, and we'll come up with anything to explain it away.

Cannibalism is something that humans have feared for a very, very long time.

Not because we're convinced that it could change us into supernatural monsters.

No, at the root of it all, cannibalism is just a line that we don't think we should cross.

And rightly so.

History is littered with examples of people who have crossed the line, not because their life was at risk or because they had no choice, but because of something darker.

Deep belief in the folklore of their upbringing, mental instability, premeditated violence.

Whatever the reason, every example reveals humans to be the true monsters, capable of anything.

Even the things we fear the most.

And maybe Jack Fiddler understood this.

Perhaps he knew that he represented the final entry in a vital ancient lineage.

He saw the world ill-equipped to defend itself against the evils he had fought all his life.

I have to imagine that the idea of it exhausted him.

On September 30th of 1907, while on a walk outside with a police constable, Jack escaped into the woods, where he strangled himself with the sash he wore.

His brother would later die in prison from tuberculosis.

A century later, on July 30th of 2008, a man named Tim McLean was riding a Greyhound bus along the Trans-Canada Highway in Manitoba when one of the other passengers attacked and killed him.

The man, Vincent Lee, did more than kill McLean, though.

He stabbed him, beheaded him, and then proceeded to cannibalize the body.

Today, we would be quick to see the killer as mentally ill and desperately in need of help.

but it's easy to see how an older worldview might point out his trip through Wendigo country and wonder if perhaps he met an evil spirit there.

The courts, as you might have guessed, ruled in favor of insanity.

In the end, he was held in a high-security mental institute in Manitoba, but he stayed there for less than a decade.

In May of 2015, he was released back into society.

Few corners of folklore hold as many chilling tales as the world of the Wendigo.

And while they are easy monsters to describe, there's a much deeper truth to them all.

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Eloceano nos deleta.

Algunos en maravillan antel colorido mundo vajula superficia.

El loceano nos alimenta.

Otros en cuentrans ensuabundancia.

El seano nos insena.

Qué nuestras decisiones díaras affectanc está los lugares more profundos.

El lo seano nos muvebe.

Ya sía susciando na hola, or admirando su impersionante velleza.

E lo seano nos connecta.

Discovere tú conection en Monterrey Bay Aquarium punto ore que diagonal connecta.

There have always been monsters around us.

Whether it's an appearance of the modern Slender Man or tales of creatures from ancient mythology, it seems that wherever people go, we take our stories of monsters with us.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that the Wendigo folklore has lasted so long.

What is surprising though is just how consistent it's been over the past few centuries.

The names may vary from one people group to another, but the wendigo has seemingly always been there, like the shadows at the edge of the firelight.

One common thread is the creature's physical description.

That tall human-like body, topped by an antlered skull, is almost universal, and so is the claim that its heart is frozen solid like a block of ice.

In fact, most of the indigenous cultures that whisper about the wendigo refer to it as a spirit of winter.

At the very least, the stories about it have a way of giving us chills.

And there are a lot of stories to pick from, too.

In his book called Observations on Hudson's Bay 1743, fur trader James Isham tried his best to record customs and stories he learned from the Cree people that he traded with.

Among a list of Cree words in his book, there's an entry for something called the Witiko.

In the column beside it, he simply wrote, The devil.

And other hunters from the same period warned of evil cannibalistic monsters in the area.

Another Hudson Bay Company trader Richard Norton recorded the story of a pair of Cree women who arrived at Fort Churchill in the winter of 1741.

They had fled the younger woman's husband who had become overcome with some supernatural force that drove him to murder and eat their children.

But the most graphic and textbook description of this transformation was actually recorded nearly a century earlier, in 1661.

That's when a Jesuit missionary named Paul Lujean wrote down a story that he experienced firsthand.

He and a handful of other Jesuits had been traveling through the St.

Lawrence Valley and were nearing a place where they would exchange guides.

But when they arrived, only one man was waiting for them, and he informed them that their new guides would not be coming to help.

Why?

Because they were dead.

They are afflicted with neither lunacy, hypochondria, nor frenzy, he wrote, but have a combination of all these species of disease which affects their imaginations and causes them a more than canine hunger.

This makes them so ravenous for human flesh that they pounce upon women, children, and even upon men, like veritable werewolves, and devour them voraciously without being able to appease their appetite, ever seeking fresh prey, and the more greedily, the more they eat.

This ailment attacked our deputies, and as death is the sole remedy, they were slain in order to stay the course of their madness.

And I think there's an important lesson we can learn from this eyewitness account, which helps us better understand the folklore of the Wendigo.

Even three and a half centuries ago, it was clear that the Wendigo were more than purely supernatural creatures lurking in the forest.

They were people transformed by something evil who did unspeakable things to others.

Today, modern historians and mental health experts have looked back on the trail of stories and given that sort of behavior a name, Wendigo Psychosis.

But let me be clear, mental health is always deeply complex, intensely personal, and easily colored by culture and tradition, especially when violence and folklore share the same space.

Despite the story's chilling description of evil behavior, it's clear that it was people who made it happen.

And I think that highlights the most frightening truth at the center of this folklore.

Wherever people go, the real monster is never far behind.

This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

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Check them both out if you want a bit more lore in your life.

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