A Ship Stranded in the Desert: 5 Unsolved Mysteries of the Wild West

In the spring of 1879, the priests of the Catholic Mission in St Albert, Canada, were greeted by a strange sight. A large man wandered into the mission alone, behaving strangely. The man, a member of the Cree tribe named Swift Runner, told the priests that his family had starved to death the previous winter. He was the only survivor.

Though the winter of 1878-1879 had been particularly brutal to the Cree tribe, the priests were suspicious. The man would often scream during his sleep, experiencing what were apparently terrifying nightmares.

Despite the claim that his family starved to death, Swift Runner seemed to be in good health (the priests estimated that he weighed roughly 200lbs). Finally, Swift Runner confessed to something that chilled the holy men to the bone; he admitted to being possessed by an evil spirit, Wendigo.

The Wendigo is known in many northern indigenous tribes as a spirit of violence and cannibalism. People lived in fear of being possessed, and those who were suspected of harboring a Wendigo spirit were often killed to protect the rest of the tribe.

Belief in the spirit was so strong that European and Canadian observers developed the term “Wendigo psychosis” to describe seemingly random acts of attempted cannibalism amongst several tribes, particularly the Cree...

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