Episode
Minnesota: The Wendigo & Bigfoot
- Podcast
- Backwoods Bigfoot Stories
- Published
- Aug 2, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3352
- Processing state
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Summary
On the morning of December 20, 1879, a Cree trapper named Swift Runner stood on a scaffold in Alberta and waited in the cold, because the hangman had forgotten the straps and had to go back for them. He had already confessed. He had already walked the police out to a clearing in the bush and shown them what was left of his family, and his explanation never changed across four months in custody. Something came into him that winter, and it made him hungry in a way that food could not answer. The men who tried him did not believe in that thing and the men who guarded him did, and both groups agreed on the physical facts, which were a camp 25 miles from a post that was issuing rations, a cooking pot, bones cracked open at the ends, and one man who walked out of those woods in the spring heavier than he went in.The road trip turns north in January, and this stop is different from the others. The wendigo is not a cryptid with a gift shop. It comes out of the traditions of living Algonquian-speaking peoples, and in northern Minnesota that means the Anishinaabe, whose seven nations in this state are governments with citizens, not historical footnotes. So we spend a few honest minutes on what the old accounts actually describe before we go anywhere near a sighting, and it turns out to be almost the opposite of what has been sold to you. There are no antlers. The deer skull came out of concept art in the last 20 years. What the tradition describes is something starving, with the skin drawn tight over the bones and the eyes sunk back in the sockets, that grows in exact proportion to whatever it eats so that the arithmetic never breaks in its favor and it is never one bite closer to full than it was when it started. And it is not only something out in the timber. It is something a…