Chace Randolph

Blog Post Number 65 Written: 01-20-2022Uploaded: 08-11-2023

I don’t know if this really happened, but this is in my memory, to me, this experience was and still is, all too real.

I met a Wendigo once. I was around ten years old, and my family had just moved into a new house, same dusty little desert town, I still went to the same school, but this was a new house on the other side of town. This was in the evening, not long after we had moved in, the first night all of my mother’s goats had been set up in their pens. My parents were feeding them, and I being a kid, was wandering the yard. This was in the twilight after the sun had set, but before the sky was dark. In our stretch of the desert, this odd gray sky could drag on for an hour on most summer evenings.

As I explored I saw something, being a kid, full of energy I ran to get closer, I wasn’t sure if one of the goats, having gotten loose or something. I didn’t know what it was, but it was too large. It was walking, on its hind legs, upright like other bipeds, but it was too large to be a man, and it reeked. The sweet sickly stench of rotting flesh, of dead things. It had cloven hooves on its feet, and long arms, with massive clawed hands that hung below its knees. It was covered in wire-like gray hair. As the hair went above the waist it became patchy, and as my eyes went higher up its back the hair gave way to burned leathery skin, and still higher, the skin became gaunt and stretched much like the dead goats I had seen as they aged out of the herd. The skin grew so tight, that it couldn’t hold the bones, and there was a rib-sticking out, the gray bone of an ancient shoulder blade. The worst part was its head. As my eyes climbed over its broad stinking shoulders and down the length of its neck to its head, where the skin was gone altogether. The meat muscle and sinew hung from the exposed vertebra down the length of the long equine neck, which hunched forward so the head jutted out. The head itself was little more than a skull with the last vestiges of meat and sour blood dripping from its long toothy jaw. Without the skin and muscle to hold it in, the tongue hung down between the jawbones.

I blinked and the thing was still there, walking, lumbering leisurely. I blinked again and looked into the empty eye sockets. Somehow I felt its vision was sweeping towards me, and any second its head would swing around to stare at me with those blackened pits. I didn’t yell, I didn’t scream, I just turned and ran. I ran as fast as I could, I swear nearly twenty years later, I still have never run faster. I returned to where my parents were. In a panic I told my father, he wasn’t concerned. I was terrified, but he told me it must have been a shadow playing tricks on my mind. I was not convinced, tricks of the light don’t carry a stench, but I didn’t push the matter further, and I didn’t explore any more that day. By the end of that month, I had a terrible sinus infection and never recovered my sense of smell, to this day I can’t smell, and my ability to taste suffers too. It was more than a year before I returned to that part of the property. At the time I had no idea what the thing was, other than it was nasty and evil and meaty and I never trusted horses again. I half expected them to start walking on their hind legs and the flesh of the head and neck to slough off.

Some odd fifteen-ish years later, I had graduated high school, worked through college, and moved to a different town, the beast all but forgotten. Until a co-worker and I on night shift were exchanging stories during our lunch break and the visage of the beast came back to me.

My co-worker sat in silence as I retold the horror. Very matter of factly he told me it was a wendigo. I had no idea what that was, I had never heard the word before, but a quick internet search turned up disturbing images that struck too close to home. It took me some time to recover, I nearly left work to go cower at home. Now more than a year after learning what it’s called, putting a name to the monster from my childhood, it still hunts me in my sleep.

I met a Wendigo once.