Comments on: The Windigo and The Beheading

By: Researcher

Researcher — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:21:08 +0000

Windigo Psychosis is actually a disorder studied as a Culture Bound Syndrome. It happened to Native American and Canadian tribe members when they over-wintered in too-small and single-room living arrangements.

VisionAndPsychosis.Net points out that a problem of physiology discovered to cause mental breaks for office workers by designers attempting to modernize business offices is the explanation for these beliefs of the Windigo. The cubicle was designed to deal with it by 1968. (Read the first 400 words on VisionAndPsychosis.Net.)

It takes some imagination to see and understand how these primitives had created the “special circumstances” for Subliminal Distraction exposure in the 1800′s.

It still happens today. The violence takes different forms depending on the cultural beliefs of the victim. In Malaysia it is called Amok. Going Postal is the event in the United States. Great Plains tribes experienced Ghost Sickness, and among the Navajo it is iich’aa. Grisi Siknis, crazy sickness, happens to Moskito Indians of Nicaragua. They believe they are being attacked and take up weapons against invisible foes. There was an outbreak after hurricane Fredric. Victims would have been confined together indoors during the storms of the hurricane.

College students are other likely victims since they have behaviors that allow the exposure to cause the mental break. The Virginia Tech shooter is one example. Cho used his laptop in the suite common room while roommates walked by ignoring him. That’s a description of SD exposure. We all saw the paranoid psychotic rant SD produced.

When the sudden mental break strikes it is perceived in terms of the victims beliefs. The Windigo was the bogey man of these people.

Fear (to the point of trembling), paranoia, depression, panic attacks, and thoughts of suicide are the symptoms of the sudden mental break.

I don’t know what the latest bizarre killer did but just sharing a room and performing something requiring deep mental investment with movement in peripheral vision would create the circumstances for exposure. Daydreaming is enough mental investment. (Think of a two person dorm room with an unprotected study desk or computer.)

There is a long list of missing students who suddenly walk away taking almost nothing with them. Some are found suicides, some are accident or crime victims, but a very few recover and return in altered mental states. This argues they had the sudden mental break to cause the disappearance.

The Windigo still walks among us.

By: mystery_man

mystery_man — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:10:09 +0000

rl_estevez- I’d say under the right influences, the human mind is certainly capable of making one really believe it is. That and believing it has witnessed shapeshifting. I’d say hallucinations supplemented with the power of belief can make the human mind believe it is capable of a lot of things.

By: rl_esteves

rl_esteves — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:57:07 +0000

Is the human mind capable of shape shifting one’s physical appearance?

By: dogu4

dogu4 — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:35:22 +0000

A natural history/cultural history note regarding ergotism and spiritual/social movements since the Witch Trials of the 1690s was brought up: the Salem witch trials occured while the northern hemisphere was still within the grasp of the thermal minimum called the “little ice age” and was experiencing one of its climate minimums. The summers were cold and damp and the land was being cleared in the old fashioned way, with lots of dead branches and stumps on the land being burned for years…ideal conditions for fungus such as the claviceps purpurea which produces ergot as well as a lot of other mushrooms some of which are psychogenic and who knows what other kinds of potentially psychogenic producing organisms. We sometime think that the witches were the ones who were effected by the ergot but it was totally believable to the populace that witches were in their midst because so many had witnessed experienced psychedelic visions that natually would have been interpreted as demonic possession.
Flash ahead to the first half of the 19th century in central New York State. A similar thermal minimum was still ongoing and it too is in contemporaneous with large scale land clearing and lots of fires burning enormous hedgerows of slash, stump choked fields and decaying woody debris.
Here’s where it get’s interesting: in the cultural history of spiritual movements in America this area is sometimes referred to the “burnt-over district” eluding to the spiritual vigor which had gripped the region according to some historians. Religious, spiritual and social movements which emphasised visions of apocalyptic or futuristic happenings and firey apparitions were attributed to a number of foundational spiritual and social movements during this time, a couple of which still persist to this day in mainstream American spiritual culture: Millerites, Shakers, LDS, Fourierist Utopians, Odeida Society and other socially radical movements.
I wonder if the area from which our cannibalistic head collector was subject to fires in its recent past or if he’d been eating the local fungus lately.

By: Maven

Maven — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:15:02 +0000

A neighbor had episodes of people dropping out of trees to attack him while he was delusional with Hepatitis C. The idea of a fungus or biological/seasonal cause isn’t too far-fetched to me.
…..However, being of a spiritual mindset, a hungry demonic entity isn’t outside my belief system either.

By: Ceroill

Ceroill — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:58:24 +0000

mystery man, quite true. Ergot poisoning has also been posited as a cause for the werewolf and witchcraft scares of Europe of days gone by.

By: lablanco

lablanco — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:20:29 +0000

SHJack, the story you mention is Algernon Blackwood’s “The Wendigo”, available online.

By: mystery_man

mystery_man — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:08:34 +0000

red_pill_junky- Your idea is not too far fetched at all. Cases of mold infected crops causing epidemics of mass hysteria have been documented since around the 14th century.

One such example is a hypothesis related to the Salem witch hunts. Some think that many of the symptoms attributed to witches, as well as the mass hysteria that followed, might have been caused by a mold induced poisoning called “ergotism”. Ergot is a chemical produced by a type of fungus and has effects similar to the drug LSD. It could have been responsible for hallucinations, seizures, mental disturbances, and bizarre behavior, as well as death and miscarriages in women. All of these things could have been attributed to supernatural or satanic causes. There are quite a few historical examples of this.

In the case of Salem, people blamed witches. Perhaps the same sort of thing could be behind some of the stories of The Windigo as well.

By: springheeledjack

springheeledjack — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:44:38 +0000

The windigo has always been one of my favorite topics (beside’s USO’s that is), and I am always interested to hear more about it–there’s a famous short story about the windigo…of course, can’t remember who wrote it, but it is good and creepy:)

Back to cryptozoology…since the phenomenon does seem to be centered up in Canada, perhaps there is some unknown microbe that causes some sort of psychotic episodes, or perhaps something about the climate that shifts chemicals in the brain of that .0001% of people…or maybe there is some sort of spirit at work…I am not going to dismiss anything native americans have to say about the world…they were here long before us, and seem to understand it a whole lot better than modern humans.

By: red_pill_junkie

red_pill_junkie — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:23:41 +0000

There has been some studies linking schizofrenia via contact with cat hair (sorry, cat lovers).

Maybe some spore that is released in the Summer season in that area of Canada might create a violent schizoid event on some people after being inhaled?