I Took A Job In Northwest Vermont: Entry One: Wendigo Psychosis

Read part one here

So I thought I’d take some time to go over some of the Abenaki legends in the area. I mentioned some stuff about the Tall Men and Skadegamutc in the last part but this whole place is rife with some truly weird legends. This place is like the Bridgewater Triangle or the rural location of some cryptozoological beast – there’s a lot of witnesses but precious little evidence to support anything.

Some of the stories are easy to understand: the wendigo legend is alive and well in this area, UFO’s are seen from time-to-time, bigfoot and little leprechaun-type critters are said to wander the state forest; but there’s also an eye-eating mountain god, vampires, sea gods, a cursed mine, and the child disappearances I talked about before, not to mention a ‘zombie epidemic’ that occurred in the 80’s that was supposedly foiled by teenagers! The Abenaki call the region ‘gichi manito’ (great mystery) and have historically treated the area with equal parts suspicion and loathing. The Historical Society records and all the local folklore agree that the Native American population only started communities in the area once the white man settled in the valley. Miss Angie says they feared the Tall Men, that there was a vengeful spirit living under the mountains that would pluck out eyes and leave the victims to starve to death in the forest. I asked her whether this was the Skadegamutc or something else and she couldn’t say either way.

The Abenaki also told of ‘flying heads’ (a myth that crosses over with Iroquois and Wyandot folklore) that streaked across the sky and bit people at night. Oh, did I mention that the heads were on fire? A lot of the flying head stories sound more like UFOs since most don’t include the ‘biting people in the night’ aspect; they would roar across the sky and cause the ground to tremble – which sounds a lot like meteor crashes. This is just to give you an idea of the kind of shit we’re dealing with here…

Just picking up little snatches of gossip between the lines of archival documents, like the mention of Ericka wandering the woods, made my heart race as my inner detective started trying to put the pieces together! Steve and his crew – more on them later, I promise – started becoming more than just passing acquaintances and we hang out most evenings. They’re all students at the community college here, Missisquoi, and between coffee at Mocha Java in the center of town in the morning and drinks in the evenings we’ve been spending a lot of time together. What strikes me as the most weird thing; however, is that none of them question any of the town’s strange rules. You could almost call them rituals at the pathological way most people follow them: from the dusk curfew for pre-teens, to letting all cats out to roam about, to touching the bronze anchor in the center of town, and finally the ban on fishing in the bay area. They don’t bat an eye at the two, count them TWO, mass disappearances in the area! Granted, they both happened over two hundred years ago, but c’mon…two entire towns go missing overnight and no one is the tiniest bit concerned over the cause?

Apparently it’s something that all newcomers to the area experience once they linger long enough. Considering there’s a multi-million-dollar tourist industry here that seemingly grows each year it would make sense that…whatever…is happening isn’t as frequent an occurrence as to affect the thousands of people moving through every winter. That’s not to say that disappearances and deaths due to ‘misadventure’ are entirely absent, but they’re spread out enough between the big tourist destinations (Precipice Bay, The Sky Dells, Golden Boughs, and the Hollows State Forest) that no one really puts all the pieces together. Hell, I’m not even sure all of them ARE connected myself, they could just be random and unconnected.

Except for the child disappearances…those I’m sure are connected to the whole Witch’s Children situation. But the last time a missing child report was filed was back in 2002, from Petersham, and the child was found two days later in a sink hole at the old Copper Mine. So are people not reporting the missing or is something else going on?

I didn’t bring any of this up to the group, though, since if it’s a ‘local vs foreigner’ kind of thing I don’t want Steve to turn around, give me a Donald Sutherland howl, and run me out of town…

So I’m keeping my broader observations to myself and just asking a lot of questions.

Miss Angie told me to talk to Tall Jim, an Abenaki who works as a bouncer at MacAddams’ Old Pool House down near the boardwalk. I’d been to MacAddams before with Steve and the other townies, it’s a large bar with a restaurant, dance floor, and second-floor pool hall. There are actually two bars inside, one in front of the dance floor when you first walk in and another behind the pool tables. The pool hall area has comfy booths and dartboards and is far enough away from the dancing that you can have a quiet conversation. They also offer free WI-fi. In fact, the “quiet” bar was where I typed up the first part of this since Miss Angie doesn’t believe in the internet.

I’d seen Tall Jim before but never paid much attention. He’s a REALLY tall guy, probably 6’7-6’9, in his 40’s (at least that’s how he looks – his voice sounds older), and always wearing a very distinctive black leather hat with silver ornaments that look like bird talons. Unassuming, he isn’t built like a normal bouncer, he’s thin and wiry. I think the only interaction I’d had with him before Miss Angie introduced us was when he took my ID the first time I went to MacAddams.

Thanks to Miss Angie we met up at the upstairs bar in the early afternoon before his shift began. He sat and drank a Shirley Temple – he’s a die-hard teetotaler – while I asked him a thousand questions.

“There aren’t any good answers to any of your questions. The first people didn’t write anything down and aside from some stories that survived there isn’t much about where the stories came from. I know of some things and I’ll tell you everything I can.

“You know about the wendigo? Most tribes have some story about it, though the spelling changes – ‘windigo’, ‘windago’ – but this area is a real hotbed of stories. First I’d heard was it was a Great Lakes story but this place? Man, we just run with it! There’s a lot of hogwash deer-headed nonsense floating around now saying it’s the wendigo and yeah, to some tribes it may be but do you know how we see it? Our wendigo is as big as the mountains with antlers that stretch across the horizon and the more it eats the bigger it gets until one day – when the stars go dark – it will be the only thing in existence. Just silence and darkness and hunger.” He took a sip of his red drink. “You’ve heard about wendigo psychosis?”

It’s a condition where an individual believes themselves to be or is in the process of becoming a wendigo. These victims crave human flesh or are terrified of becoming a cannibal, sometimes hallucinating that regular food or items are human body parts. I told him as much.

“Well three cases of the psychosis are from Darabont County. The last three confirmed cases of wendigo psychosis were treated and diagnosed here, two at Bleak Hill and one at the old sanitarium. It’s a big issue among the tribes and with good reason: we’ve had more confirmed cases of cannibalism here than anywhere else in the country. Obviously, we keep that on the down low, especially with the ski resorts and such along the mountains, but it’s true. My tribe had two cases. Some tribes don’t exist anymore because of it…but that’s neither here nor there to your question.”

He drank down half his sweet soda and checked the clock. I hadn’t even noticed any time had passed but we’d been speaking for almost an hour.

“Angie said you wanted to know more about the legends around here, the Tall Men and such, but I think you should start with the wendigo. Around here, all things begin with the wendigo.

“Did you know that the first tribes came to this area hunting a wendigo from across the lake? You can only kill wendigo with fire, did you know that? They stayed in the area since the fishing and hunting were good but only settled outside the forest. Wendigo are parts of greater darkness, they are incomplete fragments longing for the fulfillment of the whole and driven to devour or destroy anything in their path – they are drawn to the greater dark and The Great Silence. The first tribes believed that the wendigo that brought them across the lake was traveling to a greater evil and saw the forests and mountains as hiding places for ghosts and witches and spirits. So they didn’t sleep in the forest, only hunted in daylight, and returned across the lake in winter.

“Then the white man came and settled, carving into the forest and seemingly dispelling some of the mystery. So we settled as well but never too close to the mountains and we moved back North in Winter or further South to the bigger tribes. Over generations we forgot why we moved and eventually started living here year-round.”

He paused and smiled wryly to himself and stared up at the ceiling for a moment.

“Then the problems began. It was like whatever cosmic joke had finally played out and the good times were over. You know some of the stories: the disappearances, the ‘window-dressing’ as Angie likes to call it of unexplained phenomena, but we were settled now and this was our home. Better or worse nothing was going to force us to move.

“Angie said you were asking about the Tall Men and why we fear them. Well, before we moved to this area there was an…off shoot group that lived in the area. We have no history of them but they lived here before the forest spread far from the mountains. They were the outcasts, the loners, the cast-offs of a lot of different tribes drawn together by worship of a ‘God’ that lived beneath the mountain, although how they came together is lost as is what their god was or what he promised. The god was blind from living in the dark and the group – let’s call them a cult to make it clearer – the cult believed that by sacrificing their eyes they could help the god see and rise from the mountain. Every cultist gave one eye to the god and they were know as Bazegw Namito (one sight) to the locals who avoided or attacked them. Eventually they must have thought that they needed more eyes to sacrifice so they raided and kidnapped from other tribes. This continued for years until the tribes got together and tracked them back to the Tall Men. The Abenaki, Micmac, Iroquois, Wampanoag, and Mohawk tribes among others all converged on the cult and drove them back to their temple: a deep cave in the side of what’s now called Mt. Warren, the tallest of the Tall Men. For four moons the tribes kept them trapped, trying to starve them I guess, until scouts were sent.

“Inside the cave the walls were covered in paintings done in blood, the floor littered with clothes and stripped skin. The passage went deep underground until opening into a huge cavern. Now no one ever saw the cult outside of their raids or the isolated warrior, they never seemed to stop or make camp making tracking them difficult, and now the tribes knew why: they lived in the shrine to their god.

“The cult was strewn about the cavern in various stages of death. At the far end was a huge painting of an eye and in the center of the iris was a round hole about fist-sized. A pile of cultists were dead in front of the painting frozen in worship forever. Every cultist was completely blind – maybe they thought more sacrifices would finally free their god and save them? I don’t know – and some had begun resorting to cannibalism. See how everything always seems to come back to the wendigo?

“The tribes burned everything inside and killed the surviving cult members. For good measure they also sealed up the entrance to the cave, although I have no idea how they did that. And that’s why we fear the Tall Men. As a child, my mother used to scare me into doing chores or going to sleep by telling me that the One Sights would take me, drag me down into the mountains, and pluck out my eyes. So yes, our myths are old and we know why some of them came about but others…well, most of your questions are about the other kinds of myths.”

So somewhere in the side of Mt. Warren, itself one of the tallest mountains in New England, was a dark cult-hole filled with burned fanatics and possibly some eldritch horror? From over three hundred years ago? Jesus…it was just like the Witch’s Children! No wonder people in The Bay were so supersitious! I asked Jim if any attempt had been made to locate the cult’s shrine.

“None that I know of…I mean why would we want to dig something like that up? It’s probably just a tall tale, some kind of fable that just grew and grew becoming more grotesque with each retelling, but let me ask you this: would you want to reopen something like that if there was even the smallest chance some tiny part of the story was true? Would you risk exposing some part of the greater dark just to prove or disprove that the story was false?”

Jim finished his drink and lit a narrow, hand-rolled cigarette. He may not drink but he certainly smoked like a chimney. It didn’t smell like a normal cigarette, either, there was something herbacious about it but not like weed. It smelled like lavender? The incongruity of this grizzled old man drinking a shirley temple and smoking something that smelled like lavender perfume was powerful and I nearly burst out laughing. Thankfully, he didn’t notice my cough or the way I hid my smile behind my glass of cider.

“You said something about the ‘other kinds of myths’?”

“Yeah, the giant birds or lights or child disappearances…none of those have any real origin. They didn’t come from our stories and aside from Ericka – The Witch – they just kind of popped up as the years went by; there isn’t really some big kind of event that starting the rest of the tall tales in the area. That’s not to say there isn’t history behind the other stories, but I dare say that you’d probably have more luck investigating them in your archives.”

Taking that as the end of the discussion, I just wanted to circle back to what he’d mentioned about Wendigo Psychosis.

“Well, it’s almost time for my shift, but I’ll tell you one story.

“Remember how I said that some tribes don’t exist anymore because of wendigos? Obviously there are some stories from antiquity about how wendigos wiped out this group or that group, but that’s just tall tales usually. No, I’m going to tell you about the Namasak tribe and I can assure you that this story is one hundred percent true.

“This all happened in 1943, right down the river in New Stickney. The Namasak were fishermen and had been since they first came together along the Northern banks of Lake Champlain in Canada before the French arrived. By that time the tribe was ‘fishes’ in name only and occupied a small farming town outside of New Stickney proper called Fish Basket. It was winter, like you’d expect a wendigo story to take place, but it was a relatively mild season with little snow and warmer average temps. The town was fairly self-sufficient and they did a brisk trade in fruits and vegetables and the like, you know how times were back then…”

I didn’t, not really, but I took AP American History and my dad had a strange obsession with The Great Depression so I knew enough to put together some idea of what he was talking about.

“We know that the tribe was still intact and functional up until Monday, January 11th, since they collected their ration cards and gasoline for their farming machines. The entire group went silent following that with no contact with outsiders, although there was a series of snow squalls over the intervening weeks so none of their acquaintances in New Stickney thought anything strange was going on until Monday, February 8th rolled along and no one showed up for their ration books or gas.

“The next day a group of five men, including Father Nathan Dowling, a Protestant who had access to a truck, rolled up to Fish Basket. At first nothing seemed out of the ordinary except for the lack of people. And that was a strange thing as there were six families with children living on the farm, from infants to two teenagers.

“Father Dowling later reported that there was nothing amiss until they reached the first farmhouse. The snow had not been disturbed on the dirt road but there were confusing footprints crossing between the forest and houses. Confusing because they all looked like barefoot human footprints. By the time the group entered the farmhouse to investigate they were all on edge.”

Here, Jim stopped and sucked at the melted ice and lingering dregs of syrup at the bottom of his glass.

“Inside was an abattoir. The only table in room was covered in gore and part of what had once been Old Tom, the leader of the group. Tom was already dead and all that remained of him was a trunk hanging upside down from the rafters. His arms, legs, pecker…er, genitals, were all sliced off and his head was hanging down and almost completely cut off. It looked like someone had taken a knife and carved out his throat all the way back to his spine, so it just kinda hung off like a tassel. They couldn’t tell if anything around the house had been his limbs since everything had been minced down but they did find his pe…genitals…pickling in a jar in a cabinet.

“Well…you can imagine how that group felt walking into a scene like that. Dowling drove back to town to bring more men as well as the police and doctors. Ambulances, fire trucks, and the like were allotted more gas rations at the time so med wagons were the best way to bring a lot of people up the the site. Dowling also gave a brief statement to the police, which is where we get this story and the associated official records.

“One of the cops riding back to the Basket was Atherton Loggerton, whose family is still in law enforcement around here, and his official report corroborates what I’m about to tell you:

“Dowling and Loggerton returned at around 2 pm and the sun was already beginning to set. Accompanying them was a volunteer ambulance with a nurse and two orderlies from Highgate State Hospital, and a ladder truck with four volunteer fire fighters. They found no one waiting for them, no sign of the four men Dowling had left there, but there was a frenzied scramble of impressions in the snow including a lot of blood. Leaving the ambulance and firefighters at the first building, Dowling and Loggerton followed the trail away from Old Tom’s final resting place towards the biggest barn.

“There was a light on inside and the pair called out to anyone inside before approaching. The welcome they received was an ignited jar of kerosene almost landing on their heads. Loggerton’s sleeve caught fire and the conflagration and his screams proved to be enough to bring the rest of the group up the road.

“Someone was screaming and screeching from inside the barn and he had a rifle as well as more kerosene bombs. No one could understand anything they were saying and it was at such a high pitch and volume they couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman. Loggerton started shooting back and that continued for a while until either Loggerton grazed the assailant or they accidentally dropped one of their jar because they came running at the group completely ablaze.

“By the time the firemen put it out it was clear the man was a goner. He’d apparently been shooting and throwing the kerosene completely naked and there was nothing else to burn than skin so he was down to the bone in some places. Eyes gone, ears and nose melted, lips just smears against his teeth, the guy was obviously dying but that didn’t stop him from croaking through the charred meat of what was left of his throat.

“‘I’m bigger’, is what he was saying, over and over and over until he died. Never stopped, never said anything else, didn’t even move, just kept repeating it as he hacked up blood. Now what did I tell you earlier about the Wendigo?”

Ah yes…there were the nervous shakes right on schedule. It felt like the temperature in the usually warm pool hall had dropped a good twenty degrees. I parroted back his earlier comment on the insatiable hunger of the Wendigo.

“That’s right. The madman proved to be the only member of the tribe still alive…well, at the time the ‘rescue’ crew arrived he’d been alive…with the rest of them splashed about the barn and two other houses. Now the other members of the first group to arrive – the ones who mysteriously went missing between when Dowling left and returned? – they were dead, of course. No one could quite understand it, but the four men had been decapitated and stacked on the far side of the barn. Now how could a single naked man decapitate four people without serious signs of a struggle? Supposedly there weren’t any tracks leading to or from Old Tom’s house and, while there was blood, not the amount one would expect from killing four grown men. And then, how did the bodies end up by the barn with, once again, no tracks to or from? Dowling and Loggerton swore for the rest of their lives that their statements were true and they were both known for being honorable. But that’s a question that will never be answered, certainly not now…

“As for the rest of the tribe, well, like I said, there were six families amounting to eighteen adults and six children. None of them were found alive. Parts of them were found in the barn and surroundings but the majority were just among the puddles of gore. There was never any formal accounting of the deceased, no caskets, no funerals, just logs in the police records and coroner death certificates.

“Now three bodies were more-or-less intact – meaning their heads were still attached to their torsos but not much more than that – and those three are the reason why we believe the tribe succumbed to the curse of the Wendigo.

“The four bodies – I’m including Old Tom – were determined to have been the last killed. Each one was found in a different building; two cabins, a shack, and an abandoned delivery truck, and thanks to the copious amounts of blood at each location as well as some writings found in the initial search, it was determined that they had been fighting with the incredible melted man for control of the barn. It was also discovered that all four had been eating human flesh as they had all been disemboweled post-mortem and the…evidence…was clear for all to see…

“Old Tom was the leader of the group and had been since they gathered together in the late 1920s. He’d had a mass of ledgers keeping track of yields, expenditures, gains, etcetera, in his cabin – the first location Dowling and company entered. Each ledger corresponded to a year, so naturally the searchers looked at that one first.

“What they were able to salvage from the blood-drenched book was that everything had been normal until the evening of January 13. He wrote that Tomas Cesar, Richard Cesar, and Tom Crow were acting ‘strange’ that morning. No telling what ‘strange’ meant as he didn’t elaborate, but the next legible entry was from January 20 and it was just a list of reasons Old Tom hated Tom Crow…and it was written in blood.

“It seemed like the sickness affected the four men and pit them against each other, as well as a fifth individual called ‘The Hungry One’ – presumably the melted man based in the barn – in a contest of who would be ‘the biggest’. I think you can infer that ‘the biggest’ meant who could eat the most flesh…”

That just sounded terrifying! Imagine being snowbound with your friends and family when suddenly some of them turned into obsessive cannibals? Imagine waking up one morning and your father is hacking your siblings to pieces and eating them, then hunting you to kill and eat you as well? I didn’t really want to think about how the six children in the farm met their ends…

“So then who was The Hungry One? The guy who burned himself? They never found out?”

Tall Jim’s ice had melted into a pinkish layer at the bottom of his highball glass and he slurped it down. It was at that point I realized how deflated Jim looked, like talking about these strange happenings sucked some of the life out of him. I resolved that after he finished I’d stop bothering him for the night and let him get on with his shift.

“Ah…there’s where the story gets even weirder. I told you that the guy’s face was melted by the kerosene, right? Well, his body effectively liquified on the drive from the Basket back to New Stickney. No bones, nothing solid leftover, just a hell of a lot of blood. From what the – I guess you’d call – first responders reported, the melted man didn’t match any of the Namasak on record. That isn’t to say he might not have been a transient member of another tribe wandering around or a friend of a friend but that’s neither here nor there; he was a stranger who apparently brought a delicious cut of meat with him when their rations were dwindling and the snow was still falling.

“Tomas and Richard Cesar both kept journals for a least a few days after the Hungry One’s appearance and they wrote that he’d come from the forest with a bulging pack filled with what he’d said was bear meat. He asked to use their kitchens to cook his meat and invited everyone to join him. At the welcome meal he’d apparently eaten more than anyone else – hence why they called him ‘The Hungry One’. Unfortunately, aside from scrawls and nonsense wiped on the walls of the buildings, there was no more information on what happened to The Basket and how things devolved so quickly.”

So a mysterious man arrived with suspicious meat and immediately afterward people started developing what we’ll call ‘Wendigo Psychosis’, although it seems far worse than just delusions. The madness then twisted into a sick competition – although I have to wonder if the participants were actually getting physically larger…maybe I can dig up pictures of them or something…I mean, they did have ration cards at the time – that ended with all the ‘players’ dead and the immolation of the ringleader figure. And said ringleader’s body dissolved. I was starting to get one of those headaches again.

“Loggerton convinced the sheriff at the time, one Gus Sheerhan, to mark off the area for a new road and, two years later, the whole area became just another unremarkable stretch of the national highway system. And that is how the Namasak tribe died.”

Tall Jim drummed his gnarled fingers on the table before roughly slapping his palms on the pitted wood and standing up. He gave me a two fingered jaunty little salute as he walked down to the main bar that I couldn’t help but take as performative. It was clear that telling me that story took a lot out of him.

I stayed around for a while after that to say hi to Steve and the others before making my way home.

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep well that night.

Credit: Jenni Kinoshita

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