THE WENDIGO Part 2: THE BOY & THE MONSTER

In the second part of Morgan’s feature on The Wendigo, it gets personal….

By Morgan Knudsen, Entityseeker (Research & Teachings)

As investigators, my partner and I had no awareness of the goings on in Egg Lake or St Albert. It may as well have been another world in another time and place. In 2004, Stephanie and I held a lecture in Edmonton, Alberta. We were lecturing on an English folklore story known as the Black Shuck, a gigantic black dog with fiery paws said to terrorize the English countryside. It was just by chance; someone was in our audience that night who we would be tied to for the rest of our lives. His name was Matt Spearin, and as he heard our lecture, the description of the black aggressive dog stuck out to him in a way it touched no one else. After the lecture, he told us about his encounter as a child with a giant black beast and an illness that nearly resulted in his death. An illness with facial swelling, a fire like rash on his hands and feet, and a monster coming through his window in the night. Matt described the encounters in detail in his upcoming book, “Wind/Feather/Astronaut”:

“Don’t touch that, it might be Cujo”!!!! My hand pauses for a moment over the half-buried GI Joe Skimobile, lost to a late fall sand box mission and then under the previous winter’s ice. “What’s Cujo?” I ask. The name sends a chill down my spine. “Cujo is this big, scary dog that goes bad and kills all these kids,” says my neighbour, Alex, with the authority and demure of a 7-year-old over his now mystified, 4-year-old audience. My blood runs beyond cold over his words, and over the name… it actually has a name and this guy knows it. I am speechless, transfixed. “I only told my parents and my Nana about the dumb dog… how do you know about it? How do you know what it’s called?” “If you’re not careful, he’s gonna come for ya tonight and take you right outta your bed”, he says gleefully. “He comes every night,” I tell him as his smile melts from his chin into a look of puzzlement. “Right through my window,” I continue. “He shakes my bed off the floor, growling and snarling. He comes from that lonely J-Train yard on Sesame, as tall as my house and thin, with really long, spindly arms and weird, black spider-fingers. His head looks like a wicked Terrier, a Scotty, you know, the dogs with the beards? But with wild, terrifying eyes and sharp pointy ears… He’s WAY scarier and he is WAY bigger. Nastier. A giant. A monster.” “No, Cujo is just a dumb movie I saw,” he tells me, attempting to enliven the sudden, abnormal hue his face has taken on. “You don’t see him? He comes when you get really hot and when you cannot move in your bed. I cannot even yell for my mom, ~it is THAT scary. Wait until you hear it growl,” I inform him. “It sounds like there are a thousand of him in that growl. I bet he comes for you tonight, right through your window, you’ll see.” My tone is serene, convicted, the voice of a true believer. “That’s my window, right there,” pointing up to the brown frame, 8 feet from the ground, embedded in the white stucco, “Cujo passes through this yard every night. And now he knows who you are. He knows where you play, and he knows that you live RIGHT across the street.” “You’re just sayin’ that, m-makin’ it up,” he says, with the pallid, almost teary look of a kid who just had someone piss all over his grave. “So, Cujo is what it’s called,” I reflect, thinking a name like that made more sense than what I had for breakfast that morning. It was hitting a nail like a bullseye and driving it right through the board. J-Train could j-j-jump right into that name and fit like some unholy marriage. “C-U-J-O”. “Wanna stay over?” I ask.

In a small house in Braeside, St. Albert, a haunting was happening. Bought in the late 1970s, a man moved his wife and two children into a home with a basement that he purchased for an incredibly low price. The family selling the property had suffered the horrible loss of their child in a vicious accident and desperate to move on from the memories, sold the house at a low rate.

It was not long before the new owners began experiencing some strange happenings: They would hear their back door open and slam shut and the sound of distinct feet running down the steps on multiple occasions. The toilet would flush on its own. The dog would growl at the basement stairs. On many afternoons, their daughter came home to the sound of someone crying in the house. Fearful to enter, she waited on the porch until someone else arrived only to find no one had been inside. The first apparition was sighted during a dinner party. A woman with long black hair was seen crying in the dining room. When the witness asked the family about the sad figure, the family told them that no one matching that description was at the party or invited. While sitting in the basement proofreading homework for her son, the mother assumed he had returned home from the corner store, slamming the back door, and running down the stairs into the room behind her. She felt a presence and began to go over the mistakes with him, but when no one responded, she suddenly realized, to her horror, that she was alone … While they were on vacation, the family’s grandfather decided to stay to keep an eye on the house. After one night, he refused to return to sleep, or to talk about it, stating only that something was “wrong” with the basement there. The once, skeptical old man would only enter the house during the day, returning home at night until the family came back. One afternoon, during a visit from their nephew, Matt, another strange incident occurred. Seated in the dining room, the well-built glass tabletop split in front of them and then shattered to the floor with no explanation. Having had more than enough, the family decided to follow a Scottish tradition that involved moving across a river to escape nasty spirits. They left the house behind. During the move, a year-old Matt was admitted into ICU at Edmonton General after a visit to his aunt’s. A fever had started on the car ride home, throwing him into deadly convulsions. As he resided in a croupette for over 10 days, the doctors could find no explanation for the strange illness. Within a month of coming home, the situation grew far worse. Severe swelling of his tongue and eyes would frequently occur, resulting in many trips to the emergency ward. Like the source of the fever, the edema proved just as evasive, resulting in an array of inconclusive allergy tests.

… and all this time, an unwelcomed presence began to make itself known…

A creature was coming into his room at night through the window.

The red curtains would part by themselves; the blind would shoot to the roof and then it would attack – an anthropomorphic, dog-like monster: tall, frail, but incredibly strong with dark patchy, wool-like fur. Its upper torso and long, spider-like arms would burst through the window frame over his bed, growling, scratching and violently shaking him… The demonic, Scottish terrier-like head always an inch from his face so that Matt could feel its breath on his cheek. The attacks became so frequent, that when it did not show one Christmas Eve, he was elated. His parents were worried. Their son repeatedly came to them with stories of terrifying encounters and all they could do was reassure him it must be a frightening nightmare. Nonetheless, the attacks continued. His mother, concerned for her son’s wellbeing, began guarding his room at night, marking her papers beside his door so he could fall asleep in peace. She moved a little further down the hall each night in the hope of weening him off the fear. His father tried vigorously to rationalize the encounters and bring some calm to his family’s obvious distress. But the solutions were not permanent. Night after night, Matt’s childhood disappeared into endless hours of fear and terror, with no end in sight and no understanding of what the horror actually was. Could his parents be right? Was this werewolf-like monster the result of a dream? During one encounter, Matt made physical contact with the entity and kicked it hard in the face. It reacted strongly and disappeared back out the locked bedroom window as if slipping through a veil of air.

One evening, things took a turn no one was anticipating: Matt awoke to discover a new apparition, small and gaunt with round, terrifying eyes. No bigger than a house cat, it perched on unearthly feet at the end of his bed beneath the curtains. The encounter seemed to surprise them both, and the rage in the face of the creature was something that still sticks with Matt to this day. He describes:

“At the foot of my bed, beneath the curtains, stood a tiny woman. I will never forget that image, forever remembering that moment, feeling the shock resonate into my core… like being punched from inside my rib cage. No dream, no sleep, no darkness… just alive, senses ablaze to the light above and temporal lobes, attuned to the horror thing below. She appeared unaware of my gaze as she scanned the room, an ethereal movement about her tiny shoulders, grapefruitsized head, distant, listening. No more than two feet tall, the face and constitution akin to First Nations folklore ~long, black, wild hair about the crown and her complexion and gaze, the color of death. I watched the brown body, clothed in unusual rings, foreign, but familiar, like a flight suit fading into banded burial wrappings or something like baroque clown attire… far away, through time, tattered and malignant, the image made me feel sick. I quickly glanced at her feet and something between terror and amazement gripped me. Three taloned toes, like misshapen star fish adorned the bottoms her legs, carefully attuned to the eerie sway of her body atop my mattress. She was taking heavy breaths, drawing air into a set of lungs that could not be larger than halved apricots… long draws, deep, unaccustomed… an atypical mixture, this was not her usual playground. I gasped in terror, and the sound traveled like a knock at the door. She saw me and for that moment, those ancient, pupil filled eyes beheld me, pulling me through some pin sized black hole. For a second, she saw who I was, and then she charged. The movement display was analog, something in the shimmer reminded me of film, like a hologram, a halo… it seemed to bend light as she moved, but only the warm components, hitting beats in the mobility spectrum that no human ever could. In mere seconds she was upon me and I could feel her revolting breath against my lips. From within, a hiss uncoiled itself like a snake, revealing fangs - canines and incisors jutting from the wicked effigy that was her skull. The face, a sickly, jaundiced flesh to the pink, swollen protuberances on her forehead and cheek. She bore pure hatred there, unfiltered, unabated and those eyes, those eyes, black oil pools, flaring red to some invisible spectral candle in front of them. A piece of innocence died forever then and there as she struck the palm of my hand beside my face. I recoiled in terror at the blow, watching the swinging appendage, her hand, a weird Chimera of badger’s claw and pig-like hoof. And then with a cornered, black cat growl she turned and fled towards the night, back towards whatever sanctity the window world provided, back to that unholy altar above my bed. I watched her legs bound out from the sides as she ran, propelling at the hip and terror filled me in one second like seasick confusion. As she leapt up to the frame behind the curtain, the light responded to the spectrum flare as her body had become a living film, projecting the ultimate perversion. I watched the familiar, brown/diamond ring pattern shimmer across the surface, covering something hard… rust brown, chitin, the sense of some lobster-like exoskeleton beneath. And then she was gone. She was gone, and the pain in my hand remained, like the lingering taste of oil. I was wide awake.”

Matt’s head was spinning with questions. What was this bizarre new creature? Was it related to the dog monster that came at night? He had no idea, but it was only one of many puzzle pieces that had begun to unfold; a series of bizarre images and events that would not begin to make sense for decades. Symbols started to appear, with the strangest being a series of glowing, Ukrainian Easter eggs that emerged from the darkness of his bedroom closet with no explanation. The colourful, purple/ yellow 2D outlines floated towards him and then vanished. They never appeared again, but he never forgot them either. Eventually, they were filed into a pile of bizarre encounters in his head that Matt simply could not understand. The encounters seemed to stop. The family had made an energetic stand. A victim will get a restraining order as a peaceful measure. An abuser will see it as an act of war.

A year and half later, Matt returned to St Albert. His family decided to go for a walk which led them up a hill to a historical building – the oldest standing wood building in Alberta – and through a beautiful cemetery. The aged structure, which stood next to a lovely old church, was a mission. It stood just meters from its original location on the land and was well-maintained. Matt’s aunt’s home in Braeside was barely a drive down the road, beside the Sturgeon River. They walked through the cemetery, and not one of them had any clue of the history upon which they now tread. They had no idea that Swift Runner had once walked the river’s edge after murdering his entire family, banging on the door of the mission they were now visiting. They had no idea that it was there that Swift Runner lied to the missionaries who helped him; that he had just murdered his last child and he was now fat with the meat of his entire family. They also had no idea that Swift Runner awoke here, night after night screaming that that ‘Ween-de-go’, the evil spirit that devours, was violently attacking him in his sleep. Matt was older now and had not seen the beast at his window for over a year. Big kids did not have nightmares, he was passed all that. The family had supper at a local fast-food restaurant and went home. Matt’s night was far from over.

“The heat had compelled him on our return from the mission grounds, pulling him up from the gravestones on the rising of the storm waves. For a moment, I watched his true form outside, through older eyes, as if the color of the moon had stumbled there… and then he burst through the frame with the lightning of wild horses, and with a swelling storm cloud rise, the attack was upon me, like a pack of wild dogs. We wrestled into daybreak, a violent, rocking fury that set the room ablaze. My closed fist, driving repeatedly into living myth, and into the coarse fur and emaciated rib-like structures pressed against my face. He fought from above, writhing and shivering in some orgy of terror, the demonic sounds bouncing back and forth across the surfaces like music. And in the victory, he made killers or killed, and my victory was my resistance, embracing my outer demon, refusing to let him go… hurling him back on my terms, toward the window… Cujo, Wendigo, his wicked claws scraping against my left femur as he flew. In my mind and through my pain, I part the storm before me, like curtains to the rays of golden sun rise… endless white, forever light, poplar fluff at ease and weightless to the raging hail surrounding it. And as he retreats in some shadowslither movement, the arms fold across his chest in the effigy of an Egyptian death cast. I am able to witness the silhouette of an angular, bearded, canid-like head… a regal, powerful visage, with sharp, pointed ears glancing back at me one last time, disappearing behind the frame, into forever, ensnared by the wooden structure and the web of yellow ropes below it…”

THE MAN AND THE MONSTER The wendigo did not raise its head again until Matt was in his thirties. By then, we had known each other for over a decade and had been developing Entity Seeker to its fullest potential for quite a few years, being asked for speaking engagements, investigating cases, and gracing stages and television screens across Canada. One night, while listening to a podcast on native mythos, the word ‘wendigo’ fell on his ears. The tail of Swift Runner was being discussed and names and dates became the main topic of conversation.

St Albert. The Mission. Attacks by dog-like beasts. Facial swelling. Fever. Red rashes on hands and feet. Swift Runner’s crime scene: Egg Lake.

His mind began replaying the visions of his childhood and the Easter egg images flooded back to him. It was not long into investigating the new information before his father gave him a startling revelation. His grandmother was born in Legal, a short distance up the road from Lake Manawan (or ‘place of the eggs’, formally known as Egg Lake), Swift Runner’s home and the site of the gruesome slaughter of his family. It was a connection that neither of us expected. Wendigo or the case of Swift Runner had not been prevalent in our investigations. Although both of us had heard the tale, when and where it took place was not something of which we had ever taken note. To realize it was something that happened within a 20-minute drive from us was a bit of a shock, to say the least. We were on the doorstep of one of the greatest crimes in Alberta’s history, and we had no idea. Morgan x