The Wendigo

Deep Algonquin and Ojibwe folklore, told as exactly that

Windigo is the spelling most Native scholars use. It belongs to the Algonquian-speaking peoples of the northern woodlands and subarctic, among them the Ojibwe, the Eastern Cree, the Saulteaux, the Swampy Cree, the Naskapi and the Innu, and it is not a woodland cryptid. It is a moral idea with teeth.

The windigo is bound to winter, cold, the north, famine and starvation. In the traditions it is either a spirit that takes a person over or a thing a person becomes, and the act that turns them is the ultimate taboo: eating human flesh. A survivor of a starvation winter who has done that is understood to be no longer safely a person. What follows from the transformation is the detail that gives the idea its force. The windigo is never full. Feeding it makes it larger, so the hunger scales with the meal and can never be satisfied.

Read as a teaching rather than a monster, it is aimed squarely at greed, hoarding and the person who cuts themselves off from the group. In a subsistence economy where a hard winter is survived collectively or not at all, the man who takes more than his share is a genuine mortal threat to everyone around him, and the story names him.

By the early twentieth century missionaries and psychologists were writing about windigo psychosis as a culture-bound syndrome, complete with a symptom list. Modern scholarship disputes that heavily, and it is worth knowing that the diagnosis says at least as much about the people making it as about the people described.

The pin sits in the boreal forest north of Superior, because that is the country the stories come out of: spruce, muskeg, a very long way between places, and a winter that has historically killed people who were on their own.