Cabin Fever, Wendigo Psychosis, and a Chenoo Story from Maine

This winter drags on and continues to be cold and snowy. Some of us might be suffering from a little cabin fever by now, but I hope no one is suffering from wendigo psychosis.

Before you can diagnose someone with that particular mental illness, you need to know what a wendigo is. The wendigo is a mythical monster found in the folklore of some Indian groups from the Northeast and Midwest. Generally pictured as huge, emaciated giants with an insatiable desire for human flesh, wendigos are humans who have been transformed into ravenous cannibals. The mechanism for this transformation varies. Some tribes claim it is done through magic (whether purposefully or as an attack by an enemy), while others claim just one taste of human flesh will transform anyone into a wendigo.

Which leads us to wendigo psychosis. Psychologists and anthropologists coined this term in the early 20th century as they studied native societies with wendigo myths and found that some individuals had a fear of becoming a wendigo. This psychosis was particularly prevalent during the long cold winter months when food was scarce, and family and friends started to look very tasty...

Wendigo psychosis could be cured through rituals, but in extreme cases people claiming to be nascent wendigos were killed. That seems quite harsh, but I suppose you might do the same if someone you knew was threatening to eat you.

The Indians in northern New England believed in similar creatures, although they didn't call them wendigos. Instead they were called chenoos, giwakwa, or kiwakwa, but I'm just going to use chenoo for simplicity. Like wendigos chenoos are gigantic and emaciated, but they are also lipless because they hungrily chew them off. Their screams will kill anyone who hears them, and chenoos get their power from a human-shaped lump of ice that has replaced their heart.

There are lots of gruesome chenoo stories, but because winter is almost over (I hope), here's one that is not too nasty from the Passamaquoddy of Maine.

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Many years ago a young newlywed couple set off to spend the winter in the woods. They were following the traditional pattern of their people, where the tribe would come together in the summer and fall when food was plentiful, then split into smaller units during the winter when food was scarcer.

The couple set up camp by a river deep in the forest. One day while her husband was out hunting the wife heard something large stomping around outside her tent. It was a chenoo. He stuck his head into the tent and glowered at her hungrily.

Thinking quickly, the woman said, "Welcome father!" The chenoo had been planning to eat her, but was surprised at being addressed so politely. She invited the monster to come sit by the fire.

When she heard her husband approaching she went outside and explained that a chenoo was inside their home. He too addressed it as father. The chenoo was so pleased that it declared it would not eat them (at least not immediately) and moved in with them.

The chenoo lived with them for many weeks. In some ways it was quite helpful. For example, since it was so tall the husband would ride upon its back while hunting game. It also offered protection against the other chenoos that roamed through the woods. The young couple once watched in amazement as their chenoo killed a rival chenoo that wanted to eat them. Then they watched in horror as their "father" ate the corpse. Despite the benefits, they realized that at some point they too would anger the chenoo and it would eat them. 

The next day the woman made a mixture of water and salt and offered it to the chenoo as a beverage. The chenoo greedily drank it down and almost immediately vomited up a human-shaped lump of ice. This was the heart of the dead rival it had recently eaten, and the woman threw it on the fire. The chenoo shrank in size, and vomited up another human-shaped ice lump. Clearly her "father" had been busy eating other chenoos, and the woman tossed this on the fire as well.

Finally, the chenoo vomited up a third icy lump and transformed into a little old man. As the woman went to toss the ice onto the fire, the former chenoo grabbed her hand. "Daughter wait!" he cried. "That is my heart! I will die if it melts." He took it from her and swallowed it down.

Due to the efforts of the woman, the chenoo was cured. Well, at least mostly.

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I found this story in Charles Godfrey Leland's 1884 book The Algonquin Legends of New England.  There are other legends where the chenoo is cured completely or destroyed, but I like the ambivalent ending of this one. Even if you get rid of one monster you know another one will just show up next winter.

The Curse of Chocorua, and Its History

When Tony and I were up in the White Mountains in November I had hoped we'd be able to stop by Mt. Chocorua. Unlike most other mountains in New Hampshire, no trees or plants grow on the mountain's higher slopes. Why is it the lone stark, barren peak among its neighboring mountains?

The answer is that the mountain suffers from a curse placed on it by an angry Native American. I thought this would make a great blog post. Due to our schedule we unfortunately didn't get to Chocorua, but here's the blog post anyway.

The legend goes something like this. Chocorua was a Native American who lived with his young son in the area that is now Tamworth, NH. Unlike some other Indians in the area Chocorua was willing to trust the English settlers who were slowly populating the mountains. Even though his fellow tribesmen told him about the massacres and wars that had happened in southern New England, Chocorua still thought the newcomers should be given a chance.

Chocorua was particularly friendly with a settler named Cornelius Campbell and his family. One day Chocorua was called away for tribal business and asked if Cornelius could watch his young son while he was gone. Being a friendly neighbor, Cornelius said yes.

Thomas Cole, Mt. Chocorua, 1827. Thanks Wikipedia!

And here's where things go horribly wrong.

Cornelius and his family went out to work in the fields, leaving Chocorua's son alone in the house. Looking for something to drink, the little boy uncorked a bottle of fox poison and swallowed it down. By the time the Campbells returned home the child was stone-cold dead.

When Chocorua learned his son had died he was driven mad by grief. The Campbells tried to tell him it was an accident but he didn't believe them. "The other Indians were right! You Englishmen are murderers out to seize our land!" he cried before running off into the night. 

In revenge, the next day Chocorua murdered Cornelius's wife and children with a hatchet. Cornelius gathered together the other English settlers and they chased Chocorua through the forest up to the peak of a mountain. Realizing that he was trapped Chocorua turned to face his pursuers and delivered the following curse:

"A curse upon you, white men! May the great spirit curse you when he speaks in the clouds, and his words are fire! Chocorua had a son and you killed him while the sky looked bright. Lightning blast your crops! Winds and fire destroy your dwellings! The Evil One breathe death upon your cattle! Your graves lie in the war-path of the Indian! Panthers howl and wolves fatten over your bones! Chocorua goes to the Great Spirit. His curse stays with the white man."

Campbell fired his rifle, and Chocorua fell to his death from the mountain peak. His curse was swiftly fulfilled. The mountain where he died became barren. No crops would grow on its slopes, the trees on its summit died, and even the animals abandoned it. Any cattle who drank water near Chocorua died. The English settlers avoided the mountain, and its peak remains lifeless and barren even today.

I like this story, despite its grim ending. The cross-cultural misunderstanding and mistrust at the heart of it seem very realistic to me. I don't think we'll ever know the exact truth of the story, but it appears to be quite old.

A mountain named "Corua" is mentioned in Jeremy Belkap's 1784 Journal of a Tour of the White Mountains, and it is labelled "Chocorua" on a 1791 map. A few years later Henry Wadsworth Longellow wrote a poem called "Jeckoyva" about a mountain where an Indian chief was found dead at the base of a cliff.

The full story of the curse was first written down in October of 1828 by the painter Thomas Cole, who heard it while he was touring the White Mountains. Cole wrote in his journal:

We came out at length, to a lonely and deserted clearing, just at the foot of the mountain. The cause of this abandonment is, they say, the poisonous effects of the water upon the cattle; the result, according to tradition, of the curse of Chocorua, an Indian, from whom the peak, upon which he was killed by the whites, takes its name.

The brief legend that Cole wrote down was expanded by Lydia Marie Child in 1829 for a book called The Token: A Christmas and New Year's Present, which also contained an engraving by Cole showing Chocorua's death. Child's version became quite popular, and inspired multiple other variations, including the one I recounted above, which is from Charles Skinner's Myths and Legends of Our Own Lands (1896). (I found the history of the legend in an article by Lawrence Shaw Mayo in the September 1946 issue of the New England Quarterly.)

I do think there is a nugget of truth at the core of this legend, but I think the original details are probably lost in the early unrecorded years of the White Mountains.

Glooskap and the Giant Frog

A few weeks ago I borrowed a copy of John Hanson Mitchell's 1984 book Ceremonial Time from the library. It's a fascinating book that tries to tell the history of one square mile of Littleton, Massachusetts over 15,000 years. 

Let's face it, 15,000 years is a long long time. Littleton probably only has about 300 years of written history, so Mitchell turns to some unusual methods to unearth what happened in the past. For example, at one point he encounters what he thinks may be the spirit of an ancient Paleo-Indian shaman in the woods near his house. To help him understand this experience he enlists the help of some local American Indians.

One of them, a woman named Tonupasqua, tells him several stories about Glooskap, the mighty culture hero of the New England Algonquins. I've written about Glooskap before. He's a gigantic, super-strong, ancient magician who helped make the world safe for mankind. Sometimes he's a little bit dim, but in other stories, including this one from Ceremonial Time, he's a trickster.

A state of Glooskap in Nova Scotia.

According to the story, a long long time ago when the world was young a gigantic frog lived in New England. He was quite greedy, and built a huge dam to contain all the water in one enormous lake. This lake flooded the land where the humans lived, but they were powerless against the gigantic frog.

Unfortunately, the frog wasn't the only monster people had to deal with. There was also a giant bear whose favorite meal was human flesh.

The humans asked Glooskap to help them with these monsters. Glooskap tried several times to fight the frog, but whenever he got near it it would hide in the lake.

One day while it was sitting underwater the frog devised a sinister plan. Glooskap lived nearby in a large cave - why not hide at the back of Glooskap's cave and eat him when he came home? So it hopped out of the lake and hid at the back of the dark cave.

Glooskap came home from hunting, but hesitated outside his cave. He could sense something was wrong.

"Cave, are you glad to see me?" he said.

The frog said nothing.

Glooskap said, "Magic cave, are you glad to see me? Every evening when I return home you greet me. If you don't greet me I'll know something's wrong."

This was, of course, a lie. His cave never said anything, but the frog didn't know this. Pretending to be a magic cave, the frog croaked out, "Welcome home Glooskap!"

His suspicions confirmed, Glooskap quickly rolled a giant boulder across the entrance and trapped the frog inside.

At this point, the monstrously huge man-eating bear came strolling along. It said, "What's in the cave, Glooskap?"

Glooskap said, "Sweet, tasty humans who are hiding from you. I'll roll back this boulder so you can go inside and eat them. Sound good?"

The bear thought this did indeed sound good, so Glooskap rolled back the boulder.

The bear stuck his head in the cave, and the frog immediately shot out his giant sticky tongue and pulled the bear into the darkness. As the two giant animals began to fight Glooskap once again rolled the boulder across the entrance.

The bear and the frog fought for a long time. They fought so hard that the earth shook violently, which caused the frog's dam burst, releasing all the trapped waters. Finally, the two giant animals died, each mortally wounded in the battle.

When Glooskap told the humans what had happened they rejoiced, and the land once covered by water became fertile land where they could garden and hunt without fear of the giant bear.

There are several different versions of this myth, but I like this one. It definitely provides a different perspective on our landscape!