Wisconsin Wendigo Sightings Featured on In Search of Monsters

The Wendigo as seen on Travel Channel series In Search of Monsters

According to Native American legend, the wendigo is a horrifying, cannibalistic creature that dwells in the forests and waters of the Great Lakes region, hunting for its next human meal. If recent sightings are any indication, there are wendigo in Wisconsin.

The latest episode of the new Travel Channel series In Search of Monsters tells the story of several harrowing wendigo encounters in recent years around the state. It includes interviews with the witnesses, as well with Wisconsin paranormal researchers Chad Lewis and J. Nathan Couch.

What is a wendigo?

“The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones,” says Basil Johnson, an Ojibwe teacher. “With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash-gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody … Unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.”

Imagine coming face to face with that in the woods.

In “The Wendigo” episode, Chad Lewis talks with witnesses who encountered something matching the description above at a lakeside camp near Spooner, Wisconsin.

Then another sighting is recounted, one which was first reported to Goatman: Flesh or Folklore? author J. Nathan Couch about a bizarre 2014 sighting of a strange creature near Holy Hill.

Wendigo encounters in Trego and Rice Lake are also featured.

If you missed the episode look here for upcoming air dates.