Honor the Horrors of the Internet

Wendigo:A Terrifying Story

It was my friend Kaden's birthday party about a month ago and, I must say, it was pretty fun. My three friends—Enrique, Cody, Ean and I went over to his party at his house.

We went there on a Friday and stayed over for the night. We played videogames, ate cake and, best of all, drank a crap ton of soda. This fun ensued until three o'clock in the morning, when his dad finally told us to lie down and fall asleep. We did the first thing, but not the second. 

We got some sleeping bags out, and just talked for another hour or so. We joked around, talked about some stuff, and then the topic of the Wendigo came up.

The Wendigo is a cannibal demon of Native American mythology that I wrote a short, scary story about in my Creative Writing class in school. I let my friends read the story the day before, and they said it was scary. But I figured they were more scared by the picture on the cover page than the actual story.

The picture sure was frightening. It showed the portrait of a Wendigo: the skull-like head of a deer placed on a human-like, bipedal body, with long, narrow arms and fingers, and crouching, long legs with hooves like a horse. The body looked like it was rotting away, as if the Wendigo was a corpse. It had blood dripping from its long, sharp teeth.

Enrique loved the fact that the Wendigo scared Cody and Kaden so much, he basically teased them in the black of night that it was coming to possess them, turning them into cannibalistic spirits.

"Shut up!" they would tell Enrique. "Seriously, shut up!"

"What, are you scared?" he would taunt at them.

I thought the entire thing was really funny, as, of course, there was no such thing as the Wendigo. But I could tell that they were getting even more afraid. Once, Kaden looked at a window without the blinds over it and thought that the Wendigo would stare at him through the window. He was too scared to actually get up and shut the blinds, though, so I did.

Enrique continued to tease them. He got out his laptop and Googled images of the Wendigo. Then he went on the Wikipedia page for the Wendigo. He read aloud, "All cultures in which the Wendigo myth appeared shared the belief that human beings could turn into Wendigos if they ever resorted to cannibalism or, alternatively, become possessed by the demonic spirit of a Wendigo, often in a dream."

"What's a demonic spirit?" Ean asked, watching the taunting unfold.

Enrique Googled it. He found out that a demonic spirit is like a ghost, except it can possess your body and have control over all of your actions. He also found out that if you say a demon's name out loud, you have summoned it. You have made it its duty to possess you.

"Well, if that's true," Enrique said, "Wendigo, Wendigo, Wendigo, Wendigo, WENDIGO! Come get me Wendigo!"

"Enrique, shut up!" Cody and Kaden said, both of them on the verge of throwing something at his face.

I interjected, "You guys, the Wendigo is fake. Now shut up and go to sleep."

"Whatever. I'm tired anyway," Enrique said as he yawned.

And we fell asleep.

The next morning, I woke up and went to the bathroom. Nobody was up, yet. I decided I would eat some cake from yesterday for breakfast. I went to the fridge and got some. As soon as I turned around, I let out a frightened screech. Enrique was up and was in my face.

"Whoa, you scared me there," I said.

No response. He just gave a face; a chilling face. His eyes were sunken in, and he gave me a non-smiling, wide-eyed, pale look.